The rich, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, are different from you and me. Servants wait on them, they live on great estates, and they pass large fortunes on to their progeny. But their fears and desires are not unfamiliar. When an Italian patriarch makes a surprising choice as to who will succeed him as the head of the family-run textile business, we wonder if it will cause a rift. When the daughter of the family secretly confides to her mother than she is a lesbian, we wonder why it must be a secret. When the son ponders opening a restaurant with a new friend, we wonder if he’ll abandon his role in the business.
Don’t wonder too much, because the main subject of the movie is the mother, Emma, played by Tilda Swinton. Learning that her son’s friend is a cook, she takes an interest in the younger man. Swinton’s gifts apparently include speaking Italian with a Russian accent, as her character is an immigrant. (There is here the curiosity of having two native English speakers in significant roles, as Marissa Berenson plays Emma's sister-in-law.) In fact, the drama comes out of an earlier documentary director Luca Guadagnino did about the actress.
Guadagnino’s direction tends to draws attention to itself. At its best, his use of long shots, quiet, and ambient sounds emphasizes both the grandeur and the singularity of the family’s lifestyle. At other times, the use of unusual angles, odd close-ups, and jarring compositions by modern classical composer John Adams seems off-putting and pretentious.
Food lovers may enjoy the movie; it’s hard to say which is more pruriently displayed, the sins of the flesh or of the palate. The leisurely sex scene, intercut with shots of insect on flowers, gauzy shots of torsos, and closeups of skin, is positively operatic. On the other hand, a loving close-up of a seafood appetizer lasts so long that I thought there must be a secret message, written in balsamic vinegar, on the plate.
All in all, this was like a coproduction of Architectural Digest and Food & Wine. The characters seemed distant, like they were in a magazine. In the end, I felt a little like the diner given the seafood dish. It was beautiful to look at, but in the end you realize there are only three shrimp on the plate, and you are left in want of something more substantial.
IMDB link
viewed 7/7/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 7/11 and 8/3/10
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Friday, June 25, 2010
Friday, August 7, 2009
Julie & Julia (***1/2)
A good movie can make you look forward to what’s coming even though you already know the ending. In this case, we know that Julia Child (Meryl Streep) will go on to teach generations of Americans to cook with her Mastering the Art of French Cooking and, later, her pioneering cooking show on public television. And we know that Julia Powell will more or less achieve her goal of completing all 542 of the recipes in Child’s book in a year, and blogging about it, or else they wouldn’t have gotten Amy Adams to play her in a movie, would they? Unlike some other movies that alternate storylines, I was equally happy watching either one of the two that form this Nora Ephron confection.
Ephron, who most recently wrote and directed the not-bewitching Bewitched (2005) has written the semi-classic When Harry Met Sally, but in follow-ups such as Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail has proven better at crafting dialogue than compelling characters. This is mostly remedied here, since the film is an adaptation of memoirs by Child and Powell. It also helps that Meryl Streep plays Child. To watch Streep in her previous movie, Doubt, and then this is to seemingly watch two different actresses. Streep is smaller than the six-foot-tall woman she plays, but nonetheless captures the gangly movements and unusual voice that would later become famous. Her dour nun in Doubt probably wouldn’t have liked Child, who clearly reveled in sensual pleasure. And not just of food, as the charming scenes with her diplomat husband (Stanley Tucci) show. Depicting their life in France in the 1950s, the movie shows something even rarer on film than in real life, a happy couple who, in the course of the movie, never even bicker. The conflict comes from trying to get her book published, even though we know she’ll eventually succeed.
Meanwhile, in the latter-day scenes, Powell struggles in a Queens apartment with recipes for forgotten dishes like aspic, with Child as her inspiration and muse. These scenes are sometimes funny without getting too cute. As the real Julia Child showed, mistakes happen in the kitchen all the time. Unlike most of today’s cooking shows, Child left them in, and that was part of the appeal. So it is here. I suspect many people will like the flashback scenes better, since Child was such an outsize personality, but both of these women are sort of inspirational. That’s a word that usually frightens me away from a movie, because the people so described are usually too perfect to truly inspire. Yet here are two women figuring out their lives and making mistakes. On the other hand, Ephron and her cast and crew make hardly any. It’s a near-perfect soufflé of a movie, light but substantive.
IMDB link
viewed 6/17/09 (screening at ritz Bourse) and reviewed 8/7–8/09
Ephron, who most recently wrote and directed the not-bewitching Bewitched (2005) has written the semi-classic When Harry Met Sally, but in follow-ups such as Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail has proven better at crafting dialogue than compelling characters. This is mostly remedied here, since the film is an adaptation of memoirs by Child and Powell. It also helps that Meryl Streep plays Child. To watch Streep in her previous movie, Doubt, and then this is to seemingly watch two different actresses. Streep is smaller than the six-foot-tall woman she plays, but nonetheless captures the gangly movements and unusual voice that would later become famous. Her dour nun in Doubt probably wouldn’t have liked Child, who clearly reveled in sensual pleasure. And not just of food, as the charming scenes with her diplomat husband (Stanley Tucci) show. Depicting their life in France in the 1950s, the movie shows something even rarer on film than in real life, a happy couple who, in the course of the movie, never even bicker. The conflict comes from trying to get her book published, even though we know she’ll eventually succeed.
Meanwhile, in the latter-day scenes, Powell struggles in a Queens apartment with recipes for forgotten dishes like aspic, with Child as her inspiration and muse. These scenes are sometimes funny without getting too cute. As the real Julia Child showed, mistakes happen in the kitchen all the time. Unlike most of today’s cooking shows, Child left them in, and that was part of the appeal. So it is here. I suspect many people will like the flashback scenes better, since Child was such an outsize personality, but both of these women are sort of inspirational. That’s a word that usually frightens me away from a movie, because the people so described are usually too perfect to truly inspire. Yet here are two women figuring out their lives and making mistakes. On the other hand, Ephron and her cast and crew make hardly any. It’s a near-perfect soufflé of a movie, light but substantive.
IMDB link
viewed 6/17/09 (screening at ritz Bourse) and reviewed 8/7–8/09
Friday, June 29, 2007
Ratatouille (***1/4)
The latest animated effort from Pixar Animation Studios and Incredibles writer-director Brad Bird is a tasty treat about a Paris gourmet restaurant that gets a boost when the garbage boy morphs into its innovative new chef. Unbeknownst to its clientele, the mastermind behind the scrumptious new dishes is a rat called Rémy (Patton Oswalt).
Rémy must contend on the one hand with his rodent brethren who are content to scarf up the filthy scraps left behind by the humans, and on the other by the humans whom he seeks to emulate, but who regard him as vermin. Rémy takes as his inspiration the cookbook by the late great chef Gusteau (Brad Garrett) and, through a happy accident, winds up in the former kitchen of the great man himself. The inspired sequence by which the rat becomes the cook is too clever to describe. The only thing that might have improved it is UB40’s reggae classic “Rat in Mi Kitchen.” The bits in which Gusteau leaps off the page to have imaginary conversations with Rémy are also delicious.
Gusteau’s motto is “anyone can cook,” while Rémy reminds us that “not everyone should.” In this way, the movie combines the French egalitarian ideal with the American meritocratic one. Perhaps this explains why the rats and the garbage boy speak with American accents while the other humans have French ones. In any case, Bird suffuses the movie with a love of fine food that will appeal to the adult Food Channel crowd as well as kids, who could actually learn a little about how a restaurant works. Among the supporting characters, feisty cook Colette (Janeane Garofalo) and fulminating food critic Ego (Peter O’Toole) stand out, but almost all of the ingredients blend well here.
IMDB link
reviewed 7/8/07
Rémy must contend on the one hand with his rodent brethren who are content to scarf up the filthy scraps left behind by the humans, and on the other by the humans whom he seeks to emulate, but who regard him as vermin. Rémy takes as his inspiration the cookbook by the late great chef Gusteau (Brad Garrett) and, through a happy accident, winds up in the former kitchen of the great man himself. The inspired sequence by which the rat becomes the cook is too clever to describe. The only thing that might have improved it is UB40’s reggae classic “Rat in Mi Kitchen.” The bits in which Gusteau leaps off the page to have imaginary conversations with Rémy are also delicious.
Gusteau’s motto is “anyone can cook,” while Rémy reminds us that “not everyone should.” In this way, the movie combines the French egalitarian ideal with the American meritocratic one. Perhaps this explains why the rats and the garbage boy speak with American accents while the other humans have French ones. In any case, Bird suffuses the movie with a love of fine food that will appeal to the adult Food Channel crowd as well as kids, who could actually learn a little about how a restaurant works. Among the supporting characters, feisty cook Colette (Janeane Garofalo) and fulminating food critic Ego (Peter O’Toole) stand out, but almost all of the ingredients blend well here.
IMDB link
reviewed 7/8/07
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