Products |
Weekend Butler: TWO “must see” movies. Marcella Hazan’s Bolognese Sauce. John Lennon’s night light. Would you travel 3,000 miles to see a play? Still the best new book. And more.
By
Published: Nov 10, 2022
Category:
Weekend
THIS WEEK’S MUST-SEE MOVIE: “THE FABELMANS”
“The Fabelmans” is the story Steven Spielberg didn’t think he could tell. From an interview in the Times:
When the pandemic first hit, some of my kids flew in from the East Coast, and they all took up residence in their old bedrooms and Kate [Capshaw, his wife] and I got a lot of our family back. It was very disconcerting not to go into work. Directing is a social occupation, and I’m very used to interacting with people every single day. I was not really acclimating to the Zoom world very well.
I had a lot of time on my hands. I used to get in my car and drive for hours — all around Los Angeles, up Pacific Coast Highway, over to Calabasas, over near Twentynine Palms. And that gave me more time to think about what was happening in the world.
I started thinking, what’s the one story I haven’t told that I’d be really mad at myself if I don’t? It was always the same answer every time: the story of my formative years growing up between 7 and 18.
And the review? Manhola Dargis in the Times:
He will always err on the side of entertainment, I think, and will invariably try to make us weep so that he can dry our tears. I’ve chafed against that impulse of his, at times, even while falling for his movies. But it’s what he does, beautifully.
Viewer comments on the trailer: Tears. Chills. Goosebumps Watch it.
“The Fabelmans” opens Friday, November 11.
NEXT WEEK’S MUST-SEE MOVIE: “SHE SAID”
I’m the son of a woman who taught me: “There’s always something more you can do.” My hero was the commander who lost 234 men in the first four days of the first American encounter with the Vietcong and yet managed to fight off the invaders. But the most important element in the shaping of my character is the five decades I spent as a magazine journalist. Celebrity interviews? Easy. Investigative pieces? Everything from threats of indictment from a District Attorney to a veiled physical threat from a man who knew I suspected he was the real killer of his son.
The difficulty of investigative journalism grabbed me from the first minute of “She Said,” which is the story of the New York Times journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, who (along with Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker) brought down Harvey Weinstein and kickstarted the “Me Too” movement. In retrospect, it’s possible to take their achievement as challenging but inevitable. Not so. When I reviewed their book in 2019, I included this:
Guess who didn’t get it? Bob Woodward. Yes, that Bob Woodward. The Bob Woodward of Woodward and Bernstein. He appeared with Kantor and Twohey at an event in Washington. He praised the book. And then… here’s the key exchange. It comes after the writers don’t give Woodward the answer he wants.
WOODWARD: You’re artfully dodging the question.
(Audience: Rumbling begins.)
KANTOR: I’ll tell you what we know. It’s that this story is an X-ray into power, and how power works.
(Audience: Loud applause.)
WOODWARD: It’s also about sex, isn’t it?
(Audience: Several shout “No!”)
KANTOR: It’s not about sex in the romantic sense… Part of the way it’s about power is that it’s about work.
WOODWARD: What’s the reason for Weinstein’s perverted sexual crime? So, why? I’m sorry, I know this puts you on the spot. What is driving him?
(Audience: Someone tells “Stop!” Another shouts: “Let’s get to the Q&A!”)
Woodward kept going. The audience shouted at him. When Woodward wondered if Weinstein’s behavior was “some kind of weird foreplay,” the boos rained down. He just didn’t get that a CEO who puts heavy moves on a young woman at the start of her career or on her first day at work believes he “wins” not when he has sex with her but when he successfully dominates her.
And this is Bob Woodward!!!
The film is right up there with “All the President’s Men” — but with a key difference. From Indiewire:
They didn’t just set a course for a reckoning for Weinstein and his crimes but helped ignite the entire #MeToo movement on a global scale. That Weinstein’s downfall was the product of diligent reporting, dogged persistence, and the resilience of a few brave souls is essential to remember. In Maria Schrader’s artful and incendiary “She Said,” we’re reminded of something else that makes for one hell of a movie: It was women who did it.
Here’s the trailer.
“She Said” opens on Friday, November 18. Don’t be the last to see it.
KEEP THE LIGHT ON
Every year on the anniversary of his death, the National Trust leave the bedroom light on in John Lennon’s childhood home, all night. Watch.
“RAPE! MURDER! IT’S JUST A SHOT AWAY!”
Late at night in 1969, still in her pyjamas, hair in rollers and four months pregnant, Merry Clayton recorded backing vocals to “Gimme Shelter.” The isolated vocal track of the recording with Jagger will chill and thrill.
CBS “ON THE ROAD” — A TEACHER TEACHES… KINDNESS
Moving? Just a lot. Watch.
DISPATCH FROM CHARLES PIERCE
Outside my bank, a guy whose sign reads, “I lost my job. I have five kids” just played “Hallelujah” beautifully on the accordion and things got very misty. He’s moved on to Hank Williams now. Music, folks. It’ll get you through. God bless the man with the accordion.
ON TWITTER:A HAIKU ABOUT BEING AN ADULT
I am so tired
Where did my money go?
My back is hurting
A REAL POEM: JAMES TATE, “TEACHING THE APE TO WRITE POEMS”
They didn’t have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
“You look like a god sitting there.
Why don’t you try writing something?”
ELECTION UPDATE: WHO MATTERED MOST?
(to the accompaniment of this song)
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor campus)
Gretchen Witmer. 8,842 votes (94%)
Tudor Dixon 573 votes. (6%)
VIVE LA FRANCE
from Electrek
New legislation requires that all garages with 80 or more spaces must install a solar roof within 3-5 years. This could generate up to 11 gigawatts, the equivalent of 10 nuclear reactors.
STILL THE ONE
My favorite new book is Small Things Like These, 128 can’t-put-it-down pages by Claire Keegan. Now the Times is getting on the bandwagon.
FROM TWITTER: “WHAT IS DEATH?”
“I hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child and fell asleep during a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room.”
In my novel, the quote at the front is from the Dalai Lama: “Death? Just a change of clothes.”
WOULD YOU TRAVEL 3,000 MILES JUST TO SEE ONE PLAY? KIM-MARIE EVANS DID.
Kim-Marie Evans is Greenwich Magazine’s travel editor and the creator and editor of Luxury Travel Mom. Her freelance work includes articles on subjects from Cuba’s financial apartheid to international cocktail competitions. She flew with her son to New York from her home in Los Angeles specifically to see “Parade.” She wrote me to explain why:
“Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America” is ranked #1 on Amazon’s Black and American Studies bestseller list. It claims Jews were the driving force in the slave trade and the Holocaust never happened. That book and the rise of Anti-Semitism brought me to New York to see one of the seven performances of the revival of “Parade,” the musical based on the story of Leo Franck.
Leo Franck was a Brooklyn Jew living in Atlanta at the turn of the century. A 13-year-old girl who worked in the pencil factory where he was a supervisor was murdered. Franck and several Black men were arrested without evidence. The prosecutors didn’t charge the Blacks. They did create enough evidence to convict Franck. That gave the press a story: Jews against blacks — hardly the subject for an award-winning musical.
The short 1998 Broadway run of “Parade” produced Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Original Score. It still closed after only a few months. It’s gone on a national tour and is occasionally dusted off. This brief New York revival might, thanks to Kanye and Amazon, bring it back.
The appeal isn’t just the news value of the story It’s also the cast. Ben Platt was exceptional as Leo Franck, and his co-star, the relatively unknown Micaela Diamond, reached heights in her performance that Platt had to stretch to meet.
The revival was re-written and re-worked by the original composer Jason Robert Brown, who skillfully conducted the show’s orchestra along with his wife, Georgia Stitt, an award-winning composer and producer who was in the pit on piano. Thanks to Brown and Stitt, the heaviness of the tragedy was balanced with the beauty of the music and the nuances of a story that is so much more than it seems.
Postscript: the story continues. The case was re-opened in 2019.
MARCELLA HAZAN’S BOLOGNESE MEAT SAUCE
From Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking
Bolognese Meat Sauce
for about 6 servings
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
3 tablespoons butter plus 1 tablespoon for tossing with the pasta
1/2 cup chopped onion
2/3 cup chopped celery
2/3 cup chopped carrot
3/4 pound ground beef chuck, not too lean
salt & freshly ground black pepper
1 cup whole milk [or 2 %]
Whole nutmeg for grating
1 cup dry white or red wine
1 1/2 cups canned imported Italian plum tomatoes, cut up, with their juice
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 pounds pasta
Freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano at the table
Put the oil, butter, and chopped onion in a heavy-bottomed pot and turn the heat to medium. Cook and stir until the onion is translucent. Add the celery and carrot and cook for about 2 minutes, stirring to coat the vegetables with fat.
Add the meat, a large pinch of salt, and some freshly ground pepper. Break the meat up with a fork, stir well, and cook until the meat has lost its raw color.
Add milk and let simmer gently, stirring frequently, until it has bubbled away completely. Add a tiny grating, about 1/8 teaspoon, fresh nutmeg and stir.
Add the wine and let it simmer away. When the wine has evaporated, stir in the tomatoes. When they begin to bubble, turn the heat down so that the sauce cooks at the laziest of simmers, with just an intermittent bubble breaking through to the surface.
Cook, uncovered, for 3 hours, stirring from time to time. If the sauce begins to dry out, add 1/2 cup of water whenever necessary to keep it from sticking. At the end, there should be no water left, and the fat must separate from the sauce. Taste for salt.
Toss with cooked, drained pasta and the remaining tablespoon of butter. Serve freshly grated cheese at the table.
