On the happy side of life’s little ledger, I persuaded my consort to take me to see “Mid-August Lunch,” and we both squirmed through it, wondering if it was ever actually going to go anywhere. But we walked out feeling transported — it’s so very Italian, and you can almost smell the Rome apartment it’s filmed in. I was mostly interested in it for the food, and it definitely delivered, and not in a porn-ish way. Only the Italians would think sliced potatoes and fish fillets will bake in the same amount of time (branzino and orata there are always 375 degrees of separation from crudo). The crisp veal Milanese, the limp roasted asparagus, the cakes both store-bought and home-baked, the gooey/cheesy lasagne, the pasta-with-red-sauce portions are all just right. So much of the movie takes place in the kitchen and around the table it’s well worth watching once it comes to DVD. The poster slogan should be: No smarm, please. We’re Italian.
Post Category → celluloid cuisine
Olive oil is 1% worm
Time Out deserves a fist bump for printing the most self-indicting letter ever, from some bleeding idiot outraged over a photo of a whole pig roasting on a spit: “I don’t want to see visual reminders that my lunch was once a living and breathing animal.” As they say on the political blogs: Teh stupid — it burns. Hot dogs good; porchetta scary. Please. Food does not come from the supermarket. And if you can’t face the artisanal link, you certainly don’t want to contemplate the industrial chain. “Our Daily Bread” should be required viewing for anyone who reacts to a picture of a whole hog by throwing her turkey sandwich in the trash. Tom died in vain.
That kind of denial is exactly what’s involved in one of the most unsettling processes I’ve read about in some time, how processors turn pigskins into chicharrones, aka pork rinds. The story was in the WSJournal, on a dispute over imports of skins from countries with foot-and-mouth, the disease that devastated British farms less than 10 years ago. Pigs there, of course, contracted it by eating imported meat (you don’t even want to dwell). Thank allah for the photos and relatively long text to make it clear just how processed this stuff is: In one factory, frozen skins are mechanically minced and cooked into pellets, which are then boxed up and shipped off to other factories to be fried. Forget the issue of whether the meat is contaminated to begin with. How many un-health-cared hands touch it before it lands in someone’s mouth; how many chances are there for something to go horribly wrong? And people freak out about lard?
E. coli on a wire
Nothing epitomizes America’s defeated attitude better than the coming teevee show about a “chef” who works in a struggling burger joint. We don’t even aspire to cuisine these days, even as fantasy; we’ll just settle for one step up from McFilth. Someone should put “Frank’s Place” back out on DVD. Gumbo is complex — and shrimp and crab don’t get recalled for shit.
Fresh figs for all & Kanye
I’m usually pretty good at over-interpreting meanings in movies — I still remember how quickly I pegged the crack epidemic to “Alien Nation” at a time when everyone was still pretending Lee Atwater was not the vilest dog whistler around. So why am I mystified as to the significance of the frozen corn in Sendak cinematized? The kid flees the house after spurning Birds Eye’s best, with a grandiose statement of his disdain. But why? Maybe Spike Jonze’s next project is with Saint Alice and other sanctimonious souls in the Bay Area: “Where the Chang Talks Aren’t.”
The 60-Minute Mark Twain
So much for Michael Pollan’s cred. Food & Wine has just declared this the year of the home cook, even as he is swearing cobwebs are covering American stoves. Hmm Balzer notwithstanding, someone is buying an awful lot of groceries these days. Then again, there’s a whole cookbook coming out on ways to doctor up pre-fab cookie dough — with no ways to take shit out, of course, only to add it back in. Leave it to the Guardian, though, to really put all this in perspective with a story on how “Meryl Streep film starts debate on loss of cooking skills.” Yes, Sophie the Prada-Wearing Devil did it. Apparently the paper is outsourcing its headline-writing to Lahore.
When Molto met Marcella
And since even I am obviously incapable of resisting the celluloid meth of the summer, I have to add that I’m a big admirer of Madeleine Kamman’s recipes; her roasted duck legs changed the way we eat. But I like a catfight as much as anyone else and so appreciated the dredging up of the old rivalry with Mme Child. It’s yet another gauge of character that the nastiness was kept buried until she was. Could you imagine that today? I Feel Bad About My Dreck should consider making a sequel: “No Reservations, Rachael.” Targeted at two such disparate audiences, it would be a blockbuster.
“Creepy goth” almost makes it tantalizing
My compliments to I Feel Bad About My Dreck. The turkey is officially off the ground, although it was not surprising to read that the stinker that is “GI Joe” is actually flying. I may have to break down and see the thing eventually now that we just heard our friend and neighbor has a role in it, proving real actors were involved; I had been wondering if the entire cast was made up of food and media personalities who would help in the relentless promotion. (Some time ago I Twittered that if this thing were a cow, its udders would be aching from being milked so hard.) But first those seriously annoying trailers are going to have to stop popping up on so many websites. From the look of them, Meryl Streep disappears into a role about as well as a wiener does into a corn dog.
Did Beard even want people partying in his throne room?
Can “I Feel Bad About My Dreck” hustle that movie any harder? Or should the question be: Will there be anyone left to pay to see the thing once the free screenings are exhausted? Countless food bloggers have already been thoroughly co-opted, and food writers with bit parts are doing their swooning part in promoting it, too. But I find it rather amusing that formerly arboreal and other so-called legit media are apparently being asked to keep their reactions to themselves until the official opening (if you can believe one annoyed reporter on the other coast). And I wonder if that all started once the New Yorker got a whiff of turkey.
High Plains Camorra
One brilliant element among many in “Food, Inc.” was the segment of Eric Schlosser biting into a burger with fries. That kind of too-up-close-and-personal scene usually makes me gag (I’d almost rather watch food come out the other end), but it sent a message for the rest of the 90-some minutes: No one is saying you have to give up the freedom food. You just have to give a damn where it comes from. Which I hope finally ends the argument I have had with friends who think I’m ridiculous for resisting whole roast chicken for $10 in a restaurant when I pay more than that for a raw one for my consort and cat. If you calculate 30 percent food costs, you’re talking feet up, feathers in manure.
My second favorite scene was the one of Joel Salatin interviewed as his pigs porked out. After all that had come before, it slowly sinks in that he is lounging next to pigs, and no one is wearing a mask or gagging for air. Raised right, even the filthiest animals are bearable. Which of course got me thinking about a long-ago trip to Paris, one of my consort’s unlamented corporate boondoggles, when the boss’s wife commented on the second or third day: “It smells different in the bathroom here.” No shit. Garbage in, garbage out. I’m not going to romanticize the French, but a country with street markets and seasons and small farms is on the right track. With luck, even its growing love affair with le fast food will not end tragically. The villains can still reform.
Much depends on ritual
On a related note, “Departures” may have won the Oscar, but it was no “Waltz With Bashir.” About the only thing that redeemed the Japanese schmaltz-fest for me beyond the out-of-Tokyo setting was the food, and even it would have been better in half the time. I wish I could recommend it for two very opposite chicken scenes, the raw and the cooked, but they go by quickly, as does one where the tormented soul at the center eats alone (sashimi on a baguette) and another where he and his wife liberate an octopus she has bought for dinner that turns out to be alive and writhing. Maybe it’s rentable to fast-forward to one great scene where the two main characters share grilled puffer roe with salt and one glories in “eating corpses.” Unsaid is that they are eating the unborn. Won’t play in Kansas. . .
And the Oscar goes to the snood
Of all the many reasons to consider “The Wrestler” the steamingest pile to appear in theaters in donkey’s years, the scenes involving food and drink were more cringe-inducing than the stomach-churning violence. Did anyone not immediately suspect, on hearing the irredeemable lowlife was being assigned to the deli counter, that slicer and fingers would meet for dramatic effect? Did no one assigned to continuity notice that he was both free to work weekends and available to hang in a bar on a Saturday? And I guess George Bush the First, the one who didn’t know from scanners, was in charge of styling the deli scenes. What supermarket doesn’t have a printout function on its scales? Even in grimmest Jersey? If states could sue, I might even chip in for its legal bills. At least we were spared the reconciliation dinner by candlelight, if not the implication that bad dads turn daughters gay. Sweet Jeebus in spangly tights. Six seasons of “Top Chef” watched “Clockwork Orange”-style would not have been as painful.
Irritable intolerance
No Coen Brothers movie is ever a waste, but I have to say the food references helped redeem the lame latest. You gotta love a character who complains first about being “lactose reflux” and later about being allergic to “shellfood.” It’s almost as if the screenwriters did time at a women’s magazine.
Full-time travelers, part-time workers
Dinner afterward was one long argument about the quality of the movie-making, but I have to say the new Werner Herzog is a seriously good food film. A few sequences are as slow as an Omnivorish exploration of his own dieting, but I got my fill on the shoe-eater’s quoting “the best description of hunger is a description of bread” and his observation that the base camp of the first explorers now looks like “an extinct supermarket.” It does make you think about dried fruit as the new canned mutton. And the Frosty Boy churning out something that Skimpy Treat would have happily served is richly ironic in the land of hard-frozen ice. Mostly, though, I came away wondering why scientists are searching for the origins of life when death for humankind is rapping at the front door. Those scallops and squid and seals are going to be there long after the last greenhouse tomato has been infected with salmonella.
And the rat in the kitchen?
I wasn’t going to point out that this was not the optimum year for food editors to be reaching for the Hoary file and digging out that beyond-hardy perennial, the Oscar story with dishes pegged to nominees for best picture. Most reflexive examples I came across were merely predictably cringe-inducing, but the home of the Human Scratch N Match deserves a statuette of its own. A sample caption: “Nothing says bloodstain like a puree of beets.” And that’s for the movie just begging for a milkshake. “Silver dollar blinis” in honor of Javier Bardem’s penchant for forcing victims to play heads-you-die was equally tone-deaf idiotic, although even it was not as bad as deviled quail eggs for “Juno.” (That’s all the anti-choice crazies need, moviegoers craving ova.) Oh, and that “bread pudding” the wealthy British family in “Atonement” would have been familiar with? They forgot the bread. Are we really only weeks away from Erin-Go-Stupid on corned beef and cabbage?
No aftertaste
Now that orange Tic Tacs have turned up in not one but two movies about literally fucked-up situations you would almost suspect the silly things are aphrodisiacs. Maybe whoever is product-placing them should be appointed brand ambassador for what’s left of America when the Chimp finally knuckles back to his preserve in Texas. We’re going to need someone who can make shit as seductive as Shinola.