Year: 2007

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the United Kingdom came out this week with an astonishing pronouncement that pregnant women past their 12th week can safely drink “1.5 units” of alcohol per day — the equivalent of a single, small glass of wine.

This, in my opinion, is bullshit.

No one loves wine more than I. And I’m a great promoter — as many of you know — of moderate drinking for one’s health. Yet, there are two groups of people to whom I would never advocate a drop: alcoholics and pregnant women. So far as I’m concerned, it’s a simple matter of the risk/benefit ratio. For someone with a drinking problem, the antioxidant benefit isn’t worth the risk of ending up on a highway overpass, holding a sign that says “God bless.”

And for pregnant women? Consider this: The single only way to produce a baby with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) — a constellation of disorders that includes mental retardation and various birth defects — is to drink while pregnant. So as far as I’m concerned, in this case the risks outweigh the potential benefits by about a million percent.

I have a son, now 19, with profound autism. I didn’t drink while pregnant; I was, in fact, barely of legal drinking age. But I did consume fish and tap water, take Tylenol for headaches, and live downwind of a plastics plant. If someone were to tell me that avoiding salmon, bathing in pure Evian, suffering through killer migraines, moving to another state, or — for that matter — having every hair on my body singed off with a Zippo lighter would prevent my son’s having to go through the muddy chaos that is his life today. . . .I would do it in a second. Give up alcohol in order to save a kid even the off chance of impairment? I can’t conceive why any woman would do anything but.

But in this case, it’s the scientists I just don’t understand.

The NICE announcement seems like an unnecessary invitation for trouble and heartbreak. Pregnant women are routinely under stress. They’re sick, breathless, exhausted, worried, and often in conflict with their partners. One glass of wine may or may not be safe, but take a woman who’s under severe stress, lower her inhibitions with a little bit of alcohol, and what are the chances when someone refills her glass, she’ll drink that, too?

For what it’s worth, the UK Department of Health agrees with me. They came out against the NICE recommendation, saying it is unsafe for pregnant women to consume alcohol. Their advice remains what is has been for years, that women abstain completely from beer, spirits, and wine for the duration of their pregnancies. And take it from this mother of three: nine months may seem like a long dry spell. But there will be many years ahead for drinking — and many opportunities. When you’re waiting up for a 17-year-old to come home from a late-night party, for instance. Around two a.m., that’s a perfect time.

I strolled across Loring Park last night and popped into Nick and Eddie simply because I saw activity through the windows there. Turns out it’s not technically open to the public yet. They were having a “friends and family” night, and I’m neither. But the practicing staff were nice enough to let me have a look around. It’s a stark black & white space with weird bulbs on stems that protrude from the walls and poke out every which way. The tables are pressed against the walls, so there’s a wide open area in the middle — big enough for people to dance. And what luck. . .I can’t speak for the food just yet, but the sound system in this place is incredible!

It’s called High Emotion Audio, it’s sound science engineered by a couple of Nashville, TN, audiophiles, and Nick and Eddie non-owner Doug Anderson (his wife, Jessica, along with chef Steve Vranian, are the official principals) explained that the music at their restaurant offers “sound that travels at a different rate” from any other place in town. All that black décor? It’s really yards and yards of speakers: 120 mid-range, 120, tweeters, and 24 sub-woofers. This means the music has a rich, ribbony quality; it travels above and below the buzz of conversation. But it never, somehow, interferes with the frequency our voices occupy.

To me, a meal is about so much more than food. I’m auditory and olfactory: sounds and smells affect my restaurant experiences, perhaps as much as the taste of what’s on my plate. Give me a crisp fall night and a woodfire grill, an open kitchen issuing plumes of garlic, olive oil, and white wine. Give me the high emotion sound of 24 sub-woofers putting out music you can hear in your blood and your chest, along with easy, intimate conversation in a crowded room. Give me that any day.

Nick and Eddie, 1614 Harmon Place in Minneapolis, will be open to the public October 19.

Monty Python’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age; The Darjeeling Limited, and Michael Clayton.

One should never glean one’s history from the movies. Not knowing the least bit about the age of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen of England, I can still tell you that Elizabeth: The Golden Age is about as true to the facts as any of the great Monty Python flicks, and at least as entertaining. Did the red-haired monarch really stare deeply into the limpid pools that were Walt Raleigh’s eyes, hungering for a shag but settling for a chaste kiss? Probably not. Did the Virgin Queen stand atop Dover’s cliffs in fetching chain-mail and watch the Armada burn, all the while muttering “it’s only a model.” No, again (that last part I made up.) But that’s what the movies do, and often do best: they make history sexy, exciting, and, whether intended or not, hilarious. And let me tell you, there’s lots to laugh at in Elizabeth.

Elizabeth is a stellar production, a sumptuous feast for the eyes, and one that boasts a top-notch, Oscar-hungry cast: you’ve got the lovely Cate Blanchett, normally moody Clive Owen (a bit out of his element as the scallywag pirate Walter Raleigh), the always reliable Geoffrey Rush, and the underrated actress Samantha Morton, who will someday get a decent role to chew on (perhaps in the forthcoming Joy Division biopic, Control.) Throw into the mix a riotous screenplay that never really takes itself too seriously, and you have yourself a time-killer that’s loads of fun provided you don’t think too much about it.

In this Elizabeth, there’s an evil Spain hell-bent on taking control of England in a variety of ways. (This might have also been the plot of the first–I don’t remember that one at all.) They want to install Mary, Queen of Scots (Morton), still a Catholic girl, and hopefully someone who’ll inspire the country’s legions of Pope-followers into revolt.

There are two ways that they can overthrow England: They can assassinate the Queen. Or they can outright attack with the famous Spanish Armada. The leader of the vile country of Spain is Philip II, played by Jordi Molla, who gnashes his teeth and wrings his hands as if he’s about to cackle “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Later, people will try to kill our Lizzy, the Armada will attack and be turned away, and there will be intrigue and romance and kisses in front of soft-lit fireplaces. If you’re not laughing at these scenes as I was, you need to lighten up, man

Elizabeth, then, is not much different from Spider-Man, or Transformers, is it? It’s got love and action and instead of men in tights or machines, you’ve got men in pantaloons. A big budget emptiness meant to pack theaters and kill time. Except that this one has a tenuous connection to history and scores of Oscar winners on the payroll, not to mention people who want Oscar’s gold, so it’s somehow more important than what springs from Michael Bay’s mind. The scenes with the Armada attack are nothing more than CGI, and poorly staged at that–the director, Shekhar Kapur, would have been wise to stay inside the castle.

Elizabeth is fun, if a bit long in the tooth. Going over to the film’s website, I couldn’t help but notice, in the “interactive timeline”, a mention that Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s advisor, was considered by many historians (real ones, not the advisors to this film) to also have been her lover. That’s Cate Blanchett and old Geoffrey Rush for those of you keeping score. Probably it’s easier to digest the notion of Cate and Clive sharing a loving embrace, but while the thought of a tryst with Walsingham and the Queen might seem a bit dodgy, it is so much richer. History, perhaps, shouldn’t always be ignored.

…

Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, his first since the risible Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, begins with a running start. Both an aged Bill Murray, dressed in a 50s suit and hat, and young Adrien Brody, are running to catch the eponymous locomotive. The youth prevails, and watches the gasping Murray stare bewildered at the distance growing between them. It is a beautiful, funny, and strangely moving scene. One has his whole life ahead of him; the other is watching life pass him by.

From there, Anderson introduces us to the three brothers, Francis, Peter and Jack (Owen Wilson, Brody, and Jason Schwartzman), who are taking this trip at the behest of the oldest brother Francis, whose head is swathed in bandages from a horrible car accident. They are brothers, and at the beginning of this flick, perfectly realized. Francis orders everyone about, tries to shove peace and reconciliation down his brothers’ throats. The youngest, Jack, is a free-wheeler, putting the make on the sexy girl in the train, although he’s also trying desperately to forget his former flame (played briefly by Natalie Portman.) (Note: To get the background for this relationship, check out the “prologue” to Darjeeling, a short called Hotel Chevalier.)

Brody’s Peter is anxious about the coming birth of his first child. He also can’t believe that he’s not divorced yet–he loves his wife, but the weight of his parents’ failures are almost too much for him to bear.

And all three brothers are still reeling at the death of their father, struck down by a taxicab in New York City just a year earlier. That, and the fact that their mother has sequestered herself into a temple in the mountains of India, and has refused to see them, even going so far as to miss their father’s funeral. Obviously, these boys have issues.

At first, The Darjeeling Limited is simply wonderful. These three goofy Americans are touched with new-age spirituality and an earnest desire to try and fix what’s broken in their lives. The artifice in every scene is a perfect reflection of the emotional lives of these boys–and, despite their ages, they are boys–and we are at once swept up in the beauty of the set design, the camerawork, and the way these work in conjunction with the actors and their material. The train is a metaphor for their own sheltered lives. Anderson knows boys, he understands the crazy ways they try to assert themselves, their secret language and the in-jokes they make to one another, and the clumsy ways they try to open their hearts. TWilson, Brody and Schwartzman display beautiful chemistry–they seem as though they’ve been sharing sleeping quarters and arguing between bunk-beds for years.

Would that they stayed on the train. Thanks to Peter’s bringing in a poisonous snake, the trio’s kicked off the Darjeeling Limited, and from there Anderson seems utterly lost. The train is symbolic of the cocoon these man-children have lived in and will probably always live in, and it’s fine and dandy to see them shagging a bored Indian girl or insulting the German tourists next to them. It’s another thing altogether for Anderson to try and ratchet up the emotions by having the brothers save a couple of young boys from drowning in a river, only to lose another. And when Anderson takes our heroes into the village, and heaps on the details of the Indians’ poverty and grief, the shallowness of the brothers becomes apparent to everyone but the director. The young child’s funeral is so secondary to their own story as to be deeply insulting: if Anderson’s going to show us the father’s pain and suffering to such degree, then don’t cut away to a slo-mo of the three walking to the ceremony with the Kinks blaring away.

Sadly, The Darjeeling Limited never regains its footing. This is a shame, because for a moment Wes Anderson, who is a truly original voice in American cinema, had himself a film that was both touching, funny, and strangely wise. It has wonderful performances, including small roles that make one marvel at the joy of great character acting. But Anderson doesn’t understand his boundaries. His three boys morph from being three confused souls and turn into three asshole Americans who can’t see past the end of their broken noses.

…

Michael Clayton looks good, and, man, it certainly sounds good. Tony Gilroy directed the flick, from his own screenplay, which he obviously adores. Gilroy was the screenwriter for the Bourne series, which are some of the greatest spy thrillers ever made, but their screenplays weren’t their strength. But someone doesn’t agree with that assessment, because Gilroy was given the keys to the kingdom, being allowed to direct his own “thriller”, and people it was some big stars, most notably George Clooney. Unfortunately, Michael Clayton’s script, which will be soundly praised, is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

The film opens with a breathless speech by Arthur Edens, played with tremendous brio by Tom Wilkinson, another of our unheralded actors. Edens has gone crazy. Normally the chief council for a law firm defending a pesticides company that’s killing people, he meets one of the plaintiffs, a beautiful farmgirl whose parents died from the poisons his company has sprayed all over this great green earth. Upon seeing this vision of feminine loveliness, he loses his mind and, seeking to purify himself from the wickedness of his ways, decides to strip naked during a deposition and renounce his life.

In comes George Clooney’s Michael Clayton. Clayton is a fixer. He’s going to set everything straight. The fact that he never does in the course of this film, nor does he seem to be able to even convince people that he has any authority whatsoever does not to be of any concern to us, since everyone says he’s the man who fixes things, we’re meant to believe that. Needless to say, Edens won’t go away, the giant company murders the poor man, and Michael Clayton has a spiritual awakening.

The problem isn’t that the plot is an old, haggard thing that’s been recycled from better paranoid flicks from the 1970s (such as The Parallax View or Network, movies that had no problem ending on cynical, dour note, as opposed to Clayton’s triumphant end), but that Tony Gilroy is no Paddy Chayefsky. Namely, a writer whose words dominated his films. Chayefsky (Network) knew that his speeches needed to excite, needed to make the characters real, and needed to move the plot forward. Michael Clayton is so full of empty bluster it never ends up being about anything, saying nothing about our times or the characters that people the film. The film is full of startling contradictions: the murder of a key character is a great scene, meant to show us that the heavies who do this dirty work are professionals of the highest order. They kill in such a way as to leave everyone believing this was an accident… and yet, they try and off Clayton with a car bomb. What?

Subplots take far too long to play out, the dialogue has no snap, the women in the film are treated as either virginal young things or dry, shrewish corporate mouthpieces. And Clooney is way out of his league: moments where he’s supposed to be awakening to the truth make him look like a deer caught in the headlights. Clayton’s ending, too, is an insult: back in the days of The Parallax View (a film that Clayton is similar to) we weren’t force fed a happy ending. The characters in 70s paranoid thrillers were often destroyed by the machine. It was up to us–the audience–to emerge from the theater frustrated and angry, to take that anger home and maybe, just maybe, pay attention to the shitty things corporations did and do something in real life.

Michael Clayton will garner its nominations and the script, which is created partially to call attention to itself, will surely get a nomination and probably a gold statuette. Strip away the excess dialogue, some of which is very good (if not well done by Tom Wilkinson, at least) and you’ll find that the men and women are cliched, the plot is creaky and often contradictory, its ending insulting. We deserve better than this.