The Cheese Board Collective (a food review)

This all began several years ago. There was this list of the top 100 pizza restaurants in the country, and I decided to check it out, in no small part because my middle child would subsist off of pizza alone if we would let him. Which I get, I was the same way when I was his age. As it turned out, many of the top pizza places are right here in California -- no surprise, actually -- and three of them are (or were at the time) right here in the Bay Area. I added a couple of them to the list my wife and I keep of things we want to do or try. Yes, we do actually keep a list for that because we, or at least I, would forget them if we didn't keep a list.

Some of the things on the list, especially the restaurants (because we don't go out to eat all the often), we will never get to, and we probably wouldn't have gotten to The Cheese Board except that my wife had an overnight event (that we may discuss later but not right now) down in Oakland a few years ago and we had to eat out a few times. We decided to drive through Berkeley on our way home and have dinner at The Cheese Board because it was the place off our list that my wife most wanted to try.

There are a few unique things about The Cheese Board:
1. It's a collective, meaning that it's owned by the employees. On top of that, all of the employees, no matter what they do, make the same wage. It's all pretty cool.
2. It's not just a pizza place. Actually, it's a cheese shop, or that's what it started out as. Or something. The pizza came later.
3. The pizza only comes in one size. You can buy a whole pizza or a half pizza. Or, hey, even two whole pizzas!
4. They only make one kind of pizza per day, so, if you want a pizza, you get what they made not what you choose.
5. All the pizzas are vegetarian. Not in the traditional sense of pizzas; these pizzas are... creative. Both in the veggies used and the kinds of cheeses.
Remember that line in Inside Out? You know, it went something like, "Thanks, San Francisco! You ruined pizza!" Well, The Cheese Board would be a perfect example of what Mr. Anger was talking about... except that it's SO GOOD.

I don't remember what was on that first pizza we had, but I'll admit to being a bit wary of it. I like some veggies on my pizza, but I've always been more of a meat pizza person. Though, actually, now that we make pizza at home, I've come to realize that, when done correctly, the veggies add much more flavor than the meat. It's just that you're never going to get more than token flavor from veggies, or even the meat, from any chain pizza place. They don't do the right prepping to bring the flavor out of things. Red bell pepper, when properly grilled, is a flavor explosion on your pizza.
But I digress...

So, yeah, I don't remember what went on that first pizza, but it was nothing less than amazing. What I remember most about it was the incredible cheese. And, again, I'm not really a fan of "cheese pizza," because what's the point? Except, again, I've come to realize that my feeling about that has more to do with the failure of chain joints to provide anything more than melted cardboard on their cardboard crusts. The pizza we got at The Cheese Board was enough to rocket that place to my pick for pizza place ever.

And I'm not alone in that. There was recently an article (and, yes, I should have saved the link, but I didn't, and I'm not going to go look for it) about how The Cheese Board is one of the top three restaurants -- not pizza places, restaurants -- in the nation. It's certainly one of our favorite places to go... when we're anywhere near it. Last week, when returning from Monterey, we made a very deliberate detour through Berkeley just to stop for pizza.

Look, even my younger son loves it, and he doesn't eat vegetables unless we make him.

That first visit aside, since then we've had pizza with corn on it... Yes, I said corn! And, yeah, I was like, "What...?" when I saw that on the menu for their pizza that day, but it was... Unbelievable. I mean, it was corn! On pizza! But it added this bit of flavor that really worked.
And, yes, we've had pizza with broccoli.
This last time we stopped, it was bell pepper and olives.
I think that's it, just the four visits over about three years
I'd go more if I could, but my wife is convinced, no matter how good it is, that a two-three hour round trip is too far to go for pizza.

Coco (a movie review post)

This turns out to be a difficult movie for me to review. Seriously, I've been contemplating the review for two days and still haven't figured out how exactly I want to approach this.

The easy thing to do is just to say that it's a great movie, because it is a great movie. In fact, since Toy Story 3 came out in 2010, Coco is one of only two great movies that Pixar has released, the other being Inside Out. The story is well-told and heartfelt. Heartfelt enough that it brought a tear to my eye. The aforementioned Toy Story 3 was the last movie to do that to me, as far as I remember.

As per Pixar, even in their less than good movies, the animation was fantastic. And fantastic in a way that we really haven't seen before: It was fabulously colorful. Like a sugar skull:

In fact, there's not anything I can point to that I would say would make the movie better. No improvements necessary.

And, yet...

And, yet, I am uncomfortable with the message, the message that family always comes first and is most important. More important than anything. I just... well... That's just not true.

I could get into examples of why that's not true, but it's probably not really necessary. Either you agree with the statement or you don't and nothing I say is going to matter one way or the other. Besides, any examples I could make could be entire posts, and I don't want to get into trying to summarize things in a way that is succinct. For instance, I could say:

When my grandmother died, my uncle, through unethical and possibly illegal methods, stole all of  the land my grandparent's had owned, leaving my mother and my aunt with virtually nothing.

But, then, you're going to want me to explain that, and I don't feel like getting into it. The short of it is that family shouldn't get any special passes just because they're family.

However, my disagreement with the message doesn't detract from the movie itself; the movie is great, and you should certainly go see it. At the theater even. It's really a movie which should be enjoyed on the big screen.

Finding Dory (a movie review post)

I want to continue to believe in Pixar; I really do. I've met people who work there, was friends with one of the animators for a while (until we fell out of touch), and I've been to the studio. Their early movies are some of the best films ever made. However, it's undeniable at this point that their actual acquisition by Disney has had a detrimental effect. Since Disney took over, four of the seven films they have produced have been sequels, and three of their next four movies in production at this moment are also sequels. They've almost ceased to cover any new ground, the exceptions being Toy Story 3 and Inside Out.

So, yeah, Finding Dory does nothing new, covers no new ground, er, um, water. Sure, it's entertaining. It has some funny moments and introduces one new, great character, but it's virtually identical to Finding Nemo and strays out of the realm of believability far more frequently. And, yeah, I know it's a movie about talking, sentient fish, and I'll buy in for that, but I can't quite go all the way to octopus-driving-truck.

Speaking of the octopus, Hank, he's great. His character arc is also completely predictable, but he's a very fun character while onscreen. Really, he steals the whole thing. He would have been better, though, if he wasn't just the new incarnation of Gill, the escape-focused fish from Finding Nemo. No, it doesn't change the character sufficiently to have Hank wanting to escape in rather than escape out.

I guess what it really comes down to is this: If you've seen Finding Nemo, there's no real reason to see this movie unless you just really loved it and want to see the characters from a slightly different angle doing basically the same thing over again. If you have kids who are younger than Finding Nemo, they'll probably love Finding Dory and it won't matter whether they've seen Nemo or not. Kids notoriously love to watch the same thing over and over again (I still kind of have nightmares about Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, a movie I never ever need to see again).

If you haven't seen Finding Nemo... I don't know. I'd probably say just go watch Finding Nemo because it's a better movie. All I know is that when I come out of a movie and am glad I didn't have to pay full price for it (because we had two free tickets), then I can't in good conscience give it a whole-hearted recommendation. If you have the time and don't mind spending the money, sure, it's not going to drive you from the theater in disgust. It's good. Or good enough. But it's not great. It's not even Pixar-good. It's Cars 2 and Monsters University, movies completely playing to the formulas of their predecessors to rake in a buck.

Inside Out (a movie review post)

I think it's safe to say that it's been a few years since Pixar put out a truly great film. Not that I haven't enjoyed the last few, but they've lacked a certain Pixar-ness. And if you're wondering what I mean by "Pixar-ness," well, I can't answer that question. You might as well ask me to define love definitively. Whatever it is, though, Inside Out has it.

My first thought was that this is the best movie they've done since Up (because I was forgetting that Toy Story 3 was actually after Up because those movies exist all together somewhere outside of the rest of the Pixar movies). That was before I found out that this one is made by the same guy that did Up, Pete Docter. This one is just as good (I know because my wife spent approximately half of the movie crying and the other half laughing).

The first most interesting thing about the movie is the representation of how the mind works. Evidently, a lot of research went into getting the science of it correct, even if just for an animated movie. The whole thing started, basically, as a science question because, when his daughter entered adolescence, Docter asked himself the question, "I wonder what's going on her brain." And, so, he tried to find out. And, then, made a movie about it.

The idea of there being core emotions and those emotions sort of being in control of who we are as people is, what I'm going to call, "good science," meaning they didn't just make up that stuff for the movie, only simplified it a little. I think the struggle between Joy and Sadness for the movie is extremely telling for our culture, especially for girls and women for whom there is a much greater social pressure to be happy. All the time. Of course, the conflict centers around Riley's loss of control of her Sadness.

Which is where I'll stop, because I don't want to have spoilers.

The animation was amazing, as is to be expected. Mostly, it's the backgrounds. The movie is full of memory marbles (my term; I don't know what they actually call them) and, if you pay attention to them in the background, they are always active. They're not just stacks of static spheres to fill up space. Seriously, the difference in animation from when I was a kid to now is... it's the difference between making a cardboard stage and putting on a finger puppet production and television.

The voice acting was, of course, excellent. Amy Poehler and Phyllis Smith were perfect for Joy and Sadness. Poehler brought to Joy the same kind of exuberance that she brings to Leslie Knope, which is why, I'm sure, she was chosen for the role. But it's Smith who really made the movie. Her rather, what I can only describe as, sad-sack voice was the perfect fit for Sadness. The other voicers were great, too, but it all comes down to Joy and Sadness; if those two hadn't worked, the movie wouldn't have worked.

And it does work. If you've ever seen a Pixar movie and enjoyed it, you definitely don't want to miss this one. In fact, if you take the Toy Story movies as one spot, Inside Out has a fighting chance at being one of the top five movies Pixar has done. Okay, that might be a hard call, but saying top six seems kind of weird. Anyway, it's a great movie. It will make you laugh, and it might make you cry.