OK, so I just posted that we would skip our annual Oscar Dinner because we were returning from an away weekend, but The Wife insisted on meeting the challenge of catering it from Trader Joes. So here we are:
Water, rushing so extravagantly from Immortan Joe’s cliff-side fortress in Mad Max: Fury Road;
Pint of Ale from one of the Boston bars in Spotlight;
Bison Jerky from The Revenant (no raw bison liver available at TJs);
Spaghetti, which Ellis mastered eating, after much practice, in Brooklyn;
Peas and carrots from the Donovan family dinner in Bridge of Spies (served in vintage Corning ware – also on the Donovans’ table);
Potatoes (but not cultivated in our own waste) from The Martian; and
Cake as an homage both to Jake’s birthday cake (sans candles) in Room and to the Las Vegas convention dessert that Mark Baum disgustedly consumes in The Big Short.
Every year, we have watched the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. We’ve had sushi for Lost in Translation, cowboy beans for Brokeback Mountain, Somali chicken suqaar for Captain Phillips, etc. The photo above shows last year’s Oscar dinner, finished with the courtesan au chocolate, the elaborate filled pastry smuggled to Gustave (Ray Fiennes) in The Grand Budapest Hotel.
But this year, The Wife and I are spending an away weekend with our daughter and son-in-law, so we just can’t pull it off.
But, if we were going to stage our dinner, we would have considered:
spaghetti from Brooklyn;
potatoes (but not cultivated in our own waste) from The Martian;
pub pints from one of the Boston bars in Spotlight;
Steve Carell’s Las Vegas convention dessert in The Big Short;
and I like the idea of raw bison liver from The Revenant, but The Wife was never going to agree to that.
Below is our 2011 pièce de résistance, our Severed Hand Ice Sculpture for 127 Hours and Winter’s Bone.
The Movie Gourmet’s culinary tribute to 127 HOURS and WINTER’S BONE
The thought-provoking documentary The Promised Band has its world premiere next week at Cinequest. It’s about a group of Israeli and Palestinian women seeking to fight through the cultural, legal, political, military and security barriers between them (by forming a girl band). I’ve seen it, and it effectively brings the audience into the Israel-Palestine border situation and the isolating effects on both Israelis and Palestinians. The Promised Band is one of the 129 woman-directed films at this year’s Cinequest.
The most compelling subject of the documentary is the main Palestinian character, the charismatic Lina. There’s now a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to bring Lina from Ramallah to San Jose for Cinequest: Let’s Get Lina to California. I’ve kicked in a little, and I’d appreciate it if you would consider helping out, too.
Saoirse Ronan in BROOKLYN – it ain’t going to win an Oscar, but you should see it while it’s on the big screen
Here’s your last chance to watch the Oscar nominees before the awards broadcast:
45 Years with Charlotte Rampling’s enthralling Oscar-nominated performance.
The Revenant, an awesome and authentic survival tale that must be seen on the BIG SCREEN. I predict that The Revenant will be the biggest winner at the Oscars.
The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn is an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.
The Coen Brothers’ disappointingly empty comedy Hail, Caesar contains some cool Hollywood parodies.
Silicon Valley’s own film festival Cinequest is around the corner – make plans now to attend between March 1 and March 13.
My Stream/VOD of the Week is DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon, which takes us through an engaging and comprehensive history of the groundbreaking and seminal satirical magazine. You can stream it from iTunes or the Showtime VOD service (and you can catch it on the Showtime channel).
The Movie Gourmet features Overlooked Noir, but Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity is anything but overlooked – it’s justifiably recognized as one of the two or three most iconic film noir. I’ve included it as the prototypical noir in my A Classic American Movie Primer. It’s about a guy who is just selling insurance until he meets a woman he can’t resist…Double Indemnity plays on Turner Classic Movies on February 28.
Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Check out her ankle bracelet.
The Movie Gourmet saw Brooklyn again last weekend with The Wife, and I liked it better the second time around. That’s saying something because it’s already #4 on my Best Movies of 2015. (The only three movies that I admired more weren’t nominated this year.)
Here’s my original post on Brooklyn, when it was first released. This time – even though I knew what was coming – I was much more emotionally involved in the story. I predicted that Brooklyn would especially appeal to women, but even my male poker buddies who saw it told me that they “were rooting for the Italian guy”.
Saoirse Ronan is so brilliant in Brooklyn. I expect Brie Larson to win the Best Actress Oscar for Room, but Charlotte Rampling (45 Years) and Ronan are equally deserving.
On Sunday evening, The Revenant is going to beat Spotlight for the Best Picture Oscar. I rated Brooklyn the highest of the Oscar-nominated movies, even over The Revenant and Spotlight, and I’m sticking with that assessment.
Make your plans now to attend the 26th edition of Cinequest, Silicon Valley’s own major film festival. By some metrics the largest film festival in North America, Cinequest was recently voted the nation’s best by USA Today readers. The 2016 Cinequest is scheduled for March 1 through March 13 and will over 100 feature films from the US and over twenty other countries. And, at Cinequest, it’s easy to meet the filmmakers.
This year’s headline events include:
The Helen Mirren thriller Eye in the Sky on Opening Night.
A pre-release screening of the major studio The Little Prince, already spoken of as a contender for the 2017 Animated Feature Oscar.
James Franco’s appearance to present his film The Adderall Diaries.
Rita Moreno’s attendance at the world premiere of her movie Remember Me.
The Australian drama The Daughter on Closing Night (I’ve seen it – and it packs a punch!).
This year, Cinequest presents the world or US premieres of sixty features and sixty-nine shorts. And of these 129 debut films, 64 were directed by women!
I’m going to be strongly recommending at least two of these first features, the psychological thriller Lost Solace and the character-driven drama Heaven’s Floor. I’ve already screened over a dozen Cinequest 2016 movies, and I’ve already also found an excellent period romance, some thought-provoking documentaries and even a satisfying low brow comedy.
Indeed, the real treasure at Cinequest 2016 is likely to be found among the hitherto less well-known films. In the past three years, the Cinequest gems Wild Tales, ’71, Ida and The Hunt all made my Best of the Year lists.
Cinequest is on my list of Silicon Valley’s Best Movie Deals. You can get a pass for as little as $155, and you can get individual tickets as well. The express pass for an additional tax-deductible $100 is a fantastic deal – you get to skip to the front of the lines!
Take a look at the program, the schedule and the passes and tickets. (If you want to support Silicon Valley’s most important cinema event while skipping the lines, the $100 donation for Express Line Access is an awesome deal.)
As usual, I’ll be covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. I usually screen (and write about) over thirty films from around the world. I’ll soon have up a Cinequest 2016 page. Follow me on Twitter for the latest.
DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon takes us through an engaging and comprehensive history of the groundbreaking and seminal satirical magazine. For those of you who weren’t there, the National Lampoon – ever irreverent, raunchy and tasteless – was at the vanguard of the counter-culture in the early 1970s. Once reaching the rank of #2 news stand seller among all US magazines, it may be the most popularly accepted subversive art ever in the US (along with the wry Mad magazine during the Cold War).
In a few short years, the Lampoon rose from nowhere (well, actually from the Harvard Lampoon) to a humor empire with the magazine, records, a radio show and a traveling revue. And, yes, the title DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD does encapsulate the arc of the Lampoon’s story.
Documentarian Douglas Tirola tells the story so successfully because he persuaded almost all the surviving key participants to talk. We meet co-founder Henry Beard, publisher Matty Simmons, Art Director Michael Gross and other Lampoon staff including P.J. O’Rourke and Christopher Buckley. You’ll recognize the first editor, Tony Hendra, from his performance as the harried band manager in This Is Spinal Tap. We see clips of two Lampoon originals who haven’t survived, co-founder Doug Kenney and resident iconoclast Michael O’Donoghue.
The National Lampoon’s live performance revue featured John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle Murray, Gilda Radner and Harold Ramis. When Lorne Michaels hired the whole crew for Saturday Night Live, the hit television show instantly surpassed the magazine in cultural penetration. “The Lampoon lost its exceptionalism”, says one observer.
But the Lampoon made its mark on the movies by launching the entire genre of raunchy comedies with Animal House and spawning the careers of filmmakers John Landis and Harold Ramis, as well as the SNL performers. We also see a clip of Christopher Guest in an early Lampoon performance. On the other hand, I hadn’t remembered a less successful Lampoon project from its later era, Disco Beaver from Outer Space.
This is all, of course, major nostalgia for Baby Boomers. Before seeing DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD, I thought, yeah, I’ll enjoy the Blast From The Past, but will younger audience viewers dismiss this humor as quaint? After all, the Lampoon’s success came from puncturing the boundaries of taste, and it’s hard to imagine anything today that would be shockingly raunchy. But, after watching DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD, I have to say that the humor stands up today as very sharp-edged. After all, an image of a baby in a blender with Satan’s finger poised to press the “puree” button is pretty transgressive no matter when it’s published. The sole exception is the Lampoon’s over-fixation on women’s breasts, which comes off today as pathetically sophomoric – or even adolescent.
DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon has also vaulted on to my list of Longest Movie Titles.
I saw DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD at the San Francisco International Film Festival. This is an important cultural story, well-told and it deserves a wide audience. You can stream it from iTunes or the Showtime VOD service (and you can catch it on the Showtime channel).
Get ready for the Oscars by seeing these nominated films and performances, all on my Best Movies of 2015, all with some Oscar nominations:
45 Years with Charlotte Rampling’s enthralling Oscar-nominated performance.
The Revenant, an awesome and authentic survival tale that must be seen on the BIG SCREEN. I predict that The Revenant will be the biggest winner at the Oscars.
The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn is an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.
The Coen Brothers’ disappointingly empty comedy Hail, Caesar contains some cool Hollywood parodies.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the brilliant psychological drama 99 Homes, which illustrates the life-and-death stakes of our nation’s foreclosure crisis. It’s a topical film, but 99 Homes is emotionally raw and as intense as any thriller. The DVD is available to rent from Netflix and Redbox, and 99 Homes can be streamed from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, and Playstation Video.
For just a fun time at the movies, try Richard Lester’s 1974 The Four Musketeers, coming up February 21 on Turner Classic Movies. Watch Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Michael York and Frank Finlay swashbuckle away against Bad Guys Christopher Lee, Faye Dunaway and Charlton Heston. Geraldine Chaplin and Raquel Welch adorn the action.
Christopher Lee and Faye Dunaway in THE FOUR MUSKETEERSOliver Reed in THE FOUR MUSKETEERS
The opening scene of the brilliant psychological drama 99 Homes illustrates the life-and-death stakes of our nation’s foreclosure crisis. It’s a topical film, but 99 Homes is emotionally raw and as intense as any thriller. Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is a working class single dad, down on his luck. He loses his home to foreclosure and then must make a Faustian choice about supporting his family. Can he live with his choice, and what are the consequences?
With capitalism, where there are losers, there are also winners who have bet against the losers. Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) has built a prosperous real estate business on legitimate evictions and flips, supplemented with schemes to defraud federal home loan agencies, housing syndicates and individual homeowners. His world view is defined in a monologue about this nation bailing out the winners, not the losers – a cynical, but perceptive, observation.
Director Ramin Bahrani is a great American indie director, with a knack for drilling into the psyches of overlooked subsets of our society – immigrants (Chop Shop, Man Push Cart, Goodbye Solo), industrial farmers (At Any Price) and now the victims and profiteers of the Mortgage Bubble.
As foreclosure inexorably approaches, Garfield’s Nash is absorbed by dread, then desperation and, finally, to panic. His mom (Laura Dern) takes a different tack, settling firmly into denial and then erupting in hysteria. That denial recurs again and again in 99 Homes among those about to be evicted. These are people who have bought homes and can’t believe/grok/internalize that one day they will actually be forced out of them. One of the strongest aspects of 99 Homes is the use of non-actors who have lived through the nightmare. Some of the individual stories, especially one with a confused old man, are so wrenching as to be hard to watch.
This may be Andrew Garfield’ strongest cinema performance. Dennis Nash is a decent man incentivized to do the indecent. Garfield takes this good man through an amazing internal journey. Nash is forced to accept the failure resulting from his attempts to do what is right, juxtaposed with the success from conduct that he finds repulsive. Bahrani’s arty shot of the reflection of a swimming pool shimmering in a sliding glass door makes it look like Garfield is under water – which he metaphorically is at this point in the film.
Michael Shannon, one of my very favorite actors, is superb as a guy completely committed to pursuing his own survival/prosperity strategy – no matter that it is based on ruining the lives of other humans. Unlike Nash, Shannon’s Carver has accepted the incentives to act badly and has overcome any qualms about either moral ambiguity or even stark amorality.
Veteran television actor Tim Guinee is remarkable as homeowner Frank Green. Laura Dern is excellent in a pivotal role. The character actor Clancy Brown proves once again that he can grab the screen, even when he’s only visible for a minute or two.
With its searing performances by Garfield and Shannon, 99 Homes is unsparingly dark and intense until a final moment of redemption. The DVD is available to rent from Netflix and Redbox, and 99 Homes can be streamed from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, and Playstation Video.
Still in theaters, here are five choices from my Best Movies of 2015, all with some Oscar nominations:
45 Years with Charlotte Rampling’s enthralling Oscar-nominated performance.
The Revenant, an awesome and authentic survival tale that must be seen on the BIG SCREEN. I predict that The Revenant will be the biggest winner at the Oscars.
The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn is an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.
The Coen Brothers’ disappointingly empty comedy Hail, Caesar contains some cool Hollywood parodies.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the entirely novel low budget, high quality horror film Unfriended. It’s on both my lists of I Hadn’t Seen This Beforeand Low Budget, High Quality Horrorof 2015. Unfriended is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.
On February 15, Turner Classic Movies will broadcast the John Huston masterpiece The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with its superb performances by Walter Huston and Humphrey Bogart. And we don’t need no stinkin’ badges.
Walter Huston, Tim Holt and Humphrey Bogart in THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADREAlfonso Bedoya in THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE: Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.
