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This hype for the Aeon Flux movie is so full of shit:
"Aeon Flux is set 400 years in the future, in a supposedly utopian society, where a secret rebellion is brewing. In the coming war between the totalitarian government, who impose order with ruthless efficiency, and those who oppose it with ruthless abandon, the one person who may prove that individuals still matter is Aeon Flux. Flux (Charlize Theron) is the top operative in the underground "Monican" rebellion and when her assignment is to assassinate a leading government official she begins to realize that there is more to uncover than even she expected."All Hollywood adaptations now are about normalizing the weird. Find me some sort of moral in the cartoon series on which this movie is based. "Supposedly utopian?" Dystopian from the get-go. Ruthless efficiency vs ruthless abandon? The Breens and Monicans never fell into such neat categories. The amoral Aeon proved that individuals still matter by regularly playing tongue hockey with Trevor, the dictator. Such a bunch of crap comes out of Tinseltown. I don't want to see this one. I did just order the refurbished cartoon on DVD and am curious to see what was restored. Like, will the pool of blood Aeon kept waking up in in "Chronophasia" be returned to the original red color? (MTV freaked and tinted it brown.)
(Illustration from Mike Russell's "Not So Secret History of Aeon Flux"--thanks to the Eyebeam reBlog for spotting it.)
I have been wanting to eat at wd~50 for a while now, since the chef is a friend of friends and I've been hearing so much about the place. This past Thursday, as a sort of belated birthday present to myself, I went, and wow. The chef, Wylie Dufresne, is celebrated for adventurous and artistic cuisine: I missed his appearance on Iron Chef America but as a sometime watcher of the show I know the culinary experts who get invited don't screw around.
His restaurant, at 50 Clinton Street on the Lower East Side, is spacious and comfortable. I went with a party of six and we did the ten-course tasting menu. The staff brings a succession of very small, elegant dishes to the table, and Wylie's father Dewey drops by to discourse knowledgeably on the different wines you're drinking. The experience is folksy and unpretentious even though the food and drink is so ultra-refined it could be caricatured, say, in a Cohn brothers movie. (For some reason I'm thinking of Maude Lebowsky.)
Just a few examples from the tasting. The first dish out is a fig in a perfect cube shape with a slice of anchovy balancing on top. Awesome to look at and a mind-bending combo of flavors. More geometry came in the form of a smooth cylinder of foie gras (yeah I know, tortured ducks--I don't feel good about it), which breaks open to reveal a liquid center with some kind of oozy beet concoction. The taste resided somewhere between Satori and Nirvana. A bowl of fishy consomme with a hint of chocolate (!) came with a tiny squeeze bottle, complete with orange cap like Elmer's. You squeeze thin ropes of yogurt, thickened with some kind of space age enzymes into the broth. A little weird, and the fish and cocoa combo I found discordant, but a lot of great art is offputting. Many of the dishes come on beds of shavings the waiter described as "soil," as in "pea soil" or "chocolate soil," and the small dabs and smears of sauces on the plates jazz up the views and tastes.
Not a place for starving artists, but every artist should save up some money for a once in a lifetime trip. Simply amazing on every level.