Nonnas: A delectable repast

Nonnas (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for no particular reason, and suitable for all ages

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

This is a total charmer.

 

Director Stephen Chbosky’s quiet dramedy is inspired by actual events — which are adorable in their own right — although Liz Maccie’s script takes liberties with what actually went down, in order to generate enough dramatic tension for a two-hour film.

 

Joe (Vince Vaughn) challenges each of his new chefs — from left, Roberta (Lorraine
Bracco) Teresa (Talia Shire) and Antonella (Brenda Vaccaro) — to amaze him with
one of their best dishes.

Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with Maccie’s various shadings of truth, particularly when the result is this entertaining.

Chbosky’s film also has strong echoes of 1996’s Big Night, in the sense of lovingly prepared food bonding strangers into a “family” they get to choose.

 

This also joins the ranks of all-time best “foodie movies,” right up there with Babette’s Feast, Chocolat, Tom Jones and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. You’ll be ravenous before this one’s half done.

 

And when blessed with a cast top-lined by the always enjoyable Vince Vaughn — who gets plenty of competition from his quartet of veteran scene-stealing co-stars — what’s not to love?

 

The setting is a working-class Italian neighborhood in present-day New York. Joe Scaravella (Vaughn), a single MTA worker, has recently lost his mother; on this day, the house he shared with her is laden with loving friends and sympathetic well-wishers. Vaughn’s bearing throughout is note-perfect: somber, quick with a polite smile when addressed, but with a faraway gaze that bespeaks bereavement, abandonment and the hopelessness that comes from wondering what the next day will be like ... and the one after that, and the one after that.

 

Everybody eventually departs, having left a home-cooked token of love.

 

Memory flashbacks show an adolescent Joe watching in rapt fascination, at the edge of the family kitchen, as his mother and nonna (grandmother) prepare a meal; every ingredient is added in just the right amount, from memory and long practice.

 

Joe grew up retaining this fascination with food, and has become a respectable scratch cook ... within limits. He’s never been able to nail down the ingredients in his nonna’s Sunday gravy.

 

As the days inevitably pass, longtime best friend Bruno (Joe Manganiello) and his outspoken wife Stella (Drea de Matteo) encourage Joe to use his inheritance money for something fun, or wild, or meaningful ... but definitely new. Joe takes that advice in the worst possible way, and makes a down payment on a dilapidated former Staten Island restaurant, a ferry ride away from his home and work.

 

And announces that he intends to create a restaurant where all the chefs are nonnas.

Green Book: An inspirational journey

Green Book (2018) • View trailer 
Five stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, occasional profanity and brief violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.23.18

Period biographical dramas rarely are this amusing.

Comedies rarely are laden with this much shrewd social commentary.

Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen, left), having promised to write frequent letters to his wife,
is surprised when Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) expresses more than a casual
interest in the process.

Sharply etched characters rarely are portrayed so precisely — so perfectly — by the actors cast to play them.

In a word, Green Book is superb: a thoroughly engaging slice of gentle filmmaking that veers from droll, to instructive, to heartbreaking, to laugh-out-loud hilarious. It’s a richly entertaining, feel-good experience that plays, at times, like a perfect blend of Driving Miss Daisy and The Odd Couple.

But such a simplistic elevator-pitch descriptor does a disservice to director/co-scripter Peter Farrelly’s marvelous road picture, and the two memorable, lovingly depicted characters who actually made this trip together, in the real world.

Talk about your “journey of discovery.” That phrase carries a lot of weight here.

The time is 1962. Bronx-born Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) — who goes by Tony Lip — is an imposing, well-dressed bouncer at New York’s Copacabana Club. Thanks to a facility for calculated charm that blends well with his capacity for rough stuff, Tony has managed to straddle this realm of celebrities and mob honchos, where he’s respected without getting wholly co-opted by the latter.

He’s a classic Damon Runyon archetype who might have stepped out of the era popularized by Guys and Dolls. Tony is far larger than life — literally, as Mortensen gained 30 pounds and an impressive paunch for the role — but still, at the end of each night shift, a devoted family man who returns home to his beloved wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini) and their two young sons.

Their home is the locus for a noisy, extended Italian family that chatters, bickers and fills a room with the boisterous revelry of a 24/7 party. These sidebar relations are deftly and memorably defined: the curmudgeonly father, the smart-ass brother, assorted cousins and spouses. Utter chaos delivered via thick Bronx accents.

When the Copa closes for renovations during the final two months of the year, Tony is left without employment (aside from occasional wagers, details of which are best left discovered as they occur). Potential financial relief arrives with an unusual job offer, as chauffeur for a certain Dr. Don Shirley. Tony dresses up for the interview, expecting a medical office and some sort of world-famous surgeon.

Instead, he’s escorted into a posh private apartment directly above Carnegie Hall, where Dr. Shirley (Mahershala Ali) turns out to be a world-famous concert pianist.

And is African-American.

Hunter Killer: Old-school Cold War thrills

Hunter Killer (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for violence and profanity
By Derrick Bang

Boy, this one takes me back.

Director Donovan Marsh’s handsomely mounted adaptation of 2012’s Firing Point is a suspenseful, well-paced thriller. The George Wallace/Don Keith novel is, itself, a throwback to Alistair MacLean classics such as The Guns of Navarone and Ice Station Zebra, both of which also became crackling adventure films.

U.S. submarine commander Joe Glass (Gerard Butler, right) and his counterpart,
Russian commander Andropov (Michael Nyqvist) contemplate how best to handle
an international crisis that is escalating rapidly out of control.

The comparison to Ice Station Zebra is particularly apt, because Hunter Killer unfolds like a 1960s Cold War thriller, complete with U.S./Russian anxiety, posturing politicians, ground-level grunts given an impossible mission, and a maverick submarine commander willing to defy D.C. in order to avoid World War III.

Ah, the good ol’ days.

This new film also unfolds like a mystery, if only initially. The story begins deep beneath Arctic Circle ice, as a U.S. “hunter-killer” submarine clandestinely shadows a Russian sub: one side keeping tabs on the other. Suddenly the Russian vessel explodes, to the astonishment of the Americans; before they can consider whether to mount a rescue, they’re also crippled and sent to the ocean floor.

By whom, we wonder.

Back at the Pentagon, anxiety mounts when the American sub fails to make its scheduled report. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Charles Donnegan (Gary Oldman), a veteran hawk always willing to believe the worst of the Russians, wants to mobilize nearby battleships and destroyers. Rear Admiral John Fisk (Common), a next-gen negotiator loathe to jump to conclusions, seeks alternative solutions.

U.S. President Dover (Caroline Goodall, standing in for Hilary Clinton), considering all options, authorizes investigative reconnaissance by the USS Arkansas: a second hunter-killer sub, to be commanded by Joe Glass (Gerard Butler). He’s an unusual choice: a blue-collar “guy’s guy” who gained his knowledge of submarines the practical way, by working his way up through various departments, in marked contrast to Annapolis graduates with no hands-on experience.

In other words, Glass is savvier — and sneakier — than all those Pentagon desk jockeys.

Meanwhile… 

Long-range satellites have revealed unusual activity at the Polyarny Russian naval base, at the outermost western side of Kola Bay. Senior National Security Agency analyst Jayne Norquist (Linda Cardellini), sent to the Pentagon with need-to-know details, advises that Russian President Zakarin (Alexander Diachenko) has just arrived at Polyarny for unknown reasons.