Shazam! Fury of the Gods (PG-13)

Shazam! Fury of the Gods (PG-13)

Billy Batson is trying to keep the Shazam team together even though his family of superhero kids is growing up in Shazam! Fury of the Gods.

Actually, I lie, the movie isn’t about that at all. It states that a few times as Billy’s (Asher Angel as the teen, Zachary Levi as the Shazam superhero he can turn himself in to) current concern, with him insisting that all his siblings and fellow superheroes attend all rescues and family meetings together. But the movie doesn’t really seem to know how to make his desire to hold his new family together part of the story, either plot-wise or emotionally, in any kind of an organic way. Mary (Grace Caroline Currey, in both her incarnations) has in fact aged out of the foster care system but continues to live with parents Rosa (Marta Milans) and Victor (Cooper Andrews) and works between super-suiting up to contribute money to the household. Billy is himself only a few months away from turning 18, as is his bestie Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer/Adam Brody), who occasionally superheroes alone and is trying to impress new girl Ann (Rachel Zegler) at school. Younger kids/Shazam team members Pedro (Jovan Armand/D.J. Cotrona), Eugene (Ian Chen/Ross Butler) and Darla (Faithe Herman/Meagan Good) are, uhm, also there. I feel like there was a plan for them to have story lines but it doesn’t really pan out.

Meanwhile, Greek goddesses, the Daughters of Atlas (who sound like a pretty good all-lady metal cover band) — Hespera (Helen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu) — retrieve the staff that the movie thankfully reminds us that Shazam broke in the first movie. As it turns out, breaking the staff actually broke the barrier between the worlds of the gods and humans. (Wizard Djimon Hounsou had domed the gods off in a floating bubble or something — look, all the lore stuff in this movie presented dumbly and I’m not going to worry about it too much). So these ladies, dressed in full Greek warrior garb, go retrieve the staff and force the Wizard to put it back together and then head to the human realm to find and take their power back from Shazam(s).

Eventually, there’s a dragon, a giant tree that creates serious root-based damage to the Phillies’ Citizens Bank Park, and winged lions and cyclops causing havoc in the streets of Philadelphia. And, hoo-boy, is it all boring. Let me say that again: Helen Mirren is a god (typecasting) and Lucy Liu rides a dragon to fight Shazam — and this movie could not figure out how to make any of that interesting, even in a campy way.

Every dumb bit of DC Extended Universe business was a drag on the movie (there are apparently two credits scenes, I stayed for one and I don’t regret leaving before the other). There is an absolutely baffling cameo at the end of the movie that is so ham-fisted it made me mad about a character I have previously liked. The movie cares way too much about the minutiae of the backstory of Daughters of Atlas without ever bothering to make the characters of Hespera, Kalypso and mystery sister No. 3 (not really a mystery) interesting. There are a lot of things that are started, little story elements that seem like they’re going to add emotional heft to the movie, that are just dropped like they were forgotten about. The movie feels senselessly loud — not just in volume but in how everything feels three times too much as if to distract us from how nothing it is. It is brightly colored scarves thrown all over the living room in hopes you won’t notice there’s no furniture or carpet or TV.

The only time this movie shows any bit of charm is when the family — specifically, with the kids in their child versions, sometimes with the parents — is together. (In general, this movie does not have a good balance of the kids and their adult superhero avatars.) I think the heart of this superhero character and his story comes back to his family, specifically his family of people who have ultimately chosen to be each other’s family. Their kindness and empathy and decision to trust and love each other after whatever traumas and losses they previously faced are the superpowers of this group, and the first Shazam! did a good job of making that an organic element of the story. This movie seems to forget that completely, which is perhaps why most of it feels so hollow despite being so packed with superhero-movie bloat.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods feels like an inferior product whose only selling point is familiar packaging rather than a story with characters we know and care about. C-

Rated PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by David F. Sandberg and written by Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan, Shazam! Fury of the Gods is two hours and 10 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by New Line Cinema.

Featured photo: Shazam! Fury of the Gods.

I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking, 435 pages)

When the protagonist of Rebecca Makkai’s gripping new novel is a teen, she arrives at a boarding school in New Hampshire knowing little about the school or the region.

“I remembered wondering if New Hampshire kids had accents, not understanding how few of my classmates would be from New Hampshire,” she says. Bodie Kane was not headed to Phillips Exeter, but to the fictional Granby School, somewhere deep in the woods in the general vicinity of Manchester, Concord and Peterborough.

It’s now two decades later and Kane, a successful podcaster in Los Angeles, is headed back to her alma mater to teach a two-week “mini-mester” on podcasting and film. The trip is stirring up troubling memories about the death of her beautiful Granby roommate named Thalia Keith, whose body had been found in the school pool.

A Black athletic trainer had been arrested, tried and found guilty of the murder, but enough questions remained that the case had attracted national attention, even being featured on “Dateline.” And with the rising interest in true crime and an attendant rise in internet sleuthing, people were still talking about the case online and pointing out problems with the state’s case against the trainer, even picking through a grainy video of the musical that Thalia had performed in shortly before her death.

Despite their being roommates, Bodie had not been especially close to Thalia, who was one of the “in” crowd. Thalia had the sort of effortless beauty that attracted everyone to her: “She played tennis, and suddenly tennis practice had spectators.” And Thalia had arrived at Granby with an exquisite wardrobe that contained 30 sweaters, while Bodie, whose tuition was paid by kindly members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, wasn’t remotely prepared for cold weather.

But Bodie, whose “Starlet Fever” podcast probed into little-known stories of often troubled Hollywood stars, has a knack for investigation. And so when one of the students in her podcasting mini-course proposes doing her initial podcast on Thalia’s murder — with the premise that Omar Evans had falsely confessed and was innocent — Bodie agrees.

Meanwhile, she seems to have trouble brewing back at home, where the father of her children (to whom she is legally married, but only on paper) is asking nervously if she has read the news and is asking her to stay off Twitter.

It would be reductive to call I Have Some Questions For You a thriller or a whodunit, although it has many components of both. Bodie, the narrator, has her own dark past; both her father and her brother are dead (the father having died because of something her brother did). When her mother fell apart, she was taken in by the Latter-day Saint family who paid for her to escape Indiana by going to Granby. And she brings parts of her own troubled history to her obsession with cases of abused and murdered women across geography and time, even while acknowledging the moral questions about probing into their cases in true-crime shows and podcasts.

“I have opinions about their deaths, ones I’m not entitled to,” Bodie says. “I’m queasy, at the same time, about the way they’ve become public property, subject to the collective imagination. I’m queasy about the fact that the women whose deaths I dwell on are mostly beautiful and well-off. That most were young, as we prefer our sacrificial lambs. That I’m not alone in my fixations.”

Thalia Keith’s murder is, in a sense, a fictional scaffolding on which Makkai builds a serious discussion about abused and murdered women, and how we exploit and fail them. While it’s a page-turner in a practical sense — the reader is carried in the current of wanting to know what really happened to Thalia, and what the role was of the teacher that Bodie keeps addressing in the narrative -— there are frequent mentions of real women who had violent, premature deaths, and the men responsible.

If this sounds like a lot to put on the reader, well, it is; the novel feels mildly oppressive at times, with all it is trying to take on. Plus, we know there is not going to be a happy ending: Thalia is dead when the novel opens; she will be dead when it ends. Meanwhile, we are going to hear about a lot of other dead women, abused women and sexually harassed women. Amazingly, in all of this, New Hampshire comes off just fine except for the repeated insinuations that its winters are cold. Makkai is careful not to suggest that any real-life police departments would force a false confession or that any real-life attorney would have so horribly failed the wrongly convicted man.

“New Hampshire’s public defenders are apparently excellent, and know everyone in the legal system of what is, after all, a very small state. They know the culture, and they don’t overdress for court,” she writes in what seems a bit of overkill. (In her acknowledgements, Makkai also credits Portsmouth public defender Stephanie Hausman, “who course-corrected and fine-tuned the legal parts of the book.”)

As such, while it’s not a novel that New Hampshire’s chambers of commerce will want to use for marketing, it’s not a bad one for the Granite State. And every good book is made better when it’s set in familiar environs. Look for this one when the lists of the best books of 2023 emerge later this year. A

Album Reviews 23/03/23

Personal Blend, Inhale and Release (self-released)

Rochester, N.Y.-based seven-piece reggae-rock band for parties, bar mitzvahs and rock clubs, if those things even still exist. Surf, reggae, rock, dub and Rasta are the game that’s afoot here; I’d agree with the press blurb that pronounces these songs “complex arrangements” featuring digital drum rhythms, punchy horn lines and ambient vocal melodies, but really, how complex would you want your drinking music to be? OK, maybe something along the lines of Disco Biscuits, Minus The Bear or geez, I dunno, there are times when these guys go off on a prog tangent (“Skin Deep” is quite priceless). It’s pretty tight for sure, probably owing to the machine-made drums. Overall there’s a psychedelic vibe to this stuff, I suppose, but this band is dedicated to standard-issue riddims even when they throw in arena-rock curveballs like spaghetti Western guitars for mariachi-esque effect (“Watch Your Step”). Nothing wrong here. A

Walking Bombs, Spiritual Dreams Above Empty Promises (self-released)

I’m told that DIY punk dude Morgan Y. Evans — not to be confused with country music’s Morgan Evans, who recently went through a painful divorce — will be releasing several albums this year, including this one, a set of lo-fi creepy tunes “about trying not to lose hope and to remain centered despite the world’s sorrows and perils.” Written just after the death of Evans’ mother, it deals with topics like mortality, spirituality, individuality, gun violence, love and being startled awake by technology. It definitely has an early Nick Cave-in-gloom-mode feel as it labels out sentiments intended to fix someone (probably the artist himself, it would seem), for instance how we need to remember that cynicism is not as powerful as our deeper hopes, dreams and empathy. If you have any love for the Throbbing Lobster era, there’s a lot here to like; I’d offer Swans as a comparison but it’s a little too speedy (as in midtempo) for that. Same ballpark, though. A

Playlist

• New albums will magically appear this Friday, March 31, so that you can buy them, like a good doobie, for your music collection! Let’s see here, we’ve got Packs, an Ottawa, Canada-based indie quartet that’s fronted by some art school slacker named Madeline Link, who decided that her chosen career of making papier mache animals or whatever she makes out of papier mache wasn’t as spiritually fulfilling (i.e. profitable) as making awful music to go with it. Anyway, Packs’ new album, Crispy Crunchy Nothing, is just about here, and man, the new single is so awful I can’t even comprehend it, like, if they’d at least add a weird Clinic-style organ player it’d be less bad than Broadcast, but no, they’re truly out to annoy me as much as they can. It’s like Pavement, but even more Pavement-y than the average human constitution is built to withstand. My, what wonderfully off-key guitars you have, Packs! Did they hold open auditions for the very worst musicians in Canada, or — you know, I mean, how could a band even be this bad? This junk is out of style anyway, if you ask me, like I really doubt Generation Z wants nothing more out of the party lives than listening to junk that sounds like it was rejected from the Juno soundtrack, you know? I was watching some “Why New Music Sucks” influencer video where some millennial girl was trying to explain that “sorry, older people, tastes change” (Really?! Someone call the New York Times!), and that now, in her wizened wisdom, she’s figured out that Zoomers want a mixture of styles, can you imagine such a thing? This means that when Zeppelin mixed early 1900s-era American folk with heavy metal, that didn’t count as a “mixture of styles,” nor did it count when her own generation (when it wasn’t listening to truly horrible bands like Slint and Franz Ferdinand) was guzzling purple drank and watching YouTubes of Megadeth vs. Pointer Sisters mashups. I mean, I’m confused, guys. I’m confused about a lot of things, actually, but I’m not confused about how awful Pavement was, nor am I convinced that garbagey trash like this Packs album has any redeeming musical qualities at all. But really, bon appetit if listenability doesn’t matter when you’re compiling your daily Soundcloud. (Note to self: How did this ever happen?)

• Great, time once again to try to remember the difference between Deerhoof, Deer Tick and Deerhunter, oh that’s right, I don’t care. No, I’m kidding, Deerhoof is the indie band who did — let’s see, blah blah blah — never mind, no one reading this has ever heard any of their songs, unless they were at a frat party in 2005 maybe? So anyway, their fast-approaching new disk, titled Miracle-Level, features the single “Sit Down, Let Me Tell You a Story,” and boy is it awful. Absolutely terrible.

• Right, right, so James Holden is a British weird-beard electro DJ, and his new LP, This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities, has a new single making the rounds, called “Common Land,” which is pretty cool, some bizarre but accessible noise loops and a neat breakbeat. I have heard much worse songs before in my life.

• Lastly, let’s get the new Hold Steady album, The Price of Progress, out of the way so I don’t have to think about oi-rock again this week. Hm, wait, this new single, “Sideways Skull” is OK if you like noise-rock. It’s like Frank Black playing for early Big Black, a comparison you’d appreciate if you had any shred of hope that rock ’n’ roll might rise again (it won’t, but that hasn’t stopped it from trying once in a while).

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

The berry best cookies

Winter should be winding down at this point, but fresh local produce is still months away in New Hampshire. However, with a little creativity, you can enjoy treats that are full of summer flavors.

These cookies are reminiscent of summer, thanks to the addition of freeze-dried strawberries. This ingredient is the most important to consider when shopping for this recipe. You cannot use fresh or dried strawberries. Fresh strawberries have too much moisture, and dried strawberries would be chewy. However, freeze-dried strawberries are perfect, as the flavor is intense, and their crispness allows them to be diced easily.

The other ingredient of note is the white chocolate chips. They add a nice contrast of sweetness to the strawberries. Together they mimic a strawberry shortcake topped with whipped cream.

The cookies puff up when baking but flatten out while cooling. Don’t be alarmed when you return to check on them. They still are perfect. The cookies should have a moist and tender interior with a slightly crispy edge.

Now you can enjoy the flavors of summer even on a chilly day!

The berry best cookies
Makes 20

½ cup unsalted butter softened
½ cup granulated sugar
½ cup light brown sugar
1 large egg
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1⅓ cup all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup freeze-dried strawberries diced
½ cup white chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
In the bowl of a stand mixer or in a large bowl with a hand mixer, cream butter and both sugars on speed 2 for 4 minutes.
Add egg, beating to incorporate.
Add vanilla, and mix.
Add flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt, and mix until incorporated.
Add diced, freeze-dried strawberries and white chocolate chips, stirring until combined.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Place heaping teaspoonfuls of batter on the baking sheet about 2 inches apart.
Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until bottoms are golden.
Transfer to a baking rack to cool completely.

Featured photo: The berry best cookies. Photo by Michele Pesula Kuegler.

In the kitchen with Mike McDade

Mike McDade of Hollis is the owner and founder of Saucehound (saucehoundbbq.com, amazon.com/saucehound and on Facebook and Instagram), offering two craft barbecue sauces and spice rubs each. A native of Billerica, Mass., and an award-winning competitive barbecuer, McDade got his start in the world of barbecue sauces and rubs originally as a side business before deciding to jump in full-time after the start of the pandemic. The company’s name and logo, he said, are inspired by his pet bulldog, Chunk. “He was the face of the barbecue team,” McDade said. “He would just sit there next to me for hours on end, while I cooked barbecue, and stare at the smoker.” Saucehound’s products — which include the Original Recipe competition barbecue sauce and rub, and the “Naughty Dog” sauce and rub, featuring habanero and jalapeno peppers — are available in several locations across New Hampshire and Massachusetts. See saucehoundbbq.com/findus for a full list of stores.

What is your must-have kitchen item?

I would say my cast iron pan. … Whatever you’re cooking, it’s just such a great tool to have.

What would you have for your last meal?

Really good pizza, and a side of burnt ends.

What is your favorite local restaurant?

Hollis Country Kitchen. They have a corned beef hash eggs Benedict, and it is unbelievable.

What celebrity would you like to see trying one of your products?

It’s got to be Guy Fieri — he’s the mayor of Flavortown! A lot of people pay attention to him and I would just love to see him taste my sauce and then see that spiky blonde hair get blown back. … I actually met him once. He’s a super nice guy. He was at the 2011 Jack Daniel’s world barbecue championship.

What is your favorite product that you offer?

I love my sauces, but in my own cooking in my house the rubs are what I use the most. … My favorite, because I like a little bit of heat, is the Naughty Dog rub. What I like it on the most is a BLT. … I’ll usually just fry bacon in a pan the way you normally would, and then as soon as I take it out of the grease, I’ll sprinkle the rub on there and then let it sit and kind of melt in for a minute or so. The extra flavor on the bacon with a good classic BLT is awesome.

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

I do think the explosion of mobile options is interesting. I’m sure Covid had something to do with that, but there was a big trend in food trucks and stuff like that even before Covid hit.

What is your favorite thing to cook at home?

Pizza. I make my own sauce, and I usually make my own dough but in a pinch I’ll go pick up a dough from the supermarket. … I love pizza in general, but my kids absolutely love mine, and both of them like to help out with me in the kitchen.

Saucehound BLT
Courtesy of Mike McDade of Saucehound

2 slices of bread of choice
Romaine or iceberg lettuce
Tomato slices
Mayonnaise
Bacon
Saucehound BBQ rub (“Naughty Dog” rub recommended for an extra zip)

For the bacon: Fry bacon in a pan as normal. As soon as it comes out of the pan, while still hot, sprinkle both sides with the Saucehound barbecue rub and cover with tin foil to let the spices soak in. Alternatively, line a cookie sheet with parchment paper, season both sides of the bacon with the rub and bake at 425 degrees or until the desired crispiness is reached.

Very lightly toast the bread so that it’s warm but still soft. Apply a generous amount of mayonnaise to both bread slices. Put down a layer of lettuce on one slice, then cut enough slices of tomato to form your second layer. Place the bacon on top of the tomato slices. Top with your second slice of bread and cut diagonally.


Featured photo: Mike McDade, owner and founder of Saucehound. Courtesy photo.

Wake up with bacon

Shaker Road Provisions’ new breakfast menu

When George “Rocky” Burpee of Loudon decided he was in the mood for some homemade bacon one day in February 2021, he couldn’t have imagined the kind of career trajectory it would set off for him in just a few short years. By the end of that summer, he quit his day job to sell his own small-batch bacon at several local farmers markets. A butcher shop-like retail space featuring an expanded line of his scratch-made bacon-themed foods then arrived in the former Smokeshow Barbeque storefront in Concord the following spring.

Now, Burpee has expanded even further, this time in the form of a full-service breakfast menu. Shaker Road Provisions, named after his home street where the bacon venture all started, now offers a variety of scratch-cooked breakfast items five days a week. Plans are in the works to acquire a liquor license for serving brunch cocktails, mostly on Saturdays.

“My wife, Laura [Munyon], and I had always wanted to have a restaurant,” Burpee said. “When the farmers markets ended back in October, we thought, well, why don’t we look into doing a little breakfast place to sort of supplement the income until the markets start up again. … Ever since we opened here, people have come in looking for food, and we had always been kind of on the edge of like, ‘Hey, this is something we can do.’”

You’ll still be able to get bacon slices and bacon bits at the shop, as well as the bacon burgers, bacon macaroni and cheese, chicken salad and other bacon-infused items Burpee has sold out of his deli case since opening the shop last April. But now the space’s interior has been rearranged to accommodate four small tables for dining, and there are plans to incorporate a few more.

“You won’t find English muffins or bagels or breakfast sandwiches like that. Our main focus is on our waffles,” Burpee said of the new breakfast menu. “We make an amazing waffle here in house, Eggo-sized for reference, and we do breakfast sandwiches with those.”

Each menu item, he added, is named after the place where it originated from. The Concord, for example, is their signature sandwich, featuring a sausage patty, a fried egg and Vermont cheddar cheese served between two house-made apple cider waffles. Then there’s the Costa Rican, a breakfast burrito that’s stuffed with authentic Latin American rice, scrambled egg, Cotija cheese, avocado, grilled onions and peppers and Burpee’s own bacon. That one, Burpee said, is served with a side of fresh pineapple salsa that he makes himself.

“I wanted to recreate our favorite burrito that we had when we were down in Costa Rica, and so I worked hard to make it … as close as I could to the way they made it down there,” he said.

Specials are switched up every Friday. Those options have included everything from a breakfast quesadilla with egg, cheese, bacon, sausage, peppers, onions and a side of house pineapple habanero hot sauce to a corned beef hash wrap, featuring chopped and grilled homemade brisket with diced potatoes, roasted garlic, sauteed onions, eggs and cheese in a flour tortilla. Burpee has even done his own Sloppy Joe eggs, complete with scratch-made hollandaise sauce and cheesy garlic and onion hash browns on the side, and bacon “steak” and eggs, using half-inch-thick pieces of bacon that are slow-cooked.

“Our hope is that as this gets bigger, if we can get breakfast to where it’s a little bit busier … we want to transition into doing lunch as well,” Burpee said. “That’s our goal right now, is to do breakfast and lunch, and then especially for the weekend, to get a liquor license so we can bring in bloody marys and mimosas and stuff like that.”

Shaker Road Provisions’ presence at farmers markets will continue this year — the company participates in the Concord and Salem outdoor markets during the summer, and may be picking up one or two more depending on how the application process goes.

“We’ve got a girl that works for me … who is basically going to take over the bacon business, so she’ll be doing the marinating, smoking, slicing and packaging, and then she’ll be going to the farmers markets for us,” Burpee said. “That way, my wife and I are basically running the breakfast thing. So both things will still exist, but as we get into the market season they’ll kind of separate into their own entities.”

Shaker Road Provisions
Where: 89 Fort Eddy Road, Suite 2, Concord
Hours: Tuesday and Wednesday, 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Thursday, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Friday and Saturday, 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. — breakfast is served from 6 to 11 a.m. during the week and from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays
More info: Visit shakerroadprovisions.com, find them on Facebook and Instagram @shakerroadprovisions or call 856-7400

Featured photo: Breakfast quesadilla. Photo courtesy of Shaker Road Provisions.

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