April Filmfest

Funny place, that Urbandale Library.  In many ways the best of the metro libraries, this month it did something so utterly bizarre that I was unable to complete the monthly filmfest on time.  You see, one of my movies this month was “The Jazz Singer,” which I planned to get at the Urbandale Library.  I checked the catalog, saw it was in stock, ran out there, picked it up and brought the disc home.  Imagine my surprise when I found that the disc I had was only “special features,” disc 3 of a 3 disc set.  Apparently Urbandale checks out discs 1 and 2 as a single item, but disc 3 is totally separate.  So I returned disc 3, but inexplicably, someone besides me has checked out “The Jazz Singer” and won’t return it before the end of the month.  Sigh.  So it’s a five movie month, I have the movie on hold, and I’ll catch up whenever it comes back in.  In the meantime, here’s what I saw in March.

5) Easy Rider (1969) – Have you ever longed to see what would happen if Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper did a lot of drugs and aimlessly rode motorcycles around the Southwest?  No?  Me neither, but that’s what I got with this movie.  The entire plot can be summarized thusly: Two guys make a lot of money off a drug deal, buy motorcycles and decide to go to Mardi Gras.  There are but two interesting parts to this movie: Jack Nicholson’s character, and the filmography during the acid trip.  But neither of those come in until at least halfway, and the ending is so lame and arbitrary that you can’t help but feel disappointed.  Very, very pointless movie.

4) Swing Time (1936) – This seems to be a pretty standard Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie.  I don’t really know, since it’s the only one I’ve seen so far, but it’s relatively light-hearted, has some laughs and some romance, and a lot of singing and dancing, so it pretty well fit my expectations.  The plot is a pretty well-rehashed romantic comedy formula with the couple who hate each other when they meet, go through stuff together, and by the end, well, they might just be in love.  Which is fine.  This is fun, fluffy and has some catchy songs.  My only complaint is the ending with Astaire’s rival dude, which came off very rushed and out of character, like they just needed to tie up that storyline.  Other than that, it was nice, but not a favorite.

3) Patton (1970) – I fully expected to hate this, being just the type of bleeding-heart pacifist liberal that General Patton would probably hate.  But as the three hours of this movie wore on, I realized it was pretty interesting and that Patton was really quite a character.  Lots of his philosophies were things that I don’t necessarily agree with, but you can’t deny that the man was very enigmatic.  From his beliefs in reincarnation to his zeal for competition with the enemy generals, and of course the famous speech in front of the flag, there’s a lot more to General Patton than you get out of history books.  And the movie, I think, does a really good job of focusing on Patton the man, and not just the battle sequences.  Still, war movies aren’t really my thing, so it wasn’t top of the list, but I was pleasantly surprised.

2) The Sixth Sense (1999) – I originally saw this movie shortly after it came out and thought at the time it was really good.  Since then I have seen the exponential decay of the quality of M Night Shyamalan’s movies over the years.  So when I came back to this, I figured, okay, I already know the twist, and don’t all of Shyamalan’s movies suck anyway?  Once again I found myself pleasantly surprised as “Sixth Sense” was really his pinnacle.  Granted, there is the whole sci-fi/supernatural aspect to it that makes geeks like me love movies like this, but there’s also a lot more.  The material is naturally heavy stuff and Shyamalan delves right into it, pondering questions of life and death, and exploring the depth of emotion that permeates it.  I thought this would be a popcorn movie, especially on second viewing, but it was a lot deeper than I remembered.

1) Sophie’s Choice (1982) – Wow.  This was a very powerful film.  I don’t know how I’d never seen it or even heard of it before this project, but I’m glad I did.  On the surface, it’s about a young writer and the friends he makes in the building he rooms in.  But as he develops relationships with these people and there pasts begin to unravel, we learn more about them, and see the fragility of human existence as we experience joy and sorrow with them.  Meryl Streep is incredible as Sophie, the Holocaust survivor with deep inner torment, as is Kevin Kline as the man who loves her. This movie is tragically, hauntingly beautiful.  It will leave you emotionally drained, but it is absolutely worth it.  This is now my favorite of the movies I’ve seen so far on this project.

Next month I’ll finally see The Jazz Singer, plus the following:

12 Angry Men (1957)

Frankenstein (1931)

Platoon (1986)

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

A Night at the Opera (1935)

Duck Soup (1933)

Throwdown 1 Results

Here are the notes from last night’s Throwdown Chicken Marsala.  It went pretty well, I had fun, and I certainly learned a lot.  The end result was ok but not great, so I don’t necessarily recommend following this recipe yet.  We’ll tweak things in the coming months and revise, so be patient.

So we started off getting our mise en place, which is French for get all your shit together before you start cooking.  Or something like that.  Here’s what it looked like.  All good stuff: real chicken, fresh mushrooms and parsley, a little cream and butter, and imported Marsala wine, which I’m just sure is better than the cheap cooking wine version.  After all, it costs more.

Here we are prepping the ingredients.  Thinly slice 8 oz. fresh mushrooms and 2 green onions, and mince up a handful (maybe 2 Tbsp) fresh parsley.

Then the chicken needed to be flattened to about ¼ inch thick.  We tried two ways: slicing longitudinally into two sections, or placing between plastic wrap and hammering with a meat mallet.  Both seemed serviceable, but neither did a great job.  Slicing was difficult and I kinda shredded one of the pieces.  Pounding is noisy and it never seems that the thick part gets fully flattened out.  This is something we need to look into for the future versions.

Next, the chicken was dredged in ½ cup of flour with about a ½ tsp of salt, a few grinds of black pepper, and ½ tsp of dry thyme.  This was way more flour than we needed for two chicken breasts, and I’m not sure we could taste the spices.  Probably a proportion thing.

The chicken got cooked in a big sauté pan (ours is 12” but it could probably have been done in a 10”).  A combo of 1Tbsp butter and 1 Tbsp olive oil were melted together and the floured chickens were cooked for about 2 to 3 minutes per side.  Then we pulled the chicken out, put them on a plate and put foil over to retain the heat.

The pan was looking a little dry, so we added maybe another Tbsp of olive oil and sautéed the mushrooms until they let off most of their liquid, and looked awesomely soft and buttery, probably about 5 minutes.  Added the onions, sautéed for a minute more, and deglazed the pan with ½ cup of the Marsala, making sure to scrape up any of the browned bits into the liquid.  Oh, sometime about now we started the pasta cooking.

Once the pan was deglazed, we added ¼ cup chicken broth and ¼ cup heavy cream in an attempt to thicken the sauce.  It looked something like this.

Unfortunately, cream alone didn’t really do much to thicken, even as we simmered for quite some time.  After about 5 to 7 minutes, we gave in and added ½ tsp of corn starch, dissolved in just a little chicken broth.  Once we poured that in, presto!  The sauce thickened instantly.  So the thickening process is another thing for us to look into.

We plated with perhaps a bit much pasta, placed the chicken on top, and poured the sauce over.  It looked like this, and smelled awesome!  I love the aroma of Marsala wine, and this one didn’t disappoint.

The taste wasn’t quite as stimulating, though.  The sauce didn’t quite have enough of the distinct Marsala flavor, and tasted like a generic cream sauce.  The chicken pieces that were thin enough ended up being pretty tasty, but might have needed a little more crispness to the outside.  All in all, it was a good dinner, and I’m sure it would have knocked my socks off a few years ago.  But it still needs work, which is fine, and actually kinda cool.  Now I get to work on revising my recipe, fine-tuning it until we finally reach the perfect Chicken Marsala.  It might take a while, but we’ll get there!

And with April almost over, it's time to look forward to next month's Throwdown.  What will it be?  I don't know yet, but I'm sure we'll come up with something.  Maybe you have an idea?

Throwdown! Chicken Marsala

Exciting news, blog fans.  This week marks the first installment of the much-anticipated yet little-actually-done-to-get-there Throwdown series right here on Zinkthink.  For those of you who don't recall this latest attempt to blatantly rip off genuine entertainment outlets, here's the concept.  Throwdown is a show on Food Network, where Bobby Flay, world-renowned chef and grillmeister, finds the best in the world (something)-maker, trains up on how to make the (something) and then challenges them in a surprise cook-off.  It can be some fun television, though honestly I haven't watched in a long time.

Now, there are a few small differences between Bobby Flay and me.  For example, I do not own a megalithic empire of successful restaurants.  Also, and perhaps more pertinently, I do not have the time, resources or skill to cook up different versions of the dish in the test kitchen before the challenge.  And for that matter I don't have someone to challenge.  In the end, my Throwdown ends up looking not at all like the TV show and basically consists of me researching a certain dish, comparing and/or combining multiple recipes to find the one that sounds the best, then making it.  The more I write this, the less it sounds like the show, but I've started off calling this segment Throwdown, and I'm going to stick to it!

There was much hemming and hawing about which dish to begin with.  The original plan called for doing some "classic" dishes, then I decided I wanted to do fish tacos, then things just kind of fizzled out.  But we had an opening for chicken in this week's meal plan, we've had moderate success with Chicken Marsala, and it is a pretty classic Italian dish.  And it's really tasty.  So, I have between now and Saturday evening to come up with how I want to make my Chicken Marsala, and the contest begins: Greg's food versus deciding it's so bad we need to go out for dinner.  Kidding.  Sort of.

I'm now in the midst of the research phase, but here's what I know so far.  Chicken Marsala is a pretty simple meal, consisting of a few steps.  1) Saute chicken in a pan.  2) Cook accompanying vegetables.  3) Create sauce.  4) Combine all previous steps and serve, usually over pasta.  But there are still so many variables!  Flour-coat the chicken or not?  (The recipes split here, but I've gotta say yes).  What vegetables to use?  Mushrooms are classic, but you can apparently add others for more veg content.  And perhaps most importantly, how to make the sauce?  If it falls flat, the whole dish is a disappointment.  I have a preference for a thicker sauce, but even still there are many ways to get there.  So there's lots of exciting research and planning still to come.

As of now, I have consulted the following sources: Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, America's Test Kitchen, Fine Cooking website, Epicurious.com, and Food Network's site.  I'll try to come up with some other ones too, in case I need them.  I'm leery of the sheer volume on the community sites like Allrecipes and Recipezaar, but I might give them a look if I have time.  And any reader suggestions are totally welcome.

Oh, and one last note.  If I can finagle Stacia into playing photographer, I might try to make the result blog post kind of a photo essay, with some pictures of the process as well as the final dish.  Keep in mind our camera is not spectacular, especially when it comes to food, but we'll see about giving it a try this time.

All kidding aside, this is a really cool and exciting challenge for me.  I like to cook, but most of the time I feel like I don't have enough depth of knowledge or experience to make things up on my own.  By doing the real research it takes to figure out what the common ingredients or steps are in successful versions of the dish, I feel like the final compared/combined recipe will more or less be mine, which makes it more or less the first real dish I've created.  It'll be so exciting to say, "let's have Chicken Marsala tonight.  Here's my recipe."  We'll see if we get to that point with the first try, but it's the goal.  Saturday night we should know for sure.  Right now, though, I've got more research to do.

Free Coffee!

Odds are no one will see this before the end of the day, but just in case...

Starbucks is giving away free brewed coffee all day today (April 15th) if you bring in a reusable travel mug instead of using a paper cup.  I'm not the hugest fan of Starbucks' coffee to begin with, but since it also helps the environment, I think I'll have to go pick up a cup.  Go get one yourself, and pass it on!  The more people who do this, the better response Starbucks gets to greening itself, the more initiatives that are good for the planet they'll start to implement.

So take someone out for coffee tonight!  Tell them it's on you.  :)

Happy Blogoversary!

Believe it or not, Zinkthink turns 1 today!  I know it feels like only yesterday that I was an angsty youngster griping about how work didn’t challenge his creative side, and all of a sudden, I’m an angsty dude, one year older, boring handfuls of people with frighteningly verbose accounts of what I’ve cooked recently.  In the interim, I vacillated about what I wanted this blog to be, debated giving the thing up entirely, set varying obtuse rules for myself, and finally got to a point where I’m pretty satisfied with the blog.  That’s not to say I won’t suddenly get the urge to change things up again – give things another year and we’ll see what this space looks like.

Now, don’t worry, I won’t dredge up my old posts in some contrived “best of” montage.  But since I’m an engineer by training, here are some fun numbers.  In one year, I’ve written 45 blog entries, which amounts to a startling average of 3.75 posts per month, almost one a week!  That might not be interesting to you, but it’s neat for me to see, especially whenever I get the bizarre urge to set goals of X posts/week.  Max was 7/month, min was 2 on a few occasions, which gives us a lovely standard deviation of 1.45, whatever that means.

Wow, that was boring, even for me.  Anyway, since this blogoversary is so momentous, it certainly warrants celebration.  And in the Zink household, we even have a cake to mark the occasion.  Well, okay, it’s really a cake I made on Saturday for no real reason, but there’s a lot of it left, so it can be used for the 1-year party too.  Plus it’s a homemade cake, which is exciting and also a bit strange.  For you see, as much as I love to cook (you knew that, right?) I have never been able to get excited about baking.  Any time Stacia tried to get me into it, I’d end up getting bored and she’d bake the whole thing herself.  This time, the tables have turned.  But why?

Inspiration, it turns out, can come from unusual places.  Back when I was home over Christmastime, my family and I made sandwiches for lunch.  Now, other people may be able to throw baloney on a slice of white bread and call it good (which I can, sometimes), but when I really get going, my sandwiches end up elaborate, huge, and I dare say delicious, with pretty much any ingredient you can think of on them.  At the time, I modestly made a comment about how great I was at making sandwiches, and that I should quit my job and open a deli.  My sister then opined that she should open a bakery next door to bake bread for my sandwiches, so she could always have fresh-baked bread around.  We laughed, tried to think of companion stores for the rest of the family, and eventually shrugged it off.

Then I get back to Des Moines, and suddenly everyone’s blogging about baking bread.  SJ posted a challah that she made, and Sarah, who I don’t even know but found on my wife’s blogroll has had a new baked bread all year!  With the thought of fresh bread already in my mind, and pictures of it now showing up all over the place, I absolutely wanted to bake something.  I didn’t have any time, but I sure wanted to.  Then Stacia gallantly offered to go to a bachelorette party with her friends on Saturday, leaving me a whole evening with nothing to do but bake.  Go time!

Better Homes and Gardens’ plaid cookbook seemed like a good place to start for a first-time baker.  I was initially tempted by the phenomenal looking banana bread jelly roll thingy, but it sounded pretty hard to make, so I opted for the carrot cake.  It had a “best loved” emblem or something by it, and hell, who doesn’t love carrot cake?  No yeast to kill, so I even stood a chance of succeeding.

Baking a carrot cake turned out to be surprisingly easy and a lot of fun.  It was, if you’ll pardon the pun, a piece of cake.  Even a total novice can measure flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and canola oil.  Shred up a few carrots, beat some eggs, and mix the whole mess together, and you’ve got the makings of a carrot cake.  Then it only took half an hour to bake, which was great since I started the project at 10 PM.  I got the cakes out, and they looked great!  Usually I find a way to burn the crap out of the bottom of the cake or bread, but these came out beautifully golden-orange.

Making the frosting was a bit more challenging, but only just.  Cream cheese frosting has but three ingredients: cream cheese, butter, and powdered sugar.  The trick is sifting powdered sugar into the mixture, a bit at a time, and beating it together with a mixer without somehow sending the sugar flying everywhere.  I was pretty careful, but you’re bound to lose some of it, and that’s fine.  I even ended up with a very baker-like patch of sugar on the front of my shirt.  In the end, I used up all the powdered sugar we had making that frosting, layered and coated the cake, and even threw some crushed pecans on top.  It wasn’t gorgeous, but it was done.

And, spoiler alert, it was delicious!  Granted, I followed a recipe that BHG has probably had for 50+ years, but it was my first time baking and I made a kick-ass cake!  Sweet, carroty, nice and fluffy but with a slight crispness to the edges.  I did manage to get almost every single mixing bowl dirty, made a fairly sizeable mess in the kitchen, but it was a lot more fun than I’d been giving baking credit for.  Now I just need to finish this cake at tonight’s celebration and decide what to bake next.  And that whole bakery-deli concept sounds pretty tempting now, too.  At least we can have carrot cake.

Finally, happy blogoversary to me.  I’ll eat a piece of carrot cake for you, dear reader, to celebrate.  :)

The Boy(s) of Summer - Part I

The blazing sun glides low on the horizon, slipping between the manmade spires dominating the nearby skyline.  In a few hours, the crescent moon will stand vigil in a cloudless sky, gazing down on the hopeful throngs.  The breeze that has rustled with impatient furor all day has now begun to calm; soon the flags slacken on their poles in the resulting stillness.  Each breath brings cool, crisp spring air into the lungs of the six thousand people huddled en masse, rapt attention on a field of grass and dirt glowing beneath the vast banks of light.

Breath that is now held, waiting, as a three inch sphere hurtles through the air, impacting a well-worn leather mitt with an audible smack.  The umpire sends forth an unintelligible shout, punching his fist into the air, and the crowd lets loose their pent air with groans of discontent.  Strike three looking.  Game over, and the hometown team has given up the home opener.  The fans slowly rise from their seats and head for the exits; their grumbles about the umpires’ accuracy following them into the parking lots.  But through the muted rancor, there is still a sense of happiness pervading throughout.  No one can be too unhappy with tonight’s loss: regardless of the outcome, it means one thing – baseball season is back.

April 8^th never used to be a special day for me.  Many years I likely let it pass without notice, more preoccupied with school or work.  But for the past two years, that date has been figuratively circled in Sharpie on my computer screen’s calendar.  The days leading up to it have been counted down.  And www.iowacubs.com became so familiar to my browser that a simple typed “I” would bring it up in the address bar.  This year was the first that I’ve been to a season opener, but the journey leading to it started many years ago.

I never participated in organized sports as a kid.  I certainly could have, but never really had the ambition.  And in a household where no one watched baseball on TV, it was easy to presume that it wouldn’t become an interest.  But that all began to change with a pack of baseball cards, a bus trip, a book and a cap.  Oh, and ice cream.  Definitely can’t forget the ice cream.

I think the baseball cards came first, since they are the fuzziest in my mind.  I had never owned baseball cards before, but in 1990, my Dad decided for some reason to buy me a pack of Topps cards.  I don’t know how I reacted at the time, but looking back, they were an amazing piece of what’s now a bygone era.  I recall distinctly that there was a piece of gum in the package, awful, stale gum that I nonetheless hoarded until the day I finally allowed myself to indulge in its crunchy-turning-to-sticky sweet goodness.  But that’s just the gum.  The cards were a revelation too and started me on many years of collecting.  I flipped through them, reading the stats and bios, carefully studying the team names and uniforms to pick a favorite (incidentally, it was the Phillies, but only the 1970-1992 version).  I still have those cards to this day.

Shortly thereafter, the tastiest part of the story began.  Elgin is a fairly lucky city to be within a ten minute’s drive of no less than five Dairy Queens, and on hot summer evenings it wasn’t uncommon for us to be treated to ice cream for dessert.  And there was really only one item that I ever wanted to order: the sundae inside the mini plastic batting helmet.  I’ve always been susceptible to “collect them all” ploys, and combining ice cream with collectible helmets was too brilliant of a move by Dairy Queen for me to resist.  Every time we went, I’d get the helmet sundae, and we eventually amassed a stack of nested helmets that must have been three feet high.  There was no real use for the helmets once you had them, but I sure did my best to obtain one of each kind.

All of this was happening without me having even attended a real baseball game.  But with the help of the Elgin Park District, my Dad, older brother and I were about to change all that.  The park district had arranged a bus trip to Comiskey Park to see the White Sox take on the Orioles.  My Dad, having grown up in Baltimore, was game for it, and I definitely wanted to go.  My brother has never really been a sports fan, but opted to come along for the new experience and the camaraderie.  Making it a true father-sons bonding experience, we signed up.  I can still picture us about to leave the house – my Dad in his Orioles cap, me in a Sox cap we’d bought, and my brother staying neutral with a plain black baseball cap.

The game experience was a lot to take in for a kid, so my memories of that day come in bits and pieces.  I can vaguely see our seats from what I think was the upper deck.  I am fairly sure that I had a hot dog during the game.  I distinctly remember holding a fluorescent colored notepad over the railing toward the players in a fruitless attempt to obtain autographs, while my father encouraged me along.  And my Dad tried to teach me how to fill in a scorecard (that I still have), but ended up doing pretty much the whole thing himself.  I’m not sure I understood the rules of the game, much less the shorthand method for recording it, but I thought it was just the neatest thing.  And at the I-Cubs opener the other night, Stacia and I finally did fill in our first scorecard ever.

So, with all that said, you might think I’ve been a baseball fan from that day on.  Well, it didn’t end up working quite that way, though each occurrence instilled in me a little more of the love of the game.  And besides, there’s still the matter of the book and the cap that I mentioned before, right?  Well, you’ll have to wait ‘til next time for them.  I’m not quite back on deck yet, but I’ll be up soon.

March Filmfest

I had a great “Spring Break” week and a fantastic Easter weekend, but before I can even consider writing about them, I need to get the latest movie update done.  Even though the reviews are coming out five days into April, I did get the movies watched in March.  In fact, I did even better than usual this time around, seeing six movies instead of the usual five.  Not sure if that will continue, but in the meantime, here are the current six, from least favorite up to most.

6) The Last Picture Show (1971) – Allegedly a coming-of-age story set in small-town Texas, and starring a very young Jeff Bridges, I thought this one would be great.  Boy, was I wrong.  Turns out, life in small-town Texas is just really depressing, and everybody mopes around all the time, only interrupting their ennui to sleep around with almost literally everyone in town.  Or so this movie would have you believe.  And even that might have been okay, if there was some semblance of a point to it all.  By the end of the movie, there has been no overarching message about human nature or interpersonal relationships: everyone started miserable, learned nothing and ended up miserable.  It was just majorly unappealing

5) A Place in the Sun (1951) – I usually love stories of moral ambiguity and conflict, but for some reason this one was kind of uninteresting.  It’s a story of a regular guy who finds himself “entangled with two women” as Wikipedia puts it – one the pretty, rich Elizabeth Taylor, and the other an average girl from his work.  Things start to get very complicated, leading up to a rather unusual ending.  But I didn’t like it much, for two reasons.  One, the viewer sees everything, even about the mystery aspect of the film, so there’s no intrigue at all.  And two, the protagonist comes off as such a lecherous creep that there’s no way you can identify with him at all or feel bad when things go wrong.  You just think, well, you did this to yourself, so be it.  For a similar style story, I much prefer The Postman Always Rings Twice.   

4) My Fair Lady (1964) – The first time we started this one, we got about half an hour in and were so put-off by Audrey Hepburn’s screechy cockney accent that we just couldn’t go any further.  The second run went better, as the movie developed some steam as it went, but it just wasn’t a favorite of mine.  You probably know the story: Henry Higgins bets he can turn an ordinary flower seller into a proper lady, and of course things all go exactly as planned…  There were lots of fairly cute parts, a few laughs and some catchy songs.  It was pretty neat to learn that a lot of the songs my Mom sang around the house when we were kids were from this movie.  I did think the pacing was a little off; at 171 minutes, I thought the story could have been told more concisely.  Oh, and the ending I totally thought should have gone the other way.  That was a bummer.

3) The French Connection (1971) – Sigh.  Yet again I find myself thwarted by idiots who use library DVDs as coasters.  I tried two separate libraries for this movie, and each one failed around the halfway point of the film.  So it gets middle-of-the-road marks, though the part I did see was pretty average so it might deserve lower.  It’s a typical gritty cop movie, a la Dirty Harry, this one centered around a big drug shipment and featuring two cops instead of one.  You’ve got stakeouts, roughing up of the informants, chases – all the usual ingredients.  Gene Hackman works well as the loose cannon partner, but I had a harder time seeing Roy Scheider as the brooding cop.  Apparently that was kinda his thing at the time, but I’m more used to later characters from Jaws and SeaQuest, so it was weird to see him acting like a tough guy.  On the whole, this movie was generic enough that I probably won’t seek it out to watch the end.

2) Goodfellas (1990) – I’m no huge fan of mafia movies, but this one is pretty enjoyable.  It was also one of the first “grown up” movies I got to watch as a kid/teen, so I’ll always be a bit fond of it.  Ray Liotta, in probably the performance of his career, plays an Irish-American quickly working his way up in the New York mob.  Naturally, there is a lot of violence and gore, but there are actually lots of funny bits centered around his interaction with Joe Pesci’s character.  However, I think the best part of the movie is the treatment of how things start to unravel as different toes get stepped on and loyalties are betrayed.  It seems Martin Scorsesi is good at showing a person’s rise to the top, as well as the fall from it, and this movie just about nails it.  It’s pretty long, but it’s a good ride.

1) The Apartment (1960) – Hands down, my favorite from the movie project so far.  Ostensibly a comedy, it’s about a lonely office worker who allows his married managers the use of his apartment for their affairs.  Not wanting to cause conflict, he juggles their schedules without complaint until their world starts to collide with his and the girl he pines after.  There are a lot of great moments, comedy-wise, but this movie does start to get heavier pretty quickly.  The lighthearted moments are balanced expertly with the crushingly gutting ones, all expressed brilliantly by Jack Lemmon.  Lemmon is remembered for comedy, but he emotes the highs and lows in this film as well as any reputed “serious” actor.  The movie is charmingly sweet and hopelessly romantic, with abundant witty lines and laugh-out-loud moments.  I love this movie.

Next month:

Sophie’s Choice (1982)

The Jazz Singer (1927)

Swing Time (1936)

Patton (1970)

The Sixth Sense (1999)

And maybe Easy Rider (1969)