Le Chef Review

As I continue to read Honor Harrington books and really only play Path of Exile, many of my recent reviews have been things I have watched on TV (or on TV off DVD). This week is no exception. On Friday night, the family and I sat down to enjoy Le Chef, a French comedy written and directed by Daniel Cohen and starring Jean Reno.

We have liked Jean Reno movies for a long time, starting with The Professional and continuing with roles in French Kiss, Couple Retreat and others. We also have enjoyed several French movies in recent years like The Intouchables, so a comedy including Reno and cooking seemed like a good bet (and turned out to be much better than The Tasting Menu, which we watched a few weeks ago).

Le Chef is the story of Jacky Bonnot, played by Michael Youn, a cooking enthusiast who has had difficulty holding down a job, causing much consternation for his pregnant girlfriend, Beatrice. Jean Reno is Alexandre Lagarde, a famous chef with a 3-star restaurant and a cooking show who is under pressure from his restaurant's owner's son who wants to make the restaurant avant-garde. As the story progresses, Jacky and Alexandre are thrown together with their love for cooking after Jacky is found cooking clandestinely at a retirement home where he is a painter. Alexandre gives him a trial at his restaurant while Jacky tries to hide the fact he isn't painting from his long-suffering girlfriend.

The movie has many funny moments when Jacky and Alexandre clash over Alexandre's reluctance to give up control in his restaurant and Jacky's complete lack of a filter when it comes to what he thinks should be done. Throw in a trio of somewhat bumbling but completely fun cooks at the retirement home and some over the top bad modern cuisine to compare against Jacky and Alexandre's more wholesome fare, you have an interesting mix that comes out tasting good.

Nothing overly special or really new is on tap here, but there are pretty restaurants, food that looks like something you might actually eat and lovable characters. All in all, you can't go wrong with Le Chef. With all 3 of us at my house, Le Chef gets 4 Mick Happies. Now we are all looking forward to Jon Favreau's Chef next weekend.

X-Men: Days of Future Past Review

I waited a long time to see X-Men: Days of Future Past. I had intended to see it in the theaters when it released, but things conspired against that happening. Then it was available to download on iTunes for a couple weeks and I almost purchased it then. Finally, with the DVD release this past week my wife put me out of my misery and bought me a copy. X-Men: Days of Future Past (X-M:DoFP) is the latest installment in the X-Men franchise, directed by Bryan Singer and based on the classic Chris Claremont and John Byrne The Uncanny X-Men storyline, Days of Future Past.

X-M:DoFP continues the story from both the X-Men: First Class and X-Men: The Last Stand films.  X-M:DoFP starts with a view of a grim future where mutants, those who help them and those who might become them are held in internment camps and are pursued by giant robots called Sentinels. We find out that those who remain of the original X-Men (Iceman, Professor X, Magneto, Kitty Pryde, Wolverine) are hanging on by a thread with the support of some new mutants, Bishop, Blink, Warpath and Sunspot. They devise a plan to stop their future by using Kitty Pryde's ability to send the consciousness of Wolverine back to the 1970s to stop a killing that leads to the Sentinels being activated to protect humans from mutants.

The storyline of X-M:DoFP has some timey-wimey bits that you have to either think too hard about or just go along for the ride on. No, we don't see how Professor Xavier is alive in the future, but hey, that's okay. There are bits of the movie where you see something happen then it hasn't happened - but that is explained. It is interesting to see the younger and older character versions in a film that does a better job of things than Star Trek: Generations did - which also starred Patrick Stewart.

One of the best parts of X-M:DoFP is getting to see the bleak future and the cool skills of the mutants as well as getting to see all of our old X-Men movie favorites. The skills of Bishop (played by Omar Sy) and Blink are colorful and excellent on screen. It was good to see portrayals of the older Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) and Wolverine (you can tell he's older by the grey hair). However, the best character in the film, hands down, has to be Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters. The incredibly fast mutant is snarky and portrays the character's suffering because everyone else is so much slower than him well. His character also gives the most awesome special effects moment in the movie.

Which actually leads to the main niggle with the movie. We don't get enough variety in the mutants except in short spurts. The thing that made X-Men and X2 even more fun was the diversity in mutants and their powers. Here we spend a lot of time with Magneto, Professor X, Beast, Wolverine and Mystique and unfortunately they aren't the most interesting of the characters (see note above about Quicksilver). However, there is hope that X-Men: Apocalypse will broaden the number of focal characters again and hopefully will be even better for it.

X-M:DoFP is a great entry into the X-Men movie franchise. I found it better than X-Men: First Class and X-Men: The Last Stand and certainly it was worth the wait. Overall, X-M:DoFP gets 4 Mick Happies. Now, when is the Quicksilver movie going to happen?

iTunes Festival London 2014 Comments

Paolo Nutini at House of Blues, San Diego

Surprisingly enough I often have problems coming up with what to review each week or so. Sometimes it is because I am mainly playing a game I have already commented on in the past or reading book 6 in a series of 10 and reviewing it might be a little difficult. Today's post comes from one of those weeks where I have things I could write about but nothing "feels" important enough to share. Except that this week the family and I have been "watching" (read playing and skipping forward 2 -3 minutes to get through the parts we don't care about) the iTunes Festival that ran in London at the Roundhouse for the month of September. The festival, which has run for several years, is hosted by Apple and has different artists performing every night for the month of September (there is also a second iTunes Festival that ran earlier in the year in Austin, TX as well this year). Tickets to the show are free to those who can get one to be there for a show live.

This year's list of performers is a broad spectrum of musical genres and generations with everything from electronic/club music to classical and rock and pop and alternative in between. Seriously, we're talking Placido Domingo, Tony Bennett mixed in with Maroon 5, Robert Plant, Lenny Kravitz, Jessie J and Deadmau5, David Guetta and 5 Seconds of Summer not to mention Pharrell Williams, Mary J. Blige and a whole hoard of newer acts opening each night. Great thing for you is that for the month and a little time afterward you can watch any of the shows for free through iTunes or on an Apple TV.

For the last few years, we have cherry picked the few acts that we cared about and fast forwarded through the usually 60 - 90 minute shows to get to the songs we really were interested in seeing. The best parts are often when the bands are interacting with the audience rather than the performances. This year we gave a listen to a few of the acts and I am summarizing them here:

David Guetta and Calvin Harris - I am not much into the club DJ type music, can take it or leave it. However, both of these guys have songs that I do like (Titanium and Summer, respectively). Those were the songs that I was looking for when watching and both were there, of course. In between you have pounding base and strobing light shows. Being at the performances of either would probably be like going to a giant night club, which if that is your thing you would probably have really liked it.

Lenny Kravitz - Lenny has a great catalogue of excellent rock songs and he was belting them out. It was surprising to find out that this was the first gig that he had played with the latest configuration of his backup band because they sounded really good and worked well together. Certainly worth giving a listen to and he definitely made a couple songs into massive jam sessions that are fun (but easier to handle when you can move things along a bit with the clicker).

Blondie - Debbie Harry and the band were fantastic. Hard to believe that she is 69 years old when she is out there playing hit after hit. Almost every other song I turned to my wife and said, hey I forgot Blondie sang that one. For several songs, even after all these years, her vocals were almost identical to how I remember them on the radio. Worth checking out.

Paolo Nutini - The girls in our house have been fans of Paolo for a couple years now and they like a couple songs on his latest album as well. We had actually bought tickets to see him live at the House of Blues in San Diego in September, which happened to be a week or so after he performed at the iTunes Festival. Paolo puts on a soul/blues-vibe infused concert, which we watched live in San Diego and then went back to see if the iTunes performance was the same. Other than the sound and power of the performance being much better live than through the TV, Paolo ran through the same set list for both shows. If you can't get to a live show yourself, the iTunes Festival replay isn't a bad way to go.

Paolo Nutini

All-in-all, being able to see interesting shows from the comfortable confines of my living room without having to go to a festival and mosh around with 100s of people all lifting their phones to take pictures/video is pretty nice. You give up a bit in the audio quality, but maybe that would be better if you watch it on your computer with headphones. Hey and you can even move past the songs you don't care about and try out some bands you may otherwise have never had a chance to hear about. For free, you can't beat that. iTunes Festival gets 4 Mick Happies.