Category Archives: Reviews

Foodie Review: Blue by Eric Ripert

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 5/5 Food Orgasms  6/5 Hurting Pocketbooks

The highlight of my recent trip to Grand Cayman was without a doubt a trip to Blue located in the Ritz-Carlton.  Everything in Grand Cayman is expensive.  Blue is probably the most expensive of them all.  I was afraid that I was not going to get anyone to go with me when I noticed the prices, but three of my friends were momentarily drunk enough and in full vacation mode and threw caution to the wind and joined me.

We each had the seven course tasting menu with wine parings.  Add on the various pre-dinner and post-dinner freebies, and it was closer to a ten course menu.  No wine parings for the freebies.  So sad.   Calling the meal divine doesn’t do it justice.  Alas, I will never be able to recall the names of the wines, but each paring was a magnificently chosen compliment to each course.

By far, and across the board, we all agreed that the first course, the tuna-foie gras,  was the best.  It was a thinly pounded layer of tuna lightly brushed on the bottom with foie gras and placed on top of a toasted baguette with chives.  It was transcendent.  I could easily have had seven courses of just it and been happy.  Also well worth mentioning were the poached halibut and the striped bass and the mousse that was served as part of the desert course.  It was all quite yum.  That isn’t to say the other courses were bad, but they were only excellent.  They included a crab salad, a lobster dish which, with the wine pairing, tasted better with every bite, and one course I don’t quite remember.  The highlights of the wine were my finally finding a Riesling that I enjoy, a very excellent Merlot, and a Tempranillo that was to die for.

Now that you’ve read this far, I’ll tell you the price.  The seven course meal with wine pairings and one pre-dinner cocktail cost $400 including a 20% tip.  Yeah, I know, ouch, right?  It is three times what I’ve ever paid for a dinner.  The big question is was it worth it?  Yes and no.  No meal is worth that much, but the meal itself was the best I have ever tasted and given the company and the enjoyment we all had, I believe it’s a good once a lifetime experience if you make more money than you should but less than being comfortable throwing down $400 for a meal.

Movie Review: Transcendence

Jean-Paul’s Review: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Interesting subject, but poor execution.

I’m writing this on an airplane so I don’t have the use of IMDB to look up character names.  Oh, the humanity!

You ever have one of those dreams where there were all these separate parts and you know that they are supposed to fit together somehow, but they don’t?  “Transcendence” is kind of like that.  It starts with a terrorist attack by a neo-Luddite group on artificial intelligence labs and a bizarre assassination attempt against Johnny Depp that fails.  But the bullet was loaded with a radioactive isotope so it kills Johnny Depp anyway. But not before his wife and business partner upload his consciousness into a computer.  So far so good except for the needless death by radioactive isotope part.

Johnny Depp and his wife then perform a bunch of crimes and steal a lot of money and build a massive data center in the middle of the desert.  The terrorist group is all like “Oh, we have to stop him!”  Two years pass.  They are the most ineffective effective terrorist group ever.  Meanwhile, Johnny Depp and his wife are creating cyborg people by taking close to dying people and giving them super-human strength via nanobots, of course, with the added ability to network with Johnny Depp who can take control of them at any time.  This, obviously, must be stopped by all means, and the terrorist group is just the people to do it.  Or so says the government anyway.  So the government teams up with the terrorists and puts a stop to the machinations of Johnny Depp.  The end.

I’m not really giving much away.  Everything stated above is either ridiculous plot twist or obvious progression of the story.  If it sounds disjointed, that’s because it is.  The objectives of the terrorists makes no sense.  The objectives of the government makes no sense.  The objectives of Johnny Depp only make sense in retrospect.  The objectives of Johnny Depp are the only ones which are clear, but even those become muddled as the movie plods on.

I’ll give you a good for instance of how muddled things are.  Shortly before Johnny Depp’s transference into AI, the terrorist group kidnaps his business partner because they just know that Johnny Depp is up to something.  How do they know?  Well, because they were able to find out that some of the quantum processor cores from Johnny Depp’s lab were stolen, of course.  As they are interrogating the business partner, they are able to determine the location of Johnny Depp with some internet jujitsu completely without the business partner’s help.  They then continue to hold him prisoner for some reason until he becomes one of them.  WTF?

The whole movie has weird instances like that.  Obviously, from the above, you could guess that this movie is completely skippable.  How it got so many big name actors involved in it, I have no idea. 

Movie Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Your standard Wes Anderson fare.  If you don’t know what that means, this is a good movie to find out.

You know exactly what you’re getting into when you see a Wes Anderson film.  “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is no exception.  There is whimsy.  Lots and lots of whimsy.  There are eccentric characters by the hotel full.  There is scene after scene of painstakingly designed sets.  And there’s a lot of dialogue dispensed deadpanedly.  Deadpanedly is now a word.

This particular film is pretty straight forward plot wise.  Man runs upscale hotel.  Man loves the old widows that visits the hotel.  One widow dies and leaves him a valuable painting.  Her family fights to keep painting.  Man steals painting.  Man is framed for widow’s murder.  Man goes to jail.  Man escapes from jail.  Man goes to retrieve stolen painting.  Man discovers painting holds a secret.  Man inherits fortune.  I guess I should say it’s straight forward for a Wes Anderson movie.  And that’s just the basics.

I enjoy how Wes Anderson wraps this movie up at the beginning and then unfolds it.  It begins with a woman visiting a monument to a famous writer and then that gets wrapped up into the writer talking about his career and that gets wrapped up into the writer meeting a man who owns the Grand Budapest Hotel and that gets wrapped up into the owner talking about how he came to inherit the hotel and that gets wrapped up into the main plot.  Then, after the main plot is resolved, everything gets unpacked again and the credits roll.  So “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is actually a story within a story within a story within a story.  A recursive function, if you will.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” is entertaining throughout.  There was a persistent smile on my face throughout.  The great thing about a Wes Anderson film is that he always gives you something to look at.  Often more than one something at the same time.  It’s like a main course and a desert served together.  This movie also stars every actor that has ever appeared in another Wes Anderson movie.  Part of the fun is wondering when your favorite actor will finally appear.

I wouldn’t say this is Wes Anderson’s best film, but it’s certainly up there.  I’m not entirely sure I’d recommend it to a person who isn’t a fan of Wes Anderson movies, but I’d certainly recommend it as a first entry for anyone who has never been exposed to Wes Anderson’s particular film making style.

Book Review: The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner by James Hogg

Jean-Paul’s rating : 2/5 stars

I have a work friend who occasionally recommends a book to me.  These books are invariably bad.  Many times I just ignore his recommendations, but this time the book was on Project Gutenberg so I figured what the heck.  I am happy to report his 100% crappy book recommendation streak is still going strong.  After talking to him, he claimed to like it because it was a difficult read, which it was, and because it had an ending that he wasn’t able to predict.  I pointed out that there wasn’t really anything to predict and his inferences into what occurred were only inferences and never explicitly stated in the book.

I should point out that the actual title of the book is actually “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself:  With a Detail of Curious Traditionary Facts and Other Evidence by the Author”.  This is certainly the longest title for a book I’ve ever read but it’s also fairly appropriate.  The book is split up into three parts.

The first part of the book is a relation of facts as seen by the editor surrounding the life of brothers George and Robert Cowlan.  It quickly relates events from their parents’ marriage and divorce, through their younger years growing up, George with the carefree father and Robert with the strictly Calvinist mother and Reverend who may or may not be Robert’s actual father.  It then describes their young adult years in which Robert torments George by following him around and being a complete douche.  It ends with the apparent murder of George by Robert and his inheritance of all of Roberts lands and his eventual flight from justice.  This part is somewhat interesting, but there are no establishing points to go from.  A lot of the motivations from the first part are fleshed out in the second part, but it doesn’t exactly make for an exciting read when split apart like this.  What you get out of it is that George is the good brother and Robert is the bad brother.

Part two is the actual memoir referred to in the title which belongs to Robert and was found after his death.  It tells the exact same story as part one only from Robert’s point of view and in excruciating detail.  We get more into George’s strict Calvinist upbringing and his attempts to prove his predestination into heaven, the Reverend’s acceptance of Robert’s predestination, Robert’s falling in with a person (who is obviously the devil) that convinces Robert to help him purge humanity of unworthy souls, and Robert’s real or imagined descent into madness as he is haunted by demons wherever he goes.  So yeah, Robert actually thinks he’s doing good and George is the evil one.  Perceptions of good versus evil, the wackiness of Calvinism and religion in general, blah, blah, blah.  So see, there are actual themes in this book, but you have long past even pretended to care about them because it took hundreds of pages to tie them together.

Part three is fairly useless, but does leave a lot of parts one and two open to interpretation which is kind of cool.  The editor of part one is back and he’s talking about how they found the manuscript on the body of a person who hanged himself.  So Robert actually killed himself.  This is kind of cool only because you end up having to question everything Robert did.  Was the devil even real or was this all in his imagination?  It’s very Fight Clubby.  Only without any satisfying resolution.

Another weird thing about the book that really bothered me was the Scottish brogue.  Your upper-class Scots speak proper English while the servant class speaks like a much more unintelligible version of a bad Mike Myers Scottish character.  This makes it very difficult to read, which is fine; reading accents can be quite interesting.  What bothers me is how Hogg goes in and out of it sometimes for the same character.  Maybe this is on purpose and was meant as a hint into the madness of Robert.  It is very disconcerting, though, to be reading this pages and pages long soliloquy by one of Robert’s servants written all in brogue that magically transforms into standard English.

Yep, this book can be skipped.  What little entertainment there is is not nearly worth the effort of sloughing through the rest of the book.  Although it is on Project Gutenberg so at least you can get it for free.

Movie Review: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Possibly the best Marvel offering since the original “Ironman” movie.  A decent plot with lots of action and a stunning amount of violence.

There’s just something about Captain America that sets him apart from your everyday comic book superhero movie fare.  It certainly helps that there is none of the gross nationalism that you’d expect from someone named Captain America.  He doesn’t fight for America, he doesn’t fight for SHIELD, he just fights for what he believes is right.  When you do that, things can get messy, but you do the best you can with what you have as you navigate the grey areas of superherodom.  All that to say that Captain America has a humanity that isn’t really present in any of the other superheroes.

Those of you that watch the ever so mediocre “Agents of SHIELD” television show probably were able to catch the tie-in between the last episode of the show and this movie.  They did something similar with the last Thor movie but after the fact.  This time, the events of the TV show predict the opening scene of “The Winter Soldier” and the movie looks to actually drive the plot of the TV series.  This is the only time that something like this has ever been attempted as far as I know and it’s an interesting set of bonus material for the fandom without getting in the way of either the TV show or the movies.

Now to finally get to the movie itself.  It was thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish.  The plot was well crafted with twists that I did not expect, though the Winter Soldier reveal kind of fell flat for me.  It was probably one of those things that you have to be a fan of the comic books to really get.  The action in the movie is top-notch and well choreographed.  And, in a surprising turn for a Marvel movie, there is a gratuitous amount of violence in it, with a kill count that would make “Game of Thrones” proud.

If you like the comic book movies, you’ll love this one so don’t delay.  I believe “The Winter Soldier” would even be enjoyable for those that aren’t really into the whole comic book scene.  It works pretty well as a solo project.  Also, if someone could explain what the heck the ending credits preview was all about I’d appreciate it.

Book Review: Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Wherever your life’s travels take you, never share a vehicle with anyone named Gulliver for doom is sure to visit you.  I am pretty sure this advise will serve you well.

Earth: the final frontier.  These are the voyages of Lemuel Gulliver.  His on and off again mission: to satire English life in the 18th century, to use imaginary beings to point out the faults of mankind, to baldly criticise those in power except for royalty which either Jonathan Swift was totally fine with or they were too prickly of a target for his barbs.

As you can probably tell, reading “Gulliver’s Travels” reminded me of “Star Trek”.  And, as you can probably tell from my rating, we’re talking season one of TNG.  Ugh.  Through a series of voyages, Gulliver finds himself on a variety of uncharted islands inhabited by previously undiscovered intelligent species.  The only thing missing is him making funtime with the native women.

My guess would be that the biggest problem with this book is time.  While some of the material covered is timeless, the time Gulliver spends with the Liliputians and the Brobdingnags comes across as very stale because of the temporality of the topics.  Add to that the fact that writing about really short humans (the Liliputians) and really tall humans (the Brobdingnags) is no longer terribly original and you find yourself with some tedious reading to get through.  This part is not all bad though.  Swift’s description of the Brobdingnags especially really makes you reflect on the concepts of beauty as he attempts to convey the hideousness of massive pores and freckles or the repulsive nature of a 72 foot tall woman’s breast.

Gulliver’s travels do get slightly more interesting from there.  His next stop is the flying island of Laputa which is inhabited by people who pursue science purely for science sake and the preposterousness that can come from that.  It isn’t exactly good satire, but it’s at least entertaining to read Gulliver describing all the ridiculous experiments that Laputans dedicate themselves to the detriment of their daily responsibilities to society.  The only other interesting part in this adventure is Gulliver’s reflections on immortality as he meets the immortals of Glubbdrubdrib who live forever but still age normally.

Gulliver’s final travels find him on the island inhabited by Yahoos (primitive men) and Houyhnhnms (intelligent horses).  This adventure was actually enjoyable to read.  The Houyhnhnmns are the only non-human in appearance race and he uses them to portray Swift’s ideal lifestyle for humanity.  That he uses a non-human race reflects Swift’s belief of the unlikelihood of humans to ever reach that idea.

Oh, I should also mention my love of the paragraph.  Paragraphs break up stories nicely and provide bite sized chunks of information to digest.  Swift hates paragraphs.  They go on for pages in this book.  This may or may not be on purpose.  There is a fake foreword from the editor who spends some length describing how Gulliver uses meticulous detail in describing even the most non-interesting events and how he had to force Gulliver to pare down his descriptions of things.  At the onset of the book, I found the caveat that Gulliver is a horrible storyteller amusing.  After finishing the book, I think Swift may just have been an asshole.

Movie Review: The LEGO Movie

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 5/5 stars

Bottom Line: Everything IS awesome.  A perfect kids movie with good comedy and an honest to goodness moral to the story.

“The LEGO Movie” is one of those movies that you can watch again and again.  And if you have kids, you WILL be watching it again and again.  The only down side to this is not being able to get the “Everything is Awesome” song out of your head.  But that only requires one viewing.

And speaking of the “Everything is Awesome” song, I have never experienced a situation where I went from disliking a song to really liking it after hearing it in the movie.  It is an incredibly stupid pop song, but it snaps in perfectly inside the movie.  This is a welcome change to the inorganic nature that often comes with original songs in movies.

Yes, this is basically an hour and a half long LEGO commercial, but the artistry and imagery in the movie are so perfect you can believe they were ripped straight from a child’s imagination and the LEGOs are just the medium the child had chosen.  And really, LEGOs are a unique medium perfect for the fertile imagination of a child.  The idea of that imagination is used as fuel for the plot of the movie which pits those who want to always follow the directions against those who want to build as they wish.

The movie also teaches an important lesson which is rare for a children’s movie.  That lesson is there is no wrong way to play with LEGOs.  Yes, really.  Like I said, it’s a LEGO commercial.  But that can be applied to life in general.  Sometimes you need to play by the rules and follow the directions and sometimes you shouldn’t and see where it takes you.  Words to live by.

Movie Review: 300: Rise Of An Empire

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 1/5 stars

Bottom Line: Look, it’s gratuitous,over the top blood and long-winded soliloquies with excessive use of slow motion.  Where have I seen this before?  Oh yeah, it was called “300”.

So there was this empire and it, like, rose or some junk?  The title of the film may be “Rise of an Empire”, but it’s not at all clear which empire is rising or how it is rising.  The movie ends very abruptly in the middle of a pitched battle which I’m assuming you are supposed to believe that the Greeks were going to win, but it’s not really clear.

A lot of “Rise of an Empire” plays exactly like the original “300” movie did.  Almost every scene is very stylistic and shot in high contrast so every ab and muscle and piercing and gush of blood shows in great detail.  It is kind of beautiful, but it’s also empty.  I enjoyed the original “300” for its stylistic elements, but a sequel just shows how shallow those stylistic elements are.  “300” was a one-trick pony and “Rise of an Empire” is the exact same pony performing the exact same trick only with a change of costume and a different script and on a boat.

I got suckered into watching this movie after seeing a preview featuring a pretty neat origin story of Xerxes.  I had assumed that we would see a more in-depth look at Xerxes the man-god in the movie itself.  Expecting depth from this movie, however, is like expecting a mosquito not to bite.  The preview turned out to contain 90% of all of Xerxes’ involvement in the movie.  The rest is just him standing around and looking big and beating up a girl.  This movie may hold the title for making the lamest man-god ever filmed.  What’s even more amazing is this movie was “based” off of the Frank Miller comic titled “Xerxes” and barely featured the dude.

The only interesting thought I had about the movie coming out of it was a chicken or the egg thought.  The final naval battle between Greece and Persia features a plan that is eerily similar to the Battle of Blackwater from “Game of Thrones” where all the boats perform a 40 car pileup and people start jumping on the boats from land and fighting.  I wonder if this movie ripped off George R. R. Martin or if George R. R. Martin ripped off Frank Miller or if there was actually a Greek battle that featured such an outrageous tactic and everyone ripped that off.

Book Review: Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

It is the near future and copyright laws have gone from insanely restrictive to ludicrously restrictive.  It is a world where the Internet is not a luxury but a necessity.  Family’s lives are ruined because their children illegally download copyrighted materials which causes them to lose their Internet connectivity.  Teenager Trent McCauley’s obsession with remixing the works of a famous writer/director/actor into new art gets his family kicked off the Internet for a year.  Guilt-ridden for destroying his family’s livelihood, Trent runs away to London where he meets like-minded kids as he learns to survive on the mean streets of the city.

It is an interesting premise for a book and about the first half or so is lots of fun as we follow Trent’s adventures in London, learning the science of begging and finding the best dumpster food in the city and navigating the finer points of squatting in abandoned buildings.  That’s all pretext for the main story which is, unfortunately, Trent and company’s attempts to overturn the egregious copyright law which caused Trent’s family to lose their Internet in the first place.

Copyright law and a free and open Internet are topics that are often covered by Cory Doctorow and what he has to say about the topics is well worth reading.  They should not be the subject of a young adult fiction book, however.  The thing is, all the copyright stuff is incredibly boring.  You can try to hide your copyright talk in the various misadventures of teenagers all you want, it doesn’t make it any more interesting to read about.

Aside from the copyright stuff, there are some interesting topics covered from what art is to what ownership means to living on the streets of London to the hosting of pirate cinemas in the sewers to the prevalence of the surveillance state.  The problem is the rest of it is just kind of thrown in there and nothing really ties together.  Even the ending seems kind of just thrown together.  When your bright idea is showing a pirate remix on the side of Parliament to help sway the vote of a law meant to make copyright law less egregious, you may not have thought your ending through enough.

Movie Review: Non-Stop

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: A fair to middling Liam Neeson movie with just enough entertainment to keep you engaged until the wheels come off near the end.

Some movies have this great premise that sounds like a good idea on paper, but once you start exploring the premise you find there’s not much there.  Sometimes, you still decide to make the movie because you’ve got Liam freakin’ Neeson as the headliner.  Thus “Non-Stop” was made.

The first and second acts of the movie are fairly engaging.  Act one introduces us to alcoholic air marshal Bill Marks (Liam Neeson), a no nonsense, leave me alone type of man with a soft heart that peeks out every once in a while.  The movie very effectively portrays this through a series of encounters with passengers that Bill runs into while navigating through the airport on his way to his assigned plane.  Since the majority of the film is going to be shot on a tube containing 150 passengers, this was a very clever way of introducing all the major players as the story unfolds.

The story unfolds in act two as a mysterious person on the plane starts texting Bill letting him know that a person is going to die every 20 minutes unless $150 million is deposited in a bank account.  What follows is a just plausible enough series of events where passenger after passenger does indeed die as foretold.  There is some suspension of disbelief required for this portion of the film, but it is still enjoyable as Bill tries to ferret out the hidden hijacker and turns his suspicions from one passenger to the next.

Things fall off the rails pretty quickly in act three as the evil doer is revealed and describes a motive that can only be described as laughable and which calls into question all of the previous incidents in the second act that were passable assuming the foe was at all intelligent or sane.  The movie ends with the bad guys getting what they deserve and a harrowing plane landing Bill saving the life of a little girl thrown in just for…something.

There are a few things that I think would have saved this film from sub-mediocrity.  Number one on the list would be some sort of grander conspiracy than the ridiculous plot that unfolded.  Something that tied the hijacking to events occurring off the airplane.  Number two would be if they went completely the other direction and actually made Bill the hijacker.  This would not have been as difficult as it sounds since there was a question as to whether that were true pretty far into the movie.  Number three would be if there were mother-fucking snakes on this mother-fucking plane.