DINE AND DASH

In July Pete Wells, the restaurant critic for the New York Times, announced that he was stepping down from that job after 12 years. His principal reason was what the work had done to his cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar and weight. He noted the short life spans of legendary food writers like A. A. Gill and Jonathan Gold. But he also said, simply, that "I realized I wasn't hungry anymore. And I'm still not, at least not the way I used to be."

All this rang true in my experience.

For most of my years working for newspapers and magazines, I have principally been an entertainment writer, focusing on movie reviews with occasional forays into writing about theatre, television, music, books. But I've also written about dining, for various publications, for decades.

I was a fill-in restaurant reviewer at Phoenix New Times, where I also had a weekly food review/interview column called "Lunch Meet." I've reviewed or profiled many East Valley eateries for the Wrangler News, and more recently I wrote a monthly column called "Four Corners" in Phoenix Magazine, in which I reviewed four different restaurants from four ends of the Valley, for slightly over four years, until it was shut down by COVID. I've also written many food-related entries for "Best of the Valley" and features like that.

And fun and delicious as all of this was, I too have suffered burnout. I don't expect any sympathy for this, of course; as Wells hastens to add: "The first thing you learn as a restaurant critic is that nobody wants to hear you complain."

This is understandable. Restaurant reviewing is a quintessential example of Nice Work If You Can Get It. Nobody doing data entry or telephone customer service, let alone paving roads in the Arizona heat, should have to endure somebody whining about what a drag it is to eat at nice restaurants for free and then write about it.

The day I was offered the food writing gig at Phoenix Magazine, I was driving home from the doctor's office where I had just learned I had diabetes. I immediately accepted the offer. My pancreas was just going to have to learn to cope.

All the same, after a few years even that nice work can grow old. First of all, not every restaurant is good. It's not fun--at least, it isn't fun for me--to write negatively about a small business into which people have poured their heart and soul and fortune, and on which their dreams are riding.

Besides, poor food can be hard on you. Substandard, misfired meals can clobber your digestion and leave you feeling hung over and help expand your waistline, all without the compensatory pleasure of a culinary success. As Wells says, after a few years you may find you're not so hungry anymore.

Even when the food is good, however, writing about it, for me, was often difficult. Applied to food, adjectives tend to wear out fast through repetition. I adore a good burrito, but it's hard to find a new word to describe even the most heavenly burrito on the planet.

Truthfully, I have sometimes found this same syndrome creeping into my movie reviewing. For most of about nine years, that was my main job--going to see movies and then writing down my thoughts about them. No doubt, if you're a cinema lover, it beats work.

Still, it's not certain that spending your days sedentary, in a cold dark room, eating greasy popcorn and Dots and Junior Mints and drinking Dr. Pepper, is the surest ticket to health and well-being. Certainly there are many movie critics who lived to old age, but two of the most famous departed on the early side, Gene Siskel at 53 and Roger Ebert at 70.

After long stretches of movie reviewing, a sense can sometimes set in that you've seen, and reviewed, all the movies, just with different titles and actors, just as when you're reviewing restaurants, a sense can set in that you've written up all the burritos, just with different dining rooms surrounding them. In my full-time critic days, people used to sometimes say, wow, you're lucky, you get to see all the movies. 

I would agree that I was very lucky. But then remember, I would add, it's not that I get to see all the movies, it's that I have to see all the movies.

Again, I do understand how absurdly fortunate I've been to spend so much of my working life in these amusing pursuits, and I'm inexpressibly grateful for it. My only point in all this, I suppose, is that no matter how cushy a job is, in the end it's still a job. So I wish Pete Wells a happy, and hungry, post-reviewing life.

THE CAPES OF WRATH

Opening this week:

  
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—The title sounds like a Supreme Court Case, but it just refers to a spat between the two biggest names in the DC superhero stable. The Man of Steel thinks Gotham’s Dark Knight is a creepy vigilante, while the Caped Crusader thinks that the near-omnipotence of Krypton’s Favorite Son represents an existential threat to all humankind. Can either be called wrong with perfect confidence?

This had possibilities, certainly, and a deft director in Zack Snyder. And the film has its moments. The acting is quite strong—Ben Affleck makes a brooding, intriguing, suavely attractive Bruce Wayne, and his costume gives a perfectly competent performance as Batman. He’s far more credible as a superhero here than he was as Daredevil back in 2003.

Henry Cavill makes a serviceable Superman—like most actors who have played this role, his charm doubles whenever he’s in Clark Kent drag—and Jesse Eisenberg darkens his persona as a manic, nattering Lex Luthor. A young Israeli actress named Gal Gadot is introduced as Wonder Woman; she doesn’t get much to do, but she is unquestionably a wonder.

Parts of the clash between the title icons are amusing, but mostly Batman v Superman is an overwrought, laborious, punishingly heavy slog. The conflict is muddled and lacking in urgency, there isn’t nearly enough humor, and, above all, the movie is too freakin’ long. It’s TOO. FREAKIN’. LONG. By at least twenty minutes, probably more.

Various theories can be advanced as to why so many blockbuster action movies insist on being so outrageously overlong. But I would rather this review, unlike Batman v Superman itself, remain brief. 

City of Gold—This documentary challenges the commonplace that good stories require conflict. It’s a portrait of Pulitzer-Prize-winning L.A. Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, and it has almost none.

For an hour and a half, we watch the pleasant fellow galumph around the Greater L.A. area, going to Mom and Pop ethnic restaurants where adoring owners serve him plates of delicious-looking food. He takes a brief side trip to New York to dine with his idol Calvin Trillin, but otherwise that’s pretty much the whole movie, in terms of content. None of the talking heads have an unkind word to say about him; no appalling personal tragedies are revealed.

Of course, we do learn that Gold is a chronic procrastinator. A newspaper columnist who procrastinates? What a shocker! And his environmentalist brother gently reproves him for his fondness for overfished varieties of sushi. That’s about as much Shakespearean drama as we get.

But director Laura Gabbert, abetted by Bobby Johnston’s fine score, keeps City of Gold gliding along enjoyably. Gabbert’s bird’s-eye dissection of L.A.’s neighborhoods is fascinating and undeniably glamorous, and the movie works as genteel food porn as well. Mere humans may feel a pang of envy at seeing someone so seemingly contented with and well-rewarded by his talents, but Gold comes across so unassumingly that it doesn’t deepen into resentment.