An Education

The film was set in 1961.An intelligent teenager girl in suburban Twickenham was waiting for bus in a downpouring day. A stranger, a soft spoken older man (Peter Sarsgaard), drove by and offered her a ride.

That ride took her home, but also brought her into a world of adult fun and fancy – weekend trip to Paris, classical concerts, smoky jazz clubs, auctions, dressing up glamorously with the help from stranger’s glamorous friend Helen (Rosamund Pike).

I had very little knowledge about the 60’s. When I told a friend that I was going to see An Education, he wasn’t terribly impressed by the sound of it.

“I suppose this is kind of films that you saw before. They are always very similar to each other.” He said.

I laughed. Maybe he was right. I like the coming out of age films. I can see them again and again. If the film is well directed with a strong cast, I would never get bored. What we know about the sixties – feminism, sex revolutions, hippies, Vietnam War.  What about the beginning of that period in Britain?

Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams)

An Education is not a slow film. It is incredibly smooth and upbeat. The plot isn’t complicated. There are a lot of smart dialogues throughout the film. Carey Mulligan played Jenny, a pretty, innocent but rather head strong girl. Carey interpreted so well Jenny’s naivety and intelligence. When she finally got to Paris, she put her hair up and wore a dress with floral prints; she was stunning just like Audrey Hepburn!

Peter Sarsgaard did not present a slimy lady killer. His gentleness, sleepy eyes, even the flirtatious cliche lines with Jenny’s mother seemed all so harmless, light-hearted and boyish lost.  Emma Thompson is the best actress to play the imperious school-mistress.

Helen (Rosamund Pike)

Rosamund Pike perhaps was far too smart to play a beautiful dumb bimbo. Educated in Oxford, Rosamund has this depth in her beauty– pale, sophisticated, feminine, intelligent, witty, very British.

You sit there and wonder where Jenny is heading to and what she will turn out to be. It’s an education about life.

Without a doubt, this could be the best British film of the year 2009.

The film was based on Lynn Barber’s autobiographical essay in Granta Literary magazine. Screenplay by Nick Hornby. Directed by Lone Scherfig.

Trivial: In Lynn Barber’s early career, she was a journalist writing for Penthouse, she also published a book – How to Improve Men in Bed.

P.S:

My friend did see the film himself. I was surprised to hear that how much he enjoyed the film.

I just finished reading ‘An Education’ the autobiography of Lynn Barber. A rather thin volume for an autobiography, but quite amusing and insightful about British journalism.

Hotel Policy

A German friend recently travelled to Stuttgart on business.

At the hotel reception, he spoke to the receptionist:

“Single room, please.”

“I need to let you know we have a policy for single rooms.”

“What’s that?”

“If your guest stays more than 30 minutes in your room, then we will have to charge you for double room price.”

“30 minutes should be more than enough…”

The September Issue

The September Issue

This documentary tells some interesting stories about a bunch of larger than life editors at Vogue.

Editor in chief Anna Wintour – behind her icy armour, it is her business talent that has been driving Vogue to success.

Grace Coddington, ex-model turned creative director, seemed to eclipse Anna in the film. Her working relationship with Anna, however odd it is, is the compelling driving force at Vogue. In the end, Anna had to put some of  Grace’s ingenious ideas back to the drawing board.

Grace and Anna

I often thought fashion designers predict the trend for the next season.  I was wrong. It is Anna Wintour who influence the fashion industry. She has the final say about what goes to the issue. We, as readers of Vogue,  will probably never have a glimpse over what she has ‘killed’.  I was very surprised to see how those big names so scared of Anna. If she breathed a word like ‘no’, their effort over months would go to the drain.

Some critics claimed that this film failed to probe deeper into Anna’s inner world. I think the film is good enough to prevail what’s behind the glitz of fashion industry.  Do we really want to know more about Anna’s private life? We were told that her father was an editor at Evening Standard and her siblings all engage in rather respectable and more serious jobs.  Anna’s daughter wanted to go to a law school, she did not think a job like her mom’s is serious enough for her.

It is a serious job to run any business into profit.

Anna Wintour is doing a damn serious job.

Someone like it a bit hot

Chicken Curry with Vegetable

Inspired by Rick Stein’s Far Eastern Odyssey, a cookery programme I saw recently, I came up this simple but very tasty dish – Thai Chicken Curry.

This has become one of my signature dishes. It has everything – meat, vegetable, spices……I love this exotic dish!

When it comes to food, my favourite has to be food in Asia. But I have to avoid most dishes in Thai restaurants here in London. Simply because they are too spicy. And I believe too much chili ruins my taste buds as I can’t taste anything else after I got this burning sensation in my mouth.

This dish will give you a spicy taste, a tingling sensation, yet rather subtle, you will then be able to taste other spices in this dish.

Here is a list of ingredients:

1. Meat (cut into small pieces): 500g organic chicken thighs (never use chicken breasts, they will be tough and dry, alternatively use chicken drum sticks, but make sure you make a few cuts in each drum stick so it can be cooked through.)

2. Vegetable: potatoes, carrots and zucchini.

3. coconut milk (1 can, 400ml), galangal, lemon grass, shallots, fish sauce, shrimp paste, curry paste, palm sugar, fresh lime, coriander.

Now cooking instruction:

1. Heat oil in the wok, stir fry the chicken until the meat turns to white, take them out of the wok and leave them in a bowl.

2. Add some more oil to the wok, heat it, stir fry the following ingredients in the wok:  sliced galangal (one chunk is enough), chopped lemon grass, 4 or 5 shallots, then added chunks of potatoes, carrots, zucchini to the wok, stir them.

3. Add 1 or 2 teaspoons of curry sauce (depending on how spicy you want the dish to be), I used Matsaman curry sauce as it’s less spicy than other pastes. Pour a can of coconut milk, add some fish sauce (2 tea spoons), palm sugar, mix the shrimp paste with a little bit water, add it to the wok, some fresh lime juice, add half tea spoon of turmeric powder, close the lid, bring it to boil, then taste the soup and see whether you need to add more paste or fish sauce.

If you are happy with the soup, now add the chicken pieces, simmer for about 20 minutes.

When it’s ready to serve, sprinkle some coriander to the dish.

Bon Appetit!

P.S. All you need is your passion for food, plus a little imagination, you won’t fail, I promise:-)

Matsaman Curry Paste

Galangal

Lemon Grass

Seriously, is this……?!

Can someone tell me what it is on the plate:

What the hell is this?!

I ate it because I was hungry:-(

Jesus, I had the worst Kaiserschmarrn I ever had yesterday at Wolseley..really overrated restaurant. I could not believe what I saw when the dish was delivered to the table. How could anybody call this a ‘Viennese Cafe’ if they can’t even manage such a simple dish?!

To start with, we had to wait for 45 minutes to get a table…Saw Salmon Rushdie walk into the restaurant with his young son.  So what! I know that place is packed with 33% celebrities, 33% middle class who desperately want to rub shoulders with upper middle class or upper class, 33% of tourists who want to bring back the news – dined at such such places, had such such dishes..I saw a Japanese woman was eating Yorkshire pudding with sugar! LOL..obviously, she thought that was a dessert…well, the fact is Yorkshire pudding is NOT dessert pudding!

Two young girls from the states, one with LA accent  was giving the other (with NY Yankee accent) fashion tips. I quickly worked out their relationship. One hired the other to be her fashion consultant. Can I call her a stylist or wardrobe adviser -  she wore shining sequin in the bright day light! How could one seriously take her advice serious?! Did they come to London for a bit of fashion inspiration? Have they learned anything yet? I don’t think so.

I must admit it’s a place you see all kinds of people – including some very pushy American tourists. This guy stood next to me near the bar asked the Matre D at least 3 times with the same question – Is my table ready?

While I was gazing at the dinners out of boredom, I had dizzy spells due to lack of sugar in my blood – I was bloody hungry! Felt like to rush to Pret bought myself a sandwich before I faint in this up-market restaurant.

Finally, we sat down. Fish stew – the chef was most generous with the salt! Ok, main dish was rather disappointing, I still held the high hope for my dessert – after all, I came to Wolseley for my beloved Viennese dessert. ….OMG… I wanted to cry out loud over that grotesque-looking….Kaiserschmarrn? – what the hell was that? Did the chef ever see a real Kaiserschmarrn?

A Scandinavian couple next to me was murmuring the name of my dessert.

“May I just say, it doesn’t look like the Kaiserschmarrn I had in Munich, Salzburg and Vienna. ” I warned them.

“We just wonder what it is, how does it taste?” They were very curious.

“eatable”

They burst into friendly laughs.

My co-dinner obviously was very happy about his choice of food – he had Roast Beef with Roast Potatoes and Yorkshire Pudding – first thing I learned about English cuisine (if they call it cuisine at all) when I was learning English from Follow Me, a programme produced by BBC. I was about 12.

Kaiserschmarrn normally looks like this...

Good old English food is what they can do in this restaurant, but please invent a different name for what they called Kaiserschmarrn on the menu. Call it – God Knows What It Is!

Mesrine: Public Enemy No.1

I stared at the screen – the final scene – a close up of dripping blood from Mesrine’s head.

If you salute to Godfather and its sequels, you will take your hats off to this brilliant gangster film of the year.

Jean-Francois Richet’s second-part biopic of Jacque Mesrine is even more exciting! More bank robberies, more prison breaks, more escapes, at one point Mesrine was holding a judge as his hostage – one of the many highlights in the film. Kidnapping, car chasing, gun shooting, bang! bang! bang!

This installment revealed more the psychology behind Mesrine’s acts – how did he use mass media to get his household name status in France and how he fell out with the media and thus became a notorious criminal and finally gunned down in the street of Paris by a carefully planned police operation.

Mesrine’s charisma was brilliantly captured by Vincent Kassel, who obviously gained quite a bit of weight for playing the role. Mesrine ’s multifaceted personalities – violent, ruthless,  smug,  humorous, and yet he loves pretty women. They found him irresistible – women!

The music just added more excitement to the incredibly swift pace. I was fascinated by the stylishness and the thrilling sequence throughout the film.

Finally, Ludivine Sagnier   was sensational – she was naked again. “But I didn’t get naked in cheap movies. It’s not in order to tease the audience and it never got obscene……” She said in an interview.

Dicky and his Mid-Life Crisis

One day, Dicky looked at himself in the mirror: God…is that me? I am fat! That can’t be ME!

Dicky nearly had a panic attack. No, to be precise, he had his mid-life crisis.

What did he do? He jumped to a flight, started backpacking in Indonesia, rented a jeep driving around the island, ate local food, 5 meals a day! When he was back to Germany, he lost 10 kilos. He drank ginger tea, green tea, ate a lot of fish (must be hard to manage, Berlin is nowhere near the sea).

He started running…first 3 km, then 5, 7, 10, 15, 20, 25…….I could picture him run in the parks like Forrest Gump, with the determination to get back his shape so he wouldn’t scare the hell out of himself when he faced his mirror again. (Is there a statistics saying that more men look at themselves in the mirror than women? I’m pretty sure I read it somewhere with a great interest.)

I just wonder whether there is another way to deal with mid-life crisis. Maybe stop checking out himself in a full-length mirror.

Later he even quit his high-profile-burning-fast job, . Started his own business.He got more freedom, he is a much happier man.

“Nobody asked what car i ride, who I am or what I do… once you look better and are not too stupid, everything’s fine…”

I doubt about his theory. If you don’t have a good figure, if you are fat, everything will be still fine if you are loaded with 2 or 3 yachts in Monaco, a private jet waiting to take off any time. Lieber Dicky,  you were just not rich enough!

But I have to agree with him to a certain extent. It goes without saying that if you are middle aged, not established, not talented, a fat figure is not going to impress any chicks whether they are spring chicks or sophisticated mature hens. This society is all about looking good. Sounds superficial? You don’t have to be handsome. Most people weren’t born with a strikingly beautiful face. You just need to have a reasonably good figure, spend some time in the gym, eat healthy, dress sensibly…ok, if you don’t know how, hire a personal shopper or wardrobe adviser. (hey, I’m here to help:-)

Of course, rich people have their mid-life crisis too…such as wifeys walk out on them and demand half of their assets (or even more).

And yes, as Dicky said, everyone has mid-life crisis. We just deal with it differently. You don’t know when you get it. You can’t time it. You feel it when it hits you.

“men get it more than women… women have more time to live their dreams they live longer… and women always speak so much and fast, day and night because they know that men don’t live so long and so they have to tell men everything as long they’re still alive……” Dicky concluded.

Bah…….

No kidding

Charlie Croker wrote a book – One Out of Eight Brits. There some some rather useless but interesting statistics…here is one about women in Britain: 1 out of 5 women in Britain doesn’t wear a panties at work!

No underwear!

I wonder why.

Answer 1: To 100% eliminate VPL (visible panty line).  Fed up with thongs that make you so uncomfortable that you want to kill whoever designed them. (Must be a man).

Answer 2: To boost your confidence. If you don’t have a perfect figure to show off, then leak out this little secret at work, it might turn a few heads on your way to the fax machine.

Bagdad Café

Bagdad Cafe

Bagdad Cafe, also known as Out of Rosenheim, is a quiet film that speaks volumes about how human relationships influence each other even in the bleakest environment.

I have been to Rosenheim once. It was on my trip back from Austria. I didn’t see the whole town. As I remember, it was just like any other small town in Bavaria, clean and quiet.

So, the film started with this typical buxom woman from Rosenheim being dumped in this dusty barren place on her way to Las Vegas. What happened then?

It’s not a usual feel good film that falls into every category of cliché. Stereotyping the film might have, but it was one of the winning features that created a sharp contrast and clashes between Jasmin and those in the middle of nowhere.

I was particularly impressed by a sequence of Jasmin Münchgstettner sitting for Rudi, who painted a series of portraits. The progressive montage was such an excellent work that created a surreal and comic visual effect on screen without the need of more dialogue.

Taking off her clothes in front of the camera wasn’t anything new for German actress Marianne Sägebrecht. I heard that this film was inspired by the actress herself.

It certainly was a challenge to present nudity in a new light. Bagdad Café achieved it and blended it flawlessly to the simple plot with Marianne and Jack’s wonderful acting.

I must admit I wasn’t in a great mood before the film started playing. The song written for the film is so beautiful. It had a soothing effect to calm me down right in the beginning.

For the first 10 minutes, I thought it was going to be a boring slow film that I couldn’t watch to the end. Instead, I was captivated by the subtlety throughout the film. It is a real gem that shines through a pack of marbles.

This is not a film that you are likely to forget for many years to come.

Doctor and his patient

Translated from someone’s Chinese blog:

A pretty woman came to see a doctor. Doc asked her to take off her clothes for examination.

“Doc, I’m not very comfortable taking them off in front of you…”

“Ok, I turn off the light, you tell me when you are ready.”

In the dark, “Doc, I’m ready, where should I put my clothes?”

“Here, just put them on the top of my clothes”