It all started with a plate of cole slaw that tasted like the refrigerator it was stored in.

That’s the first thing Mollie Cox Bryan, novelist and writer about all things food, ordered at the Bistro restaurant in Staunton, VA. She was researching the latest installment of her restaurant review column for the city newspaper. She also ordered a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich because she’s a big fan of tomatoes and the menu listed it as a “Fried Green Tomato Sandwich.” But because she is a vegetarian, she asked the chef to hold the bacon.

The LT, as it were, still cost $8. And for that price, she received dry toast mounded with lettuce and stale tomatoes. On a five-star scale, she rated the food a 2.

She noticed other things about the restaurant, which she dutifully recorded in her April 1 article, “Bistro failed to live up to reputation.” The hostess leaned across the bar to have a personal conversation with the bartender, which gave the impression of unprofessionalism. Her table was chipped and wobbly. Still, she found something positive to say — her waitress was attentive, professional, and cheerful — and so she rated the service at 4 stars.  Not the tippy-top, but almost.  The atmosphere got an average score of 3.

I would link to the online archive of the review so you can read it for yourself, but the executive editor, David Fritz, has deleted it. His above-the-fold editorial in the April 3 paper, headlined “Bistro restaurant review failed fairness test,” is still online, however. (Here.) His reasons for retracting the story boil down to: (a) the reviewer ordered an out-of-season dish without a key ingredient; and (b) the review was based on only one visit.  I should point out that this was printed over another column in which the Fourth Estate congratulates itself for how great of a job it’s been doing.

As best I can reconstruct, based on the extensive online flamage (some of it my own) attached to Fritz’s editorial, and on my interview of Mollie Bryan, this is what happened:

1. Mollie visited the Bistro, wrote her review, and turned it in.  The column didn’t mention that she’s a vegetarian, and it said she ordered a “fried green tomato sandwich” rather than a BLT sans the B.
2. The editor directly responsible for the column, Cindy Corell, did a poor job editing the column. Corell admitted as much online: “Do I wish I’d remembered that she was a vegetarian and disclosed this to viewers and readers? Of course.” And, as Fritz wrote in his editorial, “we did a poor job not to catch those flaws while editing the piece for publication.”

I’m glad the two editors are taking responsibility for what they published, but there is more to this than just the writing and editing of a single article.

Let’s start with the way the News Leader manages its restaurant reviews.  In a word, it’s sloppy.  Mollie, a journalism graduate from Point Park University and author of two cook books, had a prior relationship with this newspaper.  She had authored a long-running column on parenting, “Thoroughly Modern Mollie.” In it, she often discussed her vegetarianism, a fact about her I wasn’t aware of until recently.  Perhaps all parties were used to a certain degree of informality, an unspoken — but erroneous and ultimately amateurish — understanding of how things would be handled in the new venue, a review column titled “Valley Food Files.”

They did discuss a few things, however, but most of these things were not put into a contract, as they should have been.  For example, they discussed Mollie’s per diem, which would be meager $100 per article.  For a work for hire copyright license, it should have been higher.  Oh, and Mollie would have to pay for her own meals.  Figure the math with me on that one: Meager – Meal = Jack.

They also discussed what to do in the event of a negative review.  Would Mollie have to make more than one visit to the restaurant?  The answer: they would look at it on a case-by-case basis.  Well, the case came up with the Bistro, but no one said anything until after the column was in print — and then it was discussed in the most humiliating, public fashion possible.

In the interests of fairness (as that’s the big buzz word here, you know), there are indeed such things as ethical standards food critics are supposed to follow.  There’s an organization called the Association of Food Journalists that seems to be the authority on this.  Their Restaurant Critics’ Guidelines, which you can download as a Word document, make the following recommendations:

• make two or even three(!) visits to a restaurant when reviewing it;
• sample the “full range” of the menu;
• order the same food multiple times to see if it remains wonderful or terrible.

Wow, those folks in AFJ must have some big bucks to afford that.  Mollie didn’t do those things with the Bistro, however.  Should she have?  Her editor and many of the News Leader readers apparently think so.  But again, who was going to pay for all that?

The other issue is Mollie’s vegetarianism and whether that disqualifies her from being a food critic.  Should Mollie’s tag line at the end of the review, instead of reading, “The writer is a national freelance writer and published author,” begin, “The vegetarian writer . . .”?  If I were a vegetarian in this circumstance, I would feel a bit like a wheelchair-bound man fired from his job because he couldn’t climb the stairs.  It makes me wonder what decade we’re living in.

I asked Mollie about this.  She said, “It’s 2012, and I felt like most restaurants have vegetarian options, so I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal.” However, in the interests of being fair (there’s that word again), she often takes along her husband or kids, who sample and report on the meat to her. It seems like a reasonable accommodation to the AFJ ethics to me — despite the fact that the newspaper isn’t paying for all of those meals.

Still, this time out the door, Mollie went alone.  She ordered the Bistro’s “Fried Green Tomato” sandwich and asked the chef to hold the bacon.  Restaurant patrons make requests like this all time.  Being a professional, the chef did as she asked.  What he didn’t do was present the sandwich with a big placard reading, “Just so you know, this sandwich now sucks, so don’t judge me on it.”  Claims that Mollie’s sandwich experience was unfairly damaged by this deletion of a “key ingredient,” as David Fritz called it, are fatuous.  Since when does leaving bacon out of a BLT turn the bread stale?  The chef, Stephen Thacker, accepted responsibility for his work the moment he sent it to Mollie’s table, and in fact he still accepts responsibility, as he wrote online: “It does not matter that she is a vegetarian, or altered a dish, the more important issue is we can always improve.”

The previous restaurant reviewers haven’t been held to the same standards, as far as I can tell.  They haven’t been required to make multiple visits to a restaurant and sample multiple dishes in order to write a review, good or bad.  The one time in recent memory when a reviewer pre-dating Mollie wrote a justifiably negative review (of the execrable Buckhorn Inn), she was unfairly excoriated by readers, just as Mollie has been.  After that point, it was laughably obvious how gun-shy she became, rating all the restaurants on a 5-star scale that ran between 3.1 and 3.9.  To get her true opinion, one had to read the score that came after the decimal point.

Because of this experience — after the way she has been humiliated by her boss and subjected to nonstop ad hominem attacks online — I wouldn’t at all be surprised if Mollie Bryan quit her gig with this newspaper.  I know I would, and I’ve told her so.

Let’s just hope the next time The News Leader ventures into this area of writing that it gives some clearer communication to its writers and readers about what to expect.

 

The Hunger Games movie would have been a great adaptation of the novel by Suzanne Collins if not for the excessive use of the hand-held “shaky-cam” technique. Why don’t we call shaky cam for what it is? Vomit cam.

Maybe I’m just an old fogey and prefer the stable-cam cinematic style of True Blood. Is it too much to ask that I can see what’s happening on screen and not just a blurry swoosh of color?

I’m not alone in these criticisms:

The amount of dramatic shaky-cam in this movie is excessive. Multiple times I had to look away from the screen. The final fight, in particular, was almost impossible to follow. Shaky-cam + quick cuts + fast-paced fight scene + darkness = very hard to see.
— Panels on Pages

The Hunger Shaky-Cam Games — I have just returned from watching a film about an epic romantic triangle between a director, his editing suite, and the shaky-cam that he couldn’t resist.
— Robyn Paterson

That last reviewer went on to make a comparison worth reading: “It’s a good technique in moderation, and like any spice can really bring out the flavour of the film it’s used in. But, just like ginger or pepper, if you use too much of it, the receiver won’t be able to taste anything except the spice in question.”

Exactly. While I don’t object to the use of shaky cam per se — I mean, it was an effective technique, like, once, in The Blair Witch Project — it’s just one tool in a director’s tool belt and should not be used at the exclusion of all else.

Remember 300? Lots of gorgeous comic-booky scenes of Spartans flying through the air with their swords. But every single spear throw and sword swing was turned into a slow-motion shot. Every. Single. One. (Or at least, that’s what it felt like.)

They’re silly affectations by artistes. Gary Ross, director of The Hunger Games, admits as much in an interview:

Let’s talk about the look of this movie. You employed a lot of shaky handheld, and there aren’t a lot of wide shots. How did you come up with that approach?

Well, I mean, I tried to do what the book did.

Oh, come on.

Because the book is told in the first person?

Yeah, it’s a very urgent first-person narrative. I tried to put you in Katniss’s shoes the way [author] Suzanne Collins put you in Katniss’s shoes. I wanted to take you through the world using this kind of serpentine tunnel vision that Katniss has. I want to destabilize you the way Suzanne has and I want you to experience the world through Katniss’s eyes, and that requires a very subjective cinematic style, to be kind of urgently in her point of view, so that’s why I shot it that way.

Let’s see. That was effective, like, twice in the whole movie. Say, when Katniss rises up through the tunnel into the arena and is blinded by sunlight, and later when she is poisoned by genetically-engineered wasps. Those were the only two times when a point-of-view cam was arguably effective. The rest of the times, it was used to cover up possibly poor fight choreography (at least that’s what I have to assume since I couldn’t even see the damn fights through the smearing gloss of vomit cam) and a hundred other things. Maybe I should’ve taken a cue from my wife and just closed my eyes and listened.

What a tragedy that is, because The Hunger Games was otherwise a brilliantly executed movie. The writing was good (due, no doubt, to Suzanne Collins herself being one of the screenplay writers), the costuming was gorgeous, the acting was great, the makeup was great, the special effects were great. But it was ruined by a director who wanted to leave his tripod at home. What a shame.

To make an analogy, this goes back to a basic production value I have in my own prose writing. The reader should not be aware of the fact he is reading. Readers want to be transported away into their imaginations. To escape, just for a moment, the physical reality of their lives, to forget about the press of bodies around them on the subway, the screaming baby in the next room. So I strive to make my prose invisible. This means active sentence structure, an absence of flowery language, and simple to nonexistent dialogue tags. The cardinal sin is to step in front of the movie camera, so to speak, and wave at the reader, just to remind them that I am the artiste who created the thing they’re trying to enjoy. And when movie directors are so enamored by their own power that they shake the hell out of the camera or slow down every fisticuff to 1/3000 speed, they’re slamming their viewers back into harsh reality.

Movie watchers pay too much for their tickets to have to be subjected to that. Give them their escape, Mein director! Treat them with respect, and they’ll do the same for you.

A friend coined my favorite saying about expressing opinions: “Put your balls on the table, and pass out hammers.”

This is a highly charged political season, and I’ve struggled with how publicly I should swing my balls around, as it were.  I’m a writer and an entertainer — not a politician — so why should anyone care what I think about gay marriage?  And why should I risk alienating potential readers?

Well, because I’m an American, goddammit.

But I really don’t want to spend from now until Election Day reposting every halfbrained link and vitriolic bone making the rounds on Facebook.  I don’t care what Orson Scott Card, a great fiction writer, thinks about politics, and I don’t expect you to care what I think about politics, either.

So I’m just going to try and get it all out of my system now.  Feel free to skip the rest.

Click only if you’re interested.

A while back, a friend and I compared our opinions about horror movies.  His philosophy was that people just want to see “boobs and blood,” especially boobs.  There are a plethora of horror films, such as such as Silent Night, Deadly Night, to support his argument. But I don’t agree with him, especially since most of the horror movies that made any money with this strategy were filmed in the 1980s.

Sure, I admit my opinion is biased from being a (mostly) prose writer.  In novels and short stories, I simply can’t rely on visual titillation because words are visually nothing more than black marks on a page.  So I have to make my stories powerful through other means.

Horror critic E.C. McMullen Jr. wrote an interesting essay a few years ago titled “Sex Won’t Sell Your Genre Movie.” His analysis is that sex had more power to sell genre movies — and cars — in decades like the 1970s because that’s when being naughty in advertising was a novel thing.  Since then, he says, our standards have changed. “Sex doesn’t sell our stuff anymore, unless they’re actually selling sexy stuff: body wash, sexy clothes, cologne, things we want when we want to fuck.”  More recent articles, such as one from The Independent, provide other evidence.

Now, I’m not sure horror movies can be compared to cars.  That’s kind of an apples and oranges thing.  I wish McMullen spent more time on better examples.  And, as my cousin who worked in the muscle-car magazine business would tell you, bikini-clad girls draped over cars are still a major part of their content.  Sex is still used to sell plenty of stuff other than sexy stuff.  My town’s newspaper, in fact, frequently runs an advertisement showing a open-legged babe squatting near a bottle of some nutritional supplement.  (In an earlier version of the ad, she squatted over the bottle.)

But I still agree with McMullen’s thesis as it applies to movies.  Sex doesn’t sell movies anymore — let alone horror movies — unless they’re sex movies, and now that the porn industry is hemorrhaging through free-to-view websites, it doesn’t even sell those very well.

So.  You want to make good horror movie?  Then here’s my advice.

Write a good story.