by Christina Waters | Apr 24, 2015 | Home |
We’ve been the best of friends, we’ve been the worst of enemies. We’ve been intimate and we’ve been indifferent. But Stephen Kessler and I have known each other for 35 years and except for the few decades when we didn’t speak, we’ve managed to maintain a robust respect for each other’s shared defiance in the face of mediocrity.
Stephen Kessler has written with a fierce intelligence pretty much every single day of his life. From those early alternative riffs called “Polygraph” that he penned at the dawning of the age of the Santa Cruz weeklies, to his literarily impeccable Redwood Review, to countless gracefully nuanced, and internationally celebrated translations of the A list of Spanish poets, Kessler just doesn’t know how to cease and desist.
And just when we thought we’d already collected enough of his work to savor for years to come, he up and launches not one, but two new works. New prose poems that Proust their jazzy way through some of the key memory spots in his personal biography—Where Was I?—and a brilliantly curated “greatest hits” of memoirs, essays, vision quests, and kvetches titled Need I Say More?
I savored the prose poems, rife with street scenes of LA and Santa Cruz, (more…)
by Christina Waters | Apr 20, 2015 | Home |
Like many of you, I still carry a torch for the intimate bistro, with its tiny little upper room and its tall Victorian brick walls, the original Oswald. During its delicious flowering nothing could match it.
But last week I enjoyed a dinner at the newer incarnation of Oswald, on its dicey corner of downtown, with its spare eschewing of ambience, and found it—yes, I’ll say it—as good as I remembered those earlier Oswaldian days.
How in God’s name could an appetizer as, shall we say “yesterday” as seared ahi, be so insanely perfect? This one was. From its sparkling fresh tuna, to the impeccable potatoes, beets (beets that somehow recoined the entire concept of “beet”), and sexy snap peas. It was a one-dish premonition of Spring, and the beginning of a dinner that went from great to greater.
My full review of this wonderful dinner at Oswald is available in the current GTWeekly.
by Christina Waters | Jan 17, 2015 | Home |
American auteur Clint Eastwood has delivered yet another provocative work in American Sniper. A physically transformed Bradley Cooper, as legendary marksman Chris Kyle, leans into the addictive allure of the Iraq conflict and illuminates Eastwood’s latest masterpiece.
An unflinching anti-war film that is draped in the American flag, Sniper forces us into the chilling midst of modern ground level warfare. Cooper, bulked up and Texas drawled, plays real-life Navy SEAL sharpshooter Kyle, who in his unimaginable four tours of duty performed feats of heroism and marksmanship that earned him the nickname “The Legend,” among military aficionados, and a bounty on his head among the Iraqi.
Eastwood and his cinematographer Tom Stern plant us in the dust and rubble of war-torn Ramadi, while the SEALs hunt and seek and attempt to take out the savvy and wily enemy, including a brutal assassin called “The Butcher.” Kyle became a born-again (radicalized?) patriot on the morning of 9/11 and believes without question that his duty was to take out the “bad guys” who threaten his fellows and his country.
Working with the cool confidence of a master, Eastwood believes in his subject—that war is hell, that sometimes we are capable of selfless actions, and that the emotional disconnect between vets and their families is often irretrievable. Eastwood is at his best at probing the quiet moments of unconscious damage done by Kyle’s kill count. (more…)
by Christina Waters | Dec 27, 2014 | Home |
I can’t stop thinking about how perilously close Benedict Cumberbatch is to becoming one of those actors doomed to circle their own groundbreaking performances. Over and over.
With his odd physiognomy and quicksilver reactions, Cumberbatch has given us some compelling geeks, socially-inept geniuses, and brooding, suffering weirdos. But as I look ahead to the roles he is slated to embody in the upcoming TV, stage, and screen pantheons, I am growing uncomfortable. Cumberbatch is about to become a stereotype!
Richard III in a three-part mini-series for TV. Yes, that Richard III! Then there will be Doctor Strange, with Cumby as Strange. He’s already filmed the next season of his eccentric and dazzling Sherlock Holmes. And I know—because I already have tickets—that he will be playing Hamlet (more…)
by Christina Waters | Dec 27, 2014 | Home |
As a devoted Benedict Cumberbatch groupie, it pains me to have to say that even the theatrical genius who dazzled us in Sherlock, and amazed us in Frankenstein cannot raise The Imitation Game—by Norwegian director Morten Tyldum—above the level of a made-for-TV Hallmark special.
Perhaps it was a hopeless task after all, attempting to express on-screen tension and drama about the creation of a code-busting device that anticipated today’s computers. Not exactly the visual equivalent of parting the Red Sea, is it? As mathematical innovator Alan Turing, Cumberbatch offers dazzling micro-gestures via twitching eyebrows, quivering lips, clenched (and unclenched) jaw, not to mention the required sort of physical awkwardness one expects of Cambridge geniuses. But these alone do not a film make. Even the surrounding cast of remarkably good-looking British actors (many recognizable from Downton Abbey) as Turing’s fellow code-breakers (more…)
by Christina Waters | Dec 10, 2014 | Home |
For two and a half hours I waited for something to pump energy, concept, or even engaging visuals into this bloated Hollywood block buster.
And for two and a half hours I waited in vain.
Interstellar is excruciatingly bad. Bad, B A D! Why do I say this? Here’s why! It pops up on our collective event horizon after the following truly engaging films: Alien, Contact, 2001, Gravity, The Right Stuff, Star Wars, hell, even Star Trek, to name but a few. Christopher (Inception, The Prestige) Nolan has gotten his knickers in such a twist paying homage to these earlier, far better films, that he seems to have forgotten that we’ve all seen them too.
We know about wormholes. We’ve seen spaceships leaving earth’s gravitational pull. We’ve watched scientists writing equations at the blackboards that somehow explain how relativity works. The very people who would be willing to sit through a new, highly-hyped sci fi film—for two and a half hours!—would be savvy about these basic space voyager tropes. What was Nolan thinking?!!!!
The only person who seemed to have forgotten these concepts (more…)
