Girl Detective

Lifetime and Bravo have finally settled their lawsuit over season six of Project Runway, which will air this summer on Lifetime.

Meanwhile, Bravo comes back swinging and doesn’t bother to pretend it’s not a rip off, with The Fashion Show, with judges Isaac Mizrahi and Fern Mallis.

For those of us left with a bad taste in our mouth after Top Chef Season Five, no date has yet been set for Season Six, though casting took place earlier this spring. Better yet, at least two Twin Cities chefs auditioned!

Meanwhile, though, Bravo keeps the culinary reality goodness alive with Top Chef Masters, kind of like an American Iron Chef a la Top Chef. (link from ALoTT5MA)

Sally Hawkins was bruited about as a likely best actress nominee for her role as Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky, but didn’t make the final list. It’s a great performance, though, in director Mike Leigh’s odd little movie that’s more deep character sketch than a coherent story.

Hawkins as Poppy is simultaneously fascinating, likeable, and annoying. She’s so upbeat, and so little brought down by the things that wear on others, that she seems almost surreal. The supporting characters, including a sympathetic flat mate, tightly wound driving instructor, stunningly cute social worker, and her class full of elementary kids, all serve to highlight this bizarrely enchanting character. Fair warning: my husband G. Grod gave up part way in when he couldn’t discern a plot and started to fall asleep. I feel asleep about half way through, in a strange and difficult scene between Poppy and a homeless man. Worth watching but not if you’re looking for a story with a beginning, middle and end, or feeling sleepy.

This was the seventh dvd that came into the library for me in the past three weeks, and the thirty-third movie I’ve watched this year. When it rains, it pours. I’m hoping to get back to more reading and writing soon. We’ll see if I can manage that.

People who talk in movie theaters irritate me. The exception: kids in movies for kids. They talk, and it delights me. I can only hope they’ll unlearn that behavior by the time they’re seeing movies for old people, like me.

5yo Drake and I went to see Bolt at the Riverview Theater with friends. The kids, 5, 4, and 2, were entranced by the show. There were lots of “Dog!” and “Wow!” comments. The story was easy to follow, had cute characters like pigeons and a hamster, and Bolt was endearing, though I found his eyes a little too creepily realistic looking. I like my cartoons to look cartoon-y, thanks.

The plot is a mash up of Toy Story and The Truman Show. Bolt thinks he’s a superdog, but he only plays one on television. When he is accidentally released into the real world, he has to learn to deal with not being super. Along the way, though, he also learns how to be a real dog, which he finds is not a bad trade off.

I doubt the movie would have been so enjoyable with older kids, and it most certainly wouldn’t have been on its own–everything is good, few things are great. But watching it with kids, and experiencing their wonder, along with real-butter popcorn and movie candy, was a delight.

Ironic parallel: Rhino the hamster spends most of his time in a plastic ball. 70’s pop culture mavens may remember one of John Travolta’s, the voice of Bolt, early movies, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.

5yo Drake and 3yo Guppy’s 8th-grade babysitter had one of the lead roles in her middle school’s production of West Side Story. Drake’s love of music runs deep, and he’s become enamored of musicals (Sound of Music) and music from Musicals (Mamma Mia! and “What a Piece of Work is Man” from Hair) so I thought I’d give it a shot.

It went well. Drake enjoyed the music, didn’t seem troubled that he couldn’t follow the story (a good thing in my book), and we sat behind the orchestra, so he got to see that as well. I gave him the option of leaving at intermission, but he wanted to stay. The kids in the play did a great job, and Drake sat through his first full-length musical. (Less winning were the grandparents behind me who talked at normal volume throughout and had to wrangle an 18mo toddler. But their other grandkid was in the play, and this was middle school, not the Guthrie, so I didn’t ask them to keep it down.)

Soon after, I saw a flyer for another local middle school’s production of Harry Allard and James Marshall’s Miss Nelson is Missing. Buoyed by my previous success, I thought it would be good for Drake and Guppy. The play itself would have been about an hour, which is what I expected. Alas, in the admirable spirit of including everybody who wants to participate, there were musical numbers between EVERY scene, so the show lasted two hours. At the end of the play, the last of its run, there were speeches, and thank yous. And more speeches. And more thanks yous. Finally I grabbed my kids and tried to make an exit.

Guppy was not on board with this plan. “I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE!” he screamed as I carried him out of the auditorium. He continued to scream, plus hit me, as we made our way through the school and outside. I put him down, he threw himself to the ground screaming and kicking. By this time the play was finally over. Playgoers streamed around us. I put him on his feet and dragged him resolutely to the car. He continued to cry and scream, and refused to get in his car seat. Mothers in the parking lot gave me sympathetic looks. Elderly people gave me dirty looks. Drake screamed because Guppy was screaming. I waited a few minutes, then wrestled Guppy into his seat. He screamed all the way home, where I handed him to G. Grod and said, “He needs a diaper. And he’s been crying for 30 minutes. I’m going to lie down.”

G got him quieted within minutes, so my frayed nerves and I could take a nap. But not before I swore off middle school musicals for a while.

This Saturday past, my husband G. Grod was at a democratic convention to support a candidate for city council. It would take most of the day, so 5yo Drake and 3yo Guppy and I would be on our own.

We were basically just lounging about in our pajamas, until Guppy wandered in waving an empty gummy-bear vitamin bottle. One that had been at least 3/4 full that morning.

I grilled both of them. Denial, denial. So I called my dad, a retired doctor, to confirm what I thought I had to do:

Make ‘em barf.

Guppy seemed the likeliest suspect, so I corralled him and stuck my finger down his throat. Voila. Gummy-smelling barf. I had to do this several times, and then take a break, during which time he tried to hide from me. I tracked him down and did a second round to be safe.

In the meantime, I realized that neither boy could be trusted, and even if Drake hadn’t ingested the vitamins I might as well be fair to Guppy and possibly use this as a teaching moment. So he had his turn in the bathroom. Surprise; he barfed up a substance remarkably similar to Guppy’s.

I was very matter of fact, quiet and firm during all of this. Amazingly, neither of them bit me. They were screaming, crying, running. Kind of like Jurassic Park, where I was the velociraptor. After, though, I calmed them down, explained why too many vitamins were bad, and why they had to get them out of their stomachs. They didn’t seem to hold a grudge.

I, on the other hand, now know better than to buy candy-like vitamins for my kids. Both are lousy eaters. Drake would subsist on yogurt, bread and sugar if I let him. So the multivitamins were recommended by their pediatrician, and serving to fill in some of the gaping holes in their diet. Now, though, they’re on their own. Scurvy and rickets, here we come.

I reserved Frozen River from my library months ago, along with Man on Wire and they came in at the same time. Interestingly, that documentary is about something so fantastic that this film seemed more real to me by comparison.

Melissa Leo is a mom of 2 boys in northern New York, struggling to make the down payment for the double wide of her dreams when her husband runs off with the money and gambles it away. He’s a Native American, and in looking for him on the reservation, she learns about a lucrative black market in transporting immigrants.

I was astonished by Leo’s performance, by turns raw, sad, despairing and hopeful. Often bleak, but not without hope, I thought the movie was very well done.

I tried to see Hamlet 2 in theaters last year but never managed. I was on a Hamlet binge at the time so it seemed a good remedy for much of the rest of the tragic stuff I was watching and reading. Alas, I didn’t love it, and didn’t laugh much. Comedies are so subjective, perhaps even more so than other types of movies. Any time I write I loved one, a commenter says they didn’t, and vice versa. So I hope there’s some love out there for Hamlet 2, but there wasn’t much love chez Girl Detective.

I do, though, highly recommend watching the video for “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus“. Not only is it so catchy it might never get out of your head, that part of the movie made me genuinely laugh.

I requested the documentary Man on Wire from the library around Oscar nomination time. It didn’t win, but I recommend seeking it out.

Phillipe Petit is a tightrope walker/performance artist who worked with a group to string a wire between the World Trade Center Towers as they were just finished in the early 70’s, then walked the wire in front of a growing crowd that came to include the police who eventually arrested him when he came off the wire. I won’t spoil the details of his crossing, as I found them jaw dropping.

Petit has a huge personality, and it’s a captivating story, told through interviews, clippings, along with Petit’s own photos and videos. It’s also eerie and strange to see the towers during conception and construction, since the images of their loss are still so fresh and raw.

Two asides:

1. While typing this, I repeatedly mistyped “wire” as “wife,” which has an entirely different implication.

2. Man on Wire (just typed “wife” again) came in for me at the same time as Frozen River and Hamlet 2. It was a bizarre trio to watch close together.

PAJAMAS are the other thing you can buy if you’ve gained weight and need some retail therapy. I try not to indulge these days, but am awfully tempted since I saw Robin wearing these Mandarin Hipster pajamas on How I Met Your Mother the other week.

It wouldn’t be the first pair of pjs I sought after seeing on the tube. I got the Yummy Sushi pajamas after I saw them on Buffy the Vampire Slayer years ago, and love them still.

Alan Moore and Frank Miller have done laudable things for the comics world, but I suspect that their dark work in the 80’s (Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke) helped scuttle comics as reading material for kids. Darker and with adult themes, comics of the 80’s and beyond earned a wider audience and widespread critical acclaim. But comics also seemed to lose their roots as the coveted items from the grocery store bought with allowance money. Yes, Archie and the Ducks were still out there, but the plethora of superhero comics and popular adaptations that I remember as a kid all but disappeared.

I’ve been pleased to see more young reader and all ages books on the shelves of the comic shop. Yesterday I was happily surprised to see three titles from imprint Boom! Kids comics, all for young children. My two sons, 3yo Guppy and 5yo Drake, were thrilled, and have been carrying them around ever since. We got Cars, The Incredibles, and The Muppet Show. More titles are coming and all with be ongoing. And clearly demand is out there; the titles sold out immediately to retailers, though they can still be found in stores.

Additionally, Toon Books has put out some wonderful hardcover comic books for kids. By request, I read Luke on the Loose, by kid favorite Harry Bliss (of Diary of a Spider, Worm and Fly) and Stinky by Eleanor Davis, umpteen times last week.

If you and your child are looking to expand horizons, check out some of these new titles and books. The mainstream media spent much of the last three decades being shocked that comics aren’t just for kids anymore; they missed that comics often weren’t for kids anymore. Perhaps a true all-ages revolution has begun.

I wish I could use prose as witty and cutting as Jane Austen’s to describe how unpleasant I found Marvel’s comic-book adaptation of her Pride and Prejudice. If you want sparkling prose, I’ll refer you to the source novel. There is little I can say about the comic to its credit, other than it starts off with Austen’s famous introduction:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

From there the comic departs from Austen’s prose. It is a shame adapter Nancy Butler squandered such strong source material in the service of choices like a clumsy character introduction to the Bennet sisters. The art, though, is really where the offense of this adaptation lies.

The color palette is mostly orange and an ugly yellow. The panels on the pages vary wildly, but not in the service of the story. Tones are either dull or too bright, and the gloss of the paper detracts even further. The illustrations of the characters look more like stills taken from a movie than images that tell a story. And the look of the characters would be laughable if they weren’t so dear to me. They are shown with giant white teeth, exactly the same build, and the glossy glamour look is more B movie/soap opera than appropriate for Austen’s time. Marvel, meanwhile, adds insult to injury with intrusive, garish and inappropriate ads that interrupt the story.

The painted cover art, by Sonny Liew, is the one element I liked. (I also liked his work on Vertigo’s My Faith in Frankie and on Re-Gifters) The art style and colors are softer, and more suited to the story than that of the interior. Unfortunately, Marvel mucked up the cover trying to be clever with girl-magazine type headlines.

My only hope is that girls who buy this might be curious to check out the novel. Had Liew painted the interiors, if it used even more of Austen’s prose, and foregone those silly cover headlines, this could have been quite charming. As it is, even as an entry point, I can’t recommend it at all.

The second season of AMC’s Breaking Bad has begun. Bryan Cranston (yes, Hal the dad from Malcolm in the Middle) plays Walt, a sad-sack guy with terminal cancer and an unexpected baby on the way. Way overqualified as a high-school chemistry teacher, he decides to cook meth as a way to earn cash to leave to his family.

Cranston won a well-deserved Emmy for best actor in a drama for his work in season one. Season two’s first three episodes have all been exceptional television. Creator Vince Gilligan, who wrote many of the best X-Files episodes, focuses on the in-between actions and emotions that other mainstream shows gloss over. It’s riveting stuff. But don’t take my word for it. Stephen King rhapsodized about it recently, too, at Entertainment Weekly.

Edited to add: The prestigious Peabody awards, for excellence in electronic media, were announced, and Breaking Bad was one of only two prime time series to win an award (the other was Lost):

Bleak, harrowing, sometimes improbably funny, the series chronicled the consequences of a mild-mannered, dying science teacher’s decision to secure his family’s future by cooking methamphetamine.

From The Breakfast Club:

Claire: I have a really low tolerance for dehydration.

Andrew: I’ve seen her dehydrate, sir. It’s pretty gross.

Since winter seems unable to give up its death grip around here, I had another look at “10 Ways to Great Winter Skin” originally in the Feb 2009 In Style magazine, reprinted at Shine from Yahoo.

Particularly useful, I thought, is the assurance that having any old lip balm is more important than using an expensive one. I find, though, that petrolatum and SPF in formulas like Chapstick can be drying, so they’re a mixed blessing.

I also like the DIY humidifier of a damp washcloth hung on the doorknob. The cleaning and maintenance of humidifiers is a giant PITA, so I’m much more likely to do this.

At the Penguin blog, “In Search of Chandler,” the fascinating tale behind Penguin’s new set of covers for Raymond Chandler’s most famous novels on the 50th anniversary of his death:

Back in summer 2008, when we came up with the idea of reissuing a selection of four of Chandler’s most well-known books (The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The Little Sister, and The Long Good-bye) we vaguely waved away the issue of getting hold of the actual covers….Easy, I thought. We get in touch with the Bodleian, they dig up copies of all of the books from the stacks, and then they whack the jackets on a scanner and whizz them over to our ftp site for me to send to our art department. And then I go home at 5.30 and run around fields and eat strawberries.

Wrong.

It’s a great story, and took me a little while to track down links to the new covers at Penguin UK, as they’re not yet for sale:

The Little Sister
The Lady in the Lake
The Long Goodbye
Farewell, My Lovely

The Penguin blog link was at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, whose “Ten Things to Read on the 50th Anniversary of Raymond Chandler’s Death” was linked to by The Morning News.

Bottle Rocket was the feature-film debut of oddball director Wes Anderson and his childhood friends Luke and Owen Wilson, the latter of whom shared writing duties, on this and Anderson’s subsequent critical darlings Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. They began with a short they showed at Sundance to get financing and went on to make this film.

As usual the Criterion Collection has done a bang-up job on the dvd of this film. The images are sharply transferred, the cover art is well matched to the film’s weird tone, and the plentiful extras include copies of Owen Wilson’s character Dignan’s hilarious notebook. (link from I Watch Stuff)

Dignan plans to pull off a heist and go on the lam with his recently released-from-the-nuthouse friend Anthony (Luke Wilson) and his curiously named friend Bob Mapplethorpe. The dialogue is fast and strange in a story more about the long-term realities of childhood friendships than armed robbery.

Here are just a few of the key ingredients: dynamite, pole vaulting, laughing gas, choppers - can you see how incredible this is going to be? - hang gliding, come on!

Dignan tries hard to act tough. Anthony projects vulnerability but clearly wants to protect Dignan from further injury in life. And Bob gets regularly beaten up by his older brother, played by a third Wilson brother, Andrew. This is sweet, funny, and just sad enough. I was thoroughly charmed.

Martin Ritt’s black and white noir-looking adaptation of John Le Carre’s Spy Who Came in from the Cold is bleak and beautiful. Richard Burton is Alec Leamas, an English spy. His voice and presence are modulated just enough so he doesn’t burst the bounds of the character. His acting was perhaps better suited to stage than film, but he looks appropriately harrowed and ravaged.

I’m a man, you fool. Don’t you understand? A plain, simple, muddled, fat-headed human being. We have them in the West, you know.

Claire Bloom, whose third husband was writer Phillip Roth, is lovely as a Communist co-worker.

The film is strikingly sharp in the new Criterion Collection edition, which includes an informative and entertaining interview with Le Carre done for the new edition. Alas, we had to watch the dvd over two nights, and I’m abashed to admit I couldn’t stay awake for either. My husband G. Grod had to explain the finer points of the complex plot. I highly recommend it in any case. The fault is more likely with me and parental fatigue, not with this classic film.

Phillip Becht, of Minneapolis’ Modern Cafe, at the City Pages, on three types of food:

1. Work eats
2. Kid eats
3. Family eats

His simple approach reminds me of Mark Bittman’s Mimimalist recipes.

I wish my kids ate a lot of broccoli. They do like the gingerbread spice cake and pizza sauce that I hide pureed broccoli in, though. Heh.

In the New York Times op ed, Mark Bittman explains why organic isn’t always better.

At Slate, Catherine Price asks Bittman and Deborah Madison for ideas to combat vegetable fatigue. Both are refreshingly honest, and Bittman’s final piece of advice is a winner. (Link from The Morning News)

The name, ChinDian, is pretty self explanatory. The chef, Nina, is Chinese. Her husband is Indian, and the cuisine at their restaurant is a blend. Friends and I visited recently and had a fabulous meal. We sampled five appetizers and devoured them all. The shrimp toast was crunchy on the outside with some chew in the middle with toothsome chunks of shrimp. The fried wontons were pleasantly non-greasy and utterly craveable. Crispy eggrolls and the chicken-chive dumplings were warm and savory, while the soft spring rolls tasted fresh and herbal.

To drink we tried the hot ginger tea, the cold ginger tea and the berry lemonade. All were pronounced excellent, though I favored the hot tea because it was a cold, wet night. I had the chow mai fun, fine rice noodles, with tofu. It was well seasoned, with excellent contrasting textures and flavors from sliced onion, carrot and the tofu; this dish easily can be gummy and lumpy. I also tried my neighbors’ mock duck broccoli and General Tso’s chicken; both had deep, rich flavors.

Chef Nina reminded us when we began to save room for dessert. It was hard with such a tempting array of items, but I managed, and was glad I did. The crepe with cream in berry sauce was not too sweet, topped generously with berries, and a wonderful complement and finish to a very good meal. I look forward to dining there again.

Rick Nelson of the Star Tribune recommended ChinDian along with Obento-Ya recently.

“Wheelhouse” is one of those terms that I figured out in context quickly. In someone’s wheelhouse means something they’d be especially good at. The term was used several times in Season 5 of Top Chef, but I kept forgetting to look it up.

According to Urban Dictionary and Word Detective, “wheelhouse” is a baseball term meaning the area of greatest potential for a hitter. More generally it means in one’s area of expertise. It likely originates either from a boat term for the elevated captain’s wheel room, or a locomotive term for the swinging power of the roundhouse.