Hacker Cinema
The Menu
2022 · Film · 107 min
Directed by Mark Mylod
A young couple travels to a remote island to eat at an exclusive restaurant where the chef has prepared a lavish menu, with some shocking surprises.
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10 comments on Hacker News
Recent good movies, just going in release order off my letterboxd, although I have to be careful to include only "Hollywood" here:
- 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - beautifully shot and a beautiful theme about what humanity is
- One Battle After Another - it's PTA, all his movies are good
- Bugonia - incredible dark comedy
- Weapons - fun little horror comedy movie
- Sinners - just won an oscar for the soundtrack, not a perfect movie but a fun watch with some incredible scenes
- Companion
- Nosferatu - incredibly atmospheric
- The Surfer - total trip with good old Nicholas Cage
- Love Lies Bleeding - just a fun, a bit crazy movie
- Dream Scenario - another trippy Cage movie
- Poor Things
- Oppenheimer ...
- Renfield
- The Menu
- The Banshees of Insherin
- Barbarian (same director as Weapons)
- Prey
- Bullet Train - fun action movie
- The Northman
- The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
- The Invisible Man - most effective horror movie I've ever seen
- The Gentlemen
- Joker -how close can you get to looking like Taxi Driver without being Taxi Driver ...
- The Vast of Night - some scenes that really draw you in and pretty nostalgic
in 2019 now, so I won't continue, but there are plenty of good movies made nowadays, and I won't say I've seen even a close amount of them from the past few years. Of course I'm watching these at home, not in theatres, so that's certainly an argument.
The Willows Inn is an even stronger parallel.
Literally a tiny island that people travel to and stay at the inn just to eat dinner. When you're there, it appears that the staff outnumber patrons about two to one.
My wife and I went there for an anniversary dinner (and breakfast the next morning). It was an incredible experience. Certainly the best meal of my life and one of the best evenings.
But I watched The Menu later and that movie hit a little too close to home.
The Menu is... overly sincere, I won't spoil it, but it's the "Restaurant as cult environment" movie. In fact the question of lacking sincerity is framed as "the audience casually disregards the immense effort and dedication requires to achieve what you demand."
...Now that's probably using restaurants as a metaphor for the film industry, but either way the point holds. I'm not put off by insincerity, it's forced, false intimacy as a product or a service goal that bothers me. Good food, good (not fawning) service is more than enough for me, I don't need this kind of race-to-the-bottom Michelin stars seem to inspire.
Going to The French Laundry has many similar to The Menu and felt like it was what the movie was satirizing
Like many here, before I read the article I assumed this was intended to be some sort of filtering mechanism... which is a bit dystopian, but IMO the truth is much MUCH more bizarre.
We're talking about a fancy restaurant that researches you and your social media to better cater to you and make you feel "special". I think I'd prefer that this just be an extension of the velvet rope, bouncers have been around for ages, but this feels genuinely creepy.
> “The information is used as a precursor to gain more of an understanding of who our guests are,” general manager Akeel Shah explained to SFGATE. “We may not even use the information, but it gives us a better way to tailor the experience and make it memorable.”
Eewwww, no. Just no. It really feels like someone watched 'The Menu', missed the entire point of the movie, and just thought "Hey wouldn't it be neat if WE knew everything about our customers before they arrived?"
I have tried the same, and had ChatGPT utterly fail.
> me: what's the relatively recent movie with a pig on the movie poster
> gpt: The movie you're referring to is likely "Pig," a 2021 American drama film. It stars Nicolas Cage as a truffle hunter who lives alone in the Oregon wilderness. He embarks on a quest to find his beloved foraging pig after she is kidnapped. The film was directed by Michael Sarnoski .
> me: no, that movie does not have a pig on the poster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_(2021_film)#/media/File:Pig_poster.jpeg
> gpt: My mistake, let's correct that. Given your description, another film that fits the criteria of having a pig on its movie poster and is relatively recent is "The Menu" (2022). This film features a darkly comedic and thrilling story set against the backdrop of an exclusive restaurant on a remote island, where a young couple experiences a very unusual dining experience. The pig on the poster is part of the film's intriguing promotional material, hinting at the film's critique of culinary culture and excess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menu_(2022_film)#/media/File:The_Menu_(2022_film).jpg
> me: No, that move does not have a pig poster
> gpt: It seems I misunderstood your initial request. After a more detailed search, I couldn't find a recent movie specifically featuring a pig prominently on its movie poster beyond the titles we've discussed. Could there be any other details about the movie you're thinking of that might help narrow it down? For instance, any specific elements of the plot, actors involved, or even the genre might provide more clues to identify the correct film.
movie I was looking for was "The Hunt": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_%282020_film%29#/media/File:The_Hunt_2020_poster.png
1) Is this what was referred to in the movie "The Menu" where they were taking the tour in the beginning and talking about the 152 day aging process for meat, but the 153rd day would bring chaos?
2) Why is there such a precise known number for that issue? Don't bacteria grow differently? It just seems odd that 152 days would definitely be ok and 153 days would definitely kill.
Hahaha, I expected the criticism of my comment to be that too much of what I was counting as good is "high brow", in fact. Too artsy-fartsy. Leaning too much toward "The Green Knight" and not enough toward "Jaws".
[EDIT] Here, lemme just list the 2022 movies that I think were worth a watch if you're at all into the kind of thing they were doing:
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Glass Onion Top Gun: Maverick Bullet Train All Quiet on the Western Front Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Crimes of the Future Death on the Nile Everything Everywhere All at Once White Noise Nope Prey The Sadness You Won't Be Alone Dual The Northman The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (arguably just a less-exciting RRR, but hey, it makes up for it by also being shorter and non-horror comedy *is* a bit weak lately, so it gets in) Watcher Dashcam (one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time—you may hate it, but you'll feel *something*, damnit!) The Banshees of Inisherin
This is just ones I've seen (I usually manage, like, 1/2 of the films in a year that I want to watch, at best) and excluding a few that did in fact suck or that I didn't think quite merited inclusion (e.g. The Menu) or that are good for what they are but are pretty narrow in appeal (Violent Night). Like, I hear Cyrano is great, Emily the Criminal, Bodies Bodies Bodies, The Whale, and a bunch of others, but haven't made it to them yet (and, inevitably, I'll end up never watching some of them).
"Quite a few of those are sequels, remakes, or adaptations! White Noise was a book! Death on the Nile! One of those is a marvel movie!" yeah, I know—good luck finding an era in Hollywood when a ton of the films, and even a ton of the good films, weren't such. I reject that as, specifically, a complaint about this moment in cinema (it has more merit as a criticism of cinema in general)
The original comment did not come across as bitter-sweet as it should be. It came across as entitled, sort of disgruntled by the fact that the monks keep the secret to themselves and the drink can not be industrialized and produced to such an extent that they can enjoy their favorite drinks wherever they please and of course, at a reasonable cost!
Their attitude is akin to how people complain and demand stuff from open source projects and why authors are annoyed when supporting such projects.
It reminds me of "The Menu" movie, the producers got fed up with the consumers and they took drastic actions. Wasn't a big fan of the movie but I can see how creators would go to such extremes or at least fantasize about them.
Disney now owns Searchlight Pictures (formerly Fox Searchlight). They have an incredible legacy of unique high quality creative films. Go watch Shape Of Water or The Favorite. They just came out with The Menu, which I’d recommend (saw it in the theater just today). Seeing adult oriented original screenplays is just heavenly. You literally couldn’t pay me to sit through a Marvel movie.