“It’s the biggest usable cavity in the field right now,” said Graham Sadtler, designer of the kitchen appliance we are admiring. We are at the launch of a new oven on what may be the hottest day of the summer so far in Toronto.

Sadtler, who wears a suit-friendly faux-hawk and tasteful rubber plugs in his earlobes, is explaining the four years of research and work that went into creating this new high-end oven (in the range—ha ha—of $5,000), made by Thermador, the North Carolina outfit who created the first in-wall oven—or, as it was known in the original 1955 literature, “a bilt-in range” (sic). Just as “bilt” seems a better-designed word, when you think about it, than the boxier, over-vowelled “built,” the oven we are looking at says “engineering” rather than “hearth” or “bread pudding.” It looks, in fact, like a cross between a smoky limousine window and a flat-screen TV. (more…)

I’m thrilled that my own personal Palme D’or pick - the Roumanian film “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days” by Cristian Mungiu - ended up winning the top prize at Cannes this year. For me it was between this film, and the Coen Brothers’ “No Country For Old Men“, and a lot of the international critics felt the same.

The Coens’ film, a genre-blender of cop chase and western based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, is an ingenious, suspenseful, and beautifully crafted picture about an aging sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones – no stretch there) trying to thwart an unstoppable serial killer, played by Javier Bardem. It’s a more serious and reflective movie than audiences might expect from the hyperironic directors of “Fargo”. Although there’s lots of bloodshed and some pungent comic bits, the movie delivers a serious and keenly elegiac portrait of a riven America in which law and order and wild-west morality have been replaced by drugs, greed and random violence. (more…)