The Movie Series Begins. I hope.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating: The Bologna Cineteca is awesome. It’s basically a movie theater that screens films in a “meaningful” way. Lots of the films are themselves “meaningful” – in the sense that they’re not Die Hard 37 – but the Cineteca also makes them more meaningful by making them into series (“Focus on Argentina”), staging lectures related to the films, and inviting the directors to present the films and field questions. Best of all, they host film festivals, and the most recent was Slow Food on Film.

One of my classmates hooked us all up with “credentials,” which let us see as many films as we wanted for free. It also gave us a lanyard with a nametag, which is almost like a membership card, and you all know by now how important membership cards are. So the credentials were great on both counts. I saw a few awesome feature-length films and a bunch of documentaries and shorts. (I’m a short fanatic, if you didn’t know.) I learned a ton – you could become a semi-expert in food just by going to the festival – and I have to say that the quality of the filmmaking really impressed me. Definitely the best film fest I’ve been to. In any case, I saw a few films that are definitely worth seeking out, and – if I can manage to follow through on the idea – I thought I’d introduce you to a few of them in the next few blog posts.

The first one is King Corn. Two guys graduate from college, discover in a hair test that they’re basically “made of corn,” and move to Iowa to farm an acre of “King Corn”. In the process, they discover all kinds of absurdities and abuses that pervade the American food system (and – really – American food). Definitely worth a look, and I’ll bet you can even find it at the library.

In other news, I made octopus for the first time tonight. I’m crazy for it, I told you, but this is the first time I’ve actually made. It comes frozen, and I bet you can find it at Wegmans if you want. If you buy it frozen, it already comes de-eyed, so you just have to plop it in a pot with a little garlic, white wine, lemon juice, and just a touch of water, and it’ll take care of itself.

So, my recommendation for tonight: A trip to Wegmans, a trip to Blockbuster, octopus, and King Corn.