Image Courtesy of Common Ground Media

Earth's most valuable and under appreciated source of fertility.

The older I get, the more I enjoy cooking. A good dinner, well made and enjoyed with friends, has long since replaced the night of shouting over the band at the bar. But when you start getting finicky about food, you quickly realize the limitations of our modern kind of big agriculture. So after too many evenings of picking through often underwhelming and overpriced supermarket produce sections, our family finally signed on to be a partner in a local farm share program.

The difference, as you might guess, is immediate and incredible in its impact. Everything has a punch and heady freshness that I'd almost forgotten about—we can literally go from field to table in under an hour. (I had tried the farm share route back in those bar days, but never had the drive to really make a go of it, ending up most weeks with a crisper drawer filled with wilted greens.) It may not always be the easiest path—most of what we get now still has a healthy amount of dirt clinging to it—but it's easily the most delicious, and when I pass by those anemic imported vegetables today, I wonder how we got by before.

I was reminded of the importance of good soil by the arrival of Dirt! The Movie, which comes to Northampton this week for a free Friday night screening at the Media Education Foundation. And while my own soil appreciation was prompted by a local connection, Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow's film, narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis, reminds us that the fate of dirt—"Earth's most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility," according to the filmmakers—has global repercussions, and that everything from "floods, drought, climate change, even war are all directly related to the way we are treating dirt." The screening starts at 7 p.m., with a discussion to follow; for more details, visit northamptoncommittee.org.

Also this week: Pleasant Street Theater continues its run of Micmacs, the latest off-kilter confection from the fever-dream French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie, City of Lost Children). As visually inventive as any director working today, Jeunet creates worlds—here, a sprawling scrap yard where a fairytale circus of a family makes its home—that feel intoxicatingly real. They're filled with a joie de vivre that calls to mind the emotive acrobatics of Buster Keaton, and remind us that films needn't be dark and brooding things to carry the torch of art.

Jack Brown can be reached at cinemacope@gmail.com.