Tag: movie

  • searching for theatre style

    Salt, oil and popping corn.

    Can you imagine how many iterations and combinations of that trio I’ve gone through over the years in search of the perfect pop-at-home theatre-style popcorn?

    I lost count long ago.

    I’ll try not to bury the lede here.

    Theatre Style Popcorn

    2 tablespoons of beta carotene infused coconut oil
    2 teaspoons of flavacol salt
    1 cup of popping corn

    That’s it. Heat the oil over a medium heat, testing the readiness with a few kernels. When they pop, add the corn and the salt.

    Stir.

    Mix.

    Pop.

    Eat.

    My personal pursuit for this particular combination is either the best kept secret behind the eleven herbs and spices …or I’ve just failed to run in the right corn popping circles for the last few decades.

    You can, after all, order all of these ingredients from your favourite online retailer’s website for prime next day delivery… though you really need to first know what to buy, I suppose.

    We grew up eating popcorn as a snack at home.

    We had an air popper, and we would melt (I want to say butter, but it was probably) margarine over it and then sprinkle table salt into the mix. It had a vibe. It was what I knew. And yet, by the time I was about fourteen I was already going to the movie theatre with some regularity and had figured out that my parent’s secret popcorn recipe was not a thing like the bag of deliciousness we scored when we went out.

    Was it a trade secret?

    I would occasional glimpse the theatre employees filling the popping machines and my takeaway from witnessing this sacred act was that whatever magic concoction they were keeping on the hush behind the counter, it was emerging pre-mixed from unmarked brown pouches. I suspected not even the teenagers making the good stuff knew what was in the blend.

    Over the years I fumbled into various online rabbit holes of perfect popcorn speculation. I mean, who hasn’t? While you were researching celebrity sightings and video game rumours, I was poking around forums suggesting that the secret was in using clarified butter or finely tuned temperatures or the stirring mechanism.

    I mean, now that I’ve figured it out theatre popcorn is actually just so simple, it almost seems that all those other theories are so much witch-craftery that they are barely worth mentioning. But seriously… that is the path upon which I strolled trying to figure this out.

    Theatre popcorn just has this, I dunno, an undefinable quality. The blur of the yellow salt and the chemistry-experiment butter-ness. I think what I had stumbled upon over and over and over and over during those years searching was people acknowledging that theatre popcorn is not necessarily great popcorn. There are definitely better ways to make popcorn. Of course. Undoubtably, the quest for good popcorn and the quest for theatre popcorn are probably not the same adventures into flavour town. There are superior popping recipes, yes. But theatre popcorn has something that is as much soul snacking nostalgia as it is food quality.

    I had figured out the Flavacol aspect about a year or two ago. Some of that online research stirred that brand name out of the digital depths and sure enough I could order it online. I popped dozens of batches and cross-mixed the fine yellow salt with all manner of methodology and popping oils. I could tell that it was close. There were hints of the theatre in whatever Flavacol was bringing to the party… but still it wasn’t quite hitting the mark.

    One night I was sitting on the couch flipping through some or other social media dreck and the second part of the clue scrolled into my feed like so much serendipitous fortune: coconut oil. But then not just any coconut oil. Of course I had already tried plain old coconut oil and it was close, but not quite right either. (Luckily it is great for seasoning cast iron!)

    Instead, there existed a coconut oil product out there specifically for popping popcorn. Dyed bright yellow by beta carotene and blended with a bit of that chemical romance of fake buttery goodness, this was the missing ingredient.

    And that’s it. Three ingredients.

    I have dabbled in variations of the trio for a couple months now, making myself a big bowl of theatre-style popcorn every other week or so, hunkering down to watch a movie at home.

    That’s the recipe. Stupidly simple, but deceptively specific.

    I mean, don’t look at the nutrition information, but Cineplex eat your heart out.

  • media review: weird al

    I don’t even know what prompted it, but last night turned into Weird Al night at our house.

    I wandered upstairs to the teevee room and the Kid had started watching the most recent of his movies, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” which I had added to our digital collection a while back when it finally made its way into general circulation. If you haven’t yet checked that one out, it stars Radcliff of Harry Potter fame channeling some very weird al energy into an over-the-top fictionalized biopic of the titular recording artist’s life. I seem to recall it was based on a Funny or Die sketch piece, and while not to everyone’s taste, caught my attention on a flight over the Atlantic a couple years ago and prompted me to go looking to have a closer look when I wasn’t fighting the cradling embrace of an economy class international flight. This isn’t a plot rehash. If you are a Weird Al fan, the kind who bought Dare to Be Stupid on cassette tape in the eighties, you’re going to find something to laugh at in this flick.

    Of course, our fun didn’t stop there.

    The movie finished and the kid opened up Youtube to look up a couple videos—rapidly prompting a small existential crisis when she realized that the video for Tacky was tagged as being a literal decade old. We had worn a permanent groove in the digital tracks listenting to Mandatory Fun album on repeat back when she was about seven and I suppose marking your mortality in Weird Al album release dates may sound a little nutty, but we’re that. I don’t know if I won or lost the fatherhood award last night as she reached peak epiphany on just how much of her childhood was built on the foundation of Weird Al.

    Heck, I said just as we should have all been getting ready to go to bed, did you know he made a movie in the eighties. It was called UHF. I have the DVD.

    It’s a good thing UHF is under two hours or I would not have made it to Starbucks this morning for my coffee. We watched the whole thing in its this-thing-hasn’t-aged-great but its still somehow funny glory. The kid literally screamed “WHAT! Nooooo!” at the screen when the phrase “Today we’re going to teach poodles how to fly…” blurted out of the teevee. And I mean really, if Weird Al isn’t evoking raw emotional screams from teenagers what are we even doing here?

    Sadly Mr. Yankovic isn’t strolling into Western Canada for any tours any time soon—I checked—or I would have bought tickets even as the credits were rolling around midnight last night. Seriously.