Brasstown Craft Chocolate

 

Located at 5029 Country Club Road in the Club Haven shopping center in Winston-Salem, Brasstown Craft Chocolate offers craft chocolate bars, bon-bons, and other chocolate products. It is open Tuesday through Saturday for in-store shopping. Online ordering and shipping are available.

 

Coming from the chocolate desert that is High Point, Brasstown Chocolate was a welcome find that reminded me of Foster Hobbs Coffee: a small concern that uses high-quality ingredients and takes its products seriously without a hint of elitism. When my wife and I visited, we were impressed by Brasstown’s selection: more than half a dozen bars and at least as many bon-bon flavors. The chocolates in question use organic fair-trade cacao beans, and each country of origin lends the resulting chocolate a different flavor profile. Considering the ingredient quality, pricing was more affordable than expected: we lucked out and hit a $1 apiece sale on the bon-bons (bars run under $10). A sampler thereof and a chili bar made for a promising haul.

 

The bon-bons did not disappoint. From amaretto to hazelnut to Irish cream, each flavor was recognizable – and tasty. The chili bar was more subdued than others I’ve had, offering a little bit of heat on the back end.

 

Black Mountain remains my go-to chocolate spot for Winston visits, but for those who live in town, Brasstown’s product quality, flavor assortment, and customer service make it absolutely worth visiting.

The Committed

 

This 2021 sequel to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 debut novel The Sympathizer picks up where the previous book left off. The unnamed protagonist (“Vo Danh” on paper and Crazy Bastard to his friends) is a “man of two minds,” the son of a French priest and a Vietnamese mother, a Communist agent recruited to infiltrate anticommunist expats. His ability to sympathize with his supposed enemies won him a trip to a Vietnamese reeducation camp where he was tortured at the behest of a masked commissar, secretly his blood brother Man. Now exiled to Paris, he meets up with his other blood brother Bon, a hardened yet grief-stricken anticommunist who has vowed revenge on the commissar, unaware that it is Man behind the mask. Together, they fall in with a criminal syndicate whose drug trafficking operation has put them in the crosshairs of an Algerian gang. Meanwhile, he is watched over by a Vietnamese agent posing as his aunt, and her leftist intellectual friends regard him with a combination of fascination and contempt. A revolutionary without a revolution, the protagonist must keep Bon from killing man, the Algerians from killing or being killed by his new friends, and his true allegiances – at times, a secret even to himself – well-hidden.

 

The Committed is a messy, ambitious, wildly uneven book, at times brilliant and at times almost painful to read. At its best, it operates in the tradition of Graham Greene, using political intrigue and a crime plot as the backdrop for a deeply personal crisis of faith and a dose of moral introspection. Nguyen does an excellent job of fleshing out the protagonist, a man wracked by guilt (he imagines the voices of those he killed chiding him) and loathing (both internal and external) who is also hilariously irreverent. This latter quality leads to many fitfully funny moments, such as the protagonist trolling his would-be captors over their failures as tortures or drinking a cocktail that “look(s) like holy water and taste(s) like Hell” as a form of penance.

 

At its worst, however, The Committed is offputtingly self-indulgent. Some of the typographical choices come across as needlessly dramatic, and not since Atlas Shrugged has a novel torpedoed its own momentum by spiraling into unnecessarily digressive declarations of political principle. A lesser annoyance is Nguyen’s aversion to names. One of the aunt’s set is The Maoist PhD, a bouncer at a brothel is the eschatological muscle, and the Algerian gangsters are introduced to us as Beatles, Rolling Stones, and the Mona Lisa. Much as Thomas Pynchon’s ridiculous character names serve to distract and lower the stakes, so too does Nguyen’s serial nicknaming.

 

Those who enjoyed The Sympathizer may find The Committed a bit of a let-down, but its frustrations are still worth enduring for its skillfully complex characterization and at-times captivating prose.

El Agavero Mexicano

 

Located at 727 West Main Street in Jamestown, El Agavero Mexicano offers Mexican cuisine for lunch and dinner seven days a week. Online ordering is available, and drink specials are offered daily.

 

El Agavero opened in February in the former Penny’s location, from which it inherited plenty of space but a dated look and feel. Going by appearances, there is nothing that would separate El Agavero from several other interchangeable bog-standard Mexican eateries in the area. That, however, would be selling this restaurant considerably short.

 

The menu here is about what you’d expect, give or take a few additions (Mexican pizza and pollo palenque) and omissions (no chile verde). The execution, however, surpasses that expectation. The torta Cubana was part Cuban sandwich, part Mexican sloppy joe. It was stuffed full of tasty meats (of which, only the pork was a bit chewy), and the accompanying fries – hot, fresh, and crispy – were surprisingly good. A cheesy, spicy chile poblano was similarly satisfying.

 

Staff here are friendly. Though our server was still learning the menu, this did not cause us any problems, and our food came relatively quickly. By pricing and portion size, Agavero is a good value, too.

 

It may not beat your go-to spot, but its convenient location and better-than-you’d think food make El Agovero worth trying for anyone in Jamestown or eastern High Point.

Tenet

 

The unnamed Protagonist (John David Washington), a CIA agent, is recruited by an organization called Tenet to track the sale of “inverted” weapons that fire backward through time. Working alongside Neil (Robert Pattinson), the Protagonist traces inverted bullets to arms dealer Priya (Dimple Kapadia), who reveals that her weapons were sold to Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). To get close to Sator, the Protagonist approaches his estranged wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), a crooked art appraiser blackmailed and controlled by Sator. Though distrustful of one another, the CIA agent and the oligarch form an uneasy partnership to steal a shipment of plutonium, but threats from the future loom over everything.

 

Tenet is an apt showcase for the best and the worst of Christopher Nolan’s capabilities. Its action set pieces – an opera house extraction mission, a literal highway robbery and subsequent high-speed chase, and an airport fight, among others – are masterfully shot, tense and exhilarating. They pair perfectly with Ludwig Gonarsson’s score. Yet Tenet took one of the most audience-alienating aspects of Interstellar – time travel backed by theoretical physics – and made it integral to the film. What could have been time-hopping James Bond far too often feels like a confusing and self-indulgent attempt to contextualize the on-screen action.

 

If the audience seems bogged down by the film’s complexities and demands, the cast does not. Washington, the son of Denzel, may lack his father’s range, but he brings an unflappable presence and an ex-NFL player’s athleticism to the leading role. The ever-versatile Pattinson takes a break from playing tortured loners in a largely sympathetic turn. That same quality extends to Debicki’s Kat, impressive given that the character is also a bitter schemer. In lesser hands, Sator would be simply another hammy Russian megalomaniac, but Branagh’s fatalistic nihilism and utter ruthlessness elevate him into something more terrifying.

 

Refreshingly cerebral at the start and hopelessly convoluted by the end, what Tenet lacks in coherence it makes up for in solid performances and visual spectacle.

Zack Snyder's Justice League

 

A plot synopsis and review of the theatrical cut can be found here.

 

This movie’s troubled production is practically a film’s worth of drama unto itself. Since 2013’s Man of Steel, director Snyder had established himself as the DC Extended Universe’s divisive cinematic architect, cranking out films that were visually distinctive but narrative lacking. Much like Marvel’s The Avengers, Justice League was meant to be the culmination of several films’ worth of build-up. However, Snyder stepped away from the film following the death of his daughter, and Warner Brothers brought in Joss Whedon to rewrite, reshoot, and finish the production. The resulting movie, while not abysmal, was nevertheless disappointing, and between studio-mandated cuts and allegations of Whedon’s misconduct, it wasn’t long before fans started clamoring for Snyder’s original film to be completed. Finally, in 2020, Snyder reassembled the original cast for re-shoots, and the completed film launched last month on HBO Max.

 

So after years of controversy and anticipation and many millions of dollars spent, did Justice League get it right the second time around? Yes and no. For starters, this is a film that demands some affinity for the source material. With a four-hour runtime, it will feel torturous to those who are apathetic toward comic books and test the patience of even those who hold a more favorable view. That caveat aside, Snyder and co-writer Chris Terrio deserve credit for what they’ve been able to pull off here. Snyder has often referred to DC superheroes as mythological figures, and this film reflects that sensibility. The grandiosity, visual splendor, and violence have all been ratcheted up, and Darkseid, previously an unseen menace, appears here in the flesh, given gravitas courtesy of Ray Porter’s menacingly deep vocal performance. But this is not another eye-rolling all style, no substance affair. The added runtime addresses several of the pacing and character development problems that have plagued previous DCEU films. Barry Allen/The Flash (Ezra Miller) and especially Victor Stone/Cyborg (Ray Fisher) are given a fuller backstory, and Fisher uses the opportunity to make Victor, already a conflicted and tragic figure, arguably the film’s most relatable and sympathetic character.

 

When all is said and done, however, Snyder’s Justice League is still a flawed film. The dialogue feels at times expository, the score is lackluster, and the film suffers from a bad case of ending fatigue. The latter is especially frustrating as the closing moments, which hint at scientist Ryan Choi (Ryan Zheng) becoming The Atom and Ben Affleck’s underrated Batman forming an unlikely alliance with Jared Leto’s much-maligned (and here, partially redeemed) Joker in a post-apocalyptic future, offer tantalizing glimpses of future movies that will likely never come to pass.

 

Snyder and his collaborators deserve praise for their passion and determination, and this version of Justice League is definitely a cut (pun intended) above the theatrical release, but it’s ultimately a movie more appreciated than enjoyed.