Soup Galore…and Movie Reviews
Well, I now have so much soup in my fridge that it is remarkable. I have soup in the fridge and freezer. Courtney came over last night with a sack of vegetable soup vegetables and the explanation that since she is spending so much time over here eating my food and studying, she’s letting all her vegetables rot at home. So we studied all day, Courtney Japanese, and me job hunting, watched Gran Torino and then made a large pot of cabbage soup on the stove. I put in dried sage and tarragon, both from the garden, and Courtney put in pepper, basil and parsley. We chopped a large cabbage, garlic, 2 zucchini, 2 yellow squash, an onion, 2 carrots, and threw pinto beans. It made a very good soup, although we had to devise a bowl to put one zucchini in, as it was apparently rotten and tasted awful.
This means I now have the ginger, chickpea, garlic, okra and sweet pototo soup still left (yes, there was actually a recipe for it that contained the remains of my very strange pantry stock leftovers). That made a fantastic spicy soup and I have been eating it often, but still quite a bit left.
So, on to Gran Torino, which was Courtney’s Netflix. Excellent movie. I remember seeing the trailers and thought it was a bang-bang-shoot-’em-up kind of movie, and so avoided it a bit even though Clint Eastwood directed, but what I didn’t know is that it is also a very funny movie. I laughed a lot. The plot concerns a old man, very set in his ways and prejediced, and his neighborhood, which has been inhabited by rival gangs. His neighbors are Asian — and in the beginning, they have a ceremony for a baby and are killing chickens, and I thought of the Hmong — and as it turns out, they were Hmong characters. Since the main character has a shotgun he takes everywhere, and there are Hmong, Mexican and various other characters, it made me think the film might be set in the Central Valley, because that mix of cultures exists there. But it’s set in Michigan instead. This is a very old fashioned movie in the way it’s made — not so much in the language used in it — but in the pacing, the amount of talking, and the amount of characters which are the focus. It has few characters but takes the time to build them and the thier world. It also has a very Western feel to it, like what would happen if Dirty Harry retired and somebody pissed him off a bit and then a bit more. Clint Eastwood also directed Mystic River and the Outlaw Josey Wales, and they all take their time to develop the story. Even though I loved Mystic River the book, I thought something was missing from the movie - the neighborhood. Well, here is the neighborhood in this movie instead.
Of course, right after I finished the movie I had to look up quotes to it to find what I had misunderstood. The DVD has a surprising lack of extras, only a featurette on what kind of car the actors would like to buy given the chance, and another only about the car which I didn’t bother to watch. I was more interested in the story, and did find one article on the web about how the writer decided to develop the culture clash. It’s a very anthropology-like movie. (Courtney said that if you were from another country and wanted a lesson in all the racial slurs which could be thrown at someone, watch this movie. She constantly called the main character a bastard, but laughed at him as much as I did).
I also finished watching the commentary on Adam this morning. It’s a movie I finished up the other day. It’s very funny to watch the commentary, if only because they point out the things I missed while watching the movie. In one scene, a bunch of women and others are gathered around a newly adopted baby. The point of the scene was apparently that the women were offended because Adam walked off, and this was because they were lesbians and had adopted. Oops, missed that. I understood the baby was adopted, there were a lot of people around it, and I only saw the one closest as being a possible parent. I’d thought they were offended for an entirely different reason — because Adam hadn’t wanted to see videos and everyone else did. It also took me a little while to understand the significance of a scene where Adam’s girlfriend’s calendar reads “meet Adam at the theater with Mom and Dad.” What they mean is, they set up meeting at the theater, but I saw it as well, of course, they met him, because they explained in the scene that there were extra tickets. Anyway, before the scene was over, I did understand it. In another scene, the mother of the girlfriend tells Adam where she is and he walks there to meet her. In the commentary, the filmmakers said they did this because the mother wanted Adam and her daughter to get back together. Really? Didn’t realize that. Made sense to me that he would go where the mother told him — because that’s where the girlfriend was.
So obviously I missed some things. But it was an entertaining romance movie that played against its genre. The issue of whether Adam gets the girl or not is not so much an issue –at least not in the way you’d think. This is a “disabled” movie like Mask, My Left Foot, and Mozart and the Whale, and like them, there is a pivotal moment in it where the disabled person acts against another character in something that pertains to their disability. In Mask, it’s when Rocky Dennis slams a kid up against a locker. In My Left Foot, it’s when Christy Brown bangs his head on the table because everyone is taking his drink away from him (and when I saw that, I thought what a jerk, but there is a point there). And in Mozart and the Whale, which like Adam deals with Asperger’s Syndrome, one character who has Aspergers commands the other who also has it to act like normal people. In this case, there is a scene that actually causes a rift between the characters with more force, but the scene that I mean is a scene where Adam defines something practically that would be emotional. That’s very interesting. The problem I have with this issue is the subplot with the girlfriend’s father, who is going to court. The pivotal moment where the girlfriend decides she can’t be with Adam is too soon in my mind after the father telling her that she can’t be with Adam because he’s disabled. It doesn’t make it seem as if she arrived a logical decision based on whether adaptation was possible — but simply because her father told her it wouldn’t work. This may not be what the filmmakers intended, but it was confusing for me. Is it something I can understand and hope was different in the movie? Yes, it is. Is it realistic that the story might happen this way in real life? Yes, it’s very much that too. This was a good movie, but it also struck me as a very sad movie in some ways. Worth watching again.
The other movie I watched awhile back with Courtney from the library is also excellent, and like Adam, is an independent film — which is probably one of the reasons it’s excellent. It’s called The Dream Catcher, and it’s two (and almost only) main characters are Freddy, who is around 18, and Albert, who is around 14, very hyperactive, a compulsive thief and liar, and also one of the film’s funniest characters. Both of them are running away for different reasons, and this is a road movie that involves cars, boxcars, Indian reservations, carnies, swearing, more swearing, guns and the power they are seen to provide, and also how these people become family. Like Gran Torino, there’s a lot of talking, but it’s in it’s place. They follow up on all the loose ends by the conclusion. I watched commentary on this one too because I was interested how independent filmmakers could make a film that involved cross-country, trains, multiple cars, dogs, and children, multiple sets, and still make it work. There’s scene in this movie that doesn’t make any sense to me, though. It’s like the Lord of the Rings…If you owned something that made bad things happen, would you really carry it around, going “I’ve got to get rid of this, it makes bad things happen.”? Definitely a movie I would rent or own though. Different pace than really popular films.
Also, I’ve discover that Warner Brothers Archive has opened their vault and are selling DVDs of some of their older movies. Sounds like no special features at all, but still, I’ve been browsing.
I had leftover pancakes for breakfast today. Yesterday, in the middle of studying and watching movies, I did all the wash, which meant we were constantly stepping over piles of clothers, and also made the Italian Day of the Dead cookies from my new library sale cookbook In Nonna’s Kitchen. I’ve been wanting to try to make them, as they sound like a combination of all good things: jam, chocolate, coffee, nuts — and they turned out excellent. That being said, I have never seen cookies with such a texture. They turned out dark brown-purple from the rasberry jam and coffee, and they bake into this strange muddy brown color. In dough form, they remind me a lot of working in clay, the look and feel of it. But in spite of this, they tried out quite good, and I have been munching. Today I need to study braille before looking for jobs. More blogging later.