Playtime
Gothamist was kind enough to distract me into seeing Jacques Tati's Playtime at Walter Reade Theater on Wednesday. It had been years since I had first seen it, on VHS, and I immediately bought two tickets for the final showing at Lincoln Center. I was really psyched about this screening, as I had almost forgotten about the film, and the new print is spectacular -- a far cry from the crappy VHS transfer I had seen back when I first moved to the city.
Riding the uptown train, I tried to recall some of the film's best moments. Playtime is the kind of movie you finish watching and immediately tell yourself always to remember how totally brilliant it was, but there's so much to remember that all you walk away with is a sense of its massive scale and hilarious detail. I was thrilled to discover just how little of it I did remember; I might watch Playtime a thousand times and still not pick up the all the delightfully still passages, the chaotic crescendos, or the squishy vinyl chair references. It was a great experience to be able to watch Tati bumble around with 268 of my closest friends.
Playtime is mind-blowingly excellent, and retains a fresh sense of modern delirium even today, three decades after Tati first blew six million Francs on what was, at the time, a gorgeous commercial failure. The new Janus print is fantastic; hopefully they'll have a good reissue of the Criterion Collection DVD soon.
film-ish , review-ish by tangentialist at 06:08 PM on 07 Jan 05 | Perm-a-link | TrackBack (0)
Masa: Four Stars, A Thousand Bucks
Masa chef/owner Masayoshi Takayama nearly slays Frank Bruni, scoring a four star review in the New York Times. In doing so, Masa becomes the first Japanese restaurant since 1983 (Hatsuhana, crowned by Mimi Sheraton) to receive that honor. As Amanda Hesser's last review as interim critic, back in June, she gave Masa a glowing but cagey 4-question-mark (????) rating, leaving the final call to Bruni -- a fantastic food writer, by the way -- who opens the review by describing his friend's appreciation of Masa's sublime toro:
His eyes grew instantly bigger as his lips twitched into a coyly restrained grin. Then the full taste of the toro, which is the buttery belly of a bluefin tuna, took visible hold. Forget restraint: he was suddenly smiling as widely as a person with a mouthful of food and a modicum of manners can. His eyes even rolled slightly backward.
A prix fixe session at Masa (you don't get to call the shots) will put you back $350 per person before tax, tip, and sake; so basically, four figures for the best sushi two people are likely ever to eat. If I read the review correctly, a meal at Masa is both inexcusably expensive and obscenely luxurious, and if Masa has done little else, it has made me wish I were the Times' head restaurant critic, so that I might be able to have this kind of sushi for lunch at least once in my life.
With Per Se just down the hall at the Time Warner Center, this puts two four-star restaurants within feet of each other. Bruni's cleaning up over there! What's next, Jamba Juice?
food-ish , new york times-ish , review-ish by tangentialist at 05:17 AM on 29 Dec 04 | Perm-a-link | TrackBack (1)