WEDNESDAY MOVIE CLUB: Bite Your Teeth Into The Ass of Life
It's a Big Night...
Hello diners!
Tonight, we make-a the pasta and take a little trip to Italy, or at least to an Italian restaurant in New Jersey, where two brothers named Primo and Secondo (Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci) are sweating over saltwater as they try to save their little trattoria from going under. Big Night is what I like to call a Hail Mary Movie — that most pleasurable of genres about One Huge Last Ditch Effort when everyone pulls out the spangles and the sparklers and the good china and goes for absolute broke because god dammit, everything is RIDING ON THIS. It has all of the shingles-inducing tension of an episode of ER but without the gross anatomy, and all of the frenetic style of a fashion documentary without some viperous designer berating models backstage. Here, all of the nail-biting is focused on whether the pasta has an al dente bitedown, on if the red sauce is red enough, on if the bottles of chianti are flowing, on if the oregano is fresh, on if the mozzarella is soft and the parmesan is hard, and if the transcendent beauty of truly rustic, passionately regional cuisine can somehow shine through and save the day despite everyone involved in making it having a wee nervous breakdown at the exact same time. Now, that’s-a spicy stress ball!
This is THE movie for you if:
You really loved that one short and life-shortening episode of “The Bear” in which too many orders come in and everyone is screaming “yes chef” at increasingly unhinged decibel levels
You believe that Minnie Driver is, in fact, one of the most underrated actresses of the nineties, and you’ve made a PowerPoint to prove it
You are a fan of the CNN documentary series “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy,” but you also want Stanley Tucci to just find Italy, already
You watch “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” just to see Tony Shalhoub flop around in old-timey suiting
You are still pronouncing that word like “fajool” ten years after watching The Sopranos despite never having ordered this item in any restaurant
You are known in certain circles as making “a pretty mean amatriciana”
You hate it when people complain in restaurants and really wish some waiter with nothing left to lose would go full-maitre-jacket and really give them a piece of his mind (along with a bit of snot in their salad)
You worked in food service at any point and have been longing for a film brave enough to depict a restaurant during rush hour as a maelstrom of chaos that might break even the most well-adjusted person
You are craving baked ziti, like, very badly, right now.
So amores, dust off your checkered tablecloths, put on some Louis Prima, grab a cannoli, and meet us at the cucina (aka the Discord) at 6pst/9est for Big Night. As Secondo says, sometimes spaghetti likes to be alone, but for tonight, you’ve got company.
—The Management