The Movie Gourmet

I haven’t seen Sex and the City 2 and don’t plan to, so I am not weighing in on the film itself. But its critical reception can best be described as uniformly venomous.  For each movie, Metacritic.com assigns numeric scores to the reviews of America’s leading critics and averages them into a Metacritic score between 1 and 100.  Generally, really outstanding movies score in the high 70s, and dreadful movies score in the low 30s.  Sex and the City 2‘s Metacritic score is 28.  As a comparison, the worst movies that I have seen this year are Tooth Fairy (Metacritic score of 36) and Leap Year (Metacritic score of 33).   The worst movie that I saw last year was Paul Blart: Mall Cop, which scored a 39.  So we can safely say that Sex and the City 2 is widely reviled and will show up on the Worst of the Year lists.

I keep Best of the Year lists but not Worst of the Year lists.  Because I’m not a professional critic, I’m not required to see every movie.  I try to avoid the bad ones.  Because I repeatedly saw the trailer for Did You Hear About the Morgans?, I skipped that one.  The only reason that I have seen Tooth Fairy and Leap Year is because they were the only movies I hadn’t seen that were showing on very long airplane flights.

I love Metacritic because the critical consensus is generally closer to my taste than that of individual critics.  Click here and check it out for yourself.

This Tuesday, TCM is showing A Man Called Horse (1970).

Modern viewers will recognize most of the plot of Avatar herein.  In the early 19^th century, Richard Harris is captured by American Indians and becomes assimilated into their culture.  Harris’ initiation into the tribe is one of cinema’s most cringe-worthy moments.  The film still stands up well  today.

A Man Called Horse fits into the subgenre of Westerns that are sympathetic to Native Americans, including  Little Big Man (1970), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Dances With Wolves (1990).   The trend became pronounced with Cheyenne Autumn in 1964 and has stayed healthy through the recent retelling of the Pocahontas story in The New Land.

Of course, even a worthy movie subgenre has its cliches.  Why is it that when the white guy encounters a native girl   –  It’s always the chief’s beautiful, unattached, nubile daughter?

Date Night has been released in France as Crazy Night.  As to the American concept of Date Night, I suspect that the French cannot imagine a planet, let alone a country, where going out to dine with your spouse is a big deal.

Also, we know know that a movie with Steve Carell and Tina Fey is going to be funny.  Note how the French movie poster makes this a little more obvious.

There were no Raisinettes, Milk Duds or (my favorite) Hot Tamales.  But there was a candy section that contained scores of bulk candies.  You could get either Hagen-Daasz or Ben and Jerry’s.  here are some shots of the movie food.