French Movie

Fresh Produce for Ratatouille, Please, but No Attitude
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: June 6, 2008

The rolling countryside of Provence may be a dream vacation spot, but it is the last place in the world that Antoine (Nicolas Cazalé), the sullen 30-year-old protagonist of “The Grocer’s Son,” would like to be. In this French variation of the fable of the prodigal son, Antoine reluctantly returns to his rural hometown after 10 years in the big city when his father (Daniel Duval) has a heart attack.

Someone has to run the family’s grocery store while his father recovers, and Antoine’s unhappily married older brother, François (Stéphan Guérin-Tillié), who stayed by their parents when Antoine fled, insists the time has come for Antoine to shoulder some responsibility. While their mother (Jeanne Goupil) has minded the store, their father has operated a van selling produce and staples to the area’s mostly elderly inhabitants.

This small gem of a film, a surprise hit in France, is the second feature directed by Éric Guirado, who prepared for it by filming portraits of traveling tradesmen in southern and central France. For 18 months he focused on mobile grocers in Corsica, the Pyrenees and the Alps. As the movie affectionately observes the gruff, self-reliant customers, some of whom hobble to the van on canes, it has a documentarylike realism. You grow to respect these hardy, weather-beaten people who lived their whole lives close to the land.

Antoine brings to his customers the same surly, put-upon attitude with which he confronted his superiors in urban restaurants where he held and lost a succession of waiter’s jobs. Brusque and detached, he repeatedly offends old folks whom his father had befriended on his rounds. Even when they voice their disgruntlement, Antoine doesn’t seem to notice. More

Hmmm

“The Mother of Tears” is silly, awkward, vulgar, outlandish, hysterical, inventive, revolting, flamboyant, titillating, ridiculous, mischievous, uproarious, cheap, priceless, tasteless and sublime. And that’s before the evil monkeys and sniggering Japanese harpies start running amok. By the time it gets to the diabolical subterranean soft-core orgies, this lunatic B-movie extravaganza has long since defied description and dazzled every irreverent, gore-hungry synapse in the brain. More

Harlan

Impish Writer on the Edge of Tomorrow
By NATHAN LEE
Published: June 4, 2008

In “Dreams With Sharp Teeth,” the writer Harlan Ellison is variously described by friends and colleagues as “a hurricane,” “performance art,” “an alternately impish and furious 11-year-old boy,” “a cranky old Jew” and, most memorably by his buddy Robin Williams, as “a skin graft on a leper.”

What his enemies — like the man to whom he mailed a dead animal, or the one whose pelvis he broke in a heated meeting — make of him remains off the record.

Combative, motormouthed, irrepressibly opinionated and indefatigably productive, Mr. Ellison, now 74, is also, of course, one of the 20th century’s most celebrated popular writers: author of nearly 2,000 short stories, acclaimed TV episodes in the 1960s for “The Outer Limits” (“Demon With a Glass Hand”) and “Star Trek” (“The City on the Edge of Forever”), and a notoriously lousy screenplay (“The Oscar”). More

WisCon

Two person view of what to watch for in Clinton's Saturday conference

http://www.psandman.com/col/hillary.htm

Or not.

To beettlejuice or to not beettlejuice, that is the question

I washed down one of my stained but not sealed plywood shelves yesterday and I can smell it still this morning. Worse, I can feel it. I was thinking about putting a coat of shellac on it last night, but because it was dripping wet and I was wearing a work shirt, I didn't. Now, of course, it would mean taking all the junk I just put on it off, taking it downstairs or outside and putting the shellac on it. I like shellac. It feels good going on. Water-based poly is OK, but there's nothing that feels good about it. OK, so maybe it is the alcohol fumes...