RAVE - Hitchcock

I'm not a particular admirer of Alfred Hitchcok, or his films. Yes, he's responsible for some of the most significant thrillers of all time, but they don't, for me, bear watching in adulation now.

But this film wasn't a biopic of his life, or a review of his films. It was the story of his marriage to Alma Reville - played by Helen Mirren - specifically while he was filming Psycho.

I remember the first time I saw Psycho. I was a in my early teens, and saw it one night on TV, while I was babysitting my Uncle and Aunt's 5 year old. Sat in a dark, somewhat unfamiliar house - the young 'un was thankfully tucked up in bed - and Psycho definitely moved me, scared me.

This film wasn't a thriller though. In fact, it was funny. The dialog was superb, and witty. The acting was superlative. Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren deserve Oscars, and no doubt in a couple months they'll be vying for those awards.

The closing lines were typical of the film's wit. 

After the premier of Psycho, Hitchcock says to his wife "I'll never find a leading lady that's a beautiful as you". 

"I've been waiting 46 years to hear those words from you Hitch" she says.

"That, my dear, is why I'm known as the Master of Suspense".

With my better half on a brief trip to the UK, I was free to watch a movie I knew she wouldn't want to see. It didn't in any way make up for her being away, but it was nevertheless an outstanding movie, and a terrific insight into the corpulent director.

If the film is to be believed, he was an incessant eater, sloppy drinker, and an all around grubby grabber of his leading ladies, with a long-suffering wife who tirelessly supported his fragile ego.

Not a bit like Mrs P, but still thoroughly enjoyable stuff.

RAVE - French Blue

Saturdays don't get much better than this. Alright, Manchester United could have got beaten today, and that would have made this particular Saturday even better. But without a United defeat, Saturdays don't get much better than 70 degrees of winter sun in St Helena, Napa Valley.

To be fair, French Blue is worth the ninety minute trip to Napa for lunch only. The menu probably isn't dinner worthy.

But it's a delightfully sunny restaurant, with a suitably relaxed vibe, elegant country decor, and - this is all sounding a bit twee.

Maybe I'm waxing a bit lyrical about a ham and egg sandwich, with extra bacon, a peppery bloody mary and a killer espresso. Wait, how can you wax over-lyrically about ham, egg, and bacon? In a sandwich? And a bloody mary?

Our outing was rounded off with more sun and more wine at Alpha Omega winery. Top-tastic.

RAVE - Quince

Last night, the Nutrisystem diet that I have been carefully following for the past four or five months, the one that has powered me to lose around thirty-five pounds of the world's largest love handles, was strapped to a rocket and shot into outer space.

Yes, it was the visit of Mrs. P's closest friend from the UK that prompted a celebration at the altar of excess, dinner at Spruce.

You can keep your touristy Gary Danko's, and your somber Masa's, your big name chefs and your fifteen minutes of fame-rs. Quince is for me the best restaurant in San Francisco.

It's not just the food - although that is unparalleled - but the service, the comfort, the decor, the experience, even the location - absolutely everything about Quince makes me delighted to have been, and excited to go back.

I won't list our meals - heaven knows there were enough dishes and flavors to give Leo Tolstoy writer's cramp. And I'm trying to avoid saying 'Ambiance', seeing as that word has lost its cachet since cheap advertisers use it to describe everything from airline seats to the average bathroom makeover.

Suffice it to say that dinner was perfect.

RAVE - Life of Pi

Only to be expected of Ang 'Crouching Tiger' Lee, this was an engrossing story, beautifully shot, with plenty of heart-stopping action at sea.

It's the story and a half of young Pi Patel, son of a zoo owner in Pondicherry, India. Faced with an uncertain financial future, Patel Sr. decides to move the family to Canada, and takes his zoo animals with them in a freighter. 

The ship meets a wild storm in the middle of the Pacific, and everyone and everything goes down, except Pi and a few of the animals. He's set adrift on a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a tiger. Sounds like the start of a joke, I know, but the weeks and months on the ocean prove to be an arduous yet life-affirming journey for Pi and the tiger - less so for the unfortunate zebra, hyena, and orangutan.

While gorgeous looking, the film didn't really benefit from 3D, as there are only so many shots of tiger claws and teeth one can stomach lunging out from the screen.

Yes, it was slightly long, and the way the film was a little too nicely tidied up with an explanation of who each lifeboat passenger signified was in some ways unnecessary.

Either way, you won't see another film like this for a while.

RANT - Taken 2

I'm tempted to say "YAWN" and be done with this review.

But surely I can give this a more intelligent put down?

It certainly deserves a warning label. I was convinced half of the scenes actually came straight from Taken 1. The plot virtually did.

I know Liam Neeson is hardly Laurence Olivier, and this role was barely a stretch. But his acting, especially in the scenes with his daughter, and/or ex-wife, and/or his pals, are painful. He steps it up to "just OK" with people he's trying to shoot, slap, or run over, but that's the best I can say or he can do.

I won't bother to tell you any of the story. It's enough to say that it picks up seamlessly from the first film, with no-one seeming to remember what happened in similar circumstances last time.

As I said. YAWN.

RAVE - Region

While we've tried several Chinese restaurants here in San Francisco, none of them have so far come up to the standard set by places like Zen, at the Heathrow Hilton. 

I know it's illogical to demand that food is prepared to an English specification - heaven knows it's unlikely to be that way in Shanghai or Beijing - but as long as the chefs hope to sell their Chinese food in Western countries, and westerners want to buy that food, we may as well have it prepared the way we want.

Which brings me to one of our favorites - Beijing Duck - which we been unable to find here the way we did in the UK.

Well, not until now.

Region is a classy place, specializing in Beijing style Chinese fare. And that means crispy Beijing Duck, cooked with the right spices and sauces, and the right thin pancakes. I say "the right" spices, sauces, and pancakes because the last time we had the dish was in Hong Kong, after a l-o-n-g and tiring flight from the US. To say that meal was a disappointment would be an understatement. It came as a slab of cold, fatty bird, that seemed to have had only a fleeting relationship with any acceptable method of cooking, and - to top it all - with overly fluffy pancakes. I'm sure the good people of Hong Kong are usually delighted with this preparation, but it left our table untouched, and us still famished.

There was no such disappointment last night. Region is a perfect place for a date, specially if like me, your date loves her duck.

The cocktails were equally classy. To tell the truth, the duck kind of out-performed the other menu items. We had the Crispy shrimp and pork Chao Zhou rolls, Grass fed Piedmontese cubed filet mignon, red onions, string bean and beech mushroom, and the Basil prawns with oyster mushrooms, green beans, eggplant and bell pepper. They were all fine, but I wouldn't be as fulsome with the praise if we hadn't first had the duck.

Duck, duck, duck, duck, and duck. I'm sorry to go on about the duck. But it was perfect.

RAVE - Lincoln

Daniel Day-Lewis may be a great actor, but he's often self-important, and that can be said of Spielberg too. 

So you can almost guarantee a bucket-load of self-important bloat when you put DDL in a movie directed by Spielberg, about probably the most lauded of American Presidents, Abraham Lincoln.

But that bloat didn't get in the way of this film.

It may have been a story about Lincoln, but it was more the story of the vote for the abolition of slavery.  This was arguably the most important vote that the US house of representatives has ever had, and one salutary fact is that the vote was so close. It could have gone either way. It would have gone against the abolition of slavery, but for some Lincolnly shenanigans.

If it wasn't for this being such an important time in US history, and the story told so well, this would have been a tedious exercise.

Daniel Day-Lewis will undoubtedly win the Oscar for best actor based on this performance. He may be an old wind-bag, but he can definitely act.

REVIEW - Skyfall

Not to be confused with my previous review of the similarly named Deadfall, this is the new 007 film, which we saw late on opening night here in San Francisco.

There, that's got the positive side of this over and done with.

Skyfall is a huge disappointment. Not just a huge disappointment over earlier Bond movies, but a huge letdown in terms of how much I wanted to enjoy this, how much I expected to enjoy it.

The plot - as in all Bond films - is irrelevant. An arch-villain steals or builds a dangerous weapon, threatens M, or one of Bond's Babes, or the whole world with it, and Bond saves the day. The Quantum of Dr No with a Golden Gun.

The style and content are critical. And Skyfall's style and content are sub-Bourne to say the best. Aside from the first fifteen minutes, which featured the obligatory action tour through a Turkish bazaar, and a clever motorcycle chase across the rooftops, the film featured no other action aside from various shootings and explosions.

There were no supercar antics. There were cheers from our audience when Bond cracked open the doors of his garage to reveal the 1963 Aston Martin DB5 made famous by the inimitable Sean Connery. Daniel Craig uses the car to escape the ludicrous Javier Bardem, taking M to the supposed safety of his family seat in Scotland. It's a good job the trip didn't require a high-speed race, as the DB5 is only a 4 liter, sub-300 bhp antique, capable of just beating the average family sedan at the traffic lights.

And what's all the hogwash about Javier Bardem being a perfect villain. Rather than being a Blofeld, he just blows. 

There was nothing new about this iteration of Her Majesty's allegedly top agent. Now, one doesn't necessarily expect an all-new Bond. The series calls for a delicate balance between staying true to the tradition, while keeping it fresh and exciting. 

However, Skyfall does neither.

REVIEW - Deadfall

A car speeding along a snowy country road hits a  deer and rolls out of control.

The two passengers survive the crash, but they just happen to be escaping from a casino robbery they just committed.

This starts a run across wild country, with the two crooks, a mostly clueless group of state troopers, and a boxer just out of prison all converging on the same address, a house in the middle of nowhere.

With a couple of mildly interesting developments, this is mostly familiar territory story-wise. It's not helped at all by the woeful Eric Bana in the lead bad guy slot. 

Bana has never been much of a "star" for me. His nothingness was sealed when it was widely rumored that he was being considered for the next James Bond role, after Pierce Brosnan and before - thankfully - Daniel Craig was chosen.

The notion of Bana - an Australian - playing the quintessential Englishman was just too much for me. It's better if he continues to meander along in roles like this.

RAVE - Flight

It's funny how everyone asks: "Have you seen the new Denzel film?" rather than use his last name. Is it because everyone feels an affinity with Denzel, or because that first name is unique?

Either way, Denzel Washington's latest performance is riveting as an alcoholic pilot who performs a miraculous manoeuvre to attempt to save the lives of his passengers as his plane suffers a number of mechanical failures on a flight from Miami to Atlanta.

The film is not really a thriller, despite the first 20 minutes which covers the flight. Instead, it's more a character study of a pilot who's lifestyle and addiction to booze and drugs leads to a disastrous outcome.

I don't know whether he intentionally let himself go for the role - putting on a few pounds and letting himself look like a less than fit guy in his late fifties - but he is certainly not the sleek character from Training Day.

With or without Denzel onboard, I want my plane and pilot to be serviceable and in tip-top condition.