Les Jones

Dinner and a Movie: La Parigo and “Star Trek”

Saturday, May 16th, 2009 | A&E, Food & Drink, Home Life | Permalink | 6 Comments |

The Dinner
Melissa had been wanting to go to La Parigo in downtown Knoxville since they opened six months or so ago. It’s a small setting inside with a covered patio outside where we ate and watched the rain. Apparently they used to be in Bearden in Mango’s old building and Southern Living them named them one of the top three French restaurants in the South, which for all I know is like being one of the three best BBQ restaurants in France.

Everything we ate except the dessert was from the du jour selections. Salad was an ahi tuna tartar with blueberries. I liked it; Melissa was crazy for it. Soup was a creamy potato and leek. Melissa liked it; I thought it was delicious and would order it again. The entree was a white fish whose name I didn’t recognize with a caper sauce, tomatoes, and sauteed Brusell sprouts, which were better than they sound, I swear.

Our waiter was especially professional, unobtrusive, and likable. I wish I had asked his name so I could thank him here for his hospitality.

Dessert was a pistachio creme brulee. It was good, but not as Pistachio-ey as I expected (and it wasn’t green, either). I prefer the Northshore Brasserie’s creme brulee with its incredibly delicate caramelized top, and in general I couldn’t help comparing La Parigo to two other Knoxville restaurants we like, the Brasserie and Bistro By The Tracks. The former is explicitly French, while the latter has French as one of its influences and is my favorite restaurant in Knoxville for the sheer enjoyment of food I can’t get anywhere else.

Right now La Parigo is in third place. We liked it quite a bit, but it stopped short of being mind-blowing. Still, I’m looking forward to our next visit to have my mind blown.

The Movie
Star Trek on the other hand was completely mind-blowing. On the big screen its vision is enormous and overwhelming. The young actors inhabiting the rebooted Trek universe are brilliant and charismatic - you can’t help worrying about them when they’re in danger, which they are constantly. I’m not a big Star Trek fan and I’m ready to pay to see it at the theater again.

From reading Jason Kottke I knew going in that the movie made extensive use of lens flare. It’s as if they’re so close to the stars with no atmosphere to protect them that there is blinding light everywhere that the camera can’t escape it. Normally lens flare is something the director and cameraman try to avoid. But just as with distortion in musical instruments you can use that mistake, that input overload, to create new textures and background and that’s what they did here to good effect.

This morning I mentioned jwz’s take on time travel: “If your story is not about time travel, but it has time travel in it, then your story sucks.” The new Trek movie falls into the sucks camp by that standard. I don’t think the time travel here really makes sense since it’s of the going-back-in-time-to-change-history variety. (If that’s the case, someone should go back in time to undo the bad guy’s actions. Either events mean something or they don’t.) It also wasn’t strictly necessary. They could have changed the story ever so slightly to change the bad guy’s motivation and done away with time travel altogether.

Slight spoilerage - highlight the text to read. It’s almost as if they used the time travel conceit to shoehorn Leonard Nimoy into the movie. And if that’s the case that would be bad, except that I really, really enjoyed him here. It’s as if my favorite uncle came back from the dead and I just can’t get enough of listening to his gravelly but wise voice. So all in all I’ll take the time travel nonsense to see the original Spock better than ever.

Ratings

La Parigo - Magnificque

Star Trek - Mother Vulcan Awesome

Tags: dinner and a movie