THE MENU***

My cousin announced she was getting married in Lisbon and as my husband and I hadn't been to Portugal for decades we thought we would make an extended holiday out of it, planning a road trip by picking every single Michelin one and two star restaurant along the way for dinner every night bar the wedding, starting in Faro and ending in Porto.  We are the greedy capitalist bastards, where the dishes become a blur, that have apparently sucked the joy out of cooking and life for celebrity chefs like the fictional Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes).

As a result, he lures a privileged few diners to his remote island restaurant for an epic tasting menu that will fully express his nihilism and totalitarian control of both staff and diners.  If you have the audacity to ask for mere bread, his maitre d, Elsa (Hong Shau) simply says "no".  Every course is exquisitely described and reveals yet more about the contempt in which the diners are held. And so we come to the inevitable horror-comedy conclusion.

For me, this is a superb social satire cum black comedy that takes the piss out of people like me. It comes as no surprise that it was written by two late night comedy writers - Will Tracy (Last Week Tonight With John Oliver) and Seth Reiss (Late Night With Seth Myers). There is a spareness to the comedy that is devastating. And the over-fussiness of the menu seems absolutely spot on.  Mark Mylod (Succession) directs with a cool deadpan tone and kudos to all involved in the production design.  The performances are uniformly good BUT Hong Chau is the stand-out in expressing the cult-like status of these chefs and the rigidity of their approach to actually enjoying food. It's kind of nuts to me that Anya Taylor-Joy has been nominated for a Golden Globe rather than Chau, who deserves awards not just for this but also her performance in THE WHALE. What a year she had in 2022.

However, while I do think the film is worth watching, well-made, and funny, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was a really good 60-minute episode of Black Mirror rather than a feature film: a high concept comedy that couldn't sustain its runtime. 

THE MENU has a running time of 107 minutes, is rated R, played Toronto 2022, and is available to stream.

THE BIG WHITE - so bad, it went passed cult-status and back to bad

What did I do when I wasn't laughing at alleged black-comedy THE BIG WHITE? 1. I wondered how it could be that British director Mark Mylod could come up with such hysterical stuff for TV (Shameless, The Royle Family) but on the big screen had saddled us with cinematic stinkers such as ALI G IN DA HOUSE. 2. I applauded Robin Williams for trying to do something a bit left-field. 3. I wondered whether the Coen Brothers were going to sue script-writer Collin Friessen for biting their style so badly. Seriously, not only does he set this "comedy" in Fargo-like snow-drenched nowheres-ville, but he tries to replicate all those eccentric quirky characters. The casting director even managed to con Tim Blake Nelson and Holly Hunter into participating. 4. I wondered if Collin Friessen's directorial effort FARM SLUTS was available on DVD, and if so, whether or not it would be more entertaining that this shambolic enterprise. I actually looked up FARM SLUTS on the internet while I was waiting for England to win the Third Test match. The guidance warned that it contained "partial nudity, language and untimely random acts of perversion." I sadly have to report that FARM SLUTS was probably even less funny than THE BIG WHITE and certainly had no other entertainment-related merits. So, overall, the whole BIG WHITE experience was fairly disappointing.

THE BIG WHITE got an indicatively small release in the US at the fag-end of 2005 and is now on release in the UK. The Germans get the pox on April 20th 2006, and the Austrians on June 2nd 2006.