TV Party is a Friday feature in which Film Editors Dominick Mayer and Justin Gerber alongside Editor-in-Chief Michael Roffman suggest one movie apiece to enjoy over the weekend. Joining them each week will be two rotating film staff writers to help round out the selections. Seek out any of the films via Netflix, Amazon, Redbox, Hulu, OnDemand, or abandoned Blockbuster and Hollywood Video stores — however you crazy kids watch movies these days! Enjoy ’em for the first time, a second, or maybe a redemptive third.
Dominick’s Pick
Blue is the Warmest Color
Abdellatif Keciche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color has had to field no shortage of debate due to the fraught circumstances under which it was made, but if you can put aside the legitimate concerns about Keciche’s voyeuristic eye in both production and execution, he also managed to make as sweepingly romantic and haunting a screen romance as has been made since the turn of the millennium. The story of Adele (Adele Exarchopolous) gets right what so few movies about love do: that while it’s usually one of the most uniquely powerful facets of any life, it’s not the only thing a person is ever living through at one time. Love informs life, but when encountered healthily, doesn’t usually dictate it.
So goes the film’s stark but pitch-perfect approach to sexuality as well. Once Adele meets Emma (Lea Seydoux) in a lesbian bar in Paris, they spend the next several years in and out of love, drifting through one another’s lives even as they’re together, at turns passionate with one another and tentative about what happens when raw passion in and of itself isn’t enough to keep a relationship going. Blue Is the Warmest Color is frank without being exploitative (at least in this writer’s estimation) and understands that love and sex and all the messy business that comes from one or both of those things is relative. It’s not a love story so much as it’s a story of how love can rotate a life off its axis and what that might mean. And it’s exceptional.
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Justin’s Pick
Like Water for Chocolate
In my youth, whenever I looked at the artwork on the video box (yes, the video box) for Like Water for Chocolate, it came off as a kind of melodramatic soap I would have no interest in seeing. This went on for years, even decades. The box shows a young man and a young woman together in the shadows — the man pressed against the woman, the woman clearly digging it. Below them: a plate of food. I thought it was some lame 9 ½ Weeks or Wild Orchid B.S. and would rent the likes of Bushwhacked or Night of the Demons 3 instead. I had great taste even then.
It took a while to discover Like Water for Chocolate, but I’m glad I did. The promotional art does the movie a disservice, because while it is a very sensual film, the fantasy and comedy elements separate it from the pack. The story revolves around Tita, the youngest of three daughters. Because she is the baby of the family, tradition demands that she remains single and takes care of her mother for the rest of her days. This inevitably leads to familial strain and secret love affairs, which are often found in melodramas. However, Tita is an expert cook, and without realizing it, she is able to infuse her emotions with the meals she makes. People get sick, sick, aroused, etc.
Like Water for Chocolate is ultimately a tragedy, but I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun watching one. And you won’t believe this: director Alfonso Arau played the “infamous” role of El Guapo in Three Amigos. Random.
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