The Hundred-Foot Journey: A Delicious Summer Movie

Lasse Halstrom is a man who directs very soothing, pretty movies. The Hundred-Foot Journey is no exception. Based on a novel by Richard C. Morais, it is a story of rival Indian and French restaurateurs in a picturesque French village and the clash of cuisines and cultures that ensues. It's guaranteed to put a smile on your face and make you very hungry.

The protagonist is Hassan (Manish Dayal), a young man who grew up in Mumbai but had to seek asylum in London with his family when a political riot resulted in the family restaurant being burnt down, killing his mother along with it. His father, known only as "Papa,"  is played by the brilliant Bollywood actor Om Puri, who tends to show up as the patriarch in a lot of these Hollywood-Bollywood collaborations. Disgusted by the English weather, Papa uproots Hassan and his four brothers and sisters for the sunnier climes of France. When Fate delivers them to a restaurant for sale in a beautiful village, Papa decides they have found their calling. Of course, the reason that restaurant is for sale is because it is next door to the only Michelin-starred restaurant around for miles, owned by the decidedly unfriendly Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren). However, Papa forges ahead, determined to teach the local population a thing or two about Indian cuisine.

Hassan's mother taught him to cook and he is an excellent, intuitive chef. He strikes up a friendship with Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon), a sous-chef in Madame Mallory's restaurant, and starts to learn about French cooking. He is determined to convince Madame Mallory that he is just as capable as any of the chefs in her kitchen, while Madame Mallory is just as determined to run this loud Indian family and their curries out of town. The acting prowess of Om Puri and Helen Mirren comes as no surprise, and the two spar beautifully over the course of the movie, while the relative newcomers Manish Dayal and Charlotte Le Bon have a charming chemistry as two chefs who bond over their shared love of food even if they don't share the same culture. If you understand Hindi and/or French, you might also experience a frisson of delight as you pick up on occasional throwaway lines in those languages, as nothing is subtitled. The Englishness of the movie is a bit bizarre - for example, there's no reason a French chef would have to translate the lyrics of La Marseillaise to English for his colleagues - but that's Hollywood for you.

Like with all Lasse Halstrom movies, there are critics who will argue it is too treacly or pristine. Although the movie does expose the ugly underbelly of racial prejudice and French nationalism in this beautiful village, it's all dealt with rather deftly, and after one big episode, everyone is happy to just get along. But this is only meant to be a light piece of cinematic fiction in the middle of August and not a gritty Oscar biopic about race relations. As far as I'm concerned, writer Steven Knight has scripted a perfectly-paced movie that is sweet without becoming overly sentimental, funny without being farcical, and dramatic without tipping into melodrama. It is a "Goldilocks" movie, never veering too far in any one direction and buoyed by fantastic performances from the four leads. It's a palate-cleanser that will make your summer much brighter and I heartily recommend it. 

Boyhood: The Ordinary Magic of Growing Up

Richard Linklater is going to win the Best Director Oscar for Boyhood. The fact that I'm willing to make that claim in August, when Oscar season hasn't even begun, should be a solid indication that this movie is a cinematic triumph.

Boyhood follows a boy named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from the ages of six to eighteen. And when I say "follows," I mean it is literally the same actor from the ages of six to eighteen. Shot over a period of twelve years, this movie is one of the most ambitious and intriguing cinematic projects you could hope to witness. Watching that boy turn into a man over the course of two and a half hours is spellbinding. Watching his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) grow up into a woman is similarly miraculous. It is a unique experience that is crazy in scope and brilliant in execution and will likely never be replicated again.

The movie plays like a series of vignettes that capture slices of Mason's life as he grows up. There might not be a key moment every year - sometimes there are just meandering conversations or a Harry Potter midnight release party. But we always glimpse another change in Mason's life that will shape the man he will become. His divorced parents, Olivia and Mason Sr. (played magnificently by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke), are going through their own upheavals that make each year another challenge and another adventure. But as Mason and Samantha hurtle towards adulthood, it's remarkable to see them turn into fully-formed human beings who will carry these experiences with them for the rest of their lives.

The movie's soundtrack is another master stroke, weaving in tracks that were popular each year and giving you a foothold in time as you progress through the movie. The technology is a similar clue, as you watch Mason move on from Game Boys to Wiis. As Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson mentioned in their Pop Culture Happy Hour discussion of this film, this is the first real piece of nostalgia for the mid-2000s, which is a bizarre thought. And yet, as a child of the 90s, I felt incredibly old as I realized "Oops!..I Did It Again" came out 14 years ago, and that these children were excited about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when they were eleven years old while I was already a sophomore in college.

Boyhood is not a universal tale of childhood. It is a distinctly white American childhood that I could barely relate to, apart from the pop cultural references. I would love to see every country make their own version of this movie that follows a child over the course of twelve years and presents the unique challenges he or she faces. But Boyhood is a twelve-year time capsule, a wonderful rendering of the ordinariness of life and the unstoppable passage of time that will turn every child into a young adult. The movie has no definitive ending - Mason is eighteen and sadly Linklater won't keep filming to show us how his life turns out in another twelve years. But I am inexpressibly grateful that we at least got to see him grow up. 

Guardians of the Galaxy: Gloriously Entertaining

Despite never having read a Marvel comic in my life, I have become enamored of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Given their penchant to not take themselves too seriously, every Marvel film has been a blast to watch in theaters, delivering spectacular visuals alongside hilarious hi-jinx. As their canon of superheroes gets increasingly obscure, they just keep adding to the intricacy of their interconnected plots and delivering well-written, eye-popping blockbusters that make you wish there was a new Marvel movie out every month. Well this month, they've presented us with Guardians of the Galaxy, and it's just spectacular.

Apart from the opening scene, Guardians of the Galaxy is set completely off Earth. That already makes it unique in the Marvel franchise, which has hitherto been very Earth-bound in all its cinematic endeavors. Sure we've gotten trips to Asgard in the Thor films, but the heroes are always focused on drama that's taking place on Earth. But in Guardians, after establishing that our hero, Peter Quill (the disarming and fantastic Chris Pratt), was a boy on Earth before being beamed up to a spaceship, we head straight off into extraterrestrial worlds of aliens, spaceships, and wonder.

The Guardians are comprised of the roguish smuggler Peter Quill, a.k.a. "Star-Lord" (a self-appointed nickname), Rocket (a mutant wisecracking raccoon voiced expertly by Bradley Cooper), Gamora (a green-skinned assassin played with no-nonsense ferociousness by Zoe Saldana), Drax the Destroyer (a hilariously literal warrior played by Dave Bautista), and Groot (a tree, voiced by Vin Diesel, who only says "I am Groot" and steals the scene every time). They are the very definition of a motley crew, a bunch of complete oddballs who are forced together by circumstances and bound by mercenary plans that eventually evolve to a heroic calling. There's a great deal of exposition that's necessary to establish these characters, none of which I'll go into here, but it is done expertly and seamlessly by writer-director James Gunn, who knows how to tell this story without getting too bogged down in the details.

The movie's villains are portrayed equally magnificently by Lee Pace, who appears to be done playing nice guys and is gleefully evil as Ronan the Accuser, and Karen Gillan, who has left Doctor Who behind and is now playing a bad-ass blue-skinned henchwoman with murderous intent. We also get to glimpse Josh Brolin as Thanos, the ultimate big bad in the Marvel universe, who will presumably have a much larger role to play in future films.

This movie is incredibly funny, filled with characters who are terribly flawed yet manage to come together and save the world despite their obvious disinclination to do anything of the kind. The visual effects are glorious, and despite the fact that two of the Guardians are an animated raccoon and a tree, you're totally along for the ride. The film also features a brilliant soundtrack of 70s pop hits, courtesy of Star-Lord's Sony Walkman, which is one of the few possessions he retained from his childhood on Earth. These songs reach out into the audience and grab your soul. Even though the action is taking place among multi-colored aliens fighting in spaceships, suddenly hearing The Runaways' "Cherry Bomb" or Blue Swede's "Hooked on a Feeling" grounds everything and gets you completely invested in the movie.

Guardians of the Galaxy is everything you want a summer blockbuster to be and is yet another runaway hit from Marvel Studios. These people have found the winning formula and they know how to deliver clever, witty, intricate movies that keep you solidly entertained for two hours and leave you wanting more. I can't believe I have to wait until May for the second installment of The Avengers, but you can bet I'll be first in line at the theater.  

Halt and Catch Fire: The PC Revolution

Halt and Catch Fire is AMC's latest attempt at prestige drama after the astronomical success of Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Set in 1983, the show is a fictionalized account of the early years of the personal computer revolution, when companies were desperately competing to create a computer that would be used by families in every American home.

Lee Pace stars as Joe MacMillan, a mysterious man who shows up at Cardiff Electric, a Dallas software company, with ambitions to build a PC that could surpass IBM's Personal Computer. He is full of ideas and is a brilliant marketer but he lacks any technical know-how. Scouting college students, he discovers Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), a brilliant young woman who understands the future of computing and is impatient to make her mark. She aspires to be like Ada Lovelace and Joe quickly recruits her. At Cardiff, he also finds software engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), a man who has failed ambitions of his own. However, inspired by Joe, he starts to believe that this is his second chance to build the computer of his dreams. His wife, Donna (Kerry Bishé), who is also an engineering whiz, is wary, knowing that her husband's projects have caused him tremendous grief in the past. But before long, she is swept up in the madness and along for the ride. 

The show is a wonderful period piece, shot and designed with an unmistakable 80s feel that instantly transports you back in time. Some episodes can be a bit slow or heavy on tech-speak, but the actors are putting in wonderful performances that highlight the characters' passion and drive. It is particularly refreshing to have two strong female leads who are even more tech savvy than their male peers. In several episodes, it is Donna or Cameron who has to save the day when a computer crashes or a hard disk is erased while their male colleagues wring their hands in despair. Even though Silicon Valley remains a male-dominated sphere today, the show's creators are at least doing their part to acknowledge the great female engineers who contributed to the technological revolution.

Halt and Catch Fire is a fascinating glimpse into the first steps that led to the laptops and tablets we all own today. It's incredible to consider how dated all the technological concepts sound when you consider that these events were taking place just a few decades ago. We are living in the future these characters are envisioning and they have no idea the innovations that will ensue from their project. So, as Sunday night is the show's finale, it's time to start binge-watching on your PCs, tablets, and phones, and marvel at how far we've come. 

The Leftovers: A Mesmerizing Mystery

This summer, Sunday night has become jam-packed with quality television. Leading the fray is The Leftovers, the magnificent HBO series based on Tom Perrotta's book of the same name. Written and produced by Lost's Damon Lindelof, this show is a mystery that gradually unfolds with each episode, occasionally answering some questions but always posing new ones, and never ceasing to amaze.

The show opens on October 14, an ordinary day. A harried woman is at the laundromat, talking on the phone, with her screaming baby in tow. Finally she gets to her car, straps her baby into the car-seat, and sits down in front of the steering wheel. Still talking on the phone, she suddenly realizes her baby isn't crying anymore. She turns around, and he has disappeared. At first she is bemused, then terrified. Screaming for her child, she thinks he must have been kidnapped. But her terror is only amplified when she looks around and discovers a boy screaming in the parking lot for his father. More people start screaming for missing relatives and friends, and cars start crashing on the road as their drivers have mysteriously vanished. This is not an ordinary day.

Flash forward to three years after this incident. 2% of the world's population disappeared on that day, and no one has been able to figure out why. Religious leaders of all faiths have their own explanations, while secularists argue that this was random happenstance. Families were wrenched apart, the world was irrevocably changed, and everyone has different ways of dealing with the subsequent chaos. The Leftovers focuses on the residents of Mapleton, a small town with a sprawling cast of characters, who all have their individual tales of loss and hardship that will gradually be uncovered via flashbacks over the course of the series.

I won't delve into any further details about these individual stories because each one is compelling and satisfying as it is told. The cast features Justin Theroux, Amy Brenneman, Liv Tyler, Christopher Eccleston, and many more, all of whom are all turning in excellent performances. These characters are broken people trying to cope with their survivors' guilt and make sense of a world in which anyone could suddenly disappear at any moment without any explanation. Some of them are trying to get on with their lives as normally as possible, while others go completely off the rails. Human beings are complicated, and in such complicated circumstances, there's no knowing what these people will do.

The Leftovers is a bizarre and wonderful show. Beautifully shot, impeccably acted, and tightly scripted, it is something I look forward to every week. I have no idea how it will end, and of course, the danger with something that has such a vague and mysterious premise is that it will never end satisfactorily. But even if the show never reaches a consensus about what happened on that fateful day, I am more than satisfied with the gradual reveals about the characters that populate this town. Each individual mystery is a thrill to uncover and every episode is a televisual treat. Interestingly, despite being on HBO, so far there hasn't been a lot of gratuitous nudity. This suggests the showrunners have a great deal of faith in their ability to keep the audience interested with a compelling plot rather than a slew of sex scenes. So log on to HBO Go or pull up HBO On Demand and delve into the world of The Leftovers. Just because Game of Thrones is over, it doesn't mean HBO still doesn't know how to entertain you on a Sunday night. 

Happy Christmas: A Slight Story

Happy Christmas stars Anna Kendrick as Jenny, a woman who comes to Chicago to stay in her brother, Jeff's basement after a bad breakup. Jeff and his wife, Kelly, have just had a baby so they assume Jenny will help out with babysitting while she figures her life out. But it looks like they might need to babysit her instead.

Jenny has a tendency to get wildly drunk and her whole life is a bit of a mystery to her brother. Nonetheless, Kelly (played by the marvelous Melanie Lynskey) takes pity on her bizarre sister-in-law and entrusts her son to her. Jenny takes care of the baby just fine, enlisting the help of her friend Cameron (Lena Dunham). The two women gradually befriend Kelly, who became a stay-at-home mom after the birth of her baby and has been struggling to find time to write a follow-up to her successful first novel. Jenny and Cameron encourage her to take a stand and carve out some time and space for herself, a subplot that is very sweet and speaks to working mothers everywhere.

Apart from that story line however, Happy Christmas is a bit of a meandering meditation that tries to have a plot but doesn't really succeed in executing it. Writer-director-actor Joe Swanberg (he plays Jeff) is an extremely indie director, one of the proponents of the mumblecore movement, who makes movies that are mostly improvised and don't have to be tightly scripted or shot expensively. This movie feels extremely low budget, and the old-fashioned opening credits initially confused me because I thought this might be a period piece set in the 70s or 80s instead of in the present day. It doesn't feel like a film for casual audiences but for indie enthusiasts or people who enjoy the work of the admittedly fantastic Kendrick and Lynskey.

If you do watch Happy Christmas, stay all the way to the end of the closing credits, as they feature a very extended scene that was cut out of the middle of the movie. It features Lynskey, Dunham, and Kendrick, sitting around and improvising their way through a very funny scene that showcases what this movie was all about. If the movie had just consisted of these three ladies sitting around and talking, in the vein of the epic conversations contained in the Before Sunrise trilogy, it would have been truly special. 

Matilda: From Screen to Stage

A few weeks ago, I saw Matilda the Musical on Broadway. I left the Shubert Theatre both delighted and appalled that the ten-year-olds on stage were already more accomplished than I could ever be.

A brief recap if you know nothing about Matilda: it's the story of a brilliant little girl who has horrible parents. She loves to read and is a child prodigy, but her parents think she is insane for preferring Dickens to reality TV. When she finally enrolls in school, she has the misfortune of attending the Crunchem Hall Academy, run by the terrifying Agatha Trunchbull, a woman who ought to be imprisoned for her barbaric treatment of the students. The one saving grace is Miss Honey, Matilda's first-grade teacher, whose name is a perfect indication of her personality. She recognizes Matilda's talents and the two of them form an alliance as they stand up to the people who keep trying to put them down. Matilda the movie was one of my all-time favorite movies as a child, but I only recently read the book. The Broadway show is relatively faithful to the book but takes a great deal of dramatic license at certain points, like fleshing out Miss Honey's backstory. This means that no matter how well you know the story, you'll still be surprised. 

I was blown away by the children in this production - they are immensely talented and supremely confident. I also had no idea they weren't British until I read the playbill. They're all speaking in spot-on British accents in addition to singing and dancing, and it's a remarkable feat. It can certainly be difficult to understand the lyrics at times as the children's voices are a bit shrill and the acoustics aren't great. But who cares about the lyrics when you're staring at the mesmerizing set? It's colorful, innovative, and spellbinding. Every inch of the stage is used to brilliant effect; trap doors and set pieces are popping up all over the place and the choreography is magnificent. One song that involves the children swinging on playground swings is particularly astonishing as they keep swinging higher and higher until they look like they could fall into the audience at any minute. You won't be able to keep your eyes off the stage.  

Matilda is an entertaining and engaging show for adults and children alike. With Tim Minchin as the composer, you can expect clever and hilarious lyrics stacked with double and triple entendres to keep audience members of all ages amused. The acting is stellar, the production design is excellent, and overall, it's one of the best ways you could spend two and half hours on Broadway.