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Showing posts from November, 2012

A Restaurant Review Worthy of Ebert and Siskel (z"l)

A bunch of years ago, Gene Siskel (z"l) and Roger Ebert were reviewing a movie on their public TV show, "At the Movies." I can't tell you the name of the movie, but I can recall the palpable outrage of these two film critics - men who loved everything about film, who lived for the cinematic experience, who took and studied the art form very seriously - at a piece of mediocre movie making that was being passed off as fine art. They were livid, and they made no bones about it. It wasn't that the movie was bad; bad movies are 99% of what gets produced. What made them furious was what (if I recall) appeared to them to be an obscene waste of time, money, precious and rare creativity and resources on a half-baked, mediocre effort. The movie was bad? Fine. The intent was mediocrity? THAT was unforgivable. I came away from that episode shaken by their intensity. And yesterday, Pete Wells, a restaurant critic for the New York Times, offered a scathing review of Guy's