The Secret to All Cusine

Because I am an old lady at heart, I recently watched Lasse Hallström's "The Hundred-Foot Journey" along with an audience whose sole drinking game consisted of taking a shot of Ensure anytime someone said "cardamom." Here's what I learned from the movie:

1. To cook you make ghosts -- mostly sea urchin ghosts. I don't know why this is relevant, as it is never brought up again.
2. English vegetables apparently have no soul
3. An entire family from India who speaks perfect, if heavily accented, English just happens to move to a small town in France where everyone speaks perfect, if heavily accented, English. How fortuitous!
4. No one in France, prior to the appearance of the Kedam family, had ever heard of any exotic spices, ever.
5. When in Northern France, near the Swiss border, it's a perfectly reasonable idea to have a restaurant with only outdoor seating. 
6. If you learn the five sauces of French cooking you can then become a culinary master within a year.
7. For a country known for surrendering the French have an unreasonably aggressive and bloody national anthem. 
8. Hassan's hands are impervious to having scalding hot soup poured into them by his mother, but are not so resistant to the contents of a molotov cocktail.
9. Molecular gastronomy is evil. Sugar coated beets and liquid nitrogen frozen foodstuffs takes away your soul, makes you drink, and causes you to blow off Michelin.

I can hardly wait for the sequel where Hassan does battle with Bibendum over the future of Le Saule Pleureur. It will inevitably be directed by Michael Bay.

And a Hero Will Crawl, Eventually

So for no particular reason I recently went and saw "The Giver" -- that is to say, I saw the movie, not that I live in some colorless, memory-free future where I am relegated to receiving my history from Jeff Bridges. Perhaps I am one of the very few people who managed to avoid reading this book as an adolescent, but after seeing the movie I am left with the distinct feeling that I didn't miss anything. Perhaps its the glut of movies about futuristic societies that are unreasonably reliant on/brutal to pre-teens and teenagers (see: Ender's Game, The Hunger Games, Divergent) that left me feeling like the Giver offered nothing new to the genre. I am aware, however, that it was actually one of the earlier dystopian teen novels and may be groundbreaking in its own right. (Note: I was slightly intrigued by the appearance of Katie Holmes. In light of the mysteriousness of her split from Tom Cruise I spend an inordinately large amount of time analyzing her movie roles to determine if they have a secret message about the religion-that-shall-not-be-named.)

Since I am not a teenager...or actually a pre-teen as the character in the original novel is supposed to be 11, not 16...I didn't really feel any particular connection with the main characters in the movie. It wasn't until the end of the movie ...... [SPOILER ALERT, I'M ABOUT TO SPOIL THE MOVIE] that I found a hero I could root for: Gabriel the Wonder-Baby! 

Gabriel appears to be just like any other randomly assigned baby in the movie, he cries, he looks around with wonder, he develops slower than he's supposed to, but it's not until Jonas decides to rescue him that we learn that Gabriel is basically the baby version of Bear Grylls. First Jonas picks up Gabriel in his special "I'm-about-to-be-murdered-and-put-down-a-laundry-chute" futuristic baby-pod and attaches him to the front of his stolen dirtbike (obvi! I mean who doesn't see that coming). Then Jonas with Gabriel/Bear/Evel Knieval JUMPS HIS DIRTBIKE OFF A CLIFF. Babies love the X-Games. I hope he did a superman seat-grab on the way down. 

After jumping the cliff, Jonas and Gabriel set off across a burning desert on the bike. Jonas has no supplies except for some mystery baby formula that magically appears. After the bike runs out of battery Jonas and Gabriel set off across the burning wasteland like Lawrence of Arabia (or Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in "Ishtar"). After going some distance the pair come under attack by a drone which picks them up and dumps them in the middle of a river full of rushing rapids.  Naturally with nothing more than a baby bjorn and his natural cunning, Jonas somehow navigates the whitewater while carrying a 12-month old baby. All in a day's work. 

So if extreme motorsports, an arid desert trek, and class four rapids aren't enough to deter Jonas and Baby Bear Grylls, they then end up in an alpine snowstorm at Christmas time. While Jonas lies down in the snow, losing his strength and his will to go on, there is baby Gabriel sitting tight, blowing a snot-bubble out of one nostril, and waiting for that lazy, good-for-nothing, teenager to wake up and walk the 20 feet it will take to find the toboggan and rescue them. 

So thanks for nothing dystopian teenagers. The only thing that any of them were good for was providing some kind of escape vehicle for Gabriel the Wonder Baby. Now I desperately want to know about Gabriel's future and how he grows up in to the most interesting man in the world. Come on Lois Lowry, write about that!