Movie Details
| Title: | The Menu | |
| Director: | Mark Mylod | |
| Year: | 2022 | |
| Genre: | Dark Comedy | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 03.18.23 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (2)
- Ali G Indahouse
- The Big White
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 03.18.23 | Internet | Tonight's double feature is a couple movies I missed at this year's Fantastic Fest. As my nonexistent movie journal readers know, Fantastic Fest is a film festival put on by the Alamo Drafthouse here in Austin every fall showing "genre" films which usually means horror, sci-fi, or fantasy but in practice wound up being off-kilter world cinema or whatever hollywood movie they could get to drum up publicity. I went to the first 10 or 11 in a run then had to skip a year so now I don't remember how many I've been to total, but covid disrupted things so my 2020 badge wound up being forwarded to 21, then to 22 where I didn't feel like I would have any fun going due to the crowds and memories of how I used to catch a cold every year before covid so I don't imagine things would be any different last year. And in a potential final nail in the coffin, the festival did a couple things to make more money which make it feel less special to me, not the least of which was putting 2023 badges on sale last december in the midst of christmas shopping and travel season. Now, it seems like me not getting a badge was wise because I've had to burn a lot of my PTO this year and probably won't have a week to take off when it comes around. But a couple interesting things have happened over the dozen or so years that I've been attending the festival. In the early years, the movies were mostly crap because they weren't established and fell right after Toronto's (much larger) festival and they really had to stretch to fill the schedule out. But then I feel like the programmers made a few discoveries and for a few years it was really fun, like to the point where several filmmakers said they made a movie just to come back. But there was a shift where in those early years you felt like you got to see movies that were otherwise unavailable, but as streaming services picked up they became a new kind of direct-to-video platform where I'd start to see all the FF movies wind up on Netflix. And lately, as is the case with this movie, I guess enough people saw those types of netflix movies that the filmmakers or subject matter is inching toward the mainstream. So this movie actually caused a stir when it didn't get any academy awards nominations, which I find bizarre. Because the subject matter hasn't changed. There was a movie called Estomago in like 2007 that dealt with a chef dabbling in cannibalism. I think it was Spanish and not great but it fit the Fantastic Fest bill perfectly, and this movie is basically the same thing. The demented sensibility of this film fits the fest perfectly, except you've got A-list actors like Ralph Finnes and Anya Taylor-Joy starring. And the next movie tonight is the same story. It's the third film from that director to play the festival, but this time it was nominated for Best Screenplay, director, and best picture(!) So is the world catching up to Fantastic Fest's genre sensibility? Or is it because these types of low budget genre pieces are the last movies standing other than Disney or Top Gun? I'm not sure, but it's a bizarre feeling to have your deviant film festival showing Best Picture nominees. But I digress. I liked this movie a lot. The humor of it is in my wheelhouse, I had no problem buying the twisted logic of it at the end, and I thought it was a wonderful send-up of the food porn genre clashed with class warfare. I was surprised to see Aimee Carrero in a supporting role as John Leguizamo's assistant. I know her from a friggin D&D stream so all my worlds are colliding right now. She was also in what I thought was the funniest scene of the movie, which I'll describe at the end in the spoilers section. The closest reference I have for this movie is Richard Bachman. To me, this movie is like a Bachman book. I believe I said the same thing about a Spanish(?) movie called The Platform from a few years back which wound up on Netflix, but it has a few trademark Bachman-isms: - a weird high concept that requires a tiny bit of suspension of disbelief - a macabre element on the concept - a strict adherence to the format it presents - a questionably terrible ending. So for those not versed in Stephen King's pseudonymous work, the idea that there's a contest where the person who can walk the longest distance gets all this fame and fortune but everyone else is executed as soon as they stop walking is a Bachman book. Same goes for the book of The Running Man where, instead of Arnold in a bizarre playground with WWF-type enemies hunting him, it's a normal guy who wants to feed his family forced to be hunting by the entire viewing audience as well as professional hunters tracking him. Or a story about a fat guy given a romani curse that he gets thinner. He also wrote a story about a school shooting but that one's proven to be too topical so I think it's been pulled from reprints. In any case, just because I read these books (collected in a tome simply titled "The Bachman Books") as an impressionable age, I find anything with that sort of arch premise similar. Like The Hunger Games. That's totally a young-adult Bachman-type story. Or Battle Royale for that matter, the movie that defined the genre. But I digress again. Anyway, The premise of a bunch of rich asshole archetypes trapped in a gourmet tasting menu by a maniacal chef appeals to me. I didn't worry about how realistic it is, and I think that's why I liked the movie so much. It doesn't have the it-can-happen-to-you terror of Hostel or the trapped-in-crazytown vibe of Nothing but Trouble. It's really closer to a Seven or Canterbury Tales, closer to a fairy tale. It works for me! SPOILERS AHOY! Back to what I thought was the funniest scene. The movie plays on the archetype of the chef as much as any of the diners. Finnes' character is beholden to his rules as much as any of the guests are to theirs. That's the logic that plays at the end which allows Taylor-Joy to escape (a la Ratatouille), by leveraging those rules, sending the food back, requesting the food he was happy making, asking for a to-go back, etc. But my favorite scene was when John Leguizamo's actor character basically asks why he's there and we learn it's because he was in a shitty movie that the chef saw on his day off. For the sin of wasting his one day off, he's condemned to die. But then! Then he asks about his assistant (Aimee Carrero) and the chef asks: "Which school did you go to?" "Brown." "Student loans?" *shakes her head no* "You die too" That's the class warfare theme of the movie in its most naked and hilarious form. Like, he had to do a little back-of-the-napkin math on whether to let her go or not. Perfect. |
