I’m never getting around to seeing Fences or Lion, so here’s…

Dwelve Into These Twelve
of 2016

1) Tower

A real life tragic event gets Waking Lifed, and it’s not only scary and horrific, but hopeful AND inspiring!

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2) I Am Not Your Negro

What it’s like to be an African-American in America (when you’re white and have no clue what it’s like).  It raises all sorts of important questions that no one is really asking, or sadly, bothering to answer

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3) Patriots Day

An event I didn’t plan on reliving ended up making me feel proud to be an American… in a time I’m ashamed to be an American

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4) 20th Century Women

It’s like listening to The Talking Heads for the very first time – WOAH!

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5) The Founder

Sometimes it takes some awful in humans to make greatness, and greasiness for us all!

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6) The Light Between Oceans

Perhaps the year’s most overlooked movie that had ‘Oscar bait’ written all over it.  You no longer have to take the bait to something that no longer is baiting you, and it’s time for you to no longer overlook this film!

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7) Bleed For This

if Miles Teller bleeds – I will come!

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8) Embrace of the Serpent

I apparently never reviewed Serpent, but you need to Embrace this film – which puts the ‘lonely’ in ‘coLONELYialism’!

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9) Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream

All things must pass – even the Lower East Side’s last remaining matzah factory, and with it, a part of Jewish culture and identity in America :( 

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10) Hell or High Water

Why choose when you can have BOTH hell AND high water!!!

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11) Sully

Dude is mad fly!

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12) Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made

These guys lived out their childhood dreams, in childhood, and finished them in their adulthood!  Fedora hats off forever to these dudes!!

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and now for the…

Honor Blackmanable Mentions

Elstree 1976 / Snowden / Rouge One / Love & Friendship / The Witch / Jackie / La La Land / Toni Erdmann / Jheronimus Bosch, Touched by the Devil / Doctor Strange / the first 2/3rds of Moonlight / Indignation / The Lobster / Me Before You / Bridget Jones’s Baby / My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2

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our annual anal movie awards – The Thighsmans – drops the Friday before the Oscars.  stay pooned!

until then, here’s the bestest films of yesterhere

2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
& 2002

Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream
Streit From The Heart
Official Website, Trailers & Mo
Unrated | 100 min

Tradition is tradition – even if tradition has to modernize to adapt to a modern world.  Passover is one of the oldest holidays, and matzah (or matzo for those who spell it that way) has been the food of Passover forever, and for the past century, Streit’s Matzos has been one of the major companies supplying the tasteless holy crackers to practitioners.  While their competitors have been bought up big larger corporations, and they’ve seen increased newer competition from cheaper brands abroad, the STILL family-owned AND run Streit team have been keeping it real, baking in the very same New York City – Lower East Side factory since day one!

But times have changed.  Their customers left the neighborhood years and years ago, and so with it, most of the heavily Jewish businesses that were there to support the community.  And while gentrification has greatly changed the heart and soul of the nabe, nothing could alter the Streit’s way.  Sure, they had outgrown the archaic factory in which they occupied, and the cost of doing actual business meant that they had to charge their customers more than they’d like to, but tradition is tradition – right?

Michael Levine‘s lovely new documentary Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream over-examines the company’s struggle of staying true to the past, while trying to be realsitic about the present and future.  And while the same argument is made over and over, it didn’t matter much to me having the same paradoxical point hammered home again and again – cause you enjoy meeting and spending time with the family and their factory workers (who are like their extended family) over and over, and going up and down and back and forth thru their the labyrinthine factory, cause this is matzah history – living and breathing!

Take a bite of this doc, even if matzah has no taste, and even if you’re aren’t Jewish – cause you don’t have to be Jewish to love a good American story, about family, and crackers!

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Matzo matzgoes here and there in very limited release

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…