Irvin’s A Month by the Lake is touted as a romantic comedy about how two lonely middle-aged people break their stiff Englishness and kiss at a picnic. It takes place at a hotel on Lake Como, and the story moves so slowly that it might as well be titled “A Month at...
The authoritative recommendation of Minerva, the Voodoo spiritualist in Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil says that when planning a picnic for witches, you must feed them pork because “witches loves pork meat.” When Minerva is performing spells on...
Madden’s picnic in a glen is a short episode designed to show how Queen Victoria’s dependence on her gillie John Brown’s guardianship. *He ensures the Queen’s privacy by chasing snooping journalists. After Albert’s death,...
Spielberg’s Jaws begins with an evening beach party on the beach. The suspense is thrilling, and the result for Chrissie is tragic: eaten by a great white shark! A picnic party on the beach also begins Jurassic Park: The Lost World, but this time, it’s suspenseful but...
If you’re planning a picnic for witches, you must feed them pork because “witches loves pork meat”—at least, this is the authoritative recommendation of Minerva, the Voodoo spiritualist in Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. When Minerva is...
All hell might break loose. Earth may be obliterated, but A. J. Frost and his sweetheart Grace Stamper ignore their food preferring sex foreplay instead. “Do you think,” asks Grace, “that anyone else in the world is doing this very same thing at the same moment?”...
Ian McEwan’s <em>Enduring Love</em> (1998) McEwan’s menu for Joe Rose and Clarissa Mellon’s picnic is black olives, mixed salad, mozzarella, focaccia, and white wine, specifically Daumas Gassac, perhaps the author’s favorite. Roger...
Dickens devotes the better part of the chapter “Blissful” to his text so that he shows how Copperfield is obsessed. “She was too bewildering,” David later explains, “To see her lay the flowers against her little dimpled chin, was to lose all presence of mind and power...
In The Odyssey, the one-eyed giant Polyphemus is a cannibal who lives in a cave, but in Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s O Brother Where Art Thou?, he’s at a picnic eating chicken, pickles, and drinking beer. The Coens claimed they did not read The Odyssey, but...
Marsh’s Dead Babies, Mood Swingers in the U.S., is a satire of a picnic disaster. If this satire is meant to be crude, it succeeds admirably. If satire aims to amuse, Dead Babies fails miserably. Ditto Martin Amis’s novel on which the film is based. The...
