Movie #388: Mallrats

Mallrats is the second movie in Kevin Smith's "View Askew-niverse," and stars Jason Lee, Claire Forlani, Jeremy London, Shannon Doherty, Ethan Suplee, Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes, and Michael Rooker.

TS (London) goes to pick up his girlfriend Brandi (Forlani) to take her to Florida, but learns that her father (Rooker) has tapped her to be on his dating show because the original contestant died swimming laps because TS called her fat. Meanwhile, Brodie (Lee), an abrasive slacker, gets dumped by his girlfriend Rene (Doherty) because...he's an abrasive slacker and she's done with it. They get together and go to the mall, where everything else in the movie happens. Brodie employs Jay and Silent Bob (Mewes and Smith, respectively) to disrupt the dating show that happens to be filming at the mall, Rene is dating a manager at a men's wear store (a very young Ben Affleck) who's deliberately looking for girls on the rebound, TS' ex Gwen (Joey Lauren Adams) is there shopping, and so on and on.

Mallrats is very much Kevin Smith suffering from some growing pains. Clerks was clever and all dialog, but the actors made it work. Here, we have two dudes who can't quite make Smith's stilted dialog sound natural. Actually, hell, that's true of Claire Forlani, too - she hasn't quite shed her accent and she utterly fails at making her character likeable, even though her character is pretty much in the right about the whole situation (to wit: her dad is a possessive ass, but so is TS).

The movie has its moments; there's an embrace of physical comedy and even some magical realism that I find fun, and Adams is always fun (and she can handle Smith's dialog, as can Doherty, weirdly). Mostly, though, the lead characters are kind of dicks, the confrontation between Brandi and TS is oddly hostile, and the women are sexualized in a pretty sophomoric way.

My Grade: C
Rewatch value: Low

Next up: The Maltese Faction, unless I buy Doctor Strange first

Arroz Con Oscars

Yesterday, of course, was the Oscars telecast, which is accompanied (in my house) by two days of furious cooking. Let's start with the menu for this year.

• La La Land: Absolut La La Land cocktail.
• Hidden Figures: Somewhat fancy deviled eggs.
• Manchester by the Sea: Haddock chowdah.
• Fences: Root beer braised short ribs.
• Moonlight: Arroz con pollo.
• Hacksaw Ridge: Okinowan sweet potatoes. 
• Hell or High Water: Green beans.
• Arrival: Universal language cheesecakes.
• Lion: Jalebis. 

Saturday, then we started cooking. We figured we'd get what we could done, so we started out with the line/saffron syrup which would be used to soak the jalebis. 

Most of the ingredients for which you can see here.

Making a syrup is pretty simple; it's just water, sugar, and whatever flavoring you want (in this case, line zest, saffron, and green cardamom). 

A-like so. 

While that was going, we figured we'd do the short ribs, too, because we could cook them and then fridge them, and just reduce the sauce and glaze them right before serving. This would prove to be a really smart decisions for a number of reasons. 

So, first, we have our meat:

MEAT SQUARES.

And our two batches of veggies and herbs, because we doubled the recipe: 

The appropriate amount of thyme, here, is "fuck it."

And then the veggies get cooked, the meat gets browned, and everything goes into the pot for a few hours. 

Browned meat.

Cookin' veggies. 

Root beer!

While that was going (in the oven), we also roasted some garlic for turning into roasted garlic mustard. 

Garlic pouch!

So fragrant! Fuck off, vampires!

Also on Saturday, we decided we'd make the cheesecakes, which involves Michelle making graham cracker crust:

Crusts. Plural. 

And then filling those little bits of joy with cheesecake filling. 

Cheesecake: Not great for fantasy art, but terrific for dessert!

And that was Saturday. I mean, we baked the cheesecakes and then stuck 'em in the fridge, and put the short ribs in separate tupperwares and poured off the juice into another container, but I didn't get pictures of that. Just know that the fridge was full to burstin'. 

Sunday! Up early, time to make the jalebis. Now, jalebis are basically Indian funnel cakes, but the recipe we found was wrong because the batter was far too dry. Fortunately the way to get around that is to add water. 

Yellow food color and saffron, you see. 

And then we melt a bunch of ghee.

Ghee wilikers. SEE TRAVIS I ALSO CAN PUN.

And then we dumped the batter into a piping bag and fried us up some jalebis!

Spirals!

It took some practice to get the thickness and all right, so we wound up with a plate of broken, but delicious, dreams. 

Seriously, so tasty.

But we eventually got it right, made a bunch of jalebis, soaked them in the lime saffron syrup, and stuck them on a drying rack. 

Two thousand jalebis!

No rest for the hungry, though. Figuring that deviled eggs needed time to cool, we boiled them suckers:

Can't really think of a way to make boiling eggs interesting. It's pretty straightforward.

Same with peeling them.

Ah, but then! Time to make the chowdah! We figured we could make it and then put it in a crock pot to stay warm. So that's onions and butter in one pot, potatoes and water in another...

I so want a bigger stove, you have no idea. 

And then hacking up poor defenseless haddock. 

#FishSoWhite

So: haddock in the potato water. Meanwhile, Michelle was mashing up egg yolks and mixing in goat cheese and that fantastic roasted garlic mustard we made yesterday. 

Slightly fancy deviled eggs.

Soup, meanwhile, gets all combined, hit with cream and broth, and simmered. 

Seriously, this was so tasty. 

And then deviled eggs arranged in the nice little plate thingies we bought. 

Which held 17 each. Still haven't figured that one out.

So then, the cheesecakes. Yes, they're done cooking, but we made them for Arrival (the other option was to serve grilled squid, but Michelle vetoed that), so they had alien language written in chocolate on them.

Michelle also discovered luster powder yesterday.

"Costello is dessert-process."

OH SHIT GREEN BEENS. So first, I had to trim them, which is fucking tedious, and then I sauteed some onions and red pepper flakes.

Cast iron is the best thing.

And shocked the green beans.

STUFF COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO! YOUNG PEOPLE USE CURSE WORDS!

And into the pan they go, along with bacon!

Secret to cooking literally anything: bacon. 

Figured we'd better get the arroz con pollo going, since it takes a while. This starts with chopping up a whole bunch of onion and red pepper, browning the chicken in a pan, cooking the onions/peppers in said pan, putting the chicken back in, adding a shitload of liquid, adding rice, and forgetting about it for an hour.

The pepper is on top of the onion, if you're wondering. 

Veggies softening. 

One more thing! The short ribs! That mostly involved putting said ribs in a pan with the liquid and boiling it until it was reduced down to sauce.

You can't smell this, but you wish you could. 

And then there were the sweet potatoes. I didn't get pictures of this process because we were scrambling to get them done alongside everything else, but basically they boil, you peel them while going "OW OW OW," and then they get sliced and tossed with a lime/butter.

The cocktail, likewise, didn't get any photos, because it'd just be me adding fruit juice to a glass.

And here are the finished products!

And that's all you get! See you next year!

And the Oscar Goes to...Feng Shui!?!

No, I just have to do some game prep is all. But seriously, wouldn't a movie based on Feng Shui be amazing?

Anydangway, last time the Dragons beat up a bunch of mutants, faced off against Si Borg's reanimated flesh, attuned a new Feng Shui site, and lost Wildfire to radioactive explosions. So now they'll be headed back into the contemporary juncture to pursue Melody, Celeste's sister.

Players, stop reading....NOW!

Oscars: Predictions & Thoughts

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Movie #387: Kubo & The Two Strings

Kubo & The Two Strings is an animated fantasy movie starring Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey, Art Parkinson, Ralph Fiennes, Rooney Mara, George Takei, Brenda Vaccaro, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa. It's probably one of my favorite films of the year.

Young Kubo (Parkinson) lives with his mother (Theron) on a mountain overlooking a village. Every day he goes down to the village to tell stories for money, but he does that with the help of magic - when he plays his shamisen, he can fold paper into characters and make them move and act out the stories. Everyone in the village kind of takes the magic as read, but they're amazed with his storytelling (except that he loses track of time and can't end the stories). His mother warns him to always be inside before the sun sets, lest the Moon King, his grandfather, find him and steal his other eye.

So right away we're dealing with some pretty high-level magical realism, here, which of course makes me happy, but then Kubo does stay out late, and his creepy-ass aunts (Mara) show up to collect him. His mother gives her life to send him away to the Far Lands and animate his Monkey charm (also voiced by Theron) to guide him in finding the armor that will let him stand up to his grandfather. Along the way they pick up Beetle (McConaughey), a cursed samurai who's convinced he served under Kubo's father.

The movie is pretty brutal. It turns out Monkey is really Kubo's mother and Beetle is really his father, but neither of them live long after those revelations come out. Kubo's mother, as it happens, was a celestial being sent to kill his father, but who fell in love with him instead. Kubo is forced to confront his grandfather alone, and tries to kill him with the weapons he's found, but ultimately chooses to give his grandfather the same gift his father gave his mother - humanity. The closing scene where the villagers tell Kubo's now-human grandfather "his story" chokes me up every time, not least because it's really damn Promethean, in a way.

The movie is visually amazing (Laika doesn't always hit home runs, but this one sure is). I think it might have been nice to have a few more Japanese people in the cast, especially the principle cast, but overall the movie feels pretty respectful to the source material (although I'm hardly the one to make that call). The cover of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" by Regina Spector over the end credits is likewise perfect.

This movie probably won't beat Moana for Best Animated Feature on Sunday, but I dunno, I think it's got my vote.

My Grade: A
Rewatch value: High

Next up: Mallrats

Movie #386: It Follows

It Follows is a horror movie starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Olivia Luccardi, Lili Sepe, Daniel Zovatto, and Jake Weary.

Jay (Monroe) is a college student, seeing a boy named Hugh (Weary). They have sex in his car on a date, after which he immediately drugs her, ties her to a wheelchair, and tells her that "it" is coming for her. "It" can look like a person, even one she knows, but it's not human and no one else can see it. If it catches her, it will kill her and then proceed on to Hugh. She can pass it along to someone else by sleeping with them. He recommends never going anywhere without more than one exit; "It's real slow but it's not dumb." And then he dumps her at home and fucks off.

Jay's sister Kelly (Sepe) and her friends Yara (Luccardi) and the smitten Paul (Gilchrist) don't immediately believe her, but they understand that she's freaked out by something (when the phantom starts to follow her and invades her house), so with their friend Greg (Zovatto) they head out of town to think about it. But then the phantom makes its presence known - it's not intangible, just invisible and apparently immortal. Jay sleeps with Greg who seems to avoid the phantom for a few days (there's some minor implication that he made have banged another girl immediately afterwards and passed along the phantom that way, but it's not clear), but then falls victim to it. Jay and her friends come up with a plan to lure it into a pool and electrocute it, which fails spectacularly, and finally Jay has sex with Paul. The movie ends with them walking hand in hand, someone out of focus in the background following them.

I like this movie a lot. It's original, for one thing. I mean, you could argue it draws on slasher films, but there's only one victim from the main cast, and the movie implies a lot more than it shows, which is nicely effective in psychological horror. Jay is a fun character. I enjoy that she initiates and obviously enjoys sex (and I had it in my head that Hugh was her first, but he wasn't; after she has sex with Greg she quietly mentions that they had sex in high school), and I like that while the creature is obviously sex-focused, it's not necessarily punishing people for fucking. It just...is. It's implacable and unrelenting, and it's never explained. There's not an investigation scene where Yara (who's constantly reading on her little weird seashell tablet) goes "Ha! It's an ancient Sumerian sex-demon!" No, it's just a nameless horror, and it's not interested in being defined.

Along with The Babadook, this is probably one of my favorite horror films of the last couple of years. And, because this is how I roll, I think it's a pretty perfect Chill movie.

The cast is, however, entirely white, and that's kind of disappointing.

My grade: A-
Rewatch value: Medium

Next up: Kubo & The Two Strings

Prometheans in the Big Easy

Gotta start doing these the day after. Long week, though.

Anyway! Last time the characters got to the New Orleans, fought some Pandorans, met Sicky, met Charon, and so forth. This time...

They wake up in the little hovel that Sicky found for them, an abandoned storefront, as Enoch arrives. Enoch had stopped off to visit a demiurge outside of town, someone who had made a Frankenstein (while Enoch hasn't; he's trying to make one of each Lineage, remember). They had a nice little chat about using heat from a crematorium to provide the necessary energy, and then Enoch arrives in New Orleans.

That morning, the owner of the building, Beth Mortaine, comes to visit. Matt immediately recognizes that she's in stage 2 Disquiet, probably from Sicky. She tells Sicky he's got rent to pay, and Sicky begs off, but Matt gives her a grand (which exhausts a lot of his walking around money) and the Prometheans promise that they'll fix the place up, clean it, and paint it so Beth can sell it. They head out and hit a Home Depot to buy supplies (which depletes the rest of Matt's cash, but Skip and Enoch both have Resources, so that's good). Feather looks around the Home Depot for Pilgrim Marks, but doesn't find any.

They head back to the storefront and start working on cleaning it up. They work on that for a few hours, and then talk to Sicky about the Promethean camp and who was there. Sicky mentions that he was surprised that the Pandoran was able to attack Avalon in the sculpture garden - he thought there was some kind of field in place that prevented it. The Prometheans decide that's worth a look. First they decide to go talk to Parris Mick, formerly the Promethean known as Papillion. She's apparently become human, completing her Great Work. Since Avalon already talked to her, they figure it should be one of the others, and Matt is one of the more adept socially (also he's not causing Disquiet since his fire is out). Feather goes with him.

They talk with Parris, and Matt claims to be writing an article for a local arts magazine. They talk about her work in the sculpture garden, but her memory seems hazy. She does agree to talk with them more the next day, though.

They wander around the place and find a planter. Someone has dug up something made of obsidian and wire, and smashed it. Avalon looks over the shards and figures it might have been shaped like a butterfly. Holding the shards, the characters get a sense of sadness and longing, like something precious has been lost. The Prometheans split up and search through the gardens for more Pandorans, and indeed, they all get jumped. A couple of them are injured, but they manage to destroy the monsters before they do any real damage.

As its now night, they decide to go find Charon, since a couple of them need electrical healing. They introduce him to Enoch, and Charon closes a hole on one of their pants (Enoch, I think?). He also tells Skip that now that he thinks about it, he doesn't know that fella with all the jangly charms, but something made him think he did. Probably Skip should be wary.

They head back to the hovel. Interspersed with all of this, too, they've been talking with Matt about his absent Divine Fire and what they might do about that. Matt isn't sure that he wants his Fire back - if he's not causing Wastelands, and he's not causing Disquiet, why, it's like being human, isn't it? The others aren't sure, though, and Matt goes upstairs, lays down, and forces an Elpis Vision.

In the Vision, he sees himself walking into the sun, but it's muted, dull, he's done it before. He's walking in the desert, but he's worn a rut in his path. And up ahead, he sees a cliff, and he knows the only ways are back the way he came or over the cliff. He awakens knowing that he needs to move forward. He needs a leap of faith.

And downstairs, the others realized that a Wasteland has started. Matt apparently still has enough Fire to create one.