Outlaw Josie wails

Top Chef Seattle hits the roller derby, where nice guys finish last

You can spot the members of the roller derby team by their green hoodies.

Photo courtesy of Bravo
Tesar reminisces about his boyhood days in the Hamptons when he ate oysters forbreakfast, lunch and dinner.

Episode eight of Top Chef Seattle sets up its premise pretty quickly: Tough-talking tomboy cheftestant Josie is a boor. OMG she talks so much. Talk talk talk. She's so obnoxious, so rude.

But will she go home? Nope. The nice guy goes home, and Josie stays — and we get punk'd by Top Chef again.

We get punk'd because Bravo does what Bravo does: It cherry-picks scenes to prod you into piling all over Josie until you realize you're being goaded into hating on a woman for being unfeminine, and the icky misogyny of it all makes you feel a little sick.

When the chefs break into teams, nobody wants to be Josie's partner, so sweet, easygoing Bart falls on the sword. But he pays the price.

Mud bugs
The episode begins with another slimy commercial for a car. It has a touch screen! And a steering wheel. It is like a chariot of the gods that transports the chefs to a shellfish farm. Hmm, shellfish — must be clams, Josh Valentine surmises.

Close, Josh. It's oysters. The chefs don rubber boots and are set free like crabs on a sandy bog to forage for oysters, which they will have to prepare for mole-like judge Emeril Lagasse.

Tesar does classic Tesar: "I have a lot of experience with oysters," he declares, before cutting one open and slurping it from the shell, with the camera cocked at an angle to make him look heroic. The others stir from the mud to ape his behavior: cracking open shells, smacking their lips, waxing about how it can't get any fresher than this.

But Josie's boots get stuck and she can't move; Micah has to pull her out. What an aggravating dunce she is. If only they could leave her in the mud. Then all their problems would be solved.

Roller girls
For the elimination challenge, the chefs must cook for one of Seattle's top "sports" teams. The "sports team" — wink, wink — turns out to be a women's roller derby team. That can't be right, can it?

After that shticky revelation, the show's interest level drops off a cliff. There's some fancy roller derby shots taken with a camera strapped to a skate, but otherwise, all that's left is to flog Josie.

She whoops at the roller rink. She spills her beer. She reveals that she played professional football. Her loudness offends Josh Valentine, who sniffs disapprovingly, and we know how refined he is.

When the chefs break into teams, nobody wants to be Josie's partner, so sweet, easygoing Bart falls on the sword. But he pays the price. When their team comes out on the bottom for underseasoned, overcooked rice, he gets the axe, not Josie.

The show sheepishly acknowledges that he has a tendency to under-salt but nonetheless allows the malevolent implication to linger, that somehow Josie is the one who should have gone home. For shame, Bravo, for shame.

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Movie Review

Korean monster movie Hope delivers thrills despite its lengthy runtime

Photo courtesy of Neon

Hwang Jung-Min and Hoyeon in Hope.

Monster movies can take on all sorts of different flavors, from all-out mayhem to quieter ones where the monster can sometimes be the protagonist. The new South Korean film Hope splits the difference to a degree, delivering action-packed sequences while also attempting to understand the non-humans in a way.

The story starts in medias res, with an unseen creature having already done great damage to a huge bull and laying waste to much of a small Korean town. The local sheriff, Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-Min), tries to take control of the situation in the town, while a group of hunters led by Sung Ki (Zo In-Sung) travel into the nearby woods to see what they can find there.

Thus starts a nearly nonstop, 160-minute epic of each side trying (and mostly failing) to defend themselves against gigantic creatures who seem hellbent on destroying everything in their path. It’s not until 40 minutes into the film that the audience is shown one of the monsters in detail, and the less said the better about what it actually looks like, as the mystery behind it keeps the intrigue going.

That initial section of the film is the best, as Beom Seok — eventually joined by deputy Sung Ae (Hoyeon) — goes on a frantic hunt around the town, always just far enough behind the monster to keep from seeing it. The utter destruction he witnesses and his interactions with various locals are intense and oddly funny, with the hectic conversations he has laced with fear and incredulity over how different people choose to act.

Writer-director Na Hong-jin bounces back and forth between the people in the town and the group in the forest, doing his best to maintain the momentum of the first section. This approach works for a while as each group makes their own discoveries about the creatures and has run-ins with them that more often than not are ill-fated. Using a mixture of relatively good CGI, great production design, and an abundance of gore, the filmmaker shows he knows how to make an effective blockbuster-style film.

The trouble is, he doesn’t know when to stop. Somewhere around the two-hour mark of the movie, the story starts to become repetitive and Hong-jin introduces elements that don’t mesh well with what has come before. For some reason, he decides that some of the creatures should speak, a move that is baffling on several fronts. The biggest one is that they are voiced by English-speaking actors like Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell, but each speaks a non-human language, rendering their performances moot.

Jung-min puts in a fantastic lead performance, one that requires him to vacillate between abject terror and in-control leadership. In-Sung is almost as good, although his character requires him to play one note over and over again. Hoyeon, who some may recognize from Squid Game, delivers an extra shot of energy when she enters the film, something she keeps going despite her character being forced to say some bad lines.

If Hong-jin had kept the focus Hope a little tighter, the sci-fi thriller might have ended up toward the top of this year’s films. But by choosing to extend the story into territories that don’t add much to the plot or make much sense, the filmmaker puts a damper on what was a fun and brutal monster movie.

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Hope is now playing in theaters.

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