Year: 2024

Alien: Romulus (R)

A rag-tag group of humans is no match for a ship full of previously dormant aliens in Alien: Romulus.

Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and Andy (David Jonsson), her android “brother” that her father programmed, are desperate to get off their dark and dreary mining colony and head to a sunny new terraformed human outpost elsewhere. But Wyland-Yutani Corporation, the evil company that runs everything, has reset the number of hours required for a trip to a better life and now Rain has to wait five to six more years.

But! A group of Rain’s friends and hostile acquaintances have spotted a derelict ship floating above the planet. They believe the ship has the cryopods and the power to get them to the sunny green outpost, if only they can steal those things. For that, they need Andy, whose androidness will help them use the ship’s computers to find what they need.

Rain is reluctant at first but decides to participate in this one shot at a better life, joining up with friendly guy Tyler (Archie Renaux), jerky guy Bjorn (Spike Fearn), Tyler’s sister Kay (Isabela Merced) and pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu). They travel to the ship in a plucky little space craft only to discover that’s no moon, it’s a space station — the “ship” is a two-part Wyland station with sides named Romulus and Remus. As a landing party starts to go through the ship, they realize it’s not so much “decommissioned” as they thought but abandoned. Because they don’t know they’re in an Alien franchise movie, they go poking around in the dark — first looking for cryopods and then looking for extra power for the crypods, not paying attention to the general creepiness until, in one flooded room, Bjorn thinks he sees Something In The Water.

The movie plays all the hits when it comes to the Alien aliens — we get the big one with the creepy drippy teeth, the whack-a-mole-ish chest popper, the face sucker. And we get some not bad imagery either — people in a small shaft of light surrounded by darkness, the ship rising up off the stormy planet to the sunlight space, red or blue lights for no particular reason other than giving the scene an extra creepiness boost. I also appreciated the general griminess of this movie — this is not a Star Trek-ian sanitized space but a “corporations are jerks who exploit the working class” scuffed up version of a space future.

But these elements are kind of it in terms of what makes this movie any different than your standard college-student (the rough age of everyone here) slasher fare. Replace “empty space station” with “college campus at the start of a holiday weekend” and “cryopods” with “booze in the dean’s office” and you’ve basically got the same movie.

The androidness of Andy gets a subplot — Rain treats him like a sweet kid brother but he turns into a hypercompetent calculating, somewhat malignant presence after an attempt to give him a security codes upgrade also programs him with a whole new prime directive. Their relationship gives Rain something more to care about than just not getting skewered by an Alien tail, but it doesn’t push the movie beyond the horror standard — the Rain/Andy relationship isn’t all that different from the big sister/little sister duo at the center of the recent Scream movies for example.

Alien: Romulus is ultimately not substantial enough to deliver on the promise of its above-average visuals and its remaining franchise cred. C+

Rated R for bloody violent content and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Fede Alvarez and written by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues, Alien: Romulus is an hour and 59 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by 20th Century Studios.

Featured photo: Alien: Romulus.

The Midnight Feast, by Lucy Foley

The Midnight Feast, by Lucy Foley (William Morrow, 350 pages)

The jacket of Lucy Foley’s The Midnight Feast promises a “deliciously twisty murder mystery,” which is more a nod to the title than a description of the book itself.

Foley, a British author who has been compared to Agatha Christie, has enjoyed success in the genre (her 2020 book The Guest List was a Reese’s Book Club pick) despite a parade of cookie-cutter covers that may be all the rage but to me suggests that the content within lacks originality.

That can’t be said of The Midnight Feast, which is complexly plotted and tries at times to deliver cultural commentary within the core mystery. But the novel suffers from an unsatisfying pileup of perspectives that prevents readers from developing any real connection with the characters.

The Midnight Feast begins at the gala opening of an opulent resort called “The Manor,” which overlooks a cliff on the Dorset Coast in southern England. The owner, Francesca Meadows, is a wealthy wellness influencer of sorts reminiscent of Gwyneth Paltrow, and is determined to give her guests a goopy good time despite the objection of locals who believe her dream estate has desecrated sacred ground.

Francesca, “very good at living in the now,” wears a black opal ring because the stone signifies “purification for the body and soul” and “provides you with a shield against energy.” She’s very much into crystals. Every room at The Manor has a selection of stones in it for the guests’ well-being and sticks of sage to burn “for cleansing.” The place has signature scents and a signature cocktail whose ingredients include ginger, vodka and a dash of CBD oil. The guests themselves are “carefully curated” to keep out the wrong kind of people.

Francesca, newly married to the architect who designed The Manor’s infinity pool, is introduced as something of a dopey villain. Disdainful of the locals and their spooky folk tales, she is scheming to acquire an old farm down the road where “the animals look sad, like they’re begging for a better life. They honestly do!”

She inherited the property from her grandmother, and she had treated her grandfather poorly in his last years of life, thinking that he was simply daft when he warned her repeatedly, “You must keep the birds happy; don’t upset the birds.”

The birds, of course, aren’t literal birds in this context, although there are plenty of them in the story, which is heavy-handed with the bird imagery. According to local legend, The Birds are human-size creatures with beaked faces that occupy the woods and demand sacrifices and on occasion take a life for themselves, leaving behind a feather or two.

Snippets of this are revealed as the story unfolds in staccato, told by five narrators interspersed with excerpts from the diary of one of the characters, and yes, this is just confusing as it sounds. In fact it’s more confusing than it sounds because the story also jumps around in time, from June 2025 to July 2010, and back and forth between the day before the solstice (i.e. the titular “midnight feast”) and the day after it. There’s so much whiplash here that the book could be a ride at the Big E.

The narrators include Bella, a single mother who has come alone to opening weekend for reasons that we learn right away are Very Mysterious, since she has brought with her a folder of articles about Francesca.

There’s also Eddie, a young employee at The Manor, whose family owns the dilapidated farm down the road and who is hiding from his family the fact that he works here. There’s Owen, Francesca’s new husband, who doesn’t seem to be a very happy newlywed; and a DI (detective inspector) named Walker who is tasked with investigating a fire and mysterious deaths at the property. Along with Francesca, they all take turns narrating what’s happening in real time and revealing snippets of the past that connect them to each other and to the land.

Although the language is simple (too much so, one might say) and the chapters short, the constant change of perspective is wearisome and diminishes character development. Also, for a book that is heralded for its plot twists, alert readers can see many of them coming, and there is nothing revealed at the end that will leave us mulling the story in disbelief for days afterward. More likely, the ending is likely to result in a feeling of relief — we’re glad things are resolved so we can move on to a more compelling book.

On the plus side, for a murder mystery, there is very little gore involved, and only a couple of scenes that might be problematic for PETA.

Credit the author for managing to neatly tie up all the loose ends at the close of the novel; she had a destination in mind and gets us there eventually. No doubt some people will consider her a mastermind for navigating such a complicated plot, but it comes at the expense of the reader. C

Album Reviews 24/08/22

Bek, Derby Girl [EP] (Amber Blue Recordings)

This mononymed DJ is a well-established player in the (reportedly vibrant) Hamburg, Germany, velvet-rope scene. He’s steadily made a name for himself as a producer as well, releasing tracks on such imprints as Traum, What Happens, Ohral and Natura Viva, and back in 2015 he won the Mixmag + ANTS Ibiza DJ competition over 300 other participating DJs. With all the resume nonsense out of the way, we can proceed to what’s on this four-songer (actually three, but the label owners added a remix to the second track, “Cannibal Licornes,” a Calvin Harris-style joint that doesn’t do much other than make you wish you were sipping mai tais in the Maldives, not that we don’t need more of that sort of vice in this loveless world). The title track is a lightly syncopated bounce-along whose (actually pretty raucous) drop comes halfway though its six minutes; overall it’s a lot more experimental than what I expected. Sure, this is fine. A–

Alison Moyet, Key (Cooking Vinyl Records)

As a celebration of 40 years of releasing records, this is one for the books, a mix of reworked songs with only a pair of new ones, but the rerubs are reflective of the changes she’s undergone personally over the years. In fact, she’s outgrown some of the tunes since her days releasing her first solo record, Alf, as a 22-ish-year-old. Like Siouxsie Sioux, Moyet’s distinctive contralto has probably been mistaken for a male tenor on many an occasion; Andy Bell mainlined her music while preparing to audition for Erasure, a RIYL name-check relative to her sound. Here, she reshapes her most famous track, “Is This Love” (from the 1986 album Raindancing and featured in the film All of Us Strangers), as an epic chillout ballad as opposed to the (very) ’80s slow-dance track it’d originally been. Major hits “All Cried Out” and “Love Resurrection” are here, updated for the times; newcomer songs “Such Small Ale” and “Filigree” are nice-enough slowbie bringdowns. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• A Friday is ahead, specifically the one that falls on Aug. 23, and you know what that means: People will be crowding the malls to buy all the new albums! Yes yes, your friends will be dressing up just like the cool but awkward kids in Pretty In Pink and making fun of all the mall cops (aren’t adults so stupid, lol) and buying plenty of albums, for your Sony Walkman audio devices, aren’t you glad Stranger Things made the ’80s come back? Right, I have no idea where I’m going with this, I’m just waiting for the ’90s-rock echo boom to take over from this tedious ’80s wave once and for all, until we’re all sick of hearing bands that sound exactly like Nirvana and Indigo Girls (I’m way ahead on both scores), and in the meantime, let’s try to ease our suffering by finding something that might be relevant to our current era of music, that’d be great. We’ll start with Philadelphia electro-psych/slowcore band Spirit Of The Beehive, which releases You’ll Have To Lose Something on Friday! They’re on a post-indie trip and insist on being weird, so the video for the first single, “Something’s Ending / I’ve Been Evil,” is moderately annoying. As for the song itself, it’s a slapdash slowcore mess that’s somehow listenable, and like many bands are doing nowadays, there’s a dubstep layer in there that serves pretty well as a sort of binding force. The vocals are faraway and over-reverbed, in other words there’s government-issue oldschool-shoegaze afoot in this business but despite the performative, androgynous gloom there’s a hint of 1960s Spanky And Our Gang sunshine-pop at work as well. If all this sounds good to you, you can catch them live at Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Mass., on Sept. 24.

• Wow, it’s the first album in 24 years from Pacific Northwest-based minimalist indie-pop/cuddlecore duo The Softies, isn’t that special? I hadn’t realized I sort of missed hearing about them, and come to think of it, I never did, but I will listen to something from their new album, The Bed I Made, because I am an equal opportunity hater, just let me pop a few Dramamine to settle my stomach first. Ack, I used to confuse these guys with The Swirlies for obvious reasons; an AllMusic reviewer nailed it on the head when he said The Softies’ stripped-down, two-voices/two-guitars aesthetic was too boring to build entire albums around. But hey, maybe they’ve added some layering, who knows, let’s go listen to the single, “I Said What I Said.” Yep, it’s twee-pop, happy and upbeat and catchy in its way, and jangly and minimalist and decidedly dated, and one of the girls is wearing nerd glasses, and both girls are wearing the spring line equivalent of Christmas sweater fashion. But like I was saying, you’d better get used to this vanilla-frappe-blooded nonsense, because it’s gonna be everywhere before you can say “Oh no, please don’t, I beg of you.”

• New York City-based industrial metal/noise-rock fivesome Uniform release their fifth album, American Standard, this Friday! They’re my kind of dark-futurist-type guys, having used samples of gunshots and explosions to produce rhythm tracks, why haven’t more bands done stuff like that? The single, “This Is Not A Prayer,” is psychotic, deranged and awesome, like “Stumbo” from Jim Thirlwell’s Wiseblood project. That’s another thing, why haven’t more bands ripped off Wiseblood?

• Lastly let’s check out Sabrina Carpenter, a nepo singing person who used to be on the Disney Channel series Girl Meets World; her aunt is Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson on The Simpsons. “Espresso,” the single from her new LP, Short n’ Sweet, is disposable Britney bubble-pop. I’m sure 6-year-old girls would like it, aren’t they growing up so fast these days (world’s loudest eyeroll)?

Corn on the cone

If you’ve ever gotten ambitious with your cooking or baking and have tried to share something new that you’ve made with friends or acquaintances, you’ve probably seen a visible reluctance on their faces to take the food you’ve offered.

“It’s OK, I’m fine,” they’ll say.

“I didn’t ask if you are fine,” you might say, if you weren’t restrained by politeness. “I asked you to accept this gift of food that I made myself, as a symbol of how much I like and value you.” But you don’t, and at the end of the day you end up bringing your miso brownies back home with you.

The frustrating fact is that most people don’t want interesting food. They want comforting food.

Here is a really interesting food that — assuming you can get them to try it — will become their new comfort food:

Charcoal-Grilled Corn Ice Cream

  • 6 leftover corn cobs from eating fresh sweet corn
  • 1 quart (946 ml) half & half
  • 1 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk

As ice creams go, this one is remarkably straightforward. You don’t have to worry about tempering egg yolks, or melting chocolate in a double boiler, or ordering Bolivian bee pollen, or anything. There are three ingredients, and four or five steps, and the level of technical knowledge involved is about the same as in making a grilled cheese sandwich. The most daunting part of making this ice cream is deciding to do it.

Whisk the cream and condensed milk together and pour it into a medium-sized airtight container. Snap the lid on, and store this in the refrigerator.

Set up your grill, light the charcoal, and get your grilling equipment — a plate, tongs and a beer — ready. Wait until the coals are roughly half gray, half black, then grill your corn cobs. Treat them like you would sausages; turn them from time to time, until they are consistently grilled — golden brown, with just a little bit of char. This should take just about long enough to drink your beer. If you are a fan of grilled foods with a heavy char, leave the cobs on the grill a few minutes longer. Remove them to the plate, and take them back into your kitchen.

(It would be a shame to waste the still perfectly good coals, so you might want to grill some actual sausages or Almost Burgers at this point.)

Put the grilled corn cobs in your cream mixture. Completely cover them with liquid, if possible. If not, put the top back on, and swirl to completely cover the cobs. Return the container to the refrigerator to rest for 24 to 48 hours, swirling occasionally. The fat in the cream is really good at absorbing flavors. Remember that time the butter tasted funny after your brother-in-law left mackerel in the fridge after his fishing trip? Same concept. The corn and smoke flavors of your grilled corn cobs will infuse into the cream. Because this is going on in your refrigerator, you don’t have to worry about gently heating the cream or anything. Shake it and leave it.

After the cream mixture has infused for a couple of days, remove the cobs from the container. There will be suspiciously less cream left than you think there should be. Everything delicious comes at a price. In this case, the corn cobs have absorbed some of the cream as a sort of souvenir. If there are any distressing bits of char in the cream, strain it through a fine-mesh strainer.

Churn the mixture in your ice cream maker until it has pulled together into a stiff, soft-serve consistency, then transfer it to freezing containers, and harden it off for a day or so in your freezer.

While this looks like vanilla ice cream, it is very much its own thing. It is sweet and slightly smoky, with a rich, corny aftertaste. You wouldn’t think that sweet and smoky would go together, but grilled peaches or pineapples are delicious, to say nothing of barbecue sauce, so it shouldn’t be surprising how delicious this is. If you wanted to complicate things, you could top it with a spoonful of lime marmalade (lime goes extremely well with smoke and corn) but one of this ice cream’s biggest assets is its delicious simplicity.

And , of course, how interesting it is.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

In the kitchen with Evan Lang

Evan Lang and his wife started Dishon Gluten-Free Bakery in New Jersey in 2022, tapping into the farmers market scene in a cottage capacity. Their business quickly outgrew what they could produce from their home, and they moved to a commercial baking space in Philadelphia, continuing with farmers markets, selling their bread wholesale and shipping online. As it turned out, unsliced bread ships well, and the business continued to grow. After moving to New Hampshire, the couple decided to devote their energy to a brick-and-mortar bakery instead of wholesale baking. Lang is the face of their new storefront, Dishon Bakery (915 Elm St. in Manchester, 600-1773, dishonbakery.com), handles day-to-day operations, and does all the baking. Dishon, named after a river in Israel, sells exclusively gluten-free bread and bagels.

What is your must-have kitchen item?

Definitely a bench scraper. It is not only a must-have for baking bread, but it is a great universal tool for all sorts of things like cleaning your workspace and transferring chopped ingredients from the cutting board to a pan or bowl. It makes working in the kitchen more efficient, and I love how it simplifies so many tasks.

What would you have for your last meal?

If it was my very last meal, I would eat things full of gluten. Since I have celiac disease and have been on a gluten-free diet for over 12 years, I would indulge in all of the things I haven’t been able to eat. Most likely I’d get a pizza and a hoppy beer.

What is your favorite local eatery?

We only recently moved to Manchester and don’t eat out often, but we did have a really good experience at the Foundry recently — I love the way the decor reflects the history of the city and the food was great. I’m sure we have lots of places to try, so I’m open to any suggestions.

Who is a celebrity you would like to see eating your bread?

Larry David. I just find him hilarious, and his candid, no-nonsense approach to life would make for a great conversation. I think it would be fun to see him enjoy something I’ve baked.

What is your favorite thing you bake in the shop?

I love baking breads that have seeds on them. Not only is the process of seeding the dough really fun (spraying down the dough balls with water and then rolling them in seeds) but I think bread that is covered with seeds bakes up really nicely and looks beautiful at the end of the process.

What is the biggest food trend you see in New Hampshire right now?

Tough for me to answer this one as well since we just moved to Manchester, but my first impressions were that there is a big push to use local ingredients here. I see local eggs, meat, dairy and beer in a lot of eateries. I think that’s really commendable.

What is your favorite thing to cook at home?

I love slow-roasted chicken — whether it’s a full chicken or chicken quarters, with simple seasoning, then slow roasted for three or four hours makes the meat so tender it just falls off the bone. It’s comforting and delicious, making it my favorite home-cooked meal.

Gluten-Free Financiers
From Evan Lang, Dishon Bakery.

1/3 cup gluten-free all-purpose flour
3/4 cup powdered sugar
2/3 cup almond flour
4 egg whites
1/3 cup melted butter

Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).
In a mixing bowl, combine the gluten-free all-purpose flour, powdered sugar, and almond flour, mixing until well-blended.
Add the egg whites to the dry mixture one at a time, mixing thoroughly after each addition.
Pour in the melted butter and mix until the batter is smooth.
Lightly butter a muffin tin and spoon the batter evenly into the cups.
Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
Allow the financiers to cool in the tin for a few minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool completely. Enjoy!


Loukanikos, souvlaki and gyros

Assumption Greek Orthodox Church in Manchester holds its annual Greekfest

If this weekend’s Greekfest has a theme, it is hospitality.

It is time for Assumption Greek Orthodox Church in Manchester to hold its annual festival of Greek food and culture. According to Costa Georgopoulos, President of the Parish Council and chairperson of the festival, the timing for the event has been carefully worked out. There are three main Greek church food festivals in the area each year, he said.

“In our Manchester community, we have St. Nicholas Church, which does their festival in June. And then there’s Glendi of St. George. They do theirs in September. And then we do ours in the middle of it. So it’s kind of special, because St. Nicholas does a one-day festival, we do a two-day festival, then Glendi wraps up the events with a three-day festival.”

“We coordinate with the churches,” Georgopoulos continued, “and it worked out really well for everybody. We don’t want to interfere with other churches. We do communicate with one another and make sure that each event is successful. We support them and they support us.”

The Assumption Greekfest follows a familiar tradition, sharing with the community.

“We serve Greek food,” Georgopoulos said, “our traditional Greek food and pastries and many, many other items for our locals and all our visitors that come in for our festival. It’s a showcase of our traditional Greek food, our Greek hospitality, and our multicultural event for our community.”

This Greekfest will feature several aspects of Greek culture, such as dancing, religious iconography, and Greek music played by a Greek DJ, but Georgopoulos said the big draw is the food.

“We provide a little bit of taste of [a Greek] experience,” he said. “But it’s really to enjoy our food. That’s kind of the main reason people come: to enjoy our traditional Greek dishes.”

It goes without saying that a centerpiece of any Greek food festival is lamb — in this case, lamb kabobs cooked on a rotisserie.

“We have a couple of machines that cook it on skewers and we serve it with rice and a Greek salad,” Georgopoulos said. “Then we have our roasted chicken with Mediterranean seasoning. We have stuffed grape leaves. And we have meatballs. We have our Greek meatballs that we make ourselves.”

Another Greek dish that guests can expect is pastichio, which Georgopoulos described as a sort of Greek lasagna. “That is ground beef with the Greek macaroni and our bechamel sauce. It’s like a creamy sauce that goes on top and it’s one of our specialties that goes very well.” There will also be loukanikos, a type of Greek sausage, souvlaki (marinated pork), and, of course, gyros — Georgopoulos’ personal favorite. “We have a gyro station,” he said. We have our gyro cones and we put it on a rotisserie and we slice off the gyro and serve it in pita bread. It’s a combination of beef and lamb. It’s a very hot item that goes very well during the festival.”

When Greek Americans talk about “pita” it isn’t always clear whether they are talking about pita bread, or a dish made with dozens of layers of crispy filo dough. The most familiar pita is spanakopita, made with spinach, feta cheese and eggs, but there will be a second pita at this Greekfest. “We also have a cheese pita without the spinach,” said Georgopoulos. “Some people don’t like spinach, so we have a little bit of a variety of that as well.’

For many Greek food fans, though, the highlight of any festival is the sweets.

“We make our rice pudding at the church,” Georgopoulos said. “We have loukoumades, which is the fried dough balls. We have a station for that as well. We have a big machine that drops the dough and people can see them cook as they order. They’re very popular. It’s funny because every town has their own little spin on them, depending on which part of Greece that you visit.” Other desserts will include baklava, finikia (Greek honey cookies soaked in syrup), kourabiedes (butter cookies) and kataifi (pastries made with shredded filo and honey).

According to Georgopoulos, it’s all part of the Greek tradition of hospitality.

“The Greek foods, the Greek religious items and hospitality, we provide a little bit of taste of that experience.”

Greekfest
Assumption Greek Orthodox Church, 111 Island Pond Road, Manchester
Saturday, Aug. 24, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday, Aug. 25, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Admission and parking are free. Visit assumptionnh.org.

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