Tag: “Ariel” (Page 2 of 2)

Hell’s Kitchen: rolling the dice

Last night’s “Hell’s Kitchen” episode on FOX began with the guys all getting along and telling each other they felt like a new team without Robert, who had spent the night in a hospital with chest pains. Then Gordon Ramsay had the two teams roll dice at a makeshift craps table, and each one had a letter that represented part of a meal they would cook. For instance, the ladies started with an “R” and Suzanne chose rabbit…can I say something here? EWWWWWWWW. That’s one step below cooking a dog or cat for dinner, isn’t it? Anyway, each team member had the chance to roll and select an ingredient. The red team wound up with rabbit, haricot verts (a fancy French term for thin green beans), potatoes, garlic and ham hocks. Ramsay praised them for having the basis for a nice, rustic dinner.

The blue team, meanwhile, started with haddock, and then Dave, who rolled an “F,” chose figs. The guys were giving Dave a hard time and hoping he would say fennel, but he didn’t. Van chose angel hair pasta for “A,” and they also had apples and tomatoes. Then each team had to cook their meal for Ramsay, and the guys were all surprised at how good their fig/tomato sauce tasted. Ramsay loved the rabbit dish (again, ewwww) but he loved the haddock dish with the figs even more, and the blue team won the challenge. Part of the reason they won was that the garlic in the rabbit dish was too overpowering, something Tennille had warned Ariel about.
The guys’ prize was a trip to Vegas, while the ladies had to unload delivery trucks all day, and even at 1am after they had gone to sleep. Yikes.

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Hell’s Kitchen: Ramsay likes throwing the curveball

With drama flying around like crazy last night on “Hell’s Kitchen” on FOX, it would be fitting that Gordon Ramsay threw a curve at the end of the episode and eliminated someone we may not have expected.

The show began with a recap of last week when Ramsay eliminated Tek, but not before giving Amanda an earful about why she looks like she’s done. So then he pulled her aside and told her that she needs to get her head back in the game, saying “I’m counting on you.” Well, I’m not so sure any of us are counting on her to go much further, but he wouldn’t pull Amanda aside if he didn’t see something in her.

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Aki Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy

Radio humorist Garrison Keillor gets a great deal of mileage poking fun at the taciturn ways of Swedish and Norwegian-Americans in the bleak Midwest. By comparison, Aki Kaurismäki’s similarly Nordic Finnish Fins make the citizens of Lake Wobegone seem like a bunch of raging drama queens. Kaurismäki is known for blending clever ultra-deadpan comedy and classical neorealist filmmaking, and since I love the former and just barely tolerate the latter, his works tend to be a hit and miss affair for me. Nevertheless, the definite class of this no-frills three-disc set from Criterion’s Eclipse line — comprised of three short feature-length movies about the lives of working folks who get themselves into bad, bad trouble — is also, however, the least overtly funny. 1990’s “The Match Factory Girl” is an ultra-dry twist on the pathos-heavy Hans Christian Anderson tale starring Kati Outinen — the female lead of Kaurismäki’s terrific 2002 art-house hit “The Man Without a Past” — as a trodden-upon lass who finally has enough of her vile parents and her even more vile boy-enemy (you can’t call him a friend). Ned Flanders-mustached Matti Pellonpää, who appears un-credited as the cruel seducer, also plays major roles in the less melodramatic, less reliably entertaining, but also very deftly made, films that round out the set: 1986’s “Shadows in Paradise,” a romantic comedy of sorts, and 1988’s “Ariel,” an out of sorts heist picture.

“Match Factory Girl” aside, this is the kind of material that will test the patience of viewers who don’t love such neorealist tropes as watching characters make tea for 15 seconds of real time. On the other hand, if kitchen sink realism and downbeat, ultra-subtle humor is your thing, they all may be your cup of tea. An ecological note: Given that all three features combined run just over 3.5 hours (the longest is an epic 76 minutes) and there are zero extras, someone should ask Criterion why was it necessary to package this brief trilogy on three separate discs.

Click to buy “Aki Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy”

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