1959's The Savage Eye is a drama and a documentary rolled into one picture. It examines how a divorced woman lives, set against a backdrop of Los Angeles city scenes. A trio of directors worked on the film during their weekends over a few years. It may have been a clever ruse to avoid taking the kids to Disneyland, but it worked out.
The divorcee isn't so gay. In fact, she finds herself cut off from the world by her failed marriage. Her views of L.A.'s not-so-soft underbelly are not exactly the stuff of which the tourist guides are made.
Savage Grace is a $35 Malbec from Dineen Vineyard in Washington’s Yakima Valley. They call it Côt instead of Malbec, in the fancy French way. The wine may be the only fancy thing about your viewing of The Savage Eye.
The 1973 French film, The Mother and the Whore, makes the most of France's nonchalant attitude towards les rapports sexuels, or as we say in the U.S. of A, sex.
A man, his wife, his lover, a lot of sex talk and a ménage à trois. What could go wrong? I'm reminded of the golf joke in which a couple of guys are plodding along behind two women who play slowly. One tells the other to go up ahead and ask if they could play through. The guy comes back and says, "I can't ask them. It's my wife and my girlfriend." The other says, "Okay, I'll go." He returns and says, "Small world, isn't it?"
That joke may take the long way around a sexual dogleg, but at least it's not as long as the movie's three and a half hours. Of course, who am I to downplay three and a half hours of sexy subtitles?
The easy pairing is Ménage a Trois, but I try not to recommend six dollar wines. Gerard Bertrand makes a $25 Grenache/Syrah/Cinsault rosé called Chou Chou, which is a French term of endearment. By the end of the movie, nobody is calling anybody by a term of endearment, but cheers anyway.
Do the Right Thing is Spike Lee's 1989 slice of a hot and turbulent Brooklyn summer. Lee produced, wrote, directed and acted in the film, er, joint, his third release. There are a few laughs along the movie's two hour length, but don't expect any at the end. The slice of life ends tragically as racial tensions heat up and boil over.
You could crack open a bottle of Absolut Brooklyn, but we do wine pairings here. I think Spike would be okay with me pairing a Pinot Noir from Esterlina Vineyards of Napa Valley. I think this, because he has already paired that $65 bottle with his own films. Esterlina is the largest African-American winery in the country.
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