Food, Glorious Food: “Big Night”

I’ve always enjoyed movies about cooking. Given that we all have to eat, I guess it’s not remarkable that food preparation can be used in so many ways to comment on the human condition. In the 1987 Danish film Babette’s Feast, a French refugee introduces an austere Scandinavian family to the joys of good food . . . and by extension the earthy pleasures of life.  Taiwan-born director Ang Lee, in his 1994 Eat Drink Man Woman, uses a retired chef cooking for his adult daughters as a way to explore Chinese  tradition as well as the relationship between generations. In 2023’s The Taste of Things, starring the luminous Juliette Binoche, a pairing involving love and loss unfolds through the relationship of a gourmet and his loyal cook. And we can’t forget the Pixar animated film, Ratatouille, which proves that you’re never too small to be very good in the kitchen.

 Earlier this year, Netflix presented Nonnas, a star-studded TV movie based on the real-life story of a New York man. He paid tribute to his late mother’s talents as a home cook by launching a popular Staten Island restaurant in which the kitchen is staffed by a clutch of Italian mamas. This slight but charming film is notable for casting veteran actresses of Italian descent (like Lorraine Bracco, Brenda Vaccaro, and Talia Shire), and having them fight epic stove-top battles over cooking techniques and regional specialties.

 Then there’s Big Night, a 1996 labor of love co-written and co-directed by Stanley Tucci. Tucci, a hyper-versatile character actor who was Oscar-nominated for playing an ominous neighbor in 2009’s The Lovely Bones, is most fondly remembered (by me, at least) as a sympathetic gay art director in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada. He also made an impressively down-to-earth Roman Catholic cardinal in last year’s Conclave.

 Throughout his career, Tucci has not been shy about proclaiming his love for good cooking, especially of the Italian variety. In 2021 he hosted  Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, a CNN series that followed him through the land of his ancestors. That same year he published Taste: My Life Through Food, a memoir that spent sixteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Other Tucci publications include What I Ate in One Year and several cookbooks.

 So it’s no surprise that when Tucci set about to make an original film, he put food preparation at its center. Big Night casts Tucci and Tony Shalhoub (of Lebanese descent but comfortable playing a wide range of nationalities) as Italian-born brothers determined to create a fine-dining restaurant near the New Jersey shore. In the film, Primo (Shalhoub) is the older brother, an artist in the kitchen who’s intolerant of shortcuts and trendy gimmicks. Tucci himself plays Secundo, the would-be practical brother who’s determined to see the business succeed, but has his own lapses into fantasyland. While locals cram into a livelier but far less authentic Italian-American bistro nearby, the brothers are desperate to stay afloat. That’s when, for reasons the film makes clear, the duo decide to risk everything on an elaborate gourmet banquet that’s spectacular but in many ways poorly conceived. This is a story about the restaurant business—yes!—but even more about the push-and-pull relationship between two brothers with very different visions of what they want to achieve in life.

 Big Night is not an Oscar-winning kind of movie. But it nabbed several writing awards, including an Independent Spirit nod for Best First Screenplay. Clearly, Tucci’s got talent in areas other than acting, and I can’t help wondering what he’ll serve us next. 

 (Here's a fascinationg addendum, provided by Hillel Schwartz, a friend and loyal reader:)  Stanley Tucci played Paul Child (Julia Child's husband) in the 2009 movie Julie & Julia. Tucci wrote about his deep admiration for Julia Child in his Taste and in an article for TIME Magazine: https://time.com/6103409/stanley-tucci-taste-julia-child/.  Ironically, Tucci was diagnosed in 2017 with a tumor at the base of his tongue, and lost his sense of taste and smell, but this was successfully treated with chemotherapy and radiation, although he had to have a feeding tube for six months. And now his co-star in Big Night, Tony Shalhoub, has his own tv series, where he goes around tasting versions of bread in different ethnic cuisines.

“Jay Kelly”: Stars in Their Eyes

I recently heard a sweet story involving a weather delay at a small airport somewhere in the northwest. For various complex reasons, the passengers suddenly had to rely on ground transportation to get to where they were going. What made all the difference was the fact that one of the passengers was the actor Keanu Reeves. Charmingly self-effacing, he befriended his fellow travelers and used his clout to hire the bus that got them all to their destinations. When they finally parted, they felt they had been personally blessed by this close proximity to stardom.

 That’s part of what being a movie star is about: having an appeal that reaches beyond the screen and makes average citizens feel they have a personal relationship with someone who is magic. There’s a similar sort of moment in the new Noah Baumbach film, Jay Kelly. In it George Clooney plays a world-famous leading man who seems (on the surface, at least) a whole lot like George Clooney. The episode begins on a European train on which Kelly, instantly recognizable by all the other passengers, charms them with self-deprecating humor. Then a disturbed man grabs the pocketbook of a nice old lady, stops the train, and runs off into the Italian countryside. Without a second’s hesitation, Kelly shifts into heroic mode, as he’s doubtless done in countless popular flicks. He leaps from the train and pursues the thief, finally emerging triumphant with the errant purse, to the huzzahs of all the other passengers. That’s the upside of being famous.

 Baumbach’s film (co-written by the talented British actress Emily Mortimer) shows us the downside too: the toll stardom takes on one’s family life, as well as the skewed sense of self that develops when the star is always encircled by a fawning entourage. The film certainly conveys the difficulties faced when an ageing celebrity is no longer so clear about his path forward, and we do feel a certain sympathy for a nice-guy leading man who’s starting to be tired of the usual clamor of expectations. But I found myself (as various critics groups have done) even more interested in the hangers-on who pay a price for their loyalty to the great man. The second lead in this film is played by Adam Sandler as Ron Sukenick, Jay’s long-time manager. He’s a guy who puts family obligations (and pretty much everything else) second to his duties as Jay’s companion, fixer, office wife, and general factotum. Yes, he’s even been known to touch up the star’s greying temples, when necessary. Now he’s left his own kids at home with an increasingly resentful wife (played by Baumbach’s own wife, Greta Gerwig) while he and Jay schlepp around Europe to attend a gala tribute event that Jay had previously turned down, but then mercurially changed his mind about at the very last minute. Sandler, who’s long since graduated from the childish comedies that first made his reputation, has already won some performance awards for this role, and I suspect there’ll be more.

The movie’s certainly a reflection on the price of stardom. And non-stardom: there’s a small but important subplot about the young Jay’s talented buddy who, through the kind of fluke with which the film industry is rife, never gets the chance to move ahead in his career. This is not Baumbach’s best film: its time-jumps and on-the-nose plotting detract from the kind of tightly-focused artistry he generally brings to projects like Marriage Story and The Squid and the Whale. Still, even if it doesn’t reach the starry heights, this is a film worth pondering.

 

 

 

Hairless in the Basement: “Bugonia”

Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is not one to play it safe. Neither, apparently, is Emma Stone. The Internet tells me that Lanthimos is a part of the so-called “Greek Weird Wave.” Unlike such earlier Greek filmmakers as the great Michael Cacoyannis—who dramatized classical tragedies like Electra (1962) and The Trojan Women (1971) while also bringing a full range of dramatic colors to 1964’s modern-day Zorba the Greek—Lanthimos is not interested in ennobling his characters. He seems to have real affection for the grotesque. I haven’t seen all of his English-language films. But The Lobster, in which single adults are given 45 days to find a mate or risk being turned into the animal of their choice, is both bizarre and extremely entertaining. And I loved Lanthimos’s first collaboration with Emma Stone, in 2018’s The Favourite, which made me regard the 18^th century British monarchy in a whole new light. None of this, though, prepared me for Poor Things (2023), a kind of berserk Frankenstein story in which Stone’s young adult character starts out with a small child’s brain, then develops a teenager’s libido, before finally reaching a kind of mental and emotional maturity. (The Oscar Stone won for this role was definitely well-deserved.)

 In this year’s Bugonia (the title refers to an ancient Greek folk ritual involving bees and cow dung), Lanthimos and Stone are together once again. And once again he seems to enjoy systematically destroying her wide-eyed beauty in the name of grim humor. In the film, Stone plays a soignée big pharma exec who works out of a hypermodern building set in the rural American countryside. She’s a powerhouse at work, but this doesn’t stop her from being kidnapped by two scruffy locals and imprisoned in their basement. The older one, Teddy, is played by the recently ubiquitous Jesse Plemons, who—with his always disheveled red hair—is looking more and more like Opie gone to seed. He’s the idea guy: the one who is absolutely convinced that Stone’s Michelle is really a dangerous space alien sent to threaten Planet Earth. The younger, Don, is Teddy’s always-loyal cousin. (He’s played by young Alban Delbis, who is genuinely afflicted with autism. A star of his SoCal high school’s drama class, Delbis gives an impressively moving performance.)

 The notion that a successful entrepreneur in a business suit and heels would  be accused by a doofus or two of actually coming from outer space sounds like it could make for fun at the movies. That’s what I thought my evening would be like, but the film’s poster should really have disabused me of that notion. Though a few of my fellow filmgoers managed to guffaw a time or two, Bugonia is hard to classify as a comedy, even a very dark one. Yes, there are some unexpected plot twists that encourage us to smirk, but I defy anyone to chuckle at the film’s gut-punching ending.

 Most critical reviews of Bugonia have been positive, I’m told, My hometown newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, titles its strong review “It’s Emma Stone’s planet now as the alien comedy ‘Bugonia’ proves.” The focus by the Times critic is on how cleverly Stone plays with our emotions, and how much she endures for her art, up to and including having the hair on her head brutally shaved off on camera. To promote the film’s opening, a Culver City theatre staged a promo performance exclusively for bald people, or those who were willing to lose their locks on-site. But despite the resulting hoopla, I’m sensing that audiences—with or without hair—are staying away.

Fancy That, Hedda!: Tessa Thompson Breaks Loose

A close member of my family, deeply immersed in high school drama, was intrigued by a classmate named Tessa Thomas. She was a pert young thing with a lively spirit, and she gravitated naturally toward ingenue roles. Hardly a shrinking violet, she had no trouble finding a date for the high school prom. But she sometimes needed a ride home from late-night rehearsals, and we were happy to oblige.

 I didn’t think about Tessa for many years thereafter, until her name started to appear in credits for major films. After appearing in a stage production of For Colored Girls, she segued into the 2010 film version, then scored a personal breakthrough in an award-winning college-set comedy, Dear White People (2013). Two years later she made her first appearance as the leading man’s love interest in Creed, then joined the Marvel Universe  as Valkyrie for Thor Ragnarok and its sequels.  Then in 2021 she joined with a past Oscar nominee, Ruth Negga for Passing, a complex indie about two old friends in 1920s Harlem, one of them acknowledging her Black heritage and the other passing as white.

 But though I saw Tessa’s face on the side of city buses, as part of the publicity push for a 2019 Men in Black sequel, she seemed to lack an above-the-title starring vehicle . . . until now. Hedda, written and directed by her close friend Nia Da Costa, features Tessa as producer as well as star, so this is definitely HER film. It’s also, of course, an adaptation of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s controversial 1890 masterpiece, Hedda Gabler. I’ve read that Tessa herself, in thinking of Ibsen classics, was most drawn to A Doll’s House, in which young wife Nora—definitely an ingenue type—discovers in herself the resolve to overturn a stifling marriage. But Da Costa wanted her to play instead a vixen who uses her sexuality and her impetuous nature to bring down everyone who thwarts her desires.

 Does Tessa make a good vixen? Yes, absolutely: she looks gorgeous in a low-cut New Look gown (the play has been updated to England in the 1950s), and mischief gleams in her eyes. And Da Costa, going far beyond Ibsen’s one-set play, gives her a fabulous (though mortgaged to the hilt) country estate in which to work her wiles. The film is set during one eventful night at a no-holds-barred party, complete with jazz band, free-flowing booze, fireworks on the lawn, and giddy skinny-dips into the lake on the property.

 So Tessa is impressive, and the look of the film can’t be bettered. Why, then, was I so restless on my living-room couch while watching this Netflix extravaganza? For me the subordinate characters in this Hedda’s world just don’t work. It’s well-known by now that Da Costa, in exploring newlywed Hedda’s ongoing desire for someone other than her dull, dutiful husband, has updated gender matters by shifting the brilliant, erratic Eilert Lovborg from male to female (he becomes “Eileen”). This could have been an interesting—and very modern—rethinking of the Ibsen original. But, in this key role, Nina Hoss just seems out of place. Large, gawky, and oddly costumed (her “evening wear” looks like a milkmaid’s dirndl), she does not seem like someone who could ever ignite Hedda’s passions. I’m ready to believe in the possibility of sexual desire between two women, but THESE two just don’t seem to fit together in a convincing way. Moreover the film’s lengthy dialogue scenes (particularly the ones between Lovborg and a more disciplined and wholesome sweetheart) are dull indeed, missing Hedda’s spark. Too bad.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Very Flexible Diane Keaton

In memory of the late Diane Keaton, I wanted to re-watch one of her films. But which one? Of course I remembered her hilarious teaming with Woody Allen in so many of his early flicks. I can still see the two of them in Sleeper (1973), elaborately pretending to be surgeons charged with cloning an assassinated political leader from his one remaining body part: a nose.  I’m also very partial to Love and Death (1975) and of course Keaton is justly adored for her Oscar-winning title role in the ultimate romantic comedy, Annie Hall (1977).

 In truth I fell for Keaton in her very first film: Lovers and Other Strangers (1970). In this charming ensemble outing, set amid the chaos of a big family wedding, she has the small role of Joan Vecchio, married to the groom’s older brother. Her appearance causes some tension at the festive gathering, because she and husband Richie are seriously thinking of separating. The problem: Joan has discovered that, after several years of wedlock, Richie’s hair no longer smells like raisins.

 Of course Keaton was later to play other wedding scenes, notably in The Godfather, where she was Michael Corleone’s naïve young wife-to-be, meeting the family at the lavish nuptials of Michael’s sister . But as she aged she hardly lost her on-screen sex appeal. In 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give, a wealthy playboy (Jack Nicholson) gives up an attractive young woman in order to woo her mother, played by Keaton, who was then almost 60. Still, the course of true love never does run smooth. In a 1996 comedy, The First Wives Club, Keaton (who in real life never married) is one of a trio of reluctant divorcees determined to get revenge on the husbands who dumped them for much younger cuties.

 Though Keaton was known for her flair for comedy, she also played highly dramatic roles. In 1977, the same year in which the world fell in love with her Annie Hall, she starred as a secretly promiscuous schoolteacher who meets a tragic fate in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Four years later, she starred with Warren Beatty in Reds, an Oscar-winning epic saga of the Russian Revolution as seen through the eyes of real-life American activists John Reed and Louise Bryant. But I decided to re-visit Keaton by way of a much smaller drama. Released in 1996, it was called Marvin’s Room. And, like Reds, it earned Keaton an Oscar nomination for Best Performance by an Actress.

 If Keaton’s Louise Bryant in Reds was heroic, her Bessie in Marvin’s Room is downright saintly. (That’s a new one for me—Diane Keaton as a saint!) In this story of a medical crisis that brings s fractured family together, Meryl Streep is the bitchy Lee, unhappily raising two misfit kids by herself ever since her no-good husband walked out. (One of her sons, a teenaged Leonardo DiCaprio, has just burned her house down.) She’s received word that her younger sister Bessie (Keaton) has been diagnosed with cancer and desperately needs a bone marrow donor. So Lee and the kids reluctantly drive from Ohio to Florida to help out a relative with whom Lee has had no contact for 20 years.

 Keaton’s Bessie, who lost her first love to an accident many years back, has spent decades of her life looking after her bed-ridden father (Hume Cronyn) and her wacky aunt (an unrecognizable Gwen Verdon). Despite the physical challenge she herself is facing, she has a radiant optimism about the days ahead. In service to others, she finds joy, and we believe every word she says. 

 

Physically and Emotionally Naked: Remembering Sally Kirkland

So, I’m sorry to say, Sally Kirkland is no longer with us.  If, that is, she ever was. My personal feeling is that Sally came from another  planet, and only visited earth occasionally. She was, in any case, one of a kind.

 The highlight of Sally’s acting career was Anna, a 1987 indie in which she played the title role, that of a Slavic actress who has survived political persecution. The showy part won her a Golden Globe, and she was even nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. (Her competition included Glenn Close for Fatal Attraction, Holly Hunter for Broadcast News, Meryl Streep for Ironweed, and the winner, Cher, for Moonstruck.)

 But I knew Sally before all that, when she was one of the many aspiring movie people hanging around the Sunset Strip offices of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. An Actors Studio alumna who had also spent time among Andy Warhol’s The Factory crazies, she helped out with casting, and also played small but flamboyant roles like “Barney’s woman” in Big Bad Mama. She performed in some major studio films too, like The Sting, Private Benjamin, and JFK, mostly in parts that called for big emotions and very few clothes.

 Sally, you see, had a thing for nudity. A former model, she was tall and lean, with augmented breasts. (Years later, she was to become a very public crusader against breast implants.) When I was researching my former boss for the biography that evolved into Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, she told me that on screen she had a gift for appearing both physically and emotionally undressed: “Combining the emotional nakedness with the physical nakedness—that’s something that Roger’s always loved about my work.” 

 The 1999 in-person interview I did with Sally for that book is something I’ll never, ever forget. We met at the Silver Spoon, a trendy West Hollywood coffee shop near her home. When I entered, she (fully dressed) was ensconced in a booth, beneath a large framed movie poster of herself in Anna. And she was not alone. There was a young male assistant sitting beside her, taking notes, and I realized I was expected to buy them both breakfast. She was also the only person I interviewed for the Corman book who required me to sign an agreement allowing her to check all her quotes and context before my book was published. (When I later complied, she kept tinkering with her own brief bio at the rear of the book to make sure pretty much every film she’d ever made was mentioned.)

 We were studying our menus when two very attractive young blondes walked through the door. They were wearing low-cut blouses and short-shorts, and they looked to be identical. Twins? They were, it turned out, Sally’s acting students, and she’d invited them along. And then . . . a third young lady arrived. Yes, triplets. Sally proudly told me that, like her, they’d been featured in a Playboy spread, and that they now—under her tutelage—were getting ready to pursue acting careers. And I discovered I’d be buying breakfast for myself and five other people. (The triplets sat, looking awestruck, as Sally praised Roger to the skies for encouraging her directing aspirations and for treating her like a member of his family.)

 Sally Kirkland was, among many other things, a crusader for a variety of causes. I of course have no way of knowing where she is now. But I’m sure of one thing: wherever she may have ended up, it’s where the action is.

 

 

 

A Tale of Three Swingers: “Trapeze”

When I was a kid, I was entranced by the ads for Trapeze, a circus drama featuring lots of high-flying action and three bona fide Hollywood stars : Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and Gina Lollobridgida. The sets and spangly costumes looked dazzling to a small girl. I wouldn’t have much cared that the film’s director was Carol Reed, a Brit who’d helmed such taut masterworks as Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man (1949). (In 1968 he was to have his big Hollywood moment, winning the Best Director Oscar for his work on a delightful film musical, Oliver!)

 Flash forward to 2025. After watching 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success, produced in part by Burt Lancaster’s own company, I read that Tony Curtis was cast as the ambitious young press agent kowtowing to Lancaster’s sinister gossip columnist largely because Lancaster had enjoyed working with Curtis on Trapeze. So, thanks to the goodly supply of vintage films on DVD at my local library, the time seemed right to check it out.

 The story of Trapeze is simple enough: every character is in love with the drama and the spectacle of the circus. This particular troupe is based in Paris, and boasts the usual combination of clowns, animals, dancing girls, and acrobats. We immediately get to the heart of things as aerialist Mike Ribble (a buff-looking Lancaster) climbs to the rafters to swing into a daring triple somersault. Once he’s performed the dangerous stunt, he’s supposed to be caught by the waiting hands of a second trapeze artist. But something goes awry, and he falls, bouncing out of the safety net and onto the ground. All of this happens before the opening credits: when we next see Mike he’s an embittered man, working for the circus as a rigger and effortfully walking with a cane. 

Along comes Tony Curtis as brash, bouncy Tino Orsini, American son of an old-school aerialist. He’s heard that Mike is the only flyer in the world who can teach him the triple somersault. Refusing to accept Mike’s rejection, he uses his talents and his easy charm to worm his way into the older man’s heart. (One of the film’s most endearing moments shows the two walking down a Paris street. The irrepressible Tino upends his body to continue walking on his hands. That’s when Mike, not willing to be totally upstaged by his new protégé, does the same. The scene fades out on the two of them, side by side, traversing the Paris trottoir upside down.)  Tino wants to learn; and Mike discovers he wants to teach. What could be better? 

 But of course there has to be a fly in the ointment. And Lola, as played by Italian “it” girl Gina Lollobrigida, is a pretty fly indeed. Originally the only female on a team of Italian acrobats, she slithers her way into the aerial act by using her sex appeal to alternately romance both Tino and Mike. Of course it all comes to a head on the night when American impresario John Ringling North is visiting, looking for acts to import.

 Frankly, I was rather disappointed by the big aerial climax when, without a net, the triple somersault is once again attempted. After all the build-up, I’d expected something far more spectacular. But the film has an effectively rueful ending in which some achieve greatness and some turn it down. Lancaster and Curtis once again make a memorable team. As for the busty, glamorous Lollobrigida, I couldn’t really decipher what her character was about. Maybe, simply, a combination of Eve and the serpent. 

 

Fanning the Flames: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

 Portrait of a Lady on Fire: what a scintillating title! Céline Sciamma’s 2019 French-language historical drama was originally called Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, which sounds almost as good. But the English-language version allows for an interesting mental connection to a Henry James classic from 1881, The Portrait of a Lady. In that novel, one of James’ most admired, young Isabel Archer is a feisty American who attracts several European suitors, but turns them down because she’s  determined to preserve her independence. Ultimately, though, she marries an American expatriate . . . only to find that he’s a schemer, and totally unworthy of her affections.

 James’ novel has a lot to say about love and marriage, but it never enters into the territory that Sciamma broaches in this fascinating and beautifully photographed film. Set in the late 18^th century or thereabouts, it begins with an art instructor (Noémie Merlant). Facing a classroom full of eager young girls, she ruefully admits that a painting one of them has unearthed in a storeroom is her long-ago work. Its title: Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Flashback to decades earlier, when the same woman-- traveling via a small rowboat to an island off the coast of Brittany—leaps into the choppy water to rescue some of her work that has been washed overboard.

 Marianne, self-confident and determined, has been summoned by a French countess to produce a portrait of her daughter, Héloïse, who’s on the brink of marriage to a wealthy Milanese nobleman. The assignment is a tricky one. Héloïse was mostly reared in a convent; it was her older sister who was destined to marry. But that sister is now dead—a suicide?—and so Héloïse (Adèle Haenel)  is being groomed to be given away in marriage in her place. Héloïse is a fascinating character; our sense is that she’s as of yet unformed: she doesn’t quite seem to know who she is or what she wants. She does know, though, that she does NOT want to pose for a commemorative portrait. And so the plan is for the talented Marianne to befriend her and then paint her portrait in secret, using herself (in Héloïse’s gown) as a model for the painting’s upper body.

 The friendship thrives, and then – in the countess’s brief absence—becomes something far more. The two young women discover that a deep sexual bond exists between them. There’s a dazzling bonfire scene on a local beach that seems to reflect their passion, and the moment of Héloïse’s long skirts catching fire hints at both the ardor and the danger of their burgeoning relationship. There’s also a provocative scene in a local peasant hut where the housemaid in the countess’s chateau matter-of-factly undergoes an abortion, with the abortionist’s own very young children nestled by her side. 

 I won’t give away what ultimately happens between Héloïse and Marianne, though the film gives us several interesting glimpses of their future lives. Suffice it to say that the ancient Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice plays a key emotional role in what ultimately transpires. Sciamma, clearly a master filmmaker, makes creative use of music both old (Summer, from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”) and new (a haunting a cappella number for female choir and rhythmic clapping). 

Portrait of a Lady on Fire was nominated for countless awards, and won many. At its Cannes debut, it was nominated for the Palme d’Or, and won for Sciamma’s screenplay. As a filmmaker devoted to the female gaze, Sciamma was doubtless pleased to have won the Queer Palm as well.