First Biergarten visit of the season yesterday! The rules are still changing every week, but yesterday outdoor dining was allowed in Landkreis Freising, and it wasn’t raining, and we took full advantage of it.
Despite cold and rain the whole week, there were only two movies. Still mostly listening to history podcasts when I’m home.
Brust oder Keule (1976)
Library DVD, Deutsch
Soylent Green reminded Mr Radish of this movie he liked as a kid. Louis de Funès is a famous French movie slapstick artist; we had previously seen and enjoyed The Cabbage Soup, about an old farmer and an extraterrestrial who keeps coming around for dinner so I was open to seeing more. Here de Funès plays the most famous restaurant critic in all of France, publisher of *the* guidebook for French dining, dismayed by the new trend toward flavorless industrial food. He’s going on a last round of reviews before retiring and leaving the business to his son (who is secretly a circus clown), and as part of his fight to save his country’s cuisine, he has agreed to appear on a live television truth-or-dare type show fighting against a food factory owner.
Still not a fan of 20th century French “cinema” and to be honest I don’t understand all the nuances of 1970s French popular culture, but: slapstick with food and clowns. I enjoyed this movie and can see further de Funès films.
Poltergeist (1982)
Cable, original English
Literally as I was on my couch was watching this movie, city utility workers found the skeletons of a mother and her children over by the old parish church St Georg while digging up the cobblestones to do some work. They’re about six hundred years old and presumably left behind when the church moved the graveyard to outside the city walls during a previous plague. At least an honest effort was made…right? Right?
Is it bad form to admit I laughed as much at this one as at de Funès? I should have tried harder to see it as a teenager; seeing it as an adult for the first time, it just seems silly. Who spends an evening soaking in the tub in a house they know is cursed and are planning on abandoning anyway? And now, from the post-Coach perspective: who the heck cast Craig T. Nelson? What am I missing here? The terrifying beast from hell looks like a Muppet, but this can be explained by Spielberg’s associations with Jim Henson and technical limitations on special effects in the early 1980s.
Movies of this vintage bring out a weird nostalgia for brand logos and product packaging. One of the investigators eats Cheetos out of a white bag with red and black text and now I am consumed with the unavailability of obtaining modern Cheetos, in their orange bag featuring Chester. (They are banned in the EU. I cannot make this stuff up. I have seen Flamin’ Hot “Chitos”, 225g for 7€, but 1) I’m pretty sure it’s a knockoff and 2) I only want the regular cheese kind anyway.)
