Christina Waters

Even the eloquent face and supple voice of Anthony Hopkins can’t save this Absolut vodka commercial masquerading as a cinematic thriller. Even though Ryan Gosling, as the rising legal star assigned to prosecute the murderer, has done his homework at the Don Johnson School of Acting, he can’t create a character out of this embarrassing waste of art direction. When was the last time you thought you’d grow nostalgic for Tom Cruise? The Firm was a real thriller involving the demimonde of attorneys and criminals. But Gosling is no Cruise (a sad comparison to begin with). And Fracture’s director, Gregory Hoblit — a career producer of TV cop shows like L.A. Law and Hill Street Blues — is no Sidney Pollack.

The star of this new exercise in visual glamor is the architecture of Los Angeles. The Disney Center, Malibu, the moody orange glaze of Hollywood sunsets, and especially the Brentwood estate that forms the crime scene for this superficial psycho-study — all conspire to look fabulous, but stop short of providing anything more than costly eye candy. Cinematographer Kramer Morganthau does give us some exceptional moments, superb overlapping reflections through skyscraper windows down to the streets below, and one bit of sinister poetry in which we see the murderer’s reflection in the viscous pool of his wife’s blood. But it’s not enough.

The story starts out laden with brisk promise. Hopkins, a wealthy architectural engineer, confronts his cheating wife in their staggeringly well-appointed mansion and shoots her point blank. He then coolly summons the police, goes to jail, and decides to defend himself against hot-shot LA district attorney Gosling. Now the film isn’t creative enough to actually show Gosling being a courtroom hotshot. We just hear his co-workers saying that he is, and he struts around a lot waving his cell phone. At this point we should hear the buzzer go off: Warning: film school assignment. Film noir dumbed down to film grey. Not a pretty sight.

Fracture trashes every opportunity to engage our emotions. Gosling finds himself in ever more lame and preposterous situations — not the least is an unconvincing sexual attraction between the hotshot and a senior law firm barracuda, played with a complete absence of expression by Rosamund Burke, whose face appears to have been genetically engineered. Whoever wrote these parts had never encountered an actual heterosexual alliance. All in all, nine (9) producers combined their best stuff to bring to the screen a thriller without tension, a courtroom drama without courtroom drama, a feature-length film without a script, and an homage to films like Vertigo, Jagged Edge and The Postman Always Rings Twice made without any working knowledge of film history.

I would walk two miles to watch the clever tricks of Hopkins, who manages to avoid repeating his Hannibal Lector mannerisms and forges a new variety of chilly evil. If viewers insist upon seeing him as Lector, that’s not his fault in this film. His lyrical Welsh accents do their best to craft some semblance of meaning into a script that appears to have been left unfinished. Even Gosling, whose character actually reads Dr. Seuss out loud in order to pad some of Fracture’s lengthy gaps, looks like he’s ad-libbing. Ad-libbing works on talk shows. Not in slick murder mysteries.

Go out and buy a copy of Architectural Digest. It will contain deeper truths and a hell of a lot more dramatic tension.

Steve Spill is an ace photographer, bon vivant and, as it turns out, can whip up some mean curries when he wants. And he wanted to last week, in the professionally equipped kitchen of the King Street bungalow he shares with his Sylvia. Munching pappodoms and an array of lip-numbing chutneys and sambals, we watched as Spill simultaneously surfed a dozen dishes bubbling and roasting and stir-frying on six burners and two ovens. Was he completely in control of the situation? Is any chef? It was often difficult to tell, as everything needed continuous stirring, browning, and turning. From a wall of spices lining one section of the kitchen, floor to ceiling, Spill had retrieved the ingredients that mysteriously merge into the perfumed results. Onions and lamb had been chopped and seeds toasted and crushed, earlier in the day. Thanks to a large trove of New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs and a few choice zinfandels, a dozen of us worked through the appetizers and then at exactly 9pm, dove into fragrant dishes the color of sunrise and sunset. My favorites included the crisp chicken kofta, the elegant, fiery mint, cilantro and chili chutney and a sensuous dal that would have done any London curry house proud.
Homemade mango chutney, chili and lime chutney, a South African tomato chutney - these zippy dips were cooled by a succulent cucumber and yogurt raita. To spoon over Spill’s perfect jasmine rice, were fat roast new potatoes - curried of course - a sauteed okra dish called bhindi bhajee, crunchy long beans with tomato, a delectable, tender lamb bhuna and rogan gosht. The latter was a splendid stew of lamb, laced with cardamom and cinnamon and tons of garlic and ginger. Probably many more spices as well. Heady stuff! Can you say “ambitious”? Steve had made even more but my palate eventually gave out after so many big flavors.

I can’t remember the last time a “civilian” chef produced such an impressive line-up of brilliant flavors. The atmosphere was wonderful too. My compliments!

In our house, Green & Black’s preternaturally intense combination of dark chocolate, currents and hazelnuts, is considered the ne plus ultra. It rules. Granted this is a chocolate experience with so much gravitas that you really cannot multi-task while you experience it. Your full attention and nothing less is required by this perfectly balanced creation of organic cacao, fruit and nuts. Welcome to our jungle — where the finest sweets can make the difference between existential darkness and going toward the light. Chocolate at once bitter and voluptuous doesn’t come along every day. Luckily it has come along in our lifetime. Not for everyone, it will appeal to those for whom personal preference borders on fanaticism. You know who you are.

Another one of my addictions - Chocolove’s 55% cocoa-rich dark chocolate bar laced with a secondary layer of bitterness in the form of orange peel. This beautiful indulgence ($2.99) is consistently bittersweet all the way through, from intense-yet-accessible start, to smooth, clean finish. The hint of orange peel adds a subtext of tropical midnight, like Angostura bitters embedded in the aroma of night. Orange wrapper. Try it.

Think of the Manet painting - the Barmaid at the Follies Bergere - as you consider this view of Katie Cater, sommelier and oenophile at Ristorante Avanti. With Cater’s guidance, I chose a soft, ripe Fuentespina Ribera del Duero 2001 to accompany a recent dinner of flawless chicken cacciatore. I’ve been ordering this dish at Avanti for a decade, and it has never been better than it was last week, succulent braised thigh and leg burnished with red wine, rosemary and top note of sage. There’s always some tangy green - broccoli rabe, endive, chard - that accompanies the chicken, although I confess that the soft pillow of polenta that soaks up those juices is pretty much the prime reason to order this dish. Perfect with the Spanish wine. Cater knew that.

Take a careful look at this label. Memorize it. Now go out and find one just like it and bring it home. This is your new best friend, oenologically-speaking. It is Bonny Doon Vineyards‘ 2004 Syrah Le Pousseur, loaded with meaty tones of spice, cassis, some indefinable berry and a top note of eucalyptus. Maybe bay leaves. Whatever. This is a wine to delve deeply into, or simply to enjoy while thumbing through your dog-eared copy of The Three Sigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Already this wine — another star from the intergalactic consciousness of wine auteur Randall Grahm — is ample and complex enough to match any rack of lamb, molecule for molecule. Given a few more years it will be able to enter any Rhône intensive in the northern hemisphere. Well under $20 but drinks like a whole lot more.

Vitiphiliacs and Bonny Doon Vineyards wine club members gathered at the winery last Saturday, for a dinner of rustic elegance wrapped around some sensational wines. Convened by BD founder Randall Grahm, the dinner helped to introduce the latest oenologic from the irrepressible impresario du vin. Sure enough, the “David Bowie of wine” is reinventing his vintage dreamscape once again, only this time instead of a predictable expansion, Bonny Doon Vineyards is in the midst of a surgical down-sizing. Way down. Determined to return to the roots of his personal vision, Grahm is transitioning from mega-winery (450,000 cases last year), to a micro, hand-made, biodynamic, all-Santa Cruz Mountains estate facility. With the re-configuration of priorities, comes a new marketing strategist, Burke Owens, recently of Napa’s Copia, and former sommelier at Masa’s….But back to the dinner.

Randall explained to me over chilled Erbaluce di Caluso spumante and crisp baguettes topped with alderwood-smoked salmon that he was aggressively seeking new vineyard property in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And a renewed quest for terroir baby, terroir. And after years of making his reputation as a leading Rhône Ranger, thanks to BD’s wildly successful Syrah, Grenache, Mourvedre and Roussane blends, Grahm is once again slouching toward Burgundy. “I really feel that pinot noir is something I want to try in a new way.” So the focus is now intensified. (more…)

Amish Gold, Amish Paste, Ananas Noir, Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Aunt Ruby’s Cherry, Azoychka, Barad’s Yellow, Basinga, Berkeley Tie Dye, Big Beef, Big Rainbow, Big White Pink Stripe, Black Cherry, Black Ethiopian, Black from Tula, Black Krim, Black Plum, Black Prince, Blondkopfchen, Bloody Butcher, Brandywine OTV, Brown’s Yellow Giant, Camalay, Caspian Pink, Cherokee Green, Cherokee Purple. Sound good? These are only some of the over 100 varieties of heirloom, exotic, hybrid and rare tomato seedlings on sale at Ben Lomond’s mighty Love Apple Farm, this weekend April 14 & 15. Proprietor Cynthia Sandberg, who grows biodynamic produce exclusively for the kitchen of acclaimed, Michelin-starred Manresa restaurant, has the greenest thumb for miles around.
Don’t miss this opportunity to purchase intriguing varieites, and to tour the grounds of Sandberg’s fertile acres. From 10am to 5pm - this weekend. For details, check the website, Love Apple Farm, 9299 Glen Arbor Road, Ben Lomond, CA.
(831) 588-3801

Purists beware! I love this stuff even though it lacks the required shade of political correctness, the highest possible cacao content and the appropriate “save the world” branding. It’s just killer Swiss dark chocolate that comes in tiny plump squares filled with impossibly succulent chocolate truffle creaminess. Mouthfeel and then some. I have two of these after lunch and my IQ soars, I love everybody and I attack my mammoth workload with a positive (okay, at least not negative) attitude. Lindt Chocolate Truffle bar - under $3. Life-affirming chocolate. Ummmmm.

It’s such a pleasure to watch Alfred Molina work — his powerful, expressive face can register sensuality (Diego Rivera in Frida), cunning (Cardinal Aringarosa in Da Vinci Code), and delicious evil (Dr. Ock in SpiderMan). So facile an actor is he that he almost (almost) makes The Hoax bearable, especially since his every small gesture wipes the floor with Richard Gere. Gere, the sequentially type-cast American gigolo, still can’t do much with those little, teeny, porcine eyes and waning hormonal swagger.

This is a big fat shame, since The Hoax — based upon the true lies of con-man Clifford Irving — requires that we sit through two hours of continuous Gere. Gere strutting. Gere with a Texas accent. Gere wearing tight, dyed-brown curls. Gere attempting humor. Gere gesturing in the general direction of subtle emotions he knows nothing about. Gere fails, however, to do much more than fill up what looks for all the world like a freshman effort from the UCLA film school. More’s the pity, since the socio-political environment of the early 1970s in which Irving cooked up his scheme to fake an autobiography of none other than clandestine billionaire Howard Hughes, froths with innuendo.

We’re on the very edge of the Watergate scandal, and Hughes has got some goods on Nixon. Enter Irving, a shallow narcissist who’s willing to compromise his sidekick and research go-fer Dick Susskind (Molino), as well as his long-suffering wife (played by a waddling, bewigged Marcia Gay Harden). Irving storms into McGraw-Hill and hands them forged documents (whipped up by himself) allegedly from Howard Hughes, authorizing Irving to write HH’s autobiography. McGraw-Hill falls for the trumped up document, sort of, and the hoax is on. In its day, the media hype around this scam was as big as the crumbling Nixon administration. And the story is still breath-taking - which is why this failed film is all the more irritating.

Gere couldn’t deliver a film with both hands and a Blackhawk helicopter. He groans, grunts, prances, yells the F-word for emphasis, slams a few doors and laughs his head off while driving in convertibles. Yeah, it’s that interesting and complex. What I really need to know is how somebody named Lasse Hallstrom got ahold of the financing to make this film. The attempts at screwball comedy, such as scenes in the McGraw-Hill editorial chambers when Gere and Molino twitch and squirm as they are almost revealed to be liars, just fall flat. The script is pathetic, as if written by extraterrestrials without a working knowledge of either human emotions or something resembling the English language.

Just when you thought Gere’s career was in the toilet, he surfaces here long enough to flush it all the way down the drain. Try to hold on to your memories of An Officer and a Gentleman. They are all that’s left of Gere. Molino, a splendid and versatile actor (who we can only speculate must have had some overdue house payments) will live to act another day. Meanwhile, the real hoax is on us!