TV Party Tonight – January 17, 2022

Stuff we’ve watched recently…

Films

Boiling Point (2021)
We were poking around on Hoopla looking for something else when this popped up. Love that Hoopla gets these odd new releases; love that a Toronto Public Library card gets you access to both Hoopla and Kanopy.

Anyway, Stephen Graham plays chef Andy Jones; his life is falling apart – he’s split up with his partner and is missing his kid, his water bottle is full of vodka, and he’s become a detriment to the smooth operation of his business, but it’s a Friday night and his hot new restaurant is full, so he’s busy with a health inspector, a kitchen team that are either high-strung or incompetent, front of house staff who are far too busy chatting with guests and each other, and a hostess/manager more interested in getting the place pumped up on social media than in competently managing her staff and ensuring good communication with the kitchen. His old boss/mentor shows up with a restaurant critic in tow, there’s a pending engagement proposal to a customer with a nut allergy on table 13, and the Black waitress refuses to tell anyone that she’s having trouble with a racist customer.

And it’s all done in one seamless 90-minute shot. Continue reading “TV Party Tonight – January 17, 2022”

Film Review – The Man in the Hat

The Man in the Hat
starring Ciarán Hinds, directed by John-Paul Davidson and Stephen Warbeck

There’s a theory, when it comes to reviews – of anything – that the reviewer needs to have a background, some level of expertise, to be able to effectively assess that which they are reviewing. In food writing, food critics will insist that to write a good review, there should be an understanding of how the food was made, flavoured, grown, etc. Meanwhile, sites like Yelp thrive on reviews based on whether or not an individual liked the taste of what they ate and little more. Does knowledge change our level of enjoyment and understanding of something?

I bring this up here because it’s an important point when it comes to The Man in the Hat as well as the reviews of this film published so far.

Continue reading “Film Review – The Man in the Hat”