Black Coal, Thin Ice is a Chinese film noir. The noir is mostly in the surroundings: the frozen ground, the sickly streetlights, run-down shops, derelict housing. People in this Northern city are cold, red-nosed, folded back on themselves. The landscape is bleak, covered in dirty snow and hard-baked ice. On slightly warmer days, there is thawed mud and the swarm-like soot of the coal-fueled power plants hovering in the grey sky. This is not a happy place.
If the noir is the backdrop, then by contrast, the people might seem less mean, right? Of course this is a ploy to make us care about them a little more. But hang on – someone very twisted is dismembering men and throwing the limbs onto lorries that bring the black coal to the power plants. Two police officers and a few unlikely suspects lose their lives. Black Coal feels like the Dardenne brothers lost a bet and had to go film a James Ellroy screenplay in the Chinese province of their choice.
Soon enough, another suspect drifts into focus, but he dies fleeing from the cops, taking every chance of finding out motive with him. The cops realize that the dead men were the husband and subsequent boyfriends of a woman who is working at a dry-cleaner’s. She is petite, brittle, fragile. There is no way she could have dismembered those guys, is there?
The guy who tries to figure out things is no longer a cop, but a security man, divorced, awkward with women, and a drunk. His motorcycle is stolen in front of his eyes. People eat, drink, dance and fuck in cheerless, soulless places. They steal from one another, they shout, kick and stumble from one day towards the next. There is always noise: the rumbling streetcar, car alarms, fighting neighbors, washing machines, conveyor belts, trucks, brothels with hysterical customers, and a creaky, untrustworthy merry-go-round. Footsteps. Gunshots.
And in the middle of this, there is that beautiful scene at the ice-rink that involves wonderful magic and subtle courtship. The final scene features daylight fireworks, which is one of the most fitting endings I’ve seen in a long time. Daylight fireworks is also the apt original title for the movie. Black Coal, Thin Ice doesn’t tell you an easy story, but there is a kind of stubborn hope in there, and the film knows where it wants to go underneath its rough-hewn surface.
I do like me a good revenge thriller – although I am also a bit of a moralist when it comes to the genre. The kind of film that takes revenge as a justification for two hours of Liam Neeson (or any other righteously growling alpha male) killing bad guys I can very much do without. If a film questions both the validity and the success rate of your average revenge spree, however, then give me more of that. Even as seemingly straight a revenge flick as Kill Bill complicates its heroine’s “roaring rampage of revenge” in a number of ways: by suggesting that vengeance may be self-perpetuating, by depicting the avenger as similarly guilty as those she wreaks vengeance on, by humanising some of the people at the receiving end of the Bride’s katana. Memento, The Limey, Inglourious Basterds, Oldboy (and in fact Chan-wook Park’s entire revenge trilogy): all of these show how characters may come to see revenge as their best course of action, but they equally suggest that vengeance has a way of coming back to bite you in the behind.
Blue Ruin may just be the most interesting revenge tale in years, and that’s in no small part due to its main character: Dwight, played by Macon Blair, is miles away from a Beatrix Kiddo or Charles Bronson in Death Wish, the granddaddy of revenge flick protagonists. With his scraggly beard and his wide eyes, he weirdly looks like the scruffiest, most frightened rabbit. Knives, guns and other stabbing or shooting utensils don’t look at home in his hands. And this drives Blue Ruin most of all: that Dwight may just be so much less capable at administering revenge than the people he’s avenging himself on. Already his murder of the man he presumes to have killed his parents is a messy act, and things don’t get any less messy along the way.
Does it matter that Dwight’s first victim turns out to be innocent of the crime he’s been convicted of? Blue Ruin presents his entire family as guilty in one way or another, and as entirely too ready to take up arms and reciprocate. Yet Dwight’s entire crusade seems misguided from the first: these are not the actions of a stable man, and definitely not those of a hero. When his actions endanger his sister and her family, he goes to warn her, after having gone off the reservation for years, and she tells him in a mixture of sadness and disappointment: “I’d forgive you if you were crazy, but you’re not. You’re weak.”
It’s this sentence that resonates most with me. For a scruffy bunny of a man, Dwight proves helpless in some moments, surprisingly resourceful and determined in others – but is he weak? The code of traditional revenge thrillers is that vengeance is that someone becomes the instrument of justice when society fails to do so. They take this task onto themselves because no one else is up to it. Blue Ruin turns this onto its head: Dwight isn’t making anything better, not for himself and most definitely not for his sister. The man that did kill Dwight’s parents is long dead, and Dwight’s first victim simply took the fall for his cancer-ridden father. He continues his spree because he believes his sister may be at risk – entirely due to his actions – but the longer he goes on, the harder it becomes not to see this as an extended, roundabout suicide-by-irate-criminal-family.
Blue Ruin isn’t perfect. Some of it feels a little too derivative – there are distinct overtones of the Coens’ Blood Simple – and while it does what it does very well, I did wish it would try to do more. It’s a small film by design, and I’m fine with that, but seeing how well writer-director Jeremy Saulnier handled his material I couldn’t help wishing that he’ll be more ambitious in his next project. Nevertheless, will stay with me, mostly for Macon Blair’s pained, frightened eyes – the eyes of a man who just about suspects that he’s in way over his head and that there’s no way this will end well for anyone involved.
It’s the darnedest thing with What We Do In The Shadows: coming out of the movie theatre, I thought I had seen an OK comedy, and now, I still think about it with a smile. I guess I like it better than I wanted to admit.
What We Do… tells about the problems and pastimes of four vampires from all over the world and from different historic eras who now live together in an old Wellington house. Viago is from late Renaissance and has come to New Zealand for love; some nights, you can see him staring at a window of a retirement home in which his immortal beloved, now a 96 year-old woman, is watching TV. He doesn’t mind the age gap – he’s four times older than she is.
There’s Vladislav from the early Middle Ages, and really rather violent when he finds out that modern people no longer succumb to his powers of suggestion and hypnosis. When people catch him staring through the window into their living-room, they invite him in. He is mortally afraid of the Beast, who is not who you think it might be. The youngest member is Deacon, a nazi vampire, who actually boasts about his involvement in highly unethical medical experiments. He thinks he is a great erotic dancer, but… erm, no, he isn’t. The oldest inhabitant is Petyr, who is over 8’000 years old. The others are in awe of him and don’t dare complain when he doesn’t do the dishes.
I guess I liked the jokes and funny situations as much as anyone, but I sometimes need some kind of minimal story to go along with. There are a few scenes where the vampires have to get along with a bunch of werewolves who try to work on their bad behavior: “Remember your manners, guys: werewolves, not swearwolves.” On the whole, the movie consists of a 86-minute parade of vampire jokes, most of them funny. I liked the two young girl vampires who have made it their mission to kill every pedophile they can find. What We Do… is a comedy on the surface, but there is dark stuff lurking underneath.
There is a new addition to their group by accident: Nick, who goes around telling people he starred in Twilight, and nobody believes him because, well, he looks nothing like Robert Pattinson. Perhaps the biggest joke of them all is not in the movie, but in the production notes: Some of the scenes were shot at the place where they shot some of the Lord of the Rings stuff – it’s impossible to tell since all the scenes take place during nighttime.
There is a human friend, Stu, who tells the group about modern communication. When Deacon receives his first ever text message, it’s from Vladislav: “There’s a crucifix behind you.” Poor Deacon almost jumps out of his skin. Viago, before biting his virgins, makes them dinner and plays a song on his guitar: “They should at least feel good and have fun before I kill them.” And so on. If you need a really strong story in a movie, look elsewhere. If not, you are in for a really funny comedy.
The Swedish movie Force Majeure, or Turist, as it is called here in Switzerland, is a mediocre affair, but you can almost see the very good movie it has entrapped in itself. A Swedish family is on a skiing holiday in a French resort when they are sprinkled over by the fallout clouds of a controlled avalanche. While Ebba, the mother, instinctively stays to protect the two kids, Tomas, the father, runs away.
Ebba is devastated that her husband would abandon his family in a dangerous situation, while Tomas claims he did not flee the scene. Their marriage has its first cracks, and the two kids are afraid their parents might be getting a divorce. Ebba and Tomas only very eventually broach the subject because, well, sometimes the ones closest to you cannot tell you the truth because a) they don’t want to hurt you, and b) they will have to live with the consequences their telling might bring.
This is all very well handled, but there are scenes that are only loosely connected to that main story. There is a bit where Ebba is talking to a woman who is married while she and her hubby keep seeing other people. That scene is there because Ebba now knows that her husband is much less reliable than she would have guessed, and she is trying to find out if other people have to deal with such weakness, too. But instead of talking to that woman with her strong sense of self, Ebba could have talked to the woman’s boyfriend who is there with her at the hotel. What is it like to be the boyfriend of a married, strong-willed woman? Do you consider yourself a weak man beside a strong woman, or do you have to be just as strong to keep up? We get much less from Ebba in that scene than we should – we merely learn that she could not live in an open relationship. But we already guessed that.
There are good things in Turist, too. You might remember Kristofer Hivju from Game of Thrones because of his flaming red hair and beard and intense eyes; here, he plays Mats, the soft-spoken friend who has brought his 20-year-old girlfriend to the resort and feels he has to negotiate between Ebba and Tomas because, being divorced, he is an expert on marriage and relationships. The scenes between him and his girlfriend are very funny without breaking the ominous atmosphere of the movie’s main story. Ebba and Tomas always start their fights in the corridor where everybody can hear them, instead of fighting in their apartment in front of the kids. Another good thing are the expository scenes with the avalanche cannons and snowplows. And it is a very bold choice to play Vivaldi’s Summer over scenes of dense snow.
The movie ends twice. Ebba goes missing in dense fog, and Tomas finds her, his masculinity half-way restored. Then the bus on the way home almost crashes on the serpentine mountain road, and they continue their journey on foot. Both scenes would have been good endings. To leave them both in there is to add unnecessary running time. Drop the ending in the fog, and drop the conversation between Ebba and the other woman, and you have a better movie.
Over the last few years we’ve been watching the Harry Potter movies with a friend who lives abroad; every time she’s been over, we watched another one or two of the films, and over the holidays we saw the two parts of Deathly Hallows, in my case for the third or fourth time. As far as I’m aware, the first part fared less well with critics and audiences than the second one, and it’s clear why: it’s definitely the less crowd-pleasing film of the two. Its plot meanders, what big setpieces there are don’t feel as cathartic as the showdown against Voldemort, and a lot of the movie seems to be dedicated to Harry, Hermione and, with some interruptions, Ron hiking, camping and generally looking wet, cold and miserable.
Nonetheless, rewatching the two films, I found myself clearly preferring the first one. Deathly Hallows Part 2 largely works because it’s the end of a journey, but it feels (and felt even when I first watched it) perfunctory to some extent. We need to resolve the different plot strands, we need to bring closure to Snape’s story, we need to dispose of the remaining horcruxes and of Voldemort himself – but little of this feels like it tells us anything about the characters. We know that Harry is brave, Hermione is smart and Ron is, well, Ron, and we also know that the visual effects wizards are great at doing what they do, as are the designers, artists and everyone else responsible for the way the film looks and sounds. After a while, though, setpieces become interchangeable, and while the escape from a fiery Room of Requirement is exciting in the moment, it’s also strangely bland. It’s a Harry Potter movie, of course there would be some chase or fight involving pixel magic, derring do and last-minute escapes. It’s fan service to some extent, but fan service isn’t automatically bad.
However, there are moments in Deathly Hallows Part 1 that are decidedly different, that are quiet and unexpected, that have nothing to do with crowd-pleasing 3D whooshery. The film already starts with some of these scenes, filled with foreboding and sadness, as Hermione for instance wipes herself from her parents’ memories so they’d be safe. It’s a largely wordless scene, not of teary farewells but of loss and poignant resolve. Another scene I found surprising and delighting was the animated Tale of the Three Brothers; and later, as Ron is temporarily off and Harry and Hermione are alone, Nick Cave’s “O Children” plays on the radio, and Harry engages his friend of many years in a clumsy, sweet dance. It doesn’t further the plot, and it doesn’t get the pulse racing with excitement and danger – but it surprised and enchanted this muggle here more than all of the final part of the final part of Harry Potter.
Obviously the Potteriad wouldn’t have worked, or at least been as successful, if all it consisted of were these quiet, unexpected, intimate moments (though it would be intriguing to see someone try their hand at creating the Before Sunrise of the wizarding world) – but for me it highlights both the shortcomings and the potential of big franchises. Many of the fans love the Harry Potter films for the magic and the world, the quidditch matches and firebreathing dragons and wizards’ duels, so obviously these are things by which later instalments are judged. We want what we know, what is comfortable, because that’s how we came to love the franchise. These expectations are reasonable, but they’re also a trap, keeping a franchise frozen like an insect in amber. It’s similar with something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where we get some variation between the different strands – Iron Man isn’t the same as Captain America, whose pulpy WW2 first instalment and more sombre second film differ from Thor‘s sci-fi/mythology mashup – but we know what we’ll get, namely some good action setpieces, some snarky humour and a band of heroic characters that need to put their rivalries and disagreement aside and come together as a family to defeat some colourful yet dull villain – or, if you’re lucky, Tom Hiddleston.
Franchises are the storytelling equivalent of comfort food: when you want a plate of spaghetti, you don’t want it to surprise you with chopped coriander or shiitake mushrooms or a honey-aceto balsamico reduction with shavings of shock-frosted lamb’s kidney. The line between comfort food and tinned spaghetti is thin, though, and there’s always a risk of that exciting quidditch match or that bit where the Hulk goes smash getting stale, to the extent where you hardly know which particular instalment you’re watching at the time. Franchises thrive on constancy, on giving fans what they want, but they can’t be that and that only if they want to be alive and vibrant. They need scenes like Harry and Hermione’s awkward dance to Nick Cave, just like they need Trevor “I am (not) the Mandarin” Slattery. They need to be willing to withhold the simple, immediate gratification of More Of The Same” at times if they want to be good and not just safe. And there’s potential in exactly this: fans know what to expect, so you can surprise them by playing with the format. The most memorable episodes in TV series (which tend to be prone to becoming formulaic) are often the ones that, once the format has been established, play with the formula: Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s “The Body”or “Once More With Feeling”, House M.D.‘s “Three Stories”, M*A*S*H‘s “The Interview”. It’s because people know the formula that they see how it’s played with, and if it works, it can create some of the most memorable moments a franchise can afford.
Doing that with an entire film is risky: people who go and watch a Harry Potter movie want to see an adventure for the whole family, with magic and special effects setpieces. Iron Man fans want an action comedy with explosions, flying metal suits and Robert Downey Jr. doing what he does so well. But the safety net of the franchise shouldn’t become a prison. By all means, establish a formula, make us fall in love with the flying brooms, the comic-book villainy, the TIE Fighters and Star Destroyers and light sabres. But use those things as a starting point. Don’t just give us what we already know we want: surprise us and win our hearts again by whisking us into a clumsy, earnest dance to the strains of “O Children”. Because being a franchise doesn’t mean we want to watch the same movie over and over again, forever stuck on repeat.
My partner-in-blog has written about his year in pictures, so I’ll end 2014 with three videos: two about the main thing that keeps us going here at Château Goofybeast, i.e. film, and one bonus one that barely qualifies as a video, but damn, if the music ain’t pretty. Here’s wishing each and every one of you a great 2015, with lots more films, books, comics, games and whatever your eyes, ears and hearts may desire!
It’s been a year of good series. The palatable horror of two seasons of Hannibal, which is much, much more than a retreading of the Thomas Harris books. The creepiness of Les Revenants, an elaborate French ghost story. The film-noir style and jarring relationship between the two cops in True Detective. The first season of The Fall with its head-to-head between a cop and a serial murderer. The first season of Utopia in which five comic-book fans try to decipher their favourite graphic novel. (The Fall and Utopia clearly turn for the worse in their second seasons.) Happy Valley. I also found good things in Broadchurch, The Leftovers, and Top of the Lake.
Movie-wise, it was a year of diminished returns, but I would like to point out The SaltoftheEarth, Nightcrawler, EverydayRebellion, and Blue Ruin. I’ve written elsewhere about Ida and Locke, but the annual movie cake must go to the excellence of Under the Skin. I’ve praised Jonathan Glazer’s movies elsewhere, but I’ve seen this one first drunk, then sober, and it works both ways. Some scenes are so strong that they have become part of my movie-going DNA.
In some respects, Under the Skin is a horror movie, but there is really only one moment where you might jump out of your seat. At its core, it’s a story about… well, an alien visiting Earth, for whatever reason or to whatever end. She (she?) is very busy trying to get to know the human race in a lonely, isolated Scotland. She lures males into a pool of black quicksand, and since she looks like Scarlett Johansson, there are several willing victims. She’s not evil, but seems to imitate what she thinks is female human behavior. To her surprise, she discovers in herself a kind of empathy, until she no longer has the upper hand.
Since this is the point where one chapter ends, I would like to thank Matt K. for Les Revenants, and Patrick M. for Southland. Another chapter will begin soon: I am looking forward to Inherent Vice and Birdman. Countless surprises await in the rectangular dark. We’ll see.
I found it practically impossible to watch A Most Wanted Man without constantly being aware that the man I was watching on the screen was dead and this was his last film. Philip Seymour Hoffman was one of Hollywood’s most unlikely stars and often one of the best things about the films he was in; this swansong, based on a John Le Carré novel, may not be one of the ones Hoffman will be most remembered for, but it is definitely a worthy final addition to his filmography.
As with many of the films based on Le Carré’s works, A Most Wanted Man is not so much a spy thriller as a drama, with a distinct tendency towards tragedy. Hoffman plays a jaded German espionage operative keeping an eye on the Muslim community in Hamburg, and when a former Chechen radical enters his hunting grounds illegally he hopes to use him as an asset in his investigation of a Muslim philanthropist with possible ties to Al Qaeda. While the film doesn’t present us with as much of a quagmire of connections, motives and plots as a successful other recent Le Carré adaptation did – and Hoffman’s operative is a descendant in spirit of George Smiley – it is about similar themes. Years ago the Swiss magazine Du published an issue on John Le Carré titled “All Sorts of Betrayal”, and apparently this is still what the author keeps returning to. All of these betrayals, whether of friends, lovers, or of organisations and countries, are finally private at heart, and A Most Wanted Man sees its main character trying to weigh betrayals, to tempt, bully and cajole others to violate trust to prevent a bigger, more final betrayal.
Except, of course, in Le Carré’s world there is no such thing as a lesser evil, and most definitely not one that can be trusted to end up being lesser. Even more, Hoffman’s body language, the way he looks at people and practices a studied cynicism, all these make it clear that A Most Wanted Man will not end happily for anyone. And this fatalism is in part why this is a good but not a great film: only in rare moments is there the urgency that comes from hoping, and even believing, that this may not end in tears. There is a grain of… faith in something other than jaded pragmatism, perhaps? Belief that even in espionage people, organisations and countries can still hold on to vestiges of a soul? And this belief keeps the main character going, but the tone of the film is as hangdog as Hoffman himself, though without his occasional sparks of hope and of righteous anger. As an audience, though, it’s difficult not to know better: this will end badly, so why commit emotionally? If anything, the film prompts us to be even more jaded than its protagonist, and this works against A Most Wanted Man.
As may the real-life circumstances: Hoffman’s death hanging over the film may make it more poignant, but this poignancy is not in sync with the film. I was prompted to sadness, though not by Le Carré’s story so much as by knowing that this is the last time we’re seeing a lead performance by an actor gone too soon. A Most Wanted Man is a good film, it’s crafted beautifully, its performances are consistently strong, but its greatest tragedy may be that it serves most as a reminder of a different tragedy that has nothing to do with the film itself. Perhaps it will be easier to see it for itself in five to ten years, when it no longer feels quite as much like a obituary.
Interstellar pushed many of the right buttons for me, primarily the big one labelled “Sense of cosmic wonder”. I was the kid who had a poster of the solar system on his bedroom wall for an embarrassingly long time; I loved anything to do with space, but I reserved a special love for space exploration, especially of the supposedly authentic kind. Sure, I wanted to fly an X-Wing, but that thought never felt as wondrous as that of NASA journeys, of the Apollo missions or the Space Shuttle. Wormholes and black holes? Accretion disks? Count me in.
That sense of wonder was definitely there when I watched Interstellar, and the film captures it well. What it captures less well, though, is human emotion – which is a problem, since for all its space age imagery the film is essentially about sentiment much more than it is about physics. It’s not the emotions themselves that are the problem; thematically, Interstellar uses its premise and setting to tell a very human story. The problem is that the Nolans are much better at telling a different kind of story – one that is conceptual, that tends to be about puzzles. At their best, the Nolan-directed and -penned films are interested in the feelings of their characters, but they don’t focus on them head on. Their protagonists are often emotionally repressed, in denial or simply unable to access or express their feelings, and the stories tend to derive poignancy from this inability. Interstellar, though, wears its heart on its sleeve. Its characters talk about their emotions, they cry quickly and freely – and while the actors are more than capable, they can’t overcome that the words they’ve been given are often clumsy, overly explicit, explaining things too much. The worst scene in this respect has a teary-eyed Anne Hathaway trying to impress on her fellow astronauts that love is a force transcending space and time. Done differently, written better and allowing for some ambiguity, this could work, but in the film it feels like a NASA-themed Hallmark card. Those moments very much suggest that when it comes to the Nolans’ dialogue, quite literally, the less said, the better.
It is this tendency to overexplain, to make things too literal, that hobbles some of Interstellar‘s central scenes as much as its clumsy handling of emotion. Late in the film, the story bends causality back on itself in a classically sci-fi way, but where Christopher Nolan often finds striking images for settings and situations, here they turn faintly ludicrous, and they fire rockets full throttle into silliness the more the protagonists explain what is happening. All fiction, including speculative fiction, engages in some narrative handwaving, leaving gaps with respect to what is happening or how precisely it is happening, because the exact mechanics are irrelevant to what the story is about. Interstellar, however, tangles itself up in knots by trying to fill in the blanks, when it should well have left alone. Trying to elaborate on what is happening, the expository dialogue is hamfistedly literal, drawing attention to what is arguably least important, and raising questions about its feasibility that shouldn’t come up in the first place. (One can only imagine a Nolan-penned 2001: A Space Odyssey, giving the Monolith a -logue to explain to Dave Bowman what the last 20 minutes meant.)
When I first saw the Interstellar trailer, I was intrigued, but I was equally worried that this would be Nolan’s Contact, an intriguing sci-fi tale that takes a turn for the sentimental: daddy issues in space. It isn’t quite that bad, and there’s a lot to like about the film. It is ambitious, it is often beautiful, and Matthew McConaughey has vastly improved as an actor since the giddy days of 1997. Interstellar is a compelling illustration of both the strengths and the limitations of Nolan’s filmmaking, though, and it is frustrating in how it could have been a better, more subtle and more convincing film. This isn’t a complaint along the lines of “Waiter, there’s some sentiment in my sci-fi soup!” I don’t think that hard sci-fi, or any sci-fi, needs to lose the human element. What it does need, though, is a human element that’s done with the same skill as the visual effects. Interstellar excels at showing us the surfaces of alien worlds, but its telescope is flawed when pointed at the human heart.
The Lunchbox starts with Ila, a Mumbai housewife and mother, cooking food and packing it in a metallic lunchbox that consists of stackable bowls. That lunchbox gets delivered across Mumbai to a grumpy, lonely office worker. He is mesmerized by the food.
If you want, you can look at The Lunchbox as a modern-day fairy tale. Ila wants to rekindle her failing marriage by enchanting her careless husband with outstanding food. We realize only eventually that Saajan, the grumpy office worker, is a complete stranger to her. The Mumbai lunch distribution industry has made a mistake. “Impossible!”, says the man who delivers Ila’s lunchbox. “The people from Harvard have confirmed that our system is faultless!”
She cooks lunch the next day, adding a little note of apology to the bowl with the naan. He writes back, complaining about the salt. A correspondence starts, in which Ila can tell about her loveless life, and Saajan, to his own surprise, tells Ila about his deceased wife. Although they have never met, they feel less lonely that way. The comfort of strangers is the best thing in both their lives right now.
A lesser movie would make them fall in love with each other. Not this film, although Ila’s food seems to have such power. Eventually, Mumbai and its overcrowded public transport system play a part. Saajan is assigned a successor, but is not keen on training the man. This movie manages to balance light comedy with darker undertones. I liked the unseen upstairs neighbor, an older woman who shouts recipe suggestions down into Ila’s kitchen. I also liked the small moments of coincidence, for instance the story about the ceiling fans.
The two main leads are played by Irrfan Khan and Nimrat Kaur, who left their impressions at this year’s Sundance festival. The director, Ritesh Batra, grew up in Mumbay and knows a lot about food and the lunchbox delivery system. This movie is his debut and is the result of a documentary he didn’t finish in favor of this feature. Towards the end, one or two scenes feel contrived and on autopilot, but no matter: The Lunchbox is a delight. All that food made me hungry. Maybe once in a while, you should go to the kitchen and cook as if your life depends on it.
