The cinetrix is sick; the Christmas music is inescapable; the finals that need to be graded hit Tuesday. Time for some Banksy anti-consumerist cheer and a link dump!
Tom Scocca digs up old interview tapes of a 1998 David Foster Wallace, yielding this cinematic namecheck among many other gems:
Q: Besides Conroy, are there any nonfiction writers who inspired your work, or—?
DFW: Oh, golly. Ever since I was in college, I've been an enormous fan of both Joan Didion and Pauline Kael. And I don't know—I think prosewise, Pauline Kael is unequaled. I mean, maybe McPhee, at his very best,is as good.
And so I don't know what influence they have, but in terms of just being slobbering fans of? Conroy's first book, Tobias Wolff, Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life. Oh, God. There's a book by a mathematician named Hardy at Oxford called A Mathematician's Apology.
Hardy gets mentioned in Good Will Hunting, by the way. Have you seen that movie?
Q: No.
DFW: Oh. Well, there's a brief mention of Hardy. Anyway. There are quite a few that are just really really really really good. But I'd say Pauline Kael above all of them is sort of, I think, the best.
The Criterion editorial crew are true professionals, running the recipes from Kore-Eda's Still Walking through a vigorous, sake-fueled test kitchen quest for excellence. Chris Kimball, you're on notice!
So when the recipes for the absurdly delicious-looking food the Yokoyamas prepare in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking, which we’re working on now for release in February, came across our desks in the editorial department for inclusion in the booklet, we knew we ought to test them (they were ably translated from the Japanese by Criterion executive producer Fumiko Takagi). If pressed, I’ll admit that the idea of a little sake-fueled hanging out and cooking followed by actually getting to eat the irresistible food we’d seen taunting us from the screen (don’t watch this movie on an empty stomach—that way madness lies) was not exactly a deterrent.
The voting closed yesterday, and the winner will be revealed Monday, but you should still check out the brackets in Boston.com's Romance Rumble.
Love Letters blogger Meredith Goldstein and movie critic Wesley Morris have each chosen 16 movies they find inarguably romantic. Your job is to choose your favorite of the 32 titles and vote it all the way to a public screening at the Somerville Theatre on Dec. 10. So not only should the winner be a movie you adore, but one you'd like to spend a Friday night with.
[Seriously, I don't know what is up with my former fellow citizens: Um, Romancing the Stone beating out Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Did Billy Ocean rig that round?]
OK, time to veg on the couch and see whether any of the on-Netflix/not-on-DVD titles Joe Dante listed in a comment on Dave Kehr's blog seem likely to have healing powers.
