Sanibel's

Located at 2929 North Main Street in High Point, Sanibel’s serves seafood for dinner Tuesday through Sunday (and lunch on Sundays as well). There are semi-daily (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays) food specials.

Every North Carolina town of a certain size needs at least one classic fried seafood joint. In High Point, Sanibel’s fits the bill. This is the kind of place that looks untouched by time. But you don’t go here for ambiance or innovation. You go to a Sanibel’s because you want cheap, plentiful fried fish that won’t make you sick, and by that measure, Sanibel’s delivers.

Sanibel’s occupies a largish space up North Main with plenty of seating and parking alike. There is a separate entrance for take-out orders, which is what I opted for. I called in ahead, and everything was ready at the time of pick-up.

Though the menu offers steaks, salads, and pasta dishes, seafood is the main draw here. You can get it broiled or fried, in single items or in combinations. My wife and I each went with a small fried combination platter, which came equipped with slaw, hushpuppies, and a choice of potato. We came away with flounder-perch-baked potato and shrimp-clams-fries respectively.

By and large, the food was tasty and satisfying in a predictable, comfort-food way. Everything fried was well-breaded and crispy without excess grease, and there were zero freshness concerns. The popcorn shrimp were tiny yet addictive and won the approval of our begging cat as well. While neither the fries nor the slaw was anything special, the onion-ring lookalike hushpuppies were a standout.

Sanibel’s represents an exceptional value for the money spent. For under $12 per, each “small” combination platter yielded two generously portioned meals’ worth of food. One shudders to think just how much a “large” would include.

I cannot attest to Sanibel’s dine-in experience, and I’m in no rush to find out if they do broiled seafood as well as they do fried, but takeout from this place seems like a smart bet for anyone with a fried fish craving or simply a few mouths to feed.

Da 5 Bloods

During the Vietnam War, five African American soldiers lead by Norman (Chadwick Boseman) seize a cache of gold from a crashed CIA plane and conspire to keep it as repayment for injustices they have faced. They bury the gold so they can retrieve it later, but their markers are destroyed and Norman is killed in the combat that follows. Decades later, the four survivors – Paul, Otis, Eddie, and Melvin – return to Vietnam to retrieve the gold and Norman’s remains. Otis (Clarke Peters) reconnects with an old girlfriend, Tien, who puts the group in contact with a French businessman (Jean Reno), who is willing to buy the gold from them. They are also joined by a guide, Vinh (Johnny Tri Nguyen), and by Paul’s estranged son David (Jonathan Majors). Internal tensions threaten to tear the group apart if mine-laced terrain and opportunistic mercenaries don’t do so first.

Spike Lee’s first Netflix film is ambitious and messy, blending elements of a war film and heist film with his usual sociopolitical commentary. The crossgenre combination doesn’t sink Da 5 Bloods – if anything, it’s a selling point – but a bloated run time, tonal whiplash, and stylistic inconsistencies detract from a powerfully acted and timely film.

While the same cannot be said of the stereotyped supporting roles, most of the leads do a phenomenal job. Lindo makes Paul uneasily sympathetic: despite him being an angry xenophobe and terrible father, he’s racked with both guilt and PTSD and is painfully aware of his own mortality. Peters and Isiah Whitlock Jr., veterans of The Wire, do solid work as Otis and Melvin as well, adding tension and camaraderie as needed. Only Eddie isn’t quite up to par: Norm Lewis is about a decade too young for the role and overacts when given any dialogue almost as if to compensate. On the other hand, Boseman radiates charismatic leadership during his brief screentime.

Da 5 Bloods weaves together past and present and, like previous Lee films, uses archival footage and historical cut-aways. That much works to give the movie a coherent message and sense of purpose, but there is a lot here that is simply off. The war-era flashback scenes are shot in 16-mm film for a retro look, but the authenticity is undone by having the 20-something soldiers still played by 60-something actors who look every bit their age. At times, Da 5 Bloods borrows documentary techniques such as a traveling handheld camera or Paul offering an up-close confessional/monologue. At other times, however, it both looks and plays like an 80s/90s B movie. Despite the characters being named for The Temptations and despite the film being scored by a jazz trumpeter (Terence Blanchard), the soundtrack borrows heavily from Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On.

These inconsistencies and a sense of ending fatigue can make Da 5 Bloods a bit of a chore to get through at times, but it has enough powerful moments to make it worthwhile.

Hunters

When Auschwitz survivor Ruth Heidelbaum (Jeannie Berlin) is murdered in 1977 New York City, her grandson Jonah (Logan Lerman) tries to find out who killed her. In doing so, he joins Ruth’s friend Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino), a philanthropist who leads a group of clandestine Nazi hunters. The Hunters’ activities catch the attention of the Nazi remnant Fourth Reich, whose leader The Colonel (Lena Olin) dispatches American operative Travis (Greg Austin) to deal with them. Meanwhile, FBI agent Millie Morris (Jerrika Hinton) encounters bureaucratic resistance as she attempts to investigate deaths connected to both groups.

There is an unspoken edict that any fictionalization of the Holocaust should still retain an air of somber gravitas, and, true to form, many Holocaust-themed works do. However, there is also a less visible tradition of Holocaust alt-history, which has resulted in works both absurd (The Boys from Brazil and its South American-bred child Hitler clones) and audacious if also morally clouded (Inglourious Basterds). Hunters, an Amazon Prime series devised by the grandson of Holocaust survivors (David Weil) belongs to the latter tradition. Upon release, Shoah Foundation director Stephen Smith denounced it as “deceptive, voyeuristic, trivializing pulp nonsense.” While it is tempting to dismiss this as hypersensitive kvetching, Hunters really is chock full of bad history, embarrassing moments and uneven pacing, tempered somewhat by strong performances, and, during its best episodes, plenty of tension and excitement.

First, the good: freed from the need to ham it up and shout in every scene, Pacino delivers one of his better late-career performances, imbuing Meyer with equal parts sagaciousness, righteousness, and ruthlessness. The overacting void is filled here by Dylan Baker as Biff, a Carter administration official with a hidden Nazi past who goes from sounding like Lindsey Graham one moment to Preacher’s Herr Starr the next. His escapades are only tangentially related to the main plot, but it’s at least an amusing distraction, and he’s a more layered character than Olin’s frosty one-note Colonel. As an audience surrogate weighing the desire for revenge against the brutal necessity of carrying it out, Lerman is merely OK. Hinton’s tenacious agent is a better stand-in for an outsider’s perspective while Austin is terrifyingly good as a murderous all-American psychopath given to random singing. Among the other Hunters, Saul Rubinek and Carl Kane are solid as husband-wife camp survivors seeking to avenge their murdered son, and Kate Mulvaney is captivating as Sister Harriet, an acerbic, take-no-prisoners, raised-Catholic German-Jewish refugee turned nun turned MI6 agent (!). The team also consists of a pompous actor (Josh Radnor), a black power activist (Tiffany Boone), and a Vietnam War vet (Louis Ozawa), the latter two of whom are given little development and are condescendingly reduced to symbols of token diversity despite the performers making the most of their minimal screen time.

In between pondering moral dilemmas and delivering exhilarating fight scenes and shootouts, Hunters often stumbles badly. As mentioned, it’s a poor representation of history, treating as shocking the American recruitment of former Nazi scientists even though this was revealed in 1946 and replacing depictions of actual wartime atrocities with over-the-top human chess games. It also takes a few tonal detours into parody game show segments (Why Do We Hate the Jews?) and mock-travel advertisements that frame Huntsville, Alabama as an ideal Nazi retirement community. These cringeworthy asides undercut the show’s weightier moments and make them hard to take seriously.

Hunters’ premise shows enough promise to justify its existence, but if the first season is anything to go by, it also shows enough missteps to see it fall short of its potential.