Summer's End Saison

So, my brewing adventures continue, or rather they continued through the summer of 2012.  Since winning my category in the 2012 Beehive Brewoff, my desire to home brew only grew.  When trying to think of the next beer to brew, Hillary was actively growing her summer plants on the porch of her apartment.  Not surprisingly, she came up with the idea to try and use her plants in our beer.  I agreed, thinking this sounded like a great idea, if we're brewing the beer, why not grow the ingredients too?  We also wanted to try out creating our own recipe rather than following a kit.  So, after some searching we found a few saison recipes and one specifically, a lime-basil recipe.  So, we modified each of the recipie into our own.  In the end we decided on a lemon basil saison.  So off we went, brewing out next beer!

A few weeks later, we bottled the very "herby" smelling beer, excited about how it might turn out.  This was around the same time Epic Brewing released their Utah Saige Saison.  As we bottled, the aroma constantly reminded us of this delicious beer, also made with local Utah herbs, from one of our favorite breweries.  As a result, we were once again overly excited about our beer and we decided, before we had even tasted it, that were were ready to enter another competition!  So, we found one in Las Vegas and sent down our newest brew "Summer's End Saison."  Once again, we won a ribbon!  This time we got second place in our catefory of spice, herb or vegetable beer.  Ironically, the first place winner this time was the second place brewer from the Beehive Brewoff.  Seems like there might be a some competition here, haha.

Anyway, we were quite happy with second place.  Since then we have also brewed "Crimson Stout," a sour cherry Irish Stout and my newest beer that is still unnamed as of now, but it is a Vanilla Nut Brown.  i go t the inspiration after having a vanilla hazelnut coffee at work, thinking "hey, I could totally turn this into a beer!"  So, I went and did just that.  They just finished bottle conditioning earlier this month and since then a few people have tried them out.  Glowing reviews from all.  Hopefully, they actually are enjoying the beer and not just being nice, haha.

Anyway, now I am in the process of entering yet another home brew comp, this one in Colorado.  I think I'll enter the C.P.P.A., in hopes it has aged well, definitely the VNB, and am debating entering the sour cherry stout.  Though I like Crimson Stout, I am not sure it's a competition winner.

At this point I am just going to consider myself caught up, as clearly I'm not doing so well with that, Sundance ended this week and I didn't post once.  So, I will just consider this my second beginning to this blog, that nobody reads anyway.

C.P.P.A. Bue Ribbon Winner, Eat Your Heart Out Pabst

So, it's clearly been a while since I have last posted anything on this blog.  I have found myself overwhelmingly busy working my new full-time job, working in film and photography, and most exiting, lots and lots of traveling.  Anyway, more on all of those things to come.

For now, I want to focus on a bit of old news.  Back in August of 2012 I entered my second beer C.P.P.A. into my first homebrew competition, and it took first place in it's category!  The competition was open to anyone interested, but attracted mostly entries from Utah, Nevada and California (I believe) and had over 500 entries.

I was extatic to learn my beer was not only delicious according to me and my friends, but apparently so does the beer community of Salt Lake City.  Th head brewer of Red rock brewing was one of the judges on my beer, and he gave it many positive accolades.

A quick note about the name, C.P.P.A. as the beer is technically a Jalpeno Pale Ale.  It is named after the department where I earned my Master's degree, the Center for Public policy and Administration, or CPPA, for short.  However, the acronym also easily stands for Chilli Pepper Pale Ale, as such I named my beer C.P.P.A.!

Unfortunately this was so long ago and I am so behind, I only have about six of these left, hot commodities now.  This is however, one of those rare instances where I am proud enough of what I create I want to share it with others, so i probably ont hoard them all to myself.  i am also saving three for entry into a homebrew competition in my home state of Vermont, hopefully they;ll hold up till then.

Well, the next few days will hopefully be filled with a bunch of new posts in trying to catch up to date.  Hopefully I will be ready and up to date by the time I rejoin the Sunadnace Film Festival up in park City in two weeks.

N.E.S.B. - Northern Extra Special Bitter

So here it is, my first beer I ever brewed.  I call it the Northern E.S.B. or N.E.S.B. for short.  As this was my first, I it brewed from a kit I bought form local brew suppliers The Beer Nut and tried my hardest to follow the directions.  I veared off here and there as I got excited and rush through a step or two.  I also took some advice from some brewing blog videos I watched while brewing.  Most importantly however, was that it turned out great for brewing without a thermometer.

When poured from the bottle into the glass its clear to see its a lighter beer, almost like an unfiltered pale ale, which is good, because that's close to what it is.  After the first sip, it's clear the beer didn't quite come out as an ESB as it came too sweet and not as bittery as a beer lover might like.  However, due to this it found many fine compliments from my friends who aren't as into beer as I am.  They appreciated the sweetness and lack of overwhelming bitterness.

Over time however, as it has been close to three weeks since I opened the first bottle, the beer has aged a little more.  Though everywhere I have read, ESBs are typically best right after bottle conditioning, I think this one has gotten better.  Some of the sweetness has been lost and therefore the beer flavor has come through a little more.  Though still not quite an ESB.

Some opinions vary nonetheless.  My partner in crime, Hillary Galvin, has often said the beers are tasting worse the longer they sit in the bottles.  Yet, she is still unable to quite pin point the reason to words yet.  The closest we have got has been it tastes like a beer that has lost carbonation.  Either way, we are both happy with our result and continue to drink them to this day!

Overall, there are many, many reasons as to why this beer came out the way it did, from lack of proper sanitization, use of SLC tap-water, to over sugaring the yeast (honestly this is my best guess for off flavors).  Either way, I know own a thermometer and have one brewed beer under my belt.

Next up is my Jalapeno Pale Ale which was bottled just this past Sunday and I am about to start a Cherry Irish Stout tonight.

Stay thirsty my friends, and make sure to grab a delicious beer for your next "movie date" with that cute girl from class.

Where My Degree Has Got Me Now...Brewing Beer!

So, as I'm sure anyone who has tried to check for a new post recently, I haven't post a review in a while.  That's because this past school year kept me too busy for me to follow up, even as I attended Sundance this past year.  I have was very busy with snowboarding, traveling, internships, jobs, etc.  Though if you are at all interested definitely check out the Bones brigade Documentary and John Dies at the End as those were my two favorites by far.

As far as this blog, I will now be turning it into a more random assortment of posts about my life as I navigate this economy post graduate school.  The next pot to look forward to will be about another interest of mine, beer.  I recently got into homebrewing and am in the process now of fermenting my first full (5-gallon batch).  It will be a E.S.B., rating at about 4.7% ABV (measured by my first attempt at measuring the Gravity of beer using a hydrometer).

Insidious. It Sucks.

So, I put the entirety of this film review in the title above.  Simply put, the 2010 horror flick Insidious, directed by James Wan, is one of the worst movies I have seen of late.  I'll even dare to say I'd rather watch The Hangover 2 again before watching this film.  The only other Wan film I have ever seen is Saw, but if this film is any indication of his work, I wish he had stopped there.

Knowing absolutely nothing about this film, I happened to walk into the theater on a whim one Sunday afternoon.  Luckily it was at the local "cheap seats," or second run theater and the two tickets purchased cost a grand total of $3.  This is important as I have never walked out of a theater and asked for my money back, a trend that saw a recent spike in popularity with the release of Terrence Malik's The Tree of Life, which I have still yet to see.  This film was almost my first.

It certainly doesn't help that in watching this film every one of my sense was attacked.  Beyond the poor excuse for a horror film happening in front of me, I was forced to watch a teen couple fondle themselves in the seats in front of me, listen to two crying babies, gag on the dollar store perfume of a lay sitting somewhere in my vicinity, and was afraid to even slip off my flip flops for fear of a sticky floor.  Nonetheless, the content of Insidious beyond my terrible movie experience also left me disappointing and annoyed.  The story was bleak and predictable, and my intelligence was even insulted when at the end, surprise surprise, Patrick Wilson's character Josh doe world of blacknesssn't return to his body and I am left with a wannabe cliff hanger ending.

The lack of a gripping plot was only heightened by a lack of acting talent and emotionless characters.  Not even Rose Byrne was able to give me a believable performance, not to mention the lack of a character ark and emotion from Patrick Wilson.  If I had a son in an unexplainable comma and a stay at home wife going insane in a haunted house, I wouldn't sit in a classroom staring at the camera with an emotionless expression for an hour and a half.  The simple lack of character expression and connection between each other, and the audience, is enough to turn me off of the movie.  Yet, still the worst part is the complete lack of imagination in the story.  I knew nothing about astral projection going into this film, and now I have no desire to ever learn anymore because it leads to 103 minute movies of people sitting around talking very unscientifically about walking through a dark "insidious" world of blackness.  Not even the imaginary world of astral projection was visually appealing enough to entertain me.  I mean Koyaanisqatsi is boring too, but at least it looks good.

Overall, this film offers nothing new to the art of film or world of entertainment.  Sadly, the writing team of James Wan and Leigh Whannell seems unable to provide the audience with a visually entertaining or intellectually creative film as they did with the first trend setting Saw.  The scariest part of this film is that one day, I may have to sit through it again.

Insidious

Let Them Eat Cake! And Watch Marie Antoinette for Their Sweet 16!

To think of Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette as a historically accurate period piece reflecting the life and times of the famed last queen of France, is as much of a mistake as believing Edward Wood Jr.’s Plan 9 From Outer Space is a flawless masterpiece. Still the acceptance of Marie Antoinette as something other than a historical period piece does not dismiss the fact that the film is a teenybopper film more suitable for mall going tweens, than the average adult movie audience. It is not a film of universal appeal as one might be lead to believe, instead Sofia Coppola has made a film about an old world Paris Hilton who seems to care more about her reputation, shopping, and money, than the position of power she has been born into. In fact, based on this film, one would half expect a homemade sex painting of Marie Antoinette copulating with the young soldier with whom she had an affair to surface and spreads around the countries newspapers. Mrs. Coppola may have set out to make a film about consumerism in the (old and current) world, only set in 18th century France, yet has focused too much on the aspects of teenage girls.
The decision to intertwine historically accurate period music, with modern pop and puck rock is one that not only deters one from the narrative of the film but also feels like an overindulgence itself. When Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” burst through the speakers, Sofia Coppola has simply taken it too far, placing more importance on the beat of the pop music, than the actual message she is trying to convey; simply because a song has a line like “I want candy,” and there is candy on screen, does not make it and appropriate correlation. Also, her choice to covertly slip in a pair of purple converse during a scene all about shoes could be conceived as a clever trick to remind the audience that the theme of this movie can apply to today as much as back then. However, with British one-hit-wonders of Bow Wow Wow, and Gang of Four begin to blast through the speakers, it is like Sofia Coppola trying to thrust her intention down my throat; as if I need modern pop music to be able to make a connection between Marie Antoinette and Paris Hilton. Beyond this, there is a constant switch between the periodic music of the 1700’s and modern punk of today. This might have been an acceptable tool had the non-diagetic music stuck to one era, and kept the period music to just the diagetic music in the film. Yet, Coppola can’t seem to decide, and in the tradition of a true adolescent teen girl, is unable to make up her mind.
Music was not the only deterrent from the film, even the acting lacks any sort of continuity throughout the film. Kirsten Dunst plays the aristocratic queen of France, yet talks in American slang like she is from the California in the 1990’s. In fact she plays the valley girl so well that it remains hard to tell if what she was doing was really acting. Dunst sounds far too comfortable dragging out her words like ‘sooooo’ that it makes the others speaking English with an attempted French accent (like Jason Schwartzman trying to play young Louis XVI) sound even more ridiculous and absurd. Watching her continually shop for new clothes and dress up in new lavish costumes everyday gives more a feel that Dunst is there playing dress up, rather than acting in a film. The varied range of acting styles in the film make it even harder to accept Marie Antoinette as a serious film with anything more to do other than capture the minds of teenage girls who giggle over the young men in the film and marvel at the shoes so often depicted in the film. Coppola even gets so brash as to throw in a pair of purple converse as if to say ‘look at me I’m now in the modern era, I know what cool is.’
Not even the set design of the film allows one a break from the barrage of trendy aesthetic. Every scene is filled with elaborate patterns and bright colors distracting from the actual image, putting the viewer in a hypnotic trance of color. Even the scenes shot outdoors with Marie Antoinette are full of an elaborate excess of design in the gardens and rows of large trees all placed in perfect lines. As she walks along a path in the garden she asks for more large trees to be planted like she wanted them tomorrow, unaware that trees cannot grow to full height in one day. She then feels as though she is compromising when she is told they do not have enough money to afford a new line of trees, so she ‘graciously’ accepts the idea to just plant smaller trees, as if this will solve the money situation of the country.
The numerous over the top attempts at being clever and attempt to force connections between Marie Antoinette, and the 20th century, makes it hard not to focus on Sofia Coppola as the director. The narrative is continually broken through loud pop music, and the periods of historical context are made so unbelievable by the differing acting styles, and the frame is so plastered by lavish, colorful designs, that the viewer is forced to focus on other aspects of the film. Therefore it is hard to not make the parallels between Sofia Coppola as a director and Marie Antoinette as the Queen of France. In both cases the two happened to be born into position of wealth and power, since Sofia Coppola is of course the daughter of the Francis Ford Coppola, the man who directed both The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. As a result, on cannot entire blame Coppola for the decisions she made for she was brought up in a rich environment in which she could be spoiled. In her defense she probably feels that shoes, candy, and parties are what people really care about, and what they really want to see. Even the opening credits slashed across the screen in a flash of white lettering surrounded by a bright pink boarder, as in a poor attempt to reference the Sex Pistols, begins the assault on the legend of Queen Marie Antoinette.
Coppola barely hints on the most important aspects of Marie Antoinette’s life, like her being the cause of the French revolution. The choice to place more emphasis and screen time on shoes rather than actual events, is an insult to the history of the true Marie Antoinette. The few scenes of historical importance are brushed over quickly with only a few references to the aid to the American Revolution, and the only scene where Mrs. Antoinette address the peasants of France, is to bow quickly and leave the frame with them as soon as possible. Yet, if one goes into Marie Antoinette not expecting a filmic masterpiece, or a film about the last queen of France, and instead prepares for a shallow teenybopper film, more like Clueless than Ben-Hur, then it will not disappoint.

Marie Antoinette

Claiming It Over: Quantum of Solace Ends the Bond Franchise

Officially the 22nd film in the EON Productions franchise on the James Bond name, Quantum of Solace continues the decline of dynasty of classic Bond films. For the first time ever in the entire history of James Bond movies, Quantum of Solace begins mere moment after its predecessor, Casino Royale (2006), left off; not only in terms of plot continuity, but also in it’s diminish quality and charm of the traditional Bond flick. Many viewers know James Bond as the suave, handsome, crime-fighting, ladies man who sleeps with every attractive girl he sees, without obtaining an STD, and fights crime, without earning himself a scratch. Similarly, the Bond tradition is one that has stood the test of time with fresh new Bond films coming out every couple of years since Dr. No in 1962, that continues to entertain the audiences of each generation. However, Quantum of Solace defies each of these timeless qualities, dropping almost of Bond film traditions for a quick cut action overload more like an ADD afflicted child’s mind than a well structured spy film.
The decision of EON Productions to hire on Marc Forster as the director may have sounded like a strong choice for his previously proven work on dramatic (and romantic) films like Finding Neverland and Stranger Than Fiction, had they not tried to balance it out by hiring on Dan Bradley of the Bourne series. The potential of these two was seemingly too much of an expectation to be placed on this film. Instead being treated with expertly coordinated, action packed, thrill sequences and dramatically enthralling segments of character interaction, we are forced to watch jarring editing and bland story lines. Forster’s, despite his previous work, does not pull full emotions out of the characters of either Bond (Daniel Craig) or Camille (Olga Kurylenko). Instead the audience is forced to watch Bond pine over dead Bond girl Vespa (Eva Green, not appearing in this film) from Casino Royale, through the constant mentioning of her death. Rather than have the Daniel Craig actually bring out his pain through his acting, Forster relies on the constant reminder of incessant referencing of the death by the other characters. This made it hard to relate to the characters and therefore taking much of the charm and appeal away from James Bond.
On the other end of the spectrum, Dan Bradley, still hot on the popularity and success of the Bourne series attempts to continue his overused style of shaky cameras and quick cuts in an attempt to portray exciting action sequences. This may have worked well for his previous movies, but the implementation of these techniques in a Bond movie is offensive. Part of the impressiveness of a James Bond film is the use of real stunts with little, or even better yet, no special effect (especially CGI) used. The use of the unnecessary, quick cutting distracts from the action on the screen and takes away from the impressiveness of the actual filming of a live car chase along the Italian cliff side roads. Quantum of Solace had the budget, time, and staff to film the action for real, so it is simply an insult to slice up these precious moments caught on film. Each cut takes more of the believability, activeness, and splendor of the action taking place on the screen, both in terms of the actual stunt being performed as well as the event taking place in the story. At some points the cutting becomes so distracting that it is even difficult to tell the difference between blonde haired Daniel Craig and his brown haired pursuit as they run through the medieval passage under Siena, Italy.
From the opening scene of the film, much of this movie is filled with action scene after action scene, after action scene. Even though Bond films tend to be booked as action packed thrillers, the downplay of the story and overuse of action sequences follows a continuing trend in American cinema in the last few years. There has always been an appeal for spectacle on the scene, from car chases, to explosions, to sex; however, Bond films have always maintained strong balance between story and action. Sadly, these past two Bond films with Daniel Craig have broke from this tradition and instead followed the pop trend of the times. In Quantum of Solace more so than Casino Royale, it felt like the story of the film, which has always played an integral part in the Bond franchise, feels less creative and existent only to show the action sequences, despite it’s being adaptation from another Ian Fleming work.
Whether this attempt at making prequels to the previous Bond and Bond films remains to be seen. Daniel Craig is still contracted for three more Bond films before the absolute fate of the Bond franchise is determined. Quantum of Solace (and Casino Royale) are supposed to be set in a time prior to the other 20 Bond films, during a time when Bond is young, messy, and motivated by revenge; a time where he was fallible, full of testosterone infused rage, and loaded with a trigger-happy finger rather than mind. It is yet to be seen as to whether Daniel Craig will mature into the classic James Bond we all knew before, and if EON Productions will revert back to it’s matured state of production rather than fall victim to the trend of the times. It may be premature to say this now, but Quantum of Solace just might be the “jumping the shark” installment of the James Bond series.


Quantum of Solace