A Year with Kate: The Glass Menagerie (1973)

Episode 40 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn takes to TV to show that Laurette Taylor can eat her heart out.

Apparently Kate adapted to TV quickly. Mere months after her first two part television interview on The Dick Cavett Show, Katharine Hepburn returned to the small screen, this time to act. Director Anthony Harvey (last teamed with Kate directing The Lion in Winter) did away with the more fantastical elements of the play in order to get a more "natural" feel, relying on strong acting rather than stagecraft. Nonetheless, The Glass Menagerie remains a touching work of nostalgia and regret that comments in unexpected ways on its legendary lead actress’s life.

When The Glass Menagerie premiered in 1944, Laurette Taylor’s performance as Southern matriarch Amanda Wingfield effectively revolutionized American theatrical acting. In her second foray into Williams’ world, Katharine Hepburn steps out of Taylor’s long shadow. Hepburn's Amanda is not a dreamer, but a fighter. (The biggest shock: Katharine Hepburn, she of the infamous Bryn Mawr brogue, nearly conquers a Southern accent.) Kate plays the most Yankee Southern Belle; she speaks quickly and she demands rather than cajoles. As Kate plays her, Amanda uses her frequent escapes into memory as anecdotal proof that her current suffering is undeserved.

Trivia, nostalgia, and a good reason never to clean out your closet after the jump.

Another explosive family dinner courtesy of Tennessee Williams.

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Jon Favreau's Chef to spawn real-life restaurant

Manuel here with some culinary news courtesy of Jon Favreau and his box office hit Chef ($45 million worldwide gross!)  

In a new interview promoting the Blu-Ray release of the film, Favreau mentioned he's toying with the idea of opening up a restaurant inspired by the film. “I love sharing the food with people, so that they could see that food really is as good as it looks,” Favreau told Yahoo movies about the restaurant. “It’s not the wisest business venture, but for me it’s a way to let the movie live on and connect with the fans.” Not since Ratatouille has a foodie movie made me so crave the various dishes in front of me. Favreau's idea of letting the film live on and connect with the fans sounds like the type of menu and drink options that movie theaters like the Alamo Drafthouse (where you can get Death Becomes Her-inspired cocktails tonight over at Yonkers, for example) and the Nitehawk Cinema (where you can get Boyhood inspired queso!) here in NYC have been toying around for a while now. If you've seen the film, you know opening up an El Jefe restaurant seems like a rather no-brainer idea. I mean look at this!

 

Box office smashes associated with large corporations have been doing this for ages; at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter you can have butterbeer at Three Broomsticks, while at Disney World you can finally be their guest at well, Be Our Guest restaurant which opened recently. In all these endeavors the focus has been on the ambience, rarely on the food which is why Favreau's idea might be a more salivating enterprise. It makes me think of all the 2014 indie food tie-ins that could still come to be: wouldn't you love to grab a Mendl's courtesan Au chocolat from A Grand Budapest Pop-Up Patisserie? Or enjoy a chocolate cake at an Under the Skin inspired diner? I would caution anyone trying to open a Snowpiercer entomophagy protein bar stand, though. 

What other movie-themed or inspired restaurants would you like to see come to life? Would you be willing to trek it out to LA to get a taste of Favreau and celebrity chef Roy Choi's venture? 

September's Gone, Girl

What a busy busy month that was. We were overachievers here, really. I'm so exhausted I'm hoping to prick my finger on a cursed spindle for a little R&R. Traffic always picks up in the fall when the adult movies arrive so if you're just rejoining us we welcome you back with slighly chilled affection (this place is hopping all year round!) by pointing out what you may have missed.

Neo, Cheryl and Rocky hike the PCT

Index of Goodies 
Toronto was a blast! - a handydandy guide (and prizes) for everything I saw there
NYFF - in progress but we've already talked about a bunch of foreign films as well as Maps to the Stars, Gone Girl & Whiplash
Best Shot S5 -highlights from Under the Skin, Eternal Sunshine, The Matrix, etc...
Robert Wise Centennial - the team had fun looking back at this versatile Oscar winner's filmography with 5 randomly selected offerings: Audrey Rose, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Curse of the Cat People, and Star! 

Four Random Goodies
Pride - my favorite September release this year 
Gone Girl - Jason read the book, so he did our first review. (But, yes, I'll chime in at some point)
The Lion in Winter - Anne Marie's "A Year With Kate" finally hit this milestone film 
Showgirls - There can be only one "Goddess": Is it Cristal or Nomi? VOTE 

Most Discussed
American Beauty 15 years on... Do you root for Lester or Carolyn?
Julianne Moore in Still Alice ... a fine movie. An even better performance
10 Best Voice-Only Performances in Films... a team top ten feat. Ursula, the Genie, Darth Vader, and...?
The Last Five Years... you're all eager to see this one apparently. It has lots of problems but a musical where the stars can actually sing is a relief
Oscar Charts... those are always popular, and they're totally up to date right now. They get discussed in the various Oscar-centric articles 

Coming in October
We haven't yet decided how to celebrate the spooky month this year - any suggestions? But some things coming up include Inherent Vice, St. Vincent, Fury, more Gone Girl and the first wave of Oscar contender interviews including talent and creatives from Boyhood, Noah, Get On Up, Birdman and more. Plus a look back at the careers of the four giants receiving Honorary Oscars in early November. (We'll probably give Maureen O'Hara a whole week because you know that's how we roll).

NYFF: Saint Laurent is Über-Stylish but...

Our NYFF coverage continues with Nathaniel on France's Oscar submission Saint Laurent.

If you're going to make a biopic of one of the great fashion designers, it better damn well be stylish. Saint Laurent one of two new biopics tackling the iconic French designer Yves Saint Laurent assures you of its gifts in this area almost immediately. There's nary a frame, at least for the first two thirds of the film, that you couldn't frame and admire for aesthetic reasons: rich decadent colors, gorgeous actors as gorgeous people, carefully composed shots in elaborately decorated homes, dark exclusive clubs, and interiors of stores that that are so beautiful in their rigidity that they look more like institutional museums after hours, free of consumers but full of art. Even the daring full frontal nudity is stylish, whether it's employed for confrontational queer desire or for humor as in a memorable sequence late in the picture between a clothed woman and naked one. The scene plays like unintentional comedy for a moment until you discern that it's actual comedy, a meta joke about overdetermined STYLE and the fashion world's self mythologizing nature within a movie positively dripping with style and self-mythologizing.

The director Bertrand Bonello (House of Tolerance, The Pornographer) has chosen the right form for his movie -- at least in part, telling the story visually first and foremost, and lushly and creatively at that. Would that I had a photographic memory to recount the many fine choices but there are three that stuck with me, all from the first and second acts...

dangerous gay players & beautiful dress-up muses after the jump...

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NYFF: Blue Is The Lukewarmest Color

Our coverage of The New York Film Festival continues with Jason's take on actor-director Mathieu Amalric's The Blue Room.

The ordinary afternoon street-scene beyond an open window half-illuminates a hotel room, letting in a miniature horde of visitors - refracted sunlight, a honeybee, a cool breeze, the implacable face of somebody's unexpected husband - all inclined to land upon the sweat-strewn backs of the bed's entangled bodies in one way or another. In Mathieu Amalric's The Blue Room the lovers inside dare this space, their nudity displayed openly, to crash down around them - the bee makes a pretty picture, the breeze cuts the sticky air, and the husband, well, he'll have his day too.

The Blue Room is based on a 1964 book by Georges Simenon, a writer who's been described by some as the French Patricia Highsmith, and much like we've come to expect from adaptations of that writer this story is obsessed with crime and sex and where the twain shall tragically meet - the "criss cross" of Highsmith's Strangers on a Train especially sneaks to mind. Simenon seems less interested in Bruno & Guy's kind of repression though; he and Amalric's concerns seem to blossom off passion's full expression. So sweat and blood roll down parted lips and Amalric lingers upon the contents of that room as if they themselves hold all the answers. Time and again we flash back to the lovers, often frozen as post-coital still-life, flushed and spent - what happens when those moments can't stay contained?

Amalric's film tries to have it both ways, running simultaneously cold and hot - the frame square as an ice-box, the strings lush with heat, a court-room drama told through lurid tales of windswept outdoor encounters - but it tends to meet in the middle more often than not, lukewarm when it should boil and tepid when it should chill to the bone. The fractured timeline structure robs us of too much emotional investment - it becomes more a what-happened than a why; an assortment of mostly unknowable glances piled up and posed.

The Blue Room screens tonight Sept 30th (9 PM)