A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, December 20, 2021

Guilt-free Pleasures

Movie: Walking a Tightrope (Nikos Papatakis, 1991) (The Criterion Channel).

Book: Anthony Trollope, The Warden

TV: Guy's Grocery Games: Fieri Family Holiday Showdown (Food Network); Station Eleven: Wheel of Fire (HBO Max); Maid: String Cheese (Netflix).

I don't care for sports. There's too much noise and hype surrounding the efforts of people to move a ball from one place to another. But I do like competitions if they involve doing something constructive: designing a dress, decorating a room, even making tchotchkes with glue guns and papier-mâché (i.e., Making It.) And food competitions are the best, which is why my DVR fills up with the latest episodes of shows like Chopped and Top Chef, among many others. I even learn something from them about ingredients and techniques in my own piddly efforts in the kitchen.

Guy Fieri has gotten a bad rap from a lot of critics: His restaurants, they say, aren't very good. He hasn't really distinguished himself as a chef. And his personality is somewhat over the top. I'm not much interested in his explorations of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, reruns of which seem to take up a heft portion of the Food Network's real estate. But I think he's good at heart, and he's done a lot of charitable work assisting restaurants hit by the pandemic and/or burned-out by California wildfires. And like DDD, as he abbreviates it, Guy's Grocery Games is a showcase for chefs around the country who often haven't made a big name for themselves except in their own towns. 

On GGG, they compete in goofy games that test their skills by limiting the ingredients or techniques they can use in preparing food for a panel of "celebrity chefs" -- usually best known for their appearances on the Food Network or Top Chef -- like Antonia Lofaso and Alex Guarnaschelli. The most recent show, which I watched last night, was a special competition centered on the Fieri family: The competitors were Fieri's sons, Hunter and Ryder, and his nephew Jules, each of them assisted by one of the frequent judges on the show, Lofaso (Hunter), Michael Voltaggio (Ryder), and Aaron May (Jules). The judges were Guy's wife and his parents. The winner got $10,000 to donate to charity. (It was Ryder, who donated it to his high school -- not, I think, the most needy of charities.)

This sort of thing is not to everyone's taste (dubious pun intended), I know, but I find it the perfect unwinding mechanism, the sort of thing people call a "guilty pleasure." I reject that term. I feel no guilt at all watching such shows -- which I do most nights after dinner, as I drink a mug of tea, and before I submit myself to heavier fare on television. The heavier fare last night included Nikos Papatakis's Walking a Tightrope, a 1991 French drama starring Michel Piccoli as a character based on Jean Genet: a successful and famous writer who likes to pick up handsome young men, not only for sex, but also to meddle in their lives. In the film, he takes on an impoverished youth (Lilah Dadi) who works for a circus scooping up elephant dung and tries to make him a star tightrope walker. Things don't go well, as you might suspect. Much of the film is quite good, but it falls apart at the end when the complications are resolved with a suicide that feels less like a sufficiently motivated act than one that fits the themes and symbols of Papatakis's screenplay. 

Maid last night continued Alex's woes, as she struggled with her attraction to Nate (Raymond Ablack), the good Samaritan who has taken in not only Alex and Maddy, but also Alex's maddening mother, who has a spectacular breakdown at the end of the episode. It's all very well-played, but I still think the series teeters on the edge of soap opera too often. I also watched the first episode of Station Eleven, a series that has gotten good reviews, partially because it begins with a pandemic that echoes our current plight, but which was scripted and partially filmed before the Covid outbreak. Patrick Somerville, its writer-producer, made one of the most intriguing TV dramas of recent years, The Leftovers (2015-2017), so I look forward to following this one.