Well, I screwed up the beet roesti, so that recipe's out. Some of the resulting hash was washed away in the sink, so the post title's at least vaguely fitting this time. I might try it later with vanilla ice cream. It's unclear where I stand on beets right now--they weren't disgusting, as I feared, but the rather nondescript taste really made me wonder why I'd gone to all the trouble of peeling and grating them. Lesson learned, I suppose.

The Visitor (2007): Thomas McCarthy is a writer, actor and director who has been seen in films from Meet The Parents to Good Night and Good Luck to Flags of Our Fathers, and more recently as the sleazy, ethically-challenged journalist on The Wire's final season. Richard Jenkins is an actor who almost anyone would recognize from somewhere--the acid-tripping FBI agent in Flirting With Disaster and Ben Stiller's psychiatrist in There's Something About Mary in particular. One directs the other in The Visitor, a jewel of a film about one man's curious education in multiculturalism. Walter Vail (Jenkins) is a professor at a Connecticut college who's essentially shut down since the death of his wife and conducts his career on auto-pilot. A chance errand to New York to give a paper at a globalization conference reveals that his city apartment has been rented-- unbeknownst to him--to two illegal immigrants, Syrian Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Senegalese Zainab (Danai Gurira). Less through kindness than through a simple inability to deal with the situation, Walter lets them stay and gradually befriends them, finding a bond with Tarek in particular through their mutual love of music (Walter's wife played the piano, Tarek plays the drums). When a simple technicality gets Tarek arrested and thrown into a detention center in Queens, Walter finds a purpose that had eluded him for years, especially when Tarek's mother Mouna (Hiam Abbass) shows up looking for her son. The Visitor is a marvelous film experience, making its points simply and effectively, and taking full advantage of its cast's abilities (sometimes remarkably so--this was apparently Gurira's film debut). Jenkins was nominated for an Oscar, and little wonder, as the experience of a quiet, reserved man awaking to what the world has to offer is matched with a stalwart character actor offered the chance to lead a finely observed film. The symbolism and ironies occasionally veer dangerously towards the too obvious--an economics professor working a market stall and a nearly displaced native-born American officiating at a globalization conference--but McCarthy's directorial touch and the cast's surefootedness (Jenkins and Abbass have fantastic chemistry) make The Visitor one of the best and most pertinent American films of the past decade.

Circle of Deceit (1981): Volker Schlondorff is probably my favorite German director by now, mainly on the strength of the magnificent The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), a brilliant slice of political theater (based on the Heinrich Boll novel and co-directed by Margarethe von Trotta) in which an innocent woman is victimized by an uncaring system. I haven't seen 1979's The Tin Drum, but probably should, although I'm not the biggest fan of the book. Based on the memoir by Nicholas Born, Circle looks at the travails of German journalist Laschen (the always excellent Bruno Ganz*) sent to cover the war in Lebanon, by then into its fifth year and showing no sign of victory on the part of either Muslim or Christian militias (the Israelis would invade a year later). While there, he finds himself unable to connect with his job, wondering how he can accurately convey the suffering around him, especially with the distractions of an attractive widow (an incandescent Hanna Schygulla) and his earthier photographer colleague (Jerzy Skolimowski), whose taste for the jugular cuts across his own doubts. Much of the filming was done in and around actual combat zones, and the surreal nature of the fighting in Beirut is brilliantly captured on camera--in the DVD extras, Schlondorff reveals that he eschewed the obvious decision for handheld cameras in favor of a more traditional setup, as the situation was already "real" enough. A simple story at heart, Circle uses the political and cultural divide between Europe and the Middle East as a vehicle for larger personal questions, such as one's relation to violence and the conflict between reality and media illusion, if there even is one anymore.

 *The Downfall parodies on www.funnyordie.co.uk, so dependent on his remarkable performance as Hitler, were apparently made with his explicit blessing--along with his work in Wenders' The American Friend (1977), that makes him one of the coolest people working in films today, if you ask me.