Culture Hound SF: November

Welcome to Culture Hound, InsideHook’s deep dive into the month’s most important pop cultural happenings.

PERUSE: Dali: Les Diners de Gala
Turns out Salvador Dali and his wife Gala used to host lavish dinner parties, inspiring the artist to release a rather surreal, extremely hard-to-find cookbook. Thankfully, it’s finally getting a proper reprint. While curating the recipes from a variety of top French chefs, Dali himself used to his cooking tome to pontificate on the art of dinner conversation and aphrodisiacs … and offer up his own rather NSFW illustrations. (11/20)

WATCH: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee tackles the politically tinged 2012 novel, transforming a scathingly funny and irreverent book into an actual spectacle: certain scenes were filmed at 120 frames per second in 3D at 4K resolution. It’s going to look insane, but early indications are that Lee’s managed to keep the script dramatic but grounded. (11/11)

GET OUT: SF Open Studios
The annual event hits the big time this week, as artists in the Mission (and Noe Valley, and the Castro, and Bernal Heights, etc.) open their doors to buyers, friends, fans, and more. We’ll stop by 1890 Bryant for Saturday’s talk with Enlightenment Barbie — but the door we’re really looking to open belongs her co-tenant Michael McConnell, who makes art of bears and raccoons and foxes and it is all excellent. (11/5)

CHECK OUT: Blue
For the Krzysztof Kieslowski entry in SFSU’s survey of great Polish cinema, we have Blue — perhaps the Warsaw-born director’s biggest achievement, though we’re similarly partial to his miniseries Dekalogue, two episodes of which will screen on 11/9. This sees Kieslowski looking across his frontier to France, as the new widow playd by Juliette Binoche adjusts to life without her family. (11/30)

LAUGH: Mitch Hedberg: The Complete Vinyl Collection
Comedy Central is releasing the entire discography of the late comic’s unusual and highly quotable work (“I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.”) as a four-record box set, which includes rare photos, new essays and some never-before-heard material. (11/4)

SEE: Killer of Sheep
You’ve almost certainly seen Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and we’re hoping you’ve seen Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, the other two films in BAMPFA’s three-piece look at “Three Lives: Classics of Contemporary African-American Cinema.” The last of the trio is their worthy antecedent: Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett’s 1977 look at contemporary life in Watts. (11/10)

BINGE: Lovesick
This British comedy used to be called Scrotal Recall, which unfortunately belied the show’s rather sweet nature (though it captured the humor just fine). Now renamed and moved to Netflix, the comedy follows one man’s mission to track down his previous romantic partners … after he’s tested positive for chlamydia (“That doesn’t sound positive.”). (11/17)

LISTEN: Our monthly Spotify playlist
The best new songs of the month, including bands old (Flaming Lips, Metallica), very old (Lee Fields, The Rolling Stones) and new (Jenny Hval, NxWorries).

ALSO: Michael Chabon takes a “fictional non-fiction” turn with Moonglow, which examines his grandfather’s death and serves more as a commentary on life in the twentieth century (11/22) … If you’re still in a nostalgic trip post-Stranger Things — but crave something lighter — Amazon’s ‘80s country club comedy Red Oaks returns for a second season (11/11) … Your escape-from-the-fam excuse on Thanksgiving arrives with Bad Santa 2 (11/23) … Call of Duty literally says “Screw it, let’s go to space” for the game’s umpteenth installment Infinite Warfare (11/4) … Metallica returns with Hardwired…to Self-Destruct, consciously going back to their trashier roots (11/18) … Before he tackles Blade Runner 2, director and budding auteur Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Sicario) take a more cerebral approach to an alien invasion — think more linguistics, less shooting with Arrival (11/11) … The Ron Howard-produced Mars is half present-day documentary, half fictional telling of the first mission to Mars (11/14).