What I’m Seeing: Local theaters are full of intriguing options right now! I’m going with the movie of the moment Civil War at Cinemapolis because I enjoyed the first three films that Alex Garland directed and because national treasure Stephen McKinley Henderson is in it.
Also in Theaters: I hope to catch both Challengers, which is at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall, and The Beast, which is at Cinemapolis, before they leave Ithaca. Had I but world enough, and time, I’d see Monkey Man (the Regal) and Sasquatch Sunset in theaters as well, but it probably isn’t going to work out. Oh well. Following a lot of turnover on local screens, the best new movie in Ithaca that I’ve already seen is once again Dune: Part Two, which is at the Regal. Cornell Cinema is winding down their spring programming with Cléo from 5 to 7 on Monday, a free screening of Borders on Tuesday, and a Science on Screen event which includes a screening of Back to the Future and a lecture by Professor Eilyan Bitar on Wednesday. Your other best bets for repertory fare are Spirited Away, which is at the Regal in dubbed or subbed versions Saturday through Wednesday, and Alien, which opens at the Regal tomorrow and runs all week.
Home Video: The name of this blog refers to the fact that I took a roughly decade off from intensive movie watching between finishing graduate school in 2009 and the birth of my second child in 2018 to concentrate on my family and career. I’m sure I still saw more films than an average person during this time, but there were also a lot of prominent new releases that I completely missed. I finally caught up with one of them the other day after Jason Bailey noted in the New York Times that Whiplash is leaving Netflix on April 30. As you probably already know, it’s terrific! J.K. Simmons is a Best Supporting Actor of the Decade candidate for his performance as Terence Fletcher, I’ve been listening to the soundtrack nonstop on Spotify all week, and the final sequence is absolutely stunning. I think I like it best, though, for its treatment of art and sport as two sides of the same coin. Sport is the art of the body, and artists are competitors just as surely as athletes are–they just have different ways of keeping score. Whiplash is about how much we’re missing when we focus only on concerts and games and ignore the countless hour of practice and decision-making that preceded them: if we applaud the final performance without understanding what led up to it, who knows what kind of awful behavior we’re condoning? At the same time the only way to convincingly rebut Fletcher’s claim that his methods are necessary if we value greatness is with a thoughtful definition of what that word does and should mean.
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts canbe found here.
Also in Theaters: The best new film playing Ithaca this week that I’ve already seen is Aurora’s Sunrise, which screens for free at Cornell Cinema on Monday. I had the pleasure of catching this ingenious blend of original (partially rotoscoped) animation; interviews with Armenian genocide survivor Arshaluys Mardigian; and footage from Auction of Souls, a 1919 American silent film about her life in which she played herself, at last year’s Maine International Film Festival. I also recommend Dune: Part Two, which continues its run at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall. New movies I hope to get to before they close include Sasquatch Sunset, which is at Cinemapolis, and Civil War, which is there and at the Regal. Best International Feature Film Oscar nominee Io Capitano, which opens at Cinemapolis today, is supposed to be good as well, as are De Humani Corporis Fabrica and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, both of which play Cornell Cinema tonight. Your best bets for repertory fare are once again two films directed by Christopher Nolan: Interstellar, which is playing the Regal this afternoon, and Inception, which is there on Wednesday. Finally, there are free screenings at Cornell Cinema on Tuesday and Wednesday, of the movies Bad Press and In Search of My Sister respectively, and a showcase of short films presented by Bike Walk Tompkins is playing Cinemapolis on Sunday with tickets available on a sliding scale from $2-$10.
Home Video: I recently finished watching everything in the “Directed by Kinuyo Tanaka” collection on The Criterion Channel. The highlight for me is Forever a Woman, which I *thought* I saw nearly 25 years ago as a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh under the title The Eternal Breasts, but I must just have remembered that it was playing as part of a local film series because its best scenes are unforgettable. It stars Yumeji Tsukioka as a long-suffering wife and daughter based on Fumiko Nakajō who is trying to finally live for herself a little as a poet before she dies of cancer and is probably the most explicit treatment of what seems to me to be Tanaka’s main theme: contrasting feminine-coded artistic pursuits like poetry and flower arrangement as a way of finding meaning in life with masculine-coded vocations like politics and journalism that are obsessed with controlling people’s destinies.
This is complicated somewhat in her next-best film as a director, Girls of the Night, in that the reformatory that former prostitute Kuniko Sugimoto (Chisako Hara) graduates from is run by women. I strongly recommend watching this film back-to-back (maybe even as a double feature) with Tanaka’s impressively assured debut effort Love Letter because it feels like an explicit attempt by a now more established director to correct the latter’s distractingly censorious attitude toward women with the audacity to seek economic security and sexual pleasure in the arms of foreign soldiers. Love Letter also includes what may be Tanaka’s single best scene, an arresting finale which cuts back and forth between the two main characters (Yoshiko Kuga’s Michika and Masayuki Mori Reikichi) but ends before the two of them ever share the frame together again.
Tanaka’s first color film, the historical epic The Wandering Princess, has really started to grow on me. The middle portion is an inversion of Forever a Woman: instead of using poetry to make meaning out of an unhappy marriage, Machiko Kyô’s Hiro Saga channels her thwarted aspirations to become a painter into building a blissfully happy home even as the world goes up in flames around her. There are also a number of nice scenes involving flowers and trees. The remaining two entries in the series, The Moon Has Risen (which is based on a script by Yasujirô Ozu and Ryôsuke Saitô) and Love Under the Crucifix, have their moments as well. All of these movies deserve to be better known, so check them out!
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts canbe found here.
I don’t think I’ve ever made it to *February* 15 without filing my taxes, let alone Tax Day, but April is nonetheless a fine time to celebrate one of my all-time favorite movie props, the notebook in which J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee) aka “Snoodles” from The Palm Beach Story writes down all of his expenses:
In honor of the Ale and Quail Club that he and Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) encounter on their way to Florida, this month’s drink is my favorite beer cocktail, the Campari & IPA Spritzer. I know about this elegantly simple concoction thanks to Anjali Prasertong from The Kitchn. She, in turn, spotted it in a 2011 New York Times article called “Summer Cocktails Made Simpler” in which author Robert Willey attributes it to Tucson bartender Cieran Wiese. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law Simon pointed out on Instagram that the cult favorite summer sipper the NASCAR Spritz follows the same formula. I suppose one of the lessons here is that the provenance of a highball is always going to be murky! Another is that the specific ingredients you choose count for a lot when there are only two (or three of you include the garnish) total, and to me this is the perfect showcase for my original favorite beer, Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA, which emerged as a star of the American craft brewing scene right as I came of drinking age. Here’s how you make it:
Add Campari to a chilled glass containing two or three ice cubs. Slowly pour in the beer and gently stir a few times to combine. Garnish with a lemon slice.
You don’t want just any IPA here–you need something with a lot of character to stand up to the Campari. You’re also looking for citrus, but not too much. Enter 90 Minute IPA, which is malty and piney and delicious on its own, but even better with a boost of sweetness and texture. While this definitely is a refreshing beverage, the high ABV and strong flavors will keep you warm when a cool breeze blows, which makes it perfect as a way to unwind after work on a spring evening or for a rainy night like the one Hackensacker and Gerry travel south on.
The seeds for that fateful train journey are planted years earlier. The Palm Beach Story begins with one of cinema’s great opening credits sequences, a silent retelling of the frantic hours leading up to Gerry’s marriage to Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea), who may or may not be the man she intended to wed. You see, although it concludes with the two of them about to exchange vows:
They both had to beat a doppelgänger to the church. Gerry accomplishes this by locking hers in a closet:
While Tom (dark tie) and his best man (no mustache) may just have had better luck with cabs than their counterparts (light tie, no mustache):
As Lisa Sternlieb writes in her American Shakespeare article “He Isn’t Exactly My Brother”: Shakespearean Illogic in The Palm Beach Story,” when these identical twins reappear at the end of the film following Tom’s comment “that was another plot entirely,” we are meant to suspect that he’s referring to the idea that “the Claudette Colbert who is gagged and locked in a closet has wanted to marry the Joel McCrea who marries her sister while the Joel McCrea who doesn’t make it to the church on time has wanted to marry the Claudette Colbert who marries his brother.” So who knows if Tom and Gerry (yes, like the cartoon cat and mouse) intended to marry each other at all? Given these uncertain beginnings, it’s hardly a surprise that the shot of the two of them is followed by title cards that say “and they lived happily ever after . . . or did they?”
These are followed additional titles in the same font which establish the year of the main action as 1942, five years after the wedding we just witnessed, and two dissolves to first a sign advertising an apartment for rent, and then a group of people getting off an elevator:
One of them is an old man played by Robert Dudley who, seemingly detecting that the apartment isn’t empty, uses what Stuart Klawans calls “his dog’s senses” in Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges “to track the female presence he picks up”:
When she finally confronts him, he reveals that he’s the inventor of the Texas wienie (“lay off ’em, you’ll live longer”) and thus in possession of a bankroll that Preston Sturges’s screenplay (as published in Four More Screenplays by Preston Sturges) describes as big enough “to choke a crocodile”:
He gives her enough money to take care of all her debts because it makes him feel young again “to do a little favor for such a beautiful lady.” She can’t wait to tell Tom the good news, but he fails to appreciate it as such: “I mean, sex didn’t even enter into it,” he says sarcastically, to which Gerry replies, “but of course it did, darling!” And then, “sex always has something to do with it. From about the time you’re about so big . . . “
” . . . and wondering why your girl friends’ fathers are getting so arch all of a sudden.” She is, of course, talking about The Look: “you know, ‘how’s about this evening, babe?'”
Their night eventually ends as all nights should with a boozy dinner and lovemaking, but she wakes up the next morning determined to capitalize on her youth and good lucks while they still last to secure a more comfortable future her herself and her husband. After a bit of business with a round pivot window that Chevy Chase and National Lampoons’s Christmas Vacation (the subject of my December, 2023 Drink & a Movie post) director Jeremiah S. Chechik were presumably familiar with:
Gerry’s off to Palm Beach to secure a divorce courtesy the wealthy members of the Ale and Quail club, who, given enough “subtle” hints, would never leave a lady stranded. One of them is even chivalrous enough to loan her the pajamas that inspired this month’s drink photo:
Here they are serenading her with “Sweet Adelaide” later that evening:
Then engaging in some harmless indoor trap shooting:
And finally, their sexual hopes frustrated, turning into what Klawans calls “a parody of a lynch mob”:
This sequence, which Alessandro Pirolini aptly describes in The Cinema of Preston Sturges: A Critical Study as being “as narratively useless as it is visually exhilarating,” ends with the conductor of the train cutting the Club’s private car (and all of Gerry’s clothes) loose:
Luckily, by this time Gerry has already met cute Hackensacker, a thinly-veiled caricature of John D. Rockefeller III, by crushing his pince-nez glasses while attempting to climb into the sleeping car bunk above his:
“Just pick off any little pieces you see, will you?” he says, ever the good sport. It’s at breakfast the following morning when we meet his notebook. Having turned her borrowed pajamas and a Pullman blanket into an almost presentable ensemble, she finds him in the dining car pouring over the menu.
“The thirty-five cent breakfast seems the best at first glance, but if you analyze it for solid value, the fifty-five center is the one.” They eventually settle on one seventy-five cent breakfast each with a la cart prairie oysters to start–“make mine on the half-shell,” he instructs the waiter.
While they wait for their food, he proposes that they get off the train in Jacksonville to buy her “the few little things” she needs, then proceed the rest of the way to Palm Beach (where he is going as well) by boat. Hackensacker dutifully records each purchase in his book:
Including a piece of jewelry that the screenplay describes as “a ruby bracelet and then some”:
The dissonance between Hackensacker’s profligacy and scrupulousness understandably makes Gerry nervous. “I keep feeling that two men with butterfly nets are going to creep up behind you and lead you away,” she worries. The revelation that he’s actually the richest man in the world is followed by a punchline which hits close to home for someone like me who can’t ever quite manage to stick to a budget: “I write things down, but I never add them up.”
Meanwhile, following his own encounter with the old man who Manny Farber described (in a New Republic essay included in Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber) as possessing “the quality of a disembodied spirit, believably a pixie–or ‘The Wienie King,'” Tom is en route to Palm Beach himself via plane to intercept Gerry. The “enchanted figures who continually grant Tom and Gerry’s spoken and unspoken wishes” are just one of the ways that, per Sternlieb, “The Palm Beach Story intricately engages with the mechanics and actively opposes the logic of Shakespearean comedy, particularly its obsession with transformation and metamorphosis.” Gerry and Hackensacker meet Hackensacker’s sister, Mary Astor’s Princess Centimillia (an underrated Sturges name!) aka Maud and her hanger-on Toto (Sig Arno), and Tom is waiting on shore as all of them disembark. Gerry introduces Tom as her brother, prompting more than one person to comment on their supposed familial resemblance. To again quote Sternlieb:
In order to love Shakespeare’s comedies, we must continually suspend our disbelief so that we can fully appreciate boys dressed as girls dressed as boys or love at first sight or soliloquies that can’t be overheard on stage, but Sturges asks the opposite of us. He asks us to notice that people are always willing to believe anything, always eager to create their own reality, always ready to form opinions of us based on nothing at all. He asks us to notice that most of us are living in Cloud Cuckoo Land, and in Cloud Cuckoo Land people will always see what isn’t there. When Gerry introduces the Hackensackers to her ‘brother’, first Maud then Snoodles exclaims, ‘You look exactly alike’. We are constantly performing or being asked to perform to meet others’ uninformed expectations, but what a relief when we can finally be ourselves.
From here it’s not long before we’re basically right back where we started. The Princess wants to make Tom her eighth husband (“I’m thinking of an American–at the moment, it seems more patriotic”), but he has eyes only for Gerry, who Hackensacker attempts to seduce by singing to her outside her window:
Unfortunately for him, it just drives Gerry back into Tom’s arms:
They come clean about their true relationship the next morning. “I don’t suppose you have a twin sister. . . . ” Hackensacker says mournfully to Gerry, but of course she does! And Tom has a twin brother. Cut to all of them (and Toto, in a nice touch) at the alter:
The shot which follows is deceptively advanced for its era, as discussed by VFX artists The Corridor Crew starting at the 10:26 mark of this video–there’s a fairly straightforward duplicated shot (you can see the seem easily here because part of Rudy Vallee’s shadow is missing), but the camera is moving in a way that would have been difficult to coordinate with 1940s technology. Anyway, neither Gerry’s sibling nor Tom’s looks particularly happy to be here:
And as the camera tracks back, The Palm Beach Story ends with the same two title cards that set its plot in motion:
‘Round and ’round and ’round we go! Sturges originally wanted to call the film Is Marriage Necessary? That title didn’t survive the Hayes Office, but the sentiment did surely did. His cynicism, like the bitterness in a Campari & IPA Spritzer, goes down easy, though. So hit play again, why don’t you, and pour yourself another! It’s good for what ails you.
Cheers!
All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife.Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.
What I’m Seeing This Week: We’ll be out of town for the next five days, but my loving wife and I are going to take advantage of the fact that we’re staying with willing babysitters to see Stalker at The Screening Room in Kingston, Ontario tonight.
Also in Theaters: The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival kicks off in earnest tomorrow with two screenings at Cinemapolis, where all remaining events will take place. Highlights include three films which made a splash on the festival circuit last year: Green Border, winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Viennale, on Saturday; Last Things and Youth (Spring)on Monday; and Pictures of Ghosts, which is directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose last feature Bacurau was the topic of my May, 2023 Drink & a Movie blog post, on Tuesday. You can find reviews of all of them by searching my Film Blogs, Etc. 2.0 CSE by title. The best new film now playing locally that I’ve already seen remains Dune: Part Two, which is at both Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall. Wicked Little Letters, which my loving wife wants to see, opens at the same two theaters tonight. Anything with both Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley in it is an easy sell for me, so we might have to make plans for another date night soon! I’m intrigued by two action movies at the Regal: Monkey Man, which is directed by one of my favorite actors, Dev Patel, and the Liam Neeson vehicle In the Land of Saints and Sinners. Critics seem to like both! Cornell Cinema returns from Spring Break with free screenings of the Burkinabé film Borders on Tuesday and A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings on Wednesday. The latter will be followed by a Q&A with director Aviva Kempner and Cornell professor Elliot Shapiro. Otherwise, your best bets for repertory fare are a trio of films playing the Regal: Gone with the Wind on Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday; The Matrix tonight; and The Dark Knight on Wednesday.
Home Video: As mentioned previously on this blog, I was troubled by this year’s Oscar winner for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound The Zone of Interest. While that remains the case, I feel like I have more appreciation for what it is *trying* to do after finally seeing The Act of Killing, which it references in a key moment that I now understand clarifies that Christian Friedel’s Rudolf Höss knows that he is a monster. This is important because I don’t think “living next to Auschwitz” is a terribly useful metaphor. The Act of Killing and its companion film The Look of Silence delve deep into the psychology of killers like Höss (in this case the leaders of gangs that murdered hundreds of thousands of so-called “communists” in Indonesia in the 60s) by way of depicting in harrowing detail not just the sky-high cost of resisting them in the moment, but also the Sisyphean task of holding them accountable afterward should they emerge victorious. This is, to me, a far more potent “there but for the grace of God” than the fear we might one day be judged by history and/or our maker to have been “good Nazis” because it doesn’t let us off the hook so easily—we can’t just say not me, I attended a protest/changed my profile picture to a flag/cast a protest vote against Joe Biden/whatever. Anyway, these movies would be a mortal lock for any Best Films of the Millennium list I might be moved to create, so: highest possible recommendation! The Act of Killing is now streaming on Peacock, The Look of Silence is available on Prime Video, and current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students have access to both via Academic Video Online.
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts canbe found here.
Last January I described eight reasons I read film criticism. I thought about this post the other day after I checked Letterboxd (which I am now finally using, obviously) to see if anyone I follow had logged The Seen and Unseen and was delighted to find a review by Michael Sincinski. But why did that make me so happy? And which of my categories did this fit into? The closest fit would seem to be #2 “to check my own impressions of a film I just watched against that of the critical community” because of my timing, but I wasn’t motivated by fear of missing something. I definitely do enjoy Sicinski’s writing, but #7 “for pleasure” didn’t seem quite right either. All of a sudden the movie The Eight Mountains popped into my head. It’s about climbing mountains in the Italian Alps, among other things, and documents a ritual whereby climbers leave messages for those who will follow in notebooks buried at the summit of each peak before beginning their descent:
In the film this facilitates intergenerational communication between the man pictured in the screengrabs above, Luca Marinelli’s Pietro Guasti, and his late father Giovanni (Filippo Timi), who he had ceased speaking to years before he died, as do the maps that the latter used to record where he had gone:
Movies, like food, are for me very consciously a substitute for travel. I can’t afford to pop off to Turin on a whim, but I can watch a movie shot there or pick up a bottle of Barolo pretty much any time I like and learn something about the region that way. I also think of cinema as a terrain to explore in its own right. Film criticism is like the lines on Giovanni’s map: it says, “this place is worth going to!” It’s also like the messages in the notebooks he and Pietro find on their climbs: “I passed this way, too, and here is what I saw.” Which is to say that that engaging with it doesn’t always have to have a deliberate purpose–sometimes you follow a trail just to see where it leads and then you read whatever you find at the end of the road because it’s there.
Also in Theaters: The 2024 edition Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, which has the theme “turbulence,” kicks off on Monday with an online new media exhibition. More on this next week after the movies get started! You’ve got one last chance to see the dubbed version of The Boy and the Heron with “bonus content” at the Regal Ithaca Mall tonight; otherwise Dune: Part Two, which is at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, remains the best new film now playing locally that I’ve seen, but depending on what else you’re into I might recommend Love Lies Bleeding, which is at Cinemapolis, instead. There are two free screenings at Cornell Cinema tonight which feature conversations with the filmmakers afterward, first Jole Dobe Na / Those Who Do Not Drown at 4:45pm and then The Art of Un-War at 7:30. Three films that garnered attention (some positive, some negative) on the festival circuit last year open at the Regal tonight: They Shot the Piano Player; Asphalt City (which premiered at Cannes with the title Black Flies), and Late Night with the Devil. Your best bets for repertory fare are Chinatown, which is at the Regal tonight; Dogtooth, which is at Cornell Cinema tomorrow; and The Matrix, which has a 25th anniversary screening at the Regal on Wednesday.
Home Video: One of my favorite things about The Criterion Channel is the wealth of short films available on it. Whenever I’m not pressed for time, I like to watch one before each feature I view at home. Many of them are grouped into collections, and I recently worked my way through everything in the “Animated Shorts” program. Three titles won’t be available after March 31 and are absolutely worth checking out before they leave. Spook Sport is directed by Mary Ellen Bute, whose Synchromy No. 4: Escape made a huge impression on me when I saw it at last year’s Nitrate Picture Show, and features direct animation by the OG Norman McLaren. Papageno is silhouette animation set to Mozart’s The Magic Flute directed by another giant of cinema, Lotte Reiniger, which has terrific backgrounds that lend outstanding depth to her compositions. Finally, A Night on Bald Mountain is a pioneering pinscreen animation by the technique’s inventors Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker which has many affinities with Movie Year 2023’s Godland (also on The Criterion Channel), including black and white living and dead horses, an erupting volcano, and the theme of civilization vs. nature. Additional highlights include Les Escargots, a tale of giant snails that my kids loved, and Something to Remember, a melancholy snapshot of a society of animals on the verge of collapse remarkably made in 2019 when, you know, HUMAN society was teetering on the brink. The pick of the litter, though, is the utterly charming Cockaboody, which recreates one of the great privileges and pleasures of parenthood: overhearing snippets of imaginative play.
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts canbe found here.
What I’m Seeing This Week: Lots of possibilities, but I think I’m going with Hundreds of Beavers at Cinemapolis unless I audible to Problemista, which is playing there as well.
Also in Theaters: Deserving Best Animated Feature Oscar winner The Boy and the Heron is back at the Regal Ithaca Mall in dubbed and subtitled versions, both with “bonus content.” The next best new movie that I’ve already seen is the satisfyingly epic Dune: Part Two, which is there and at Cinemapolis. Love Lies Bleeding is at both of these theaters as well, and if you saw its trailer and thought “that’s my kind of movie,” you won’t be disappointed–it’s absolutely bonkers! The “immersive feature documentary and profound sensory experience” 32 Sounds that I mentioned last week is back at Cornell Cinema on Saturday and Sunday. If none of that sounds good, there are quite a few choice repertory options this week, including a 50th anniversary screening of Chinatown at the Regal on Wednesday, a screening of Wings of Desire at Cinemapolis that same night co-sponsored by Buffalo Street Books as part of their “Stories to Explore” series, and a screening of Babette’s Feast at Cornell Cinema on Tuesday which is accompanied by lectures on the “science of taste” and a “special tasting.”
Home Video: In my “Top Ten Movies of 2023” post earlier this month I mentioned that I had not yet seen John Wick: Chapter Four because my loving wife and I were saving it for a movie marathon. That day came sooner rather than later when Jason Bailey of the New York Times alerted us to the fact that the first three films leave Netflix on March 30. Long story short, we enjoyed them all immensely! As someone who can’t watch high-rise collapse in an action movie without thinking of all the people who live in it who might not have renter’s insurance, I appreciate the fact that there is astonishingly little collateral damage in these films. I counted a handful of parked cars that will need some body work and any number of buildings end up with bullet holes in them, but civilians are conspicuously absent from most of the major fight sequences, which tend to take place in spaces that are coded as either abandoned or belonging to the bad guys. And my goodness, what a riot of color, grace, and inventiveness they are! My favorite installments in the saga are the original John Wick, which takes its sweet time coming to a simmer, and the last, which spends nearly its entire 170 minute runtime at full boil. I believe these will be regarded as classic movies of our era and I look forward to watching them again in a few years, at which time I might even dare to try to say something original about why.
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts canbe found here.
Also in Theaters: There’s a ton of interesting stuff at Cornell Cinema this week! The highlight for me is probably a visit from experimental filmmaker Christopher Harris with his works Reckless Eyeballing, Distant Shores, and Still/Here tomorrow or the screening of the “immersive feature documentary and profound sensory experience” 32 Soundson Saturday. Only 100 tickets are available to the latter so that every member of the audience can be given their own set of headphones. Two movies that appeared on plenty of top ten lists last year, How to Have Sex and Monster, are also there tonight and this weekend. Unfortunately, *none* of these showtimes work with my schedule! Oh well. The best new film that I’ve already seen remains The Taste of Things, which is at Cinemapolis, for at least one more week. The two biggest winners at this year’s Oscars, Oppenheimerand Poor Things, are back at the Regal. Finally, my top repertory recommendation is The Secret of Kells, which is at Cornell Cinema on Sunday afternoon.
Home Video: After all the controversy that Saltburn generated last year and with Swimming Home garnering attention on the festival circuit, I though it was high time that I finally watched Teorema, which both movies have been compared to. As a film almost entirely constructed out of captivating screen presences (including most notably Terence Stamp, Anne Wiazemsky, and Silvana Mangano) being captivating, it’s absolutely worth seeing. I’m not entirely convinced that it achieves all that it appears to aspire to in the realms of philosophy or theology, but at worst it may just be the definitive cinematic text on the phenomenon of the quarter/midlife crisis. It also features an intriguing sepia-toned silent introduction to the main action, Ninetto Davoli as a spirited herald-mailman, and a naked and epically hairy Massimo Girotti stumbling through an ashen Mount Etna landscape. Teorema is now streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts canbe found here.
My loving wife is a proud graduate of Duke University, so the Tobacco Road recipe by Joe Bolam of Char Steak and Lounge in nearby Rochester, New York in the booklet which came with my new bottle of Fee Brothers Turkish Tobacco Bitters immediately caught my eye. When it turned out to taste like something these guys would love:
I knew I had my drink and a movie pairing for March! They are all panelists on the television program The Sports Writers on TV, and the person they are talking about is William Gates, who along with Arthur Agee is one of the two main subjects of the documentary Hoop Dreams. The sport they both play is basketball, which our household becomes fairly obsessed with each year at this time as the Atlantic Coast Conference (I’m a Pitt grad) regular season wraps up and we head into the postseason. Here’s how to make this month’s cocktail:
Stir all of the ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled glass.
The Tobacco Road is a rich drink thanks to the Carpano Antica and Heering, so we left it ungarnished, but as a Black Manhattan variation, a Maraschino cherry would not be out of place. It has a lot of fruit on the nose, chocolate and coffee on the sip, and an almost sherry-like finish which suggests that it would go great with a cigar like the one Bill Gleason is smoking above in the image on the right.
On to Hoop Dreams! Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD release:
It can also be streamed on a wide range of platforms, including both The Criterion Channel and Max with a subscription, and some people may have access to it via Kanopy through a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.
Hoop Dreams is a longitudinal documentary which follows Agee and Gates over a five-year period which begins with them being discovered on the streetball courts of inner city Chicago and recruited by St. Joseph, an elite prep school in the suburbs, and ends shortly after the conclusion of their respective high school basketball careers. At the start of the film, Gates is ascendant: the excerpts from The Sports Writers on TV that I began this post with are from the “Freshman Year” section of Hoop Dreams and in them Bill Gleason compares him to Hall of Fame point guard Isiah Thomas. Agee, on the other hand, is kicked out of St. Joseph his sophomore year after his family falls behind on their tuition payments. Gates suffers two major knee injuries during his junior year, though, and is therefore never able to lead St. Joseph to the promised land of the Illinois state championship tournament while Agee blossoms as an upperclassman and leads Marshall Metro High School on a Cinderella run to the semi-finals of the same event. The movie concludes with end titles indicating that both players are now seniors in college playing for Marquette and Arkansas State respectively, but noting that Gates has grown disillusioned with basketball.
Agee and Gates represent the millions of youth athletes in the United States fighting for a shot to become one of the roughly 500 professionals who appear in an NBA game each season. Competition is part of the film’s DNA, so it’s understandable that for many critics it’s of paramount importance to determine who its “winner” is. To bell hooks, writing in Sight & Sound in 1995, “the triumphant individual in the film is (the young) Arthur Agee, who remains obsessed with the game” while Gates “is portrayed as a victim” despite the fact that (or because) he “learns to critique the ethic of competition that he has been socialised to accept passively within white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” Kimberly Chabot Davis argues against this interpretation in a South Atlantic Review article called “White Filmmakers and Minority Subjects: Cinema Vérité and the Politics of Irony in Hoop Dreams and Paris Is Burning“:
Hooks sees William Gates as the loser of the film because he eventually decides to reject the basketball dream, and she is upset that “his longing to be a good parent, to not be obsessed with basketball, is not represented [by the filmmakers] as a positive shift in his thinking,” whereas Arthur Agee, who never questions the dream, is represented as ‘the triumphant individual.’ In direct opposition to hooks’s reading, I came out of the film thinking that the filmmakers indirectly criticize Arthur Agee’s blind pursuit of the NBA dream and attempt to portray William Gates as the real winner because he learns that education and family responsibility are “truer” measures of success.
Comments made by filmmakers Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert in the short documentary Life After Hoop Dreams included on the Criterion Collection DVD as an extra suggest that the latter may track more closely to their actual feelings, but the genius of the film is that it supports both readings. As John Edgar Wiseman notes in his essay “Serious Game,” its final cut “seems not based on assumptions the filmmakers formed before they encountered the actual lives of their subjects but a story that evolved naturally as footage accumulated.” While Hoop Dreams doesn’t insist on a moral, it definitely does have a point of view. Take, for instance, the transition between its first two sections. “Freshman Year” ends after St. Joseph’s varsity team is eliminated from the playoffs with voiceover narration by James that says, “despite the loss, William’s gutty performance bodes well for next year.”
“Sophomore Year” then begins with him in class:
James notes that he and Agee are both on partial scholarships which aren’t big enough to cover a recent tuition increase. Cut to Patricia Wier, President of Encyclopedia Britannica explaining how in response to a solicitation by St. Joseph she and her husband decided to sponsor a student, who turned out to be Gates. There’s a shot of Wier and husband in the stands watching a game:
Followed by one of them introducing Gates to their friends:
James’s narration explains that “with continuing support from Patricia Wier, William is assured that his entire education at St. Joe’s will be free.” This is immediately succeeded by a series of interviews with Agee, his mother, and St. Joseph basketball coach Gene Pingatore describing the chain of events that led to Agee being dismissed from the school. “I thought Pingatore and them would help me out, but. . . . ” Agee says, shaking his head:
Pingatore, Agee, and Agee’s mother then all speak in turn: Pingatore defends the school’s decision on the grounds that St. Joseph is dependent on tuition dollars to function, Agee speculates that Pingatore was concerned about his height, and Agee’s mother states that she never would have enrolled her son at St. Joseph in the first place if she had known he might experience the anguish of being forced to change schools in the middle of the year. The scene ends with a four-shot montage sequence: it begins with empty desks and a row of padlocks:
Followed by a statue of Saint Joseph himself:
And then a shot of a sort of shrine to Isiah Thomas, who attended St. Joseph, in the school’s lobby which is shown multiple times throughout the movie:
Whatever the filmmakers think of Agee’s and Gate’s choices and values, they clearly don’t believe that St. Joseph has treated the two boys equally and have a theory why not. Another thing I like about Hoop Dreams is the way it utilizes repetition effectively. Robert Greene discusses one great example in his essay “The Real Thing.” A one-on-one game between Agee and his father which takes place at the beginning of the film:
Is echoed by second near the end which, because of everything that has happened in between, “has the cadence and expressive power of an epic showdown.”
Another is the way the filmmakers leverage a recurring establishing shot of the Agee’s apartment at night with its lights on to efficiently communicate that their power has been turned off:
Speaking of efficient, James’s narration does a marvelous job of concisely telling the story of important basketball games, such as this one in which Agee and his teammates force a taller but slower opponent out of its comfort zone by holding the ball late into the shot clock:
And I love the way the film lets us into spaces we may never otherwise get to see such as a D1 recruiting visit:
And a nurse’s assistant graduation:
I was surprised to find that what I appreciated most after recently spending time with Criterion Collection edition of this film, though, were the commentary tracks. The one featuring Agee and Gates comes closer to being “essential” than any other I’ve ever listened to: anyone willing to spend nearly three hours of your life watching Hoop Dreams absolutely will want to hear what its subjects have to say! The commentary track with James, Marx, and Gilbert is full of insights as well and the two sometimes work in tandem to show parts of the movie in a new light. To go back to St. Joseph’s treatment of Agee, both groups believe that school didn’t just treat him unfairly, but in fact acted contrary to its own best interests. The former players observe that it was a bad basketball decision:
ARTHUR: But they was just, like, “I guess we got room for one guy. And this one guy is gonna take us down state, like, we’re gonna put everything in him. We don’t need another guy that HE needs.” And they didn’t know that William needed me to take that pressure off of him.
WILLIAM: I mean, if there was somebody that understood me at St. Joe’s, it was Arthur. Because at that particular point I really felt like the only person who could have understood me out there was him. And I felt like not only did I lose a best friend at the time, I felt like a part of me was gone.
While the filmmakers express bewilderment that St. Joseph could be so un-PR-conscious to kick Arthur out of school knowing that he was the subject of a movie. At other times, illumination comes from the distance between the commenters’ different experiences of the same event such as when James and company lament not being told earlier that Gates had a daughter with his girlfriend, while he says this can’t possibly be true because the St. Joseph school newspaper ran a story about it. They also both note that Pingatore changed after the film but have different explanations for why: Agee and Gates think it’s because he learned from watching himself on screen and began yelling less and giving his players more freedom, whereas the filmmakers ascribe his more relaxed demeanor to finally winning a state championship in 1999, not anything to do with Hoop Dreams.
Mostly, though, it’s amazing to just listen to Agee and Gates relive pivotal moments in their lives like the two free throws that Gates misses at the end of his junior year which lead directly to a St. Joseph loss in the playoffs.
He explains that he heard his cartilage tear earlier and therefore didn’t want the ball at the end of the game. As Gates watches himself go to the line, he observes that he shot 100% from the line in the games leading up to this one and that “all of these games are high-pressure games. None of them are more high-pressure than the others.” To him, the reason he missed those two shots was simple: he couldn’t bend his knees and never should have let himself be inserted back into the game. “People think I’m disappointed because I missed the free throws,” had adds. “No, I’m disappointed because I wasn’t honest with myself or my teammates. I let my team down that year.”
If you do watch the film, both commentary tracks, and Life After Hoop Dreams, you will have spent more than 12 hours with Agee and Gates by the time you finish. The cumulative effect is that of revisiting your own sports memories, the way we Horbals like to break out our video recording of my little brother’s 4×800 relay team winning a Pennsylvania state track title in 2005. And that, I think, is the real achievement of the Criterion Collection’s presentation of Hoop Dreams: it makes these two young men and everyone in their lives seem like family.
Cheers!
All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife.Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 