Cork and Grind, A Wine and Coffee Bar

 

Located at 1605 N. Main Street in High Point, Cork and Grind offers wines by the bottle or glass as well as beers and coffee drinks. Drink discounts are offered regularly, and coffee specials change monthly. Cork and Grind is open from Tuesday through Saturday.

 

This High Point spot calls to mind Potent Potables in Jamestown albeit with coffee and a smaller beer selection. Unlike PP or The Brewer’s Kettle, however, Cork and Grind is open early (8 or 9 a.m., depending on the day), which makes it a great morning coffee option if you don’t mind limited choices. I’ve tried several of their rotating coffee drinks (most recently, a banana mocha latte and a cookies-and-cream frozee) and have not been disappointed. They use FosterHobbs beans, which is a definite plus.

 

Another major perk (pun not intended this time) to Cork and Grind is that it tends to draw a wide variety of food trucks and pop-up vendors. They’ve hosted everything from charcuterie to craft chocolate to seafood trucks and more. Robbie and crew are friendly and provide good service, and the atmosphere is comfortable.

 

Whether enticed by an event or simply in search of a place to grab a drink, Cork and Grind is well worth a look.

The Underground Railroad

 

Enslaved on a Georgia cotton plantation owned by the cruel Terrance Randall (Benjamin Walker), Cora (Thusa Mbedu) and Caesar (Aaron Pierre) escape to freedom. The pair are separated, and Cora, now a wanted fugitive, must rely on the underground railroad to ferry her from place to place. All the while, she is pursued by the slavecatcher Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) and his young black apprentice Homer (Chase Dillon).

 

Barry Jenkins’s Prime Video miniseries adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel may not hit all the highs of its source material, but it still does the book justice. Whitehead’s central conceit was to meld history and magical realism: the titular railroad here is a literal train, and different states have adopted policies that allegorize America’s fraught approaches to race. North Carolina, for instance, has abolished slavery but also slaves (executing any runaways found therein) while South Carolina has adopted a paternalistic social welfare program that serves as a front for what amounts to the Tuskegee Experiment. Jenkins preserves these elements and renders them in sharp visual detail. The presentation is harrowing without being gratuitous, a procession of brutal images accompanied by Nicholas Britell’s equally haunting score.

 

In front of the camera, Mbedu convincingly embodies Cora’s determination and will to survive. Edgerton’s performance is showier, and Ridgeway’s grandiosity either adds to the character’s mystique (as was the case in the book) or comes across as a ridiculous, overcompensatory put-on (more the case here as the series shows a younger Ridgeway taking up his vocation to spite his father). William Jackson Harper puts in a good turn as Royal, a railroad conductor who befriends Cora, but the series isn’t with him long enough to get to know him well, something true of much of the supporting cast. Even in Homer’s case – he gets far more screen time – we are kept at arm’s length, which feels like a missed opportunity.

 

While the stakes are high, the series’ episodic pacing and questionable narrative digressions do it no favors. The Underground Railroad is at its best when it stays engaged with the story’s present. Even when it isn’t on the move, it can keep the audience’s attention, as is the case with Cora’s sojourn to a Black-owned Indiana winery. However, the series is just as likely to dedicate whole episodes (rather than mere flashbacks during the journey) to past events, which undercuts the momentum.

 

Rarely an easy watch and not always a rewarding one, The Underground Railroad is nevertheless, at its best (i.e. the ninth episode), powerfully acted and aesthetically dazzling.

Black Widow

 

Before she was an Avenger, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) was a Black Widow, an assassin trained and controlled by the Red Room overseen by Soviet Gen. Dreykov (Ray Winstone). Before that, however, she and fellow Black Widow child recruit Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) lived in Ohio posing as the children of Soviet agents Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour) and Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz), a super-soldier and a senior Black Widow, respectively. In 2016, while on the run from American government official Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt), Natasha is contacted by Yelena, who has recently broken free of the Red Room. Mutually distrustful, the former sisters must work together to confront their past.

 

If nothing else, Black Widow is a victim of circumstance. Though envisioned as a stand-alone “sidequel” to give the title character a proper send-off following her death in Avengers: Endgame, multiple delays pushed Black Widow into the unenviable position of being the first MCU film release in more than a year at a time when Marvel’s Disney Plus series were making the big screen seem irrelevant. Ouch. Taking timing out of the equation, however, and Black Widow is a solidly exciting action flick with deft humor, a likable cast, and several glaring flaws.

 

Helmed by Cate Shortland and written by WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer, among others, Black Widow manages a mishmash of tones. It spares us the gratuitousness of a firsthand look at Red Room training while still conveying the gravity of its trauma, which both Johansson and Pugh do quite convincingly. At the same time, Natasha and Yelena’s competitive banter, which switches between English and Russian, is a source of humanization for the hardened assassins as well as humor. Speaking of the latter, Alexei as a boastful Soviet-equivalent Captain America knockoff gone to seed, is set up as the film’s comic relief, but his arc is still tinged with pathos.

 

The only substantial characters lacking in complexity are Dreykov and his top enforcer, the Taskmaster. In the case of the former, Winstone plays him as a distinctively loathsome bastard, so this isn’t exactly a liability. Taskmaster, while a formidable combatant, is largely a waste of the character. The comic book counterpart is a trash-talking mercenary rival to Deadpool with a photographic memory and the ability to copy an opponent’s fighting style. The film version retains the latter trait though presents a different character under the armor as a largely mute minion, devoid of everything else that made Taskmaster interesting.

 

If Black Widow’s tone is in flux, so too is the quality of its plentiful action sequences. When it sticks to hand-to-hand combat and gunplay, it’s well-choreographed. Though Yelena mocks Natasha’s combat poses, the latter is still as competent a fighter as ever. Once the film becomes airborne, however, it kicks suspension of disbelief out the window and resorts to excesses that would make Michael Bay blush.

 

In keeping with Marvel traditions, Black Widow’s post-credits scene hints at what is to come. That moment aside, this is one of the MCU’s least impactful entries though, all things considered, hardly one of its worst.

Bosch

 

Adapted by Eric Overmyer as an Amazon Prime Video series (seven seasons) from Michael Connelly’s long-running crime novel series, Bosch follows veteran LAPD detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch (Titus Welliver). Working alongside Det. Jerry Edgar (Jamie Hector) under the command of Lt. Grace Billets (Amy Aquino) out of the Hollywood division, Bosch investigates homicides while raising a teen daughter, Maddie (Madison Lintz). His dedication to the belief that “Everybody counts or nobody counts” and his stubborn refusal to back down put him not only in danger but also at odds with police brass such as the politically ambitious Irvin Irving (Lance Reddick).

 

In the wake of morally ambiguous The Shield and sociological magnum opus that is The Wire, a more straightforward police procedural such as Bosch can seem like an anachronism, a throwback to the days of 1990s Law & Order. While it is true that Bosch lacks the audacity of police officers murdering their own team members to cover up their corruption or fabricating a serial killer to clock overtime hours, its lower-key approach is far from staid and sanitized. What it lacks in ingenuity, it makes up for in earnestness, atmosphere, and craftsmanship.

 

It helps that there is so much source material from which to draw. Connnelly, a former Los Angeles Times crime reporter, has written more than twenty Bosch novels during the past three decades, and a typical season of the show stitches together plotlines from two or three of them. This is a pragmatic move on Overmyer’s part that makes the show accessible to those who haven’t read the books while capturing enough of their essence (even when changing details) to avoid aggravating those who have. It ensures that there is plenty going on each season though it may not always seem that way due to the show’s slow, deliberate pacing.

 

For those with the requisite patience, however, character development pays off handsomely. Welliver is an excellent character actor, and this role is no exception, but his take on Harry doesn’t have quite enough gravitas to carry the series. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to. Edgar’s law-bending pursuit of a protected Haitian war criminal, Grace’s battle against sexism in the department (as well as a homophobic witch hunt initiated by a rival), and Maddie’s journey toward finding her place in the world are all compelling, and they help establish the ensemble as more than a collective of suits spouting one-liners. Even Irving, mostly antagonistic in the books, is given more humanity here, his political maneuvering juxtaposed against his parental anguish.

 

Beyond that, the series makes good use of Los Angeles locations, and, especially, music. Harry’s love of jazz is retained from the novels, and the show’s opening theme (“Can’t Let Go” by Caught a Ghost) is extremely catchy. You won’t find Rian Johnson levels of camera wizardry here, but Bosch is atmospherically engrossing in its own right.

 

Those who tie a work’s worth to its willingness to disrupt the status quo will likely roll their eyes at Bosch’s conventionality, but writing it off as just another cop show overlooks the complexities in the lives that it tracks.