Welcome to issue 76 of EatDrinkFilms.

This week features two installments of Critics Corner with an emphasis on vivid humor: M.K. Brown and Paul Krassner view Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon and bring their own experiences to bear upon the movie’s version of events, while Robert Bloomberg and Ralph Eggleston celebrate the diverse themes and imaginative visions of Ron Diamond’s traveling festival the Animation Show of Shows. The Animation Show of Shows also provides the international trio of works showcased in this week’s Eat My Shorts.

In Issue 75 Daniel Barnes previewed the Mill Valley Film Festival, and this week, Pam Grady follows up with a guide to some of the movies and actors at the 38th incarnation of the event that are generating the most buzz. While performances by Ian McKellen, Michael Fassbender, and newer talents such as Saoirse Ronan and Emily VanCamp draw praise, animation is still in the picture – Grady also singles out the stop-motion puppetry of Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa.

Last week Eat Drink Films brought back Jonathan “Max” Davis’s essay “Wine and Chocolate, or A Bittersweet Decision,” and the pairing returns through two varied book excerpts in EDF 76. In conjunction with Litquake, the issue includes an excerpt from Frances Dinkelspiel’s book Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California, which uncovers the story behind a massively destructive fire at a wine warehouse in Vallejo in 2005, constructing a profile of a criminal and a history of wine and California in the process. In her Eat Like the Stars column, Jenny Hammerton writes appreciatively of son Luca Dotti’s new book Audrey at Home: Memories of My Mother’s Kitchen, sharing three of his mother Audrey Hepburn’s favorite recipes, including one for Chocolate Cake with Whipped Cream, while also revealing the harrowing experiences connected to Hepburn’s sweet tooth and love for cooking.

We also preview Litquake and Uncharted Ideas.

Sincerely,

Johnny

Johnny Ray Huston has written about film, music, and visual art for 25 years at newspapers, magazines, and websites. He has co-created movies and put together film programs shown at Artists’ Television Access, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, and the San Francisco International Film Festival, and written and made collage work for exhibitions at [2nd Floor Projects] in San Francisco.