pullquote

Lou on Vine

Pullquote exclusive! Must credit Pullquote!

FOC Johnny Hong Kong sends along his review of Mr. Manola Dargis's new restaurant, Lou on Vine. Rest assured: JHK has both the cinematic and culinary chops for the job.

Christopher Walken brought us together, if you must know. See, our friendship was born--back in our salad days--over a missing copy of The Prophecy. At the time, the cinetrix was slinging videos, and JHK was slinging hash at a restaurant down the road. Good times.

Take it away, Johnny:

The place is totally trippy, sort of like walking into a David Lynch movie. It's in a strip mall (of course), and there are these crazy floral print curtains separating the convenience store-style glass doors and the dark interior of the restaurant.

The first thing we see when we walk in is a group of older folks sitting in the northeast corner, drinking wine and laughing loudly, which contributed to the David Lynch-y feelings, calling to mind the scene in Mulholland Drive at the end where Naomi Watts's "parents" are laughing into the fisheye lens. Then you see the "crazy tree wall paper," which makes the whole place feel like an Elks Lodge. Our waiter (and Lou himself, who tended bar) both look like they could be extras in a David Lynch movie, too. Come to think of it, their signature dish, pig candy, also calls to mind a Lynch movie (which one is it where someone runs around with a pig mask on? Was it Blue Velvet? or Wild at Heart? If there's not a Lynch movie with a guy in a pig mask, there should be. Amen to that--ed.)

 

The wine list is impressive, with servings coming in tasting, glass, and bottle sizes. 

 

The menu is small with a bunch of tapas-style offerings, charcuterie and cheese plates, and only one traditional entree on the menu. Mary Milan and I decided to work through the small plates and forgo the beef roast.

 

Here's the set list and impressions:

 

1. Wine (grenache, merlot, etc.): Good. Both wines, light and spicy.

2. Olives and almonds: Fabulous. The candied almonds with sweet and salty flavor were key. Any dish that contains Lucques olives can't be bad. 

3. Pig candy: As good as they say. Hints of strawberry jam. Divine. 

 

Interlude

 

4. Wine (pinot noir): Easy, much more mellow. Just in case Dennis Hopper wheeled his ass out from the back, our palates would be in a much more relaxed space.

5. Crostini trio: Mushrooms, red pepper puree and truffle salt, canellini beans: 2/3's of greatness.  The mushroom one, while good, failed to live up to the the standard of its brothers. 

6. Mac and cheese with fleur de sel: A must have. The fleur de sel sets off the texture difference in the baked, browned top nicely. Plus, it's a nice surprise for the palate. The cheese is yummy. 

 

Interlude

 

7. Pig candy: Just like New York City, it's so nice, we had it twice.

 

Interlude

 

8. Pecan tart with vanilla ice cream: I was suspicious at first because I'm not a big fan of pecan tarts - they are usually sickly sweet and gross, but this was not. Packed full of pecans. Definitely good.

 

Final judgment is that this wine bar serves really distinctive food, better than some restaurants I've been to in the city. Eating in a David Lynch movie is not the most settling experience, if you catch my drift, but the wine list, pig candy, and mac and cheese make the place a keeper.

 

(And on the Dargis front, there was a customer there dining with a gentleman who looked like a younger, prettier version of our favorite Pulitzer nominee. Lou gracefully stayed behind the bar). 

Gimme Fiction

Cinetrix here [barely]. Still recovering from my stint at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival last weekend, which was bracketed on either side with documentary screenings closer to home. Filmmaker Michael Gitlin presented his downright Lynchian in parts look at amateur ornithologists and bird watchers in the odd and compelling The Birdpeople last week, and evangelical Ike-lover Eugene Jarecki breezed through yesterday with his outstanding doc Why We Fight, which blew me away precisely one year ago at Full Frame and should be playing soon at the proverbial theatre near you.

In time, I will post reviews a go-go, but for now I leave you with the following bits of chum to nibble:

Crazy:

BLVR: Rumor has it that you turned down the chance to direct Disney’s remake of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner because you felt they weren’t interested in really exploring racism.

HR: The way they wanted to do it didn’t have a lot to do with the colossal amount of pain and violence that swirls around racial injustice. It would’ve been like an episode of The Jeffersons. What’s the point? But who knows, maybe that’s as much as most people want. I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “When I go to the movies, I don’t want to think.”

BLVR: Does that offend you as a filmmaker?

HR: It offends me as a human being. Why wouldn’t you want to think? What does that mean? Why not just shoot yourself in the fucking head? Or people’ll say that they don’t want to see any negative emotions. They don’t want to see unpleasantness. I did a comedy with Al Franken about his character Stuart Smalley, which was really about alcoholism and addiction and codependency. It had some painful stuff in it. When we showed it to focus groups, some of them actually said, “If I want to see a dysfunctional family, I’ll stay home.”

Sexy [not]:

Practically asexual, A.O. Scott prefers the "most risqué" moment in a movie to be "ocular intercourse" that "stands in for the more vigorous variety, which is kept mainly off screen" (Casanova). If Scott had his druthers, sex scenes would be "mostly talk," because "there are still a few filmmakers who are capable of infusing the bodily expressions of erotic desire with dramatic force and psychological meaning." (Closer).

Cool:

I think that one very particular thing that a film critic can do — it's part of the task of writing  — is description. But a very particular kind of description. I don't mean plot description. I think far too many film reviews have far too much plot synopsis in them. Which is boring. I mean, who wants to read five paragraphs of plot synopsis? If I want to see the plot I'll go see the film. I want the motor of that plot, I want something about the hook of that plot to get me interested. But, beyond that, I want something that is more a quality of what I think of as a sort of sensuous description of the film, of the rhythm of the film, the color of the film, of the mood itself, of the changing moods of the film. Something that gives you a feeling, a really experiential feeling of the film that you try to translate into your own language, whether it be on radio or in print or a television segment or whatever it might be.

Back soon. Save a seat for me.

FFDFF: Sketches

Greetings from lovely Durham, NC, where your pal the cinetrix is covering the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival for GreenCine Daily.

In the press area, the whole world drifts by if you sit sucking wi-fi long enough. Ken Burns and festival director Nancy Buirski schmoozed mere feet away en route to a work in progress screening of an episode from his latest series, The War. Burns narrowly missed multihyphenate Sydney Pollack, whose first documentary directing effort, Sketches of Frank Gehry, bowed last night as the Opening Night Film to a packed house. Pollack was fortunate in his subject—Gehry is garrulous and charming—but his Hollywood roots showed through in his choice of talking heads. Noted architecture “experts” Barry Diller, Mikes Ovitz and Eisner share the screen with architect Philip Johnson in one of his last interviews, Herbert Muschamp, and, as comic relief, an outsized Julian Schnabel, clad in a white bathrobe and opining wildly, a snifter in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

The true stars of the post-film Q&A, conducted by Alan Berliner, were Pollack's gleaming cordovan cowboy boots, drawing my eye even from the perilous heights of the second balcony. Today, he was sporting an equally buttery black pair. What will he wear tomorrow? Developing....

OK, off to learn about rich people and Iraq, in that order. More TK.

The Union Forever

Can you guess where we are in our film class adventure? Here's a hint:

Then, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane.

That's right, the obligatory screening of Citizen Kane, without which no film survey course is complete. There's so much going on in that movie that the kiddies can press the full breadth of their new vocabularies into service, which is nice. But it also allows us to get into a discussion of auteurism, which will segue neatly into next week's Hitchcock flick. So in addition to the textbook reading, I assigned a Bazin article and discussed ol' Andrew Sarris.

And I do mean old. Over at the Reeler, Stu has caught the father of American auteur theory cadging his column copy for the Observer almost verbatim from Film Forum's program notes. Tacky! The students are sometimes budding plagiarists themselves and don't need encouragement still so innocent that the cinetrix didn't mention it in class. However, I did invoke the Sarris-Kael feuds of yore as an explanation of why Pauline went to such lengths to nominate screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as the real auteur of Kane.

Did the kids like the movie? Who can say? Does it matter? Here are some proud pedogogic moments:

• Having a student know the story behind "Rosebud," so I didn't have to explain it. [Gore Vidal does a bang-up job of discussing it here that's worth reading.]
• Drawing an elaborate diagram of the plot on the board, inspired by Mulvey's bfi monograph on Kane. [Go figure.]
• Playing this clever You Tube video for No. 1 Welles fan Jack White's White Stripes song "The Union Forever," which illustrates the cultural resonance of the film and Orson Welles even today. No, really. [Remember, they're too young to know about Paul Masson. Or even The Critic.]

Dinner and a movie II

The Fesser posed the following cinematic query to his readers, and I pass it and their responses along to you as a public service.

For Fessering reasons tedious to relate, I'm screening Birth of a Nation this week for 8-10 undergrads. To incentivize sitting through a three-hour silent b&w pro-Klan opus, I promised to feed them. Now, the question is, feed them what? Dinner-and-a-movie-wise, what is the dinner when the movie is Birth of a Nation? And no, I'm not gonna light a cross in the yard and make s'mores.

Menu suggestions may be found here. Ultimately, in the interest of fighting anemia, London broil with bearnaise, creamed spinach, and buttermilk mashed potatoes were served to the starving undergrads, who felt so at home a couple ducked out to the store to get Pillsbury cookie dough to make dessert.

The cinetrix was good, relatively, and kept her comments about Griffith's pioneering use of parallel editing and Diawara's ideas about black spectatorship to a minimum.

But it did get me to thinking, what are/would be some of your favorite at-home or on the town dinner-and-a-movie combinations? What would you serve with a surrealist film, say? Bresson? Makmalbaf? De Sica? Spielberg? [Perhaps the next blog roundelay on a film or filmmaker should include recipes and serving suggestions.] After all, even cinephages gotta eat.

Dinner and a movie I

Forgive the lassitude. The cinetrix foolishly decided to start her week with a 6:40 a.m. flight out of Newark on Monday morning [kids, don't try this at home], which has left her decidedly behind the 8-ball, sleepwise.

It also means I am still in no position to fully process this item from The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz blog, although it is nice to see NYU cinema studies grads promote one another:

In other Dargis-related news, her husband Lou Amdur has opened an intimate Hollywood restaurant called, surprise, Lou, which is located on Vine, close to both the Paramount lot and Raleigh studios. I look forward to checking it out.

The most important aspect of this news is that Mr. Dargis has pig candy on the menu. Good man. The Fesser approves, even as he wonders at how those two seem to be biting our game.

Would one of the cinetrix's Hellay operatives please investigate this joint immediately and report back? I am even willing to defray reasonable pig candy expenses.