Too Much Carrot Tartare

 It's Oscars season, meaning publications I read like the WSJ, Time, and the NY Times will be pushing the best films of 2023 for viewers to catch up on the Oscars buzz.... already some controversy at the Golden Globes with Cilian Murphy winning Best Actor over Bradley Cooper for Maestro, despite Bradley Cooper having dedicated 6 years of his life to prepare himself to play the role of Leonard Bernstein, or so he says. The thing is, I was all pumped up to watch Maestro with MJ when it came out on Netflix.....and then after the laborious first 30 minutes of Cooper playing music and smoking, playing music and smoking......I went to go work out. The problem with these critically acclaimed movies, for a novice like me at least, there's too much nuance, too much symbolism, too much unexpressed emotion and messages below the service, it's like having too much of a good thing all at once, like going to Eleven Madison Park (at one time the best restaurant in the world) and getting too much quality, too many exquisite sauces over fancy made dishes like carrot tartare, too much one-bite food with professional chefs coming out to explain their creations to you......when really I would have been OK with a nice pasta and salad with cashew sauce mix, or curry over bok choi and rice, 2 dishes MJ expertly made this week (with the help of her new subscription meal service, ironically called the Purple Carrot- did the company also enjoy carrot tartare at Eleven Madison?). Like quality is subjective; fashion is subjective; it brings me back to high school English class where I thought some my papers were great, but the collective opinion of writers and literature experts gave the opinion that my paper wasn't good. All of which leads to Past Lives, the movie set in NYC, with more than half of the dialogue in Korean, with an admittedly interesting message about what-could-have-been; it's too slow for me. not enough things happening, not enough characters (just 3 people, a love triangle). Which is what's allowing me to write about it here while watching it at half attention. It's a beautiful movie, but the message is kind of simple: yes, I get it, you had a past life where you loved this man from Korean, you could have been with him, but you chose a different life with a white guy in the U.S. and now you don't know how things would have turned out with the other guy. Welcome to probably everyone in the world who's ever been in love with someone else and looks back fondly and with regret. "We were really babies back then." A line in the movie- yup, all adults feel that way about when they were younger, so many things we would all do differently. Not taking much risks here. 

I read somewhere that the only horror movie ever to win an Oscar for best picture was....Silence of the Lambs? Uh, are people forgetting about Parasite? When the old housekeeper opened up the hidden entrance down to the basement leading down the path of a hell to a horrible underworld? That was horrifying. Still the best Korean movie I've ever seen. 

Today I learned a phrase called "the maintenance phase," the time to keep the weight off after losing a substantial amount of weight. I've never had to worry about that; I've had a standard deviation of 10 pounds or so, give or take, my normal weight for the last 20 years of my life, but I get how hard the maintenance phase is. (Keep it up, MJ!) There was one winter in Chicago with MJ where we both gained substantial amount of weight in the cold harsh winter with a wildly irresponsible diets of Subway sandwiches and roast beef late at night and then sitting all day in the office (at least I was). The retreat back to L.A. helped to take off some of that weight, and the maintenance phase was just eating LESS.... much, much less. Without making too big of a leap, the secret to a maintenance phase might just be getting the best quality food without eating too much of it, like eating only carrot tartare and not junk food; watching only quality films like Past Lives that make us ruminate about our lives in a healthy and introspective way (yes, as I've been writing this post the film has started growing on me) instead of the junk-food equivalent "Trolls World Tour" or "Fast and Furious 10" or whatever iteration they are on..... I guess I'll have to settle into a maintenance phase of watching quality movies from now until the Oscars.