DUCK SOUP w/ DUCK SOUP!
Schedule
Fri Dec 20 2024 at 06:30 pm to 10:00 pm
Location
Epsilon Spires | Brattleboro, VT
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Our Screwball Speakeasy series begins with the Marx Brother's anarchic classic: Duck Soup (1933) followed by a delicious dinner of Homemade Duck Soup & Sourdough Bread (Vegan "Faux Duck Pho" is also available!) Thematic cocktails inspired by Groucho, Harpo, Chico (and sometimes Zeppo) are included!Duck Soup (1933) is considered to be among the Marx Brothers' best films. Especially noted for its anarchic style, this classic comedy is a short (70 minutes) but cutting satire on nationalism and dictators, diplomacy and war, international intrigue and espionage. The Brothers were ecstatic when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini took the film as a personal insult and banned it in Italy. Why the title? It is claimed that Groucho provided the following recipe: "Take two turkeys, one goose, four cabbages, but no duck, and mix them together. After one taste, you’ll duck soup the rest of your life.“
After the screening we will enjoy a delicious communal supper of Homemade Duck Soup & Sourdough Bread with fresh herb butter. Choose between a hearty duck and wild rice soup with foraged mushrooms, or a vegan Vietnamese "Faux Duck Pho." Thematic cocktails inspired by Groucho, Harpo, Chico (and sometimes Zeppo) are included! Spaces are very limited, we recommend reserving in advance.
CRITICAL ACCLAIM:
"Over the years, Duck Soup has been praised for its understanding of paranoia in international diplomacy and of the economics of warfare. It is full of gags about the futility of war and its financial advantages, but taken as a whole, the film is too explosively nonsensical to let itself succumb to the discipline of satire, which might loosely be described as comedy with an agenda. (Nonsense is not an alternative version of sense, but rather its negation.)"- The Guardian
"Although they were not taken as seriously, they were as surrealist as Dali, as shocking as Stravinsky, as verbally outrageous as Gertrude Stein, as alienated as Kafka. Because they worked the genres of slapstick and screwball, they did not get the same kind of attention, but their effect on the popular mind was probably more influential. 'As an absurdist essay on politics and warfare,' wrote the British critic Patrick McCray, ” `Duck Soup’ can stand alongside (or even above) the works of Beckett, and Ionesco."- Roger Ebert
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Where is it happening?
Epsilon Spires, 190 Main St, Brattleboro, VT 05301-2837, United States,Brattleboro, VermontEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
