Like staring at the sun

Dallas bad boy John Tesar steals the show on Top Chef Seattle

Who's first to get quoted? Tesar. Who scores immunity? Tesar. Who knowsinstantly that the geoduck needs a little more salt? Tesar.
Photo courtesy of Bravo
Dallas cheftestants Danyele McPherson of The Grape, John Tesar of Spoon andJoshua Valentine of FT33.

In episode 2 of Top Chef: Seattle, Dallas chef John Tesar casts a voodoo spell, his pent-up enthusiasm and scary-intuitive knowingness so intense, it's like seeing molten lava right before the volcano erupts. It's like staring at the sun.

Forget Padma, forget Tom, forget the other contestants. Tesar is a ready-made reality star, a vortex who can't help but slurp up all the attention in the room.

He's the first contestant to get quoted. He can tell instantly that the geoduck needs more salt. He spots a pot of chili oil about to burn up.

What must it be like to be a viewer from Michigan or Montana and not be clued in to his inexorable gravity pull? Watching the show as a Dallasite is like being in on a secret. We're inoculated with Tesar powder. Wise to his combination of chef chops and high drama, we know it's a waste of our time learning the name of the beige girl with vertigo or the swarthy guy with the stretched-out earlobes.

Watching the show as a Dallasite is like being in on a secret. We're inoculated with Tesar powder.

The producers throw in a few plot twists, like their dumb idea of bringing back three contestants from earlier seasons to re-compete for the Top Chef title. One of them has even stahhged at Noma. But Tesar silently rules, his glasses propped on his forehead, perched at an awkward angle between his eyes and his hairline.

The only other cheftestants who make a dent on this episode are the female with the accent who talks nonstop and FT33 chef Josh Valentine, also from Dallas, who scowls at the news of the three returning contestants.

"That sucks. I'm gonna get in fights, I'm sure, now," Valentine says. "It's our turn. None of them were able to seal the deal. I hate them all."

He starts to lose it when he misplaces an ingredient for his dish.

"Hey hey, where's my fucking mushrooms?" he asks. "I think a lot of people think I'm just this little guy from Oklahoma, and that'd be their mistake."

Good effort, Josh!

The episode is all about Seattle, beginning with the opening quickfire challenge to use local seafood. Tesar teams up with Sheldon from Hawaii and English-as-a-second-language Kuniko.

"I know she's Japanese, I'm thinking to myself, maybe she has incredible knife skills," Tesar says. "I've watched every episode of Top Chef and I think the decisions you make are just as important as the dishes you make."

"Winning the first quickfire on Top Chef is gonna be up there in the top five things of all time in my life, not only in my career," Tesar says.

There are clams, crabs and other things pulled from the Seattle sea, still live and twitching. The camera catches Tesar, up to his wrists in a vat of mud to pull out a live geoduck, while two girl chefs stand nearby, wringing their hands. As he and his teammates finalize their plan and start chopping, he says aloud to no one, "Who says the most hated chef in Dallas can't get along with people?"

Quickfire happens, Team Tesar wins. Only one in the three-member team will get immunity, so they draw knives to see who. Who else? Why even bother drawing knives?

"I've been a chef for a long time, and I've accomplished a lot of things," Tesar says earnestly. "But I have to tell you, winning the first quickfire on Top Chef is gonna be up there in the top five things of all time in my life, not only in my career."

The elimination challenge takes place inside the Space Needle, the quintessential Seattle building where the chefs must make the quintessential Seattle dish. They have 47 minutes because that's how long it takes for the needle to rotate – hey, just like Reunion Tower. We can conclude from this challenge that Seattle loves the heck out of rectangles of fish plopped atop fava beans, because that's what all of them turn out.

"They all did very similar dishes, so in a way it is easy to compare them," says judge Gail, glass half full.

The dishes may be all very similar, but only one has been touched by Tesar: the chili-oil-poached cod with daishi. His team takes it and Kuniko wins for her clever idea of poaching fish in a pot of chili oil. It's hugs all around, with Tesar graciously not mentioning the part where he saved the chili oil from burning.

Letting her have the spotlight makes him look big. He wins again.

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Movie Review

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is better than the first but not by much

Blumhouse

Five Nights at Freddy's 2

Blumhouse Productions first made their name with the Paranormal Activity series, establishing themselves as a leader in the horror genre thanks to their relatively cheap yet effective movies. In recent years, they’ve added on “soft” horror films likeM3GAN and Five Nights at Freddy’s to draw in a younger audience, with both films becoming so successful that each was quickly given a sequel.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 finds Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) still recovering from the events of the first film, with Abby particularly missing her “friends.” Those friends just so happen to be the souls of murdered children who inhabit animatronic characters at the long-defunct Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, children who were abducted and killed by William Afton (Matthew Lillard).

A new threat emerges at another Freddy Fazbear’s location in the form of Charlotte, another murdered child who inhabits a creepy large marionette. Mike, distracted by a possible romance with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), fails to keep track of Abby, who makes her way to the old pizzeria and inadvertently unleashes Charlotte and her minions on the surrounding town.

Directed by Emma Tammi and written by Scott Cawthon (who also created the video game on which the series is based), the film tries to mix together goofy elements with intense scenes. One particular sequence, in which the security guard for Freddy Fazbear’s lets a group of ghost hunters onto the property, toes the line between soft and hard horror. That and a few others show the potential that the filmmakers had if they had stuck to their guns.

Unfortunately, more often than not they either soft-pedal things that would normally be horrific, or can’t figure out how to properly stage scenes. The sight of animatronic robots wreaking havoc is one that is simultaneously frightening and laughable, and the filmmakers never seem to find the right balance in tone. Every step in the direction of making a truly scary horror film is undercut by another in which the robots fail to live up to their promise.

It doesn’t help that Cawthon gives the cast some extremely wooden dialogue, lines that none of the actors can elevate. What may work in a video game format comes off as stilted when said by actors in a live-action film. The story also loses momentum quickly after the first half hour or so, with Cawthon seemingly content to just have characters move from place to place with no sense of connection between any of the scenes.

Hutcherson (The Hunger Games series), after being the true lead of the first film, is given very little to do in this film, and his effort is equal to his character’s arc. The same goes for Lail, whose character seems to be shoehorned into the story. Rubio is called upon to carry the load for a lot of the movie, and the teenager is not quite up to the task. A brief appearance by Skeet Ulrich seems to be a blatant appeal to Scream fans, but he and Lillard only underscore how limited this film is compared to that franchise.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is better than the first film, but not by much. The filmmakers do a decent job of making the new marionette character into a great villain, but they fail to capitalize on its inherent creepiness. Instead, they fall back on less effective elements, ensuring that the film will be forgettable for anyone other than hardcore Freddy fans.

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Five Nights at Freddy's 2 opens in theaters on December 5.

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