We had a dog (Glen, RIP) and he was a perfect, elderly angel, sent from Dog Heaven for a brief stint to heal our cold hearts, before returning to Dog Heaven, where all his friends and Dog God live. That was about a year ago. Since then, we’ve fostered a motley and devilish crew of dogs, ranging from Clover (tried to eat a flattened, dead rat, I had to pry it out of her mouth with a long stick), to Macarena (sweetheart, followed us like a shadow, went aggro and berserk the second she got out of the house), to Emmy (aloof, confused), and now Winnie, who is goofy and loving. Winnie is also is built like a linebacker and during her zoomies on Wednesday, bonked my head so hard that I got a fat lip and, I believe, a mild concussion.
Cue Alli goading me from the next room to “take a five minute screen break,” and me reluctantly agreeing and cuddling with Winnie (who is now on doggy drugs to give her—and me—a little bit of calm).
Just painting a little picture of my life and headspace right now. How’s everyone else doing? Am I wrong in thinking it’s been a weird and itchy week? Bad feelings abound! Why not cure it all with a…………..GOOD MOVIE?!
And a recipe for soda bread :)
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A few weeks ago I was thrilled to see that Criterion had added Melvin Van Peebles’s 1967 THE STORY OF A THREE DAY PASS to the channel. Van Peebles, considered the “Godfather of Black Cinema,” passed away just last year and I’d heard this was one of his most influential films.
Indeed, it is stylish, breezy, and radical, both reverent to the French New Wave and charting the experimentalism of early American indie filmmaking. THE STORY OF A THREE DAY PASS follows a Black soldier stationed in France who gets a promotion and a weekend off to explore Paris. Over the titular three days, he finds romance, racism, and an identity crisis, as he struggles to determine how much he is in fact willing to code switch and play the “happy Negro” to his white colleagues, and to the purportedly progressive Parisians he encounters.
Borne out of Van Peebles’s own struggles to break into Hollywood and subsequent move to France, the film strikes a perfect balance of playful and angry.
WATCH IF YOU LIKE: early Spike Lee, the French New Wave, Francophilia
Streaming on the Criterion Channel, and available to rent here
For my birthday I got Al and myself tickets to fly down to Durham and visit my dear friend Carson. Carson lives in a big white farmhouse and we spent our mornings eating banana bread and watching horses graze in the pasture. In addition to just being in town to hang with my bud, we were verklempt to see Carson’s solo show at ArtSpace in Raleigh. It was phenomenal and moving and whimsical and impressive and I could go on.
A note about Carson, despite our great old friendship, and despite the fact that in childhood she showed me two of my most formative movies (MOULIN ROUGE, duh, and WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, duh), she’s not really a movie person. You might even say she actively dislikes movies.
So I was shocked when our flight got in and she immediately suggested we stock up on candy at Wal-Mart and head to the cinema to see a movie she had already seen. And that movie was JACKASS FOREVER. She was effusive and we had to take her up on it.
We had a blast. Not only were we high on sugar (the magical one-two-three-four punch of Twizzlers, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, and the new potato chip Reese’s), but we laughed and cringed for pretty much the entire runtime of this joyful, weird, and dumb movie. There are some bones I’d pick with a some elements of the film but mostly I found myself laughing very hard and constantly surprised, which is a really nice way to feel at a time when every day looks about the same.
It was also the first time in a long time since I watched a movie that felt like a piece of the cultural conversation. Maybe that had to do with being in from out of town, and meeting a lot of new people with whom our main shared piece of news was having seen this one movie, but hey, I think it just speaks to one of the joys of moviegoing, which is the actual “going” part, that is, the act of being there, together.
I also enjoyed reading this piece on some of the filmic context for the franchise.
WATCH IF YOU LIKE: skate videos, fail videos, straight guys who love each other, toilet humor
Now playing in theaters
I’ve written before about the wonderful world of Errol Morris before, and in 1991’s A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, he hones his focus two subjects: the cosmos through the eyes of Stephen Hawking, and Stephen Hawking through the eyes of the cosmos. The resulting documentary is humbling and awesome. I’ve never seen THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, but based one what I’ve heard, I’m going to hazard a guess that this movie is way better. Morris includes his standard moments of winks and whimsy and uses his trademark “reenactments” to explain complicated concepts with objects as simple as dice. Philip Glass did the score, which reminds me, I wrote last week about THE INQUIRING NUNS, which we actually saw in the context of a short program of films scored by Glass, presented in partnership with the Chicago Symphony. In A BRIEF HISTORY, the score is Glass as we know him now: moody and chromatic, but in THE INQUIRING NUNS, we are getting Glass pre-Glass, a.k.a. just a guy willing to put some notes down for friends making a low budget documentary. The director of the film guesses he paid Glass around $100. Not bad.
WATCH IF YOU LIKE: physics, spirituality, marveling at how small we are compared to the big beautiful galaxy, wishing you’d paid more attention in science class
Streaming on the Criterion Channel, HBOMax, and rentable on YouTube and Vudu
Well gosh, I guess it’s St. Patrick’s Day…! The Chicago River is green, Guinness was on tap at the Charleston and I woke up early and made soda bread the other morning.
The truth is, I only made soda bread because I was up too early (see: foster dog) and we were out of eggs and this is a few-ingredient, small-ish baked good that makes a nice start to the day (or “top-o’-the-mornin’,” if you will) if you’ve got buttermilk in the fridge.
I’ve made this once before and in that past iteration I included whiskey soaked raisins…it was better with the raisins than without! If you decide you’d like to include anything like that, just add as the final step before shaping.
SODA BREAD
adapted from Melissa Clark
480 grams all-purpose flour (~3.5 cups)
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
Heat oven to 450 and butter a baking sheet.
In a large bowl, sift together all dry ingredients and make a well in the center.
Pour the buttermilk into the well and mix using your hands. The dough should be soft but not sticky. Add a bit of flour if needed.
Wash and dry your hands (do this—it will make the next part far easier). Turn onto a floured surface and knead briefly, then pat the dough into a round about 1/2 inch thick.
Transfer the dough to the baking sheet and, using a sharp knife, cut a deep cross into the top, from end to end.
Bake for 15 minutes, then reduce the oven temp to 400. Continue to bake until the top is golden and the base sounds hollow when tapped, about 30 minutes.
Serve warm with a lot of butter, preferably Kerrygold.
All for now! Headed to see THE BATMAN!
Nina