REVIEW - St Vincent

A good example of a restaurant in the Mission district: dark walls, interesting lighting and artifacts, and packed on a Tuesday night.

The food was good, while not being spectacular.

We had the Kale and Green Oak lettuce, with peanuts, sardines 'n stuff - crispy and tasty, but perhaps a little bit too much greenery.

Vinegar braised Pork, mop sauce, potato chips, mustard and radish trimmings - this was excellent, and I could have done with seconds.

Salinas Asparagus, steak tartare, green garlic, cress and alyssum. This was good, but the miniscule serving of steak tartare meant that Mrs Page ordered another dish in addition the moment she saw it. That dish was: Chicken liver mousse, mustard, and lovely, lovely bread.

St Vincent's main claim to fame is their sommelier - David Lynch, late of Quince - and his wine selection. At least 100 of their wines are available for under $100 a bottle, and also can be had by the half bottle. This feature seemed to be going down well with last night's diners, as there were open bottles strewn near every table.

REVIEW - Erased

Demoted and drummed out of his job as a CIA black ops guy (haven't we heard this before? See Numbers Station), Aaron Eckhart gets a job in Belgium (see, I said he was demoted) for a security firm.

The trouble is, that security firm is a front for something or other, and one day Eckhart shows up for work to find out the company has not only closed down his office, but has erased all record of him, or any other employee working there.

Now that kind of retirement is one that many of us long for, but in this case it turns nasty, when all of his ex co-workers are killed.

So starts a story that has been done a million times better by one Jason Bourne, and maybe a hundred times better by Liam Neeson and a few others.

Eckhart has his moves, and plays them well enough, but one just watches and waits as he gets roughed up, then roughs up someone else, then there's a car crash, then an explosion, and so on until the scheming business mogul is permanently silenced, and everything's back to normal in sleepy Belgium.

RANT - Oblivion

What should have been an ordinary REVIEW was pushed down to a RANT by the presence of the annoying Tom Cruise, who manages to turn everything into a wooden exercise in non-acting.

To be fair, he doesn't single-handedly ruin the movie; he's helped in that department by a lackluster plot - one with twists and turns that:

a) were more like slight curves rather than out and out twists and 

b) with an ending that was telegraphed in the trailer. 

Cruise exclaims "we've been tricked" or something to that effect, and any fool could see their mission to extract earth's natural resources - as much water as they could suck into various space tankers - before hightailing it to the human colony on Titan, is all a deceit.

The other problem is that their time is spent - just the two of them (Tom and some babe in a space uniform) - marking time in a lonely, sterile existence. 

One that I keenly felt watching this dull film. 

REVIEW - Antiviral

A slow, ugly but great-looking film about a clinic that deals in viral infections from famous stars and celebrities which are then sold to their fans.

The notion is ugly enough, and the way the film shows in excruciating detail the extraction and transfer of the much-prized viruses, and the effects on the central character - who works at the clinic and injects himself in order to harvest and sell some of those viruses on the black market - makes it uglier still.

Directed by Brandon, son of David Cronenberg, who directed such vivid horror classics as Scanners, Videodrome, and The Fly, Antiviral has that Cronenberg air, that sense that something's off, or something horrible's always about to happen.

While being low budget, it still manages to look classy, in a mostly white, antiseptic way that gives that underlying horror a stark, vivid feel.

But its lethargic pace stops Antiviral from truly breaking out.

REVIEW - The Numbers Station

Not quite the thriller it tries to be, mostly because it all takes place in and around a secret underground bunker. These bunkers have existed since the cold war, and still operate as a means of distributing coded messages to the shady agents of equally shady government departments around the world.

This particular bunker is in South-East England, where John Cusack and Malin Akerman show up every day for their shift - Cusack as an ex black ops guy now relegated to protecting the numbers station and its operator, Akerman. 

Their humdrum working lives are disrupted one day when their bunker is attacked by operatives looking to send orders to US agents directing them to assassinate key executives within their own organization. Sounds exciting? Well, it isn't really.

I wanted to like it more, but perhaps it needed a bigger screen - rather than my iPad - and a seat more comfortable than my Delta flight could provide. Whatever, it was still way better than watching reruns of reruns of Friends, or first runs that feel as tired as reruns of How I Met Your Mother.

RAVE - Beware of Mr Baker

First of all - a Warning. I am a huge fan of Ginger Baker, former drummer with Cream, Blind Faith, Baker Gurvitz Army, Ginger Baker's Air Force, and a number of other bands that bravely allowed him in, until they couldn't stand him any longer.

Therefore, this film will either be for you a wonderful story of the world's best rock drummer - if you're like me - or the tale of a walking disaster area, who proved to be impossible for most people to work with.

The film revolves around interviews conducted by Rolling Stone journalist Jay Bulger with the sour, spiteful, emotionally and physically scarred, once ginger but now grey-haired greatest living percussionist in his current home in South Africa. Baker lives there with his fourth wife, and his string of 30 polo horses. The scars come mostly from his decades long addiction, to heroin and a variety of other drugs, but one can't help feeling the basic curmudgeonly ingredients must have been there in the first place.

The effects from working with him were described in a 2009 interview with Jack Bruce - Cream's bass player and vocalist: "It's a knife-edge thing between me and Ginger. Nowadays, we're happily co-existing in different continents [Bruce lives in Britain, Baker in South Africa]...although I was thinking of asking him to move. He's still a bit too close".

There's enough electrifying action from Baker to provide heavy relief from his griping about Bruce - who Ginger claims took credit for all the great arrangements he engineered for Cream; about other, "lesser" drummers like Led Zeppelin's John Bonham "Oh, he had good technique, but he wasn't in the same league as me" or Keith Moon "No way was he as good as me!"; and about his various business and musical alliances.

It's hard to escape the fact that Baker is now, and may have been for his entire career, a bitter and essentially unpleasant character. But boy, could he play the drums.

RAVE - Sociale

This is the first time in a few years we've dined at Sociale, and I don't know why we've left it so long.

It's an Italian restaurant that's a world away from the tourist traps of North Beach. It's romantic, stylish, and stylishly comfortable.

After ordering a bottle of Brunello di Montalino, I set about persuading my wife that it was absolutely essential we have a 'proper' Italian dinner of three courses - Cominciare, Continuare, and Concentrare in Sociale-speak. 

We luxuriated in the White Bean Crostino (a wonderful hummus-like paste on crostino, with arugula salad and shaved parmigiano-reggiano), and Duck Meatballs (taste bombs with dried cherry sugo) to start; English Pea Tortelloni (lovely pasta, but I never know why restaurants refer to 'English' pea - is there any other kind?) and Pork Belly Ravioli (with whole grain mustard parmigiano cream, spinach and shallots) to continue; and we both had the Roasted Quail (together with potato, cauliflower, and bacon in a tasty sauce) for our third course. 

My date insists - as I write this rave - the wine didn't open up in the way she wanted, or the price implied that it would. But that's the only negative that remains after a night of sleeping off all that beautiful food.

REVIEW - The Place Beyond The Pines

Not a great film, despite what you may have heard. And I guess that all depends upon what you're expecting.

It's not an out and out thriller. Nor is it an out and out romantic story. 

True, it has elements of both, but for me it was a bit of a mess, spoiled - or made, depending on your view - by the two major jumps in the story, which turned it into three stories. 

Each element is connected by the children of Ryan Gosling, who plays a motorcycle stunt rider traveling around with a circus; Eva Mendes, a struggling single mother; and Bradley Cooper, a rookie cop who halts Gosling's side career as a Bank robber. Ray Liotta shows up to do his usual 'bad cop' routine, a role that he must be as tired of performing as I am of watching.

The abruptness by which that story jumps from Gosling, to Cooper, and then by fifteen years to their children meeting via weed, ecstasy and OxyContin to an "every son follows his destiny" type of ending broke the whole thing up a little too much for me, especially when each time I felt the story was just getting into its stride.

My wife didn't like the story jumps either, but for a completely different reason. She said she only really enjoyed the first third - basically any scene that featured Ryan Gosling. 

I doubt she'll be taking over from Roger Ebert as the nation's premier film critic now that he has sadly passed.

RANT - Idiotic Advertisements

Is advertising getting more stupid as each year passes, or am I becoming the grumpy old man I've been threatening to turn into?

It's probably a bit of both, and while getting older and grumpier is natural, there's no excuse for some of the stupidest ads we get on TV.

Short-listed for my award for the brain-deadliest ads of this month are:

1. WaxVac ear wax vacuum device

You've got to applaud their doctor spokesperson, who manages to say these paid-for words without laughing: "Don't use a cotton swab in your ears because it could cause significant damage". And the way their actors scream in pain as they accidentally plunge cotton swabs in their ears and presumably pierce their brains. About as likely as killing yourself through sloppy use of a toothbrush, or lopping off your leg through overly vigorous use of your toenail clipper.

2. Accutech Nano blood sugar test meter

I had planned an entire diatribe on this stupid ad, but have opted for brevity and plagiarism: 
"The Accutech Nano commercial makes having diabetes look cool" tweeted one jokester. 
That a device that checks how close you are to death or organ failure needs a BLOODY JINGLE
beggars belief.

3. Car insurance

It's statistically and commercially impossible for every auto insurance advertiser to be able to undercut their competitors, and yet, that's exactly what they tell us .... Save 15% by switching to us, save $650 or more by switching from your current insurer, ad nauseum.

4. "New" car ads

... that claim this year's model is "all new" when clearly it would be impossible, illogical, and economically suicidal for an automaker to change absolutely every nut, bolt, rivet, and body panel on their "new" car. Right? Yet they all lie the same.

5. Beds

I don't know if it's an annoying feature of our local radio stations and how they're so reliant on the few companies that do use radio advertising, but I guarantee every time I turn on the radio in my car, at least one - sometimes two - of the pre-set stations will be playing a Mancini's Sleep World ad. "Don't listen to those stations" I hear you say. Well, I could go on about the lame selection of indie-rock stations we have among the mix of dried up hippie rubbish, tired old re-tread rawk stations, and heard-it-all-before RnB but that would be blending my rants into coronary territory.

RAVE - Serpentine (again)

I shouldn't let this umpteenth visit to Serpentine to pass without mentioning that it has now become our go to cocktail and bar meal venue of choice. 

Whether it's the fifteen minute walk down the hill to Third Street - with the less pleasant walk back - or the lazy drive down that same slope, each visit is met with the same very agreeable result: grab the couple of remaining stools at the bar, relish in a Monice's Shrine for the lady and a Perfect Rye Manhattan or Whiskey Smash for me, and decide what to eat.

Our favorite dishes include the Marinated Gaeta and Castelvetrano Olives, and the Spiced Lupini Beans to nibble at, the Serpentine Meat Board (duck prosciutto, speck, rosette de lyon, wild boar salami, duck liver mousse, cornichons and caper berries with pineapple and pear mostarda and grilled levain toasts) to gnaw at, or a selection of the day's Cheese (detroit street brick, mount townsend cirrus, and kinderhook creek, with kumquat marmalade and cranberry walnut bread) to munch on. Not forgetting to leave space for Pan Seared Petaluma Chicken Livers (with fenugreek spice, thai bird chili, and cilantro with mizuna and hears of palm salad), and I could go on - and on.

On this last visit, her ladyship had the House Made Potato Gnocchi with Wild Mushrooms (with leeks, baby rapini, grana padano cheese, oregano, creme fraiche, and bread crumbs in mushroom stock), while I revelled in the delightful Fava Bean & Ricotta Agnolotti (with smoked ham hocks, fava beans, rana padano, ham hock broth, and micro licorice greens).

We always leave marvelously satisfied and in great spirits, whatever method of transport takes us home.