Christina Waters

Last week we were all over the map - Luca in Carmel, Soif for appetizers, and Au Midi for dinner. All wonderful stuff in general, with scallops, root veggies and wintry natural meat dishes showing off nicely.

Across Dolores Street from Winfield Gallery, Luca sits between Ocean and Seventh, in a contemporary re-design that moves from the intimate front bar seating, past the wood-burning pizza ovens, into a huge back dining room. Heavy beamed ceilings in the front room, brick barrel vaulting in back, attest to the vintage of this attractive space, masterminded by Mirabel Hotel and Restaurant Group entrepreneur David (Bouchée) Fink.

The lunch menu created by Executive Chef Jason Balestrieri (formerly of LA’s Patina) was instantly appealing, and our quartet ordered glasses of earthy Sardinian Cannonau to go with a shared arugula, pecorino and pear salad, a pizza Margherita, another pizza topped with caramelized onion and wild funghi and a shared salumi plate of artisan-made salametto and speck. I could admire the view of large slabs of hams and cured salumi hanging in a glass aging chamber from my spot on the banquette.

Every flavor was sparkling, from the delicious, ungreasy meats to the perfect pizza. Crisp crust, chewy delicious dough, buffalo mozzarella and San Marzano tomato topping. The arugula salad — inflected with beets and thin slivers of pear — was generous enough for us all to enjoy. Even the opening salvo of crusty bread was terrific, served with an addictive olive oil and balsamic mixture filled with chopped olives.

Put Luca on your list next time you’re in Carmel - open for lunch (during the week) and dinner daily - 831/625-6500.

The exact youthful energy, yearning innocence and reckless abandon that Baby Boomers brought to the world-altering ’60s is packed into Across the Universe, Julie (Frida, The Lion King) Taymor’s deceptively complex romp through the dawning of the age of counter-cultural awakening.

Ambitiously rife with imagination and spunk, the film takes Boomers on a magical mystery tour through the soundtrack of their coming of age.
That would be the Beatles, whose songs are re-awakened by the young cast who sing their way through a slender tale of boys and girls, hippies and wannabes, worlds colliding and tripping into the psychedelic fantastic. For any viewer old enough to remember all the lyrics, this film will more than reward its overly-long (and sometimes hokey) feast of sights and sounds.

Joe Alexander is brilliant as Max (above left), whose sister Lucy (in the sky with …played by Evan Rachel Wood) falls in love with a young Liverpudlian Jude (Jim Sturgess, above right). (more…)

Can you say “perfect film?” An existential tale of corporate corruption that plays like Greek tragedy crossed with Kafka. That’s Michael Clayton, the latest George Clooney cinematic encounter produced by a handful of gifted directors, written/directed by Tony Gilroy (who wrote all the “Bourne” films) and flawlessly cast.

Given Clooney’s remarkable presence, you enter the theater expecting slick, glamor and extreme urban style. What you get, thanks to the gritty intelligence of the entire filmic package, is a dreamlike membrane of loss, grit and greed whose central Everyman is an emotionally bruised company fixer for a New York corporate law firm.

Clooney is our era’s Marilyn Monroe. The camera adores him. It is impossible not to be drawn to his screen image, his brooding beauty — which is now tinged by enough middle-aged seediness to be haunting. The loss of Michael Clayton’s personal center echoes the threadbare quality of the northeast itself, and while never showy, the camerawork of Robert Elswit etches the disintegration just under the surface of humans, landscape and social networks gathered into this vivid film. (more…)

Hot and fast enough to pierce full body armor, The Bourne Ultimatum locks on and doesn’t let up for almost two hours. Utterly jet-propelled, this flick delivers rock solid movie licks and then some. Don’t even think about waiting until it’s out in DVD — you gotta see this one on the Big Screen so that you can go for what amounts to one Very Big Ride.

I promise that you will be glued to your seat, unable to breathe, during this intense and intelligent flash cinema spectacle. Let’s just say that Bourne makes James Bond look positively lethargic. (more…)

Don’t even think about seeing Away from Her unless you’re prepared to 1) cry your eyes out and 2) have your cultural stereotypes about marriage shattered to pieces.

As beautiful as ever, and radiantly no-longer-young, Julie Christie illuminates the broken heart of this deeply affecting film, as a woman entering the twilight of dementia. But before the film even unpacks its considerable candor about the loss of memory, it transforms itself into a transcendent portrait of love.

It took me an hour to compose myself after I walked out of the Nickelodeon last weekend (take kleenex and dark glasses!), but once I was able to focus again I realized I’d just seen something breath-takingly rare — a film about the distilled quality of a long love directed by a woman still in her 20s.

Co-starring Gordon Pinsent and Olympia Dukakis (in a searing and unexpected performance), Away from Her opens with a few quirky moments in which lovely Fiona Anderssen (Christie) may or may not be slipping into Alzheimer’s. Set in snowy Canada — indeed with the exception of Dukakis, the entire cast, crew and setting are Canadian – the film observes the difficult moments of recognition, acceptance, and then non-acceptance between the long-married husband and wife as to her condition. Based on a short story by Alice Munro, the script is a tissue of exceptional clarity — and it just stretches to feature length, thanks to the letter-perfect casting and hands-off directorial style of writer/director Sarah Polley.

Christie was always a beauty, back in the 60s and 70s when her incandescent face and generous mouth made her an international sex symbol. But I never thought her much of an actress. (more…)

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.

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!

Digitally-manipulated postmodern super-hero mythology — yeah, baby! I am disgusted with myself, but I must confess up front. I wallowed, blissfully, in this two-hour exercise in visual S&M. I’m referring of course to 300, a graphic novel (i.e. adult comic book) by Frank Miller, brought to the screen (whether it needed to be or not) by Zack Snyder and company. A truly phenomenal bit of blood porno, 300 retells the legend/hype of 300 warrier-maniac Spartans making a stand against tens of thousands of Persians at Thermopylae. The real skirmish happened around 480 BC when Persian king Xerxes sent his bigger-than-God army to conquer Greece. But he didn’t count on the foolish bloodlust of the Spartans, who make their stand at the mouth of a narrow canyon, where they can maximize their numbers.

Yes, it’s a suicide mission — but god-almighty it offers a wild ride for the neural synapses. Making full, even ridiculous, use of leading-edge digital technology, the production breaks into visual territory that actually has no precedent. Sure there are the slow-motion, stop-action effects we’ve seen in Crouching Tiger, or The Matrix. And there are dazzling color effects — draining out everything except bronze and sepia-tones, and then pumping up the reds for all they’re worth — we’ve seen in recent work, such as Pan’s Labyrinth. But the overall package — artfully packed with more 12-pack abs, thighs of steel and just plain ripped-and-cut male bodies than I would have thought even existed on one small planet — is thrilling. Yes, I’m aghast that I am confessing this. Blood porn, to be sure. But in a socio-political era (ours) that is fast outpacing even Nero’s Rome for decay and decadence, 300 provides a splash of much-needed catharsis. And I must quickly point out that masculine beauty aside, there are scenes of breathtaking poetry in which the potential of digital sculpting is pushed way out to the front of the wave. (more…)

Opening this Friday at The Del Mar is an exhiliratingly odd and haunting underwater monster sci-fi thriller called The Host. The work of South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, this is an all-you-can-eat package of film genres crammed into a juicy two hour ride. A dysfunctional family forms the centerpiece of what is sometimes an existential gloss on contemporary alienation, sometimes a delicious parody of Godzilla, Monster from the Black Lagoon and that grainy footage from Roswell. What starts off as a scream-fest when picnickers are attacked by a mutant monster-fish rising up out of Seoul’s polluted Han River, quickly morphs into ironic comedy as we meet precocious Hyun-Seo, her slacker father Gang-Du (who runs a snack shop by the river with his father), plus Gang’s brother — an unemployed university graduate and his sister, a champion archer. Relax, it’s easy to understand when told by Joon-ho’s uncanny, often poetic camerawork.

The film is stained a dozen shades of urban grey punctuated with the pop colors of Korea’s youth culture, and everything turns suddenly alarming when the government puts the feckless family into quarantine. Terry Gilliam meets Art Bell (more…)

Nothing prepared me for this spellbinding package of high def digital cinematography, under-stated horror and savvy, ensemble acting. But that’s exactly what Zodiac delivers. Long (2 hours, 40 minutes) yet so taut and intricately edited that time stands still. And anyone old enough to recall the shock and awe the Bay Area experienced during the early 70s as the serial killer of the title insinuated himself onto the front pages and the collective psyche, will be gripped by this brilliant true-life crime film.

Director David Fincher has already shown his dark power in Seven, and earlier in the cult classic, Fight Club. This time he restrains himself, turns the colors down to the saturated browns of another era, with a few David Lynchean touches of aqua and acid yellow, adds some vintage Donovan to the Hurdy-Gurdy Man soundtrack and shoots away. (The digital process used by cinematographer Harris Savides is called Viper. No film, no videotape — this is the first major motion picture to use the process). The effect is visually pulverizing, as chrome grilles of Ford Galaxies fill the entire screen, every stop light oozes danger and the editorial offices of the San Francisco Chronicle take on the frenetic pulse of an entire city.

Three compelling actors — each at the top of his game — power this film along, like a mystery play in three acts. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith, on whose book the film is based. With bulldog tenacity Gyllenhaal’s character gets caught up in the newsroom excitement, as the Zodiac killer begins sending his coded messages in to the newspaper. Journalist Paul Avery (played by an astonishing Robert Downey, Jr) starts tracking the case in print, while homicide detective David Toschi (played by Mark Ruffalo) tries to connect the dots as more murders crop up around the Bay Area backroads. Each man attempts to make sense of the seemingly random killings, and the enigmatic hand-written notes from Zodiac, as the film tightens, yet never succumbs to thriller genre pornography. (more…)