Erik Moe: Critic at Large

Columbia Room = Highly recommended

The newly-opened Columbia Room at The Passenger is an intimate speakeasy-style oasis custom built for a single purpose: impeccable presentation of cocktails. The space seats perhaps 14 in a two-tiered arrangement that puts all the focus on craft cocktail expert Derek Brown behind the bar. The Service by Brown and improbably-named fantastically-named sommelier Kat Bangs is personal and extraordinarily attentive.

Bangs and Brown both have worked at and helped develop some of DC’s best restaurants and in this intimate space their talents shine. Brown’s artistry and attention to detail are on display as he hand-carves ice to melt appropriately in each drink and methodically measures ingredients and tests temperatures.

A reservation at Columbia includes an opening glass of champagne, two cocktails and a light food pairing. I’ll leave deconstructing and geeking out over the particulars to experts like my coworker Matt, but the general outline of the evening is re-assembled after the jump. Highly recommended.

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I really like Jennifer Dorsey’s work now on view at Flashpoint gallery. The series documents two DC schools. Some of the photographs are nearly abstract closeups of surfaces like blackboards. Others are empty rooms in which you can imagine all the generations of students that have played basketball or learned geography in them. Can’t seem to find a link with more examples of her work, but will update if I do.

Hunger = highly recommended

Hunger is brutal and beautiful. The film tells the story of Bobby Sands, who led the 1981 IRA hunger strike at Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. Not easy viewing by any means. The visual depth and humanity created by artist-director Steve McQueen earned him a comparison to Rembrandt from the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones.

• Niloofar = recommended. The Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries had a nice series of Iranian films going. Sadly, I caught only one.
• Since Otar Left = highly recommended. A Georgian film to follow the Georgian feast.
• Nollywood Lady = fine.
• The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers = fine.
• Ajami = fine. A best foreign film Oscar nominee. Impressive for the use of untrained actors, but halfway through I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just watching the Israeli version of Crash.
• The Devil and Miss Jones = highly recommended. Part of a Jean Arthur retrospective at AFI Silver, this is essentially a screwball version of “Undercover Boss” amid a union organizing drive at a New York department store. Every labor activist out there will thoroughly enjoy the ending.
• Terribly Happy = recommended. Aptly billed as Coen Brothers-esque.
• Up in the Air = recommended. Emotionally not all that different from driving a Volkswagen Bug into a brick wall.

Not the actual Georgian dumplings (Khinkali) I ate on Febgiving, but these look pretty similar

This past Febgiving was celebrated at my house with a delicious Georgian feast inspired by Darra Goldstein’s book on the subject. Celebrating Febgiving was my idea. The Georgian theme and most of the menu was Michelle’s idea (see that Tumblr link for a glimpse of some pickled cabbage that was brought to the table). She made these dumplings vegetarian-friendly by swapping mushrooms and Boca crumbles for the traditional meat filling. Finally, the Khinkali were topped with a wonderful garlic-walnut sauce (Bahze) not typically used on dumplings, but I doubt anyone in Tbilisi would complain about the delicious pairing.

So, one of my goals since moving to DC is to make art a bigger part of my life. When I lived in Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Chicago it was a huge and very natural part of the life of the city. Much of the time I was also working in the arts world until I moved to DC, which certainly helped. In this government town the visual art scene has been tough to crack, but there is a ton of creativity under the surface. In a third new series of series for this blog I’m going to do my best to chronicle some of it.

For now, I give you these candy hearts that cropped up around Logan Circle last week. I suspect they are related to these candy corn traffic cones that appeared last October and are credited to Diabetik.

Wheat pasted candy hearts, 14th & P, February 2010.

This weekend there are openings at Flashpoint Gallery, Civilian Art Projects, and a pop-up space in Colombia Heights called Activation. I hope to see you out there.

Fish Tank = highly recommended

Of the many, many films I saw during the days (Weeks? Months?) of extreme snow here in D.C., Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank was most striking. I went into the film not knowing much about where the film would take me. It turns out this is exactly the situation Arnold threw her actors into: no pages of the script beyond the currently-filming scene were made available. The resulting meandering film about sixteen-year-old Mia’s life in an English housing project with her non-parenting mother has been aptly compared to The 400 Blows.

• The White Ribbon is also about poverty and parenting. German pre-WWI feudal poverty and deeply conservative parenting. Highly recommended.
• The Cove is going to win this year’s Oscar for best documentary since it is an informative, engaging, advocacy doc about cute animals in danger. Nonetheless, I consider it recommended
• Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 = Fine
• Inglorious Bastards = Recommended
• Niloofar = Recommended (finally caught part of the Iranian film series at the Freer-Sackler).
• The Hurt Locker = Highly recommended. I feared this would just be a series of classic MacGuyver bomb-defusing scenes. Instead it paints a fairly nuanced portrait of the modern soldier technologically (and otherwise) insulated from war.

The best thing I ate since last report: truffle egg toast with bottarga during brunch at ‘inoteca on the Lower East Side.

I can’t say that this is a great brunch spot (it was a last-minute pick). It felt like breakfast was an afterthought tacked on to a (probably good) dinner spot: the menu is short on A.M. comfort food, and something as simple as morning coffee seemed foreign (you’ll get Lavazza espresso served Americano).

THAT SAID, the truffle egg toast with bottarga is delicious. Crunchy toast yields to perfectly soft eggs with a delightful hint of truffle oil. The optional bottarga adds a nice complimentary texture. Yum.

PS: In DC, Pizzeria Paradiso offers something very similar in pizza form.

The Deer Hunter

I couldn’t help thinking of Avatar while reading Jonathan Rosenbaum’s over-the-top takedown of The Deer Hunter, originally written in 1979. Excerpt:

Try and imagine a boneless elephant sitting in your lap for three hours while you’re trying to think. It’s flabby beyond belief, convinced not only of its importance but its relevance to Americans (i.e., human beings) everywhere, and even winds up bleating a mournful rendition of “God Bless America” in your ear, hoping that you’ll join in or at least have sympathy for its plight.

The Deer Hunter is on my list of Very Important Movies™ that I haven’t seen. Is it time to take care of that? Maybe just to fish for parallels with James Cameron’s Very Important Movie™ ?

Two strong films about desperation amid tough times in Eastern Europe. The bleakness of the former is haunting even as it verges on becoming a crime thriller. Import/Export paints a much seedier, grittier portrait. Much (all?) of the interior scenes are filmed in static/unmoving camera shots reminiscent of the recently released 1975 classic Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

The Seagull = Fine
Screened as part of the National Gallery of Art’s “Celebrating Chekhov on the Russian Screen” series. The best parts were the subtitled translations of Russian insults. I’m still waiting for an opportunity to call someone a “Bourgeois Kievian.”

Encounters at the End of the World = recommended
Werner Herzog’s documentary about Antarctica focuses on the people who live there: scientists, adventurers, wandering philosophers. A nice detour touching on some of Herzog’s old man vs. nature themes. The shots of strange ocean creatures living deep under the Antarctic ice are amazing.

New World Order = highly not recommended
Clearly at least one of the “best documentaries of the decade” lists I added to my Netflix queue was a mistake of enormous magnitude.

I have no problem with the Academy’s choice to expand best picture nominees to ten this year. It is high-profile exposure for great films. Unfortunately, I’ve seen most of the just-announced ten and they are not great. A look at Metacritic’s assessment of Blind Side inspired me to highlight that site’s clearest critical insult of each nominee.

Avatar

“Avatar clears the hurdle in terms of being optical candy. Its story, though, is pure cheese.”
—Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News

The Blind Side

“…peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them.”
—Melissa Anderson, Village Voice

District 9

“It’s a bad joke that District 9 will be hailed for its ‘originality.’”
—Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun

An Education

“…a third-act tonal shift makes for an incongruous, excessively moralistic fit with everything that’s preceded. Most insulting, though, is the way in which the climactic passages miraculously tidy up every frayed edge of Jenny’s life.”
—Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

The Hurt Locker

“Stretched both timewise and for plausibility.”
—Kyle Smith, New York Post

Inglourious Basterds

“The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did “Springtime for Hitler”: because it’s so bad they think it’s good.”
—Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun

Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire

“In its eagerness to drag us through the lower depths of human experience, Precious leaves no space for the audience to breathe or to draw our own conclusions. For a film about empowerment and self-actualization, it wields an awfully large cudgel.”
—Dana Stevens, Slate

A Serious Man

“All the Coens come up with is a movie about bad things happening to limited people.”
—Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun

Up

“Save for a few inspired canine gags and a handful of very pretty visual details, Up left me cold. Its charms appear to have been applied with surgical precision; by the end, I felt expertly sutured, but not much else.”
—Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

Up in the Air

“[Writer/Director Jason Reitman] feels the constant need to “deepen” his characters, granting them wants and motivations–especially during the moralistic third act–that are totally alien to how they’re initially portrayed.”
—Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

I’ll probably try to see The Hurt Locker and Up in the Air before the 22nd, but so far I’m not excited to call any of these films the best of 2009. The big winner this year might end up being The Baltimore Sun.