Best TV & Movies Of 2008 David Edelstein's Top 10 Movies of 2008
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Anne Hathaway
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Bob Vergara
Married Bliss: Back in October, David Edelstein called the Anne Hathaway dramedy a masterpiece; now it's No. 1 on his year-end list. Sony Pictures Classics
Fresh Air from WHYY, December 23, 2008 · It's that time of year — time to put together our critics' lists of the top movies of 2008, and see what we can learn about the larger cultural trends reflected in those films.
The common wisdom — that in hard times audiences turn to escapist entertainment — doesn't hold this year, says Fresh Air movie critic David Edelstein.
From The Dark Knight, the year's biggest box-office smash, to the animated triumph Wall-E, the tone was distinctly dystopian, and the best films decidedly more complicated than most Hollywood fare.
Edelstein, who's also chief film critic at New York magazine, talks with Terry Gross about his Ten Best List for 2008.
Which, it turns out, is actually an Eleven Best List this time around — even though The Dark Knight doesn't appear on it:
1. Rachel Getting Married
2. Wall-E
3. Happy-Go-Lucky
4. Cadillac Records
5. The Class
6. Waltz with Bashir
7. Shotgun Stories
8. Kit Kittredge: American Girl
9. Doubt
10. Taxi to the Dark Side
11. Trouble the Water
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98634268
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Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Best TV & Movies Of 2008 Mark Jenkins: My 10 Movie Picks For 2008 by Mark Jenkins
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Best TV & Movies Of 2008 Mark Jenkins: My 10 Movie Picks For 2008 by Mark Jenkins
9. Taxi to the Dark Side: Soldiers in red light
THINKFilm
NPR.org, December 31, 2008 · Every December, cineplexes teem with marquee actors, posh accents and somber themes, all of them assembled to attract awards-season attention. And some of these (mostly Anglo-American) ingredients will indeed help their respective movies get statuettes.
But the year's best films came from all over the globe. And they were distinguished not by the usual artistic suspects but by distinctive personal visions.
These are my choices for 2008's 10 most remarkable movies, listed alphabetically. They're so good that I barely regret the ones (see below) left on the cutting-room floor.
Most Sublime Vision Of Everyday Life
1. - Red Balloon: Song Fang and Simon Iteanu
IFC Films
The Flight of the Red Balloon
Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien
Unrated
* David Edelstein's Review
Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien's homage to 1956's The Red Balloon is set in a city far from home, based on a premise the director didn't choose and featuring dialogue improvised in a language he doesn't speak. Yet the movie is unquestionably Hou's, from its brilliant use of color to its gliding long takes. With Juliette Binoche playing a voice actress with an interest in Chinese puppetry, the scenario cleverly balances East and West. While the film could only have been shot in Paris, Hou's visual style transforms familiar landmarks and vistas.
Most Chilling Vision Of Everyday Life
2. 4 Weeks - Anamaria Marinca and Alex Potocean
IFC Films
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Director: Cristian Mungiu
Unrated
* Bob Mondello's Review
Trailing closely with a hand-held camera, writer-director Cristian Mungiu observes a young woman as she arranges an abortion for her college roommate. It's Romania in 1987, and the procedure is illegal. That means the woman will enter the world of black-market services, where she'll get a clear view of life under a faltering totalitarian regime. The movie's intensifying sense of menace doesn't lead to any particular assault. Instead, it reflects the generalized dread of living in a place where everybody zealously enforces their tiny rations of power — just as the roommates' agreement never to talk about the abortion stands for the many things that can't be said in an authoritarian land.
Most Sprightly Critique Of Totalitarianism
3. - I Served: Ivan Barnev as Jan Dite
Sony Pictures Classics
I Served the King of England
Director: Jiri Menzel
Rated R
* Mark Jenkins' Review
In a year when both Kate Winslet and Tom Cruise played Nazis, the near-silent clown Ivan Barnev offers a comic yet more convincing depiction of why someone might have donned the swastika: to win the heart of an earnest Teutonic blond. Barnev plays a Chaplin-like waiter who rises to a job at Prague's best hotel, where he seeks only money and love. Instead, he is clobbered by the one-two punch of Nazi occupation and Soviet domination. Director Jiri Menzel doesn't play everything for laughs; there are wrenching shifts of tone at crucial moments. That the movie treats the 20th century as absurd doesn't mean it takes historical horrors lightly.
Most Eccentric Biopic
4. My Winnipeg: Frozen Horse Heads
IFC Films
My Winnipeg
Director: Guy Maddin
Unrated
* David Edelstein's Review
Offered the opportunity to make a movie about his hometown, Guy Maddin produced an astonishing and often hilarious "docu-fantasia." This film also has Nazis, but they're a minor irritant next to the shock of adolescent sexuality, the treachery of the National Hockey League and a domineering uber-mom. The director's style is simultaneously a homage to and parody of silent-era cinema, mostly in contrasty black and white but with fevered shades of local color. According to Maddin's mock history, his hometown "has 10 times the sleepwalking rate of any city in the world" — and this movie indeed suggests something encountered on the cusp of wakefulness.
Most Distinctive Teen Flick
5. Paranoid Park: Gabe Nevins
IFC Films
Paranoid Park
Director: Gus Van Sant
Rated R
* David Edelstein's Review
Paranoid Park is Gus Van Sant's best use yet of his mainstream narrative style, but his most heartfelt films are more abstract. While this beguiling tale of a shaggy-haired lost boy begins with a conventional strategy, adapting a mystery novel, the director circles around the story rather than approaching it directly. Turning on events at an ominous skateboard park and a nearby rail yard, the movie is a coming-of-age tale that depicts oncoming adulthood as both threatening and disorienting. Van Sant turns the mystery inside out, emphasizing his protagonist's blurry confusion over a crisp resolution.
Giddiest New-Wave Update
6. Reprise: Espen Klouman Hoiner and Anders Danielsen Lie
Miramax Films
Reprise
Director: Joachim Trier
Rated R
* Bob Mondello's Review
At the start of this literary-life caper, two college-age aspiring writers drop their respective first novels into an Oslo mailbox — and the world explodes with possibility. Writer-director Joachim Trier takes the young men's emotions seriously, but also observes with amused detachment. The result is a comedy with tragic elements, and its shifts in pitch are thrilling. So are the speedy flashbacks, narrated asides, impatient edits, and sprinting hand-held camera. No explosions, shootouts or car chases are required when a film moves this beautifully. Trier was inspired by the '60s French new wave, but it's surely also relevant that he's a former Norwegian skateboard champion.
Most Audacious Account Of Youthful Triumph
7. Slumdog Millionaire: Dev Patel and Freida Pinto
Fox Searchlight
Slumdog Millionaire
Director: Danny Boyle
Rated R
* Bob Mondello's Review
Borrowing from Bollywood, City of God and the book Maximum City, British director Danny Boyle crafts a portrait of Mumbai that's half romp, half expose. The framework is a round of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in which each question summons an episode from the young contestant's often horrific past. For all its flash, the movie is not superficial: Every flashback reveals some aspect of the diverse city's history or culture. If the characters are thin, it's because Slumdog is really the story of a far bigger organism — one stuffed with gods, factions and unresolved rivalries.
Most Audacious Account Of Youthful Defeat
8. Summer Palace: Hao Lei and Guo Xiaodong
Palm Pictures
Summer Palace
Director: Lou Ye
Unrated
That this electrifying movie was made at all is a marvel of artistic sedition. Shooting without permission, Chinese director Lou Ye managed to film a comprehensive account of the Tiananmen Square generation, complete with a highly effective simulation of the student uprising itself. Politically, that sequence is the movie's boldest aspect. Dramatically, however, the film's gutsiest move is to place the official crackdown at the midpoint, allowing another hour for disillusion to seep gradually into the characters. After the adrenaline stops pumping, youthful commitment — and youth itself — slowly fade.
Most Outraged Anti-War Film
9. Taxi to the Dark Side: Soldiers in red light
Taxi to the Dark Side
Director: Alex Gibney
Rated R
* Bob Mondello's Review
The title of Alex Gibney's essential documentary neatly encapsulates the story it tells. On one side is Afghan taxi driver Dilawar, an apparently innocent victim of American policies; on the other is Vice President Dick Cheney, who in 2001 announced that the U.S. would have to enter "the dark side." Sold to the Yanks for cash, Dilawar was not charged with any crime and had no known ties to al-Qaida or the Taliban. He probably would have been released in short order. But before that could happen, he died from being severely beaten and then hanged by shackles from a metal-grate ceiling. The film expands from Dilawar's case to cover the thousands of detainees who were imprisoned and tortured, according to one interrogator, simply because top U.S. officials "wanted them to be guilty."
Most Introspective Anti-War Film
10. Bashir: Ari Folman and Carmi Cnaa'n
Sony Pictures Classics
Waltz with Bashir
Director: Ari Folman
Rated R
* Mark Jenkins' Review
Ari Folman's innovative "animated documentary" was sparked by sessions with an Israeli army psychiatrist; discovering long-buried memories of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the filmmaker went searching for other reminiscences. The real-life stories include some whimsical anecdotes but culminate near the two Palestinian refugee camps where Phalangist militias rampaged after the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel. The movie was drawn, rather than filmed, in order to capture the protean qualities of memory. Yet it finally shifts to documentary footage — acknowledging that what happened is not just the stuff of individual nightmares.
Runners-up: Ashes of Time Redux, Boy A, Chop Shop, A Christmas Tale, The Exiles, Love Songs, Milk, Religulous, Still Life, Tell No One
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98870049
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Best TV & Movies Of 2008 Mark Jenkins: My 10 Movie Picks For 2008 by Mark Jenkins
9. Taxi to the Dark Side: Soldiers in red light
THINKFilm
NPR.org, December 31, 2008 · Every December, cineplexes teem with marquee actors, posh accents and somber themes, all of them assembled to attract awards-season attention. And some of these (mostly Anglo-American) ingredients will indeed help their respective movies get statuettes.
But the year's best films came from all over the globe. And they were distinguished not by the usual artistic suspects but by distinctive personal visions.
These are my choices for 2008's 10 most remarkable movies, listed alphabetically. They're so good that I barely regret the ones (see below) left on the cutting-room floor.
Most Sublime Vision Of Everyday Life
1. - Red Balloon: Song Fang and Simon Iteanu
IFC Films
The Flight of the Red Balloon
Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien
Unrated
* David Edelstein's Review
Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien's homage to 1956's The Red Balloon is set in a city far from home, based on a premise the director didn't choose and featuring dialogue improvised in a language he doesn't speak. Yet the movie is unquestionably Hou's, from its brilliant use of color to its gliding long takes. With Juliette Binoche playing a voice actress with an interest in Chinese puppetry, the scenario cleverly balances East and West. While the film could only have been shot in Paris, Hou's visual style transforms familiar landmarks and vistas.
Most Chilling Vision Of Everyday Life
2. 4 Weeks - Anamaria Marinca and Alex Potocean
IFC Films
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Director: Cristian Mungiu
Unrated
* Bob Mondello's Review
Trailing closely with a hand-held camera, writer-director Cristian Mungiu observes a young woman as she arranges an abortion for her college roommate. It's Romania in 1987, and the procedure is illegal. That means the woman will enter the world of black-market services, where she'll get a clear view of life under a faltering totalitarian regime. The movie's intensifying sense of menace doesn't lead to any particular assault. Instead, it reflects the generalized dread of living in a place where everybody zealously enforces their tiny rations of power — just as the roommates' agreement never to talk about the abortion stands for the many things that can't be said in an authoritarian land.
Most Sprightly Critique Of Totalitarianism
3. - I Served: Ivan Barnev as Jan Dite
Sony Pictures Classics
I Served the King of England
Director: Jiri Menzel
Rated R
* Mark Jenkins' Review
In a year when both Kate Winslet and Tom Cruise played Nazis, the near-silent clown Ivan Barnev offers a comic yet more convincing depiction of why someone might have donned the swastika: to win the heart of an earnest Teutonic blond. Barnev plays a Chaplin-like waiter who rises to a job at Prague's best hotel, where he seeks only money and love. Instead, he is clobbered by the one-two punch of Nazi occupation and Soviet domination. Director Jiri Menzel doesn't play everything for laughs; there are wrenching shifts of tone at crucial moments. That the movie treats the 20th century as absurd doesn't mean it takes historical horrors lightly.
Most Eccentric Biopic
4. My Winnipeg: Frozen Horse Heads
IFC Films
My Winnipeg
Director: Guy Maddin
Unrated
* David Edelstein's Review
Offered the opportunity to make a movie about his hometown, Guy Maddin produced an astonishing and often hilarious "docu-fantasia." This film also has Nazis, but they're a minor irritant next to the shock of adolescent sexuality, the treachery of the National Hockey League and a domineering uber-mom. The director's style is simultaneously a homage to and parody of silent-era cinema, mostly in contrasty black and white but with fevered shades of local color. According to Maddin's mock history, his hometown "has 10 times the sleepwalking rate of any city in the world" — and this movie indeed suggests something encountered on the cusp of wakefulness.
Most Distinctive Teen Flick
5. Paranoid Park: Gabe Nevins
IFC Films
Paranoid Park
Director: Gus Van Sant
Rated R
* David Edelstein's Review
Paranoid Park is Gus Van Sant's best use yet of his mainstream narrative style, but his most heartfelt films are more abstract. While this beguiling tale of a shaggy-haired lost boy begins with a conventional strategy, adapting a mystery novel, the director circles around the story rather than approaching it directly. Turning on events at an ominous skateboard park and a nearby rail yard, the movie is a coming-of-age tale that depicts oncoming adulthood as both threatening and disorienting. Van Sant turns the mystery inside out, emphasizing his protagonist's blurry confusion over a crisp resolution.
Giddiest New-Wave Update
6. Reprise: Espen Klouman Hoiner and Anders Danielsen Lie
Miramax Films
Reprise
Director: Joachim Trier
Rated R
* Bob Mondello's Review
At the start of this literary-life caper, two college-age aspiring writers drop their respective first novels into an Oslo mailbox — and the world explodes with possibility. Writer-director Joachim Trier takes the young men's emotions seriously, but also observes with amused detachment. The result is a comedy with tragic elements, and its shifts in pitch are thrilling. So are the speedy flashbacks, narrated asides, impatient edits, and sprinting hand-held camera. No explosions, shootouts or car chases are required when a film moves this beautifully. Trier was inspired by the '60s French new wave, but it's surely also relevant that he's a former Norwegian skateboard champion.
Most Audacious Account Of Youthful Triumph
7. Slumdog Millionaire: Dev Patel and Freida Pinto
Fox Searchlight
Slumdog Millionaire
Director: Danny Boyle
Rated R
* Bob Mondello's Review
Borrowing from Bollywood, City of God and the book Maximum City, British director Danny Boyle crafts a portrait of Mumbai that's half romp, half expose. The framework is a round of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in which each question summons an episode from the young contestant's often horrific past. For all its flash, the movie is not superficial: Every flashback reveals some aspect of the diverse city's history or culture. If the characters are thin, it's because Slumdog is really the story of a far bigger organism — one stuffed with gods, factions and unresolved rivalries.
Most Audacious Account Of Youthful Defeat
8. Summer Palace: Hao Lei and Guo Xiaodong
Palm Pictures
Summer Palace
Director: Lou Ye
Unrated
That this electrifying movie was made at all is a marvel of artistic sedition. Shooting without permission, Chinese director Lou Ye managed to film a comprehensive account of the Tiananmen Square generation, complete with a highly effective simulation of the student uprising itself. Politically, that sequence is the movie's boldest aspect. Dramatically, however, the film's gutsiest move is to place the official crackdown at the midpoint, allowing another hour for disillusion to seep gradually into the characters. After the adrenaline stops pumping, youthful commitment — and youth itself — slowly fade.
Most Outraged Anti-War Film
9. Taxi to the Dark Side: Soldiers in red light
Taxi to the Dark Side
Director: Alex Gibney
Rated R
* Bob Mondello's Review
The title of Alex Gibney's essential documentary neatly encapsulates the story it tells. On one side is Afghan taxi driver Dilawar, an apparently innocent victim of American policies; on the other is Vice President Dick Cheney, who in 2001 announced that the U.S. would have to enter "the dark side." Sold to the Yanks for cash, Dilawar was not charged with any crime and had no known ties to al-Qaida or the Taliban. He probably would have been released in short order. But before that could happen, he died from being severely beaten and then hanged by shackles from a metal-grate ceiling. The film expands from Dilawar's case to cover the thousands of detainees who were imprisoned and tortured, according to one interrogator, simply because top U.S. officials "wanted them to be guilty."
Most Introspective Anti-War Film
10. Bashir: Ari Folman and Carmi Cnaa'n
Sony Pictures Classics
Waltz with Bashir
Director: Ari Folman
Rated R
* Mark Jenkins' Review
Ari Folman's innovative "animated documentary" was sparked by sessions with an Israeli army psychiatrist; discovering long-buried memories of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the filmmaker went searching for other reminiscences. The real-life stories include some whimsical anecdotes but culminate near the two Palestinian refugee camps where Phalangist militias rampaged after the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel. The movie was drawn, rather than filmed, in order to capture the protean qualities of memory. Yet it finally shifts to documentary footage — acknowledging that what happened is not just the stuff of individual nightmares.
Runners-up: Ashes of Time Redux, Boy A, Chop Shop, A Christmas Tale, The Exiles, Love Songs, Milk, Religulous, Still Life, Tell No One
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98870049
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Best TV & Movies Of 2008 Kenneth Turan Picks His Favorite Films Of 2008 by Kenneth Turan
Best TV & Movies Of 2008 Kenneth Turan Picks His Favorite Films Of 2008 by Kenneth Turan
Dev Patel and Freida Pinto in 'Slumdog Millionaire.'
Enlarge
Dev Patel and Freida Pinto are at the center of an old-fashioned Hollywood-style romantic melodrama in Slumdog Millionaire. Celador Films/Fox Searchlight Pictures
Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve in 'A Christmas Tale.'
Enlarge
Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve star in one of the best of a great crop of French films, A Christmas Tale. Why Not Productions
Michael Sheen and Frank Langella in 'Frost/Nixon.'
Enlarge
Michael Sheen is David Frost and Frank Langella is a convincing Richard M. Nixon in Frost/Nixon. Universal Pictures
Sally Hawkins and Alexis Zegerman in 'Happy-Go-Lucky.'
Enlarge
Director Mike Leigh's Happy- Go-Lucky, starring Sally Hawkins (left) and Alexis Zegerman, is a ray of sunshine. Miramax
Anne Hathaway in 'Rachel Getting Married.'
Enlarge
Anne Hathaway gives director Jonathan Demme a powerful performance in Rachel Getting Married. Sony Pictures Classics
An animated scene at an airport from 'Waltz With Bashir.'
Enlarge
Israeli writer/director Ari Folman was the talent behind the animated film Waltz With Bashir. Sony Pictures Classics
Reader Poll: Best Movies
What's On Your List?
You've heard from the critics, now vote for the best films of 2008
NPR.org, December 31, 2008 · I enjoy doing a Top 10 films list, but ranking the films is something I try to avoid. This year, however, is different. While slots 2 to 10 will be listed alphabetically, I'm going to name a clear No. 1 film: Danny Boyle's exhilarating Slumdog Millionaire.
I'm departing from tradition and naming it No. 1 because watching this film was like seeing an old friend long presumed dead. Slumdog is an updated version of an old-fashioned Hollywood-style romantic melodrama. If you think this kind of thing is easy to do, you haven't been going to the movies lately.
As to the other nine slots, I have taken the liberty of doubling up films on occasion to make it easier to acknowledge deserving work. Here goes:
A Christmas Tale and The Class. The year 2008 was an especially good one for French film. These two were standouts at Cannes, where The Class — which looks at a year in the life of a Parisian middle-school class — deservedly won the Palme d'Or. Christmas Tale provides a new twist on the familiar family-holiday theme. It's the kind of film Hollywood would make if it had the skill, or nerve.
Frost/Nixon. The most mature work Ron Howard has created, a sterling example of how to transform a prime stage property into something that works onscreen. Frank Langella's Tony-winning performance is certainly ready for its close-up.
Frozen River and Ballast. These Sundance winners demonstrate that independent film is alive and well and show the variety of approaches and styles that keep the movement vital.
Gomorrah and Happy-Go-Lucky. Joining these wildly different foreign films might qualify as an act of critical perversity, but their very diversity makes them not-so-strange bedfellows. The first is a bleak look at Italy's Mafia-esque Camorra; the other, the happiest film British director Mike Leigh has ever made.
Rachel Getting Married. A return to top storytelling form for director Jonathan Demme and a breakthrough for star Anne Hathaway. Together they bring the texture of edgy reality — both intensified and captured on the fly — to the proceedings.
Sundance documentaries. Four exceptional docs — Man on Wire, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Stranded and Trouble The Water — all appeared in the Park City festival that has become this country's top documentary showcase. What a group.
Tell No One. A space all its own for the little French thriller that could. This is a film no one wanted that went on to become 2008's top-grossing foreign-language film.
Wall-E. The latest wonder from Pixar is daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental. How often do you see that?
Waltz With Bashir. Provocative, hallucinatory, incendiary — this animated personal documentary about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is unlike any Israeli film you've seen. Or any other film, for that matter.
Dev Patel and Freida Pinto in 'Slumdog Millionaire.'
Enlarge
Dev Patel and Freida Pinto are at the center of an old-fashioned Hollywood-style romantic melodrama in Slumdog Millionaire. Celador Films/Fox Searchlight Pictures
Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve in 'A Christmas Tale.'
Enlarge
Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve star in one of the best of a great crop of French films, A Christmas Tale. Why Not Productions
Michael Sheen and Frank Langella in 'Frost/Nixon.'
Enlarge
Michael Sheen is David Frost and Frank Langella is a convincing Richard M. Nixon in Frost/Nixon. Universal Pictures
Sally Hawkins and Alexis Zegerman in 'Happy-Go-Lucky.'
Enlarge
Director Mike Leigh's Happy- Go-Lucky, starring Sally Hawkins (left) and Alexis Zegerman, is a ray of sunshine. Miramax
Anne Hathaway in 'Rachel Getting Married.'
Enlarge
Anne Hathaway gives director Jonathan Demme a powerful performance in Rachel Getting Married. Sony Pictures Classics
An animated scene at an airport from 'Waltz With Bashir.'
Enlarge
Israeli writer/director Ari Folman was the talent behind the animated film Waltz With Bashir. Sony Pictures Classics
Reader Poll: Best Movies
What's On Your List?
You've heard from the critics, now vote for the best films of 2008
NPR.org, December 31, 2008 · I enjoy doing a Top 10 films list, but ranking the films is something I try to avoid. This year, however, is different. While slots 2 to 10 will be listed alphabetically, I'm going to name a clear No. 1 film: Danny Boyle's exhilarating Slumdog Millionaire.
I'm departing from tradition and naming it No. 1 because watching this film was like seeing an old friend long presumed dead. Slumdog is an updated version of an old-fashioned Hollywood-style romantic melodrama. If you think this kind of thing is easy to do, you haven't been going to the movies lately.
As to the other nine slots, I have taken the liberty of doubling up films on occasion to make it easier to acknowledge deserving work. Here goes:
A Christmas Tale and The Class. The year 2008 was an especially good one for French film. These two were standouts at Cannes, where The Class — which looks at a year in the life of a Parisian middle-school class — deservedly won the Palme d'Or. Christmas Tale provides a new twist on the familiar family-holiday theme. It's the kind of film Hollywood would make if it had the skill, or nerve.
Frost/Nixon. The most mature work Ron Howard has created, a sterling example of how to transform a prime stage property into something that works onscreen. Frank Langella's Tony-winning performance is certainly ready for its close-up.
Frozen River and Ballast. These Sundance winners demonstrate that independent film is alive and well and show the variety of approaches and styles that keep the movement vital.
Gomorrah and Happy-Go-Lucky. Joining these wildly different foreign films might qualify as an act of critical perversity, but their very diversity makes them not-so-strange bedfellows. The first is a bleak look at Italy's Mafia-esque Camorra; the other, the happiest film British director Mike Leigh has ever made.
Rachel Getting Married. A return to top storytelling form for director Jonathan Demme and a breakthrough for star Anne Hathaway. Together they bring the texture of edgy reality — both intensified and captured on the fly — to the proceedings.
Sundance documentaries. Four exceptional docs — Man on Wire, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Stranded and Trouble The Water — all appeared in the Park City festival that has become this country's top documentary showcase. What a group.
Tell No One. A space all its own for the little French thriller that could. This is a film no one wanted that went on to become 2008's top-grossing foreign-language film.
Wall-E. The latest wonder from Pixar is daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental. How often do you see that?
Waltz With Bashir. Provocative, hallucinatory, incendiary — this animated personal documentary about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is unlike any Israeli film you've seen. Or any other film, for that matter.
Best TV & Movies Of 2008 Bob Mondello's Top 10 Movies — Plus 12 Bonus Picks by Bob Mondello
*
Best TV & Movies Of 2008 Bob Mondello's Top 10 Movies — Plus 12 Bonus Picks by Bob Mondello
Listen Now [8 min 15 sec] add to playlist
Wall-E
Enlarge
Dirty Job: Solving a Rubik's Cube is child's play next to Wall-E's assignment — cleaning up a landfill that used to be called Earth. Pixar
At A Glance
Bob's Top 10 Films Of 2008
* Slumdog Millionaire
* Wall-E
* Milk
* 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
* Vicky Cristina Barcelona
* Rachel Getting Married
* The Class
* Man on Wire
* The Dark Knight
* A Christmas Tale
Honorable Mentions
* The Edge of Heaven
* Waltz with Bashir
* Happy-Go-Lucky
* Frozen River
* Boy A
* Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
* U2-3D
* Frost/Nixon
* Tell No One
* Synecdoche, New York
* I've Loved You So Long
* Pray the Devil Back to Hell
Reader Poll: Best Movies
What's On Your List?
You've heard from the critics, now vote for the best films of 2008
Milk
Enlarge
Gotta Give 'Em Hope: Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) forged unlikely political coalitions on his march toward San Francisco City Hall. Focus Features
Slumdog Millionaire
Enlarge
Ishika Mohan
Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) struggles to rescue the love of his life (Freida Pinto) in Slumdog Millionaire. Fox Searchlight
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. IFC Films
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Enlarge
Victor Bello
With little effort, artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) sweeps frisky Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) off her feet in the romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The Weinstein Company
Rachel Getting Married
Enlarge
Bob Vergara
Sprung from rehab, Kym (Anne Hathaway) faces a family wedding with something less than equanimity in Rachel Getting Married. Sony Pictures Classics
The Class
Enlarge
Pierre Milon
Ain't Misbehavin': In The Class, Francois Marin (Francois Begaudeau) struggles to control his unruly students, who are assuredly interested in learning — just not always from their textbooks. Sony Pictures Classics
Man On Wire
Enlarge
Jean-Louis Blondeau
Philippe Petit's stroll through the Manhattan skies in Man On Wire took place more than 1,300 feet above ground. Polaris Images
The Dark Knight
Enlarge
Stephen Vaughan
Arch-nemeses Batman (Christian Bale) and the Joker (Heath Ledger) are opposing forces of order and chaos in Gotham City. Warner Bros.
A Christmas Tale
Enlarge
Mathieu Amalric plays Junon's black-sheep son, Henri, in A Christmas Tale; their relationship is prickly, to say the least. IFC Films
All Things Considered, December 31, 2008 · The economy may be dicey, but Hollywood still had a respectable year at the box office.
With help from quite a few troubled superheroes — and last week from a yellow lab named Marley — the film industry took in more than $9.5 billion in 2008.
That's down just a hair from the previous year's all-time record. And if you look, as critics do, at quality rather than at cash, 2008 wasn't too bad either.
For the first time in ages, two of the year's most popular movies were also two of its best. Both were dark, though that didn't keep them from being exhilarating.
And both relied heavily on digital effects — in one case, exclusively on digital effects, to tell a cautionary environmental tale through the eyes of a quirkily personable robot named Wall-E.
The first half of Pixar's animated movie is hands-down the best silent comedy since Charlie Chaplin stopped making them.
And if Wall-E's tale of environmental calamity drew big crowds, a tale of social calamity with a different kind of joker at its center proved even more popular.
That Joker, played by Heath Ledger, was the principal thorn in the side of Gotham's increasingly batty defender, The Dark Knight — and Ledger, who died earlier this year, is an Oscar front-runner for best supporting actor.
The best-actor favorite is probably Sean Penn for his portrayal of activist Harvey Milk, laboring to make San Francisco a safe haven from the sort of prejudice and anti-gay rhetoric that Anita Bryant spouted so loudly in the 1970s. Penn proved downright charismatic in Milk, hence the Oscar talk.
Similar buzz surrounds Anne Hathaway's performance as one family's black sheep, out on a weekend pass from rehab to attend her sister's wedding. Jonathan Demme directed Rachel Getting Married as a sort of elaborate home movie, using mostly hand-held cameras.
Demme's decision was an aesthetic one, but British director Danny Boyle didn't have a choice about hand-held cameras. He had to use them in the teeming slums of Mumbai, where he filmed the exuberant story of an uneducated kid — a "slumdog," as one character sneers — who surprises all of India by correctly answering question after question on TV's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire tells its story — a love story, it turns out, and the story of a city — in flashbacks that reveal how and why its title character is managing to do so well with his final answers.
Another sort of flashback was the province of the year's most astonishing documentary: Man on Wire offers a zip back to 1974, when French tightrope-walker Philippe Petit strolled between the roofs of the World Trade Center towers. Even three decades later, the event is still alive for the folks who were up there with him, and Man on Wire is quite literally breathtaking.
That's six of the year's best. The next three are in foreign languages: a grim but stunning Romanian drama, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, whose title refers to the length of time the desperate main character has been pregnant; a French film, The Class, shot documentary-style with a real teacher and middle-school students playing approximations of themselves to startling effect; and the even more startling A Christmas Tale, about a holiday gathering at which a mom (played by the still-glamorous Catherine Deneuve) tells the son who is her best hope for a bone-marrow transplant that she never liked him — not one bit.
Rounding out the Top 10 is a seriously sexy American comedy set overseas — Vicky Cristina Barcelona the story of two American tourists and the city where they both find romance with a charming stranger. It's writer-director Woody Allen in top comic form.
That's my Top 10, but 10's arbitrary, and it was a good year, so I'll just keep going.
Some of the year's best performances were in low-budget independent pictures — Melissa Leo's struggling mom, making ends meet illegally in Frozen River, for instance. Also Andrew Garfield's tentative, frightened ex-con in Boy A.
And no performer this year was bubblier than Sally Hawkins as the unbeatably cheerful character at the center of Mike Leigh's aptly titled Happy-Go-Lucky
3D glasses were the amazingly effective gimmick of the year's best concert film, U2-3D. In the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, African women band together to stop abuse and torture in Liberia. The Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir uses animation to explore Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
And two fine pictures looked specifically at how stories get told. A theater director builds a life-size replica of a Manhattan neighborhood to tell his life story in the weirder-than-weird Synecdoche, New York, while skillful impersonators re-enact David Frost's 1977 interviews with Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon, which is an exploration of both political power and the power of television.
Foreign directors made some striking detective stories, and two of the most haunting — I've Loved You So Long and Tell No One — featured Kristin Scott Thomas.
The Edge of Heaven, meanwhile, links a half-dozen Turkish and German characters in a plot that feels like a metaphor for the expansion of the European Union.
And if all those sound too dark and complicated, try Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, a teen comedy sweet and smart enough to brighten any outlook.
That's 12 extras, for a total of 22 reasons for cheer as we look forward to all the special recessionary treats Hollywood has in store for 2009.
Among the titles on the horizon: Real Men Cry, My Life in Ruins, and Confessions of a Shopaholic. Can you wait?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98614769
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Best TV & Movies Of 2008 Bob Mondello's Top 10 Movies — Plus 12 Bonus Picks by Bob Mondello
Listen Now [8 min 15 sec] add to playlist
Wall-E
Enlarge
Dirty Job: Solving a Rubik's Cube is child's play next to Wall-E's assignment — cleaning up a landfill that used to be called Earth. Pixar
At A Glance
Bob's Top 10 Films Of 2008
* Slumdog Millionaire
* Wall-E
* Milk
* 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
* Vicky Cristina Barcelona
* Rachel Getting Married
* The Class
* Man on Wire
* The Dark Knight
* A Christmas Tale
Honorable Mentions
* The Edge of Heaven
* Waltz with Bashir
* Happy-Go-Lucky
* Frozen River
* Boy A
* Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
* U2-3D
* Frost/Nixon
* Tell No One
* Synecdoche, New York
* I've Loved You So Long
* Pray the Devil Back to Hell
Reader Poll: Best Movies
What's On Your List?
You've heard from the critics, now vote for the best films of 2008
Milk
Enlarge
Gotta Give 'Em Hope: Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) forged unlikely political coalitions on his march toward San Francisco City Hall. Focus Features
Slumdog Millionaire
Enlarge
Ishika Mohan
Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) struggles to rescue the love of his life (Freida Pinto) in Slumdog Millionaire. Fox Searchlight
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. IFC Films
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Enlarge
Victor Bello
With little effort, artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) sweeps frisky Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) off her feet in the romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The Weinstein Company
Rachel Getting Married
Enlarge
Bob Vergara
Sprung from rehab, Kym (Anne Hathaway) faces a family wedding with something less than equanimity in Rachel Getting Married. Sony Pictures Classics
The Class
Enlarge
Pierre Milon
Ain't Misbehavin': In The Class, Francois Marin (Francois Begaudeau) struggles to control his unruly students, who are assuredly interested in learning — just not always from their textbooks. Sony Pictures Classics
Man On Wire
Enlarge
Jean-Louis Blondeau
Philippe Petit's stroll through the Manhattan skies in Man On Wire took place more than 1,300 feet above ground. Polaris Images
The Dark Knight
Enlarge
Stephen Vaughan
Arch-nemeses Batman (Christian Bale) and the Joker (Heath Ledger) are opposing forces of order and chaos in Gotham City. Warner Bros.
A Christmas Tale
Enlarge
Mathieu Amalric plays Junon's black-sheep son, Henri, in A Christmas Tale; their relationship is prickly, to say the least. IFC Films
All Things Considered, December 31, 2008 · The economy may be dicey, but Hollywood still had a respectable year at the box office.
With help from quite a few troubled superheroes — and last week from a yellow lab named Marley — the film industry took in more than $9.5 billion in 2008.
That's down just a hair from the previous year's all-time record. And if you look, as critics do, at quality rather than at cash, 2008 wasn't too bad either.
For the first time in ages, two of the year's most popular movies were also two of its best. Both were dark, though that didn't keep them from being exhilarating.
And both relied heavily on digital effects — in one case, exclusively on digital effects, to tell a cautionary environmental tale through the eyes of a quirkily personable robot named Wall-E.
The first half of Pixar's animated movie is hands-down the best silent comedy since Charlie Chaplin stopped making them.
And if Wall-E's tale of environmental calamity drew big crowds, a tale of social calamity with a different kind of joker at its center proved even more popular.
That Joker, played by Heath Ledger, was the principal thorn in the side of Gotham's increasingly batty defender, The Dark Knight — and Ledger, who died earlier this year, is an Oscar front-runner for best supporting actor.
The best-actor favorite is probably Sean Penn for his portrayal of activist Harvey Milk, laboring to make San Francisco a safe haven from the sort of prejudice and anti-gay rhetoric that Anita Bryant spouted so loudly in the 1970s. Penn proved downright charismatic in Milk, hence the Oscar talk.
Similar buzz surrounds Anne Hathaway's performance as one family's black sheep, out on a weekend pass from rehab to attend her sister's wedding. Jonathan Demme directed Rachel Getting Married as a sort of elaborate home movie, using mostly hand-held cameras.
Demme's decision was an aesthetic one, but British director Danny Boyle didn't have a choice about hand-held cameras. He had to use them in the teeming slums of Mumbai, where he filmed the exuberant story of an uneducated kid — a "slumdog," as one character sneers — who surprises all of India by correctly answering question after question on TV's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire tells its story — a love story, it turns out, and the story of a city — in flashbacks that reveal how and why its title character is managing to do so well with his final answers.
Another sort of flashback was the province of the year's most astonishing documentary: Man on Wire offers a zip back to 1974, when French tightrope-walker Philippe Petit strolled between the roofs of the World Trade Center towers. Even three decades later, the event is still alive for the folks who were up there with him, and Man on Wire is quite literally breathtaking.
That's six of the year's best. The next three are in foreign languages: a grim but stunning Romanian drama, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, whose title refers to the length of time the desperate main character has been pregnant; a French film, The Class, shot documentary-style with a real teacher and middle-school students playing approximations of themselves to startling effect; and the even more startling A Christmas Tale, about a holiday gathering at which a mom (played by the still-glamorous Catherine Deneuve) tells the son who is her best hope for a bone-marrow transplant that she never liked him — not one bit.
Rounding out the Top 10 is a seriously sexy American comedy set overseas — Vicky Cristina Barcelona the story of two American tourists and the city where they both find romance with a charming stranger. It's writer-director Woody Allen in top comic form.
That's my Top 10, but 10's arbitrary, and it was a good year, so I'll just keep going.
Some of the year's best performances were in low-budget independent pictures — Melissa Leo's struggling mom, making ends meet illegally in Frozen River, for instance. Also Andrew Garfield's tentative, frightened ex-con in Boy A.
And no performer this year was bubblier than Sally Hawkins as the unbeatably cheerful character at the center of Mike Leigh's aptly titled Happy-Go-Lucky
3D glasses were the amazingly effective gimmick of the year's best concert film, U2-3D. In the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, African women band together to stop abuse and torture in Liberia. The Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir uses animation to explore Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
And two fine pictures looked specifically at how stories get told. A theater director builds a life-size replica of a Manhattan neighborhood to tell his life story in the weirder-than-weird Synecdoche, New York, while skillful impersonators re-enact David Frost's 1977 interviews with Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon, which is an exploration of both political power and the power of television.
Foreign directors made some striking detective stories, and two of the most haunting — I've Loved You So Long and Tell No One — featured Kristin Scott Thomas.
The Edge of Heaven, meanwhile, links a half-dozen Turkish and German characters in a plot that feels like a metaphor for the expansion of the European Union.
And if all those sound too dark and complicated, try Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, a teen comedy sweet and smart enough to brighten any outlook.
That's 12 extras, for a total of 22 reasons for cheer as we look forward to all the special recessionary treats Hollywood has in store for 2009.
Among the titles on the horizon: Real Men Cry, My Life in Ruins, and Confessions of a Shopaholic. Can you wait?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98614769
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The 10 Best New Restaurants of 2008 By FRANK BRUNI
The 10 Best New Restaurants of 2008 By FRANK BRUNI
1. MOMOFUKU KO David Chang’s intimate 12-seat, sushi-counter-style restaurant heads this list not only because its best dishes and moments are so memorable, but because it’s a paradigm-busting experiment that, like so much of what Mr. Chang has done, heeds and adjusts for what a new generation of discerning diners cares most about — and what fuss and frippery they can do without.
2. CORTON This blissful collaboration of the restaurateur Drew Nieporent and the chef Paul Liebrandt presents luxury of a more classic sort, at an admirably moment-reflecting price of $76 for a three-course prix fixe with a flurry of amuse-bouches and petit fours. And it finds Mr. Liebrandt at the sweet spot between runaway imagination and good sense.
3. (TIE) SCARPETTA To what heights can a simple dish of spaghetti al pomodoro rise? Scarpetta provided the answer — the sky’s the limit — and a host of other delights, its sometimes agitated setting in the meatpacking district not among them. At Scarpetta the chef Scott Conant reconnected with his early glory days at L’Impero.
3. (TIE) CONVIVIO The post-Conant L’Impero, meanwhile, became this warmer, redder, more convivial restaurant. The chef Michael White’s improved menu here pegged him as one of the city’s top pasta whizzes, and he showed a Batali-esque enthusiasm for organ meat.
5. DOVETAIL The chef John Fraser abandoned Compass but not the Upper West Side, reemerging in this somewhat plain but entirely comfortable and charming restaurant, which surpassed just about everyone’s expectations, becoming more than just a neighborhood favorite.
6. MATSUGEN In the TriBeCa space where he had tried to make a lasting success of 66, Jean-Georges Vongerichten decided to treat Japanese cooking in a more straightforward and respectful vein than 66 had treated Chinese. He left the menu and cooking to a team from Tokyo, who rewarded him with underexposed, compelling dishes and excellent soba.
7. ADOUR ALAIN DUCASSE Mr. Ducasse ratcheted down the opulence of his previous fancy Manhattan restaurant in the Essex House with this successor in the St. Regis, notable for Sandro Micheli’s exceptional desserts and for a blockbuster (and pricey) wine list. I’d rank this higher if a first-year change in executive chef and Mr. Ducasse’s distant involvement didn’t raise questions about consistency.
8. BAR BOULUD This relatively casual effort from Daniel Boulud doesn’t get everything right, but for its outstanding charcuterie, an exemplary wine list and scattered other delights, it deserves big applause.
9. ALLEGRETTI Alain Allegretti, a French chef who worked under Mr. Ducasse, struck out on his own, choosing an odd block and a risky moment for saucy cooking that was, at its best, a heady ticket straight to Provence.
10. MIA DONA The chef Michael Psilakis, perhaps more prescient about the economy than some peers, responded to the kudos for his haute Greek restaurant Anthos with this Italian restaurant of big flavors and big portions at accessible prices.
December 31, 2008
Critic’s Notebook
Same Table Next Year? Not So Fast By FRANK BRUNI
IN a humble East Village space with dimensions better suited to a take-out pizza parlor, a restaurant as significant as any in the last few years bloomed. And though it charges an unyielding $100 for food alone at dinner — and an unbending $160 at lunch — admission is nearly as competitive as at certain elite preschools. What many food enthusiasts have wanted more than anything else in 2008 is one of the 12 stools at Momofuku Ko.
Where Montrachet withered, what took root was something more refined, more ambitious and arguably more French. In fact Corton, its replacement, may be the most quietly, classically serious restaurant in the restaurateur Drew Nieporent’s large portfolio and long career.
Financial crisis? Economic meltdown? In the pace and quality of restaurant openings this year, the recession was hardly reflected. In fact, 2008 was probably the best year for new restaurants in this city since 2004, when New York welcomed two four-star restaurants, Per Se and Masa, in one month. There hasn’t been a new four-star restaurant since.
This was the year of three stars. I gave that rating to seven debuts, all on my list of the year’s 10 best new restaurants. By comparison, there were no three-star debuts in 2007, and my top 10 list was headed by a place I awarded only two stars. As stocks tumbled, the city’s chefs and restaurateurs seemed to rally, staging what could turn out to be a last blast — for a while at least — of nearly unsullied optimism and unbound dreams.
But it wasn’t an act of defiance. Restaurants are planned, and reach a point of no return, far in advance of their debuts. The bumper crop of 2008 was planted anywhere from 6 to 24 months before the challenges they would face became clear.
I shudder to think about this time in 2009 — about the kind of reflection on the New York restaurant scene that might be in order then.
The next 12 months promise to be a grueling survival test for all but the most intensely beloved or flat-out utilitarian restaurants. Although there will be newcomers to celebrate and congratulate, most of them, I suspect, will come along during the first months of the year, laggards that missed their projected fall openings. The second half of 2009 could be barren and grim.
Will there be anything like Matsugen, a bold wager that superior soba in a relatively straightforward setting could be enough of a draw to fill more than 100 seats? I hope so, but I doubt it.
Or anything like Adour Alain Ducasse, with its baronial splendor and its interactive touch-screen wine bar? I wouldn’t bet on it, and while we can certainly live without such pomp and pampering, isn’t it nicer to have them around, just in case?
I’m not confident, in fact, that all of the worthy restaurants among this year’s top 10 will be around next December. And that drives me to appreciate them and extol their virtues, along with all the many other positive restaurant developments in 2008, all the more.
It was a great year for pasta, thanks in large part to one entirely new restaurant (Scarpetta), one sort-of-new restaurant (Convivio) and the installation of a new chef, Simone Bonelli, at an existing restaurant (Perbacco) that can barely contain his creativity. Their combined force should, by all rights, relegate the no-carbohydrate regimen to the dustbin of dietary history.
In fact, Scarpetta’s spaghetti al pomodoro alone should. The only reason I haven’t listed it among the best new dishes of 2008 is that it hasn’t changed substantially since Scarpetta’s chef, Scott Conant, cooked it years ago at L’Impero. If he’s smart, he’ll still be cooking it years from now.
It was a great year (yet again!) for David Chang. While tinkering restlessly to make Momofuku Noodle Bar and Ssam Bar even better than before, he unveiled Ko, whose significance isn’t a function principally of the novelty and quality of its dishes, impressive as they are. What Ko did, like Ssam Bar before it, was tweak and reevaluate the usual atmospheric context for superior cooking, rejecting old models and reassessing what’s important.
As if that weren’t enough, Mr. Chang also unveiled Momofuku Bakery and Milk Bar, where he showcases the pastry talents of Christina Tosi.
The continued emphasis on informality and the consistently growing respect for the contributions of spirits to an enjoyable meal made it a banner year for bars. I’m talking not about ales and highballs but about nomenclature.
New restaurants that misleadingly labeled themselves bars, wagering on the efficacy of that come-on, include Bar Milano, Bar Blanc, Bar Boulud, Bar Q, Bar Breton and Socarrat Paella Bar, which has the greatest justification, inasmuch as almost all of its seats are stools at a high, two-sided counter.
Speaking of libations and of bars nominal and actual, wine bars came into their own, not only multiplying in number but also serving food so appealing that lines were blurred and categories made less tidy.
Exhibit A is Terroir, whose best snacks and dishes are reason enough to wedge into a cramped East Village space and straddle a stool. Exhibit B is Gottino, where the chef Jody Williams turns out small plates that do full justice to the gifts she previously demonstrated with larger dishes at more conventional, full-fledged restaurants.
The trend toward outstanding food in incidental, unassuming and unusual formats was continued and amplified in 2008, and it was a banner period for the related phenomenon of limited-purpose, tightly focused restaurants.
Porchetta serves little more than, well, porchetta. Momofuku Bakery and Milk Bar devotes itself to breads and desserts. Socarrat revels in permutations of paella, while Obika mulls the possibilities in mozzarella.
Salumeria Rosi — much, much humbler than the prior enterprises of one of its owners, the chef Cesare Casella — invests its energies in imported Italian cured meats and cheeses. And the Cave des Fondus stakes its fortunes on fondue, along with wine and beer served in baby bottles, though the latter isn’t a trend. It’s just plain weird.
The year ushered in many opportunities for great eating at contained prices, though I suspect in this one sense 2009 may outpace 2008. It will have its work cut out for it, because in addition to Porchetta, Gottino and Terroir, there’s Cabrito, whose best dishes — including the carnitas with salsa verde and the roasted poblano peppers in cream — match those at just about any Mexican restaurant in New York.
There’s also Rhong-Tiam, where the chef Andy Yang does better Thai food than at his misguided and more expensive follow-up, Kurve, proving anew that pricier isn’t necessarily better. There’s the Redhead, the East Village bar that evolved this year into a Southern-accented restaurant with two runners-up for the year’s list of best dishes: its bacon peanut brittle and its fried chicken with cornbread.
Artichoke Basille’s Pizza & Brewery opened in the same few square blocks of the East Village where Una Pizza Napoletana struts its stuff, competing for pie lovers’ loyalty and intensifying the happy, fattening debate over what’s right, wrong and best when it comes to thin, thick and blistered crusts.
All in all the year’s blessings go far beyond the list of top 10 restaurants here. I left out Tom: Tuesday Dinner, a noteworthy new experiment by the chef Tom Colicchio, because it operates for only one evening every other week and because Mr. Colicchio hasn’t committed to keeping it going for more than a year. It served its first meal in mid-October.
And there are restaurants that came along at the end of the year that might well turn out to have as much merit as anything on my top 10 list; they just haven’t been open long enough for me to review them.
There’s some excitement out there, for example, about the John Dory, a British seafood restaurant from the team behind the Spotted Pig, and about Shang, where the acclaimed Toronto chef Susur Lee is making his New York debut. For the purposes of my top 10 rankings, they belong to 2009, just as Dovetail, which opened at the very end of 2007, belongs to 2008.
There were of course bitter disappointments and puzzling setbacks along with the good news in 2008. The restaurant Florent closed, marking nothing less than the end of an era. The chef Gray Kunz, such a great talent and such a persistent underperformer of late, closed Cafe Gray and severed his ties with the half-cocktail-lounge, half-restaurant Grayz, meaning he is once again a man without a Manhattan restaurant kitchen.
And what to make of David Bouley and Marcus Samuelsson, two highly regarded chefs with highly visible duds this year?
Perhaps distracted by all the other activity in his mini-empire, including the relocation of Bouley, Mr. Bouley inflicted a mess of a brasserie named Secession on a TriBeCa neighborhood that expected better of him. And Mr. Samuelsson’s supposed great labor of love, Merkato 55, a pan-African restaurant in the meatpacking district, drew less attention from him than it sorely needed.
But 2008 will be remembered more sharply for its many great successes. And that would be the case even if 2009 wasn’t looking as ominous as it does.
The Best Meal of 2008
If there’s a New York restaurant with a confidence, diligence and steadiness that surpass those of Le Bernardin, I don’t know it. I stopped here just once in 2008, for a (relatively) low-key lunch. And it was hands down my best meal of the year.
Lunchtime flatters this restaurant. The muted natural light that filters through its windows makes up for the dining room’s cosmetic shortcomings, and the restrained portions, which can leave you wanting more at dinnertime, are ideal for midday, when you don’t want to be weighed down.
My companion and I didn’t linger, heading off to our busy afternoons no more than 90 minutes after we had sat down. But Le Bernardin didn’t need any more time than that to remind us of its magic: of the ways its artfulness always stops short of preciousness or flamboyance; of the precision with which every ingredient is prepared and plated.
Could langoustines be cooked more expertly than those in one of our appetizers? The tail meat in several discrete, beautifully curved arches on the plate was so delicate that my companion insisted it must really be some sort of mousse.
Our other appetizer layered rectangles of cucumber, smoked salmon, fresh salmon and apple in three colorful, identical four-tiered towers, the balance of flavors as careful and appealing as the architecture.
The entrees were even better. Baked mahi-mahi was surrounded by an earthy, faintly sweet and bracingly intense broth made with fresh bamboo shoots, dried oyster mushrooms, brandy and young ginger.
Poached fillets of halibut had impossibly creamy flesh, draped with brussels sprout leaves for some textural contrast and sauced with a purée of uni, clam juice and mustard oil for some briny, zingy wow.
Each dimension of every dish sang with the exact pitch and volume that the chef Eric Ripert had no doubt intended. He’s a maestro, and his kitchen a finely tuned orchestra, and I could happily lose myself in their music every day.
The Best New Restaurant Dishes of 2008
MOMOFUKU KO’S FROZEN FOIE GRAS David Chang turned a classic torchon into flakes piled high, like an incongruously fatty and liver-y Sno-Kone, over a brittle of nuts and a sweet wine gelée.
PERBACCO’S ROLLED PASTA WITH TRUFFLED ZABAGLIONE This rich symphony of speck, buffalo milk mozzarella, béchamel and more was the most wickedly indulgent of the inventive pasta dishes on Simone Bonelli’s new menu.
TOM: TUESDAY DINNER’S CRISPY PORK TROTTER By frying the trotter and pairing it with a beet-stained, pickled quail egg, Tom Colicchio came up with something akin to a dinnertime bacon-and-eggs for the most jaded epicures.
GOTTINO’S WALNUT PESTO The best spread for toasted bread since crunchy peanut butter, it combines walnuts with olive oil, thyme, Parmesan and a dab of sun-dried tomato, which Jody Williams wisely rescues from disrepute.
TERROIR’S PORK BLADE STEAK Like many peers, Marco Canora smartly turned to the Virginia farmer Bev Eggleston for pork, then made the additionally sharp decisions to broil this thin shoulder cut and dump arugula and Parmesan onto it.
CONVIVIO’S PECORINO POTATOES The side dish of the year, a crazily addictive midpoint between roasted potatoes and French fries, given a salty charge and an extra dimension by the right cheese.
BAR BOULUD’S CROQUES-MONSIEUR AND -MADAME Two timeless sandwiches get the reverence they deserve and a richness beyond the norm.
CORTON’S CARAMEL BRIOCHE It’s a dessert (with banana and passion fruit in the mix), a cheese course (thanks to Stilton), a breakfast (in its mimicry of syrupy French toast) and altogether wonderful.
ADOUR ALAIN DUCASSE’S CONTEMPORARY VACHERIN. The terrific pastry chef Sandro Micheli stages a riveting tart-sweet drama with layers of mango marmalade, passion fruit sorbet and coconut meringue.
December 31, 2008
Resolution: Dine Well Without Breaking the Budget
Here are some of the best inexpensive places reviewed in the Dining section this year.
ABRAçO ESPRESSO 86 East Seventh Street, East Village; (212) 388-9731.
Espresso drinks are among the city's finest and drip coffee is even better. There's a small flavorful menu with a Spanish-style frittata of ethereal, custardy creaminess ($4) and warm French toast folded around sweet ricotta ($3).
THE BROOKLYN FLEA Starting in April at the playground of Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, Lafayette Avenue between Clermont and Vanderbilt Avenues, Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Hours are available at brooklynflea.com. Winter location at 76 Front Street (Washington Street), Dumbo, Brooklyn, has limited food vending.
This market is full of craftspeople, designers and costly vintage items, as well as food vendors from the Red Hook ball fields and elsewhere. Among the notables are the Vaquero family's grilled corn with mayo, cheese and chili powder ($3); Salvatore Bklyn Ricotta cannoli ($3), filled to order with lightly sweetened ricotta spiked with lemon zest, Marsala, chopped chocolate and salt; tiny cupcakes from Kumquat Cupcakery ($1 apiece); bonbons ($20 for a dozen) from Nunu Chocolates; sandwiches ($6.50 to $7.25) at Choice Cafe and pizza from Pizza Moto.
CABRITO 50 Carmine Street (Bedford Street), West Village; (212) 929-5050.
Tacos ($4 to $6) and enchiladas ($14) are delicious and carefully made, wrapped in tortillas with the drape of linen and the tenderness of crepes.
GAZALA PLACE 709 Ninth Avenue (49th Street), Clinton; (212) 245-0709.
Perhaps New York's first outpost of Druse cooking. Gazala Halabi is an accomplished baker with a roster of breads ($4 to $5) topped with spices, cheese or meat, or some combination of the three. Burekas are as flaky and buttery as the best puff pastry, with a thick, rich filling of goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes. An ideal end to a meal is osh al-saraia ($3.50), an alliance of yogurt and spongecake soaked with rosewater and honey.
GOTTINO 52 Greenwich Avenue (Charles Street), Greenwich Village; (212) 633-2590.
A wine bar with a great chef, Jody Williams. The crostini with walnut pesto or with fava beans and sheep's milk ricotta ($5) trawl the confluence of Italian soul and finger food.
IPPUDO NY 65 Fourth Avenue (Ninth Street), East Village; (212) 388-0088.
The purest expression of tonkotsu ramen, the richest style of this noodle soup, made with pork. The akamaru modern ramen ($13) builds on the template to make a bowl of noodle soup about as good as any in the city. Every noodle in every bowl of soup is cooked perfectly al dente.
LA SUPERIOR 295 Berry Street (South Second Street), Williamsburg, Brooklyn; (718) 388-5988, lasuperiornyc.com.
Tacos (most $2.50) taste resoundingly good, especially those with rajas, strips of mild roasted poblanos swaddled in thick cream, and grilled pescado zarandeado, a very welcome addition to New York's fish-taco landscape. Quesadillas are big, deep-fried turnovers filled with sautéed mushrooms or a mash of potatoes and chorizo, then hidden under thick cream and fresh cheese ($3.50). Gorditas with requesón ($5 for two), and the torta ahogada ($7.50), a sandwich with crisp, juicy chunks of carnitas, covered with a red sauce of chiles de arból are worthy of passion.
NO. 7 7 Greene Avenue (Fulton Street), Fort Greene, Brooklyn; (718) 522-6370.
No. 7 offers sophisticated assemblages, like slices of rare tuna fanned out with crisp, almost sweet Asian pear ($10). Allow the server to talk you into the appetizer of "fried broccoli, dill, grapefruit, black beans" ($7). Shrimp cocktail ($12) gets a spicy, bracing update from chili peppers and sesame oil in the sauce. Expertly cooked hanger steak with spicy kimchi pirogis ($20) overachieves.
PORCHETTA 110 East Seventh Street (First Avenue), East Village; (212) 777-2151.
Pork loin, wrapped in pork belly with fennel pollen, garlic, sage, rosemary and fistfuls of salt and pepper, then roasted for five hours in a combi oven that has locked in its moisture, wants nothing but slicing onto Sullivan Street Bakery rolls ($9). Potatoes ($5) are crisped with leftover bits of the good stuff.
THE REDHEAD 349 East 13th Street (First Avenue), East Village; (212) 533-6212.
A soft pretzel with grilled Texas sausages ($8); pecan sandies with butterscotch pudding ($6); and salty, picnic-ready buttermilk fried chicken and biscuits ($17) that ought to be in the Biscuit Museum are the kind of cooking that should be getting more serious attention in New York.
ROBERTA'S 261 Moore Street (Bogart Street), Bushwick, Brooklyn; (718) 417-1118.
Heretically creative pies are the thing to get, although the menu goes beyond pizza. Roberta's take on a Hawaiian pie ($15) comes topped with paper-thin sheets of ripe pineapple, shreds of fine ham, sliced jalapeños and dabs of ricotta. Guanciale and egg ($12) is just that: a mozzarella pizza strewn with crisp-cooked pieces of housemade guanciale and an egg cooked to a slightly runny doneness.
SOBA TOTTO 211 East 43rd Street, Midtown; (212) 557-8200.
Buckwheat noodles ($10 to $20), made fresh every day, are the centerpiece of the menu. There is also a full complement of deftly prepared yakitori ($2.50 to $8 each).
SOCARRAT PAELLA BAR 259 West 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 462-1000, socarratpaellabar.com.
Eight paellas ($21 to $23 a person) dispel many paella misconceptions. Paella Valenciana has pork ribs, rabbit and snails. There's an all-seafood paella, a vegetarian paella, and a house paella with seafood, chicken, beef and fava beans. One's made with squid ink, and a meat paella gets an earthy kick from a mushroom soffrito and a spicy kick from thick coins of chorizo. Fideua (fee-day-WAH) is made with thin, crisp strands of pasta.
TERROIR 413 East 12th Street (First Avenue), East Village; (646) 602-1300, wineisterroir.com.
Along with the pork blade steak ($17), bruschette with braised black cabbage and pork sausage ($7), and deep-fried lamb sausage wrapped in sage leaves ($7) rise far above the glorified sandwiches and snacks at many wine bars.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/dining/31cheap.html?ref=dining&pagewanted=print
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1. MOMOFUKU KO David Chang’s intimate 12-seat, sushi-counter-style restaurant heads this list not only because its best dishes and moments are so memorable, but because it’s a paradigm-busting experiment that, like so much of what Mr. Chang has done, heeds and adjusts for what a new generation of discerning diners cares most about — and what fuss and frippery they can do without.
2. CORTON This blissful collaboration of the restaurateur Drew Nieporent and the chef Paul Liebrandt presents luxury of a more classic sort, at an admirably moment-reflecting price of $76 for a three-course prix fixe with a flurry of amuse-bouches and petit fours. And it finds Mr. Liebrandt at the sweet spot between runaway imagination and good sense.
3. (TIE) SCARPETTA To what heights can a simple dish of spaghetti al pomodoro rise? Scarpetta provided the answer — the sky’s the limit — and a host of other delights, its sometimes agitated setting in the meatpacking district not among them. At Scarpetta the chef Scott Conant reconnected with his early glory days at L’Impero.
3. (TIE) CONVIVIO The post-Conant L’Impero, meanwhile, became this warmer, redder, more convivial restaurant. The chef Michael White’s improved menu here pegged him as one of the city’s top pasta whizzes, and he showed a Batali-esque enthusiasm for organ meat.
5. DOVETAIL The chef John Fraser abandoned Compass but not the Upper West Side, reemerging in this somewhat plain but entirely comfortable and charming restaurant, which surpassed just about everyone’s expectations, becoming more than just a neighborhood favorite.
6. MATSUGEN In the TriBeCa space where he had tried to make a lasting success of 66, Jean-Georges Vongerichten decided to treat Japanese cooking in a more straightforward and respectful vein than 66 had treated Chinese. He left the menu and cooking to a team from Tokyo, who rewarded him with underexposed, compelling dishes and excellent soba.
7. ADOUR ALAIN DUCASSE Mr. Ducasse ratcheted down the opulence of his previous fancy Manhattan restaurant in the Essex House with this successor in the St. Regis, notable for Sandro Micheli’s exceptional desserts and for a blockbuster (and pricey) wine list. I’d rank this higher if a first-year change in executive chef and Mr. Ducasse’s distant involvement didn’t raise questions about consistency.
8. BAR BOULUD This relatively casual effort from Daniel Boulud doesn’t get everything right, but for its outstanding charcuterie, an exemplary wine list and scattered other delights, it deserves big applause.
9. ALLEGRETTI Alain Allegretti, a French chef who worked under Mr. Ducasse, struck out on his own, choosing an odd block and a risky moment for saucy cooking that was, at its best, a heady ticket straight to Provence.
10. MIA DONA The chef Michael Psilakis, perhaps more prescient about the economy than some peers, responded to the kudos for his haute Greek restaurant Anthos with this Italian restaurant of big flavors and big portions at accessible prices.
December 31, 2008
Critic’s Notebook
Same Table Next Year? Not So Fast By FRANK BRUNI
IN a humble East Village space with dimensions better suited to a take-out pizza parlor, a restaurant as significant as any in the last few years bloomed. And though it charges an unyielding $100 for food alone at dinner — and an unbending $160 at lunch — admission is nearly as competitive as at certain elite preschools. What many food enthusiasts have wanted more than anything else in 2008 is one of the 12 stools at Momofuku Ko.
Where Montrachet withered, what took root was something more refined, more ambitious and arguably more French. In fact Corton, its replacement, may be the most quietly, classically serious restaurant in the restaurateur Drew Nieporent’s large portfolio and long career.
Financial crisis? Economic meltdown? In the pace and quality of restaurant openings this year, the recession was hardly reflected. In fact, 2008 was probably the best year for new restaurants in this city since 2004, when New York welcomed two four-star restaurants, Per Se and Masa, in one month. There hasn’t been a new four-star restaurant since.
This was the year of three stars. I gave that rating to seven debuts, all on my list of the year’s 10 best new restaurants. By comparison, there were no three-star debuts in 2007, and my top 10 list was headed by a place I awarded only two stars. As stocks tumbled, the city’s chefs and restaurateurs seemed to rally, staging what could turn out to be a last blast — for a while at least — of nearly unsullied optimism and unbound dreams.
But it wasn’t an act of defiance. Restaurants are planned, and reach a point of no return, far in advance of their debuts. The bumper crop of 2008 was planted anywhere from 6 to 24 months before the challenges they would face became clear.
I shudder to think about this time in 2009 — about the kind of reflection on the New York restaurant scene that might be in order then.
The next 12 months promise to be a grueling survival test for all but the most intensely beloved or flat-out utilitarian restaurants. Although there will be newcomers to celebrate and congratulate, most of them, I suspect, will come along during the first months of the year, laggards that missed their projected fall openings. The second half of 2009 could be barren and grim.
Will there be anything like Matsugen, a bold wager that superior soba in a relatively straightforward setting could be enough of a draw to fill more than 100 seats? I hope so, but I doubt it.
Or anything like Adour Alain Ducasse, with its baronial splendor and its interactive touch-screen wine bar? I wouldn’t bet on it, and while we can certainly live without such pomp and pampering, isn’t it nicer to have them around, just in case?
I’m not confident, in fact, that all of the worthy restaurants among this year’s top 10 will be around next December. And that drives me to appreciate them and extol their virtues, along with all the many other positive restaurant developments in 2008, all the more.
It was a great year for pasta, thanks in large part to one entirely new restaurant (Scarpetta), one sort-of-new restaurant (Convivio) and the installation of a new chef, Simone Bonelli, at an existing restaurant (Perbacco) that can barely contain his creativity. Their combined force should, by all rights, relegate the no-carbohydrate regimen to the dustbin of dietary history.
In fact, Scarpetta’s spaghetti al pomodoro alone should. The only reason I haven’t listed it among the best new dishes of 2008 is that it hasn’t changed substantially since Scarpetta’s chef, Scott Conant, cooked it years ago at L’Impero. If he’s smart, he’ll still be cooking it years from now.
It was a great year (yet again!) for David Chang. While tinkering restlessly to make Momofuku Noodle Bar and Ssam Bar even better than before, he unveiled Ko, whose significance isn’t a function principally of the novelty and quality of its dishes, impressive as they are. What Ko did, like Ssam Bar before it, was tweak and reevaluate the usual atmospheric context for superior cooking, rejecting old models and reassessing what’s important.
As if that weren’t enough, Mr. Chang also unveiled Momofuku Bakery and Milk Bar, where he showcases the pastry talents of Christina Tosi.
The continued emphasis on informality and the consistently growing respect for the contributions of spirits to an enjoyable meal made it a banner year for bars. I’m talking not about ales and highballs but about nomenclature.
New restaurants that misleadingly labeled themselves bars, wagering on the efficacy of that come-on, include Bar Milano, Bar Blanc, Bar Boulud, Bar Q, Bar Breton and Socarrat Paella Bar, which has the greatest justification, inasmuch as almost all of its seats are stools at a high, two-sided counter.
Speaking of libations and of bars nominal and actual, wine bars came into their own, not only multiplying in number but also serving food so appealing that lines were blurred and categories made less tidy.
Exhibit A is Terroir, whose best snacks and dishes are reason enough to wedge into a cramped East Village space and straddle a stool. Exhibit B is Gottino, where the chef Jody Williams turns out small plates that do full justice to the gifts she previously demonstrated with larger dishes at more conventional, full-fledged restaurants.
The trend toward outstanding food in incidental, unassuming and unusual formats was continued and amplified in 2008, and it was a banner period for the related phenomenon of limited-purpose, tightly focused restaurants.
Porchetta serves little more than, well, porchetta. Momofuku Bakery and Milk Bar devotes itself to breads and desserts. Socarrat revels in permutations of paella, while Obika mulls the possibilities in mozzarella.
Salumeria Rosi — much, much humbler than the prior enterprises of one of its owners, the chef Cesare Casella — invests its energies in imported Italian cured meats and cheeses. And the Cave des Fondus stakes its fortunes on fondue, along with wine and beer served in baby bottles, though the latter isn’t a trend. It’s just plain weird.
The year ushered in many opportunities for great eating at contained prices, though I suspect in this one sense 2009 may outpace 2008. It will have its work cut out for it, because in addition to Porchetta, Gottino and Terroir, there’s Cabrito, whose best dishes — including the carnitas with salsa verde and the roasted poblano peppers in cream — match those at just about any Mexican restaurant in New York.
There’s also Rhong-Tiam, where the chef Andy Yang does better Thai food than at his misguided and more expensive follow-up, Kurve, proving anew that pricier isn’t necessarily better. There’s the Redhead, the East Village bar that evolved this year into a Southern-accented restaurant with two runners-up for the year’s list of best dishes: its bacon peanut brittle and its fried chicken with cornbread.
Artichoke Basille’s Pizza & Brewery opened in the same few square blocks of the East Village where Una Pizza Napoletana struts its stuff, competing for pie lovers’ loyalty and intensifying the happy, fattening debate over what’s right, wrong and best when it comes to thin, thick and blistered crusts.
All in all the year’s blessings go far beyond the list of top 10 restaurants here. I left out Tom: Tuesday Dinner, a noteworthy new experiment by the chef Tom Colicchio, because it operates for only one evening every other week and because Mr. Colicchio hasn’t committed to keeping it going for more than a year. It served its first meal in mid-October.
And there are restaurants that came along at the end of the year that might well turn out to have as much merit as anything on my top 10 list; they just haven’t been open long enough for me to review them.
There’s some excitement out there, for example, about the John Dory, a British seafood restaurant from the team behind the Spotted Pig, and about Shang, where the acclaimed Toronto chef Susur Lee is making his New York debut. For the purposes of my top 10 rankings, they belong to 2009, just as Dovetail, which opened at the very end of 2007, belongs to 2008.
There were of course bitter disappointments and puzzling setbacks along with the good news in 2008. The restaurant Florent closed, marking nothing less than the end of an era. The chef Gray Kunz, such a great talent and such a persistent underperformer of late, closed Cafe Gray and severed his ties with the half-cocktail-lounge, half-restaurant Grayz, meaning he is once again a man without a Manhattan restaurant kitchen.
And what to make of David Bouley and Marcus Samuelsson, two highly regarded chefs with highly visible duds this year?
Perhaps distracted by all the other activity in his mini-empire, including the relocation of Bouley, Mr. Bouley inflicted a mess of a brasserie named Secession on a TriBeCa neighborhood that expected better of him. And Mr. Samuelsson’s supposed great labor of love, Merkato 55, a pan-African restaurant in the meatpacking district, drew less attention from him than it sorely needed.
But 2008 will be remembered more sharply for its many great successes. And that would be the case even if 2009 wasn’t looking as ominous as it does.
The Best Meal of 2008
If there’s a New York restaurant with a confidence, diligence and steadiness that surpass those of Le Bernardin, I don’t know it. I stopped here just once in 2008, for a (relatively) low-key lunch. And it was hands down my best meal of the year.
Lunchtime flatters this restaurant. The muted natural light that filters through its windows makes up for the dining room’s cosmetic shortcomings, and the restrained portions, which can leave you wanting more at dinnertime, are ideal for midday, when you don’t want to be weighed down.
My companion and I didn’t linger, heading off to our busy afternoons no more than 90 minutes after we had sat down. But Le Bernardin didn’t need any more time than that to remind us of its magic: of the ways its artfulness always stops short of preciousness or flamboyance; of the precision with which every ingredient is prepared and plated.
Could langoustines be cooked more expertly than those in one of our appetizers? The tail meat in several discrete, beautifully curved arches on the plate was so delicate that my companion insisted it must really be some sort of mousse.
Our other appetizer layered rectangles of cucumber, smoked salmon, fresh salmon and apple in three colorful, identical four-tiered towers, the balance of flavors as careful and appealing as the architecture.
The entrees were even better. Baked mahi-mahi was surrounded by an earthy, faintly sweet and bracingly intense broth made with fresh bamboo shoots, dried oyster mushrooms, brandy and young ginger.
Poached fillets of halibut had impossibly creamy flesh, draped with brussels sprout leaves for some textural contrast and sauced with a purée of uni, clam juice and mustard oil for some briny, zingy wow.
Each dimension of every dish sang with the exact pitch and volume that the chef Eric Ripert had no doubt intended. He’s a maestro, and his kitchen a finely tuned orchestra, and I could happily lose myself in their music every day.
The Best New Restaurant Dishes of 2008
MOMOFUKU KO’S FROZEN FOIE GRAS David Chang turned a classic torchon into flakes piled high, like an incongruously fatty and liver-y Sno-Kone, over a brittle of nuts and a sweet wine gelée.
PERBACCO’S ROLLED PASTA WITH TRUFFLED ZABAGLIONE This rich symphony of speck, buffalo milk mozzarella, béchamel and more was the most wickedly indulgent of the inventive pasta dishes on Simone Bonelli’s new menu.
TOM: TUESDAY DINNER’S CRISPY PORK TROTTER By frying the trotter and pairing it with a beet-stained, pickled quail egg, Tom Colicchio came up with something akin to a dinnertime bacon-and-eggs for the most jaded epicures.
GOTTINO’S WALNUT PESTO The best spread for toasted bread since crunchy peanut butter, it combines walnuts with olive oil, thyme, Parmesan and a dab of sun-dried tomato, which Jody Williams wisely rescues from disrepute.
TERROIR’S PORK BLADE STEAK Like many peers, Marco Canora smartly turned to the Virginia farmer Bev Eggleston for pork, then made the additionally sharp decisions to broil this thin shoulder cut and dump arugula and Parmesan onto it.
CONVIVIO’S PECORINO POTATOES The side dish of the year, a crazily addictive midpoint between roasted potatoes and French fries, given a salty charge and an extra dimension by the right cheese.
BAR BOULUD’S CROQUES-MONSIEUR AND -MADAME Two timeless sandwiches get the reverence they deserve and a richness beyond the norm.
CORTON’S CARAMEL BRIOCHE It’s a dessert (with banana and passion fruit in the mix), a cheese course (thanks to Stilton), a breakfast (in its mimicry of syrupy French toast) and altogether wonderful.
ADOUR ALAIN DUCASSE’S CONTEMPORARY VACHERIN. The terrific pastry chef Sandro Micheli stages a riveting tart-sweet drama with layers of mango marmalade, passion fruit sorbet and coconut meringue.
December 31, 2008
Resolution: Dine Well Without Breaking the Budget
Here are some of the best inexpensive places reviewed in the Dining section this year.
ABRAçO ESPRESSO 86 East Seventh Street, East Village; (212) 388-9731.
Espresso drinks are among the city's finest and drip coffee is even better. There's a small flavorful menu with a Spanish-style frittata of ethereal, custardy creaminess ($4) and warm French toast folded around sweet ricotta ($3).
THE BROOKLYN FLEA Starting in April at the playground of Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, Lafayette Avenue between Clermont and Vanderbilt Avenues, Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Hours are available at brooklynflea.com. Winter location at 76 Front Street (Washington Street), Dumbo, Brooklyn, has limited food vending.
This market is full of craftspeople, designers and costly vintage items, as well as food vendors from the Red Hook ball fields and elsewhere. Among the notables are the Vaquero family's grilled corn with mayo, cheese and chili powder ($3); Salvatore Bklyn Ricotta cannoli ($3), filled to order with lightly sweetened ricotta spiked with lemon zest, Marsala, chopped chocolate and salt; tiny cupcakes from Kumquat Cupcakery ($1 apiece); bonbons ($20 for a dozen) from Nunu Chocolates; sandwiches ($6.50 to $7.25) at Choice Cafe and pizza from Pizza Moto.
CABRITO 50 Carmine Street (Bedford Street), West Village; (212) 929-5050.
Tacos ($4 to $6) and enchiladas ($14) are delicious and carefully made, wrapped in tortillas with the drape of linen and the tenderness of crepes.
GAZALA PLACE 709 Ninth Avenue (49th Street), Clinton; (212) 245-0709.
Perhaps New York's first outpost of Druse cooking. Gazala Halabi is an accomplished baker with a roster of breads ($4 to $5) topped with spices, cheese or meat, or some combination of the three. Burekas are as flaky and buttery as the best puff pastry, with a thick, rich filling of goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes. An ideal end to a meal is osh al-saraia ($3.50), an alliance of yogurt and spongecake soaked with rosewater and honey.
GOTTINO 52 Greenwich Avenue (Charles Street), Greenwich Village; (212) 633-2590.
A wine bar with a great chef, Jody Williams. The crostini with walnut pesto or with fava beans and sheep's milk ricotta ($5) trawl the confluence of Italian soul and finger food.
IPPUDO NY 65 Fourth Avenue (Ninth Street), East Village; (212) 388-0088.
The purest expression of tonkotsu ramen, the richest style of this noodle soup, made with pork. The akamaru modern ramen ($13) builds on the template to make a bowl of noodle soup about as good as any in the city. Every noodle in every bowl of soup is cooked perfectly al dente.
LA SUPERIOR 295 Berry Street (South Second Street), Williamsburg, Brooklyn; (718) 388-5988, lasuperiornyc.com.
Tacos (most $2.50) taste resoundingly good, especially those with rajas, strips of mild roasted poblanos swaddled in thick cream, and grilled pescado zarandeado, a very welcome addition to New York's fish-taco landscape. Quesadillas are big, deep-fried turnovers filled with sautéed mushrooms or a mash of potatoes and chorizo, then hidden under thick cream and fresh cheese ($3.50). Gorditas with requesón ($5 for two), and the torta ahogada ($7.50), a sandwich with crisp, juicy chunks of carnitas, covered with a red sauce of chiles de arból are worthy of passion.
NO. 7 7 Greene Avenue (Fulton Street), Fort Greene, Brooklyn; (718) 522-6370.
No. 7 offers sophisticated assemblages, like slices of rare tuna fanned out with crisp, almost sweet Asian pear ($10). Allow the server to talk you into the appetizer of "fried broccoli, dill, grapefruit, black beans" ($7). Shrimp cocktail ($12) gets a spicy, bracing update from chili peppers and sesame oil in the sauce. Expertly cooked hanger steak with spicy kimchi pirogis ($20) overachieves.
PORCHETTA 110 East Seventh Street (First Avenue), East Village; (212) 777-2151.
Pork loin, wrapped in pork belly with fennel pollen, garlic, sage, rosemary and fistfuls of salt and pepper, then roasted for five hours in a combi oven that has locked in its moisture, wants nothing but slicing onto Sullivan Street Bakery rolls ($9). Potatoes ($5) are crisped with leftover bits of the good stuff.
THE REDHEAD 349 East 13th Street (First Avenue), East Village; (212) 533-6212.
A soft pretzel with grilled Texas sausages ($8); pecan sandies with butterscotch pudding ($6); and salty, picnic-ready buttermilk fried chicken and biscuits ($17) that ought to be in the Biscuit Museum are the kind of cooking that should be getting more serious attention in New York.
ROBERTA'S 261 Moore Street (Bogart Street), Bushwick, Brooklyn; (718) 417-1118.
Heretically creative pies are the thing to get, although the menu goes beyond pizza. Roberta's take on a Hawaiian pie ($15) comes topped with paper-thin sheets of ripe pineapple, shreds of fine ham, sliced jalapeños and dabs of ricotta. Guanciale and egg ($12) is just that: a mozzarella pizza strewn with crisp-cooked pieces of housemade guanciale and an egg cooked to a slightly runny doneness.
SOBA TOTTO 211 East 43rd Street, Midtown; (212) 557-8200.
Buckwheat noodles ($10 to $20), made fresh every day, are the centerpiece of the menu. There is also a full complement of deftly prepared yakitori ($2.50 to $8 each).
SOCARRAT PAELLA BAR 259 West 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 462-1000, socarratpaellabar.com.
Eight paellas ($21 to $23 a person) dispel many paella misconceptions. Paella Valenciana has pork ribs, rabbit and snails. There's an all-seafood paella, a vegetarian paella, and a house paella with seafood, chicken, beef and fava beans. One's made with squid ink, and a meat paella gets an earthy kick from a mushroom soffrito and a spicy kick from thick coins of chorizo. Fideua (fee-day-WAH) is made with thin, crisp strands of pasta.
TERROIR 413 East 12th Street (First Avenue), East Village; (646) 602-1300, wineisterroir.com.
Along with the pork blade steak ($17), bruschette with braised black cabbage and pork sausage ($7), and deep-fried lamb sausage wrapped in sage leaves ($7) rise far above the glorified sandwiches and snacks at many wine bars.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/dining/31cheap.html?ref=dining&pagewanted=print
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Still Paging Mr. Salinger By CHARLES McGRATH
Books
Still Paging Mr. Salinger By CHARLES McGRATH
On Thursday, J. D. Salinger turns 90. There probably won’t be a party, or if there is we’ll never know. For more than 50 years Mr. Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish, N.H. For a while it used to be a journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters up to Cornish in hopes of a sighting, or at least a quotation from a garrulous local, but Mr. Salinger hasn’t been photographed in decades now and the neighbors have all clammed up. He’s been so secretive he makes Thomas Pynchon seem like a gadabout.
Mr. Salinger’s disappearing act has succeeded so well, in fact, that it may be hard for readers who aren’t middle-aged to appreciate what a sensation he once caused. With its very first sentence, his novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. “Nine Stories,” published two years later, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone.
In the 1960s, though, when he was at the peak of his fame, Mr. Salinger went silent. “Franny and Zooey,” a collection of two long stories about the fictional Glass family, came out in 1961; two more long stories about the Glasses, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction,” appeared together in book form in 1963. The last work of Mr. Salinger’s to appear in print was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a short story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. In the ’70s he stopped giving interviews, and in the late ’80s he went all the way to the Supreme Court to block the British critic Ian Hamilton from quoting his letters in a biography.
So what has Mr. Salinger been doing for the last 40 years? The question obsesses Salingerologists, of whom there are still a great many, and there are all kinds of theories. He hasn’t written a word. Or he writes all the time and, like Gogol at the end of his life, burns the manuscripts. Or he has volumes and volumes just waiting to be published posthumously.
Joyce Maynard, who lived with Mr. Salinger in the early ’70s, wrote in a 1998 memoir that she had seen shelves of notebooks devoted to the Glass family and believed there were at least two new novels locked away in a safe.
“Hapworth,” which has never been published in book form, may be our only clue to what Mr. Salinger is thinking, and it’s unlike anything else he has written. The story used to be available only in samizdat — photocopies of photocopies passed along from hand to hand and becoming blurrier with each recopying — though it has become somewhat more accessible since the 2005 DVD edition of “The Complete New Yorker.” In 1997 Mr. Salinger agreed to let Orchises Press, a small publisher in Alexandria, Va., bring out a hardcover edition, but five years later he backed out of the deal.
Ever since, Salinger fans have been poring over the text, looking for hidden meaning. Did the author’s temporary willingness to reissue “Hapworth” indicate a throat-clearing, a warming up of the famously silent machinery? Or was it instead an act of closure, a final binding-up of the Glass family saga — one that, coming last but also at the chronological beginning, brings the whole enterprise full circle?
“Hapworth,” to summarize the unsummarizable, is a letter — or rather a transcription of a letter — 25,000 words, written in haste, by the 7-year old Seymour Glass, away at summer camp, to his parents, the long-suffering ex-vaudevillians Les and Bessie, and his siblings Walt, Waker and Boo Boo, back in New York.
Seymour, we learn, is already reading several languages and lusting after Mrs. Happy, the young wife of the camp owner. He condescends to his campmates and dispenses advice to the various members of the family: Les should be careful about his accent when singing, Boo Boo needs to practice her handwriting, Walt his manners, and so on.
The letter concludes with an extraordinary annotated list of books Seymour would like sent to him — a lifetime of reading for most people, but in his case merely the books he needs to get through the next six weeks: “Any unbigoted or bigoted books on God or merely religion, as written by persons whose last names begin with any letter after H; to stay on the safe side, please include H itself, though I think I have mostly exhausted it. ... The complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy. ... Charles Dickens, either in blessed entirety or in any touching shape or form. My God, I salute you, Charles Dickens!” And so on, all the way through Proust — in French, naturally — Goethe, and Porter Smith’s “Chinese Materia Medica.”
“Hapworth,” in short, must be the longest, most pretentious (and least plausible) letter from camp ever written. But though it’s the work of a prodigy, it’s also, like all camp letters, a homesick cry for attention.
Its author is the same Seymour who, while on his honeymoon in Florida years later (but — it gets confusing — 17 years earlier in real time, in the 1948 short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”), will take an automatic pistol from the bottom of his suitcase and shoot himself through the temple as his bride lies napping in the twin bed next to him. And the same Seymour — the family saint, poet and mystic — whom we’ve heard about at such length in the later Glass stories.
Or is he the same? The Seymour of “Bananafish,” and “Raise High the Roof Beam,” is more a sweetly charming neurotic than the ethereal, otherworldly figure described in “Seymour: An Introduction,” who in turn seems not in the least like the superior, boastful little genius of “Hapworth.” The discrepancies among the various versions of Seymour is such that some critics have questioned the motives and reliability of Buddy, Seymour’s younger brother and the family scribe, who is our source for much of what we know (and also the transcriber of the “Hapworth” letter).
But that kind of tricky, Nabokovian reading feels forced in this case. Mr. Salinger seems less interested in keeping the details straight than in getting them right and offering some explanation, or justification perhaps, for that moment, still startling even after many rereadings, when Seymour blows his brains out. It’s as if Mr. Salinger realized, belatedly, that he had prematurely killed his best character and wanted to make it up to him.
And at some point, it seems fair to say, he fell in love with this project — not just with Seymour but with the whole clan. Who can blame him? The Glasses are one of the liveliest, funniest, most fully realized families in all of fiction. The trouble is that like a lot of families, they occasionally take themselves too seriously and presume to lecture the rest of the world. In the early ’60s, as a certain amount of sentimental and half-baked mysticism began to be spouted by some of the younger Glasses, the critics quickly turned on Mr. Salinger, and “Hapworth” was grumpily dismissed.
What makes “Hapworth” so fascinating, though, is that it’s the only work of Mr. Salinger’s in which the voice is not secure, as the young Seymour fidgets first with one tone and then with another — by turns earnest, anxious, playful and sarcastic. In effect he’s always revising himself. He worries about his spirituality and then skewers his fellow campers. He wants to be like Jesus, and he wants to sleep with Mrs. Happy. He yearns to be left alone, and is desperate to be noticed. He wants to be a saint, and even if he can’t quite admit it yet, he wants to be a great author. Intentionally or not, he seems like a projection of his creator.
In general what has dated most in Mr. Salinger’s writing is not the prose — much of the dialogue, in the stories especially and in the second half of “Franny and Zooey,” still seems brilliant and fresh — but the ideas. Mr. Salinger’s fixation on the difference between “phoniness,” as Holden Caulfield would put it, and authenticity now has a twilight, ’50s feeling about it. It’s no longer news, and probably never was.
This is the theme, though, that comes increasingly to dominate the Glass chronicles: the unsolvable problem of ego and self-consciousness, of how to lead a spiritual life in a vulgar, material society. The very thing that makes the Glasses, and Seymour especially, so appealing to Mr. Salinger — that they’re too sensitive and exceptional for this world — is also what came to make them irritating to so many readers.
Another way to pose the Glass problem is: How do you make art for an audience, or a critical establishment, too crass to understand it? This is the issue that caused Seymour to give up, presumably, and one is tempted to say it’s what soured Mr. Salinger on wanting to see anything else in print.
Sadly, though, Mr. Salinger’s spiritual side is his least convincing. His gift is less for profundity than for observation, for listening and for comedy. Except perhaps for Mark Twain, no other American writer has registered with such precision the humor — and the pathos — of false sophistication and the vital banality of big-city pretension.
For all his reclusiveness, moreover, Mr. Salinger has none of the sage’s self-effacement; his manner is a big and showy one, given to tours-de-force and to large emotional gestures. In spite of his best efforts to silence himself or become a seer, he remains an original and influential stylist — the kind of writer the mature Seymour (but not necessarily the precocious 7-year-old) would probably deplore.
Still Paging Mr. Salinger By CHARLES McGRATH
On Thursday, J. D. Salinger turns 90. There probably won’t be a party, or if there is we’ll never know. For more than 50 years Mr. Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish, N.H. For a while it used to be a journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters up to Cornish in hopes of a sighting, or at least a quotation from a garrulous local, but Mr. Salinger hasn’t been photographed in decades now and the neighbors have all clammed up. He’s been so secretive he makes Thomas Pynchon seem like a gadabout.
Mr. Salinger’s disappearing act has succeeded so well, in fact, that it may be hard for readers who aren’t middle-aged to appreciate what a sensation he once caused. With its very first sentence, his novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. “Nine Stories,” published two years later, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone.
In the 1960s, though, when he was at the peak of his fame, Mr. Salinger went silent. “Franny and Zooey,” a collection of two long stories about the fictional Glass family, came out in 1961; two more long stories about the Glasses, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction,” appeared together in book form in 1963. The last work of Mr. Salinger’s to appear in print was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a short story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. In the ’70s he stopped giving interviews, and in the late ’80s he went all the way to the Supreme Court to block the British critic Ian Hamilton from quoting his letters in a biography.
So what has Mr. Salinger been doing for the last 40 years? The question obsesses Salingerologists, of whom there are still a great many, and there are all kinds of theories. He hasn’t written a word. Or he writes all the time and, like Gogol at the end of his life, burns the manuscripts. Or he has volumes and volumes just waiting to be published posthumously.
Joyce Maynard, who lived with Mr. Salinger in the early ’70s, wrote in a 1998 memoir that she had seen shelves of notebooks devoted to the Glass family and believed there were at least two new novels locked away in a safe.
“Hapworth,” which has never been published in book form, may be our only clue to what Mr. Salinger is thinking, and it’s unlike anything else he has written. The story used to be available only in samizdat — photocopies of photocopies passed along from hand to hand and becoming blurrier with each recopying — though it has become somewhat more accessible since the 2005 DVD edition of “The Complete New Yorker.” In 1997 Mr. Salinger agreed to let Orchises Press, a small publisher in Alexandria, Va., bring out a hardcover edition, but five years later he backed out of the deal.
Ever since, Salinger fans have been poring over the text, looking for hidden meaning. Did the author’s temporary willingness to reissue “Hapworth” indicate a throat-clearing, a warming up of the famously silent machinery? Or was it instead an act of closure, a final binding-up of the Glass family saga — one that, coming last but also at the chronological beginning, brings the whole enterprise full circle?
“Hapworth,” to summarize the unsummarizable, is a letter — or rather a transcription of a letter — 25,000 words, written in haste, by the 7-year old Seymour Glass, away at summer camp, to his parents, the long-suffering ex-vaudevillians Les and Bessie, and his siblings Walt, Waker and Boo Boo, back in New York.
Seymour, we learn, is already reading several languages and lusting after Mrs. Happy, the young wife of the camp owner. He condescends to his campmates and dispenses advice to the various members of the family: Les should be careful about his accent when singing, Boo Boo needs to practice her handwriting, Walt his manners, and so on.
The letter concludes with an extraordinary annotated list of books Seymour would like sent to him — a lifetime of reading for most people, but in his case merely the books he needs to get through the next six weeks: “Any unbigoted or bigoted books on God or merely religion, as written by persons whose last names begin with any letter after H; to stay on the safe side, please include H itself, though I think I have mostly exhausted it. ... The complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy. ... Charles Dickens, either in blessed entirety or in any touching shape or form. My God, I salute you, Charles Dickens!” And so on, all the way through Proust — in French, naturally — Goethe, and Porter Smith’s “Chinese Materia Medica.”
“Hapworth,” in short, must be the longest, most pretentious (and least plausible) letter from camp ever written. But though it’s the work of a prodigy, it’s also, like all camp letters, a homesick cry for attention.
Its author is the same Seymour who, while on his honeymoon in Florida years later (but — it gets confusing — 17 years earlier in real time, in the 1948 short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”), will take an automatic pistol from the bottom of his suitcase and shoot himself through the temple as his bride lies napping in the twin bed next to him. And the same Seymour — the family saint, poet and mystic — whom we’ve heard about at such length in the later Glass stories.
Or is he the same? The Seymour of “Bananafish,” and “Raise High the Roof Beam,” is more a sweetly charming neurotic than the ethereal, otherworldly figure described in “Seymour: An Introduction,” who in turn seems not in the least like the superior, boastful little genius of “Hapworth.” The discrepancies among the various versions of Seymour is such that some critics have questioned the motives and reliability of Buddy, Seymour’s younger brother and the family scribe, who is our source for much of what we know (and also the transcriber of the “Hapworth” letter).
But that kind of tricky, Nabokovian reading feels forced in this case. Mr. Salinger seems less interested in keeping the details straight than in getting them right and offering some explanation, or justification perhaps, for that moment, still startling even after many rereadings, when Seymour blows his brains out. It’s as if Mr. Salinger realized, belatedly, that he had prematurely killed his best character and wanted to make it up to him.
And at some point, it seems fair to say, he fell in love with this project — not just with Seymour but with the whole clan. Who can blame him? The Glasses are one of the liveliest, funniest, most fully realized families in all of fiction. The trouble is that like a lot of families, they occasionally take themselves too seriously and presume to lecture the rest of the world. In the early ’60s, as a certain amount of sentimental and half-baked mysticism began to be spouted by some of the younger Glasses, the critics quickly turned on Mr. Salinger, and “Hapworth” was grumpily dismissed.
What makes “Hapworth” so fascinating, though, is that it’s the only work of Mr. Salinger’s in which the voice is not secure, as the young Seymour fidgets first with one tone and then with another — by turns earnest, anxious, playful and sarcastic. In effect he’s always revising himself. He worries about his spirituality and then skewers his fellow campers. He wants to be like Jesus, and he wants to sleep with Mrs. Happy. He yearns to be left alone, and is desperate to be noticed. He wants to be a saint, and even if he can’t quite admit it yet, he wants to be a great author. Intentionally or not, he seems like a projection of his creator.
In general what has dated most in Mr. Salinger’s writing is not the prose — much of the dialogue, in the stories especially and in the second half of “Franny and Zooey,” still seems brilliant and fresh — but the ideas. Mr. Salinger’s fixation on the difference between “phoniness,” as Holden Caulfield would put it, and authenticity now has a twilight, ’50s feeling about it. It’s no longer news, and probably never was.
This is the theme, though, that comes increasingly to dominate the Glass chronicles: the unsolvable problem of ego and self-consciousness, of how to lead a spiritual life in a vulgar, material society. The very thing that makes the Glasses, and Seymour especially, so appealing to Mr. Salinger — that they’re too sensitive and exceptional for this world — is also what came to make them irritating to so many readers.
Another way to pose the Glass problem is: How do you make art for an audience, or a critical establishment, too crass to understand it? This is the issue that caused Seymour to give up, presumably, and one is tempted to say it’s what soured Mr. Salinger on wanting to see anything else in print.
Sadly, though, Mr. Salinger’s spiritual side is his least convincing. His gift is less for profundity than for observation, for listening and for comedy. Except perhaps for Mark Twain, no other American writer has registered with such precision the humor — and the pathos — of false sophistication and the vital banality of big-city pretension.
For all his reclusiveness, moreover, Mr. Salinger has none of the sage’s self-effacement; his manner is a big and showy one, given to tours-de-force and to large emotional gestures. In spite of his best efforts to silence himself or become a seer, he remains an original and influential stylist — the kind of writer the mature Seymour (but not necessarily the precocious 7-year-old) would probably deplore.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
The Fight Over NASA's Future By JOHN SCHWARTZ
December 30, 2008
The Long Countdown
The Fight Over NASA's Future By JOHN SCHWARTZ
NASA has named the rocket Ares I, as in the god of war — and its life has been a battle from the start.
Ares I is part of a new system of spacecraft being designed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to replace the nation's aging space shuttles. The Ares I and its Orion capsule, along with a companion heavy-lift rocket known as the Ares V, are meant for travel to the Moon and beyond.
Technical troubles have dogged the design process for the Ares I, the first of the rockets scheduled to be built, with attendant delays and growing costs. And in an age of always-on communication, instant messages and blogs, internal debate that once might have been part of a cloistered process has spilled into public view.
Some critics say there are profound problems with the design that render the Ares I dead on arrival, while other observers argue that technical complications crop up in any spacecraft development program of this scope.
The issues have become a focus of the members of the presidential transition team dealing with NASA, and the space program could undergo a transformation after Barack Obama takes office.
During his campaign, Mr. Obama expressed support for NASA and criticized the five-year gap between the scheduled end of the space shuttle program in 2010 and the planned debut of the first components of the new system, which NASA has given the overall name Constellation, in 2015. (During the pause in American flights — a Bush administration plan to conserve money during the development process — the United States will depend on Russia and its Soyuz spacecraft for trips to the International Space Station.)
But NASA, which has a $17 billion annual budget and most likely would face higher expenses if the gap is to be narrowed and the new program kept on track, will be competing for money as the new administration faces urgent and expensive crises.
The Obama transition team, in meetings and requests for information from NASA, contractors and others with a stake in the process, has asked whether increased financing can narrow the five-year flight gap by speeding development of the new spacecraft. The advisers have also asked what the costs and consequences might be of continuing to fly the shuttles for at least one or two additional flights, or even to keep flying them until the next system is ready.
The team has also asked whether the development program is truly in trouble and, if so, whether the Ares I should be modified or replaced by rockets used by the Air Force to launch satellites, or the Ariane 5 rocket from Europe.
While some involved in developing the rockets have read volumes into the questions, a spokesman for the transition team, Nick Shapiro, said that "the role of the agency review teams is not to make recommendations on any of the issues they are reviewing. They are fact-finding and preparing the full range of options for consideration by the incoming appointees."
Nonetheless, tensions have increased between the incoming administration and the management of NASA, whose administrator, Michael D. Griffin, is fighting to keep the program on course. If he is not reappointed by Mr. Obama, his term will end Jan. 20.
John Logsdon, a space historian at the Smithsonian Institution, said Mr. Griffin was fighting for a program "which he's put his whole reputation on." On the other hand, Dr. Logsdon said, a new president needs to press and probe. "Any administration making a choice that's going to last for a generation needs to make that choice for itself," he said.
A New Direction
In an enormous barnlike building at the Kennedy Space Center earlier this year, officials proudly showed off a prototype of the heat shield of the new Orion capsule, a rounded disc some 15 feet across. Startlingly large but oddly prosaic — it looked like nothing so much as a gigantic muffin top — it served as a powerful symbol for those at the space center. It meant the first pieces of test hardware were moving from computer screens to reality.
Metal, as they say, is being bent.
President Bush announced the new direction for the space program in January 2004, nearly a year after the loss of the shuttle Columbia underscored the risks inherent in the spacecraft — especially the potential for debris to strike it during launching. In 2005, NASA lifted the curtain on the Constellation program, with the Orion capsule that would ride on top of its rocket, Ares I, out of the way of launch debris. It would be capable of carrying six astronauts; Apollo held three.
The Ares rockets are very different — both from the shuttle and each other.
Ares I, uses as its first stage a lengthened solid rocket booster like the ones used by the shuttle. The second stage is a rocket that will burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, as the shuttle's main engines do. Atop the stack will sit the Orion capsule.
The first test of an unmanned Ares I could take place next summer. The test, however, will use a spacecraft that is very different from the Ares I to come. It will involve a solid rocket booster of the same length that the shuttle uses, and the second stage and capsule will be dummies. Four more test flights are scheduled before the rocket is used beginning in 2015.
The Ares V is a much brawnier rocket designed to send equipment to the Moon and beyond. Its first stage includes two solid rocket boosters and a liquid-fueled set of six rocket engines.
The design process has run into technical problems. Orion is far heavier than the Apollo capsule and weight issues have required redesigns of both the capsule and the rocket, further complicating technical issues. Engineers have also had to come up with ways to dampen potentially dangerous vibrations along the shaft of the rocket as the solid rocket engine empties.
Some inside the development program have complained that it is run with a my-way-or-the-highway attitude that stifles dissent and innovation. Jeffrey Finckenor, an engineer who left NASA this year, sent a goodbye letter to colleagues that expressed his frustrations with the program. "At the highest levels of the agency, there seems to be a belief that you can mandate reality," he wrote, "followed by a refusal to accept any information that runs counter to that mandate." The letter was posted to the independent NASA Watch Web site.
Mr. Finckenor has refused to comment further.
Leroy Chiao, a retired astronaut who flew three shuttle missions and served aboard the space station, said that the 2004 announcement by Mr. Bush of NASA's new direction "was a time of great optimism." Mr. Chiao is not involved with the Constellation project today, but he said it was clear from some of the leaked discussions that "the program has not panned out as I, and the vast majority of people, had hoped."
Sunny Assessments
NASA officials say the Constellation program is actually coming along well. In an interview in November, Mr. Griffin said, "I can't imagine somebody thinks you're going to develop a new space transportation system and encounter no challenges." The ones NASA is encountering, he said, are "routine in the extreme."
Douglas R. Cooke, a leading space agency official on the Constellation program, told reporters this month that the weight and vibration issues were well on their way to being fixed. And Neil Otte, the launching chief engineer for the Constellation rockets, said that solving tough problems was what engineers did for a living. When they encounter a particularly difficult challenge, he said, their attitude is, "Hey, it's starting to get fun now, and we're earning our money."
Nonetheless, the chorus of naysayers that has arisen online, and even within NASA, often has a favorite alternative in mind. There is momentum behind using Atlas and Delta rockets developed for satellite delivery, which proponents say could quickly be fitted with the Orion capsule.
Mr. Griffin has proposed using satellite launchers for human flights in the past, a process known as "human rating" that involves upgrades to the safety and reliability of the craft. This year, he told French lawmakers that it would be a "small step" from today's French Ariane 5 rocket, which has launched a cargo craft to the International Space Station, to "an independent European human spaceflight capability." But he opposes the plan to use the military rockets and has said that the switch would lead to delay and cost increases while risking safety.
Mr. Otte said using military rockets would be far more complex than simply putting a capsule on top of off-the-shelf equipment. Rockets built for satellites would have to be extensively modified before putting humans aboard.
A second group of engineers favors plans for a follow-up system, called Direct 2.0, that is drawn largely from old NASA plans that had been abandoned. Ross Tierney, a spokesman for the group pushing Direct 2.0, said, "Let's have an independent review and check them all out."
"We're confident of what the numbers are going to be, and that we'll come out on top," he said.
But that concept has gained few followers, and in April, Richard Gilbrech, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems at the time, testified before the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics that "we can't justify, based on laws of physics, the performance" claimed by the plan's proponents.
Edward F. Crawley, a senior professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that the Ares I was not perfect, but that when seen in the context of its use of components from the shuttle program, military systems and the coming Ares V, it was the product of sensible choices. "I don't have any reason to believe there are major technical issues to block its success," he said.
Building a new rocket "is a hard thing," Dr. Crawley said, and initial test flights often end in embarrassment or even disaster because everything in a very complex system has to go right. "It's one strike and you're out," he said. "If you put every day of its development under a microscope, you'll find plenty of things to write about."
To Keep Flying or Not
When Mr. Obama decides what to do about space, he might also decide to narrow NASA's five-year flight gap simply by flying the space shuttles past the Bush administration's 2010 deadline.
Pressure has grown to keep the shuttles flying. In July, former Senator John Glenn of Ohio said in testimony before the House Science and Technology Committee that he favored flying the shuttles until the Constellation craft were ready to fly. "I never thought I would see the day when the world's richest, most powerful, most accomplished spacefaring nation would have to buy tickets from Russia to get up to our station," said Mr. Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.
Continuing shuttle flights has also been proposed by the New Democracy Project, a group with strong ties to John D. Podesta, a co-chairman of the Obama transition team.
To Mr. Griffin, though, such proposals threaten to scuttle the new space program by hijacking billions of dollars that could go to Constellation development. He also argues that the shuttle's considerable risks make it unsafe to continue flying it. In an interview in November, Mr. Griffin defended the program he has put in place.
"U.S. civil space policy, in terms of its goals, was headed in the wrong direction after the Nixon administration," he said. Today, with the nation talking about going back to the Moon, exploring near-Earth asteroids and even going to Mars, "that's the right path for us to be investing in," he said.
Dr. Crawley of M.I.T. said he would like to see a panel of "unbiased and wise people" under the new administration weigh NASA's plans against the alternatives while keeping in mind the broad range of budgetary, workforce and technical issues. "I don't frankly know what the answer is," he said, "but I know it's a lot closer and a lot more complicated answer than the one playing out in the media and the blogs."
And then, Dr. Crawley said, get on with it. The space program's $17 billion annual budget is small in comparison with other elements of the nation's spending. But its payoff, he noted, can be big. If the new president seeks to stimulate the economy with "domestic high-technology jobs that provide stable and rewarding employment," he said, "space would be a well-placed investment."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/science/30spac.html?ref=science&pagewanted=print
null
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/12/29/science/space/CONSTELLATION.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/12/29/science/123008-Nasa_index.html
The Long Countdown
The Fight Over NASA's Future By JOHN SCHWARTZ
NASA has named the rocket Ares I, as in the god of war — and its life has been a battle from the start.
Ares I is part of a new system of spacecraft being designed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to replace the nation's aging space shuttles. The Ares I and its Orion capsule, along with a companion heavy-lift rocket known as the Ares V, are meant for travel to the Moon and beyond.
Technical troubles have dogged the design process for the Ares I, the first of the rockets scheduled to be built, with attendant delays and growing costs. And in an age of always-on communication, instant messages and blogs, internal debate that once might have been part of a cloistered process has spilled into public view.
Some critics say there are profound problems with the design that render the Ares I dead on arrival, while other observers argue that technical complications crop up in any spacecraft development program of this scope.
The issues have become a focus of the members of the presidential transition team dealing with NASA, and the space program could undergo a transformation after Barack Obama takes office.
During his campaign, Mr. Obama expressed support for NASA and criticized the five-year gap between the scheduled end of the space shuttle program in 2010 and the planned debut of the first components of the new system, which NASA has given the overall name Constellation, in 2015. (During the pause in American flights — a Bush administration plan to conserve money during the development process — the United States will depend on Russia and its Soyuz spacecraft for trips to the International Space Station.)
But NASA, which has a $17 billion annual budget and most likely would face higher expenses if the gap is to be narrowed and the new program kept on track, will be competing for money as the new administration faces urgent and expensive crises.
The Obama transition team, in meetings and requests for information from NASA, contractors and others with a stake in the process, has asked whether increased financing can narrow the five-year flight gap by speeding development of the new spacecraft. The advisers have also asked what the costs and consequences might be of continuing to fly the shuttles for at least one or two additional flights, or even to keep flying them until the next system is ready.
The team has also asked whether the development program is truly in trouble and, if so, whether the Ares I should be modified or replaced by rockets used by the Air Force to launch satellites, or the Ariane 5 rocket from Europe.
While some involved in developing the rockets have read volumes into the questions, a spokesman for the transition team, Nick Shapiro, said that "the role of the agency review teams is not to make recommendations on any of the issues they are reviewing. They are fact-finding and preparing the full range of options for consideration by the incoming appointees."
Nonetheless, tensions have increased between the incoming administration and the management of NASA, whose administrator, Michael D. Griffin, is fighting to keep the program on course. If he is not reappointed by Mr. Obama, his term will end Jan. 20.
John Logsdon, a space historian at the Smithsonian Institution, said Mr. Griffin was fighting for a program "which he's put his whole reputation on." On the other hand, Dr. Logsdon said, a new president needs to press and probe. "Any administration making a choice that's going to last for a generation needs to make that choice for itself," he said.
A New Direction
In an enormous barnlike building at the Kennedy Space Center earlier this year, officials proudly showed off a prototype of the heat shield of the new Orion capsule, a rounded disc some 15 feet across. Startlingly large but oddly prosaic — it looked like nothing so much as a gigantic muffin top — it served as a powerful symbol for those at the space center. It meant the first pieces of test hardware were moving from computer screens to reality.
Metal, as they say, is being bent.
President Bush announced the new direction for the space program in January 2004, nearly a year after the loss of the shuttle Columbia underscored the risks inherent in the spacecraft — especially the potential for debris to strike it during launching. In 2005, NASA lifted the curtain on the Constellation program, with the Orion capsule that would ride on top of its rocket, Ares I, out of the way of launch debris. It would be capable of carrying six astronauts; Apollo held three.
The Ares rockets are very different — both from the shuttle and each other.
Ares I, uses as its first stage a lengthened solid rocket booster like the ones used by the shuttle. The second stage is a rocket that will burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, as the shuttle's main engines do. Atop the stack will sit the Orion capsule.
The first test of an unmanned Ares I could take place next summer. The test, however, will use a spacecraft that is very different from the Ares I to come. It will involve a solid rocket booster of the same length that the shuttle uses, and the second stage and capsule will be dummies. Four more test flights are scheduled before the rocket is used beginning in 2015.
The Ares V is a much brawnier rocket designed to send equipment to the Moon and beyond. Its first stage includes two solid rocket boosters and a liquid-fueled set of six rocket engines.
The design process has run into technical problems. Orion is far heavier than the Apollo capsule and weight issues have required redesigns of both the capsule and the rocket, further complicating technical issues. Engineers have also had to come up with ways to dampen potentially dangerous vibrations along the shaft of the rocket as the solid rocket engine empties.
Some inside the development program have complained that it is run with a my-way-or-the-highway attitude that stifles dissent and innovation. Jeffrey Finckenor, an engineer who left NASA this year, sent a goodbye letter to colleagues that expressed his frustrations with the program. "At the highest levels of the agency, there seems to be a belief that you can mandate reality," he wrote, "followed by a refusal to accept any information that runs counter to that mandate." The letter was posted to the independent NASA Watch Web site.
Mr. Finckenor has refused to comment further.
Leroy Chiao, a retired astronaut who flew three shuttle missions and served aboard the space station, said that the 2004 announcement by Mr. Bush of NASA's new direction "was a time of great optimism." Mr. Chiao is not involved with the Constellation project today, but he said it was clear from some of the leaked discussions that "the program has not panned out as I, and the vast majority of people, had hoped."
Sunny Assessments
NASA officials say the Constellation program is actually coming along well. In an interview in November, Mr. Griffin said, "I can't imagine somebody thinks you're going to develop a new space transportation system and encounter no challenges." The ones NASA is encountering, he said, are "routine in the extreme."
Douglas R. Cooke, a leading space agency official on the Constellation program, told reporters this month that the weight and vibration issues were well on their way to being fixed. And Neil Otte, the launching chief engineer for the Constellation rockets, said that solving tough problems was what engineers did for a living. When they encounter a particularly difficult challenge, he said, their attitude is, "Hey, it's starting to get fun now, and we're earning our money."
Nonetheless, the chorus of naysayers that has arisen online, and even within NASA, often has a favorite alternative in mind. There is momentum behind using Atlas and Delta rockets developed for satellite delivery, which proponents say could quickly be fitted with the Orion capsule.
Mr. Griffin has proposed using satellite launchers for human flights in the past, a process known as "human rating" that involves upgrades to the safety and reliability of the craft. This year, he told French lawmakers that it would be a "small step" from today's French Ariane 5 rocket, which has launched a cargo craft to the International Space Station, to "an independent European human spaceflight capability." But he opposes the plan to use the military rockets and has said that the switch would lead to delay and cost increases while risking safety.
Mr. Otte said using military rockets would be far more complex than simply putting a capsule on top of off-the-shelf equipment. Rockets built for satellites would have to be extensively modified before putting humans aboard.
A second group of engineers favors plans for a follow-up system, called Direct 2.0, that is drawn largely from old NASA plans that had been abandoned. Ross Tierney, a spokesman for the group pushing Direct 2.0, said, "Let's have an independent review and check them all out."
"We're confident of what the numbers are going to be, and that we'll come out on top," he said.
But that concept has gained few followers, and in April, Richard Gilbrech, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems at the time, testified before the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics that "we can't justify, based on laws of physics, the performance" claimed by the plan's proponents.
Edward F. Crawley, a senior professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that the Ares I was not perfect, but that when seen in the context of its use of components from the shuttle program, military systems and the coming Ares V, it was the product of sensible choices. "I don't have any reason to believe there are major technical issues to block its success," he said.
Building a new rocket "is a hard thing," Dr. Crawley said, and initial test flights often end in embarrassment or even disaster because everything in a very complex system has to go right. "It's one strike and you're out," he said. "If you put every day of its development under a microscope, you'll find plenty of things to write about."
To Keep Flying or Not
When Mr. Obama decides what to do about space, he might also decide to narrow NASA's five-year flight gap simply by flying the space shuttles past the Bush administration's 2010 deadline.
Pressure has grown to keep the shuttles flying. In July, former Senator John Glenn of Ohio said in testimony before the House Science and Technology Committee that he favored flying the shuttles until the Constellation craft were ready to fly. "I never thought I would see the day when the world's richest, most powerful, most accomplished spacefaring nation would have to buy tickets from Russia to get up to our station," said Mr. Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.
Continuing shuttle flights has also been proposed by the New Democracy Project, a group with strong ties to John D. Podesta, a co-chairman of the Obama transition team.
To Mr. Griffin, though, such proposals threaten to scuttle the new space program by hijacking billions of dollars that could go to Constellation development. He also argues that the shuttle's considerable risks make it unsafe to continue flying it. In an interview in November, Mr. Griffin defended the program he has put in place.
"U.S. civil space policy, in terms of its goals, was headed in the wrong direction after the Nixon administration," he said. Today, with the nation talking about going back to the Moon, exploring near-Earth asteroids and even going to Mars, "that's the right path for us to be investing in," he said.
Dr. Crawley of M.I.T. said he would like to see a panel of "unbiased and wise people" under the new administration weigh NASA's plans against the alternatives while keeping in mind the broad range of budgetary, workforce and technical issues. "I don't frankly know what the answer is," he said, "but I know it's a lot closer and a lot more complicated answer than the one playing out in the media and the blogs."
And then, Dr. Crawley said, get on with it. The space program's $17 billion annual budget is small in comparison with other elements of the nation's spending. But its payoff, he noted, can be big. If the new president seeks to stimulate the economy with "domestic high-technology jobs that provide stable and rewarding employment," he said, "space would be a well-placed investment."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/science/30spac.html?ref=science&pagewanted=print
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http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/12/29/science/space/CONSTELLATION.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/12/29/science/123008-Nasa_index.html
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Ann Hornaday | Film
Ann Hornaday | Film
Sunday, December 28, 2008; M06
It's fashionable to complain that they don't make movies for grown-ups anymore, but a glance back at 2008 reveals a far more cheerful truth: Fans of smart, engaged, ambitious cinema were spoiled for choice this year. What's more, they were treated to films that, whether intentionally or not, vividly reflected their time and place, such as the pluralist, post-9/11 New York of Tom McCarthy's keenly observed "The Visitor" or German director Fatih Akin's polyglot, intercultural drama "The Edge of Heaven." Perhaps most encouragingly, what was once the subject of the classic "problem picture" has now become context not worth commenting on, such as the interracial marriage of "Rachel Getting Married," which could be subtitled "Who Cares Who's Coming to Dinner?" Indeed, this year's most effective problem picture also happened to be its finest children's film, "WALL E," in which the balletic, silent grace of Charlie Chaplin met the environmental passion of Al Gore. Even when they weren't for grown-ups, this year's best movies mattered.
1. "The Visitor"
2. "WALL E"
3. "Milk"
4. "The Edge of Heaven"
5. "Man on Wire"
6. "Chicago 10"
7. "Happy-Go-Lucky"
8. "Rachel Getting Married"
9. "I've Loved You So Long"
10. "Tell No One"
Sunday, December 28, 2008; M06
It's fashionable to complain that they don't make movies for grown-ups anymore, but a glance back at 2008 reveals a far more cheerful truth: Fans of smart, engaged, ambitious cinema were spoiled for choice this year. What's more, they were treated to films that, whether intentionally or not, vividly reflected their time and place, such as the pluralist, post-9/11 New York of Tom McCarthy's keenly observed "The Visitor" or German director Fatih Akin's polyglot, intercultural drama "The Edge of Heaven." Perhaps most encouragingly, what was once the subject of the classic "problem picture" has now become context not worth commenting on, such as the interracial marriage of "Rachel Getting Married," which could be subtitled "Who Cares Who's Coming to Dinner?" Indeed, this year's most effective problem picture also happened to be its finest children's film, "WALL E," in which the balletic, silent grace of Charlie Chaplin met the environmental passion of Al Gore. Even when they weren't for grown-ups, this year's best movies mattered.
1. "The Visitor"
2. "WALL E"
3. "Milk"
4. "The Edge of Heaven"
5. "Man on Wire"
6. "Chicago 10"
7. "Happy-Go-Lucky"
8. "Rachel Getting Married"
9. "I've Loved You So Long"
10. "Tell No One"
Best New Programs Tom Shales | Television
Tom Shales | Television
Sunday, December 28, 2008; M07
Best New Programs Tom Shales | Television
Ebb was a more powerful force than flow on TV in 2008; splendid, seductive new shows were scarce if not nonexistent. Networks took risks on goofy premises and departures from the norm, but the departures were mostly quick to depart. The whole idea of a "TV series" in the old sense -- 24 weeks on, some reruns, then a return -- may be dying. NBC gave credence to that thesis at the end of the year when it announced that when Jay Leno leaves as host of "The Tonight Show" (to be replaced by Conan O'Brien as long ago agreed), he will headline a nightly prime-time comedy-and-music hour, thus removing five slots where scripted dramas might have gone. · The great shows this past year were mostly one-time specials or such spectacular events as NBC's high-def Beijing Olympics. Once again, HBO put the networks and basic cable to shame with all manner of programming, including the breakthrough series "In Treatment," a nightly session with a shrink and his patients. And yes, "Morning Joe" came on the air in 2007, but in its first full year it has blossomed as a provocative, alternate-universe newstalk show -- anchored by Joe Scarborough but energized by the brilliantly versatile co-host Mika Brzezinski (daughter of Zbigniew).
1. "John Adams," HBO.
2. "In Treatment," HBO.
3. "The Black List," HBO.
4. "Morning Joe," MSNBC.
5. "Crusoe," NBC.
Breakout Performers
The biggest splash made on cable this year was by Rachel Maddow, whose rise has been breathtakingly fast and whose nightly talk hour on MSNBC has been known to beat the long-dominant Larry King on CNN among the desirable set of 25-to-54-year-olds. Maddow is an immensely attractive figure who, unlike many TV pundits, doesn't rant, roar, shriek or freak. · Tina Fey blossomed this year by adding to her Emmy-winning comedy "30 Rock" with return appearances on "Saturday Night Live" as a remarkably rollicking comic clone of Sarah Palin, a portrayal so rich and gratifying that the audience couldn't get enough of it. · Three Australians, coincidentally or not, were among the men making the strongest impressions: Chris Lilley, a down-under Ricky Gervais, not only created and wrote the tour de force "Summer Heights High," imported by HBO, but also played the three principal characters, one of them a teenage girl who called herself Ja'mie. Meanwhile, on broadcast network TV, Simon Baker greatly elevated a routine crime drama, "The Mentalist," which premiered in the fall on CBS, with a suave but self-mocking style reminiscent of the original Bond, James Bond. Ryan Kwanten, third of the trio, stole scene after scene of "True Blood," the HBO comedy-drama about vampires of the 21st century, managing the neat trick of macho boyishness.
1. Rachel Maddow, MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show."
2. Tina Fey, NBC's "Saturday Night Live," "30 Rock."
3. Chris Lilley, HBO's "Summer Heights High."
4. Simon Baker, CBS's "The Mentalist."
5. Ryan Kwanten, HBO's "True Blood."
Sunday, December 28, 2008; M07
Best New Programs Tom Shales | Television
Ebb was a more powerful force than flow on TV in 2008; splendid, seductive new shows were scarce if not nonexistent. Networks took risks on goofy premises and departures from the norm, but the departures were mostly quick to depart. The whole idea of a "TV series" in the old sense -- 24 weeks on, some reruns, then a return -- may be dying. NBC gave credence to that thesis at the end of the year when it announced that when Jay Leno leaves as host of "The Tonight Show" (to be replaced by Conan O'Brien as long ago agreed), he will headline a nightly prime-time comedy-and-music hour, thus removing five slots where scripted dramas might have gone. · The great shows this past year were mostly one-time specials or such spectacular events as NBC's high-def Beijing Olympics. Once again, HBO put the networks and basic cable to shame with all manner of programming, including the breakthrough series "In Treatment," a nightly session with a shrink and his patients. And yes, "Morning Joe" came on the air in 2007, but in its first full year it has blossomed as a provocative, alternate-universe newstalk show -- anchored by Joe Scarborough but energized by the brilliantly versatile co-host Mika Brzezinski (daughter of Zbigniew).
1. "John Adams," HBO.
2. "In Treatment," HBO.
3. "The Black List," HBO.
4. "Morning Joe," MSNBC.
5. "Crusoe," NBC.
Breakout Performers
The biggest splash made on cable this year was by Rachel Maddow, whose rise has been breathtakingly fast and whose nightly talk hour on MSNBC has been known to beat the long-dominant Larry King on CNN among the desirable set of 25-to-54-year-olds. Maddow is an immensely attractive figure who, unlike many TV pundits, doesn't rant, roar, shriek or freak. · Tina Fey blossomed this year by adding to her Emmy-winning comedy "30 Rock" with return appearances on "Saturday Night Live" as a remarkably rollicking comic clone of Sarah Palin, a portrayal so rich and gratifying that the audience couldn't get enough of it. · Three Australians, coincidentally or not, were among the men making the strongest impressions: Chris Lilley, a down-under Ricky Gervais, not only created and wrote the tour de force "Summer Heights High," imported by HBO, but also played the three principal characters, one of them a teenage girl who called herself Ja'mie. Meanwhile, on broadcast network TV, Simon Baker greatly elevated a routine crime drama, "The Mentalist," which premiered in the fall on CBS, with a suave but self-mocking style reminiscent of the original Bond, James Bond. Ryan Kwanten, third of the trio, stole scene after scene of "True Blood," the HBO comedy-drama about vampires of the 21st century, managing the neat trick of macho boyishness.
1. Rachel Maddow, MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show."
2. Tina Fey, NBC's "Saturday Night Live," "30 Rock."
3. Chris Lilley, HBO's "Summer Heights High."
4. Simon Baker, CBS's "The Mentalist."
5. Ryan Kwanten, HBO's "True Blood."
Winners and Losers '08: One Writer's View By JERRY GARRETT
December 27, 2008
Winners and Losers '08: One Writer's View By JERRY GARRETT
IN its 2008 Car Reliability Study, Consumer Reports ranked the Chrysler Sebring convertible, with a reliability score that was "283 percent worse than average," dead last among the 357 vehicles covered in the survey of subscribers. At the other end of the scale was the new Scion xD, the industry's reliability champ, at about 82 percent "better than average."
Coincidentally, the plucky pint-size xD and its somewhat more sophisticated stablemate, the boxy xB, get my vote as the best new car values for 2008. Starting at around $15,000 each, the Scion siblings provide great bang for the buck, along with their reliability and strong resale values.
The Sebring, a sorry reminder of issues that have tainted the reputations of Detroit automakers, more than earned its place in the basement. Rental fleets still love them, though.
Over all, 2008 has been a year of hits and misses for the United States auto industry. Ford has given its die-hard fans reason for hope, with several admirable new models; by comparison, G.M. and Chrysler have far less to cheer about. Toyota reliability remains tough to top, and BMW continues to set the standard for styling and engineering excellence.
And so long as there are still recounts underway from the November elections, I would like to retroactively change my vote for the 2002 Car of the Year. It rightfully goes to the 2009 Pontiac G8. Yes, General Motors is late to the party again, but consider buying one of these anachronistic V-8 gas guzzlers, because if the company needs more bailout money, your tax dollars will be paying for one anyway. What else is worth noting? Here are my picks and pans for 2008, sorted in my own unscientific classifications from the year that could go down in history as the year the American auto industry went, uh, down in history:
Best Compact/Subcompact (besides the xD): The xB from Scion, which as a car company is on something of a roll.
Worst Compact/Subcompact: Smart Fortwo. You can't be serious about that herky-jerky drivetrain, can you? Oh, you were?
Best Midsize: Chevrolet Malibu. Best-looking G.M. interior in a blue-collar model since the Harley Earl era.
Worst Midsize: Sebring again. The mortality rate for Chrysler midsize cars is higher than that of Spinal Tap drummers.
Best Large Car: Ford Taurus. Even though it is a rebadged Five Hundred, it still beats an ennui-infused collection of big sedans. The 2010 model, to be unveiled in January, incites lust.
Worst Large Car: Speaking of the Pontiac G8 ...
Best Premium-Class Car: A tie: BMW's 5 Series and 7 Series are refined all-around performers, despite indecipherable controls.
Worst Premium: BMW's 1-Series is right-sized, but how can you charge a 3-Series price for a car that is less, in every way?
Best Convertible: The intelligent design of the retracting hardtop on BMW's new M3 helps make it the class valedictorian.
Worst Convertible: As hard as it is to make a bad convertible, advantage Sebring.
Best Sporty Coupe: Seeking a long-term relationship? Go with Audi's A5. But for a hot, sweaty one-night-stand, call 1-900-Dodge Challenger.
Worst Sporty/Performance Car: Dodge's Viper, returning after a one-year sabbatical, is still the epitome of irrelevance.
Best Utility Wagon: Ford's Flex. When Ford introduced it three years ago as a concept, I said, "Over Land Rover's dead body." Apparently that was not a consideration.
Worst Sport Utility Vehicle: The Toyota Sequoia is as strong as the mighty redwood — a tree with a known drinking habit — and as thirsty as one.
Best Crossover: Toyota's Venza is the industry's 61st crossover, yet somehow Venza manages to seem like a fresh idea.
Worst Crossover: A 60-place tie for last.
Best Truck: Ford's F-150 is still the champ — bloodied after a bout with $4 gas, but unbowed.
Worst Truck: Dodge Ram. In a shrinking industry's game of musical chairs, a truck with so-so fuel mileage and reliability may find itself with no place to sit.
Most fun, fashionable and fuel-efficient? No, this is not a category, but if it were, at the top of my list would be the Clubman, Mini's new little stretch limo. I wanted one; sadly, Santa let me down.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/automobiles/28GARRETT.html?ref=automobiles&pagewanted=print
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Winners and Losers '08: One Writer's View By JERRY GARRETT
IN its 2008 Car Reliability Study, Consumer Reports ranked the Chrysler Sebring convertible, with a reliability score that was "283 percent worse than average," dead last among the 357 vehicles covered in the survey of subscribers. At the other end of the scale was the new Scion xD, the industry's reliability champ, at about 82 percent "better than average."
Coincidentally, the plucky pint-size xD and its somewhat more sophisticated stablemate, the boxy xB, get my vote as the best new car values for 2008. Starting at around $15,000 each, the Scion siblings provide great bang for the buck, along with their reliability and strong resale values.
The Sebring, a sorry reminder of issues that have tainted the reputations of Detroit automakers, more than earned its place in the basement. Rental fleets still love them, though.
Over all, 2008 has been a year of hits and misses for the United States auto industry. Ford has given its die-hard fans reason for hope, with several admirable new models; by comparison, G.M. and Chrysler have far less to cheer about. Toyota reliability remains tough to top, and BMW continues to set the standard for styling and engineering excellence.
And so long as there are still recounts underway from the November elections, I would like to retroactively change my vote for the 2002 Car of the Year. It rightfully goes to the 2009 Pontiac G8. Yes, General Motors is late to the party again, but consider buying one of these anachronistic V-8 gas guzzlers, because if the company needs more bailout money, your tax dollars will be paying for one anyway. What else is worth noting? Here are my picks and pans for 2008, sorted in my own unscientific classifications from the year that could go down in history as the year the American auto industry went, uh, down in history:
Best Compact/Subcompact (besides the xD): The xB from Scion, which as a car company is on something of a roll.
Worst Compact/Subcompact: Smart Fortwo. You can't be serious about that herky-jerky drivetrain, can you? Oh, you were?
Best Midsize: Chevrolet Malibu. Best-looking G.M. interior in a blue-collar model since the Harley Earl era.
Worst Midsize: Sebring again. The mortality rate for Chrysler midsize cars is higher than that of Spinal Tap drummers.
Best Large Car: Ford Taurus. Even though it is a rebadged Five Hundred, it still beats an ennui-infused collection of big sedans. The 2010 model, to be unveiled in January, incites lust.
Worst Large Car: Speaking of the Pontiac G8 ...
Best Premium-Class Car: A tie: BMW's 5 Series and 7 Series are refined all-around performers, despite indecipherable controls.
Worst Premium: BMW's 1-Series is right-sized, but how can you charge a 3-Series price for a car that is less, in every way?
Best Convertible: The intelligent design of the retracting hardtop on BMW's new M3 helps make it the class valedictorian.
Worst Convertible: As hard as it is to make a bad convertible, advantage Sebring.
Best Sporty Coupe: Seeking a long-term relationship? Go with Audi's A5. But for a hot, sweaty one-night-stand, call 1-900-Dodge Challenger.
Worst Sporty/Performance Car: Dodge's Viper, returning after a one-year sabbatical, is still the epitome of irrelevance.
Best Utility Wagon: Ford's Flex. When Ford introduced it three years ago as a concept, I said, "Over Land Rover's dead body." Apparently that was not a consideration.
Worst Sport Utility Vehicle: The Toyota Sequoia is as strong as the mighty redwood — a tree with a known drinking habit — and as thirsty as one.
Best Crossover: Toyota's Venza is the industry's 61st crossover, yet somehow Venza manages to seem like a fresh idea.
Worst Crossover: A 60-place tie for last.
Best Truck: Ford's F-150 is still the champ — bloodied after a bout with $4 gas, but unbowed.
Worst Truck: Dodge Ram. In a shrinking industry's game of musical chairs, a truck with so-so fuel mileage and reliability may find itself with no place to sit.
Most fun, fashionable and fuel-efficient? No, this is not a category, but if it were, at the top of my list would be the Clubman, Mini's new little stretch limo. I wanted one; sadly, Santa let me down.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/automobiles/28GARRETT.html?ref=automobiles&pagewanted=print
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Last Call for Horsepower By EZRA DYER
December 28, 2008
Last Call for Horsepower By EZRA DYER
LAST Jan. 3, Porsche sent out a news release with this upbeat headline: Porsche Reports Best-Ever Annual Sales in U.S. — Fourth Consecutive Record Sales Year.
And that was it for good news in 2008.
But there is reason for optimism, believe it or not. Business may be bleak now, but the car industry is on the cusp of historic changes. Skeptics can point to dead-ends like the General Motors EV1 and say the auto industry is always on the verge of a revolution that never comes, but that attitude diminishes the significance of this moment.
Until 2008, there was never a production electric car with the range of the Tesla Roadster. (Never mind its teething problems.) We’ve never had a fuel-cell car so abjectly normal — in terms of range, performance and production-readiness — as the Honda FCX Clarity, which Honda is offering for lease in California. Before 2008, we never had an American plug-in hybrid so close to production — if only General Motors survives long enough to see it through.
There’s even hope for the internal-combustion engine. At the introduction of the Bentley Flying Spur Speed — perhaps the last place you’d expect a discussion of alternative energy — the company’s head of engineering, Ulrich Eichhorn, proffered a dose of optimism about biofuels.
Bentley is working with energy companies to develop advanced biofuels — in what was probablya first, a Bentley press document included the words “intensively farmed algae.”
Don’t get mad that I love overpowered cars like the Corvette ZR1. If Corvette profits help to develop the Volt, that’s 638 horsepower deployed for the common good. And if some of my picks are not the most efficient cars out there, perhaps that means more money for hard-working algae farmers. After 2008, not much would surprise me.
1. NISSAN GT-R This was the most-hyped sports car in recent memory, and it actually delivers on its promise: Porsche 911 Turbo performance for base-911 money. To my mind, the fact that it doesn’t wear a fancy nameplate adds to its appeal.
2. MERCEDES-BENZ ML320 BLUETEC
Here’s a heavy four-wheel-drive luxury S.U.V. that is E.P.A.-rated at 24 m.p.g. on the highway and in reality will do about 26. Its diesel V-6 lends itself well to S.U.V. duty, with mammoth low-end power. (It will tow 7,200 pounds.) I also like that it’s not plastered with decals proclaiming its virtue — just a few small Bluetec badges.
3. DODGE CHALLENGER R/T I wasn’t particularly interested in the Challenger before I had a chance to drive it. But the 6-speed manual transmission endows this car with a riotously fun, burnout-happy personality. It may be a dinosaur, but it’s an endearing dinosaur.
4. LOTUS EXIGE S 240 This is probably the most focused car on the road. Whenever there was a choice to be made during the Exige’s gestation, Lotus made driving pleasure a priority and subjugated everything else. It’s a strong flavor, not for everyone, and that’s why I like it.
5. CHEVROLET CORVETTE ZR1 Here’s a ZR1 party trick: rolling along in second gear at 45 m.p.h., slam the throttle down. The power arrives so suddenly it will actually chirp the tires, no clutch-drop needed. The pushrod V-8, it seems, has some life left in it.
6. PONTIAC G8 I searched Pontiac’s Web site for a price quote on a 2008 G8 GT, a sharply tailored, 361-horsepower rear-drive performance sedan. The result was an improbably precise $25,044.46. But wait, there was a disclosure: “Red Tag price may be even less.” Instead of the Volt, Rick Wagoner should have taken a G8 to Congress and challenged the legislators to find a better deal for 25 grand.
7. BMW 135I I know, I know — you can get a larger 335i for not too much more money. Thanks, but I’ll take the car that’s lighter and costs less. With a 300-horsepower twin-turbo 6-cylinder, the 135i gives you performance about on par with a previous-generation M3.
8. AUDI RS4 CABRIOLET This is my current answer to the question, “If you could only have one car for everything, what would it be?” With the RS4 Cab, you get seating for four, a decent trunk, all-wheel-drive for the winter, a convertible top for the summer and, oh, yes — the same 420-horsepower V-8 engine that’s in the exotic R8.
Didn’t Make the Cut
1. HONDA FIT I respect the Fit — an inexpensive little car with an inordinately well-done interior — it’s just strange to me that Honda dealers can’t keep them on the lot. A Hyundai Elantra GLS offers 21 more horsepower, more passenger room, the same highway mileage and a lower price. So is everyone abuzz about the Elantra? No.
2. BMW X6 In 20 years, the X6 will either be considered a daring, iconic design that sent S.U.V.’s in a completely new direction, or it will be a weirdo outlier embraced by only the most hard-core BMW fanatics. I have absolutely no idea which way it’s heading.
3. MITSUBISHI EVO MR I thought the last Evo was euphoric to drive but silly to look at. I mean, shark teeth on the roof? The latest MR looks taut and purposeful — the big wing notwithstanding — but the motor’s newfound refinement is sort of sad. There’s less turbo lag, but the old Evo’s giant wallop of boost was part of the fun. The good news is that the new motor is still extremely tunable, so 400 horsepower and a crude wallop of boost is just a few minor modifications away.
4. FORD FLEX The Flex competes with minivans, so it needs some dynamic advantage over those vans — like, say, a turbocharged direct-injection V-6. Ford’s EcoBoost V-6 is on the way, and when it arrives, the Flex will have the muscle to match its provocative styling.
Not in My Garage
1. CADILLAC ESCALADE HYBRID It has the same powertrain as the GMC Yukon and Chevy Tahoe hybrids, both of which are nearly as luxurious and cost much less. So why not just get one of those instead? The Escalade Hybrid is like the Lexus LS 600h L hybrid — technically impressive, but somehow cynical.
2. ACURA TL I’ll admit that avant-garde auto design usually goes over my head at first. I thought the current BMW 5 Series was atrocious when it came out, but now I’m used to it. Same with the elongated Audi corporate grille. But the new TL looks like an evil Transformer robot sent to enslave the human race. In two years, I’ll probably like it.
3. SCION XB I personally think the xB looks like a Fisher-Price version of a Brinks truck, but when a friend asked me to recommend a car for his neighbor’s 16-year-old skateboarder son, I found myself endorsing Scion’s strange cube. At least I know when a car is not aimed at me.
4. SMART FORTWO If you live in a city and there are dedicated parking spots for the Smart (or you are allowed to piggyback two into one spot), it’s not completely pointless. Otherwise, I fail to see the point.
Last Call for Horsepower By EZRA DYER
LAST Jan. 3, Porsche sent out a news release with this upbeat headline: Porsche Reports Best-Ever Annual Sales in U.S. — Fourth Consecutive Record Sales Year.
And that was it for good news in 2008.
But there is reason for optimism, believe it or not. Business may be bleak now, but the car industry is on the cusp of historic changes. Skeptics can point to dead-ends like the General Motors EV1 and say the auto industry is always on the verge of a revolution that never comes, but that attitude diminishes the significance of this moment.
Until 2008, there was never a production electric car with the range of the Tesla Roadster. (Never mind its teething problems.) We’ve never had a fuel-cell car so abjectly normal — in terms of range, performance and production-readiness — as the Honda FCX Clarity, which Honda is offering for lease in California. Before 2008, we never had an American plug-in hybrid so close to production — if only General Motors survives long enough to see it through.
There’s even hope for the internal-combustion engine. At the introduction of the Bentley Flying Spur Speed — perhaps the last place you’d expect a discussion of alternative energy — the company’s head of engineering, Ulrich Eichhorn, proffered a dose of optimism about biofuels.
Bentley is working with energy companies to develop advanced biofuels — in what was probablya first, a Bentley press document included the words “intensively farmed algae.”
Don’t get mad that I love overpowered cars like the Corvette ZR1. If Corvette profits help to develop the Volt, that’s 638 horsepower deployed for the common good. And if some of my picks are not the most efficient cars out there, perhaps that means more money for hard-working algae farmers. After 2008, not much would surprise me.
1. NISSAN GT-R This was the most-hyped sports car in recent memory, and it actually delivers on its promise: Porsche 911 Turbo performance for base-911 money. To my mind, the fact that it doesn’t wear a fancy nameplate adds to its appeal.
2. MERCEDES-BENZ ML320 BLUETEC
Here’s a heavy four-wheel-drive luxury S.U.V. that is E.P.A.-rated at 24 m.p.g. on the highway and in reality will do about 26. Its diesel V-6 lends itself well to S.U.V. duty, with mammoth low-end power. (It will tow 7,200 pounds.) I also like that it’s not plastered with decals proclaiming its virtue — just a few small Bluetec badges.
3. DODGE CHALLENGER R/T I wasn’t particularly interested in the Challenger before I had a chance to drive it. But the 6-speed manual transmission endows this car with a riotously fun, burnout-happy personality. It may be a dinosaur, but it’s an endearing dinosaur.
4. LOTUS EXIGE S 240 This is probably the most focused car on the road. Whenever there was a choice to be made during the Exige’s gestation, Lotus made driving pleasure a priority and subjugated everything else. It’s a strong flavor, not for everyone, and that’s why I like it.
5. CHEVROLET CORVETTE ZR1 Here’s a ZR1 party trick: rolling along in second gear at 45 m.p.h., slam the throttle down. The power arrives so suddenly it will actually chirp the tires, no clutch-drop needed. The pushrod V-8, it seems, has some life left in it.
6. PONTIAC G8 I searched Pontiac’s Web site for a price quote on a 2008 G8 GT, a sharply tailored, 361-horsepower rear-drive performance sedan. The result was an improbably precise $25,044.46. But wait, there was a disclosure: “Red Tag price may be even less.” Instead of the Volt, Rick Wagoner should have taken a G8 to Congress and challenged the legislators to find a better deal for 25 grand.
7. BMW 135I I know, I know — you can get a larger 335i for not too much more money. Thanks, but I’ll take the car that’s lighter and costs less. With a 300-horsepower twin-turbo 6-cylinder, the 135i gives you performance about on par with a previous-generation M3.
8. AUDI RS4 CABRIOLET This is my current answer to the question, “If you could only have one car for everything, what would it be?” With the RS4 Cab, you get seating for four, a decent trunk, all-wheel-drive for the winter, a convertible top for the summer and, oh, yes — the same 420-horsepower V-8 engine that’s in the exotic R8.
Didn’t Make the Cut
1. HONDA FIT I respect the Fit — an inexpensive little car with an inordinately well-done interior — it’s just strange to me that Honda dealers can’t keep them on the lot. A Hyundai Elantra GLS offers 21 more horsepower, more passenger room, the same highway mileage and a lower price. So is everyone abuzz about the Elantra? No.
2. BMW X6 In 20 years, the X6 will either be considered a daring, iconic design that sent S.U.V.’s in a completely new direction, or it will be a weirdo outlier embraced by only the most hard-core BMW fanatics. I have absolutely no idea which way it’s heading.
3. MITSUBISHI EVO MR I thought the last Evo was euphoric to drive but silly to look at. I mean, shark teeth on the roof? The latest MR looks taut and purposeful — the big wing notwithstanding — but the motor’s newfound refinement is sort of sad. There’s less turbo lag, but the old Evo’s giant wallop of boost was part of the fun. The good news is that the new motor is still extremely tunable, so 400 horsepower and a crude wallop of boost is just a few minor modifications away.
4. FORD FLEX The Flex competes with minivans, so it needs some dynamic advantage over those vans — like, say, a turbocharged direct-injection V-6. Ford’s EcoBoost V-6 is on the way, and when it arrives, the Flex will have the muscle to match its provocative styling.
Not in My Garage
1. CADILLAC ESCALADE HYBRID It has the same powertrain as the GMC Yukon and Chevy Tahoe hybrids, both of which are nearly as luxurious and cost much less. So why not just get one of those instead? The Escalade Hybrid is like the Lexus LS 600h L hybrid — technically impressive, but somehow cynical.
2. ACURA TL I’ll admit that avant-garde auto design usually goes over my head at first. I thought the current BMW 5 Series was atrocious when it came out, but now I’m used to it. Same with the elongated Audi corporate grille. But the new TL looks like an evil Transformer robot sent to enslave the human race. In two years, I’ll probably like it.
3. SCION XB I personally think the xB looks like a Fisher-Price version of a Brinks truck, but when a friend asked me to recommend a car for his neighbor’s 16-year-old skateboarder son, I found myself endorsing Scion’s strange cube. At least I know when a car is not aimed at me.
4. SMART FORTWO If you live in a city and there are dedicated parking spots for the Smart (or you are allowed to piggyback two into one spot), it’s not completely pointless. Otherwise, I fail to see the point.
Detroit, We Have a Problem By JAMES G. COBB
December 28, 2008
Detroit, We Have a Problem By JAMES G. COBB
WHEN Toyota, the auto industry's financial Godzilla, forecasts its first operating loss in 70 years, you know times are tough. When senators suggest that General Motors (of "What's good for the country..." fame) should be left to collapse, you know the ground has shifted.
Partly this is because many of us still nurse grudges over '79 Skylarks that stranded us and '86 Sables that wouldn't start. Partly it's because of decades-long resentment over automaker attempts to block safety, pollution and economy rules (which, it's often forgotten, foreign automakers usually opposed, too).
But this year the industry has been battered by other factors. Gasoline marched toward $5 a gallon, turning Hummers into white elephants with running boards, then collapsed below $2, sending Prius sales into a tailspin. Credit markets froze; potential customers lost their jobs.
Next year may be worse, but when the perfect storm finally ends there will be better, more relevant cars to buy. Frugal clean diesels are coming to market, along with a flock of new hybrids. Smaller European models are heading this way. And two of the cars that impressed me the most this year, one that runs on diesel and one on hydrogen, suggest that the future may turn sunny.
Here are my favorites of 2008:
1. HONDA FCX CLARITY No, you can't buy one of these hydrogen fuel-cell cars (though if you live in Southern California, there's a slim chance you can lease one of about 200 available). But the FCX Clarity is notable for the fact that if hydrogen should suddenly become widely available at reasonable prices, Honda is ready to roll with a most agreeable car. The FCX Clarity is stylish, roomy, comfortable, whisper-quiet and, yes, pretty cool in a welcome-to-the-future sort of way.
2. BMW 123D The smaller, simpler 1 Series has become my favorite line of BMWs, and the winsome 128i convertible could easily have made my list. But a too-brief fling at the wheel of the diesel-powered 123d hatchback made me forget the gasoline version. The twin-turbo 4-cylinder produces rocketlike thrust, and the handling is close to sublime. The 123d's fuel economy approaches 50 m.p.g., proving convincingly that enthusiasts have no reason to dread the arrival of greener cars. On the down side, the 123d isn't sold in the United States, but it ought to be.
3. PONTIAC G8 An Australian-built sedan with American big-rump accommodations and European road manners, the G8 is the sort of well-rounded, rich-feeling, reasonably priced sedan that G.M. had long seemed incapable of building. Too bad the G8, like several other impressive new G.M. cars, may have landed too late to pull the company out of its deep financial hole.
4. HONDA FIT The genius of this second-generation subcompact is not that it's small or economical. It's that the Fit manages to feel spacious, comfortable and well-thought-out. I especially like the second-row seat that folds flat with one hand, headrests included, even when the front seats are all the way back — a small detail that is seldom done right.
5. NISSAN GT-R Given all the hoopla over this supercoupe, a video-game superstar that Nissan never before imported to the United States, I was inclined to dismiss this exhibitionistic overachiever as a bauble for boy racers. But a few minutes at the wheel won me over. Civil around town and a beast when unleashed, the GT-R is now on the short list of cars I'd like to own.
6. DODGE CHALLENGER SRT8 Another car that turned out much better than expected, the Challenger is bigger and more substantial than its namesake of the early 1970s, and its sharp handling makes the iconic originals feel like antiques.
7. FORD FLEX Even with a prosaic drivetrain — fortunately, a promising new engine is coming — the Flex feels fresh. Inside the big-block body, so boxy it's slick, there's a cavernous interior that shows attention to detail. Yes, the Flex is essentially a minivan, but that can be our little secret.
8. CHEVROLET TRAVERSE I've been a big fan of G.M.'s larger car-based crossovers like the GMC Acadia, and this new Chevy may be the best version yet. Although the styling and interior are more conventional than the Flex's, the Traverse's driving dynamics are superior.
9. VOLKSWAGEN CC Remember the Phaeton? Probably not, given that it, like VW's other attempts to go upscale, ended up as a historical footnote. But this fancy variation on the Passat, with a swoopy roofline, stylish interior and 280-horsepower VR6 engine, had me wondering if VW was trying to make the Audi A4, the CC's cousin, obsolete.
10. BMW M3 When I tested the M3, premium unleaded was selling for more than $4 a gallon and I felt guilty taking it up the street to Target. And, truth be told, 414-horsepower supercoupes probably don't have a bright future. But as much as I wanted to scorn the M3 — for its thirst, for its price, for its electronic fussiness, for its unapologetic V-8 excess — it won me over by providing a driving experience that puts most sub-$100,000 cars to shame.
Didn't Make the Cut
1. BMW X6 It has street presence, for sure, and it's powerful and expensive. But I still can't figure out what the high-riding hunchbacked X6 is supposed to be and why anyone would want one over an X5 or BMW's terrific 5 Series station wagon.
2. HONDA PILOT The original Pilot's carlike qualities added to its appeal. The new one tries to pretend it's a truck, including a blunt and homely new face, and right now trucks are damaged goods.
3. INFINITI FX50 The original FX still turns my head, but the new one lacks its predecessor's athletic lines and lean demeanor. The FX now has more power, more features and more heft, but sometimes more is just too much.
4. CHEVROLET TAHOE HYBRID I'm not opposed to hybrids or better fuel economy, but a hybrid should make economic sense. G.M. is charging thousands of dollars more for the hybrid than for the regular Tahoe, meaning it will take a very, very long time to recoup your investment.
Not in My Garage
1. SMART FORTWO As a toy, it's kind of fun. As a car, it leaves much to be desired. For starters, I desire a transmission that shifts gears without dancing the Jerk.
2. KIA BORREGO This truckish sport utility isn't awful at all, though it brings nothing new to the party. Still, the Borrego has one big problem: it arrived at the worst possible time for a big S.U.V. Hey, Kia, the party's over.
3. JAGUAR XF Many critics love it, but the new midrange Jaguar seems rather unexceptional to me. For starters, a Jag sedan has to be drop-dead gorgeous, and the styling of this one suffered from so many compromises it could pass for a Japanese near-luxury car. Jaguar desperately needs help, and this car isn't special enough to save the day.
4. NISSAN ROGUE Maybe it's not so easy to make a crossover on a budget, but for prices that can approach $30,000, a buyer expects a vehicle that isn't coarse and tinny. Other companies, including Toyota, Ford and Honda, are managing to deliver them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/automobiles/28COBB.html?ref=automobiles&pagewanted=print
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Detroit, We Have a Problem By JAMES G. COBB
WHEN Toyota, the auto industry's financial Godzilla, forecasts its first operating loss in 70 years, you know times are tough. When senators suggest that General Motors (of "What's good for the country..." fame) should be left to collapse, you know the ground has shifted.
Partly this is because many of us still nurse grudges over '79 Skylarks that stranded us and '86 Sables that wouldn't start. Partly it's because of decades-long resentment over automaker attempts to block safety, pollution and economy rules (which, it's often forgotten, foreign automakers usually opposed, too).
But this year the industry has been battered by other factors. Gasoline marched toward $5 a gallon, turning Hummers into white elephants with running boards, then collapsed below $2, sending Prius sales into a tailspin. Credit markets froze; potential customers lost their jobs.
Next year may be worse, but when the perfect storm finally ends there will be better, more relevant cars to buy. Frugal clean diesels are coming to market, along with a flock of new hybrids. Smaller European models are heading this way. And two of the cars that impressed me the most this year, one that runs on diesel and one on hydrogen, suggest that the future may turn sunny.
Here are my favorites of 2008:
1. HONDA FCX CLARITY No, you can't buy one of these hydrogen fuel-cell cars (though if you live in Southern California, there's a slim chance you can lease one of about 200 available). But the FCX Clarity is notable for the fact that if hydrogen should suddenly become widely available at reasonable prices, Honda is ready to roll with a most agreeable car. The FCX Clarity is stylish, roomy, comfortable, whisper-quiet and, yes, pretty cool in a welcome-to-the-future sort of way.
2. BMW 123D The smaller, simpler 1 Series has become my favorite line of BMWs, and the winsome 128i convertible could easily have made my list. But a too-brief fling at the wheel of the diesel-powered 123d hatchback made me forget the gasoline version. The twin-turbo 4-cylinder produces rocketlike thrust, and the handling is close to sublime. The 123d's fuel economy approaches 50 m.p.g., proving convincingly that enthusiasts have no reason to dread the arrival of greener cars. On the down side, the 123d isn't sold in the United States, but it ought to be.
3. PONTIAC G8 An Australian-built sedan with American big-rump accommodations and European road manners, the G8 is the sort of well-rounded, rich-feeling, reasonably priced sedan that G.M. had long seemed incapable of building. Too bad the G8, like several other impressive new G.M. cars, may have landed too late to pull the company out of its deep financial hole.
4. HONDA FIT The genius of this second-generation subcompact is not that it's small or economical. It's that the Fit manages to feel spacious, comfortable and well-thought-out. I especially like the second-row seat that folds flat with one hand, headrests included, even when the front seats are all the way back — a small detail that is seldom done right.
5. NISSAN GT-R Given all the hoopla over this supercoupe, a video-game superstar that Nissan never before imported to the United States, I was inclined to dismiss this exhibitionistic overachiever as a bauble for boy racers. But a few minutes at the wheel won me over. Civil around town and a beast when unleashed, the GT-R is now on the short list of cars I'd like to own.
6. DODGE CHALLENGER SRT8 Another car that turned out much better than expected, the Challenger is bigger and more substantial than its namesake of the early 1970s, and its sharp handling makes the iconic originals feel like antiques.
7. FORD FLEX Even with a prosaic drivetrain — fortunately, a promising new engine is coming — the Flex feels fresh. Inside the big-block body, so boxy it's slick, there's a cavernous interior that shows attention to detail. Yes, the Flex is essentially a minivan, but that can be our little secret.
8. CHEVROLET TRAVERSE I've been a big fan of G.M.'s larger car-based crossovers like the GMC Acadia, and this new Chevy may be the best version yet. Although the styling and interior are more conventional than the Flex's, the Traverse's driving dynamics are superior.
9. VOLKSWAGEN CC Remember the Phaeton? Probably not, given that it, like VW's other attempts to go upscale, ended up as a historical footnote. But this fancy variation on the Passat, with a swoopy roofline, stylish interior and 280-horsepower VR6 engine, had me wondering if VW was trying to make the Audi A4, the CC's cousin, obsolete.
10. BMW M3 When I tested the M3, premium unleaded was selling for more than $4 a gallon and I felt guilty taking it up the street to Target. And, truth be told, 414-horsepower supercoupes probably don't have a bright future. But as much as I wanted to scorn the M3 — for its thirst, for its price, for its electronic fussiness, for its unapologetic V-8 excess — it won me over by providing a driving experience that puts most sub-$100,000 cars to shame.
Didn't Make the Cut
1. BMW X6 It has street presence, for sure, and it's powerful and expensive. But I still can't figure out what the high-riding hunchbacked X6 is supposed to be and why anyone would want one over an X5 or BMW's terrific 5 Series station wagon.
2. HONDA PILOT The original Pilot's carlike qualities added to its appeal. The new one tries to pretend it's a truck, including a blunt and homely new face, and right now trucks are damaged goods.
3. INFINITI FX50 The original FX still turns my head, but the new one lacks its predecessor's athletic lines and lean demeanor. The FX now has more power, more features and more heft, but sometimes more is just too much.
4. CHEVROLET TAHOE HYBRID I'm not opposed to hybrids or better fuel economy, but a hybrid should make economic sense. G.M. is charging thousands of dollars more for the hybrid than for the regular Tahoe, meaning it will take a very, very long time to recoup your investment.
Not in My Garage
1. SMART FORTWO As a toy, it's kind of fun. As a car, it leaves much to be desired. For starters, I desire a transmission that shifts gears without dancing the Jerk.
2. KIA BORREGO This truckish sport utility isn't awful at all, though it brings nothing new to the party. Still, the Borrego has one big problem: it arrived at the worst possible time for a big S.U.V. Hey, Kia, the party's over.
3. JAGUAR XF Many critics love it, but the new midrange Jaguar seems rather unexceptional to me. For starters, a Jag sedan has to be drop-dead gorgeous, and the styling of this one suffered from so many compromises it could pass for a Japanese near-luxury car. Jaguar desperately needs help, and this car isn't special enough to save the day.
4. NISSAN ROGUE Maybe it's not so easy to make a crossover on a budget, but for prices that can approach $30,000, a buyer expects a vehicle that isn't coarse and tinny. Other companies, including Toyota, Ford and Honda, are managing to deliver them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/automobiles/28COBB.html?ref=automobiles&pagewanted=print
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Cars Didn't Cause the Crisis By LAWRENCE ULRICH
December 28, 2008
Cars Didn't Cause the Crisis By LAWRENCE ULRICH
WITH car sales at a crawl in 2008, and worse numbers projected for 2009, the auto industry is a depressing place. It's worse for the domestic companies, whose leaders should have driven to Washington in the Joads' Dust Bowl truck to plead their poverty case.
Yet the cars themselves are solid, if only people had the cash, credit and confidence to buy them. And while the overnight shift from trucks to cars caught everyone by surprise, the industry has no choice but to dance with the cars that brought them, at least until new faces arrive.
Ford was taken to task in some quarters for rolling out a redesigned Ford F-150 pickup. Yet even in this slumping, truck-averse market, the F-150 remained America's best-selling car or truck, as it's been for 27 years. Calling it quits would make as much sense as Apple pulling the plug on the iPod.
To me, that disconnect between the auto companies' balance sheets and the products they sell is the No. 1 thing that many citizens — and Washington politicians — don't grasp about the industry. Making bad cars eventually catches up with any automaker. But for more than a century, some companies have made good, great, even revolutionary cars without necessarily being successful in business.
Certainly, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have too many deadbeat brands and models. But while G.M.'s financial cupboard may be bare, its product cupboard spilled out more critically lauded models than any other company this year, import or domestic. If G.M. manages to ride out the recession, perhaps the can-do spirit that created recent Corvettes and Cadillacs can be applied to the rest of its lineup.
Here are my favorite vehicles of the year:
1. BMW 1 SERIES Yes, the back seats of the 128i and 135i are tight. But most sports cars with the BMW's giddy performance don't even have a back seat, so consider it a bonus. Coupe or convertible, this is a car I'd kill to put in my own garage. It outhustles the larger 3 Series and costs at least $4,000 less.
2. HONDA FIT I've owned economy cars that made me want to stash them behind a Dumpster. The Fit, in contrast, makes a virtue of cheapness. It's the roomiest, best-handling car in its class, gets 35 m.p.g. on the highway, and offers a navigation system that barely differs from the one in a $50,000 Acura.
3. G.M.'S GIANT SLAYERS I'm referring to the Corvette ZR1, Cadillac CTS-V and Pontiac G8. The 205-m.p.h. ZR1 (638 horsepower), CTS-V (556 horses) and Pontiac G8 GT (361) deserve a three-peat mention. All of them can hang with, or beat, snooty European models with bigger names and much bigger price tags. All three put the lie to the notion that G.M. cannot build a world-class machine that doesn't have a hound dog in the back.
4. MERCEDES-BENZ GL320 BLUETEC The Mercedes M-Class diesel is terrific, but the larger GL may benefit even more from the new Bluetec clean-diesel technology. With three rows of seats sized for adults, this royal-plush S.U.V. gets 23 m.p.g. on the highway and can cover 600 miles on a tank.
5. DODGE CHALLENGER If you never got the pony car you asked for in the '70s, hop into the reborn Challenger. The muscular Dodge, whose three engines max out with a 425-horsepower Hemi V-8, is as fast and extroverted as you'd expect. More surprising is how well it handles and stops. This Mopar trumps the Mustang; now bring on the 2010 Chevy Camaro.
6. LAMBORGHINI GALLARDO LP560-4 Lamborghini fixed everything that was wrong with the previous Gallardo — hair-trigger brakes, balky transmission — and amped up everything that was right: the future-classic styling, superb all-wheel-drive performance and a 560-horsepower V-10 served under glass.
7. TOYOTA VENZA Toyota knows more about the American family than Oprah, so it's not surprising that its Venza — a Camry-based tall-wagon thingy — is an ideal family conveyance: Enormous inside, effortless to drive, easy on gas. What's surprising from this conservative automaker is the Venza's daringly different styling.
8. BMW X6 With apologies to my colleagues, some auto reactionaries just don't get it. They say the X6 is ugly. But pretty women reacted to the tall, swoopy design as though Justin Timberlake were inside, so I'll stick with that. The BMW isn't supposed to seat six or be socially defensible. It's supposed to be the Ferrari of S.U.V.'s, and its game-changing performance unseats the Porsche Cayenne as the class benchmark. Only a Hooveresque economy is keeping this Bimmer from being a smash with the style-first, cost-who-cares crowd.
9. NISSAN 370Z The Nissan GT-R has been gobbling up auto awards this year, so I'd rather extol this other Nissan sports car, which costs half as much. Starting at $30,000, the 332-horsepower Z is stronger, lighter, swifter and more solid than the departing model, and it looks terrific. If there's a sweeter two-seater for less than $40,000, I haven't driven it.
10. DODGE RAM Conventional wisdom flatters the Ford F-150. But the Ford doesn't satisfy my truck jones as the Ram does. The Dodge looks badder and it rides and handles better. And its available 390-horse Hemi V-8 thumps anything from Ford or Chevy.
Didn't Make the Cut
1. AUDI A4 I'm supposed to love the new A4, which is so techno, so tasteful, so German. So what's the problem? Perhaps it's my sense that Audi has forgotten what the A4 was about, a luxury car that opened its doors to younger, less elite buyers. The new A4 feels overwrought, oversized and overpriced.
2. HYUNDAI GENESIS The Genesis is roomy and well-built and delivers a fat roster of luxury features for around $35,000. In this economy, that may be smart. Yet luxury is also about desire. And it's hard to desire a car that, from its generic grille to its copycat cabin, seems more like cold data than a hot date: it's as though they entered Lexus, Acura and BMW into the Car-o-matic, and out popped the Genesis. And the Hyundai still steers like a Buick.
3. INFINITI EX35 My wife adored the EX35, which she correctly assessed was not a crossover at all, but the world's most expensive hatchback. The EX is fast, deluxe and overflowing with gizmos, but I don't see why anyone wouldn't want its sibling, the awesome G37 sedan, instead.
4. FORD FLEX Well packaged and as quiet as most luxury crossovers, the Flex puts the final nail in the Explorer's coffin. The styling grabs attention; now if only the V-6 powertrain were on par with the rest of the package.
5. MAZDA 6 On paper, I thought I'd adore the redesigned 6. But while the car looks terrific and feels fairly sporty, why did it have to become so darn big? The world already has a Honda Accord; Mazda didn't need to make another.
Not in My Garage
1. SMART FORTWO In competition with a golf cart, the Smart is a toss-up. But at least the golf cart holds two sets of clubs. Whoever decided that this crude two-seat, 36 m.p.g. tortoise was right for America should have his Sierra Club membership revoked.
2. CHEVROLET TAHOE HYBRID I'll follow the year's dumbest small vehicle with the dumbest big one: a V-8-powered battery-boosted S.U.V. that returns around 20 m.p.g. for an extra six grand. Somewhere in the Middle East, an oil sheik is laughing.
3. NISSAN MAXIMA I'm not paying $35,000 for a front-drive anything, let alone a family four-door that looks like Chris-Craft's tribute to Shamu.
4. VOLKSWAGEN TIGUAN The Tiguan is cute on the outside, but it is the first VW in ages that feels chintzy inside. Worse, this compact S.U.V. can cost almost as much as a BMW X3 or an Acura RD-X, though it can't touch their performance.
5. MITSUBISHI GALANT RALLIART You may not know this midsize sedan exists, and that's a good thing. When the tricked-up Galant appeared at my doorstep, I started looking for the time machine that had upchucked it from some late-'90s dance club.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/automobiles/28ULRICH.html?_r=1&ref=automobiles&pagewanted=print
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Cars Didn't Cause the Crisis By LAWRENCE ULRICH
WITH car sales at a crawl in 2008, and worse numbers projected for 2009, the auto industry is a depressing place. It's worse for the domestic companies, whose leaders should have driven to Washington in the Joads' Dust Bowl truck to plead their poverty case.
Yet the cars themselves are solid, if only people had the cash, credit and confidence to buy them. And while the overnight shift from trucks to cars caught everyone by surprise, the industry has no choice but to dance with the cars that brought them, at least until new faces arrive.
Ford was taken to task in some quarters for rolling out a redesigned Ford F-150 pickup. Yet even in this slumping, truck-averse market, the F-150 remained America's best-selling car or truck, as it's been for 27 years. Calling it quits would make as much sense as Apple pulling the plug on the iPod.
To me, that disconnect between the auto companies' balance sheets and the products they sell is the No. 1 thing that many citizens — and Washington politicians — don't grasp about the industry. Making bad cars eventually catches up with any automaker. But for more than a century, some companies have made good, great, even revolutionary cars without necessarily being successful in business.
Certainly, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have too many deadbeat brands and models. But while G.M.'s financial cupboard may be bare, its product cupboard spilled out more critically lauded models than any other company this year, import or domestic. If G.M. manages to ride out the recession, perhaps the can-do spirit that created recent Corvettes and Cadillacs can be applied to the rest of its lineup.
Here are my favorite vehicles of the year:
1. BMW 1 SERIES Yes, the back seats of the 128i and 135i are tight. But most sports cars with the BMW's giddy performance don't even have a back seat, so consider it a bonus. Coupe or convertible, this is a car I'd kill to put in my own garage. It outhustles the larger 3 Series and costs at least $4,000 less.
2. HONDA FIT I've owned economy cars that made me want to stash them behind a Dumpster. The Fit, in contrast, makes a virtue of cheapness. It's the roomiest, best-handling car in its class, gets 35 m.p.g. on the highway, and offers a navigation system that barely differs from the one in a $50,000 Acura.
3. G.M.'S GIANT SLAYERS I'm referring to the Corvette ZR1, Cadillac CTS-V and Pontiac G8. The 205-m.p.h. ZR1 (638 horsepower), CTS-V (556 horses) and Pontiac G8 GT (361) deserve a three-peat mention. All of them can hang with, or beat, snooty European models with bigger names and much bigger price tags. All three put the lie to the notion that G.M. cannot build a world-class machine that doesn't have a hound dog in the back.
4. MERCEDES-BENZ GL320 BLUETEC The Mercedes M-Class diesel is terrific, but the larger GL may benefit even more from the new Bluetec clean-diesel technology. With three rows of seats sized for adults, this royal-plush S.U.V. gets 23 m.p.g. on the highway and can cover 600 miles on a tank.
5. DODGE CHALLENGER If you never got the pony car you asked for in the '70s, hop into the reborn Challenger. The muscular Dodge, whose three engines max out with a 425-horsepower Hemi V-8, is as fast and extroverted as you'd expect. More surprising is how well it handles and stops. This Mopar trumps the Mustang; now bring on the 2010 Chevy Camaro.
6. LAMBORGHINI GALLARDO LP560-4 Lamborghini fixed everything that was wrong with the previous Gallardo — hair-trigger brakes, balky transmission — and amped up everything that was right: the future-classic styling, superb all-wheel-drive performance and a 560-horsepower V-10 served under glass.
7. TOYOTA VENZA Toyota knows more about the American family than Oprah, so it's not surprising that its Venza — a Camry-based tall-wagon thingy — is an ideal family conveyance: Enormous inside, effortless to drive, easy on gas. What's surprising from this conservative automaker is the Venza's daringly different styling.
8. BMW X6 With apologies to my colleagues, some auto reactionaries just don't get it. They say the X6 is ugly. But pretty women reacted to the tall, swoopy design as though Justin Timberlake were inside, so I'll stick with that. The BMW isn't supposed to seat six or be socially defensible. It's supposed to be the Ferrari of S.U.V.'s, and its game-changing performance unseats the Porsche Cayenne as the class benchmark. Only a Hooveresque economy is keeping this Bimmer from being a smash with the style-first, cost-who-cares crowd.
9. NISSAN 370Z The Nissan GT-R has been gobbling up auto awards this year, so I'd rather extol this other Nissan sports car, which costs half as much. Starting at $30,000, the 332-horsepower Z is stronger, lighter, swifter and more solid than the departing model, and it looks terrific. If there's a sweeter two-seater for less than $40,000, I haven't driven it.
10. DODGE RAM Conventional wisdom flatters the Ford F-150. But the Ford doesn't satisfy my truck jones as the Ram does. The Dodge looks badder and it rides and handles better. And its available 390-horse Hemi V-8 thumps anything from Ford or Chevy.
Didn't Make the Cut
1. AUDI A4 I'm supposed to love the new A4, which is so techno, so tasteful, so German. So what's the problem? Perhaps it's my sense that Audi has forgotten what the A4 was about, a luxury car that opened its doors to younger, less elite buyers. The new A4 feels overwrought, oversized and overpriced.
2. HYUNDAI GENESIS The Genesis is roomy and well-built and delivers a fat roster of luxury features for around $35,000. In this economy, that may be smart. Yet luxury is also about desire. And it's hard to desire a car that, from its generic grille to its copycat cabin, seems more like cold data than a hot date: it's as though they entered Lexus, Acura and BMW into the Car-o-matic, and out popped the Genesis. And the Hyundai still steers like a Buick.
3. INFINITI EX35 My wife adored the EX35, which she correctly assessed was not a crossover at all, but the world's most expensive hatchback. The EX is fast, deluxe and overflowing with gizmos, but I don't see why anyone wouldn't want its sibling, the awesome G37 sedan, instead.
4. FORD FLEX Well packaged and as quiet as most luxury crossovers, the Flex puts the final nail in the Explorer's coffin. The styling grabs attention; now if only the V-6 powertrain were on par with the rest of the package.
5. MAZDA 6 On paper, I thought I'd adore the redesigned 6. But while the car looks terrific and feels fairly sporty, why did it have to become so darn big? The world already has a Honda Accord; Mazda didn't need to make another.
Not in My Garage
1. SMART FORTWO In competition with a golf cart, the Smart is a toss-up. But at least the golf cart holds two sets of clubs. Whoever decided that this crude two-seat, 36 m.p.g. tortoise was right for America should have his Sierra Club membership revoked.
2. CHEVROLET TAHOE HYBRID I'll follow the year's dumbest small vehicle with the dumbest big one: a V-8-powered battery-boosted S.U.V. that returns around 20 m.p.g. for an extra six grand. Somewhere in the Middle East, an oil sheik is laughing.
3. NISSAN MAXIMA I'm not paying $35,000 for a front-drive anything, let alone a family four-door that looks like Chris-Craft's tribute to Shamu.
4. VOLKSWAGEN TIGUAN The Tiguan is cute on the outside, but it is the first VW in ages that feels chintzy inside. Worse, this compact S.U.V. can cost almost as much as a BMW X3 or an Acura RD-X, though it can't touch their performance.
5. MITSUBISHI GALANT RALLIART You may not know this midsize sedan exists, and that's a good thing. When the tricked-up Galant appeared at my doorstep, I started looking for the time machine that had upchucked it from some late-'90s dance club.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/automobiles/28ULRICH.html?_r=1&ref=automobiles&pagewanted=print
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