Shariq’s Département

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last week - I was away on vacation, and did not have any NY-specific experiences to share!

I am back now and all revved up to get the blog going on full throttle!

Shariq

Crema, a cool, avante-garde Mexican in the flatiron district (on 17th street, just off 6th avenue) has been one of my favourite restaurants since it opened a couple of years ago.  The chef manages to continuously surprised the palate with innovative variations on classic Mexican dishes.

I went there recently again and found that the quality of the food is as good as ever.  I had the pork chop with pineapples and a chorizo tamale which was exceptional.  The tamale was spicy and the contrast with the sweet, juicy pineapple made for a surreal pork experiences (Picture 1).  P. had the spicy fish empanadas (Picture 2) which were also very good.

Highly recommended!

A muddled, frenetic Norwegian movie with meta-alternative-what-if pretensions, Reprise, although hyped by critics like Manohla Dargis of the New York Times (who is generally spot-on), is fluffy and disappointing.

On the positive side, the movie, about close friends Phillip and Erik, in their twenties who both write and publish their first novels, successfully conveys the exuberance of youth where passion, optimism, loud music and sex rule.  But this has been done so many times before - what makes it a little bit unique is that we get to see contemporary Norway, a country which does not generally export many movies to the U.S.

The plot, focused on Phillip’s nervous breakdown post-publication and obsession with a woman he is in love with, might have worked quite well, except that the director, Joachim Trier, is so focused on quick editing and quirky “this would have happened if Erik did this” voice-overs that we, the audience are left emotionally numb.  Why does the audience care if Phillip is heartbroken or falling apart if the scenario is continously shifting in a post-modern fashion?  Essential parts of character and plot seem to be missing.  But perhaps that is part of the point.  Is young adult angst really definable or understandable?

Go see it for the thrill of a Norwegian rush - but you might be a bit disappointed.

P. and I visited The House in Gramercy for a second time and had a wonderful meal.  This restaurant is a cosy, romantic hideaway on 17th street, just off Irving Place, and is formed from an old converted carriage house.  We especially like sitting on the second floor, at a windowed table (picture 1).

The food is top notch here.  My favourite dish was the rack of lamb with mint sauce and leeks (picture 2).  Having had my share of pedestrian lamb dishes in NYC, this one really hit the mark, and it was bursting with flavor.  The lamb was beautifully cooked.  P.’s favourite dish was an appetizer of red wine braised wild mushrooms over polenta (picture 3), while my appetizer of duck three ways was also good (picture 4).  The first time I came to House I tried the tuna crudo appetizer, which was excellent.  We found a great Austrian wine Braufankish (picture 5) which is definitely worth trying and a great value - have not seen this wine on many menus.

One of the better restaurants in the neighbourhood!

Caryl Churchill’s classic ’80s play Top Girls is brilliantly executed in a dynamic ensemble performance on Broadway.  The play, an entertaining rumination on feminism, the travails of women in the workplace, and the costs of breaking the norms of society, features exceptional performances by Martha Plimpton, Mary Catherine Garrison and Jennifer Ikeda. 

The first act is a fantasy women’s restaurant dinner where a recently promoted career woman, Marlene, hosts historical women who challenged the constraints of their times, such as the rumored female Pope Joan, a Japanese courtesan from the 13th century who became a Buddhist nun, and Griselda, the obedient, loyal wife described by Chaucer.  Themes of sacrifice, punishment for pushing limits, and the impact of bearing children reverberate in the playful yet emotionally charged banter within this group.

The latter part of the play focuses on Marlene’s actual life in the office and with her rural family she ran away from as a teenager.  What’s exciting about the acting is that the actresses play multiple characters.  So Martha Plimpton, who is nominated for a Tony, plays Pope Joan as well as a slow, dim-witted rural, possibly lesbian teenager.  The change from certitude in character to a lost, angry soul shows the depth of Plimpton’s acting ability.  The play also riffs with variations by having the same actress play multiple roles, as Pope Joan’s drag is transformed into confused, nascent modern-day lesbianism.  Similarly, the wonderful Mary Catherine Garrison, morphs from a patient fictional icon to a petulant, whiny teenager to a hip, 21-year old looking for a job.  I thought she was absolutely fascinating as Kit, the teenager, and the show is worth watching just to see the complexity she imbues into each line of delivery.  I will be looking forward to see anything she acts in again.

The biggest disappointment in the play was the academy-award winning Marisa Tomei, whose Scottish and British accents were so bad that they sounded forced, making it hard to understand an actress who was no longer enunciating well and losing all emotional tonality in her delivery as she focused on sounding authentic.  She sounded like she might have a cold, so maybe she was having an off-day.

The play becomes a metaphor for challenging the norms of society and the  consequences of doing so.  See it before it ends!  The show closes on June 29th.  Watch the Tony awards this weekend!

In this enjoyable but way-too-long movie about finding love, and seeking happiness through close friends, children and plenty of sex, the nymphomaniac from the show, Samantha ends up being the subtle heroine of the movie.

Carrie, dumped by Big on her wedding day, loses her make-up to expose sallow, sagging post-40 skin, reflecting a diseased fear that she will be deprived of committed, intimate love all her life.  But, without revealing too much of the plot, let me just say that Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda all end up revealing an inherent insecurity within themselves without a man or children.  Samantha, the only one who is not married, or looking to get married at the start of the movie, ends up chucking a relationship that she has outgrown.  She believes in herself, and is not afraid to be alone in order to grow.  She also displays tremendous maturity in not cheating on her boyfried, despite several voluptuous Playgirl-type nude opportunites with her hot next-door neighbour.

Unlike the TV show, there is an undertone of pathos in this movie.  All the characters are older, look tired and have lines on their faces.  There is a sense of desperation surrounding them at this mid-life crisis age.  They seem to be wondering is this all there is - is there more I should expect or want out of life?  It is Samantha in the movie, and not Carrie, who (perhaps unconsciously on the screenwriter’s part) provides the answer.

So I finally went to see the new Indiana Jones movie, which debuted at Cannes this month, and although the movie is entertaining enough, the main attraction is not the flimsy plot but the fun of seeing great actors having a good time.

Harrison Ford, although in his sixties now, has not lost his boyish, rakish charm that continues to make him an effortless, fun-to-watch hero.  You can’t help but root for him, no matter how silly the dialog is.  Cate Blanchett is also good as the evil Russian Dr. Irina Spalko, looking for paranormal ways to control the world - she seems to be thoroughly enjoying herself, especially when kicking Shia LaBeouf’s butt in a nicely choreographed fight across two jeeps.  LaBeouf, who has been charismatic on the screen before in Disturbia, is oddly muted here and completely overshadowed by Ford.  There is a scene at the end of the movie where LaBeouf tries to take Indiana’s hat, almost as if to say: hey, its my turn now.  Ford, as Indiana, grabs the hat back, and you can almost hear the audience breathing a collective sigh of relief - no, LaBeouf will not be able to sustain the franchise on his own.  Karen Allen is also a delight to watch, and her fascination with Indiana Jones is infectious.

The plot will not appeal to a lot of people who find New Age approaches to relics and archeological sites too fantastical to entertain.  I will say that the movie feels well researched on New Age topics ranging from groupthink, collective consciousness, interdimensional portals, intuitive symbols, to the transparent crystal (embodying light and sound) nature of other planes.  However the climax seems cheesy and unlikely.

Not a classic, but worth watching!

The insightful documentary Up the Yangtze, playing at the Quad cinema, uses the creation of the Three Gorges Dam in China to explore changing aspects of Chinese daily life.  Peasants who are forced to move from areas being flooded must seek alternative forms of income to support themselves in a post-Communist economy where cash instead of a paternalistic communist government handout is necessary to survive.  Meanwhile, foreign tourists from the US, Canada and France are crowding tour boats along the Yangtze river to see this disappearing world before the flooding occurs. 

The movie documents the attempts of two young Chinese teenagers learning to work on these ships.  For the girl, Cindy, from an extremely poor family, she has to work and give up high school to support her peasant parents who are illiterate.  We watch her struggling to come to terms with the reality that she must forgo an education to feed her parents; the film juxtaposes images of fat American tourists gorging on plates of heaping buffet food to make the point that we live such wonderful lives in the West that we cannot imagine the difficulties others go through in the developing world just to survive.  I’d recommend you see this movie just to remind yourself that no matter how bad your life might seem to you, you have it pretty good!  One American woman leaving the cruise at the end of the movie congratulates a young Chinese aide/porter for not being as “obtrusive” on her cruise as she had feared.  She has a lot to learn.

The movie reminded me of another film about the Three Gorges Dam I saw a couple of months ago, the excellent Still Life, directed by the very talented Jia ZhangKe. 

This movie won the best picture prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 and is successful in using the Dam to explore what the meaning of change is for two different protagonists: a man who is in search of a wife who left him many years ago, and in a parallel story, a woman who comes to the Three Gorges area to seek her husband who is involved in constructing a new bridge across the Yangtze.  The images in this movie are as real as the ones in the documentary (pre-flooding), and one almost thinks that the two movies must have been shot at the same time. 

But what is really interesting in Still Life is that Jhangke suggests that although change is occurring in China, people feel like they are trapped in a limbo as they wait for a future to arrive, not knowing what form it will take.  A pre-dam life has ended, but where do the people go from here?  The male protagonist is shown to be the wiser one, as he silently accepts life and seeks new possibilities when life does not go his way, accepting that the future will reveal itself in its own time.  The woman protagonist is more limited, struggling and crying as she realizes she has lost her husband, bewildered at fate’s hand.  She is stuck in the limbo, as probably many are in China, the movie suggests.  The movie is filmed in washed out colors and has many long takes, suggesting the faded, meandering quality of a life that is changing but is arrested, and has not yet fully birthed the future.

The busy, bustling new restaurant in Gramercy, Bar Milano actually has very good food, and is a much needed culinary addition to the neighbourhood.

Dishes highlight market ingredients, such as pickled trout with heirloom beets (picture 1) and a pork chop with spicy apples (picture 2).

We had a great time!

Part of the problem the beautifully executed and sombre production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses on Broadway faces is that the story has become so familiar.  The movie version with Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer and John Malkovich became a classic with Oscar buzz.  The story was replayed in various forms, such as the Reese Witherspoon movie Cruel Intentions.  So, excited though I was to sit through this production, it felt like I was watching a familiar Shakespeare play - you knew what was going to happen, which robbed the play of much excitement.

The most noteworthy part of the production is Ben Daniels’ star turn as the morally corrupt Vicomte de Valmont.  Daniels, who I remember as the nerdy middle-aged lover in the British movie Beautiful Thing, manages to be be convincingly cruel, sexy, charming all at the same time.  He also successfully brings about a metamorphosis in the character by the end of the play - we truly believe, watching him, that he has been taught a lesson about the importance of morality and love in life.  He is a marked improvement on John Malkovich, who, in the movie version, seemed icky and slimy enough that you did not care much what happened to him. This allowed Glenn Close to dominate the movie version.

Unfortunately for Laura Linney, who I love, but is seriously miscast as the conniving Marquise de Merteuil (played by Glenn Close in the movie), Daniels is the more interesting and compelling character in this production.  No matter how hard she tries to be nasty, Linney’s smile, which is meant to be artifice, actually comes across sometimes as hidden goodness.  We, the audience, just do not believe she is as nasty as her actions show.  And this robs the show of some of its dramatic tension, moving us to pathos instead.  This tone of pathos is reinforced by mournful, choral singing to mark the change in scenes.  The singing, while beautiful, throws a cover of melancholy over the proceedings. 

Ben Daniels’ performance and Mamie Gummer’s (Meryl Streep’s daughter’s) comic timing are reasons to see this show.  But, it can drag at times, as we do not seem to care much for the other characters.