How is it possible that Chocolat (2000) is twenty-five years old now? Wow. I remember hanging a magazine ad for it on my dorm room wall. I didn't manage to see it in the theater, but some college friends and I rented it as soon as it came to video, and if I hadn't already been a Johnny Depp fan before that, boy howdy, I would have been by the end of that viewing. And same goes for Judi Dench. They're both absolutely perfect in this movie -- honestly, everyone is!
At its core, Chocolat is about finding a balance between discipline and indulgence. If you are all discipline like the rigid Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina), or all indulgence like the abusive Serge Muscat (Peter Stormare), you're going to bring a lot of grief to others and yourself. Even the heroine, Vianne (Juliette Binoche) swings from one to the other too much before finding her balance by the end. The same goes for all the other main characters. You have to stand on both feet to balance, knowing when to be disciplined and when to indulge in something fun or enjoyable.
I really love how Chocolate is framed as almost a sort of fairy tale. Once upon a time, a woman named Vianne and her daughter Anouk (Victoire Thivisol) blow into a sleepy little French village on the earliest wings of springtime. Vianne rents a vacant shop and revitalizes it with paint and love. The locals are excited by having something new in town, even if it's just a new patisserie (aka bakery).
But it's not a new patisserie. It's a chocolaterie. Opening just at the beginning of Lent, the forty days that lead up to Easter which Roman Catholics traditionally observe by "giving something up," or abstaining from some specific enjoyable thing (often meat, sometimes sweets -- it really depends on the person). "Giving something up for Lent" is supposed to be a way to help a believer focus throughout the day on what Jesus gave up in order to win their eternal salvation from sin, death, and Hell. But, too often, it gets turned into a pietistic outward act to make a person look good in the eyes of their friends and neighbors (or their local judgey minor aristocrat). In this little village, everyone is expected to give up all sweets, it seems. And yet, Vianne does a pretty good business.
This village is governed by the Comte de Reynaud, who makes it his business to know everything about everyone, or so he thinks. He knows everything about the outward appearances of everyone's lives, anyway. He's a one-man morality police, and even writes sermons for Pere Henri (Hugh O'Conor), the mild-mannered local priest.
The Comte instructs Pere Henri to tell everyone in the village not to patronize Vianne's store. Not only is she flouting convention by trying to sell delicious sweets during Lent, she has a daughter and has never been married. She's a ruined woman who's going to ruin the whole town. Repentance is a word the Comte likes to throw around, but he's very fuzzy on the ideas of forgiveness and living a renewed life.
Vianne makes a few friends, like crusty old Armand (Judi Dench) and troubled Josephine Muscat (Lena Olin), as well as a sweet old widow (Leslie Caron) and her devoted would-be suitor (John Wood). But her daughter Anouk is bullied at school and struggles to make new friends, relying on her imaginary kangaroo to keep her company.
The last straw for the Comte comes in the form of a band of gypsies, among them a roguish musician and handyman called Roux (Johnny Depp). Vianne befriends the gypsies. The gypsies are even more Suspiciously Different than Vianne. A careless comment dropped by the Comte in the hearing of a desperate and angry man leads to a dangerous and almost deadly crime, and the Comte suddenly begins to see that perhaps he's been terribly wrong about a good many things. At the same time, Vianne realizes that her too-indulgent parenting and lifestyle comes with a potentially terrible price.
An epic (and comic) fall from grace puts the Comte back on the level with all the ordinary people of the village, particularly in his own eyes. And Vianne has learned that indulging her whims and wishes, and relying only on herself instead of allowing others to truly befriend and help her, is also an unbalanced way to live.
The movie closes with the whole village celebrating Easter, which is absolutely fitting in every way since Easter is the celebration of the day when Jesus rose from the dead, proving that he had balanced God's scales of justice and mercy for all time.
Is this movie family friendly? Not exactly. Some characters use double entendres. We see the evidence of a man's physical abuse of his wife. There are several suggestive moments and a fade-to-black love scene. There's one scene of fairly intense physical violence and a scary fire. An old woman dies, and a child finds her body. And there are a handful of cuss words. Not to mention a chocolate sculpture of a naked woman, although it's got a classic art sort of thing going on, it's not meant to be erotic. I've told my teens they can watch it after they graduate from high school.
This is my contribution to the Food and Film Blogathon hosted this week by 18 Cinema Lane. Check out Sally's blog for all the other delicious contributions.
Well, I've seen it. Prepare yourself for some wild and whirling words, my lovely blogging friends, because I am freshly home from seeing Benedict Cumberbatch play Hamlet, I am full of caffeine and chocolate, and I am bursting with things to say. This will likely not be the most coherent or well-organized review I've ever written, but by jingo, it will be an enthusiastic one!
By the way, don't eat a Snickers bar and drink a mocha Starbucks protein coffee drink thingie at the same time. It makes the mocha taste like cough syrup. Weirdest thing. I was positively forced to eat more Snickers to get the taste out of my mouth. You've been warned.
So, obviously, I didn't go to London to see this. Thanks to something called National Theatre Live, I got to see a live performance from the relative comfort of a relatively local movie theater. Here's their little trailer for it, so you can get the teensiest of tastes:
That at least gives you an idea of what the set is like, and you can see a few of the costumes. Not that you care about that very much, though. You mainly want to know... how was Cumberbatch? Was he Hamlet-y enough? Was he wonderful? Was he lovable? Was he wild and tame and sad and angry and determined and despairing in all the right places?
Yes, he was indeed. He was a very emotional Hamlet, but also energetic. He played most scenes on the verge of tears -- here is a prince who loved his dear father very much, who still loves his mother even though he's quite angry with her, and who may have even loved his uncle until Claudius started being so dreadful. He also loves Ophelia, and maybe even Horatio. This Hamlet is very loving, very lovable. He was also very energetic -- lots of leaping and whirling and activity. In a little interview before the play began, Benedict said he ends every performance quite hungry, and I can well believe it. He made me hungry just watching! Hence the Snickers bar on the way home.
Right, more cast notes, and then I'll get into overall production stuff like text and staging. While I was exceedingly excited to see Benedict Cumberbatch in the role, being a fan of his from Sherlock and so on, I was also really eager to see Ciaran Hinds as Claudius because I quite enjoy him in many things as well. Here, I was also not disappointed.
Hinds was a bombastic Claudius, fond of shouting (is this a Hinds thing? Think how shouty his Mr. Rochester is too), but also fiercely intelligent. A dangerous Claudius, which is how I like them. And he was bitter, especially toward the end, as Gertrude turned away from him more and more. I was very moved by his prayer scene, where he confesses his guilt and tries to find some sense of repentance within himself. Well done.
I can't find any pictures of Horatio (Leo Bill) online, and that's probably because he's kind of a nonentity. I was disappointed by this Horatio. He spends more time hanging out with the soldiers than with Hamlet, he popped on and off the stage at convenient moments to deliver messages, and that was about it. I want my Horatio and Hamlet to be very dear friends, you see, and while Hamlet often reached out to Horatio, literally and figuratively, Horatio seemed almost aloof, like a spectator and not a part of the proceedings.
Laertes (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) was better, but not wonderful. I never got any sense that he had any real affection for Ophelia except in a couple really nice moments involving a piano -- at the beginning, when he leaves, the two of them sat together and played a little duet, which Polonius interrupted. Then during Ophelia's flower scene, she begged him to play that song for her, which was sweet and charming, and if they'd had that same level of connectedness in the rest of their time together, I would have been well pleased.
Now, Ophelia (Sian Brooke) was really good. At first I was a little indifferent toward her, because she seemed almost childlike and sort of random, but I think they were trying to show that not only was she naive, but she was also mentally fragile already at the beginning. Not mad yet, but certainly easy to push toward madness. And her mad scenes were wrenchingly good. Really, some of the best I've seen. I had tears in my eyes by the time she made her final exit. Oh, and they did a super cool thing there where she walked off into the misty distance, and Gertrude realized Ophelia was contemplating making an end of things and rushed off after her.
Gertrude (Anastasia Hille) was good, but I didn't love her. She was very sympathetic. Polonius (Jim Norton) was fine, and so was everyone else, really. Horatio was the only off-note for me. But this was such a strong Hamlet that the story didn't suffer too much from a mostly-absent and ineffectual Horatio -- it served to isolate Hamlet further in a way.
Okay, so the set you saw a bit in that trailer, and here's another photo of it:
They did some interesting things with it with lighting and so on, making it seem almost haunted a couple of times. And then when Hamlet left to go to England, in the scene this shot is taken from, they filled it full of... something. I suspect bits of ground up car tires -- something black and clumpy that blew in through the doors as the curtain went down for the intermission. When things began again, the whole set was filled with this stuff, great heaps of it like rubble, and all the chairs were turned over and everything was disordered like there had been an earthquake or a bombing. I'm kind of figuring this was to represent the corruption and moral decay going on within the characters, or the way that Hamlet's absence affected everything while he was gone, or... something. It was kind of odd, and I must admit I spent some time puzzling over it while waiting for Hamlet to return.
Return he did, that wonderfully determined and settled-down Hamlet who comes back from cheating death and getting kidnapped/rescued by pirates. The last act was riveting, as it ought to be.
Interesting thing about their use of the text: they mixed it all up. They grabbed lines from here and there and gave them to other characters, they changed the order of some scenes or bits of scenes... at first, I was annoyed. Yes, I was. I was all, "How can you mess around this much with this text? What do you think you're doing?" But I decided to just go with it and see how it worked, and for the most part, it worked fine. I think that audience members who didn't know the text well would not have been bugged at all, but I did spend a lot of time going, "Wait, no, you don't say that. And that's not from this scene at all." One reordering I liked really well, though, was that they had the "To be or not to be" soliloquy come right after Hamlet told Polonius, "You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal -- except my life. Except my life. Except my life." That worked super well.
Ahh, speaking of the soliloquies. For most of them, they did something nifty that I very much enjoyed. Rather than having everyone else leave the stage so Hamlet could unpack his heart with words to the audience, they would plunge everyone but Hamlet suddenly into a colored half-light, with him in a spotlight, and everyone else would do this slow-mo thing while he addressed the audience in real time, so it was like here are all the things he's thinking while things are still going on around him. And then when he was done, the lights would come up and he'd rejoin the action and everything would go on as normal. I totally dug it.
I have no idea what time period they were trying to go for with the costumes and sets. They had sort of this WWII-era thing going on with the sets and props, with phonographs and telephones and stuff like that. But then the costumes ranged all over the place, from '40s looking things to Hamlet wearing I think a David Bowie t-shirt for a while, and Horatio was totally modern with lots of tattoos and sort of a scrubby, grungy thing going on. Perhaps they wanted it to be like a dream, or like a production that's sort of thrown together by a local company with whatever props and costumes they already have on hand from other plays? I have no idea, to be honest.
Okay, I'm finally running out of words and caffeine, so here's how I rate this for my Hamlet Comparisons file:
Hamlet: A+
Horatio: D
Laertes: C
Ophelia: A
Claudius: B+
Gertrude: B-
Polonius: B
Overall Production: B+
If you're really wishing now that you had found a way to go see this -- check Fandango or a similar site, because there are encore showings scheduled! None right near me, but next week there's supposed to be one on Saturday in some places. I'm also really hoping and praying that they decide to release this to DVD, because I definitely would buy it.
Joanna at The Squirrel's Diary started this variation on Chocolate Book Tag and tagged me weeks ago. Thanks a lot, Joanna! Now I have to think about movies AND chocolate at the same time!!! Torture, I tell you. Absolute torture ;-)
I'm going to answer this with all movies that I love.
Dark Chocolate (a movie that covers a dark topic):42 (2013). It's the story of how a determined team owner (Harrison Ford) hired Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) as the first black player in major league baseball. Lots of grappling with racism, but an uplifting movie overall.
White Chocolate (a light and humorous watch): You've Got Mail (1998) Two email pen pals (Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan) interact with each other in real life without knowing they know each other online too. It's sweet and charming and happy, though there's one scene that does make me tear up a bit.
Caramel-filled chocolate (a movie that makes you feel all gooey inside):Chocolat (2000). You knew this had to be here somewhere, right? I love this tale of a single mother (Juliette Binoche) who brings chocolate and joy to a small French town and falls for a gypsy (Johnny Depp). I don't get tired of this movie or its soundtrack.
Milk Chocolate (a movie with a lot of hype that you're dying to watch):Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). Nothing else to say, other than that I'm madly excited.
Wafer-less Kit-Kat (a movie that surprised you): The Count of Monte Cristo (2002). I refused to see this for 12 years because I didn't like the changes I'd heard they'd made to the story . This is my second-favorite novel, and while I'm not usually a purist, I was afraid they'd screwed it up. But two friends kept insisting it was awesome, so I finally watched it. And I liked it so well that I asked for it for Christmas. And got it. So I watched it a second time last night and wow, I liked it even better the second time through. Totally a fan now.
Snickers (a movie you're going nuts about): I can't wait to see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) again. I've been wandering around in its aftermath in my imagination for a week now and loving it.
Hot Chocolate with Mini Marshmallows (a movie you turn to for comfort): I don't have just one. I definitely put on a western if I'm in need of solace, though.
A Box of Chocolates (a franchise you feel has something for everyone): Um... I can't think of one. If you're not into superheroes, you won't like the Avengers or X-Men movies. If you're not into fantasy, you're not going to like The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit or Harry Potter. If you're not into sci-fi, you're not going to want to watch Star Wars. I don't think there's any franchise I would universally recommend. I'm not going to tag anyone with this, but if you think it looks fun and wanna play, please do!
I didn't realize there were enough shows that involve ships for this to be a category, but hey. My favorite ship on a TV show is definitely the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701. The original ship from the original series. She's sleek, elegant, roomy, and iconic. I've spent more hours imagining myself aboard her than any other vessel. I even put together a model of her back in high school, which I still have. My paint job didn't turn out quite as nicely as this one, but you get the idea.
Oh, and if anyone wanted to buy me one of these as a gift, I would not complain! Who knew the Enterprise could be beautiful AND tasty?
Saturday, April 05, 2008
They have a new limited-edition Snickers bar out called the Indiana Jones Adventure Bar. It has a hint of coconut to it, but is otherwise like a normal Snickers. Of all the variations-on-a-Snickers they've come up with, this is my favorite, and not just cuz it's got Harrison Ford on the wrapper :-) I think that's because they're the most like a normal Snickers, and you really can't improve on those.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
I tried a new cake recipe yesterday. It's Banana's husband the Leatherneck's birthday next month, so I wanted to send him his own mini-cake in Iraq, since I was usually the one who baked the birthday cakes when we all lived in Ruralsburg. It's a surprise, but I don't think he's ever read this blog, so I think it's pretty safe to blog about this here. Anyway, the cake turned out really well, so I thought I'd post the recipe here, because it's easy-peasy and tasty. I made a mini-cake and a regular-size cake, and Cowboy took half the regular cake to work with him today. He emailed me to say that it was gone in 45 minutes, although his co-workers said they like my brownies better.
Anyway, here's the recipe:
Death-by-Chocolate Cake 3/4 cup sour cream 4 eggs 1/2 cup water 1/2 cup oil 1 chocolate cake mix 1 small (4-serving) box instant chocolate pudding 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips powdered sugar
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Beat sour cream, eggs, water, and oil together in a large bowl until thoroughly mixed.Add cake mix and pudding mix.Stir in chocolate chips.Place batter in a greased and floured bundt pan. Bake 45-55 minutes, or until fork inserted into cake comes out clean. While still hot, invert cake onto a serving platter.When cool, sift powdered sugar over top of cake.
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