There was no love lost for Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry among my hardy band of student cinemaphages this week. Sad to say, they are firmly in the Ebert camp. However, their distaste/boredom made for a lively discussion and a batch of amusing response papers. It was fun, too, to consider Kiarostami's flick alongside another 1997 release in which landscape, car travel, and taboo play a large part--Insomnia, which we'd screened before Thanksgiving but hadn't otherwise talked about.
And now we're at the end, nearly, of this semester-long experiment in 50 years of world cinema, Criterion-stizz. Our final film is Edward Yang's Yi Yi: a One and a Two. Given its nearly three-hour runtime, I decided to invite the kiddies to watch it at the house this Sunday and promised that I [which is to say the 'Fesser] would feed them dinner. We're thinking food for ten [eight voracious college students going into exam period and us], and ideally of a size and shape that lends itself to being eaten from plates balanced on one's lap. But neither of us knows bupkes about Taiwanese cuisine. So, if you have ideas, recipes, suggestions, post 'em here or over at The Gurgling Cod. Thanks.
