Big Night | | Cast : | Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub | | Director : | Stanley Tucci, Campbell Scott | | Studio : | Columbia/Tristar Studios | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen | | Released Date : | September 20, 1996 | | DVD Released Date : | February 04, 2003 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 29, 2005 | | Summary | A Feast | Content
 | Big Night, the story of immigrant brothers struggling to make it in America is a feast for its viewers. It is a small film, much of its action taking place in the small restaurant owned by the brothers. These brothers mount one last, big party in hopes to save their establishment. In the end, for one reason or another, everyone has turned away, leaving them with their biggest supporter, each other. This is not an action flick and not even a popcorn movie... But, for me, this film was a smorgasbord. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 01, 2005 | | Summary | Big Meal | Content
| "Big Night" is a compelling movie with good acting, great direction, a good plot...Wait a minute?!? What plot? That's the only problem with "Big Night"; the story doesn't seem to go anywhere. We find ourselves enjoying the company, starting to feel like regulars at the ristorante but eventually it hits us; What was the point of the movie? Well, some might say the point can be found in the movie's title. After all, it is actually a lot of fun to be present at the big party; even if the guest of honor didn't show. And how about that meal? Have you ever had a better one? Or, at least, have you ever seen a better one?
"Big Night" is a pleasant way to spend an evening. Just enjoy the cameraderie and the visual culinary delights and you will come away the better for it. I know I did. |
| Rating | | | Date | May 22, 2005 | | Summary | Food For the Soul and the Body | Content
| The meal isn't over till there's a satiated big beautiful woman laying on the table enjoying a cigarette like Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in "Now, Voyager." But life goes on, and someone has to pay the bill.
This movie is about how you pay that bill. Primo would pay it with money earned by his sweat and formidable talent; honestly. Secundo would not order what he could not afford, but he would ask the waiter about the lobster and the caviar to savor the idea of the best meal; realistically. Cometitor Pasqualle would continue entertaining his friends till one of them becomes so exhausted, that they pick up the bill so they can go home and sleep; he gets someone else to pay it. Big Night is about how you feed your body via the spiritual essence of living your life. The movie shows us the personification of idealism and perfection, realism and honesty, and deceit and manipulation. It shows us our own choices between what we want and what we have to do.
It is a peek of Atlas Shrugged that fits on film. Instead of the smoke, steam and clatter of industrialism, we have the smoke, steam and clatter of the kitchen--something we all recognize as the most basic way to nurture ourselves and those we love. We recognize that those we don't love must have their own kitchen, too.
The way we manage our kitchen is a reflection of what we really are. Pasqualle berates the help as he gives people what they want, even though he clearly knows that there is better to give them. Pasqualle himself tells us that to be a success, first you have to give "them" what they want, then someday you can give then what you want (to give them). He has sold out though, content with the security of meeting demand.
Primo and Secundo manage their kitchen earnestly, and want to succeed on their ability. Secundo struggles to keep the business afloat, lured by the security Pasqualle has created. He flirts with glamor, just as he carries on a physical affair with Pasqualle's wife and professes he wants marriage with his girlfriend. The affair is exciting, but his fiancee is consistent and loyal. Pasqualle's club is exciting, but the brothers want their resturaunt to be enjoyed without glitz and artiface. The real issue is that they don't have the time for the approach they want to use; just as our choices are constrained by time and resources.
Leonard Maltin said this movie is slow-paced. He's welcome to the short-order meals offered by casual dining. I prefer to dine less often at a real resturaunt where the food is hand made from scratch. Big Night is an irrestable orgy of food and good times, and the moral of the story is that there is an honest compromise between good times on someone else's dime and deprivation that would mean the death of the spirit. It is about being a good failure as well as defining for yourself what success really means.
This movie is not about the overdramatized "reality" referred to as gritty; it is about reality that really exists for real people who question themselves and are honest with themselves.
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| Rating | | | Date | April 09, 2005 | | Summary | Hey, Marc Anthony is in this movie! | Content
| ...but I don't think he has a single line. I don't even know the name of his character, but he was right in the middle of this struggle between two brothers running this Italian restaurant. Primo the expert Chef who refuses to compromise his art, and Secondo the businessman. Secondo seems to be in charge here, yet he respects his brother's opinion, as demonstrated when he decides to keep risotto on the menu although it is not a favorite with the customers. Pascal, the competitor across the street, gives the customer simple dishes that they demand on the Jersey shore. The brother's Paradise restaurant is doomed to failure.
Ultimately this was a movie about the value of family, art and perserverance. The movie began at a slow pace as we learned about the struggle, but the pace and humor picked up as the Big Night approached.
Little things make this movie great. I like how Secondo nudges Primo to make a connection with a woman that he clearly likes. As Secondo test drives a Cadillac, he asks if the car is "this year's model" without actually saying the year, leaving car buffs estimating that it had to be late fifties.
Isabella Rosellini is beautiful and Minnie Driver is the proverbial girl next door. Secondo looks impeccable in his suits and Pascal's excitement is catching as well as funny.
Subtlety runs throughout this movie, except for the scene where the brothers wrestle in the sand, exchanging dialogue in Italian (subtitled) the entire time. It isn't long after this though, that the movie wraps up with a powerful piece of film with no dialogue at all that says it all: this family is strong enough to endure this trial. |
| Rating | | | Date | February 21, 2005 | | Summary | Great Little Story of Italians, Food, and how they relate. | Content
| `Big Night' is co-writer / co-director Stanley Tucci's contribution to the select collection of `food films'. The leading members of this very gourmet list of films is the Japanese `Tampopo' and the French `Babette's Feast'. If you look at it cross-eyed, you may even add Peter Greenway's `The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover'. `Tampopo' is hands down the most interesting of these, but `Big Night' can hold its own in this crowd of culinary celluloid.
Like Siskel and Ebert, you will like this movie a lot if you like movies by Fellini and Renoir. I sensed more than a few little echos here and there of Fellini's `La Dolce Vita', although I confess Tucci simply does not have the great touch of the Fredrico Fellini / Marcello Mastroianni team. But that bar is so high, Tucci Company still manage to come in with a remarkable little film.
For fans of some of the players in this film such as Minnie Driver, Isabella Rosselini, Tony Shalhoub, and `C. J. Craig', Allison Janney, you may be disappointed at the rather thin part each of these actors receives, although all but Miss West Wing carry their roles off with great skill. While on the surface the main drama seems to be between Tucci and Shalhoub, the two immigrant Italian brothers who own and run a small high quality restaurant in 1957 New Jersey, the best tension is between Tucci's character and Ian Holm (later to famously appear in the role of Bilbo Baggins in `Lord of the Rings'). Holm plays a competing restaurateur whose very successful establishment is just down the block from the brothers' weakly performing `Restorante'.
The setup for understanding the difficulties the brothers face is what we see on a typically light night when a typical 1950's American woman is served a seafood risotto and simply cannot understand the dish, as she was expecting spaghetti with the rice and sees no seafood on the dish. This sets up the culinary interest to the foodies in the audience who are fully aware of the difference between classic Italian fare and the `Italian-American' cuisine being sold down the street at Holm's restaurant. Of course chef and older brother Shalhoub is totally unsympathetic to these uneducated tastes and balks at simply making a side dish of spaghetti to go along with the rice.
This movie was made before 2001 and Shalhoub shows absolutely no trace of his Emmy award winning Adrian Monk persona. Behind his great Groucho mustache, one can almost not even recognize him, as even the quality of his voice seems changed to fit the part.
The driving force behind the story is the fact that the bank will no longer extend the deadline on the loan for their restaurant, so the brothers need to come up with much more money than they currently take in over the course of a week. Holm offers the suggestion that part of the success of his restaurant lies in the interest he generates with celebrities who come to eat at his place and leave lots of autographed photographs behind. So, Holm suggests that he will attract Louie Prima to come to the brothers' restaurant to eat on a particular `Big Night'
Preparation of the food for this event brings culinary interest back to the forefront when we see Shalhoub and his assistant hand make pasta which is then assembled into that most elaborate dish an `Il Timpano', a great upside down casserole filled with pasta, sauce, sausage, and all sorts of other good things to eat.
A secondary plot is the relation of Tucci with girlfriend Minnie Driver complicated with an affair with Holm's wife, played by Isabella Rosselini. The end of the movie leaves many of these relationships in disarray, most especially the one between the brothers.
It is totally proper that almost all the music is from recordings of performances by Louie Prima and wife Keely Smith. The feeling of being filmed in the mid-1950's is almost perfect except for the to me dreadful coloring which may work on `The Matrix' but which does not work on northern New Jersey. Everything looks red and green. The movie would have been much better served by having been filmed in black and white a la Woody Allen of `Manhatten' or in a lush 1950's Technicolor where the colors are more real than in real life.
This is a great little movie with the one property that makes buying it on DVD worth while. It will yield additional pleasures on a second and third and fourth viewing, as long as you liked it to begin with. I bought it and I was not disappointed.
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