FILM: A Simple Favor

What a wild ride! A Simple Favor was fun, funny, clever, with good twists and turns, you just don’t really know who’s doing what to whom until the very end. Anna Kendrick is always good, but Blake Lively - wow! And Henry Golding, great performance hot on the heels of Crazy Rich Asians. Think Body Heat, Vertigo, or Double Indemnity for the vlog age.

STAGE: Love's Labour's Lost

Rounded out our Oregon Shakespeare Festival with a rollicking production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. We anticipated fun when we laid eyes on the eccentric set, and the show filled the promise. Who knew the Bard wrote a rock musical? The costumes were clever too, playing on the color imagery in the language, all white at first, increasingly splashed with tempera paints, then all red in Act IV, and all black at the end. A fair amount of ad libbing suits this play, including a bit with a smartphone. Such good fun!

FOOD: Coquina (Ashland OR)

Another extraordinary dinner in Ashland. Everything was plated like artworks and such innovative dishes of seasonal local ingredients. Started with a fennel custard with wild sturgeon roe, quark (a fresh yogurt cheese), Pernod gelée, beet chips, arugula blossoms, and crispy shallots. A simple chilled artichoke soup with crème fraîche and artichoke chips was silky smooth and full of flavor. Burrata was served with slow-roasted tomatoes and prosciutto with aged balsamic. Our main was a sous vide duck breast with figs, baby potatoes, beech cap mushrooms, pickled ramps (no doubt house-pickled from the spring), with three different puddles of flavor, including a foie/olive purée, a balsamic vinaigrette, and a mustard seed gastrique. Our desserts were a cynar panna cotta with candied artichokes and caramel hazelnuts, and a chocolate truffle tort with cherries and raspberries. (You wouldn’t expect artichoke and cynar - an Italian herbal/artichoke aperitif - to be good in a dessert, but candied and with vanilla, it was an unexpected delight.) This was all complimented with local wines from Goldback, a Grenache rosé and a Rhône blend Cuvée. (We are lightweight drinkers, good for one glass each, and they were lovely to suggest that we could split glasses, so we could have a bit of rosé with the appetizers and the heavier red with our main.)

STAGE: Romeo and Juliet (OSF)

Just back from a marvelous production of Romeo and Juliet at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Elizabethan Theatre. Very well acted, beautifully staged. That beautiful language, and so heartbreaking no matter how many times you see it. "My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep, for both are infinite."

FOOD: Amuse (Ashland OR)

Fantastic first dinner in Ashland at Amuse, a French-inspired bistro featuring local ingredients. Started with an amuse of beet “caviar” on crostini with fresh tarragon. The bread service (including nice gluten-free crackers for George) came with thyme butter and a tasty pepperade of cured peppers, onions, fennel. I started with a carrot soup with cumin and coriander, while G had a beet salad with goat cheese and figs. I had a succulent roast game hen in truffle butter with pole beans and Tokyo turnips, while G had a wild mushroom risotto with zucchini and arugula pesto. They had some really good southern Oregon wines. My Upper Five “Oso Grande” was a Grenache/Syrah /Tempranillo blend, a nice compliment to the truffles, while G had a lovely roussanne/ marsanne/ viognier. (Didn’t hurt that they served in appropriate Riedel crystal glasses.) For dessert, I took the pavlova with fresh blue and blackberries from a local farm, while G had a caramel pot de crème. And the check came with figs in ganache as a mignardise. Quite impressed with this place!

BOOKS: Interpreter of Maladies

Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” is a charming collection of short stories, some set in her ancestral Bengal region of India, but more often about Bengali immigrants in North America. (Some will recognize her as the author of “The Namesake”, which was also made into a movie.) Her stories often keenly illustrate the tensions of people who have one foot in the old world and one foot in the new, or those between generations of immigrants. Typically the story is told from the perspective of a particular character, and in several, that character is a child. She has a lovely skill of capturing a child’s observations of adult relationships around them. In other stories, characters implicitly wrestle with the meaning of marriage. The nine stories are all very well told, with thoughtfully developed characters, and an enjoyable read.

FILM: Crazy Rich Asians

What a pleasure to see Crazy Rich Asians. Not only a charming rom com with very likeable attractive leads, some interesting complications, good side characters, and plenty of laughs, tears, and heart-warming scenes, plus the bonus of some good food porn, travel porn, and fashion porn, but on top of all that you get some thoughtful glimpses of tensions between immigrant generations, between old world values and American values, between love and family, between sacrifice and self-fulfillment. Constance Wu is spot on as the Rachel, the heroine, a Chinese-American economics professor at NYU, smart, down to earth, and mostly confident though that is tested. Newcomer Henry Golding is perfectly handsome and charming as Rachel’s boyfriend Nick. Michelle Yeoh is flawless as Nick’s fierce tiger mother, with a nuanced performance that conveys so much with just a look. This film has layers, including nuances of Asian culture that are not elaborated, but add richness to those who will pick up on them. There’s a pivotal scene toward the end of the movie where the heroine confronts her boyfriend’s mother over a game of mahjong. I was very curious about the deeper symbolism that I suspected lay in those tiles and how the mahjong game unfolds. Gotta love the Internet -- I found a great blog post (caution: heavy spoilers!) that explains it, and it does enrich an already wonderful story.