Star Trek

In this reboot of the iconic sci-fi franchise, Cpt. Nero (Eric Bana) a renegade Romulian, destroys a Federation starship, killing Capt. George Kirk (Chris Hemsworth) in the process. George’s son, James (Chris Pine), grows up a headstrong rebel in the midwest. Eventually, he joins Starfleet and ends up on the Enterprise alongside Dr. Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban), translator Uhara (Zoe Saldana), pilot Hiraku Sulu (Jonathan Cho), navigator Pavel Chekov (Anton Yelchin) and ultra-logical half-Vulcan Cmdr. Spock (Zachary Quinto). Together, they must stop Nero from destroying the Federation planet by planet.

Star Trek tends to provoke as much controversy and passion among its fans as hockey does among Quebecers or World of Warcraft does among computer nerds. As a non-fan, I’m ill-equipped to evaluate this latest effort as a work of Star Trek lore. I can’t attest to its fidelity to the original series and I will fein neither giddy enthusiasm nor abject loathing for its very existence. All I can do is rate it as a movie.

As a movie, Star Trek leaves a lot to be desired. As with many so-so films, the script is the chief culprit. The plot manages to blend the metaphysical confusion of time travel with an overly simplistic revenge story. Characterization is nothing if not thin and predictable. The rebellious Kirk shows up on a motorcycle at one point (clichéd much?) and even as his character supposedly matures under pressure, we don’t see him actually undergo much of an internal change. Likewise, Spock’s supposed intelligence and rationality is undermined by his inability to adapt to remarks about his mother (portrayed briefly by a nearly unrecognizable Winona Ryder).

The acting is uneven, but less suspect. Simon Pegg is hilarious as engineer Montgomery Scott, Quinto makes the most of a difficult role and Leonard Nimoy is fun to watch as an aged version of his trademark character. Pine isn’t terrible in the lead, but he can’t help but seem inadequate. Ditto Bana – he brings some sympathy to a villainous role, but it’s still not enough to make Nero memorable. Both fare better than Soldana and Hemsworth though. The former is reduced to Object of the Hero’s Affection status, while the latter is embarrassingly wooden.

The one thing that action director J.J. Abrams did get completely right is the movie’s pace. Star Trek moves quickly without feeling rushed and there’s barely a wasted, extraneous moment to be found. Largely eschewing the CGI-happy antics of his contemporaries, Abrams also demonstrates that it’s possible to shoot a good-looking film the old-fashioned way.

It will undoubtedly thrill Trekkies to see this franchise given new life, but for those who didn’t have any investment in the TV series, there’s nothing exemplary here. Watch it, but don’t expect to go where no man has gone before.

6.5/10

Anna's Baking

As a rule of thumb, I don’t review anything which isn’t commercially available. And while I won’t make an exception here, I will say this: my friend Anna is one hell of a baker. Her confections, which are too numerous to list, have included frosted banana cupcakes, a Philadelphia Phillies cake, macaroons, cream cheese cookies, various brownies and much, much more. Even on the rare occasions when the end result is misshapen (such an attempted croquembouche) or slightly burnt, it is still reliably tasty and sweet. Armed with a high-powered Kitchen Aid mixer and an encyclopedic knowledge of Martha Stewart lore, it seems like there is little she can’t concoct if given sufficient motivation and time.

Anna has a few recipes up on her blog. Lobby her and she may post a few more. Barring that, you could always become her friend.

NOTE: I was not compensated with cupcakes in exchange for this write-up. That would constitute a violation of my ethics. If this should lead to more baking in the future from which I would benefit, that is merely a happy coincidence.

Things Change

Gino (Don Ameche), a simple Chicago shoe-shiner, is offered a considerable sum of money to take the fall for a murder committed by a Mafioso he resembles. Determined to one day buy a fishing boat, he accepts the offer. Jerry (Joe Mantegna), a low-level mob figure who has fallen out of favor, is assigned to watch Gino until his court date. He decides to show the older man a good time before he gets sent to prison and takes him to Lake Tahoe instead. Jerry passes his newfound acquaintance off as a powerful mob boss and, astonishingly, the ruse works. The more time they spend taking advantage of their newfound prestige, however, the more they stand to lose.

David Mamet has long had a fascination with crime and his second film can best be described as Being There crossed with Scorcese. Like Peter Sellers’ Chance the Gardener, Ameche’s Gino gets by because his naiveté is mistaken for genius by all around him. Mantegna gives some humanity to Jerry by making him more than just a moocher. The two leads are fun to watch and other Mamet regulars (magician Ricky Jay as a consigliore and a young bleach-blond William H. Macy as a chauffeur) make the most of their small parts.

What nearly kills this film is its lack of plausibility. Without giving too much away, these gangsters don’t act like gangsters – not even dumb ones. And yet the heaping of coincidence upon coincidence is essential to the plot. For that reason, Things Change works much better as a farce than a crime film. Taken in this vein, it’s equal parts entertaining and touching, though inescapably small.

7/10

Let the Great World Spin

Set in New York City in 1974 against the backdrop of Philippe Petit’s infamous tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, Colum McCann’s National Book Award Winner explores the intertwined lives of more than a half-dozen characters. Corrigan, an idealistic Irish priest, lives in poverty and provides shelter for prostitutes while his pragmatic brother Ciaran tries to get him to go back to the old country. One of those prostitutes, Tillie, struggles to be a mother (and grandmother) despite the demands of the street life. Conservative, Jewish Judge Soderbergh, who sentences Tillie to prison, mourns the death of his son, while his high-strung WASP wife, Claire, forges an unexpected friendship with Gloria, a black woman with her own personal tragedies.

With its frequent point-of-view shifts and sprawling structure, “Let the Great World Spin” is a supremely ambitious work. McCann very nearly demonstrates that he has the talent to pull it off. His lyrical descriptions bring the city to life and he manages to give each character’s section a (mostly) unique style and voice. Even though the same events are touched on over and over again, they come across as fresh because we are seeing them through different eyes.


Unfortunately, the quality of McCann’s prose isn’t always an asset to the novel. In some sections, his penchant for descriptiveness comes across as distant and authorial rather than organic. The frequent point-of-view shifts are sometimes jarring. We are often dropped into a new character’s perspective without any context and it may take pages for us to find out who we are following and why.


The book’s final section is extremely puzzling. Set in the near-present, it introduces Tillie’s granddaughter, Jaslyn, and reveals the fates of many of the book’s characters. Though intended as a culmination, it reads more like a starting point. The good news is that we’re interested in Jaslyn, both as a product of the tragic circumstances which shape the book and as a lead character in her own right and we want to keep reading. The bad news is that the shift to modern day at the very end reduces the majority of the novel to a very elaborate backstory.


“Let the Great World Spin” is a flawed book full of interesting parallels. In examine a miraculous spectacle high in the air, McCann reminds us that miraculous things happen on the ground, too.


7.5/10

A Serious Man

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a Jewish-American physics professor in 1967 Minnesota whose life seems to be unraveling by the minute. His wife (Sari Lennick) wants a divorce, his kids (Aaron Wolff and Jessica McManus) are ungrateful troublemakers, his brother (Richard Kind) is an unwelcome houseguest with legal woes, a disgruntled Asian student is threatening his job and he’s up for tenure. Unhelpful consultations with his lawyer (Adam Arkin) and several rabbis leave him wondering what it all means.

There used to be a time when “a Coen Brothers film” meant something. Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo and The Big Lebowski shared cast members, homages galore and a darkly comedic sensibility. Nowadays, no two Coen Brothers movies are alike. No Country For Old Men broke sharply with everything (Blood Simple notwithstanding) that came before, while Burn After Reading broke sharply with No Country. A Serious Man continues the pattern by having next to nothing in common with either film. Those looking for a return to the Coen Brothers “formula” (if a fairly complex body of work can even be described as such) will be disappointed.

Fortunately, change isn’t always a bad thing. Here, the Coens delve deeply into Judaica. Larry’s plight mirrors that of Job, bits of Hebrew are sprinkled throughout the dialogue and the various rabbi characters provide insight into Jewish traditions. How much of this will appeal to gentile audiences is tough to determine. As a Jew, I found it a well-intentioned, if not always flattering, examination of the faith.

Despite the gravity of Larry’s situation (and the implications of the title), A Serious Man manages to be fitfully funny. Larry being muscled into moving into a motel, the Korean student’s father’s botched attempts at threats and bribery and a Jefferson Airplane-quoting senior rabbi are among the endearingly odd, painfully awkward highlights.

Led by unknowns, the cast manages to bolster the film’s thematic aspirations. Despite the immense sympathy generated by his situation, Stuhlbarg manages to keep Larry just a touch dislikable. Even still, he has nothing on Fred Melamed as the wife-stealing Cy Abelman, an overbearing widower who is also a “serious man.” And Kind steals scenes as the underachieving, unbalanced Uncle Arthur.

A Serious Man is a painstakingly crafted – and painstakingly personal – film. Relentlessly bleak, unapologetically Jewish, engrossingly strange, it’s a challenging movie that offers thought-provoking dividends for those who get it and misanthropic torment for those who do not.

8/10

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

The life and work of famed Japanese author Yukio Mishima (Ken Ogata) is presented in four different episodes, each with a different theme. The first segment is an adaptation of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, in which a shy, stuttering Buddhist acolyte comes to revile a temple he has been raised to admire. The second segment is based on Kyoko’s House. Here, a young actor enters a destructive relationship with a wealthy woman to cancel his mother’s debt. The third episode is an adaptation of Runaway Horses, in which a young reactionary is determined to assassinate capitalists and bureaucrats and return Japan to its former glory no matter what the cost. The final episode focuses on Mishima’s final days, in which the controversial author and members of his private militia conspire to takeover a military garrison so he can deliver a rousing speech and launch a royalist coup.

Director and co-writer Paul Schrader has cited this unorthodox biopic as his finest work and it isn’t hard to see why. Ogata brings gravitas to the title role, the highly stylized look (exaggeratedly bright colors during the adaptations, black-and-white during flashback sequences and more natural tones in the frame story) is breathtaking and a Philip Glass/Kronos Quartet score imparts a sense of grandeur.

Nevertheless, the film doesn’t quite live up to its lofty ambitions. By structuring everything episodically, we get a good sense of Mishima’s ideas, but only a vague sense of the man himself. Pivotal moments in his life – a trip to the theater with his domineering grandmother, rejection from Army service, a dalliance in a gay bar – are shown briefly, minimizing the impact. That’s a shame, as Mishima makes for a complex, contradictory and captivating character: a prolific, closeted gay ultranationalist novelist/playwright/essayist who clung to the bushido code, founded his own army and didn’t live past 45.

Similarly, the film’s atmosphere, while stunning, doesn’t always work in its favor. There are times when the repetitive score seems overbearing and the artifice created by the bright color scheme leaves us wanting something more subdued. It goes without saying that this can easily confuse someone with no familiarity of Mishima or his work, but at the very least, it will inspire curiosity.

Because of its sprawling, episodic nature, A Life in Four Chapters is a difficult film to assess as a whole. As a biography, it leaves too much unanswered. As an adaptation of a writer’s work, it’s overly condensed. But as a concept film, it offers a rewarding and provocative – if somewhat flawed – experience.

7.75/10

Child of God

Kicked off his land and falsely accused of rape, Lester Ballard wanders the mountains of Sevier County, Tennessee looking for trouble. The deranged, rifle-toting misfit pays visits to everyone from a domineering junkyard owner to an unexpecting shopkeeper, committing a serious of increasingly bizarre and violent crimes along the way.

First printed in 1974, Cormac McCarthy’s third novel is also among his more accessible. His trademark poetic landscape descriptions and quoteless dialogue are both here, but neither are done to excess. As a result, Child of God has a far quicker, more fluid pace than later McCarthy works, Suttree in particular.

The most striking aspect of Child of God is its idiosyncratic point of view. In the first section of the book, the narrative switches between Ballard’s perspective and that of unnamed townsfolk, who comment disparagingly (and ironically, given their own lack of sophistication) on his upbringing. We’re left with old Lester for the duration, but we never get too far inside his head. McCarthy takes us through the course of his days dispassionately, a plus not only because Ballard is a miserable human being, but also because this lack of judgment allows his monstrous acts to speak for themselves.

Weighing in at just under 200 pages, Child of God lacks both the literal and intellectual heft of Suttree and Blood Meridian, but it still gets at meaty concerns about the fabric of society and builds to a chillingly brutal conclusion. This is not McCarthy’s grandest work, but it may be his most tightly written. Neither the novice nor the experienced McCarthy reader should skip this overlooked gem.

8/10

Don

Located at 423 Tate Street, Don serves Japanese appetizers, rice and noodle dishes. A limited selection of alcoholic beverages is available.

Japanese cuisine and sushi are synonymous in the imagination of the American public. As such, Japanese restaurants that don’t serve sushi are easy to overlook. However, Don convincingly makes the case that there’s more to savor than sashimi and specialty rolls.

Food at Don comes in a few different categories. In addition to the familiar ramen, there’s ishiyaki (sizzling rice bowls), yakisoba (thin fried noodles) and udon (thicker noodles in a stir fry or soup), each with different combinations of toppings. I’ve had the best luck with the ishiyaki, my favorites being shrimp, red snapper and katsu pork. Each is served sizzling hot, meaning you’ll have to do some stirring if you don’t want anything to burn. A selection of optional sauces allows you to season each dish to your liking and the complimentary miso is flavorful and not too salty.

Other dishes are hit-and-miss. Steamed gyoza are decent, but you can get better down the street. The chicken yakisoba is satisfactorily crunchy and has a good balance of flavors, though the serving size is small. Shoyu (soy) ramen was salty but otherwise bland.

Don’s interior is comfortable, modern and clean. Colorful paper lamps and decorative Japanese wall accent an otherwise dark space. There’s bar seating, though you shouldn’t have any problem getting a table here. Don is rarely ever crowded and service doesn’t lag.

Prices at Don are very reasonable. All entrees run under $10 and appetizers are generally in the $3 to $6 range. You can easily get a filling meal here without breaking the bank.

Don is no Sushi Republic – neither the caliber of cuisine nor the expense are comparable – but it’s a great option for diners who don’t need an expansive menu to enjoy a satisfying meal.

7.5/10

Zoe's Kitchen

Located in the Shops at Friendly, Zoe’s Kitchen offers Greek influenced soups, sandwiches, salads, kabobs and more. Takeout dinners for four are available, side items can be purchased by the tub and there is a limited selection of alcoholic beverages.

A Greek-deli hybrid with a health-conscious spin, Zoe’s Kitchen sounds great on paper, but fails to live up to the promise of its concept. To its credit, the Birmingham-based chain shows some innovation with its menu. Sides include braised white beans and mayo-free marinated slaw and hibiscus green tea is available as a fountain drink. Several dishes can be prepared to accommodate vegetarian, vegan or gluten-free diners.

Unfortunately, not all of these innovations are successful. Zoe’s signature sandwich, the “Gruben” (turkey, Swiss, slaw and mustard on rye) lacks zest and will leave you craving the real thing. Though feta is an oft-utilized ingredient, Greek staples such as gyros and spanikopita are notably absent here.

Pricing here isn’t unreasonable. Sandwiches are an even $7 with one side included and the sides are generously portioned. Salads and entrees (with the exception of salmon kabobs) are all under $10.

Lunchtime at Zoe’s can be a mob scene. Show up between noon and 1 p.m. and you should expect at least a five-minute line wait. That, coupled with the garishly bright interior design and less-than-comfortable chairs, severely diminishes its appeal as a dining option.

All and all, Zoe’s Kitchen is well-intentioned and offers a few novel selections, but the food has a long way to go.


6/10