TV Bites: Mean Streets

THE SNACK:
Zeppole



Got some crazy chest cold/flu thing the last few days which hit me hard. Lots of sleeping, eating lots of Thai soups, catching up on work, and planning my schedule for Fantastic Fest next week. The best part of Fantastic Fest is that my buddy and director Eugenio Mira will be my house guest for the duration. If you're unfamiliar with Eugenio's work, one of the coolest things he's ever done is actually in front of the camera. In the upcoming film, Red Lights, he got to play a young Robert De Niro! Check it out! That's mighty awesome, in my book. So how appropriate and coincidental that this is the film I chose for this edition....

Tomorrow, the 15th of September is the first day of the Feast of San Gennaro. And there's only ONE movie to watch, and only ONE food to eat to celebrate. So let's get to it....

The Class: The Harder They Come

THE CLASS:
Hot Pepper Shrimp
Jerk Chicken
Baked Yams with Sweet Onions & Ginger
Caribbean Cole Slaw
Gizzada (Spiced Sweet Coconut Tart)



When I was a teenager, there was this weird little theater in the quiet suburb of Uniondale, New York called the Uniondale Mini-Cinema. Before the "midnight movie" craze hit the mainstream, this was one of those first experiments in letting young people, especially young people who were influenced by what was then known as "the counter-culture," and certainly those who had a love and reverence for movies, be allowed to program an actual movie theater.

Now remember this was before there were videotapes, or even cable TV. This was the only place where you could stay up all night and watch Marx Brothers movies, the new "concert" films like Woodstock or Jimi Plays Berkeley, and was a home for "outsider" filmmakers such as Robert Downey Sr. and John Waters. Later, after I had gone to seek my fortunes on the West Coast, it was one of the first theaters to do the whole Rocky Horror Picture Show thing. But it was also one of the first theaters to run The Harder They Come.

TV Bites: Amarcord

THE SNACK:
Piadine



A shorter version of this post was originally published on the Criterion Collection website.

By this point, you should now I'm going to be doing quasi-monthly Chef du Cinema mini-posts at the Criterion Collection website (see above). When the lovely people there suggested that I just pick something from their catalog I wanted to do first, I was sure I’d be overwhelmed to choose one. But starting with their new releases, the first film on the list was Federico Fellini’s Amarcord, and I stopped right there. I’d been dying to give it the Chef du Cinema treatment as it’s been one of my favorite movies since I first saw it in a theater over 30 years ago. Partly because I love Fellini in general, and partly because I spent part of my youth living in a seaside resort town in New York, and could relate to Fellini’s own memories of his youth in the Italian seaside resort town of Rimini.