I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to see The King of Comedy, the cynical Scorsese gem about the delusional and fame hungry Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) with Jerry Lewis and Sandra Bernhard in supporting roles.
Criterion has recently released Abbas Kiarostami's 1990 Close-Up, a film I've never seen but it looks amazing and is now at the top of my queue. Watch a clip here and read about the DVD here.
The critic Godfrey Cheshire, who has written extensively on Iranian cinema and contributed an essay to the Criterion DVD booklet, calls 'Close-Up' a version of 'The Bicycle Thief' in which what's stolen is not a bicycle but an identity.
Worth your time: Merci Pour Le Chocolat, an under appreciated minor masterpiece from the great Claude Chabrol, with Isabelle Huppert & Jacques Dutronc.
Released earlier this year and on a list of things I'd like to own; an anthology of essays from Gastronomica magazine. From NYT:
Some of the topics: Christian diets, food in wartime, cooking’s effect on human evolution, seafood and caviar in Muslim dietary laws in Iran, food as clothing, a Bengali cooking implement called a bonti, profiles of a rice farmer in the Carolinas, food choices in Zambia as they relate to genetic modification, and egg creams. There is also poetry and art.
