Word: blandly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...believe a beleaguered distributor. The affair between Padre Amaro and Amelia ends in trag-edy. But before that occurs, director Carlos Carrera's handsome film offers a richly detailed portrait of a church not so much corrupt as morally lazy after centuries in command of an overwhelmingly Catholic country. Bland bishops, older priests turning a blind eye to drug lords, churchly displeasure with the film's most heroic figure--a people's padre--are shown with cool objectivity. Exit polls in Mexico found that 70% of audiences approved of the movie...
From the hot meze, the Karentika ($3.50), a chickpea custard in a pie crust, is uniformly bland. It comes smothered, however, under a wonderfully piquant harissa, a spicy condiment made by pounding chili peppers in a mortar with salt, olive oil, and spices. Harissa is one of the foundations of all North African cooking, and it’s excellent at Baraka Café. You’d be well-advised to order harissa alone as a meze ($3.50), and forgo the Karentika. The Zaatar Coca ($4.50)—a hand-stretched bread, grilled over a fire, then sprinkled...
...reviewers of the time dismissed these films (though audiences lapped them up), but over the years academics, feminist theorists and the ga-ga cinephile community have insisted on a re-evaluation. They see in Sirk's films' sympathy for his painfully repressed heroines a slyly subversive assault on the bland values that strangled them...
...That places Hu, a smart but bland technocrat, in the awkward position of having to consolidate his power through Machiavellian wiles. Every Chinese leader since Mao has signaled his own arrival by ousting his predecessor's followers. Deng Xiaoping cast out Mao's choice, Hua Guofeng, to become China's supreme leader in 1978. And Jiang himself declared his independence in 1995 by ordering the arrest on corruption charges of Deng's faithful Beijing Party chief, Chen Xitong. "The congress has resolved very little, and Hu will have to move against someone" in Jiang's camp to show his strength...
...with the help of local farms. An earthy sort of goodness is evident in dishes such as the seared scallop special ($23). Five fresh, tender and juicy scallops surround an herbalita red wine reduction of bacon, celery, onion, carrot and gigante beans atop a mild turnip puree. The bland turnip does not add much to the scallops, which are quite tasty in their own right, and the bread pudding-esque herbalita is fatty and almost slimy, a poor textual complement for the scallops. One vegetarian option is an entrée-sized portion of ricotta and bread dumplings...