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| Highlights of Cleveland |
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| Guardians of Transportation, Hope Memorial Bridge, Cleveland |
Strangely, I was not all that excited about seeing Guardians of the Galaxy, I was going to see it because I thought there might be some connection with Avengers 2, and you know, people have certain expectations of me. My brother and I saw it on a Sunday night, and there were more people at a 7:40 show than I would have expected. Maybe I set the bar really low in my mind, but the movie destroyed the bar; it was incredible. It had humor, action, special effects, a team of misfits led by Chris Pratt as Star Lord/Peter Quill and Zoe Saldana as Gamora; Bradley Cooper voices Rocket the Raccoon and Vin Diesel voices Groot, a tree-like being. Quill/Star Lord is a human who gets pulled into another universe when he is very young and becomes a scavenger. Early in the movie Quill finds an orb that is in high demand by a lot of people (or beings), including Thanos, an incredibly powerful character who wants to be more powerful through this orb. The movie follows Quill as he fights to keep the orb, being sent to a prison with his new cohorts, eventually getting into a battle royale with Ronan. I am not even going to try and give you a more detailed synopsis because so much happened, and it will be so much more fun for you to experience it on your own. What I will tell you is that at first I thought the movie would be stupidly silly and I was happily disappointed: the humor was not overdone and pretty funny; Pratt was great as Star Lord and was appropriately flippant and cocky. Groot and Rocket (both voiced characters) were entertaining, and Groot's limited vocabulary provided some good laughs. The effects were very well done, and while I'm not a huge fan of 3D films (mainly because I never think I get my money's worth and it's not worth the headache I usually get), but my brother and I agreed that this would have been pretty good in 3D (it is in 3D, we just didn't go). Quill listens to a Walkman with a mix tape his mother made, and it has songs from the 1970s on it ("Hooked on a Feeling" by Blue Swede, among many others); I liked the stroll down memory lane. My one 'issue' is probably not shared by a lot of other people, but I found the Benecio del Toro's character, The Collector, to be annoying and they really stretched it to make it connect to the earlier Marvel movies. I don't know that they needed that link, and I think there were other ways to do what they were trying to do. That's just me, though, and that's really picking nits. We thoroughly enjoyed the movie and thought it was one that we could watch more than once, and hoped that the promised sequel is as good.
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| Cedar Lee Theater, Cleveland Heights |
8/11/14 Chef, not yet nominated
A trip home would not be complete without at least one movie at the Cedar Lee. What to see? What to see? Mon frere and I decided we would see Chef, written and directed by Jon Favreau; we had seen the trailers a few months ago on my last visit and wanted to see it, so it was nice we could see it together. Favreau is Chef Carl Casper who works for an unimaginative restaurant owner, Riva, played by Dustin Hoffman. Casper wants to change up his menu for a food critic who is coming to review his food, but Riva won't hear of it and threatens Carl with losing his job. John Leguizamo is Martin, a line cook who has great admiration for Carl, and Bobby Cannavale is Tony, a sous chef who mostly seems hungover. Sofia Vergara is Inez, Carl's ex-wife who seems to live very well from the proceeds of her first marriage to Marvin. Casper ultimately quits due to Riva's inflexibility, but has no prospects. Oh, and in the mean time, Carl has begun an ill-planned Twitter war with the food critic (played by Oliver Platt), and gets on YouTube after a video of him losing his nut over chocolate lava cake goes viral. Inez convinces Carl to go to Miami with her to watch their son, Percy, while she works. Inez connects Carl with Marvin, a quirky guy with no edit button, played by Robert Downey Jr, who seems to be improvising his role and doing his best to throw Carl off his game when they meet. It was probably less than 10 minutes of screen time, but it was pretty good. Carl gets a beat up food truck from Marvin and begins his bonding time with Percy. Percy, Carl and Martin embark on a road trip to drive the food truck back to Los Angeles, and they stop in several food famous cities, including Miami, Austin and New Orleans. There is some funny 'boy' humor, including one bit involving corn starch. The food looked so delicious, I kind of wanted Favreau to make me a grilled cheese sandwich (we were both full after a great Turkish food, but I could have eaten again). There was nothing groundbreaking or any big plot twists, and that's okay. It was a nice story, a buddy/road trip movie that did use different forms of social media throughout: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and vines, which made it very current (I wonder what it will feel like in 15 years when so many of these may be extinct or evolved, will it be dated?). This is one of those smaller movies that seems to have some staying power, at least at the Cedar Lee theater, because it was released in May and is still playing 3 months later, and the theater was pretty full (the Cedar Lee is divided into smaller theaters, so you don't have those cavernous auditoriums like at the megaplexes).It's almost the idea of a microcinema (check out this article on a microcinema in Akron). But anyway, I guess my point is, there were still people going out to see this movie. The Hundred Foot Journey, another food movie, was playing in a theater down the hall, and I hope to catch that one soon. If you like food movies (and who doesn't?), check out Babette's Feast a Danish film that also played at the Cedar Lee over 20 years ago, and at the time, a Cleveland restaurant was serving a menu based on the film. A friend of mine who lives in LA, says that there was a pop up restaurant during the premiere screenings for Chef. If you can find Chef in the theaters, go out to dinner (at a food truck?) and then see the film. Bon appetit.
