Trash Talking the TV

Somewhere I heard that when you're low on certain vitamins and nutrients, you crave the food that has the ones you need. Well I don't know what vitamin deficiency leads to an irresistible urge to watch trash tv, but I have it. Probably to make up for the fact that The Bachelor is over. Oh, Jake, I believed you might be a normal human being who simply made the regrettable decision to go on national tv not once, but twice. Then you chose fellow attention-whore Vienna and Dancing With the Stars. One of those life choices I might have been willing to overlook. But both? Combined with your previous track record? No, good sir, that I will not abide.

Ok, fine, I still like you. Just...keep your shirt off to remind me of that fact.

Really, I'm not actually all that invested. I get involved in tv shows, especially reality tv shows, the same way most people get into drugs. That is, I watch them as a social activity and probably wouldn't do so if other people weren't involved. There are not many shows that I watch by myself. Even if I'm the only one in the household watching a particular show, I have a friend somewhere else that I discuss it with later. I need feedback in order to make it real. I have no idea what that says about me, so feel free to play internet psychologist.

Proving just how trashy the Bachelor was, I have indulged myself twice this week with shows that normally would not catch my interest. First it was the E! show "Pretty Wild", a show revolving around 3 teenage girls and their former Playboy mother. I have no idea what the premise for this show was supposed to be originally. I'm not sure E! knew either - they were just following the formula of hot girls + cameras + ? = profit. After the pilot episode, that ? has a myriad of options for this particular show. Irresponsible fame-whoring mother, underage drinking, criminal charges. I read somewhere that E! was basically hoping that this would be a wilder, less responsible version of the family dynamic in "Keeping Up with the Kardashians".

"That's right, by comparison, we're 'responsible'."

Woah. When the Kardashians are the classy version, you know this is going to be trouble. Let's start from the top of the problem pyramid and work our way down. The mother. Oh lordy, the mother. A former Playboy bunny and lingerie model, the mother wants the same classy lifestyle for her daughters. In the pilot she is shown doling out Ritalin to the girls due to their ADHD diagnosis somewhere along the line, doing a roll-call for the pills not unlike every mental asylum movie I've seen. It gets better, though. She home-schools them. Maybe she's hiding a doctorate education in her ditzy act (after all, "Girls Next Door" Bridget has a Masters in Communication), but I have a feeling those girls can only do fractions because their drug dealer taught them. It still gets better. She teaches them lessons based on The Secret. Seriously. The little bit of their "schooling" that they show has her handing them piles of magazines and asking them to make a photo collage of responsible role-models, representing the people that they look up to in their lives. Angelina Jolie is a popular choice for the girls, mostly due to her hot husband.

The Secret is that we have daddy issues.

Maybe I'm being too harsh about the school and they just edited it to look scary. After all, the two older girls are somewhere around 18 at the time of filming, so maybe the others have already graduated and are just doing this as a bonus. The youngest girl, Gabby, 15 at time of filming, is the most responsible of the three. By far, if editing is to be believed, since she seems to not party or drink and cleans up after everyone else in the house. The oldest, Tess, actually isn't related to the other two at all. It's kind of bewildering really, especially given the fact that it's completely implied that the three girls are sisters and being "raised" and "disciplined" by the mother. But Tess is actually unrelated to everyone in the house - the girls, the mother, the rarely seen step-father and absent biological father. So while at first it seemed kind of crazy that Tess stayed out all night and walked into The Secret home-school totally hungover (getting a weak reaction from the mother figure in the situation), when you realize she's over 18 and lives there voluntarily, it's a bit different. Plus she's already done some Playboy modeling of her own. It's entirely possible that the explanation for all of this was left on the cutting room floor as a result of the drama that took place just 3 days into the filming of the series. Hence the reason I said that it is hard to tell what E! originally had planned for the show. Three or four days into filming, the LAPD knocked on the door with a search warrant based on their suspicions that the third daughter, Alexis, was holding property that was stolen as a part of the celebrity burglaries happening at the time, lamely entitled The Bling Ring. Alexis gets arrested as a result. The cameras kept rolling, the cases are still pending, so I imagine now a large part of the show will focus on the fall-out from that.

As if that weren't enough, as a result of this little piece on one of my fave sites meant I had to track down a new CW reality show called "High Society". I was sucked in by the promise of some woman being racist and homophobic and awful, and she delivered just as that article said she would. It should be noted that immediately after saying that she used the n-word regularly and didn't have many friends that weren't skinny and white just like her, she said that she wanted to work at the UN someday. I'm still digesting that tidbit. Was that a joke? Is the leathery face preventing me from reading sarcasm in her facial cues? I just don't know.

"The United Nations is a fashion house, right?"

I expected that to be the be-all and end-all of the episode, but the show has some real scene-stealers in it. Allegedly, the focus is on Tinsley Mortimer, a New York socialite recently divorced from Topper Mortimer. Although not poor prior to the marriage, it seems Tinsley didn't become a socialite until she married into the Mortimers (an old money family with interesting genealogical connections like the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay). Apparently she enjoyed the parties and the fashion shows whereas the Mortimer family disdained press, resulting in bad juju in her marriage. Actual high society old-money families don't generally attention-whore. There was a subdued murmur to that effect when NYC Prep came out, claiming to be the real world Gossip Girl, with people criticizing the people who appeared on that show as being the bottom of the prep-school barrel. Not a bad barrel to be on the bottom of, but apparently the real rich and fabulous think seeking out bad press via reality shows is tres trashy.

Anyway, Tinsley is kind of boring. She designs handbags (like every single no-talent socialite you've ever heard about). Her mom really wants her to make it work with the ex and is horrified that she is moving from her fab Upper Eastside place to scary Midtown. Mom also disapproves of the latest boyfriend, a ridiculously tall German Prince of some sort. So blah blah blah on Tinsley. But her friends include the Crazy Racist Chick who looks like she's lived a hard life already as well as CRC's sworn enemy, Paul Johnson Calderon, aka PJC. He's fabulously gay, but based on some of his behavior, I would guess he is not really fabulously wealthy. But he is a genuine scene-stealer, and I want him in every moment of this show. Luckily, he's a bit of a klepto, so scene-stealing seems to be on the menu if this show continues.

"Admit it, I'm stealing your heart right now, aren't I?"

Just in this episode he makes out with a very hot model, throws a can of PBR out of his limo, throws a tumbler of whiskey into someone's eye, evades the police called to the club as a result of said whiskey incident, and demonstrates how far he can pull wool over his mother's eyes. I find the last one the most interesting. His mother comes to the city to visit him, and she interviews that she thinks the two stints he spent in rehab really taught her son his lesson and that he probably only has one drink when he goes out now and is looking for a serious relationship. Cut to clips from the previous night of PJC getting trashed and making out with a random guy at a party. I wish we could have like, picture in picture of her watching this episode. Especially as we get to the next part, where he asks her for $50,000 from his trust fund so that he can get his own apartment. I'm a little unclear as to where he's living now, but, whatever, it's not like I want this show to be an hour long just so we can learn mundane things like the fact that he has a roommate or something. She chastises him blowing through $200k of his trust already and says she'll have to think about it. That is indication #1 that PJC is not as rich as he seems (I don't count the stealing incidents because that can indicate something more than just needing money). I mean, based on drink prices alone, I don't think $200k is all that impressive to go through. We're not given the amount of time, but anyway, whatever. The fact that his mother and he are treating those numbers like big numbers tells me that they're not all that rich. That may be a lot of money to me, but it shouldn't be to them. I just watched "Selling New York" last night on HGTV, and those people didn't even bother haggling over a 2.3 million price tag, they just paid it and moved in, netting their realtor a one-time paycheck about four times the median NYC annual salary. (Further reading reveals that they may not have paid the full price, so who knows. You mean reality tv isn't real?!? Say it ain't so! Either way, PJC isn't going to be doing a cross-over episodes for that series.)

When PJC's deluded mother agrees to give him half the amount he asks, he immediately rents a luxury hotel suite and calls up his friends to help him spend his hard-earned cash. He has a bubble bath drawn and champagne popped while a personal shopper brings him a couple racks of clothing to browse. Then of course they go out on the town and he buys rounds of drinks for his friends and shots for random hot guys in the vicinity. I'm worn out just thinking about what a hectic day he must have had.

Next up on the blog front - I'm in the process of two different reading groups with my friend Linda, so I'm thinking I might write up some thoughts on those. That's assuming I can get myself to sit still for a couple of hours and read. I'm a fast reader, but not when I'm actually trying to remember what I've read and think about it. Then I have to stop and make notes and high-light and look things up, etc etc. I'm a few chapters into Moby Dick, but I need to move it along if I want to be able to take part in any meaningful discussions. That's right, from trash tv to Moby Dick. Diversity, that's how I roll.

Autotune the Universe

I could spin this particular topic off into so many tangents that we could have a 3 day conference on it. I'm sure someone out there already has. One of the tangents is social media. As a brief blip of a comment, I have many opinions on the extent and nature of social media's change on human interaction. The sum of which is this: tell it to the 19th century. Every major advance in technology has changed us and yet changed nothing really. Facebook, Chatroulette, the party line - just the latest stop on the line.

The one social media/internet tool that I'm focusing on for the point of today's discussion is Youtube. I find it amusing the way in which social gatherings frequently devolve into everyone showing the randomness they've found on YouTube (or the internet in general, but it's frequently a viral video of sorts). I remember taking a fall break trip to NYC and sitting in my friend's basement while someone showed us videos of 4 foot long centipedes that would peel off cave ceilings to digest bats. Urgh, that still haunts me. Around Halloween, my roommate and I would watch numerous "ghost" videos. I've shown everyone I know this in order to explain why I couldn't sustain meaningful relationships for 3 years.

Do you see how these tangents are going to come back around to autotune? Yeah, me neither. Let's see how we can bring this all together. Most of this topic is interwoven with my time spent searching Youtube the other day. I was spurred by a video/song sent to me by Jersey that featured a very excellent cover of "Hey Ya".

1. Cover Songs

I spent a good portion of a day on Youtube, looking for cover versions of popular songs. Anyone who knows me knows that I have an affinity for cover songs. I especially love when something completely different is done with it, in particular when rap songs are turned into softly sung acoustics (i.e. Ben Fold's cover of Bitches Ain't Shit (nsfw), Jenny Owen Youngs doing Hot in Herre). It's like the musical equivalent of drag. Wow, yeah. I just wrote that, but I totally agree with it and it makes me understand more about my love of covers. I've read enough about drag in gender theory texts to know the main tenets. In theory, it's a hyped up "performance" of what it is to be a man or woman. It's an homage in exaggeration. Drag makes it clear what is great about the gender but you can also see what's ridiculous about it. I think that there's something more authentic about gender (and cover songs) when performed. Maybe authentic isn't the word I'm looking for - I'm struggling to find the word, but basically everyone knows that these actions are put on, purposeful. Because you're not getting the popular song that was formed and manipulated by a million executives and put out into the mainstream on their terms, and you're not getting gender as performed by the person who was molded and shaped into those behaviors from birth. Ok, I love this analogy, but I really am going to take it back to cover songs and quit attempting to parallel everything. I think cover songs mostly show you just how good a song is. Even when it's performed with a different voice, tempo, accompaniment, the bones of the song are so good that they translate. It's an embarrassing story, but maybe it proves my point: I heard the Johnny Cash version of "Hurt" first. I wasn't a Nine Inch Nails fan. Loving the song, I put the lyrics in my AIM profile and attributed them to Johnny Cash. You know, the little profile box you used to express yourself before Myspace/Facebook/Twitter expanded the franchise to include farm animals? Always looking for a way to make fun of me, one of my friends pointed out that I was quoting Trent Reznor. Oops.

2. The Talent Pool

Naturally, my searches branched out into the stars of Youtube, the people who post hundreds of videos of them singing in their bathrooms or on their ratty looking futons. Maybe they'll get a record deal, or a Superbowl commercial, but for the most part they're producing music with pretty basic technology for no money in an environment that will get them seen by the internet, but maybe not the world at large. There are a lot of talented people on there. And sure, some of them have some decent recording equipment. And maybe they're even working musicians, as small time performers or instructors or whatever. The point is, all of these people are less well known than the person who come in 8th place on American Idol, and yet some of them are much more talented than the people who come in first.

That's the nature of one of my tangents, and it's one that I know tons of people have spoken about before. Since I have had an on/off viewing of American Idol, this is one of the rare years I've tuned in for the full show, and seeing what I have seen, I feel the need to comment. It's a love/hate relationship that I have with reality tv. No one with any passing acquaintance with musically talented people would believe that this show is actually looking for or finding talent the majority of the time. Anyone who hangs out with people actually working as singers would know that there is a very large pool of people who can hold a tune and look good doing it. These same people get rejected from shows like American Idol. Sometimes it's because their story isn't interesting enough. Ding! That would be clue number one that no one is looking for talent. The other reason may be that the show purports to take someone more raw who has no training in music, just a love of it, and give them the chance to pursue it in a way they can't or don't already do in their daily lives. Ok, that one I'll take. And maybe, if you had 24 people with perfect pitch on the show, the show would be less entertaining. I find that hard to believe that people would rather hear awful performances than celebrate an abundance of talent, but maybe that's the reason I'm not a reality tv producer. Like I said, most people know that this is what tv does, but I worry that there's still a lot of people who think that all 24 of those people represent the super-talented cross-section of America, and that's where they get the delusion that they can actually sing and possibly make it on the show. Hence the painful auditions of delusional people. Also, I blame karaoke.

This can also go the other way, though. For one, people are used to hearing studio versions the vast majority of the time - on the radio, their ipods, and even in concerts where lip-sync is heavily utilized. So people forget what it sounds like for real people to really sing. Studio versions are done in multiple takes, layering and piecing together hundreds of sessions, applying tricks (like Autotune) to make it sound cleaner than the real, live person ever could. How this affects American Idol is that sometimes people are not impressed by a performance that is actually pretty good. If you were to put Taylor Swift on that stage with no production tricks and limited rehearsal time...well, just watch her performance on the Grammys really.

I'm not sure where the rest of that tangent was going, so let's just move on to my Autotune dilemma.

3. Autotune

Autotune, if you're not familiar, is applied both in studio and live situations. It corrects the sound of the pitch to the nearest note, making flat and sharp notes right in line with where they should be (see this awesome explanation featuring Weird Al here - see, I've been on Youtube a lot lately). Although I've heard my sister complain that she wished Glee was less Autotuned, I'm not sure that most people can tell the difference between a performance that is or isn't "real". I quote that word because the industry has been applying all sorts of technology to make sound better quality for years, so who is to say what is real or not? I guess I would draw the line between advancements that make the sound you hear on the cd more like the live, true voice of the performer in person, and those that distort it to make it sound better than it actually is.

This is the dilemma I'm facing - I can't tell the difference between something that has been Autotuned and what hasn't, unless they're using more of the obvious effects of the device which make it sound robotic. So if I enjoy a song, does it make a difference? I can appreciate live music, I can enjoy the imperfections of Youtube stars, I love Broadway singers who always sound more perfect than humanly possible, and I like albums that include lies. It's an odd moral dilemma, but not a unique one. Prior to autotune, knowing that Britney Spears couldn't actually sing didn't stop me from singing along to her songs, dancing to them in clubs and college basements, etc. The songs were still good, even if they weren't "real". And yet something about this latest trend offends me, because it's not as obvious of a lie as Britney Spears was. When Britney sang live, you could tell because it sucked. When someone uses Autotune at a live performance and sounds great, you have no way of knowing whether or not they're actually talented. And since you can't tell the difference, it feels like a betrayal.

What I wish would happen is a division between artists we recognize as real, and those that are more performers. It's not possible, but I wish there was a difference. Performers who can't actually sing can get MTV awards, but not Grammys. Something like that. Or just have people make studio albums that are overproduced, and then have drag queens lip-sync those songs during live events. Then everyone knows what is fake and what is real and we all can enjoy the spectacle without questioning our perceptions of talent and reality.

To access my current list of Youtube favorite videos, go here. It includes all manner of videos I've added to my favorites list lately, but you should be able to see my top 6. If you only waste a little bit of time on the internet today, I really recommend you watch those videos.

Not This, But That: An Interlude

I started writing up a blog that was going to be a mish-mashed combination of topics such as American Idol, autotune and Youtube artists. I'm still writing it in fact, so I offer this mini-entry as an apology. I think I may have to go to a regular schedule of just two or three days a week so that I get a format and stick to it. The Oscars threw me off that plan last week. I might continue working on the entry for a couple of days and start with the schedule on Monday or Tuesday, depending on whether I decide to do Tues-Thurs or Mon-Wed-Fri. We'll see. Until then, I wanted to show you the following video.

Why? Because part of my article brought up drag. Which got me thinking of that episode of RuPaul's drag race I caught last week, in which one of the queens imitated Carol Channing, to my utter delight. If you can catch an episode of it, it's great.

"Vietnamese" Vegetarian Curry Soup

Again, Weight Watchers attempts to label a watered-down diet recipe made with ingredients that you can easily find in normal grocery store as being somehow authentically ethnic (I had doubts about the coconut milk, but success! It was harder to find orzo in our local grocery than it was to find coconut milk. Weird.)

I had a bit of a stumbling block with this recipe as it called for vegetable broth. I'm a "reluctant omnivore", meaning I wouldn't mind being vegetarian, but it's hard to do when you're attempting to cook for an entire family and diet and not break said family's bank at the store. So at this point I would normally be quite willing to throw in some chicken broth and call it a day. But we didn't have any, and I'd hit my weekly limit for how many times I was willing to go to the grocery store for some random necessary item. The more I thought about it, the more I was unwilling to potentially alter the taste of the dish. And then I realized that we had all manner of miscellaneous vegetables with no immediate plans. How hard could vegetable broth really be? Not hard at all, I learned.

Collect vegetables. Chop.

Put in pot. Throw in a little olive oil, parsley, saute up the onions and such (we had a couple of leeks that weren't getting used for anything else, so that was perfect). Let it boil for an hour.

Strain. The directions I had said something about cheesecloth, but it wasn't necessary, especially with this smaller strainer that we had.

I grabbed the first handy thing, which happened to be the crock pot, and strained it into that. I let it cool off, and then put it in tupperware containers and froze everything I didn't immediately need. The only thing I wish I could have done differently is the freezing process - I had read somewhere that it's really handy to freeze it into ice cube trays, and then a few can be tossed into anything you need. Sadly/Fortunately, we have an ice maker, so that was a no-go.

So that was Part 1/Day 1 of this recipe. Since that took a long time, the actual recipe was going to need to wait until the next day.

First a few notes on how the recipe turned out. Initially I wasn't enjoying it. I think I expected it to look and taste exactly like a yellow curry soup from a Thai restaurant, since the ingredients seemed pretty much congruent. It doesn't taste like that, but after a bit of an adjustment (a bit more salt and pretty much tripling the amount of curry, plus adding a dash to every bowl I've heated up from the leftovers), it is very tasty in its own way. Apparently the recipe authors totally doubt my commitment to Sparkle Motion. I mean curry.

The ingredients gather together, awaiting their boiled fate. In the back, you may notice cilantro. Cut to 5 years from now, where I enter a rehab with other foodies addicted to fresh herbs. Notice the pretty-labeled coconut milk that I found in our international aisle. The recipe technically called for cremini mushrooms, so I thought I was missing out on something by substituting baby bellas. Turns out that creminis are pretty typical-looking mushrooms, somewhere in between a portobella and button. Here I thought I was being deprived because I can never use the mushrooms they ask for, and it's true that we don't have shitakes or anything, but really it's just a fancy name for the normal fare.

Like many awesome recipes, it starts with onion and garlic on the bottom of the pan. I think the ginger was in there, too. Fresh ginger probably isn't necessary, but it's nice sometimes.

Yeah, that pot sees a lot of action. That one and its pot-mates are supremely good at even cooking and non-stickage. After that it's just a matter of throwing in the chopped ingredients and broth, saving the coconut milk for post-simmer incorporation.

And so on, and so forth. This is why I love soups. Get everything chopped up and it's basically a matter of 1+1=delicious.

Serve with a delicious beverage that is of a color not found in nature (Crystal Light Strawberry Tangerine). Or you know, water. If you want to be boring like that. Like I said, I ended up just scooping a bunch more curry in there to make it more flavorful.

Thanks for sticking with me through the crazy extensiveness of this recipe.

Oscars 2010: Post-Show Wrap-Up

I promise, it will be at least a few months before you have to hear me talk about Oscars so much again. I'll still probably talk about movies, but I'm just as likely to discuss my latest re-watching of 17 Again as any award-worthy film (so shoot me - what else is on tv on a Saturday night?).

The Ceremony - The Bad

General consensus is that it was a kind of dull show this year. I had fun watching anyway, for various reasons, but the biggest show in Hollywood shouldn't mean that everyone there takes a break from entertaining us for the night. We, the public, reward you with billions of our dollars so that you can have one of the best jobs in the world. You don't have to be a scripted character, but sweet jeebus at least prepare a witty anecdote or a moving story with which to accept your award. I wasn't really rooting for Sandra Bullock on an artistic level, but I was at least happy she won because she gives a good and entertaining speech rather than a laundry list. Your producer knows that you owe him, as does the casting agent and the man who gets your coffee. That doesn't mean they need or deserve a mention in a list of other names rendered meaningless as you read them off in front of a microphone. Five seconds later only the star and that person will even remember that they were mentioned, and you have a burden to the other million people watching to do something more relevant than that.

Other problems with the ceremony included a corny opening number with Neil Patrick Harris. Is it required that he be a part of everything on television for the next five years? I love him, but seriously. What happened to the old film-montage openings, digitally inserting the hosts into various films of that year? Is only Billy Crystal allowed to do that? If so, bring him back. I love a big gay dance number as much as the next person, actually, much more so than the next person given the fact that I reside in Indiana, but it was corny. Go back to doing what you do best, Hollywood - bring back the montage. Leave the dance numbers to the Tony Awards. I thought Steve and Alec were pretty good hosts, but like other commentators, I'm going to start rooting for the show to be hosted (and written) by Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. next year, who were by far the best presenters in the history of presenters.

Then we have James Taylor, singing "In My Life" during a death montage that felt like it was on fast forward and didn't include Bea Arthur or Farrah Fawcett, as other friends and commentators have pointed out. How does that idea even look good on paper? The only thing I was thankful for was that they didn't do like some of the previous awards shows have done with the video production choices. In previous shows this season, they merely videotaped the big-screen montage that was being shown in the theater, meaning that I couldn't read half the names put on the screen because of how small they appeared on my medium-sized tv.

Let's see, what else was awful? I know Ben Stiller is being given kudos for appearing in full Avatar makeup and making lewd comments about his tail to James Cameron, but I refuse to acknowledge that he was even at the ceremony. I have blocked it from my memory.

One way they could have avoided going over on the ceremony was to not include that horror-movie montage. Not really necessary, just trying to tap into the latest craze, which is irrelevant to the Oscars because they so rarely get nominated.

I know everyone is against the interpretive dance number. I'll admit, it wasn't as good as I was expecting. I'm probably only defending it because I love the League of Extraordinary Dancers and the alumni of So You Think You Can Dance. Ugh. So let's just pretend that it didn't happen so that I can still be properly excited about both of those things in the future, ok? Besides, it still wasn't half as bad as some of the other choices they've made regarding the music categories in previous years. Am I the only one who remembers something involving seriously bad interpretive dancing and maybe even William Shatner? Or was that a fever dream? I'm not getting any good feedback from Google searches on that front. They also didn't make the people involved with the original song categories perform on stage (worked out great for Robin Williams and South Park, not so great for Amy Adams and Enchanted), and they didn't ask Beyonce to perform every song as if she were the only relevant songstress of the decade. There just isn't a really good way to get music into the production sometimes. They need to take into consideration what the nominees are before making those choices. This year probably would have been a good year to have people perform the songs. Anika Noni Rose, Colin Farrell, Marion Cotillard - they probably could have pulled off a performance. Or whatever - pull in Lady Gaga to do "The Weary Kind". That would have entertained me at least.

The Ceremony - The Good

Anyone else notice a major party missing from the ceremony? No Jack Nicholson this year! It felt like the last couple of years were just people constantly talking to him, about him, etc. It was getting old. Although, this is also kind of a negative, because it means that all of the jokes and attention that would have focused on him instead deflected to Meryl Streep and George Clooney. Streep was affable and entertaining to watch react to the jabs, Clooney looked like was pissed off or seriously ill. I thought he acted fine in the brief moment I saw him on the red carpet, so I don't know what happened, but he looked really tired during the ceremony and barely able to muster a smile.

Gabby Sidibe. Confident, sassy, and yet appropriately awed at the fact that she was sharing screen time with Meryl and got a lauded introduction by Oprah.

Again, Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr.

Most of all, the John Hughes tribute. A few weeks ago, One Tree Hill did an homage episode to Hughes. I know, cheesy - both that I watch One Tree Hill with regularity and that I loved the episode. I'm not going to say that all teen programming is a result of Hughes career, but what Judd Nelson said last night was right on - "He had a gift for treating young people not as children, but as developing adults." He was very influential on my adolescence and the tribute had me sobbing early on.

The Prediction Pool

My little pool consisted of my best friend (Momo), my law school roommate (Jersey) and her boyfriend - all extremely knowledgeable and passionate about movies. I'm sure they were in other pools, but I wanted to get the four of us back in the same pool we had last year in order to offer us a chance at a rematch against Momo. The pre-show rivalry was a bit intense and in the end, Momo came out with the win again. I advised him to stay out of New Jersey for a while. As usual, I lost. I'm never surprised that I lose. I can see exactly where I went wrong, and in every instance it was a situation where I picked who I wanted to win rather than who I knew would win. I read the articles and the analyses. It was almost a certainty that Bullock would pull of the Best Actress win, but I wanted Gabby, so I chose her. I also had indications that Bigelow would pull in the directing award, but I ignored my inclination at the last minute. It seems an anti-feminist thing to do, but in truth it was a very feminist choice. I pretended she was a man. If she was a man, would she have won? Maybe. It was an excellent movie, a challenge for any director and handled brilliantly. But I think part of the reason she won was also politics and the desire to see history made. It's fine, I don't mind it, but I thought Tarantino deserved recognition for his work on Basterds. Of course, that was possibly a political choice as well - James Cameron put an incredible amount of work into Avatar. But I didn't want to see him get up and make a douchy speech like his Titanic one, so that was a no-go for me. A lot of the categories were ones that pretty much everyone in my pool failed - the shorts and the sound categories were especially harsh on my pool members. Sometimes the only thing that saved me from an even bigger loss was the fact that the expected winner that others had chosen didn't win either - Adapted Screenplay going to Push, for instance. I had chosen In the Loop, some of the others had Up in the Air, the expected winner. Only Jersey chose the winner on that one, and she ended up in second place. The decisive factors in Momo's win were probably editing, costume and score. No one else got editing correct, and Jersey didn't get costume or score, so that allowed him to pull ahead in the end, with 15/24 correct. Like I said, it was not a good year. We *all* got Best Picture wrong.

For more entertaining commentary, be sure to check out the collection of slideshows put together on Television Without Pity, one of my favorite websites ever (each word goes to a different recap or discussion).

Oscars 2010: Official Picks

Unexpected yard work this morning and a good long talk with Momo means that I don't really have much time to do a wrap up on the other categories. I still have my initial-viewing notes on a lot of them, though, so I may share those as a filler sometime in the near future. For now, I'll just post my predictions and we'll see how I do, huh? Rivalry is intense in the little pool that I've been in the last couple of years. Threats have been made. Like the Oscars, we may have to change how we tabulate the scores in the future. Whatever, I never win. I know I'm going to be wrong on a couple of these, but I would rather root for the person I want to see win sometimes rather than actually be right.

Best Picture: Avatar
Best Director: Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds
Best Actor: Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart
Best Actress: Gabourey Sidibe for Precious
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds
Best Supporting Actress: MoNique for Precious
Best Original Screenplay: Inglourious Basterds: Quentin Tarantino
Best Adapted Screenplay: In the Loop: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche
Cinematography: Avatar: Mauro Fiore
Editing: Inglourious Basterds
Art Direction: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Costume Design: The Young Victoria
Original Score: Fantastic Mr. Fox
Original Song: Crazy Heart: T-Bone Burnett, Ryan Bingham("The Weary Kind")
Best Makeup: Star Trek: Barney Burman, Mindy Hall, Joel Harlow
Best Sound Mixing: Inglourious Basterds: Michael Minkler, Tony Lamberti, Mark Ulano
Best Sound Editing: Avatar: Christopher Boyes, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle
Best Visual Effects: Avatar: Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham, Andy Jones
Best Animated Feature Film: Fantastic Mr. Fox: Wes Anderson
Best Foreign Language Film: Un prophete (France)
Best Documentary Feature: Food, Inc.: Robert Kenner, Elise Pearlstein
Best Documentary Short: The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (TV): Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert
Best Live Action Short: The New Tenants: Joachim Back, Tivi Magnusson
Best Animated Short: Wallace and Gromit in 'A Matter of Loaf and Death (TV): Nick Park

Oscars 2010: Supporting Actor/Actress

The supporting categories are the ones that are the closest thing to a lock this year. I'll try to keep this brief since my predictions coincide with who I want to see win and there's not much left to say except to sum up some of the other highlights of the year.

Supporting Actor

It is unbelievable to me that Christopher Waltz wasn't really known until this moment in time. I thought maybe he had just done things overseas that I just wasn't aware of, but from his wiki article it seems that he was a German tv actor before this. Now, maybe these shows are like, the Lost of Germany and that's how he came to the attention of Tarantino, but it's still a big leap. I want to say that he's too talented to be mostly a character actor, but I'm not sure that would be a bad thing. Besides, can you really be typecast as a slightly fruity homicidal genius? Only in the Hollywood of my dreams. Either way, the role is perfect and I can't imagine what the movie would have been without his contribution. It takes Daniel Day-Lewis levels of talent to create the layers upon layers of personality that Waltz managed to convey. Evil artistic genius.

I said yesterday that I was impressed with Matt Damon in Invictus. I think mostly that I'm impressed by how much I have enjoyed Damon's career. He manages to be a believable action star, but then plays second fiddle to Clooney and Pitt in Ocean's 11, makes cameos in Kevin Smith movies, jokes around with the likes of Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Kimmel, plays gritty and corrupt in The Departed, etc, etc. And now the inspirational racial tension movie. I think he does well with the material. It could easily be cliche, but from him I find it believable and touching.

He's not really my type, but I'd do him if that's what it took to get a laugh.

Ok, who else do we have...haven't seen Last Station or Lovely Bones, so that just leaves Woody Harrelson. Talk about someone who is typecast with some regularity. I think some of this nomination may have come from surprise that Harrelson has such depth and range. But it's not all surprise - he really is an excellently complex character in a great movie. I think I was less surprised by how good he was than I was by how much this movie was one of my favorite pre-Oscar viewings. In a movie that basically has grief and sadness as its entire plot, he manages to wring out a few moments that made me feel devastated for him. And it's not even that anything that bad is happening to him. He's basically reacting to someone else's awful story at the time, but he's just displaying all of the emotion that he holds in at every other moment in the few seconds it takes to get another beer from the kitchen. Like I said before, it's hard to watch this kind of stuff when you're depressed about other things, and those few seconds were hard.

Supporting Actress

Talk about funny, how about that comedienne Mo'Nique in her first Oscar nomination? Oh, right. Oscars = sad. There's one big monologue towards the end of the movie, and if that were her only screen time in the entire film, I would still say it was totally warranted. I cry at movies, it's no secret to anyone who has sat through one with me, even when it's a multiple-viewings situation. So when I tell you that I still cry during V for Vendetta, even though I've seen it dozens of times, then you should understand how I was during Precious. I had to struggle, during that monologue in particular, not to do a full-out wail in the middle of the theater. But that wasn't her entire scene, and even in the little things she defined that movie for me. Every time I think of the title to the movie, I hear her voice saying it, yelling it, with a cigarette in her hand and a scarf on her head.

"I'm laughing on the inside because this movie is too goddamned depressing."

Two nominations for the Up in the Air actresses, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick. I adored Vera in The Departed, so I'm happy to see her playing Clooney's female alter-ego in this role. She fools everyone about who she really is, and finding out at the end makes all the memories of her tainted by the hindsight. It's like when you get broken up with in a horrible, nasty way, and it's suddenly impossible to believe that you ever thought they were a decent person. Hopefully I haven't revealed too much so that it taints your own viewing of the film. Ah, who am I kidding, only a couple of people are reading this anyway and they've already seen the movie. So, Kendrick. I'd like to say that I saw her talent coming from a mile away, from the moment she said, "I know, right?" after Mike calls Bella funny in the first Twilight movie. To be honest, I did like her in the movies, but that's easy enough to say when she gets 5 minutes of screen time compared to 46 minutes of Kristen Stewart's twitching eyeballs. Before now I never would have envisioned her for this movie, but I'm happy that she has it. She plays the part of high-strung overachiever very well, but I look forward to seeing what else she might be able to do in the future. A good showing for a first nomination, though.

Could Anna play Bella? Maybe. But Kristen definitely could not have played Natalie. So it worked out for the best.

You know, the more I think about that movie, the more I think I was too hard on Clooney yesterday. I was remembering the first part of the movie, when it's just him being him. I forgot how well he played off the women in the film, how much their characters challenged and reflected his in unexpected ways. Sorry, George.

Do you remember last year at the Oscars, when Kate Winslet won and she was naming off her fellow nominees and she had a brain fart and couldn't remember that Angelina Jolie was the other one nominated because hardly anyone had seen The Changeling, let alone thought Jolie should be nominated for it? At least, that's how I felt. And Penelope Cruz is my brain fart this year. I can rattle off all the others, but I forget that Cruz is even nominated. I didn't like Nine. I found it long and boring and self-indulgent. It should have been something I liked - it was a musical, it had dream-sequence numbers, Daniel Day-Lewis, Rob Marshall, etc, etc. I fully expected to like it, but I had inklings that I might not when I found out that the cast included Fergie. She wasn't awful and the song was kinda catchy, but there's just something I find completely unattractive about her - the combination of her demeanor, lack of ability to perform live, fashion, the face that looks like the end result of an experiment in plastic surgery techniques, I don't like it. What were we talking about? Oh right, Cruz. Actually, her acting was some of the best of the film, but that doesn't save it from being craptastic.

I said it the other day - Crazy Heart is a great movie and you should see it. I wasn't surprised that Maggie Gyllenhaal was good, but sometimes it's hard to tell because in the same way that Fergie is inexplicably unattractive to me, I like Gyllenhaal for reasons I can't always explain. Except for the fact that I have to constantly review how to spell her last name. Maybe its her hipster vibe, her indie choices in film roles, her relation to Jake, or her marriage to Peter Sarsgaard, whom I have had an intensified crush on ever since seeing An Education. Whatever it is, I like her. But I think this role could have been phoned in or taken to a place that would have been annoying, and I admire her for avoiding that. She's part groupie (and it is only the charisma of Jeff Bridges keeping that from being an unpalatable thought), part southern single mother, part alcoholic-enabler. But she gives those roles backbone and prevents them from being a pitiable existence.

So that's that. Predictions are for the heavy-favorites, Waltz and Mo'Nique, and I wouldn't ask for anyone else to win. Others had good or great performances, but those two can't be topped.

Science!

It's a Rube Goldberg machine if done by collaborative effort between art, music and engineering students.

Oscars 2010: Best Actor/Actress

It's sometimes hard to watch Oscar-nominated films when you're already depressed. Even if they're ultimately uplifting, most of the time you still spend a couple of hours getting your heart broken before getting to the happy parts. I still don't think I've emotionally recovered from Precious, and that was almost 2 months ago. I wasn't planning on even bothering with something like The Princess and the Frog, but I needed something lighter the other day. It was better than I expected. That's for another day, though. I want to go ahead and knock out some other major categories. There are a couple movies I'm still missing, but I just don't think I'm going to be able to make it to whatever random theater they happen to be showing at in the next few days. I'll definitely make a note to catch them when they come out on dvd, but they're not going to affect my choices in these categories, for sure. Why anyone would bet against the leading contenders in the supporting categories, I don't know.

Best Actor

Every one of these performances was great (I didn't see A Single Man, but I bet it was just as good as the others). And actually, I thought Ben Foster was so good in The Messenger that he could have been included as well, in a year that did not have as much competition. I don't know whose place he would take, though. Except perhaps George Clooney. Now, don't get me wrong, I love the Clooney. It was a perfect role for him and he lived up to the script and his co-stars. But that's just it - he lived up to my expectations and nothing more. I expect him to be good, and he is, but for some reason that equation doesn't leave me feeling any differently than I did before the movie. I could say that the same equation happens with Meryl Streep, and yet every time I see her performances I get a little giddy and I give thanks that she exists. Perhaps it's because I get the impression that Clooney is playing himself 9 times out of 10. The rare situation that I don't get that feeling is when the Coen brothers are involved. Burn After Reading is my favorite Clooney role ever. I love Clooney, I'm glad he got the nomination, the film deserves recognition, etc, etc. I just don't think it was the best of the bunch.

"You don't like me. You really don't like me!"

Morgan Freeman was great as Nelson Mandela, although I would need a speech expert to tell me whether or not his accent sucked. Same goes for Matt Damon. Since I don't know enough about South African accents to be distracted, it was a non-issue for me. Freeman is just the master of tone and inflection, accent or no. I would listen to him read poetry all day long. Especially the poem behind the title - Invictus. It's kind of Dead Poets Society-level heavy-handedness, but I can't help but get suckered into that kind of stuff. Listening to Freeman do voice-overs takes me back to Shawshank Redemption, and I get happy all over again. Truth be told, though, the movie made some editing choices that I didn't agree with and I was distracted from Freeman's performance by how well I thought Damon did. Not the front-runner, but better than some of Freeman's choices in the last few years, so kudos for that.

I spoke a little bit about The Hurt Locker the other day and how much I enjoyed it. Since Jeremy Renner was the vast majority of the movie, I think it's safe to say he was excellent. The movie rested on his ability to engage an audience and make us care about what was motivating his actions. He did that very well. The way his part was written, I think it would have been easy to slip over into arrogant jerk and eliminate a portion of the audience that would have sympathized with him otherwise.

Finally we have Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart. It's hard to think of Bridges without thinking of The Big Lebowski, and is it just me or did he look just as rough then as he does now?

"Say what you will about my wrinkles, man, just check out my wavy locks of hair."

I mean, add some more gray and a few more wrinkles, but he hasn't changed much in 12 years. Normally people say that when people still look as young as they did way back when. But he actually looks just as old as he did back then.

Same facial hair, same great hair. Substitute McClure's Whiskey for White Russians and it's basically The Dude: The Later Years.

Now, this is a picture taken from the film in which he looks better than he does throughout most of it. When you portray an alcoholic old country star, you get to go onto set with stains on your shirt, un-brushed hair and without a shower. Where do I sign up? I feel like I can be a bit tangential in my review of how Bridges fares in this film because in the end what I'm going to say is that you should see this movie. At the end of all this awards-show talk, I'll probably do a wrap up of movies from this field of contenders that I would recommend you make an effort to see. Suffice it to say that he earned the nomination and will probably be walking away with the statue. [Side-bar: Does anyone else with a law school education find it extraordinarily difficult to type the word "statue" without it turning into "statute"? Every time. Thank goodness for backspace keys.] He was boozy, charming and talented, which is just how I like my actors. The Dude for the win.

Best Actress

Here's the thing - I enjoyed the Blind Side. I did. I wanted to see it, because, as has been said before, I love an inspirational sports movie. I saw A League of Their Own as a child and never looked back. I also like Sandra Bullock. I will actually watch The Net when it comes on tv, that's how much I like her (of course I also saw Sneakers as a child and never really got over the techno-savvy thriller movies, so that might be an explanation). I guess what I'm really getting at is the Best Picture nomination for Blind Side, which is not really at issue here but still deserves a mention for its ridiculousness. Often the movies that most of America spends money to see and those that are part of awards shows are a Venn diagram with very little overlap. I complain about the fact that America has crap taste, but I try to be better than that. I took a wine class in college, and the professor was a kindly older man in his last year of teaching whose take on wine was this - people like what they like. You can have an expert rate it and tell you it's worth a couple hundred dollars and scores a 99/100 on their taste test, but an individual person still may not like it. If a person likes Mad Dog 20/20, that's their preference and it is not up to us to tell them they're wrong. I say that I try to think like that. I often fail. Especially when someone out there looked at a bottom line and decided that they could actually make Big Momma and make a profit. Not once, not twice, but 3 times.

I don't know what racism is anymore.

I've decided that Linda does a better job of summing up what's wrong with the Blind Side on her blog, and she does it without rambling off-topic about fortified wine beverages, so be sure you read her take on it all.

I guess I should talk about Bullock's acting, since that's technically the category. But I don't think this nomination is about her acting. It's rewarding her for being who she is. And for that, I think she deserves an award. I mean, have you heard about the joking death threats she and Meryl have been sending back and forth? It's been an enjoyable side show. So if she walks away with it, whatever. I'll get over it, and she'll be able to put "Academy award winning" in front of her name, which is only foretelling of future greatness if she continues to make decent choices (see: Renee Zellweger)(also see: All About Steve. Poor Sandra kinda has an Eddie Murphy-Norbit situation with that one).

I'm over talking about this. Meryl Streep was good, but that's because her name is Meryl Streep. And the movie isn't entitled Mamma Mia. Enough said.

Gabourey Sidibe is incredible and I'm sure you don't need to look far to find a source praising that movie and her role in it. In addition, she is the current celebrity that I would most like to meet in person. Everything I've read about her paints her as a wittier-than-average first time nominee. Given the funny, confident, sassy young woman that comes out in her interviews, it is even more amazing to see what she pulled off on film. I said something to Momo either right after I saw Precious, or perhaps after I read the book and he had seen the movie, that what is interesting about the character is how much of a clean slate it is at first. The character (from both the book and the movie) doesn't really set the stage for you emotionally. She doesn't tell you how she's feeling. I think there are a couple of possibilities for why it seems that way, one of which being that you're so horrified by what her life is like that it's left blank so that you can deal with your own emotions. It also may just be a portrayal of the personality of the perpetually abused, where expressiveness just leads to more problems. And that does seem to be what Sidibe alludes to in her interviews on how she interpreted the portrayal. Either way, it's only towards the end of the movie where she is able to speak up and demonstrate that she does have a personality that she's finally free to show. Ugh, seriously, I'm getting a little depressed just thinking about that movie again.

Seeing An Education made me finally understand why Carey Mulligan's been popping up on my celebrity and fashion websites with more frequency. She was lovely and charming and I think the only appropriate word for her is ingenue. I remember seeing the trailer for this movie long ago and making a note to see it, but I didn't expect to love it as much as I did. Mulligan did a wonderful job of playing an intelligent girl who is naive and enamored.

Didn't get around to The Last Station, but I'm sure Helen Mirren was wonderful. If I had to predict, I would say that this award will go to Bullock. If I had to admit who I really want to see get it? Sidibe. I don't want this to be the high point of her career, and I hope that people find and create roles that will show all she can do. An Oscar win might help her be even more memorable. If not, then at least her career high moment was everything it could possibly be.

Oscar 2010: Best Picture/Best Direction

Perhaps it would be better to lead up to the big categories just like they do in the ceremonies, but I'm going to need to do things backwards. I would have been upset with myself if I hadn't seen The Hurt Locker come Oscar night, because it's a major contender in multiple categories. But if I don't get around to all of the costume awards, well it's not like I'll be out of the loop when it comes time to talk around the water cooler the next day. Not that I have a water cooler to gather around. Or coworkers. Or a job for that matter. But if I did, well then, I would want to be prepared. Enough about my depression, let's talk movies!

Best Picture/Best Director

There's a lot to discuss in these categories due to the expansion of the Best Picture category to 10 entries. (An issue that I'm usually willing to discuss at length, but I think I'd rather just get over it and move along to other things. Perhaps I'll rant on that later this week.) I'm going to discuss the two categories together because, well, for one, all of the Best Direction entries are included in the Picture category. In addition, I think in a year when there are two front-runners that are equally strong in very different ways, the Academy should split the difference and throw one category to each (history demonstrates that they don't often do this, but I think there have been years where it would have been appropriate - 2004's tug of war between Million Dollar Baby and Aviator for one). It's not impossible that something other than Avatar and The Hurt Locker will come away the winner (I know many people are pulling for Inglourious Basterds, and I may be one of them in the end), but if I were to place odds on it, I think those will be the two to beat.

Before I run through the merits of several of the other films in these categories, let's get my favorites and the likely winners out of the way. I think it's going to go to Avatar for the big win. Now, do I want to see James Cameron get up there and be all the douche that he can be? No, not really. But if we want to talk about a movie that captured the attention of everyone, from critics to movie snobs to people who pay to see Eddie Murphy in a fat suit, then Avatar is that movie. I think everything came together perfectly on Avatar - the acting, the story, the technology, and I think that should be rewarded. I know The Hurt Locker has been garnering awards left and right in some of the other awards shows overseas, but I think the momentum is going to carry Avatar through to the big win.

With my split-the-categories theory, this means The Hurt Locker will likely give Kathryn Bigelow a well-deserved directing award. I was surprised by how much I loved The Hurt Locker. I think it's safe to say that I'm tired of the war. The real one as well as the thousands of portrayals of it on film and documentaries. I'm war-weary. I don't even gravitate towards that many war or action movies, but I feel saturated by their existence all the same. That being said, I loved The Hurt Locker.

"I thought I threw my ice-scraper in the trunk. Now where could it be?"

So little happens in 2 hours, but you're glued to every tense moment of a bomb-disarming squad in the middle of Iraq. There's very little plot, and yet the plot is huge and complex. But it's not because there's a lot of dialogue or a lot of characters, it's because humans themselves are so complex, especially in a situation such as war. When you get down into just two or three people and immerse them in constant tension, you're rewarded with complexity and comprehension of their personalities. Every little thing that person does matters, and spirals off into a thousand more questions of motivation and human reasoning. It was tense, and touching, and I thought it did a good job of immersing you into the constant suspicion and tension for those soldiers. It didn't delve into the big political questions, because that's a different movie. It didn't extrapolate on how that tension translates into a home life, because that would be a different movie as well. It was the story of a couple guys doing their job. Their incredibly difficult and dangerous job. Pulling together that story and getting the performances from the actors that she did warrants an award for Bigelow. (Interesting connection: Two out of the three soldiers who are the focus of the majority of the film are played by Brian Geraghty and Anthony Mackie. Those two were also together as teammates on the Marshall football team in one of my favorite crying-sports movies ever: We Are Marshall. Maybe that's only interesting to me because I liked that movie so much.)

The one movie that I think could, and maybe even should, perform an upset in either one of these categories is Inglourious Basterds. I think the only reason that it's not a stronger contender is due to its odd release date. Maybe everyone underestimated Tarantino and that's why the film wasn't put closer to awards time to make a strong impression on the voters. I don't know. What I do know is that until the awards season started and I saw clips of Basterds during the Globes and the SAG Awards, I had forgotten how amazing I thought that movie was when I saw it initially. Since it's been so long since I've seen it, I'm not going to try to analyze the finer details. Just know that it is Tarantino at his best and it's making me seriously reconsider my desires when it comes to who I would want to win.

If there were an Awesome Mustache category, Brad Pitt would win, hands down.

I think I'll save my discussion of some of the other entries when it comes time to review other categories like writing or cinematography. To sum up, I'm going to say Avatar for the big win, with director going to Bigelow for Hurt Locker. But, with a side bet on Basterds to pull out a surprise in the latter. As for what I want to win - I love Hurt Locker, but I would rather see Basterds get direction. Tarantino did a wonderful job of pulling together a great story and surprising actors and beautiful camera-work. I want to see him get the credit he deserves for that.

[Upon reviewing some of the history of the Best Picture category, it seems that it is fairly rare for a film to win Best Picture when they have no acting nominations. Now, out of my three purported front-runners for Best Picture, the only one that actually has an acting nomination is Basterds, for Christopher Waltz. So either Basterds is going to pull a big surprise and take the Best Picture, or this is just one of those years that is an exception to the rule. I think the latter is going to be true, but reviewing the history makes me wonder about Academy voters and what they'll ultimately choose. It should be noted that I am awful at predicting these things. Probably should have warned you about that at the beginning of this discussion.]

"Cuban Style" Pork and Sweet Potatoes

I don't know Cuban food. I'm willing to wager that most recipe authors for Weight Watchers don't, either. They may have improved since 1974 (what on earth do pimientos and bean sprouts have to do with Polynesia?!?), but they still have a very odd relationship with ingredients and food that I don't have enough education to weigh in on at this time. So the quotes remain. What I do know is this: I enjoy just about any recipe that ends with the words "add a splash of lime and garnish with cilantro". I would buy cilantro air freshener if they made it. Then again, I'd be perpetually hungry if I used something that, and given the fact that I'm using Weight Watchers recipes, it's probably apparent that this is not something I need.

Most of the time, recipes are like movie trailers - I can view them and know from the ingredients involved whether I will enjoy them. It's not perfect, and sometimes I give into peer pressure and end up sitting through "Couples Retreat" wishing for a technical problem so that the bleeding from my eyes and ears will cease, but those times are rare. Plus, unlike movies, when you find a recipe unpalatable you can always makes changes for the next time around that will make it better. I can't go around saying "Ah, next time we see that movie we're going to leave out the Ben Stiller. I think that will prevent it from smelling like rotting vegetables." My entire analogy just fell apart, didn't it?

To sum up, when I saw this recipe I saw that it had cumin and cilantro. Those two ingredients are like the food equivalent of Natalie Portman and Cate Blanchett. It may not be for everyone, but I know I'll enjoy it.

The other ingredients include pork loin, sweet potatoes, green onions and diced tomatoes. Crock pot on low for several hours and then throw in the lime and cilantro at the end. I am not usually a meat eater, and this was, in large proportion, stewed meat and very little else (I think some sort of bean might be very good in there, I'm just not sure which kind yet). But there are times when the rest of the ingredients pull me in and I can't immediately think of an appropriate method of replacing the meat that would leave all the flavor intact. So I don't and I just live with the fact that I'm a reluctant omnivore. The sweet potatoes did not seem to add much of their own flavor because so much else was going on, but I think they were more appropriate than white potatoes would have been (and are better for you, so that's a bonus). With every bite I was getting something a little different. I would get a little cilantro and think of Mexican, Thai food, citrus-scented stir fry dishes. Then I would get some tomatoes and pork and the cumin would come through and it was like an international chili. In fact, that's what I'm going to call it - International Chili. Perhaps I just get stuck on the cumin and I haven't enjoyed it in enough ways to associate it with anything other than chili. But I think for most people that would probably serve as a better description than I'm going to be able to come up with. It's probably not something I'll make too often while living with my family, because my dad doesn't like sweet potatoes (even if they don't really taste like whatever sweet potato dish made him dislike them in the first place). And my sister, while very graciously adventurous and willing to try anything I make, prefers simpler cooking with pasta and potatoes. I do too, but a combination of friends and circumstances make me gravitate towards things that are different. Especially when dieting. When you have to adjust your cooking and leave out things that you would have piled on before, you have to find very strong flavor profiles that you enjoy but that aren't as bad for you. My future kitchen will probably never see real butter, but the herb and spice cabinet is going to have everything I can find in a 100 mile radius. Or whatever size radius that can include a Whole Foods.