movie night roundup, staring mint-walnut pesto

[dr_tectonic]

For dinner tonight I made a green bean salad that turned out surprisingly well. It's basically just green beans and new potatoes with a mint-walnut pesto. (Recipe) Made mostly because I had a bunch of mint leftover from last weekend, and poked around looking for recipes on teh inatrwebs. I didn't measure very precisely, and I probably used more nuts and mint+parsley than it called for, but it was really good. The mint is subtle and everything blends well. And it's vegan, even!

Tonight we watched Gosford Park. It was good that we had Greg & Mel, who have both seen it several times, so that we could stop a couple times to get the rundown on how all the characters were related and who was that again? Because man, is it complicated. But it's a great murder mystery. The ending is not resolved traditionally, but I still found it satisfying.

Oh, and last weekend we watched Ladies in Lavendar, the last of the Maggie Smith movies, also starring Judi Dench. (Gosford Park is our transition to murder mysteries.) Sorry, Dame Judi Dench. It solidified something for me: I really like it when movies don't feel it necessary to spell everything out, but let the audience figure it out. And it's another one where if you just wrote down what the characters said, it wouldn't capture at all what had actually happened in the scene, which I'm thinking is really the sign of a great movie actor.

Comments

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

We talked about watching Gosford Park with subtitles! Did you watch the extra scenes? Because they cut a whole fabulous plot about the end of the servant-class era in England (I guess more the end of the true aristocracy class) that blew me away. I see why they did it, the movie was so long already, but wow.

[(Anonymous)]

Mmmmm, pesto.

Sorry we missed it. Again. Our new club is opening today, and I had to go in and work in the afternoon to get stuff finished up, and my sweet hubby came along to help.

[mahannie57.livejournal.com]

The green bean salad was yummy and I got to have some leftovers that taste even better on the second day....

[blockade-boy.livejournal.com]

I love Gosford Park but it does suffer from Altman's fatal flaw: too much crap goin' on (as the cineasts like to say). The one really confusing subplot for me involved the young man who showed up for the weekend late, with his friend. Not only did the two actors look very similar -- and both were dreadful in their roles, all stone-faced and flat-voiced -- but half of their scenes were shot in low light, so I couldn't even tell them apart. That aside, though, I thought it was a pretty good film.