Top Chef All-Stars: 12/15 power rankings

1. Angelo
2. Richard
3. Dale T.
4. Antonia
5. Tre
6. Marcel
7. Carla
8. Tiffani
9. Spike
10. Casey
11. Tiffany
12. Jamie
13. Mike
14. Fabio

Angelo: still weasly, still on top. Dale's win, plus Antonia's strong showing, brings the top 4 back to the same it was after the first episode. Fabio is running hot and cold, but more cold than hot and when he's cold he's cold. Luckily for him, Dale L. had the lesser dish.

Reasons why The Rocketeer, despite its faults, is still awesome.

- evil Timothy Dalton (see also: Hot Fuzz)
- Terry O'Quinn as Howard Hughes
- an animated Nazi propaganda film
- general Art Deco-ness
- Tiny Ron Taylor as a "heavy"
- a zeppelin
- mobsters and G-Men teaming up to fight Nazis

Top Chef All-Stars: 12/8 Power Rankings

1. Angelo
2. Richard
3. Dale T.
4. Tiffani
5. Marcel
6. Antonia
7. Tre
8. Carla
9. Dale L.
10. Spike
11. Fabio
12. Casey
13. Jamie
14. Tiffany
15. Stephen
16. Mike

Clearly, we got "second half of Top Chef: Las Vegas" Jen instead of "first half of Top Chef: Las Vegas" Jen.

Tiffani gets a huge boost this week. Jamie nosedives, although most of the drama surrounding her was a total non-event. Spike is inching his way towards respectability.

Brief thoughts on The Secret in Their Eyes

I'll be concise and to the point: The Secret in Their Eyes is an Argentinean crime drama that won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. It's good. You should watch it.

But I do want to highlight some quotes from reviews of the film. Slate sums up the movie best by calling it "a really long, really awesome episode of Law & Order set in Buenos Aires," which is better praise than I could come up with. Roger Ebert describes Ricardo Darin's character as "one of those men on whom a beard seems inevitable." Once again, he's right on the money, and as a bearded man I appreciate his insight (although in this case, I hope I'm not quite like that character).

If I may be so humble as to add my own insights to the movie, it's real genius is that its three best scenes are not only back-to-back-to-back but that the first is brilliantly written, the second brilliantly staged, and the third brilliantly acted. The Secret in Their Eyes is a procedural at heart, and a melodramatic one at that, but it uses its few flourishes to better effect than any movie I've seen all year.

Top Chef All-Stars power rankings: 12/1

1. Angelo
2. Richard
3. Dale T.
4. Antonia
5. Jennifer
6. Jamie
7. Tre
8. Carla
9. Tiffany
10. Marcel
11. Dale L.
12. Casey
13. Spike
14. Tiffani
15. Mike
16. Fabio
17. Stephen

Not a lot of major changes to note. Spike has a good chance of doing what he did during his season; being just competent enough to not get eliminated, but never excelling. It's too soon to tell whether mid-level chefs with strong dishes (Jamie, Mike) are stronger overall, or if they simply learned from their one fatal mistake. The strong Chicago cast has a predictably strong showing. Stephen looks lost. Jennifer couldn't cook well under pressure in Las Vegas, and this season is all pressure. Fabio spent too much time shilling for Bravo and not enough time in the kitchen. Do the producers actually have the stones to paint good guy Richard as a villain, or did he just inadvertently slip up by going over his alloted time?

Top Chef All-Stars: Preseason Power Rankings

Bravo's Top Chef franchise is one of the network's flagship programs, but it has laid the cooking on a little thick this year. Immediately after another technically proficient but drama-free season of Top Chef: Masters, the extremely underwhelming Top Chef: DC premiered. The weakest season in the show's history was followed by another spinoff, Top Chef: Just Desserts, which had to have set a statistical record for amount of crying per episode. I've been a fervent Top Chefian for years now, but I couldn't finish Top Chef: Just Desserts. The fun wasn't there anymore. Bravo seems to feel that the series has lagged, too, hence Wednesday's premiere of Top Chef: All-Stars. If they're looking to freshen up the series, they've done a good job, since the cast is absolutely loaded with talent. Even better, they've brought on Anthony Bourdain as a judge. I'm stoked. Let's handicap this race.

1. Richard
2. Angelo
3. Carla
4. Antonia
5. Jennifer
6. Dale T.
7. Tre
8. Tiffany
9. Fabio
10. Marcel
11. Dale L.
12. Casey
13. Elia
14. Tiffani
15. Stephen
16. Jamie
17. Mike
18. Spike

Admittedly, I'm making educated guesses with Tiffani and Stephen since I never saw the first season. It's pretty clear that Mike and Spike are the lesser of the cheftestants by a country mile. Conversely, it's clear that Richard and Angelo are the cream of the crop. Virtually everyone else is a wildcard. Will Dale Talde keep his temper? Will Tre redeem himself? Can chokers like Carla and Jennifer regain their swagger?

The Walking Dead - "Guts"

It was only inevitable that there would be a drop-off in quality between the first episode of The Walking Dead and the second. Frank Darabont doesn't just direct his own script on a basic cable show every day. His presence aside, the pilot was a stripped-down, spartan, effective example of storytelling. Zombie hordes aside, Rick Grimes was the only character onscreen for roughly half of the episode, and he spent most of the other half with only two other characters (one of whom was played by Lennie James, and you can't go wrong with Lennie James). Grimes doesn't have the same magnetism that Tony Soprano or Don Draper did in their premieres, but he's a capable dramatic center, and two-or-three person scenes are generally strong ones.

"Guts" more or less doubles the number of Walking Dead characters, but to little effect. Plucky young Glenn is the only one who shows immediate potential; most of the others are still undeveloped, with two exceptions. There's some blonde woman I don't care much about, and then there's Merle Dixon. It's no stretch of the imagination that a survivor of a zombie apocalypse has lost his cool, but Merle is a raving lunatic in addition to being racist, sexist, and a generally terrible human being overall. It's not that I have a problem with the introduction of an instigator, since they're reliable and somewhat necessary archetypes for zombie movies. But Merle's clashes with T-Dog (himself an uninspiring character) are depressingly cliche. Black/white tensions have been a staple of zombie films since the first Living Dead film and they're becoming old hat. Why not have Merle hate Mexicans? Or have a gay character for him to play off of? I'm not asking the show to reinvent the wheel, just to take a familiar trope in a new direction.

Things improved once Rick and Glenn enacted their bonkers escape plan, which provided an exciting finish to the episode. The less said the better about Rick's wife and the rest of the crew at the Survivalist Trailer Park. That's partially my bias against Dr. Sara Tancredi but even then the scenes are just treading plot water for when the two bands of survivors reunite.

I still have high hopes for the show, of course, and most of these new characters will either be thoughtfully fleshed out or become zombie bait. But the mere presence of Merle is a very bad omen. That kind of shit wouldn't fly on Mad Men. This is AMC, I expect more.