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SHORT TAKES
FILM
- In Bong Joon-Ho’s BARKING DOGS NEVER BITE (the PARASITE director’s first film), the poor pay for the sins of the middle class, whose only recourse is to bribe the rich for the privilege of treading water.
- If you’d like affirmation of the subway’s hidden terrors, might I suggest MIMIC? Guillermo del Toro’s skin-crawling 1997 movie about genetically engineered roaches lacks his world-vision and suffers Weinstein’s oversight, but makes for solid creature feature. (You can watch the director’s provides a glint of del Toro’s vision.)
- Only Noomi Rapace could make nursing an infant sheep look normal. LAMB Is a storybook fable with picturesque images, and a lackluster but appropriate ending, a cosmic joke about humankind’s comeuppance.
- BARBARIAN (Zach Cregger) is like that X-Files episode “Home,” glazed in intergenerational and gendered dread, where women are feared instead of adored.
- The Romanian film INTREGALDE (Radu Muntean) is an accidental anti-Land Rover campaign, and an intentional critique of altruistic do-gooder intentions. It’s a pseudo horror movie about what happens when you’re stuck in the backwoods, but the real threats are your own preconceptions coupled with underlying tensions with your s.o.
- A booty call begins with eye-gazing foreplay at the freaking bodega in SEA OF LOVE (1989), which is better than it has any right to be. Al Pacino’s detective falls for Ellen Barkin’s potential suspect in this lightly erotic neo-noir which sidles up into a charmingly cheesy romance, costarring John Goodman. It also features the most delightfully arbitrary shower curtain in film history.
- The cornball quality of HACKERS (1995), heavy on juvenile zoinks! and inside-the-machine visual sequences (more striking ways to portray computer system manipulation do in fact exist, and in the least there’s Chris Hemsworth dubious typing skills) is less alluring. This complaint doesn’t extend to its cyberpunk fits, especially Angelina Jolie’s—a scuzzy yet chic mix of materials (heavy metals, slick neoprene, cracked leather) that would feel right at home at Basement with some minor tweaking.
- As funny as her first feature (Slums of Beverly Hills) and as grim as the second (Savages), Tamara Jenkins's third film PRIVATE LIFE (2018) cuts the difference between them. It’s largely invigorated by Kathryn Hahn, who proves the ideal vessel for Jenkins’ cinema of squirrelly discontent and “emotional incontinence,” to borrow a phrase from her character.
FOOD
- The namesake burger < collard greens on foccaccia < zingy salads with Campo Rosso greens < any and all desserts at the newly revamped Superiority Burger.
- There’s something unexpectedly infantilizing about Double Chicken Please, a cocktail bar that employs a bouncer as early as 5pm. Sitting at a formica counter with some unduly sweetened drinks (naturally, at least: longan, honey, raisin, plums) and a small popcorn bucket of boneless fried chicken (overflowing, $12, a true bargain) I felt like a high school sophomore with a Popeyes and cherry coke, in neither a fun nor nostalgic way
- The hippie sandwich at Quinnie’s upstate presents a multicolor strata of vegetables—an orange block of squash, a green tangle of pea shoots, and ribbons of zucchini and purple carrots—tied together with green goddess dressing and pickled fresno chiles. Charred scallions and white cheddar seal the deal for this carnivore.
- At Raf’s, the hazelnut-quince danish is built upward. The dough is coiled into a beehive stashed with the fruit, oxidized and pulverized to oblivion, and dusted with hazelnuts. It tastes a bit like pb&j and leaves too an unending trail of flakey crumbs.
- The pistachio pie at West Taghkanic Diner is a treat best served old, for breakfast the next day chilled from the fridge. By then the brittle crumb crust (Biscoff, perhaps?) has had time to soften—though its immense sweetness remains. As relief: a cloud of cream whipped, sugarless and flavored with vanilla bean, on top.