The Movie Gourmet had a great year at the movies and here are the highlights:
1. Taking The Wife to Bad Girl Night at the Noir City Film Festival. Noir City is the great San Francisco celebration of film noir, and Bad Girl Night is an annual double feature of noir’s nastiest femmes fatale. Now The Wife loves it too!
2. Interviewing Cinequest’s international film programmer Charlie Cockey – a film finder extraordinaire and a man who devours culture in any form. Watch for the interview when I preview the 2014 Cinequest.
3. Seeing three wholly original films at Cinequest: the German dark comedy Oh Boy (the debut from talented writer-director Jan Ole Gerster, the absurdist Czech comedy Polski Film and the offbeat The Dead Man and Being Happy, with its gloriously wacky road trip through the backwaters of Argentina.
4. Seeing five of the year’s best films (Mud, Stories We Tell, Me and You, The Spectacular Now and Before Midnight) in a May fortnight that included The Movie Gourmet’s Film Rampage.
5. I was the only audience member for Not Fade Away. I love sitting all alone in a theater because it makes me feel like a movie mogul in a studio screening room. Because I see lots of obscure movies at odd times like Monday nights and Sunday mornings, I am often part of a very small audience (five or fewer). But I hadn’t been the ONLY viewer since El Mariachi in 1992.
6. The DVD release of Here’s the Kicker featuring a blurb from The Movie Gourmet on the DVD cover. I enjoyed this indie comedy, and I hope my blurb will persuade folks to see it.
