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Baker's Dozen (2021)
Highest Quality Fluff
This prolonged pandemic, now two years going with no end in sight, has generated two kinds of domestic camps: those who have dived in, apron first, into baking and gastronomy (both for tastes denied as the outer world fell apart and the domestic catharsis of producing tangible yums); and those who watched streaming serials about the first group. Baker's Dozen hits a sweet spot of aspirational entertainment, and it goes down easy. Not normally a fan of anything competitive or even "reality" adjacent, I am an unlikely consumer of this show, won over entirely by Hulu's own advertising for this show during its other programming (hat tip, there). The ads promised a visually appealing, light, fun, well-executed fluff, and the actual experience of watching Baker's Dozen doesn't disappoint. Being a child of a certain generation, I was also enticed to see how Tamera Mowry-Housley (from the 90s sitcom Sister, Sister) was doing, and this definitely seemed less annoying and more creative than some other celebrity-infused-but-otherwise-pointless redux of a game show, improbable travel show, or phony-seeming battle spectacle.
It's hard to explain the low ratings here. Baker's Dozen attempts to do something surprisingly specific, and actually nails it: a wholesome, not-all-that-competitive, contestant-elimination show with judged food production, specifically baked goods and sweets/confections. It's sunny, upbeat, and not grating or saccharine, which, these days, is an accomplishment in itself. What's novel about the show (to, again, a viewer who is not all that invested in the reality show sphere) is its embrace of both professional bakers trying to show their stripes (and drum up their and their businesses' profiles), and self-taught, but no less passionate, practitioners who came to baking for as many diverse reasons as there are types of things to bake. I enjoyed that element, of having self-taught people competing against professionals; there's very few opportunities in this society for self-taught people to showcase that "self-taught" doesn't mean "inferior" (while also often being as good or superior to what the "professionals" can do).
Baker's Dozen is, in no uncertain terms, pure eye candy and food porn: you could watch it on mute and still have a delightful experience. It's very enjoyable to live vicariously through the beautiful and inspired creations from the bakers. It is highly aware of our highly visual, screen-oriented age, and openly embraces an ethos of Make It Pretty. It cannot deny that taste alone is not enough; and presentation here means not only designing for the group being served, but for Instagram and Pintrest as well, for clicks as well as bites. This isn't a fire that Baker's Dozen started, but it is interesting to see how they use their consciousness of our specific historical moment in time-one where a constant acute awareness of style is a kind of new normal-to cook up a subtle interrogation of our "viral" culture itself. How, indeed, does anyone "make" anything viral? One can't yell at a rose to bloom. And yet, just beneath the surface, there is a well-internalized sense of what sparks interest, what generates views (and, the logic goes, dollars). What's refreshing here is that the self-taught bakers are on a level playing field with the entrepreneurs and the professionals; perhaps it only took a global pandemic to validate personal perseverance and self-made talents as consisting of real labor and generating real value.
I also truly appreciate how diverse and inclusive the contestant base consistently is: all genders, races, body types, and sexualities are welcome here-baking welcomes all, because what matters more than your ingredients is what you do with them. In a world of almost limitless variety (both in people and food), how could we not have a show as reflective as the world it comes from? Diversity is simply matter-of-fact here; not forced or deployed to evoke some point, and not needing to be. The abundance of difference here is not meant to be politicized, unless one is triggered by being honestly confronted with the world as it is instead of something more "curated," stereotypical, formulaic.
Speaking of formulas: although the show has one, it isn't boring. Tamera Mowry-Housley glows but also shares the spotlight well with her co-host Bill Yosses (former White House chef) and shows genuine interest in the lives and interests of the contestants without being too obviously favoritist (an avid self-taught baker herself, Tamera is encouraging without being overbearing). There's a real sense of camaraderie out of the gate, both because of the literal hard work of baking (some ingredients are definitely more camera-friendly than others), and because of the shared experience of the time pressure. It's fantastic to see not only the diversity of bakers (and, on occasion, get a glimpse into their personal journeys into baking and what they get out of baking), but the amazing variety of work they produce under somewhat arbitrary time constraints (which, while par for the course in professional life, one wonders if the time parameters couldn't have been more generous for a friendlier bake-off such as this).
Each episode, it is enjoyable to see, for example, what the final challenge will be and who the new celebrity viral guest judge will be, especially for those of us who can't possibly follow every new trend in food but who enjoy getting an idea of what "the cool kids are doing." It's nice to learn a new baking term or technique here or there without it veering into formal instruction (this isn't a cooking show, nor does it try to be, but it does take an admirable pride-in-craft). It's good that the frenzy of the competition is interspersed -tempered, if you will- with biographical vignettes and blurbs from the contestants themselves, helping us to feel more invested in certain personalities and backstories (but, thankfully, without letting all that explication get in the way of the real priority: the food).
I also cannot possibly overstate how visually delicious the show is, from the items produced, to the way everyone and everything is photographed and edited so effervescently. It's fast-moving without being erratic, with a structure that quickly becomes more comforting than predictable. Baker's Dozen can't be all things to all people, but it comes pretty darn close. With a few tweaks and America's appetite for new and specialty flavors only growing, Baker's Dozen could easily keep going for multiple seasons. Let's hope it keeps going and doesn't bite off more than it can chew.
RJ Winters, 10/19/2021.
Arbitrage (2012)
For Love and Money
Richard Gere plays Icarus-I mean, Robert Miller, a Very Successful Man, who, even in a new economy, has the wardrobe and mannerisms of old money. He flies too close to the sun in many ways, and, in classic riches-to-rags fashion, we see some of his descent. While writer/director Nicholas Jarecki tries to not stick too religiously to the My-How-The-Mighty-Have-Fallen formula, there is ultimately too little vital originality and urgency to not write off (get it? Financial pun) Arbitrage as a formula film. A well-executed formula film, to be sure, but a formula film nonetheless.
Just to give you an idea of the backdrop we're dealing with here, these are not just the lives of the Rich and Famous. These are the lives of the Rich and Famous who own cancer centers named after them. We're thankfully spared from an over-exposition of their consumption habits and rapidly enough ushered into the staging of what ultimately is a good old-fashioned police procedural; to wit, the investigation of Robert Miller's manslaughter of his artist-girlfriend-mistress Julie (Laetitia Casta), who dies in a late night car crash when Robert gets drowsy behind the wheel. The rest of the film is a living testament to the seemingly postmodern (but actually eternal) truism "the cover-up is worse than the crime."
The problem is that this police procedural thinly veils what is really a morality play. We don't get a sense of-if it exists-any of Robert's special talents; we don't really even ever get inside his head into his desires, his ambitions, what makes him tick, why he makes the decisions he makes. Thus, unfortunately for us, Robert's more empty suit than self-made-man as portrayed; only in the beginning do we get a glimmer of how he developed what become a multimillion dollar enterprise from little. In an understandable effort to not let Miller's ego and persona take up the entire film-for this is an ensemble play here, to be sure-we lose some of the psychological richness of the situation that could have offset the amply-laden moralizing.
"The situation," coinciding with the homicide, is the ethical quandary coming from Robert's trying to sell his own company while concealing a hole of $412 million from the buyer-behavior you or I would get taken down for as fraud (interestingly, in Spain the film is "El Fraude"). Robert is fidgety when this process stalls and stalls, and he gets hot under the collar when the police come calling, not for his cooking the books, as we would expect, but regarding the mysterious death of a young, promising artist. Complicating Robert's efforts to purge himself from his history with Julie are the police being hot on the trail of Jimmy (Nate Parker), a young black male Robert called to help him in his hour of need. When it comes to light that Jimmy could do at least a decade in prison for Obstruction (due to having one prior), Robert's trust is tested.
It is unclear why Robert would call someone who would seem to be from an entirely different world in practically all ways-economically, ethnically-and it takes entirely too long for it to be explained that Jimmy is a surrogate son of sorts, albeit a neglected one (without giving too much away: Jimmy's father worked for Robert in a non-financial capacity, and died a long time ago in Backstory Land). Admirably, the film recognizes how dangerously close it gets to putting Jimmy squarely in "Magical Negro" territory and confronts issues of race and power in the context of race head-on: it just doesn't resolve these issues. It tries, though, and Jimmy has surprising depth for someone who is still clearly signifying a "type." What makes Jimmy less of a "type" is the fact that everyone here is a type-Brit Marling as Brooke, the naïve-in-the-ways-of-men daughter that still figures-out-the-fraud; Susan Sarandon as Ellen, the classically bitter wife-who-will-look-the-other-way-to-a-point; Robert's Extremely Wise and Extremely Jewish lawyer Syd Felder (Stuart Margolin) who is unheeded when he tells Robert to turn himself over to the authorities; and let's not forget Julie, herself the fiery artist with a libido-of-gold who wins over patrons with her prowess in the sack and martyred to make the wheels of repentance turn.
Still, Jimmy and Robert's relationship-and their navigating of what constitutes being "even" with each other-is the most interesting relationship of the film, and one that could and should have been expanded further.
However, there is an instance of the mishandling of the nuance that is needed in portraying Jimmy and Robert's relationship that needs to be called out. Upon hearing that the police have a photo of Jimmy's car crossing the Triborough bridge, presented at Jimmy's indictment, Robert pays a visit to Jimmy's modest apartment to ask him to hold out a bit longer and to continue to resist surrendering information (that is, turning over to the police the identity of who he gave a lift to, and why) until he can 'work something out'-the perpetual promise of the powerful. In this brief encounter many viewers are likely to forget, we learn that Jimmy was hoping to relocate to Virginia, here he had purchased an Applebee's. Showing who Robert is as a character, he asks: "What's an Applebee's?" It's a delicious detail showing how out of touch regal Robert (he's never addressed as "Bob") is-how he does use people to fit his ends, as Det. Bryer (Tim Roth) has him pegged.
To believe that Jimmy and his girlfriend have saved the few hundred thousand dollars to purchase a franchise restaurant-even one in Virginia, while living and scrimping in New York, "in this economy" (which is the shadowy idée fixe of the film)-requires the suspension of disbelief we're told is the stuff of fiction. So we do suspend our disbelief because this exchange, even if clumsily, underlines a theme Jarecki is afraid of losing, that: everything can be bought and sold, almost like a subclause of Murphy's Law-everything that could potentially be bought or sold, could be. Who works anymore? Who would want to? In an age where fortunes can be made and sold completely electronically-and an age when candidates for the nation's highest office can elect not to release their tax returns-working clearly is for suckers. Money is the vehicle to a better life; and money is the way to buy oneself out of having to work. We're told not a few times, and not subtly, that money is all that matters to Robert-and we see it in the way he treats people. He even pointedly says, when asked to justify himself in a kind of interrogation by his daughter/business partner that "Everyone works for me!" Clearly, Robert's atonement does not come easily or willingly, and part of it is that he has to learn how to say he is sorry-words that are far harder to articulate than the complex contractual negotiations the people relying on him cannot possibly understand. Thankfully, though, Robert's megalomania is far more subdued than it is in most financial dramas-- it's just that it is explicated and analyzed to death.
In this universe-which is not so removed from our own-everything is transactional, and even Tim Roth's well-played Det. Bryer is a broker of sorts, willing to do whatever it takes to 'seal the deal' on his collar, only to have the glory of a stroke in the W column ripped from his fingers, at least for now. It would have been wonderful to have allowed the good detective to have a bit more screen time, and for us to see more than a taste of how big money keeps the hands of justice distant from those affluent sons who try to get away with murder.
It bears repeating that the script is extremely heavy-handed, slowing down an otherwise lean film and doing a disservice to the material. After all, this is a human story, even if rendered in parable form. There's drag-and not necessarily because this is a dialogue-driven film (for there are perfectly wonderful dialogue-driven films out there), but because we never fully get a sense of what is at stake-perhaps on a cognitive level (barely),but not on a visceral, emotional level: wealth doth remove too much, perhaps. People this comfortable never lose that comfort quickly or easily, and it is difficult to have sympathy for Robert as just another white-collar criminal who doesn't get caught until he veers into ordinary criminal territory. Just as Robert finds himself borrowing from Peter to pay Paul and trying to serve many masters, so does the script have multiple masters: the financial collapse of Robert's company and Robert's psychological collapse (via trying to evade responsibility for Julie's death). While this dual plot structure captures the panic of life to an extent, neither master is served altogether well, as though neither dilemma was compelling enough for a film of its own-so we get to see how they might (or might not, as the case may be) collide.
Another scene that will likely be forgotten by viewers but which deserves special attention is when the Very Important Mr. Mayfield (Graydon Carter), the hesitant buyer of Robert's company, is presented with a second, more objective audit of the company-unfortunately, after the ink has dried on the deal. When the unaccounted for $412 million is made undeniably apparent, Mayfield flexes his cognitive dissonance muscle to pronounce, "I don't see anything wrong here." Get it? It's an allegory for the state of affairs of our markets! And, not to put too fine a point on it, how people will defend the decisions they've made-their purchases, literally-to the death, and how these biases have gotten so blown out of proportion that our economy isn't much more than a sleek shell game. Mayfield needs to do something to distract his investors from their own down period, so what better than an acquisition to shut them up, to placate their need for ever higher returns-the same damning court of popular opinion that drove Robert to deal with the devil to plug that $412 million hole via fraud in the first place. (9 27 2012)
Celeste & Jesse Forever (2012)
Emotional Truth in Modern Cinema? It's not impossible.
Celeste and Jesse Forever is not just a romantic comedy about an amicable divorce (and whether such a thing can exist). It is a meditation on modern loneliness and essential viewing for anyone trying to make meaning of what love is in the age of iphones.
Co-written by Rashida Jones, it's not surprising that most of the story is about Celeste. Yet Jesse is also given his due and Andy Samburg plays him with a surprising sensitivity, complexity, and presence, perhaps priming him for further roles as a dramatic lead. The casting is pretty idiosyncratic (i.e., unexpected, especially in the supporting cast) but each character owns their role and carries themselves well.
Celeste has to learn how to move gracefully through the world after being married for seven years after setting free her best friend, Jesse, whom she didn't think he was mature enough, to her standards (there are some biological-clock issues at work, but, thankfully, we aren't beaten over the head with them). Like most modern people, it is difficult for Celeste to acknoledge the possibility and/or the necessity of being alone, especially in an age of instant communication and seeming abundance. Yet communication does not always connection make, and outside of professional composure Celeste is forced to admit that she doesn't know what she is doing and doesn't know how to make decisions in her own interest.
In one of the most ironic character professions in cinema, she is a trend forecaster--"I forecast trends," as she explains it. Of all livelihoods, hers depends acutely on being right-- of not just noticing past patterns but of being able to outline what her high-powered clients can anticipate from the very future they're trying to manipulate. One of her love interests, Paul (Chris Messina), asks Celeste if she would rather be right or happy. More than the particular aspects of her relationship with Jesse, this is the central tension of the film: this very adult crisis of identity, of the problems and promises of freedom. These are heavy existential issues for a romantic comedy, and they're handled with a knowing and weary, but not disillusioned, wink.
Celeste is not used to compromise and is a classic "maximizer," wanting the best of all worlds because, well, she works hard and feels she deserves it. Celeste has to learn how to, as others tell her, "let go," but that's something she has to figure out for herself, on her own terms. Seeing a control freak discombobulate is the kind of tragedy that lends itself best to comedy, but, thankfully, the film doesn't become Chicken Soup for the Twentysomething's Soul or Relating for Dummies. Far from it.
In nagging moments Celeste wonders about whether this divorce is an omen for her relationships in general, and wonders if she will ever love again in the same way, or wind up being alone. She is fascinated and incensed by the idea that Jese is moving on very quickly and inhabiting mature roles, including fatherhood, that she claims she was waiting for him to grow into with her. It takes every ounce of her strength not to become unhinged by the idea that her ex-husband impregnated another woman while they were separated and that he is going to try to be a father to another woman's child, to give up the slacker behaviors he had in their dynamic.
Both Celeste and Jesse try the usual panaceas for transformation-- drugs, drinking, food, and fitness-- to become better people and restore emotional equilibrium as their boundaries, like bones, get broken and reset. Again, thankfully, we don't drown in these details, as could have easily happened, nor are they merely background or comic relief. Instead these details serve as quick shorthand of the sacrifice involved as the heart is forced to recalibrate in line with external circumstances. Even when Celeste or Jesse thinks they're falling apart, they actually are amazingly resilient-- and honoring that uneven and jagged trajectory of healing allows the story a further timelessness that resonates with us.
The beauty of the film is that it really does go against type, choosing the risk of being authentic, even if that means it doesn't make the big bucks. It doesn't fall into being maudlin or indulgent, as it very easily could have been. It has a pretty well-developed, self-contained universe, making its fiction real and relatable. The visual style is sharp and slick without being in love with itself, and is used precisely to enhance the telling of the story.
The camera work, the angles and panoramas in which faces are focused on and scenes move from one to the other, is subtle and exquisite. The camera is given the time and space to do its work and allow the cast to greatly enhance an already rich script with attention to telling facial expressions (Jones, for example, really movingly inhabits her character while avoiding pressing obvious 'tearjerker' buttons).
It also is brave enough and sure of itself enough to be able to make quick cuts into social commentary, to give us a sense that the world the characters are living in is our own world-- and to remind us that, as romantic and sensual as these characters are, they still have to wait in line for coffee, take on clients they would rather not, and pick up dry cleaning. These are not characters who get everything they want or whil themselves into a frenzy to get everything they want. These are characters who are just doing the best they can at the time-- but not using that as a cop-out: really trying to give all of themselves in a given moment, really trying to be emotionally present and responsible and courageous and intimate in their relationships and their lives. And putting that depth on film is extremely difficult, and it's done here, and that nuance and vulnerability is worth the price of admission.
Celeste and Jesse is a short, tightly edited film that doesn't feel rushed-- details echo eachother with a comedian's ear for callbacks and fall into place naturally. You're in on the inside joke; you're brought into the emotional life cycle of the characters. A lot of psychological terrain is skillfully traversed in a short span. Despite having a simple, time-limited premise-- basically spanning from the separation to the signing of the divorce papers-- the film avoids predictability because we are emotionally invested in the characters.
Even if you personally have never been in the situation of deeply caring for an ex or have ever wondered if you ended a relationship too soon, from very early on we want the best for both Celeste and Jesse. This shades-of-grey storytelling is usually sorely missed from breakup stories, and particularly Hollywood pictures. In fact, I don't even think it is accurate to call this a "breakup story." Celeste and Jesse are not the kind of people who hold grudges; they love life too much to just throw away people they've spent years of their life with. The tagline for the film, "a loved story," is perhaps the best, and most succinct, way to describe this smart, funny, and important film-- a film that really catches in amber many truths and annoyances about our era but will likely stand the test of time as one of the best romances of this decade, if not longer.
(Original review by RJ Winters; originally published on Facebook to limited audience, August 26, 2012.)
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)
Not Safe, But Sweet
How far back would you like to go? Alienated Darius (Aubrey Plaza) tells us she tries to not get her hopes up, probably would be happiest at some blurry point in her childhood-but doesn't get too bogged down in nostalgia, or so her thick exterior would have us believe. Plaza is spot-on as the disaffected, hard-boiled young lady who would seem to be a typical angsty underemployed twentysomething (interning at Seattle Magazine).
Her character would read as grating had we not been told early on, to align ourselves with her damaged psyche, she has faced legitimate pain and heartbreak, having lost her mother at the tender age of 14, cruelly and randomly. When an opportunity to retreat into the past is offered by a too-good-to-be-real classified ad, Darius is all too pleased to jump at the chance and make it her own personal project: anything to break up the tedium of the present-and if she gets a story out of it, all the better. She is removed from the present not out of aloofness but from a sense of abandonment. Interestingly, in the workplace in which she is almost entirely invisible and unappreciated, her introspection, social withdrawal, and seeming asexuality is often read as being gay: her and her co-intern's, Arnau (Karan Soni) introversion are told in parallel, as though to make a larger point about tightly-wrapped hearts and the mixed signals that are part and parcel of a sensitive person's life. The film makes its mission to explore whether the best moments of our life come from going it alone or from getting a partner to help us find our way, to help us be true to ourselves.
Darius, her superior at the magazine, Jeff (Jake M. Johnson), and Arnau set out on a local road trip to find out if there is a story to be made from a person looking, supposedly, for someone to time travel with him: someone who should be prepared to use weapons, we're cautioned, and someone who is comfortable with a certain level of danger. Darius finds herself taken in with the way the new object of her observations, a grocery clerk/ time scientist Kenneth (Mark Duplass), demonstrates a fierce drivenness in everything he does, as though he has resisted the entropy of everyday life. Increasingly the beat becomes Darius', as she establishes a rapport with Kenneth and becomes his comrade/sidekick. While her co-workers deride Kenneth as being some kind of mentalcase or eccentric, Darius develops genuine affection for Kenneth and begins to feel conflict about collecting material about him for the article, wishing the time-travel mission was real, longing for escape. The initial assignment gets extended a few days at a time as Jeff procrastinates on the company dime, trying to win back his old high-school flame, and as Darius strives to figure out what Kenneth is all about.
Time runs short as deadlines loom, and conflicting interests collide as Kenneth's paranoia about being followed was apparently not without reason: he was being perused by government agents who thought that his interest in time travel (and thefts of supplies) made him a spy. The agents, following the bumbling trio of lit types, reveal Darius' true identity and all comes out. Kenneth, who by this point has also become smitten with the jaded-with-a-heart-of-gold persona of Darius, doesn't know who to trust, and doesn't know whether to make his second time trip alone after all, just like his first. Multiple parties make leaps of faith in a charming, but not too easy, conclusion. Duplass is excellent as someone who would seem to be a tinfoil-hat wearing weirdo who turns out to be more complex than mainstream society would have believed.
The fear, of course, with any identifiably indie production, is that it will be too twee, too hipster, too self-aware. Thankfully, SNG dances along these lines, and tangoes with predictability, but retains a sincere core, an intense heart, not unlike the sincerity Kenneth is looking for and which Darius didn't know she yearned for as well. SNG is a parable about love and about using time wisely. Every character plays with time: Jeff realizes he can't go home again, unable to drag his longtime crush back to Seattle-his idealized visions of domesticity fail to be portable enough to take back to big city life. Darius realizes the importance of the present; and Arnau learns to give in to abandon, to take uncalculated risks, and treasure the youth he has now, rather than being so incredibly score-keeping and future-focused. Kenneth also stops living in the past as much, realigning his priorities and rethinking his motivations behind history chasing in the first place.
Seattle is given a loving cameo and the beaches and wilderness of Washington state are shown in some of their best moments. There is an attractively strong sense of place and a loving cinematography toward the more rustic elements of Pacific Northwest life, where even bland grocery stores still look homey and quaint, almost trapped in time.
Make no mistake-thin sci-fi gestures aside, SNG is a romance, a love story, a possible "chick flick" wrapped in a road-trip buddy adventure. By mid-journey, we know the time travel is almost tangential, but it's a nice thing to have. SNG is a heartfelt film with a simple, single premise, accomplishing what it sets out to do without falling into the trap of trying to be all things to all people-it's more magical realism than sci-fi, if we're honest. Like all the best fiction, it transforms us-allows us to experience catharsis, to be altered-through the artful suspension of disbelief. Through love, we're told again, what comes off as "the impossible" can actually be possible.
(Originally published to limited audience on Facebook July 4, 2012--originally written by RJ Winters)