Chef. The movie that spawned a hit Netflix cooking show starring Jon Favreau and chef/consultant Roy Choi. Look, this entire film is nothing but food porn and you can take your pick of favorite scenes. You can also find the recipes for the film right here. Youtube wouldn\u2019t let me include any one scene so I\u2019m attaching the trailer here in case you haven\u2019t watched the film yet. It\u2019s family friendly and one of my favorite comfort films. Oh, and for heaven\u2019s sake, learn to make pasta in garlic and oil. You\u2019ll thank me later.
Sean grew up in West Belfast in the shadows of the Troubles. Although the conflict is technically over, its vestiges remain in the poverty, alcoholism, joblessness, and PTSD that surround him. A good kid, Sean is the first in his family to leave home and go to college to study English literature in Liverpool. But when he returns home in the early 2010s, he finds that little has changed and there are limited opportunities for progress. After getting in a fight at a house party and sentenced to 200 hours of community service, any dream that he had of being a writer is put on hold, as Sean must balance his temporary job as a bartender in a nightclub, with the demands of staying out of prison.
From the late 1950s through the early 1990s, hundreds of people participated in a psychotherapy cult on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The Sullivan Institute for Research promoted sexual liberation, the destruction of the traditional nuclear family, rebellion against parents, and relentless psychoanalysis. Many of the therapists had little training outside of the Institute itself, and yet every member of the group religiously attended weekly sessions to learn about how their parents had ruined them and how they would ruin their children after them. As the group evolved, the Institute organized communal single-sex homes in the area, ranging from apartment units to, eventually, an entire building that could accommodate their nearly 400 members at its peak. Participants were immediately inducted into a close-knit social scene, full of parties, dates every night, and communal living. Not only were a litany of famous people attracted to the group, including Jackson Pollock, Clement Greenberg, and Judy Collins, but most of the Sullivanians were highly educated, high functioning professional adults sucked into the promises of a counterrevolution.
As an eighteen-year-old in her Chasidic, ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn community, Raizl is expected to get married. While she waits for her match, she works to allow the men in her family to study and takes accounting classes at a Manhattan college. In order to do her homework, Raizl has been granted a special dispensation to have a school-issued laptop with internet access, a fact that is kept secret so as not to disrupt her marriage prospects. Suddenly, however, Raizl is given a device that gives her a new way to see the world. Starting by asking Google \u201Cwhat is Hashem,\u201D she moves through the internet rabbit hole until she lands on \u2026 porn. Shocked and intrigued by these new images, Raizel stays up late into the night watching under her covers to avoid detection by the rest of her family. At the same time that Raizl is discovering this less modest version of the world (\u201Cshmutz!\u201D), she meets and becomes friends with people at school who not only aren\u2019t in her community, but also are not Jewish. These combined experiences force Raizl to question the constraints of her life thus far, all while she undergoes the process of finding a binding match.
I thought this book did an excellent job of exploring the power and limits of faith and expectations. Raizl\u2019s addiction to porn, although jarring for a girl who wears thick tights under her already ankle-length skirts, is less about the porn and more about the sudden exposure to a larger world filled with different conceptions of self. I was also particularly impressed by the narrative voice created by Berliner for Raizl, which almost perfectly evoked the duality of the naivety of youth as well as the wiseness of someone on the cusp of forced adulthood.
So is the play going to go on? What happens? It starts this week, so you should be able to keep that all kind of condensed in one little nice package and honest. Don't spoil it at the end. Who? Who is responsible? Maybe I should go back and crush the first two seasons again, because that's Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez, is it?
Well, it's the same way with that. With the Winning Time series, you could tell that there was a little goose there that kind of made it a little different. So I think it's fine to get that little extra something, but if you're featured in it, maybe you don't like that kind of stuff. Jerry West did not look good in that first season.
But again, it's not like you're not going to get a heads up on all of this. You need to do a little research. In fact, today I got a thing about a new Netflix series that I had never heard of, and I thought, wow, this is this is kind of odd that they would drop it that quickly. But, you know, there you are.
It had some ups and downs. I think The Mandalorian has been generally pretty good, but it even this last season was it felt like a little bit of a downer to me. I'm looking forward to season two, which is supposed to be the final season of Andor because I thought that one was really good. And the funny thing is I still think that Andor was the best of all the series so far that they've done.
So I don't know. You know, you bring up before we kind of move in to the the main event, if you will, that I did want to bring up a little bit more just because the strike has created a few interesting things. You know, number one, it's it's shut down some production while shut down most production, you know, with some some exceptions here and there.
It was way too much, you know, like when they went under the sea, there was like, is it crowded down there? Is it that much stuff that you want to be like? No wonder she wanted to get out of that Sea World. She wanted it be a little less congested, but they tried to heart. And I think that's always where you go wrong.
It was okay. I mean, I kind of laughed a little bit when John Oliver, he was doing the voice of of the bird, but it was I didn't need it. Yeah, there's way too much expectation and little delivered is what happens with that kind of stuff. And you know, they're looking for a money bag. It's if they can make a bunch of money off this and then they have more toys, you know, they came out with more Little Mermaid dolls.
And even Tom Hanks, who was in it, looked bad. He did look terrible. Right. And he played so many characters so that I wouldn't show that to a kid. I'd read the book two of them before I'd show them that movie, because that movie was dreadful. Oh, yeah. So what do you have for us this week? You've got a little interview.
So there is your $0.02 worth on that one. But they do say it's hugely popular. They have little kids that are in their gym doing this whole kind of ninja stuff. They have a series of YouTube videos. If you want to follow them. You can see, you know, the techniques and the training things that they tell you. But it is, I must tell you, sorry, dear, it's a young man's game.
And, you know, we as watchers, viewers of movies, TV shows, would we even notice it if if they used A.I. because we've gotten so used to seeing such crazy special effects. So, you know, they talk a little bit about the evolution of, you know, like a Christopher Reeve in Superman years ago, being hung with wires and all that stuff.
I swear it's a stunt man who wears the costume. They throw him around a little bit and then if they need to, they superimpose the face of the actor on them. So, yeah, see what happens. But that sounds fascinating. That's what we want to watch next week. You know, what I'd like to do was that I'd like to look back at the the year to date and look at the things that were and the things that were misses and the things that will last.
dd2b598166