Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
In recommending Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter as my DVD of the Week, I mentioned the amazing tsunami scene at the beginning of the film. You can easily find and watch this sequence on YouTube by searching for “Hereafter tsunami”.
Here’s a featurette by Scanline VFX that illustrates how they created the Oscar-nominated special effects for Hereafter.
To compare it with the real thing, here are some real tsunami videos from last week.
Every year, The Movie Gourmet watches the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. You can read more at Oscar Dinner.
Planning this year’s Oscar Dinner proved challenging (despite being a great year for movie Food Porn). Fortunately I received some great suggestions from my readers.
Here is my menu for Oscar Dinner 2011.
COCKTAILS AND STARTERS
First, the pièce de résistance: Severed Hand Ice Sculpture for 127 Hours and Winter’s Bone.
We will be floating the ice sculpture in an Appletini Punch for The Social Network. I read that, after seeing the film, Mark Zuckerberg made the Appletini the official cocktail of Facebook.
Pistachios from Inception. It looks like the guys are sharing a bowlful of pistachios while assembling the team in Mombasa.
Beer Nuts from The Fighter. Amy Adams’ bar looks like a beer nut kind of place. I am told by a New Englander that the Eklund-Ward clan would be drinking Narragansett, but I can’t find ‘Gansetts in California, so a MGD or PBR will have to do.
Tortilla Roll Ups from Toy Story 3. This is inspired by the all-time funniest movie scene involving a tortilla: Mr. Potato Head executes a prison escape by putting his facial features on a tortilla that can slide under a door.
DINNER
Cowboy beans from True Grit. Obvious and right out of the movie.
Steak and Organic Roast Vegetable Salad served with a Petite Syrah from The Kids Are All Right. The Mark Ruffalo character serves steak (he mists it with truffle oil) while hosting the family at his house. Earlier, he brings a bottle of Petite Syrah to dinner, which impresses the Annette Bening character (before she drinks too much of it too fast). We see organic strawberries from his restaurant’s garden, but I can see his menu featuring a nice salad of roasted veggies.
DESSERT
Coffee from Inception. From the Parisian cafe scene.
Sheet cake from Black Swan. (We will not vomit it back up.)
English toffees for The King’s Speech. They’re English and we will have difficulty speaking when we are chewing them.
(I decided not to skin my own squirrel for Winter’s Bone and not to recycle my urine for 127 Hours.)
You’ve sent me some great suggestions for my Oscar Dinner. Every year, The Movie Gourmet watches the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. For example, last year’s highlight was Grandma Ethel’s Brisket for A Serious Man. We also had airplane bottles of liquor for Up in the Air, fastfood chicken for Precious and Middle Eastern fare for The Hurt Locker. I particularly relished having prawns for District 9; (“prawn” is the South African slur for the aliens). You get the idea and you can read more at Oscar Dinner.
But this year, I was stumped on 127 Hours The King’s Speech and The Fighter and asked for your help.
127 Hours: imagemoved said, “all he had was freeze dried food and granola bars. He also left that bottle of Gatorade in his car. Maybe do something with that?” The Wife suggested a water bottle with the exact number of milliliters of water that he had when he got stuck. The Wife has so far vetoed my idea of a water bottle with faux urine (the protagonist recycles his own urine while trapped). But Ana may have a winning idea: “Ginger ale, pineapple, white grape, and cranberry juice punch with an ice hand floating inside (pour water in a latex glove and freeze, remove glove and place in punch) — A bit gruesome but funny too, right? …right..? lol”.
The King’s Speech: I think Ana also has a winner here: “English toffees. 1) They’re English 2) Their stickiness renders you temporarily incapable of speech. Get it? Eh, eh? 
“. They also made a big deal of serving tea in The King’s Speech, but I really like the idea of gumming up my jaw with the toffee.
The Fighter: Ana suggests “Boneless Buffalo Wings — They’re manly and something you’d eat while watching a boxing match…and their flavor is a real ‘knockout’.” But something tells me that Amy Adams would be serving the buffalo wings WITH bones in that bar. Maybe I’ll just pick up some MGD or PBR.
Any more ideas?
The Super Bowl audience just got a glimpse of the newest genre mutant – a sci fi blended with a Western. Universal recently released the trailer for its $100 million summer 2011 blockbuster Cowboys & Aliens. In this article, the New York Times reports that the trailer’s first showing to a live audience evoked gales of laughter – but it’s not supposed to be a comedy.
According to the trailer, Harrison Ford’s torch-bearing mounted lynch mob is interrupted by laser attack from an alien spaceship. Daniel Craig, playing a Clint Eastwoodesque Man With No Name, awakes with his memory erased by aliens and a futuristic bracelet. Saloon gal Olivia Wilde (House, The OC) is pulled into the sky by alien forces.
It turns out that this isn’t the first Western with space aliens, although Oblivion aimed a lot lower. This 1994 schlockfest starred Andrew Divoff (as the alien Redeye), Richard Joseph Paul, Meg Foster, Isaac Hayes and Julie Newmar, with George Takei as the Jim Beam-swilling town doctor. Amazingly, Oblivion rated a 1996 sequel, Oblivion 2: Backlash.
Here’s the real trailer for Cowboys & Aliens.
Earlier this month, I giggled through Season of the Witch, about the medieval Church’s exorcism of demons from an accused witch. Season of the Witch was set in the 13th century.
The new film The Rite is based on a book about Father Gary, who is the Diocese of San Jose’s official exorcist. Now. In 2011.
Helpfully, the Diocese has published FAQs about its modern-day exorcism. The FAQs include this statement:
“The Catholic Church maintains that demons are real and very rarely can inhabit the physical bodies of human beings, and to this day practices a rite of exorcism to make them leave. While it may take months or even years of exorcisms to free a person from a demonic presence, the Church’s solemn ritual of exorcism can be a formidable weapon against such evil.”
There is no word from the Diocese as to any Official Inquisitor.
Every year, The Movie Gourmet watches the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. For example, last year’s highlight was Grandma Ethel’s Brisket for A Serious Man. We also had airplane bottles of liquor for Up in the Air, fastfood chicken for Precious and Middle Eastern fare for The Hurt Locker. I particularly relished having prawns for District 9; (“prawn” is the South African slur for the aliens). You get the idea and you can read more at Oscar Dinner.
But this year, the elements of my Oscar Dinner are not so obvious (despite being a great year for movie Food Porn). Now, I do know what I’m going to serve for True Grit, Black Swan, Toy Story 3, Inception, The Social Network and The Kids Are All Right.
But I’m stumped on 127 Hours The King’s Speech and The Fighter. I need to find food and/or beverages found in these movies or inspired by the movies (typical of the movie’s setting, a pun on the movie, etc.) Any ideas? I welcome your suggestions.
I’m pretty pleased with this year’s Oscar nominees. The Academy did better than usual and avoided its frequent horribly undeserving nominations and inexplicably unjust missed nominations.
I’m downright giddy that my pick for the year’s best movie, the underdog indie Winter’s Bone, earned four Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence), Best Supporting Actor (John Hawkes) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Director Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini).
Of the ten nominees for Best Picture, eight are on my list of Best Movies of 2010 – all except 127 Hours (which I have not seen) and The Kids Are Alright (which was OK but not great in my book). The one-year old format of ten Best Picture nominees made it pretty obvious that True Grit, The Social Network, Black Swan, The King’s Speech and Inception would make the list along with the deserving Pixar entry Toy Story 3. The question was about the other four, and, fortunately, Winter’s Bone and The Fighter slipped in.
I’m also delighted that Australian veteran actress Jacki Weaver was nominated for her role in Animal Kingdom as an impossibly upbeat gal who can effortlessly put out a contract on her own grandson.
Christopher Nolan should have gotten a Best Director nod for his Best Picture nominee Inception. I wish that Winter’s Bone‘s Debra Granik had been nominated for Best Director. And I did find it odd that GasLand rated an Oscar nod for Best Documentary, but not The Tillman Story or Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. But those are just quibbles relative to my complaints in other years. Here’s to the Oscars!
This week’s DVD release of Roger Corman’s Sci Fi Classics is my occasion for celebrating the prolific low-budget producer Roger Corman. So far, Corman has produced 395 titles – mostly shameless and delicious exploitation movies for the teen market. In one four-year period, he produced The Student Nurses, Private Duty Nurses, Night Call Nurses and Candy Stripe Nurses – and 21 other movies!
Corman’s great gift to us all is his mentorship of young and talented filmmakers. Filmmakers who got their first assignment from Corman (called “the Corman Film School”) include Oscar winning directors James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Curtis Hanson, Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese. Not to mention cult directors Paul Bartels and Monte Hellman (Corman produced Hellman’s Warren Oates classic Cockfighter). And Chinatown screenwriter Robert Townsend.
Jack Nicholson first got some attention playing the masochistic dental patient in Corman’s 1960 Little Shop of Horrors. Nicholson showed up again in Corman’s 1967 The Wild Angels (biker gangs), 1967 The Shooting (trippy Western) and 1967’s LSD flick The Trip (more on that tomorrow).
Probably the best movie that Corman has produced was St. Jack (1976), directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Corman had given Bogdanovich his start, and in the intervening 12 years Bogdanovich’s star had risen (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon) and fallen (Daisy Miller). Ben Gazzara and Denholm Elliott delivered great performances in this story of a hustling American expat running a GI brothel in Singapore during the Vietnam War.
Roger Corman’s Sci Fi Classics includes three films that I haven’t seen (or don’t remember seeing): Attack of the Crab Monsters, War of the Satellites and Not of this Earth. Although I may not have seen them, I can tell you that 1) they don’t have fancy production values; 2) they are fast paced and not too long; and 3) they’re a kick.
Well, here’s some grand news – Roger Ebert is bringing back At the Movies as Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies, beginning around this Friday, January 21 on PBS. The co-hosts will be respected film critic Christy LeMire and up and coming film critic and blogger Ignatiy Vishnevetsky. Ebert himself will appear with the aid of computer-generated speech in the “Roger’s Office” segment. The show will also include movie bloggers Kim Morgan (sunsetgun.com) and Omar Moore (popcornreel.com). Ebert and his wife Chaz have gone back to the show’s roots and are producing the show for public television stations.
To conclude my 2010 in Movies series, here’s another very fun trend: 2010 brought us more food-centric films than any year in memory: I Am Love (Io sono l’amore), Mid-August Lunch, The Kings of Pastry, Today’s Special, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle House and Soul Kitchen. The Movie Gourmet approves of this trend.
You can get the idea here from I Am Love‘s trailer. Check out the plate of glazed prawns about 58 seconds into the trailer.
Here’s my list of 10 Food Porn Movies.