I felt like Tuesday was the day of well-made movies that went for the easy feel-good, kind of a guilty pleasure, basically how I felt watching This Is Us, like I know I’m being manipulated but it’s kind of nice.
I think we started with a little breakfast at the AirBNB. We’d gone to the big Loblaws and got some yogurt and fruit, and we bought bagels and cream cheese at Nü Bugel Friday, and we got peanut butter and some granola and more fruit at Whole Foods. I haven’t been doing my diet and exercise log, so I’m having trouble remembering what we ate when, but that probably doesn’t matter because we’re talking movies here right now anyways. I know there was one day when we had strawberries and yogurt and bagels with cream cheese and another day when we were out of bread items and I had my yogurt with banana and granola. The Whole Foods peanut butter is not as good as my Cream Nut, it was harder to get stirred together and is a bit too runny to stay on a banana, but it’ll do. It is nice and crunchy. I think I’ll turn it into cookies when I get back to Wisconsin.
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- Whole Foods crunchy with Canadian label
I think Tuesday was the rainy day, and we had coffee at Black Bear – where my last post ended.
Then proceeded on to movie #1 of the day, The Holdovers, directed by Alexander Payne who came to introduce the film and told a funny story about finding a great location to shoot a 1970s liquor store scene in Boston and hiring one of the store’s clerks to be in the movie. Evidently the guy was in quarantine for Covid and somehow was in the basement of the store, so the store owner went down and took a phone picture of him, and Payne hired him on that basis. Payne told the audience to watch for the clerk’s one line, “here ya go, killer” and course there was applause when we spotted it. The movie’s about a small group of high school aged boarding school kids who don’t have anyplace to go over the holidays, and have to stay at school with one teacher, played by Paul Giamatti, to supervise them. The head cook, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph, stays too.
After, I think the rain stopped and Tuesday was also the day we walked up to Kensington Market to a place called Wanda’s Pie in the Sky, and split a slice of quiche. I had a slice of Ontario cherry pie and Mark had apple crumble and we traded bites. It was a nice lunch, after which I took the street car and Mark walked back to festival zone.
Movie #2 was The Burial, another feel good, with Jamie Lee Foxx as a fast talking Black lawyer, and Tommy Lee Jones as a Southern white guy with a big family who has a family business – funeral homes and burial insurance – that he wants to pass on to his many children and grandchildren. The movie is the story of them suing a big corporation that’s trying to buy the Tommy Lee Jones character out for breach of contract, since the big company draws up the contract then drags their feet about singing. Of course turns out they’re up to a lot of other nasty shit as well, and also of course the good guys win. And of course the good guys are an unlikely team of Black and white people, women and men, who must all overcome their prejudices against each other. The prejudice that bothered me the most is that the head of the big corporation is clearly supposed to be Jewish (played by Bill Camp; character’s last name is Loewen). The movie was based on a New Yorker article by Jonathan Harr, from 1999.
Movie #3 Tuesday was Flora & Son. In between we got gelato at this little hole in the wall place and ate it in the Hyatt hotel lobby, and watched the carp in their fountain. I finally remembered because I felt really dumpy with a belly full of gelato, wearing my tie-dye sweatshirt and wrinkled Old Navy jumper when we got to Flora & Son, in Roy Thomson Hall, the fancy concert hall, where there was a remarkable number of very sleek and well-dressed people, at 9:30 on a Tuesday night. Anyways, Flora & Son was another feel-good, written directed by John Carney, who was also the director of Once. The long distance romance between Flora (Eve Hewson) and her American guitar teacher Jeff, played by Joseph Gordon-Leavitt was handled deftly. It avoided the really improbable, like one of them appearing on the other’s doorstep before the end of the film – that I think would’ve happened in This Is Us. John Carney was there to introduce, and came back to lead a sing along at the end. Even the serious-looking tall guy in a suit sitting next to me, one of the glamorous people who intimidated me at the beginning, sang a bit.
Wednesday was our day to go the St. Lawrence Market. I biked and Mark walked and we met up there. We bought a bacon sandwich and a Montreal bagel and ate them outside with coffee from Balzacs. I think we’re going back today, Saturday, because we got our peameal bacon sandwich plain and Mark would’ve preferred mustard, and I would’ve preferred what the Brits call streaky and I think is side bacon here.
We brought our purchases back and dropped off them and my bike and headed off for movies.
Wednesday’s movies were:
Widow Clicquot was a beautiful period piece except many of the scenes were dark interiors instead of outside in the sunny vineyard, like below. With Haley Bennett as the widow, Tom Sturridge, a.k.a. Sandman as the late husband, and Sam Riley, a.k.a. Ian Curtis as the widow’s charming wine broker. I liked it – Mark wondered why there was so little food in it; after all, champagne is for celebrations and there should be food.
We grabbed a coffee at Hot Back after the widow. My phone keeps reminding me of what the sunscreen over their back courtyard looked like the last time we were here in 2019, so I had to take a picture of this year.
2019
Hot Black outdoors 2023
The Critic was Ian McKellan as a closeted gay theater critic and Gemma Arterton as an actress in the late 1930s in London, just before WWII, when homosexuality was illegal and there was a British Nazi party and toughs in the streets, not to mention speculation about the political leanings of the paper McKellan works for. It went off the rails a bit at the end, veering noir with murders and suicides. Mark thought it was a waste of a great cast, but I mostly didn’t like the ending.
Last of the day was Quiz Lady, and that was just plain fun and funny, with Sandra Oh and Awkwafina as sisters who go on a quiz show to pay off their mom’s debts. I got a beer and gummi bears before the film and turned into the kind of seat mate Mark just can’t stand – squirmy, chatter-y, and crackling my food wrappers. But I was quiet again by the time the movie started. The director, Jessica Yu, was there, and like John Carney’s sing along after Flora, the Q&A was a little different – we started with Yu recording a kind of an applause-o-meter for her stars and partners who didn’t come due to the strike – she read their names, and recorded the audience reactions – and then there was a quiz with details from the movie with some little prizes tossed out to the audience. Definitely fun.
We came back and made sandwiches & peanut butter toast and fell into bed.
Thursday & Friday & Saturday’s films will be along Real Soon Now™ promise!