It’s time to take a break from the sorts of social injustice films coated in this column for the previous few months and, as an alternative, shift to extra nice fodder, like a stunning grandmother with a salt and pepper assortment. Meredith Moore’s “Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers” is the form of Mom’s Day providing that goes down straightforward: filled with attraction, heat and surprises, particularly with all these large explosions. It is probably not the deepest movie coated right here, however in the spirit of Mom’s Day, it looks like the precise brief movie to write down about. I even have a weak spot for brief docs about bizarre collections.

“Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers” is about two individuals: Margie Soudek and her granddaughter, Meredith Moore, who’s making the movie. Soudek is in her nineties and has a huge wall filled with (what else?) salt and pepper shakers, a powerful assortment she has been including to for a number of many years. Moore, naturally, desires to interview her grandmother whereas she will be able to about this accomplishment and to know why and how she began this passion. Moore additionally occurs to be a visible results teacher and duties her college students to give you visible results to assist in the telling of this profile documentary. Why? I’m nonetheless not solely positive, however it does assist separate itself from different private profile docs of this kind. 

Soudek appears keen to go together with it, though she doesn’t fairly know what her granddaughter goes for with the VFX gimmick. By the top, we’re left to marvel what the movie is finally about. Moore has her reply, however prompts us to contemplate different solutions. For me, it’s about compulsion. Not in a method that’s meant to be investigative or to have us query what drives us to do what we do, however in a method that’s usually acceptable and a part of who we’re. Soudek has a big assortment, in all probability as a result of she will be able to’t assist however buy a set when she finds one which fills her with a optimistic feeling. Maybe Moore can not assist however take easy video footage and add one thing fantastical into it, both for enjoyable or for a problem. (I attempted for a Q&A with Moore, however by no means bought a response.) 

“Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers” jogged my memory of one other brief I wrote about right here a few years in the past: Sol Friedman’s “Bacon and God’s Wrath,” a few filmmaker’s grandmother who, on the age of 90, was going to attempt bacon for the primary time. Each of those movies take easy interview footage of an aged member of the family and use no matter instruments they’ve as filmmakers and results wizards and punctuate the ultimate movie with unpredictable visible aptitude, the likes of which may by no means have been imagined again when these ladies had been the age of their grandchildren.

In the long run, as Moore tries to reply her grandmother’s questions as to what this movie is about, it’s actually only a easy doc about her and her grandmother and their compulsions that assist make them who they’re. That’s purpose sufficient to make it and purpose sufficient for us to take pleasure in it.