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.
Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent in Mike Leigh's Another Year
There are more excellent movies in the theaters RIGHT NOW than any other time of the year. Right now, you can see Another Year, True Grit, The King’s Speech, Black Swan, The Way Back, Somewhere, Biutiful, The Fighter, Rabbit Hole and Fair Game. It just doesn’t get any better than this for movie fans.
True Grit is the Coen Brothers’ splendid Old West story of Mattie Ross, a girl of unrelenting resolve and moxie played by 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld in a breakthrough performance, and Jeff Bridges is perfect as the hilarious, oft-besotted and frequently lethal Rooster Cogburn. The King’s Speech is the crowd pleasing story of a good man (Colin Firth) overcoming his stammer to inspire his nation in wartime with the help of a brassy commoner (Geoffrey Rush). Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a rip roaring thriller and a showcase for Natalie Portman and Barbara Hershey. Another Year is Mike Leigh’s brilliant observation of the human condition, and asks why some people find contentment and others just cannot; Lesley Manville has the flashiest role – and gives the most remarkable performance – as a woman whose long trail of bad choices hasn’t left her with many options for a happy life.
Biutiful is a grim, grim movie with a great performance by Javier Bardem in a compelling portrait of a desperate man in desperate circumstance, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores perros, 21 Grams, Babel).
Somewhere is Sofia Coppola’s (Lost in Translation) artsy portrait of a man so purposeless that he can find no pleasure in pleasure. An A-list movie star (Steven Dorff) is living at the Chateau Marmont with his expensive toys, booze and drugs and an inexhaustible supply of beautiful, sexually available women, but without Without any purpose or connection to others, his debauchery is completely joyless. To his surprise and discomfort, his eleven-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) moves in for a few weeks.
The Way Back is inspired by the story of a 1940 escape from a Siberian gulag by men who walk over 4,000 miles to freedom in India – a trek of 4000 miles. It’s beautifully shot by director Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, Master and Commander) but, eleven months of trudging through dangerous, unfamiliar territory while suffering from starvation and exposure is really impressive, but not that engaging.
I strongly recommend Rabbit Hole, an exquisite exploration of the grieving process with great performances by Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhardt, Diane Wiest, Sandra Oh and Miles Tenner. The Fighter is an excellent drama, starring Mark Wahlberg as a boxer trying to succeed despite his crack addict brother (Christian Bale) and trashy mom (Melissa Leo). Fair Game, the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson story with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, is also excellent. All are on my list of Best Movies of 2010.
I Love You, Phillip Morris is an entertaining offbeat combo of the con man, prison and romantic comedy genres. Red Hill is a stylish contemporary Aussie Western. Season of the Witch is a bad Nicholas Cage/Ron Perlman buddy movie set among the plague, crusades and witch hunts of the 13th century.
Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake) has brought us another brilliant observation of the human condition, and asks why some people find contentment and others just cannot. The film observes a year in the life of a happily married couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen). They generously host their friends and family; the couple (and we the audience) pick up insights about the visitors – variously scarred by unhappy circumstance, cluelessness and self-destructiveness.
Mike Leigh may be the cinema’s best director of actors, and Another Year is filled with excellent performances, especially Broadbent and Sheen, David Bradley and Peter Wight. The wonderful Imelda Staunton drops in with a searing cameo at the beginning of the film. But Lesley Manville has the flashiest role – and gives the most remarkable performance – as a woman whose long trail of bad choices hasn’t left her with many options for a happy life.
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!
It’s Roger Corman Week at The Movie Gourmet, but our DVD is NOT the just released Roger Corman’s Sci Fi Classics. Instead, I’m going with an unintentionally hilarious movie that Corman himself directed, The Trip (1967). It’s a time-capsule exploitation film written by Jack Nicholson. TV director Peter Fonda decides to take LSD. After buying acid from Dennis Hopper (there’s a stretch!), the plan is for Fonda to trip at his friend Bruce Dern’s house. Now is it a good idea to entrust someone tripping for the first time to Bruce Dern? Of course not! Fonda wanders off and wall-bangs nightmarishly down Sunset Boulevard. The DVD is available from Netflix.
On Friday, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting Night of the Lepus (1972). If you enjoy mocking cheesy special effects in bad Mutant Animal Monster movies, you’ll love the giant mutant rabbits rumbling through small Western towns, bursting through windows to kill humans and even chowing down on a herd of horses. Here’s a clip of the thundering herd of bloodthirsty bunnies.
And here’s the trailer, which gives you a very good sense of the movie’s production values.
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.
Cedar Rapids is an “aim low” comedy about a lame guy (Ed Helm) whose life is so boring that an insurance agent conference in Cedar Rapids is a revelatory experience. It’s got John C. Reilly as the Wild and Crazy Insurance Agent and is directed by Miguel Arteta, director of the underrated The Good Girl and Youth in Revolt. Releases February 11.
Hanna is a paranoid thriller starring Saoirse Ronan as a 16-year-old raised in the Arctic Circle to be a master assassin by her rogue secret agent father (Eric Bana), and then released upon the CIA. She is matched up against special ops wiz Cate Blanchett. Hanna is directed by Joe Wright (Atonement, The Soloist). Releases April 8.
The Way Back is inspired by the story of a 1940 escape from a Siberian prison; three men slipped out of the gulag and walked out of Siberia, across Mongolia, across China’s Gobi Desert, through Tibet and over the Himalayas to freedom in India – a trek of 4000 miles. This is not a spoiler, because, at the very beginning of the movie, we are told that three men make it from the gulags to India. The remaining dramatic tension is in finding out which three of the seven who start the journey will finish it.
Of course, director Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, Master and Commander) knows how to make a movie, and it is beautifully shot on locations chosen to illustrate the magnitude of the distances and the challenges. It is well acted, especially by Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Saoirse Ronan and Colin Farrell.
It’s a tremendous survival tale that results in a good, but not great movie. It comes down to this: eleven months of trudging through dangerous, unfamiliar territory while suffering from starvation and exposure is really impressive, but not that engaging.
