Pressure Cooker

I went to see Pressure Cooker on the advice of Denveater, who described it as Rocky with toques. It was the third movie I saw at the Starz Denver Film Festival.

That seems like a pretty accurate description to me, though I haven’t seen Rocky since it originally came out: my memory is a little hazy. Certainly, all the high school students in this movie had something to overcome, even if, in the case of the football player cum chef, it was only his reputation.

This being a movie about a high-class cooking competition, they also had to overcome their ghetto tastebuds, as their hard-driving teacher put it.

She is the kind of person I would have run from screaming when I was younger, but she managed to motivate those she loved. She’s a terror and a lover—if you get on her good side. And she does not settle—ever.

What surprised me about this documentary was the relatively small amount of cooking in it. I expected all cooking, all the time, but most of the movie was taken up with stories about the contestants’ families and other aspects of their lives. The cooking competitions themselves functioned like punctuation.

My favorite character was Fatoumata, a girl from Africa who was basically a slave to her father and her stepmother. She did all the cooking and cleaning for them, but she was so earnest in her appreciation of the opportunities this high school in Philadelphia offered her. And in the end, she won a scholarship through the cooking competition, won her freedom by attending Monroe College and being “happily on her own.”

At the end we met one of the directors, Jennifer Grausman, as we have with every movie we’ve seen at the Starz Denver Film Festival. And when asked how she came across these people, she said her dad runs a nonprofit program called the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program, which distributes scholarships to at-risk high school students who train in the culinary arts.

***

Todd and I went to the Closing Night show, which was Last Chance Harvey. Here’s my review: if you are completely, absolutely addicted to Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, go see that movie. Otherwise, don’t bother.

The Last Reel party was fun, but Bill Pullman left halfway through the movie. That’s the closest I ever got to a celebrity in my life!

Go forth and eat, everyone! Happy Thanksgiving.

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Lord God Bird
Starz Denver Film Festival

Hell, it wasn’t just grown men crying at the thought of seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker. I cried too, for all the times that some piece of land where I used to wander had been developed, for the fact that I’ll never see a flock of passenger pigeons darkening the sky.

And please understand, the men crying in these movies are hunters, backwoods types, comfortable traveling through swamps where they could float past a crocodile in their canoe. They know the area so well they “have the trees named.” (I think I saw one female researcher in this movie.)

Butler must like tough guys—his first movie was Pumping Iron, which made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star. His next movie will be about Bengal tigers in the Sundarbans (India), which he says are quickly going extinct. He hopes Lord God Bird will draw attention to the problems of extinction.

This movie is thick with the politics of ornithology. Who’d have thought there was such a thing? But in the mid-twentieth century, saying you’d seen an ivory-billed woodpecker was death to your career.

It opens with John Dennis, Jr., son of a man who said he saw the ivory-bill in the 1960s and was mocked for it. Everyone thought it had gone extinct in the 1940s.

John Dennis, Sr., became obsessed with proving himself and kept going to the Big Thicket in Texas year after year. One year he made a recording of the call, which sounds like a cartoon character saying meep, meep, and sent it off to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to compare to their 1944 recording. They dithered around and then eventually implied he’d somehow made a copy of the 1944 recording of the bird’s call.

To his son, the search for the ivory-bill is the “search for a lost part of American heritage” and also a chance for him to vindicate his late father.

Even if you’re not a birder or would shoot a woodpecker as soon as look at it, go see this movie for the landscapes and their light. Most Americans won’t get a chance—or wouldn’t be caught dead—floating through cypress swamps, but they do make for great armchair traveling. The cinematography is stunning.

There’s so much more I could say about this movie. I could tell you about all the reported sightings, about the lone female ivory-bill calling and calling with no answer, about the men crawling up trees and vacuuming debris out of holes in the hopes of finding a feather, about the Singer Tract and the airport in the Florida panhandle that will destroy habitat (in which ivory-bills might live), about the trays and trays of dead ivory-bills shot for museum collections in the nineteenth century.

But I’ll leave you with the final image of the movie: a big man covered in shredded camouflage, sitting at the base of a huge cypress, his ivory-bill decoy moving back and forth above him, calling. He sits there, and he listens.

Best quote from a movie so far
“Get on the pecker bench.” (Florida)

Bird continuity
Count Basie’s band used to play at Birdland.

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Count Basie: Then as Now, Count’s the King
Starz Denver Film Festival
Directed by Gary Keys

I like to see documentaries at the Starz Denver Film Festival because they don’t show at nearby theaters. We truly are doubly blessed in the Denver-Boulder area: we have the film festival, and when that’s over, we can go to Video Station, which has everything, including a large collection of documentaries.

The first and last thing I noticed about this Count Basie movie was how cool the director, Gary Keys, was. His first film played the Denver Film Festival in the 1980s. Before that, he was an art director at MOMA and concert promoter, so that’s how he met all these jazz types. He knew Sinatra, Basie, Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis.

He produced the first pop concert at Lincoln Center (the Supremes) and sold them as the “modern-day Andrews Sisters.” The crowd at Lincoln Center was so hyped up at the end of the show that staff wanted to call the police, but Keys said, “No, no,” and had the Supremes come back out and sing the line, “Stop, in the name of love!” I wondered if he was having us on.

The first thing I noticed about Basie himself in the movie was his lovely eyes. I would call them “Egyptian eyes.” I’ll bet he had the ladies coming and going.

The movie spent most of its time listening to members of Count Basie’s band, sitting around a table, reminiscing. And one of them—speaking of ladies coming and going—recalled a night soon after his wedding, when his new wife was in the audience and his mistress started following her around. He got so mad he ran off the stage and chased the mistress out of the theater and still managed to make it back for the end of the song.

No word on whether he kept the old mistress or got a new one.

They talked about Lester Young, how he did everything different—how he famously held his tenor saxophone up sideways—”he was from somewhere else,” one of them said.

I went to this movie to listen to the music, and I wasn’t disappointed. When the director said, “Count Basie made you want to dance,” he was so right. There was a lot of great music, including vocals by Billie Holiday and Joe Williams and Ella Fitzgerald (at the very end), but I did wish Keys would have included more entire songs.

My husband didn’t like it as much as I did. He wanted more about Basie himself. To be honest, I got the impression that the movie might not be quite finished, that its makers were using the film festival as a way to gauge audience reaction. One of the questions on the survey form was about the title, which I disliked, and the television footage shown in the film was just awful (Todd’s suggestion was “video tiling”).

Amazing and Hilarious
Two passages from the movie in which Jerry Lewis pantomimes Basie songs. You can see them in “The Errand Boy” and “Jerry Lewis Does the Dishes” on YouTube.

Another Reason to See Blazing Saddles Again
Basie’s band plays in the middle of the desert.

A Memorable Gesture
To get his huge band to go all out, Basie would raise his index finger.

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