Our love for Frances McDormand is intensified, and Dave discovers a possible cure for soggy popcorn.
Dave: I love Frances McDormand. She’s brilliant in everything she’s been in. And the acting by the rest of the cast in this film was brilliant: subtle, darkly funny, and deeply human. But the movie pulled at every single heartstring: police violence, racism, homophobia, misogyny, - and I could go on. It seemed like a brilliant cast was given the script for a Lifetime movie and told: “See what you can do with this!” The movie is worth watching, but the plot and the stubborn clichéd woodenness of several characters dampened everything for me just a bit. (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
Much like the movie, I expected more from this popcorn. If you hear barbecue sauce and jalapeño, you generally think: giant flavor. Sadly, the popcorn was slightly sweet, not at all smoky, and only a little bit spicy. That might’ve been helped by using a better-quality barbecue sauce, but who uses $4 sauce to just dump on popcorn? On the plus side, baking potentially soggy popcorn after you’ve doused it with some drippy sauce is a brilliant strategy, and one we will keep in our popcorn making toolkit. (⭐️⭐️⭐️)
Joe: At one point during the film, I turned to Dave and said, “This film should have been titled Trigger Warning - racial epithets, gay epithets, violence against women, rape, police brutality, murder...” “...Tacky gift shops,” quipped Dave. So, yeah. This is a pretty brutal film that fires on all cylinders. But it is also nuanced and plunges depths that most films don’t touch. The characters are flawed and complex, and the acting, uniformly across the entire cast, is fearless. But this is McDormand’s film. She’s fucking amazing in general, but this outshines all her other work. I imagine the Academy watched only her monologue to the priest, and were like, “Clearly we have to give her the Oscar.” An incredible, profound, and deeply unsettling film. (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
I ate a few slices of pizza at an event before coming home, so I wasn’t particularly hungry for anything, let alone popcorn. But as I was making this treat (which, at one point, involves adding baking soda to make a fizzy wonderland of a science experiment), I had a feeling it was going to be great. It is. Sweet, slightly spicy, and caramelized, it’s an unexpected treat. And not soggy! Had I not eaten so much pizza, I would’ve swatted Dave’s hand away from the bowl. I’m beginning to the think the woman who wrote this recipe book is an unmitigated genius. I’d gladly make this again. And again. And again. (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
Popcorn recipe from: Party Popcorn by Ashton Epps Swank. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).
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