They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To

So here’s “There Will Be Blood.” A great film. No. A Great Film. No. An Otherworldly Experience in Cinema. By a prodigiously talented director who was pretty much put on this earth to record marvelous images on motion picture film stock and display those images in a dark room with sound. A performance by Daniel Day-Lewis that is major even by his lofty standards. The first Great American Film since…………..

I do not know.

I can’t remember a Great American Film between “There Will Be Blood” now and Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man” in 1995. Someone please comment and tell me why I’m wrong, which I’d really like to be.

Second City Chicago Training Class–Advice For Newbies

I was thinking today about classes at The Second City Chicago. Probably it came to mind because I drove by there, but mostly because I started the Beginning Program in early January, which is fast upon us, and I remember how excited I was a week before my first class. I think the first session of the year is a popular one for people starting out due to both people who decide that “this year I’m going to…” and people who get the class as a Christmas gift.

There are a lot of people in the Training Center at Second City and they are there for so many different reasons I might crash the WordPress server if I list them all. Second City encourages you to pick a time at the start and stick with it all year. If your Level A is Monday at 7:00, they want you all, as a group, to take Levels B-E Monday at 7:00 and to develop as an ensemble.

The first people to drop out of the class are the folks who tell you on Day 1 that “I am the funny one in the crowd.” They’re here to learn to be even funnier, to be the life of the party. Many of these people believe that Lorne Michaels is going to drop in on their class and say “Get your butt to New York tomorrow!” These people will be gone by week 4. Additionally, anyone in your class because “my sister got it for me as a Christmas gift because she says I need to…” will be gone by week 4.

The first level of Second City Beginning Improvisation is playing kids games. Making funny noises. Learning to drop inhibitions. You’ll spend half a class talking in jibberish. You’ll spend an hour here and an hour there pretending to be the animal of your choice, rolling around on the ground and making odd noises. A third of one class will be dedicated to pretending to move big objects as a group.

In the first level, and much of the second and third, you’re learning to do a lot of things that you may not/will not realize. You’re dropping your inhibitions and learning to behave in a completely free–often very silly–manner in an environment in which you can completely trust those around you. They’re learning the same and behaving the same, and together you’re learning that trust as well. If you’re self-conscious, you’re going to have a rough time in the early weeks and months. You’re learning to have a group mindset. Your teachers probably will not tell you you’re learning these things–mine didn’t–so take time after class, either over beers with your classmates or at home on your own, to reflect on what you did in class and what it taught you.

If you think you’re there to learn comedy, you’re going to be grossly disappointed not just in the first few levels, but in the entire program. When we started doing scene work in Level B, my teacher, Brian Posen, the best instructor I had at Second City, frequently had to remind people not to make jokes. Someone asked “aren’t we here to learn comedy?” The answer is no, you’re here to learn the art form of improvisation. In the course of the year, you’ll learn to create characters, to get in touch with every part of your body, to learn to make real decisions while pretending to be someone else–as long as that pretend person is real, you’ll be ok. Make sense?

Comedy is best discovered in character, not premise. As an example, let’s take a look at a fantastic Saturday Night Live skit from several years ago. Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch play two rather unattractive intellectuals in a hot tub. There’s nothing funny until you start putting in character traits. They “should” be bland, boring people–college professors on vacation. But they have bizarre, adventurous sexual habits that they describe in great detail. They like goat meat and the juices from goat meat get them especially aroused. They are typically joined in the scenario by a single person of their kind, with whom they’ve shared sexual adventures. Will Ferrell’s character over-pronounces words: “I was sitting in a broken down su-BAR-u, waiting for a TOW-truck.” They would usually throw Jimmy Fallon in the mix as a square peg who has encountered them and is being roped into some kind of weird sex, and in the end, when they have no audience to whom they can play, Ferrell drops the funny talk and insists that his lover get off of his sore back. People in a hot tub on vacation: not funny. Characters with wants and personalities in a hot tub: funny. They could put those two characters in any setting and they would be funny. It doesn’t work the same for the setting: you can’t drop two or three people in and make it funny.

Understanding that comedy comes from character, from people who are pretend but real, who have real wants and needs and desires, and not from a quirky scenario is what you’ll be on the road to learning at the Second City Training Center in the Beginning Program.

Improv is about stepping up and winging it. You shouldn’t have anything “written” in advance. If you want to write jokes and create a routine, take standup classes. If you want to learn to play from scratch, take improv.

The people in your class who think they’re coming to learn how to be funny will be mostly gone by the end of Level A, and all gone by the end of Level B. We lost two of them after week 2. We lost two more at the end of Level A.

After Level B, you will have people in your class, and they will be in the minority, who are theater students or are very serious about learning the art form of improvisation. Opposite of them will be the people who are there to gain a skill–like listening, or group dynamics, or just plain coming out of their shell–to help in work, and the people who are there to take the class as a hobby. This will be your core group through your graduation show at the end of Level E. A couple will drop, and you might pick up one or two who are in a class that gets condensed. This happens when the Sunday at 4:00 class has enough people who either drop or realize they don’t want to be in a classroom mid-day on Sunday in the summer and they switch to another day/time.

If you’re a hobbyist, you owe it to your classmates to do the following, simple things: 1. Come to class every week. 2. Pay attention in class. 3. Apply what you’re learning in class. The few serious students will be doing these three things, and you’ll waste a lot of their time if you don’t do the same.

If you don’t do #1, you’ll fall behind. That week that you miss while the rest of the class spends 3 hours working on developing wants in Level C will kill you. Missing two classes in one term, or 25% of the classroom time, will have you way behind the rest of the class. You will embarrass yourself–and maybe the others–during your class performances with everyone’s friends and families watching.

As far as #2 and #3, those are just as important. If you’re in class, but thinking about that great joke you’re going to use in your next scene that’s really going to knock them dead, and you’re not paying attention to what the others are doing and/or what the teacher is saying, you won’t apply the lessons learned and you may as well have missed the class.

So go to class. Take it all in. Pay attention and work hard. And most importantly have fun. But not if you think you’re going to learn to be Don Rickles. For that, you should take a stand-up class, and stand-up classes are bountiful in Chicago.

People Magazine’s Entertainer of the Year

…is Patrick Dempsey.  Really?  Really?

Not Judd Apatow, responsible for two huge comedy hits?

Or Seth Rogan?

Or Tina Fey, who didn’t just star in the best comedy on TV, she wrote and produced it as well?

Or Kanye West, who is the rarest of rare:  a critics’ darling with almost unlimited popular appeal?

Or Tom, the guy who founded MySpace which has marketed more bands, movies, comedians, television shows and theater troupes than anyone else the past couple years?

Or  David Chase, who ended one of the best shows in television history with probably the most talked-about finale in same?

Or JK Rowling, who gave us the final Harry Potter chapter and the revelation that the one guy was gay?  ( Don’t know the name, have not read any of the books or seen any of the movies.)

No, People magazine selected the dreamboat guy from a crappy soap opera.  What do you expect, you play to your audience.

Lack of Hollywood Originality: The Sequel

Top 10 Films this year by box office, in order: Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Spiderman 3, Shrek 3, Transformers, Ratatouille, The Simpsons, 300, The Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4.

Translated: Threequel, fivequel, threequel, threequel, based-on-tv-cartoon, holy shit how did something original get in here, based-on-tv-cartoon, based-on-book-cartoon, threequel, fourquel.

Translated further: the fine folks in Hollywood cannot produce anything original that people want to run out in flocks to see. No one in Hollywood has an idea–other than the creator of Ratatouille, one of the rare films that is not only in the top 10 in box office, but also probably one of the 10 best films of the year–that is not based on someone else’s idea. They’re recycling characters, scenarios, costumes, sets, as fast as they can to keep the machine turning right along.

Shame on Hollywood for not making a real blockbuster that is a good film. Like Jaws, or Close Encounters. Or E.T. Hey, where’s Spielberg? Oh yeah, he’s working on the fourth Indiana Jones movie.

The Best Moment in Film, 2007

The best single moment in any film from 2007 takes place toward the end of “Ratatouille.” The notoriously fickle food critic Anton Ego takes a bite of the titular dish, typically scoffed at as peasant food but now being served to him in a very swanky Parisian restaurant. With the first bite he is taken in a flash back to his youth, a little boy at the doorstep of his mother’s kitchen. She’s making him ratatouille. Back to real time, he drops his pen to the floor, having an emotional reaction to the food that is beyond words–and the filmmaker Brad Bird is smart enough to let the scene pass without dialog.

Some of the most revelatory moments we have with food as adults come when taste or smell takes us back to another time and place in our lives.  Sometimes the remembrance can be nostalgic, sometimes it can be very emotional.  Those memories that are tied to eating are vivid and amazing, and I’m grateful to the makers of “Ratatouille” for expressing them so eloquently in film.

Kitchen Gadgets, Fake Foodies, Immersion Blenders, Rachael Ray

“America has spoken. Put my food in a fucking bowl”–Patton Oswalt

I’m not a gadget cook. If I were to stock my kitchen with tools, I think I could get by pretty well with the following, provided they’re all high quality:

Knives: 8 inch chef knife, 6 inch boning knife, 8.75 inch slicer, 5.5 inch paring knife.

Cookware: a Le Creuset 7.25 qt. dutch oven, a stockpot, a few sauce pans of varying sizes, a 6qt. saute pan, a 1o-inch fry pan, an omelette pan and a cast iron skillet.

Misc.: a blender, a heavy wood chopping block, a chinois, and a collander.

And that’s it. I’m not counting the little things I’d use frequently like kitchen twine and cheesecloth. Just the everyday cookware.

I’m thinking about this because I got an immersion blender for Christmas. It’s something I wanted, and I had mentioned it in passing to my mother-in-law a month ago. She was thoughtful enough to pick one up for me for the holiday, and I put it to use last night for the first time to make a carrot-thyme soup. Maybe my immersion blender skills are not quite up to snuff, but I’ve made this soup twenty times if I’ve made it once, and it didn’t come out with the same smooth quality that it’s had when I’ve run it through my stand-up blender. (The recipe is very easy. Saute a little minced onion and garlic in a dutch oven, add 1.5 lbs carrots and 4c chicken stock, cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Blend until smooth, return to pan, stir in 1/4 c orange juice, then stir in 1/3 c half and half, then stir in the leaves of about 10 sprigs of thyme and serve.)

The only advantage to using the hand blender is clean up. Just pop off the end and wash in warm water. Much easier than taking apart a countertop blender and cleaning it. Otherwise I was not impressed. However, I am looking forward to trying it out for other tasks, like foaming and making smoothies, and I will try it on soup again before I shove it in the back of a cabinet.

This also got me thinking about the way kitchen items are packaged and sold, particularly now that we have rock star chefs, cooking on television 24 hours/day, and probably four times more people who would describe themselves as “foodies” than there were 10 years ago.

I think you could take the entire kitchen section of a Bed Bath And Beyond, toss out all the needless stuff and save a couple thousand sqare feet. Of all the espresso makers they have, there are only a couple that have the potential to brew a cup of espresso that truly tastes like real espresso. They also have the cheap ones, and all the in-betweens. They could toss all the in-betweens, sell the cheap ones to people who just want something basic that makes them feel like they’re baristas-for-a-day, and the nice ones to the people who know the difference. But the rub is that people buy the in-betweeners, which are neither cheap enough to carry any value to the budget-minded buyer, or good enough for the gourmand. Yet people tell BB&B every day that they’re willing to pay a premium for something that gives them the appearance that they’re buying something better than just a cheap old espresso maker. I find this both humorous and sad, but not surprising.

The same goes for crap like electric knives. There is a certain joy to taking a very sharp slicing knife and cutting into a well-roasted piece of meat. Yet people will pay for an electric kife, which upon use will bastardize an otherwise nice pice of meat on contact. And this is why that spike in people who would describe themselves as foodies is comprised of a lot of people who are not true foodies, but people enjoying a recent fad.

To see the best display of bad opinions amongst the people who now think they know a ton about food, one need look no further than www.yelp.com. Users can review their experiences at local businesses, and the most passionate, most opinionated posts are typically for restaurants. It’s there that you can read “Som T.”’s 3-star review of Alinea, calling it “pretentious” and deriding it for not being vegetarian-friendly. Um, Som, it’s the best restaurant in America right now, and if Grant Achatz doesn’t want to be veg-friendly, he doesn’t have to be. Call ahead and ask. Same for “Brad B” who gave Gary Danko, a San Francisco temple of gastronomy, one star, saying “My partner took me here for my birthday. Big mistake, neither of use (sic) consulted the menu in advance and they weren’t wlling (sic) to acomodate (sic) me who is vegan.” So it’s a one-star restaurant because someone with extreme dietary restrictions isn’t pleased? There’s “Serene C.” of Seattle, who said about Rover’s: “If there is ever a time to go baller style on a meal, it’s a birthday. With this in mind, I rolled up with my swerviest of pimp strolls and loved laughing at all the poor minions eating their sad meals at Chinoise Cafe across the street. ” Thanks Serene, real helpful. Most of the reviews on yelp.com have adjectives like “delicious”, “great”, “wonderful”. But you’d be hard pressed to find on yelp, among the new generation of self-proclaimed Foodies with a capital F, someone with anything truly informed to say about the food. There are few comments about flavor combinations in dishes, or how the chef’s choice of preparation method brought out any certain qualities. I blame this all on the recent food and cooking fad. If you go to a restaurant, sure, you’re entitled to your opinion. It does not, however, make you an expert. Sadly, a lot of people now take their opinions from the uninformed of yelp.com, rather than from restaurant reviewers with years of experience and culinary school training. In the age of the Internet and blogs, the cumulative opinions of the uninformed masses are outweighing the practiced, thoughtful knowledge of the real experts. And while everyone has an opinion to which they are entitled, everyone is certainly not an expert. Although many now seem to claim to be.

The Food Network recently decided not to renew “Emeril Live”, Emeril Lagasse’s show that was highly responsible for the Food TV boom that began in the past decade. Mario Batali, another of the major Food Network stars of the boom, now appears only as one of their “iron” chefs. Of all the chefs to have appeared on the Food Network, they are unquestionably the two with the best chef pedigree. Say what you will about Emeril’s stagey showmanship, his “BAM”s, his “aw, yeah, babeee”s, he is a well-trained chef highly respected by other chefs for his talent and his creativity in a kitchen. And Batali’s Babbo is one of the best restaurants in New York. Instead, viewers will be treated to more Rachael Ray This is not a chef who is going to broaden the understanding of ingredients and technique among the viewing audience. Ray is a TV personality and a woman who has endorsed Burger King, which tells us plenty about the balance between her deisre to make money and her desire to promote good food and nutrition.

What this means is that Ray is pretty much the electric knife of televised cooking shows. She’s not good for us. But just like BB&B sells the electric knife because there is a buyer, Food Network throws tons of money and broadcast hours at Ray because we, as a nation, will buy.

So here we are with more people thinking they know more about food, who really know how to pop open a couple cans from the pantry and toss together something edible in under 30 minutes. These are not foodies. These are folks who have tricked themselves into believeing they are. These are people with busy lives, perhaps with kids to feed, who don’t have the most time in the world. What Ray has tought them through her 30 Minute Meals, is how to be more efficient. And that’s what America seems to be telling the Food Network: don’t bother us with chef/personalities like Batali and Lagasse, people who are going to ask that we roast something for hours or make our own stock. Oh no, show us how to throw something together fast and cheap. Rachael Ray is not going to give anyone a better understanding of food or food science or cooking technique.

I was in Barnes & Noble at Webster Place a month ago, and headed toward the cookbook section. They have a display wall that highlights a select 20 or so cookbooks. About half the space was taken up with Rachael Ray books. So the Food Network is not entirely responsible for the promotion of Ray and the promotion of quick eats over good food.

I don’t blame Ray, she’s making a buck. I don’t blame the Food Network, they’re making a buck. Same with Barnes & Noble. Same with Bed Bath & Beyond. Give the people what they want. And what we seem to want now is to be involved in the fads of food and cooking, not to learn how to cook great meals. We want electric knives, overpriced espresso machines and 30 minute meals full of preservatives from a series of tin cans. We want 700 options at Bed Bath & Beyond. We think we’re getting smarter, when we’re just getting to be better consumers. I also find this a little humorous and a little sad, and not the least surprising.

Now Playing in New York and Los Angeles…

I’m so sick of movies that come out in NYC and LA days or weeks or months before they hit Chicago. In large part the distributors want to generate word-of-mouth in NY and LA before they open the film nationwide. So…who is a Chicagoan (or a San Franciscan, or a Seattleite, or a Portlander, etc.) going to hear from via word-of-mouth that a film is worth seeing? Probably not a friend, but more likely a blog like this one written by a NY or LA blogger, which is free and easy for anyone to post, and which packs zero in credentials, and which does not mean anything in the general scope of things other than giving the reader one person’s opinion.

Generally, I’m offended by the idea that people in NY and/or LA are smarter than I. (Most NY or LA bloggers would have typed the incorrect “…smarter than me” for what it’s worth.) I’ve blogged earlier about “Juno,” a pretty poor comedy that came out on both coasts prior to screening in Chicago, where it already had plenty of buzz via the national media.

Now as far as comedy goes, there is no one in NY or LA who can tell Chicago anything. Sorry. We develop comedy. We train the Steve Carrells, and Stephen Colberts, and Tina Feys, and Adam McKays, and Chris Farleys, and Mike Myerses etc. of the world then send them out to the media capitals of the country to entertain millions. But if you played “Juno” to a crowd at the iO West in LA and the iO Chicago, you would not receive a more informed, more thoughtful, more intelligent reaction or set of opinions from the west coast group. Chicago defines comedy in the US. So screw the distributors for thinking that we are not as worthy of seeing “Juno” at the same time as NY and LA.

Music? Most every independent rock band that has made a name for themselves has Pitchfork (www.pitchforkmedia.com) to thank. They make careers more than Rolling Stone and Spin these days. Where are they based? Chicago.

Film criticism? The only really famous film critics (by famous I mean outside of film geek circles) were/are from Chicago: Siskel, Ebert and Roeper (who’s really a non-critic, just a hack with a keen knack for right place/right time.) Probably the most intelligent, erudite film critic in the US is Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader. Again, there’s not much film criticism written in the New York Times or The Village Voice or anywhere else in NY or LA that is going to be more informative than reading Ebert or especially Rosenbaum.

Hottest restaurant scene in America right now, with the brightest young American chefs? Grant Achatz at Alinea, Homaro Canto at Moto, Graham Elliott Bowles at Avenues in the Peninsula Hotel. All in Chicago.

Yeah, the media centers of the US production-wise are NY and LA, and I yield to no one in my love for New York (or my hatred for LA.) But one would hope that at some point the people who create this media will stop treating the dare-I-say-it brightest city in the US, and currently probably the hippest, as if we’re dumb midwesterners who require the approving filter of New Yorkers and Los Angelenos before we receive their product.

Juno what? A highly disappointing film.

If you live in a big city you’ve seen them. The kids in Wicker Park (Chicago), Williamsburg, Brooklyn, The Mission in San Francisco, Capitol Hill in Seattle. The kids with pale skin and arms, legs and necks full of tattoos. The guys with the skinny pencil-leg jeans. The ones whose favorite bands are so much better than your favorite bands.

“Juno” is the cinematic equivalent of these kids. It’s trying to hard, and putting on way too many hipster airs, to be straightforward and real. It’s a shame, because at its core, there’s a story that’s certainly worth better treatment than it gets here. High Schooler Juno (Ellen Page) is pregnant, knocked up on her first time, also the first time of the father, Paulie (Michael Cera) who is her best buddy, not her boyfriend. She decides to deliver the child twice–once in a hospital, then the second time to a couple (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) who cannot conceive.

There are really six characters of central importance in the film. The four mentioned above, and Juno’s dad (J.K. Simmons) and stepmom (Allison Janney). Cera and Garner are given a lot to work with, and pretty much carry the emotional load of the film. Maybe the best accomplishment of “Juno” is that it pulls a pretty good performance out of Garner, who as far as I can tell otherwise is just about the single shittiest actress in Hollywood. Cera is solid as he has been throughout his young career, but he plays the same anxious teen he’s made his calling card. It will be interesting to see if he can transition from teenage awkwardness to a career as an adult.

The rest of the characters are so incredibly disaffected that they don’t stand up as real people. Juno’s parents have almost a non-reaction to the news that she is pregnant. The stepmom is relieved that Juno hasn’t been expelled and isn’t into hard drugs. Juno herself takes the pregnancy in stride, the only emotion we see from her comes strictly as the result of the lack of attention she gets from the men in her life: she’s upset that Paulie is taking a girl to prom, and she’s crestfallen when Bateman’s adoptive-father-to-be doesn’t reveal romantic feelings for her.

The dynamic between Bateman’s Mark and Page’s Juno is based solely on their tastes in music and film. There is a constant barrage of name-dropping between the two: Sonic Youth, Mott The Hopple, Iggy and The Stooges, Dario Argento and more. Some parts call to mind the scene in “Garden State” in which Natalie Portman puts her headphones on Zach Braff’s head and tells him that a Shins song will “change your life.” It’s a relationship based on shared interests.

Cody and Reitman cram the film full of their own obscure interests, everything from the set design (Juno’s telephone is shaped like a hamburger) to the costumes (Juno dresses like a homeless person with unlimited credit at Urban Outfitters) to the discussion of and soundtack presence of obscure and overly hip indie rock. In the hands of a more capable writer and director, like Wes Anderson, the wall-to-wall compacting of minutiae into the frame can come across well, but that is because Anderson tends to have those little items tell us something important and/or interesting about the characters. Juno has a hamburger phone almost for the express purpose of allowing her to shake it and tell the person on the other end “can you hand on, I’m on a hamburger phone.” This does not come across as real. Neither does it come across as real when Juno’s dad asks “hey big puffy version of Junebug, where you been?” and the reply is “Just out dealing with things way beyond my maturity level.” It’s true, she’s been trying to flirt up Bateman, her immaturity in thinking that an older guy who likes horror films is the man for her. But it’s false, because her maturity level at 16 would not let her acknowledge that, and because no teenager delivers a line like that.

In the end, the film has some redeeming qualities that make it worth seeing. Page can deliver a line reading as well as any young actor, and does well enough with the material she’s given. Cera holds that teen angst in his shoulders and on his face extremely well. But I was left cold by the disaffectd characters who seem ever-to-cool to spare any energy on genuine emotion.