Big Night
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DVD Cover Information Actor: Isabella Rossellini, Minnie Driver Brand: DRIVER,MINNIE DVD: Region Code 1 Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.85:1 Running Time: 107 minutes DVD Release Date: 2002-12-26 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment |
| New | New Usually ships in 1-2 business days | $69.95 | ||
| Used | Used Usually ships in 1-2 business days | $24.99 | ||
| Collectible | Collectible Usually ships in 1-2 business days | $102.02 |
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Movie Reviews of Big Night
Movie Review: A bland meal
Summary: 2 Stars
I've seen BIG NIGHT described as "one of the great food movies". Let me clarify something here. The adjective "great" modifies "food", but not "movies".Primo (Tony Shalhoub) and Secondo (Stanley Tucci) are Italian immigrant brothers who've opened the Paradise restaurant in an unidentified surfside town on the Eastern seaboard sometime in the 1950s. The elder Primo is a superlative chef, and both he and Secondo know it. But, Primo cooks to his desires and not the customers'. So, two years into the venture, the brothers are almost broke, the bank is about to repossess, and Secondo, the one with the business sense, is driven to despairing distraction.
Down the street is the competing Italian restaurant owned by Pascal (Ian Holm). While he admires Primo's talent, Pascal gives his patrons what they want, so his eatery is enormously successful. To help the boys out, Pascal arranges to have his friend, the Italian-American singer Louis Prima, come to the Paradise with his band for dinner. Secondo spends virtually the last of their savings preparing for the BIG NIGHT with the expectation that the event and its attendant publicity will yank them back from the brink of insolvency. In the meantime, he avoids emotional commitment to his girlfriend Phyllis (Minnie Driver) while having an affair with Gabriella (Isabella Rossellini), Pascal's mistress. After all, what are pals for?
The best bits of this film are the too infrequent cooking sequences. But the best ends there. BIG NIGHT doesn't know whether to be a drama or comedy, and succeeds at neither. The dialogue is flat and uninspired throughout, and the plot goes nowhere of interest. My wife, perhaps a dollop more impressed than I was, called the film a "character study". But no persona in this otherwise dull movie is engaging, and, indeed, I found Pascal's ebullient crassness positively annoying. About the only other good thing I can say about BIG NIGHT is that it uses as props some well-preserved, large tail-finned, period Cadillacs that will perhaps stimulate vintage car buffs.
Better films to rent that revolve around food preparation are MOSTLY MARTHA (2001) and EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN (1994). These, at least, portray characters to care about.