News

Movie Review Film has plenty of shortcomings

Lifeless, stagey and lacking a palpable subversive pulse despite the ready opportunities offered by the material, Cosmopolis is a stillborn adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel that will initially attract some Robert Pattinson fans but will be widely met with audience indifference.

DeLillo's short, chilly 2003 book adopted a Ulysses-like format of a man's journey across a city in a single day in a white stretch limo to presciently foresee the anarchic "Occupy" mentality rising up to protest the financial shenanigans of the ultra-rich.

The film, from director David Cronenberg, is remarkably prosaic, confined through long stretches to the dark and narrow interior of the car, only to be concluded by a static half-hour final scene that feels like a two-character, off-Broadway play.

Just a few simple steps can save you big bucks on food

Melissa d'Arabian is a home economist for a new era. Actually, she's more CFO than home ec.

That's because the Food Network host is as adept at balancing ledger sheets as she is at getting dinner on the table.

It's a handy skill that comes with being a trained financial strategist, and turned out to be an unlikely backbone for her culinary career. Her basic message to thrifty home cooks? Stretch your food dollars by treating your kitchen in terms of profit and loss.

"As the manager of a household you're actually running a fairly complicated business," she says. "There are simple lessons we can take from the business world and apply to our own homes."

Before hosting Food Network's Ten Dollar Dinners, d'Arabian was a financial services consultant, then a high-powered financial executive for The Walt Disney Co.

Movie Review Pretty movie lost to flat, sappy tale

You'll either be inspired or nauseated by The Odd Life of Timothy Green. This is a member of the nauseated camp speaking.

The movie from novelist and filmmaker Peter Hedges, author of What's Eating Gilbert Grape and creator of Katie Holmes's lovely independent feature Pieces of April, strains to Disney-ize the family dysfunction territory he explored so well in those works.

In Timothy Green, it's all gone flat, mushy and hollow. Adapting a short story by Ahmet Zappa (son of Frank), writer-director Hedges tries for old-fashioned wholesomeness only to flounder amid a well-intended but sappy tale of a childless couple mystically granted a test run at parenthood.

Hedges assembled an impressive cast, led by Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton as the parents, and the actors buy into the story's conceits wholeheartedly. The characters are simplistic and artificial, though, behaving in ways that often are insultingly naive and sometimes just plain stupid.

Q and A Nina Garcia knows what's in and out

As a judge on Lifetime's Project Runway, the fashion director of Marie Claire and the author of four books on dressing your best, Nina Garcia is no stranger to voicing her opinions on what's in and what's out. That's why she'll fit right in as the new style voice and fashion collector/curator for J.C. Penney. If you haven't hit up the 99-year-old retailer since grade school, you could be pleasantly surprised to see the ways in which Garcia is lending it her finely tuned sartorial eye.

Q: What exactly does your new role entail?

A: I'll work closely with the merchandising and design teams, offering them insight into what they might need and what they might want to add that season. I'll give advice and share the experience I've learned after 15-odd years in fashion.

Q: Any particular trends you're looking forward to this fall?

Pembroke couple proves you don't need a lot of land for a great garden

People often complain that they'd love to have a garden but don't even attempt it because their lot is too small or too shady. One couple in Pembroke has tackled both these problems, and the resulting gardens around their suburban home are not only breathtakingly beautiful but full of surprises.

Vinny and Erika Flewelling have lived on a small corner lot for 37 years. Over time, they've lost some large, older trees and planted some new ones. They kept the stumps of a tall blue spruce and a roadside maple and turned them into supports for collections of bird houses, wind chimes and other garden art, along with hanging baskets and flowering vines. The newer trees - maples and ash - have grown up to cast their shade on the many varieties of hosta, as well as caladiums and other shade-loving plants.

I used to consider the occasional massage a blissful, self-indulgent luxury. But as I've gotten older, I've become more and more convinced that regular rubdowns are an important prescription for physical and mental well-being.

In fact, there is a growing body of research confirming that massage can be good medicine.

"We now know that massage therapy is not just for pleasure, but has significant psychological, physiological and biochemical effects that enhance health," says Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami Medical School, which has conducted more than 100 studies showing that massage's benefits can include positive effects on depression and anxiety, sleep, stress hormones, immunity and pain relief.

Baggage Check

Q: My closest friend just got a devastating cancer diagnosis. There's a chance she will beat this and if anyone can fight it, she can.

But I'm so thrown and stressed and saddened by this I don't think I'm being a good friend. I keep thinking about her young children and her husband and my own potential loss of her. I'm finding it difficult to be there for her when I'm so sad.

A: Be honest with her about not knowing what to say and how it's affecting you - "I sometimes don't want to show you how sad I am about this." But it's simply not fair right now for you to burden her with your pain.

You deserve your own support, whether it's from your family, other friends or through counseling.

Monitor board of contributors Don't let bad choices derail exercise

As a physical therapist, I often recommend bicycling as an excellent form of aerobic exercise. It helps reduce the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and chronic pain and to mitigate these problems. It is also an economical means to stay healthy and offers an alternative to car transportation, which allows people to be green while getting lean. So what's the problem?

The problem with my recommendation is that I don't typically follow it up with these suggestions:

1. Wear a helmet.

2. Don't smoke a cigarette while riding.

3. Obey the rules of the road.

4. Avoid riding in the dark.

By not discussing these four seemingly obvious rules, I expose my patients to potential injury that would far outweigh the health benefits of cycling.

North Carolina Perhaps fitting that controversy surrounds convention in Charlotte

When all is said and done, perhaps it was destiny that Charlotte host the Democratic National Convention - and that its choice be controversial.

After all, the city and surrounding county of Mecklenburg are the main players in one of North Carolina's great historic controversies: whether a document known as the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence was signed here more than a year before that other Declaration of Independence (the one drafted by Thomas Jefferson) showed up in 1776.

The Mecklenburg declaration wasn't published until 1819, but the date of its supposed signing, May 20, 1775, is printed on the North Carolina state flag, even though most historians no longer believe the document ever existed.

the screenplay

A new Bible translation tackles the challenge of turning ancient Greek and Hebrew texts into modern American English and then adds a twist: It's written like a screenplay.

Take the passage from Genesis in which God gets angry at Adam for eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil:

"Adam (pointing at the woman): It was she! The woman You gave me as a companion put the fruit in my hands, and I ate it.

"God (to the woman): What have you done?

"Eve: It was the serpent! He tricked me, and I ate."

Later, Eve bears her first son, Cain.

"Eve (excited): Look, I have created a new human, a male child, with the help of the Eternal."

Even people who have never read the Bible could probably guess that other translations don't say Adam pointed his finger at Eve when he blamed her for his disobedience. Neither do other Bibles describe Eve as "excited" about her newborn son.

Warner Contemporary gallery opens at Indian Museum

What are medicine bags decorated with space-age beads doing in the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum?

Displayed alongside traditional creations, they are part of the current exhibit in the museum's new Contemporary Art Gallery, "Like Breathing: Native American Quill and Beadwork," which runs through Oct. 31.

What the pieces have in common is that they are all new.

The gallery grew out of a request by basket-maker Bill Gould and craftsman Darryl Peasley, who asked if the museum could provide a space for high quality, locally produced art. Gould- makers from Warner, are the first Native American juried members of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen.

Executive Director Lynn Clark and Curator Nancy Jo Chabot liked the idea. The gallery would not only benefit the artists but also inform visitors that native culture is alive and flourishing.

Film review

The fourth film in the Bourne franchise, The Bourne Legacy, may seem heady and intentionally disorienting and hard to follow at first - until you realize it's really about drug addiction, and the lengths to which a junkie will go to get his fix.

Structurally, yes, it's loaded with all the lies, schemes and high-tech trickery that are staples of the espionage genre. But a deeper, more individualistic source of tension propels the film along. Think of it as Drugstore Cowboy with an international scope and more explosions. That may help as you compare it with the first three films in the series that starred Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, the amnesiac CIA assassin of Robert Ludlum's novels, and established Damon as the rare action star who can actually act.

Check out these fabulous dishes made using summer's bounty of local foods Embed multimedia (photos, galleries, audio, map):  Home plate Home plate Home plate

Last week, thanks to a grant from the Capital Area Wellness Coalition, I spent a few days rounding up local food from people who sell every Wednesday at the Canterbury Community Farmers Market. Pork and goat cheese mozzarella from Our Place Farm in Loudon. Bicolor corn and tomatoes from Warner River Organics. Tomina's Lemon balm cookie dough made in Laconia. A tangy fresh cow milk cheese called quark from Brookford farm in Canterbury, along with just-spun cream and beets and, best of all, bread flour made from wheat they grow themselves. Maple syrup and cucumbers from North Family Farm (which happens to be owned by my brother- and sister-in-law).

Salty olives and capers and a good-quality chicken sausage make all the difference in this Paleo Diet-friendly main course. To reduce prep time further, shop at a salad bar for cut vegetables. Feel free to add red bell peppers, eggplant or tomatoes, and adjust the cooking time accordingly. The recipe was tested using an organic apple chicken sausage.

Chicken Sausage With Squash and Fresh Herbs

1 medium red onion

12 ounces cooked chicken sausage (in links)

2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more as needed

1½ pounds mixed summer squash and zucchini

½ cup mixed fresh flat-leaf parsley, basil and/or thyme leaves

½ cup pitted kalamata olives (about 25)

¼ teaspoon salt, more to taste

¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, more to taste

¼ cup capers, drained

half a lemon

Cut the onion into very thin slices. Cut the sausage crosswise into 2-inch chunks.

Soup sparked the idea for this dish

There are few foods as simple, delicious and complete as fresh seasonal corn on the cob. When it's really fresh, I'll even eat it raw. No boiling, no butter, no salt. It's perfectly sweet and tender right off the stalk.

Still, even perfection can get boring, and I recently began wondering what else I could do with fresh corn. I thought back to my days as the host of the Food Network's Cooking Live, when one of my guest chefs whipped up some corn soup and thickened it with pureed corn.

Of course, I'd known that any pureed vegetable will thicken a stew or soup. But corn has a secret ingredient - Duh! - cornstarch. I was astonished by the creaminess and thickness of my guest's soup.

This recipe was inspired by that soup. Creamed corn is thus named because it usually depends on cream for its creaminess. That's a problem for me for a couple of reasons. The cream not only makes the dish too rich, it also tends to mask the flavor of the corn.

Streep, Jones play stuck-in-rut couple

Here's how surprisingly effective Hope Springs is: It will make you want to go home and have sex with your spouse afterward. Or at least share a longer hug or a more passionate kiss.

You don't have to be married for 31 years like the stuck-in-a-rut couple Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones play to feel inspired by the film's message about the importance of keeping your relationship alive. It sounds like a cliche because it is a cliche, and more: It's a cottage industry, one that's launched countless afternoon talk show episodes and shelf after shelf of self-help books.

Learn more about living fossils with a loooooong history

The recent rain has brought much needed moisture to our region and returned the woods to a panorama of lush textures and colors. Some of the main contributors to this array of verdant frilliness are ferns.

Ferns are ancient plants. Fossil records show that they first appeared about 360 million years ago. If that isn't reason enough to appreciate them, I don't know what is. But there is more to like about ferns.

They have a fascinating life history. Instead of producing flowers or seeds like other vascular plants they make spores, sometimes millions of them. One scientist estimated that a single leaf from a wood fern produced 7 million spores! The spores come in little cases called sori. In some species they are found on the underside of the leaf or frond, while in other species they grow on a separate fertile frond. The pattern of the sori on the leaves or the shape and color of the fertile frond are often used as distinguishing identification features.

Think outside the box when booking

Last week I gave a somewhat grumpy overview of airfare pricing, tempered a bit with an alert to watch for a probable drop in fares across the board around Aug. 20-21. But let's say the drop doesn't help you that much - perhaps you're traveling as a family of four or more. Is there anything else you can do to reduce the overall cost of vacationing? Indeed, yes!

There's still enough summer left for optimism, but the season is going by fast. If you didn't plant it, cultivate it or nurture the heck out of it this year, you've probably had a so-so year for certain plants. Take heart, for it wasn't entirely your fault.

Many of the old standbys, some of our most beloved perennial plants (orange daylilies or phlox panniculata, which are renowned for their steadfast endurance), have bloomed and gone by in a flash.

And what a tsunami of blueberries we've had - many were coming way ahead of season and all at once, but now there are none or few blueberries left.

Geraniums, those classic and stalwart sun-loving heat-tolerant favorites, under-performed for many. Liberal pruning encourages dense growth, and geraniums like well-drained, fertile, moist soil, but never wet leaves.

Trying to avoid spoilers in this social media-driven world is a sport all its own

Mandy Hauck turned 25 on Wednesday, but she avoided Facebook and her happy birthday messages to steer clear of Olympic spoilers about her favorite sport, fencing.

Hauck has also deleted her iPhone apps for CNN and ESPN, opting for news from the London Games the old-fashioned way, via TV coverage that's time-delayed by NBC for prime time.

The network is making live streams of the action available in real time online. Hauck's hanging tough, though, in favor of doing actual work during the day as the marketing communications manager for a software company in Atlanta, a job that requires her to stay on Twitter while she attempts to stay away from its main page and trending topics.