Previous “I’ve Got Poetry In Me” posts can be found here.
I’ve Got Poetry In Me #8: Beau Travail
Juxtaposition #30
From Filipiñana:
From “Just Lather, That’s All” by Hernando Téllez in Contemporary Latin American Short Stories (Ed. Pat McNees Mancini):
Murderer or hero? My destiny depends on the edge of this blade. I can turn my hand a bit more press a little harder on the razor, and sink it in. The skin would give way like silk, like rubber. There is nothing more tender than human skin and the blood is always there, ready to pour forth.
But I don’t want to be a murderer. You came to me for a shave. And I perform my work honorably . . . I don’t want blood on my hands. Just lather, that’s all. You are an executioner and I am only a barber. Each person has his own place in the scheme of things.
Previous “Juxtaposition” posts can be found here.
Ithaca Film Journal: 10/8/26
In Theaters: I audibled away from The History of Concrete last week, so seeing it at Cinemapolis remains my top priority. I’m also planning to catch NAZA there, and Primetime there or at the Regal Ithaca Mall.
My favorite holdover is the much-maligned (but also, in other corners, passionately defended) Digger, which continues its run at the same two theaters and which, for reasons I can’t explain without risking “spoilers,” dovetails perfectly with the blog post I’m currently writing about the 28 Years Later movies, Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, this Substack post by Cass Sunstein, and personal responsibility in an age of perpetual political crisis. I look forward to revisiting the film after I finish getting my thoughts in order, so: stay tuned! I also enjoyed Filipiñana, which is at Cinemapolis on Sunday.
Additional new releases that I’m interested in, but don’t currently have time for, include the documentary Barbara Forever, which plays Cornell Cinema tonight; Verity, which continues its run at the Regal; and The Social Reckoning, which is opening there and at Cinemapolis.
Special events include three more free Cine con Cultura screenings at Cinemapolis and Ithaca College. Finally, repertory highlights include Terminator 2: Judgment Day at Cornell Cinema tonight, Stalker there tomorrow, The Thing at the Regal on Monday, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at Cinemapolis on Wednesday.
Home Video Recommendation: Longtime readers know that one of my passions is identifying movies that would make for killer double features, and the other day I came up with a great one after finally watching West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty! As I said on Letterboxd:
This would make an excellent double feature with Quatermass and the Pit, which features an excavated (space) ship that reawakens modern London’s latent hive mind. Here director Med Hondo builds a slaver in an abandoned French factory to remind us that our base instincts are responsible for much of the wealth Western Europe enjoys to this day. I love how you can see his colonizer characters’ breath in many scenes, which literalizes how they’re full of hot air.
West Indies is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel with a subscription and is also available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, and Quatermass is available on Blu-ray from Shout! Factory.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
Juxtaposition #29
Ithaca Film Journal: 10/1/26
In Theaters: Happy Birthday Cinemapolis! Our local arthouse movie theater is celebrating its 40th with a Free Movie Day on Saturday that includes a screening of a 1916 version of Snow White accompanied by harpist-composer Leslie McMichael and violist Barbara McMichael to kick off the Wharton Studio Museum’s annual Silent Movie Month. That would also be an excellent time to check out 2026 films The History of Concrete, which I’m hearing great things about, and Digger, which I’m not, but am going to see anyway. I didn’t make it to Resident Evil last week, so that’s on my list as well. It and Digger are also at the Regal Ithaca Mall.
The other new release I’m making time for is Levitating, which plays Cornell Cinema Saturday evening. I have varying degrees of interest in If I Go Will They Miss Me (Cinemapolis), Primetime (Cinemapolis and the Regal), and Verity (Regal) as well, but they’ll have to wait. My favorite holdover, meanwhile, is once again The Odyssey.
Special events include two more free Silent Movie Month screenings of Out Here at Cinemapolis and The Great K&A Train Robbery at the Cayuga Museum of History and Art‘s Carriage House Theatre on Sunday and Wednesday respectively; a bunch of free Cine con Cultura 2026 screenings at Cinemapolis and Cornell Cinema throughout the week; the return of CatVideoFest to Cornell Cinema this weekend; and a free program of short films from Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine at Cornell Cinema on Tuesday called “Poetics of Life and Death.” Finally, noteworthy repertory options include The Shining at the Regal on Friday, Stalker at Cornell Cinema on Sunday, and House at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.
Home Video Recommendation: Speaking of silent movies, although the Criterion Collection’s Eclipse Series box set Silent Naruse is out of print, you can still (and should!) watch the five films it includes on the Criterion Channel with a subscription. Apart from You and No Blood Relation contain exuberant tracking shots which, as I noted on Letterboxd, struck me as “another link in the chain between the ‘unchained camera’ of F.W. Murnau and Karl Freund and the Guru Dutt/V.K. Murthy collaborations Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool” that “represent for me the pinnacle of expressive cinematography.” But if you only have time for one movie, my recommendation is Flunky, Work Hard! Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd:
Wife! Be Like a Rose! was THE discovery of last year’s Nitrate Picture Show for me, and while this fellow noun-imperative work by director Mikio Naruse isn’t quite on the same level, it also more than earns its exclamation point with a dazzling display of technique and seamless shift in tone. Highlights include a wife nearly sweeping out the (toy) baby and a picture of the husband she’s mad at with the dustbin, two insurance salesmen endangering a whole neighborhood of children in their distracted zeal to make a sale, and a montage featuring every (visual) trick in the 1931 edition of the book to represent a man’s reeling reaction to an unthinkable tragedy. Watched with my kids coincidentally just minutes after I lectured them about lashing out at each other, which was convenient.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
Juxtaposition #28
From Mare’s Nest:
MOON: Why are you in the middle of the road? Let me tell you why you’re in the middle of the road. Once, a long, long time ago, there was a tiny molecule riding the surface of the sea.
Our molecule was thrown about. The water was rough, and it had to adapt or break. But then a storm came up, and our molecule was struck by lightning. This charged it with a strange energy. This was the origin of life, or Ool.
So there was our molecule in the sea. Our sea was soupy, warm and dense, with a bloom of oily bubbles in the crest of the waves. Our molecule sealed itself inside one of these bubbles, and that was the first body.
From The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe:
The whole world was coming to pieces molecule by molecule now and swimming like grease bubbles in a cup of coffee, disappearing into the intergalactic ooze and gasses all around–including his own body. He lost his skin, his skeleton, his pulmonary veins–sneaking out into the ooze like eels, they are, reeking phosphorus, his neural ganglia–unraveling like hot worms and wiggling down the galactic drain, his whole substance dissolving into gaseous nothingness until finally he was down to one cell. One human cell: his; that was all that was left of the entire known world, and if he lost control of that one cell, there would be nothing left. The world would be, like, over. He has to rebuild himself and the entire world from that one cell with a gigantic act of will–too overwhelming. Where does a man start? With California Route 1 so he can get out of here in his car? or will it turn out to be merely the filthy Rue Ventru with the Bastille mobs waiting? or start with the car? the differential? how do they make the bastards? or the beach? all those freaking grains of sand? the marsh grass? the tourist cabins? got to put every blue door back? or the ocean? or leave it dry? save making all those filthy blind bathosphere black animals down there . . . or the sky? how far does it go? the Big Dipper? the Ursa Minor? the Delphinium? suppose it is really infinite concentric spheres of crystal making infinite gelatinous submarinal vibrations? the Dead? the Pranksters? Kesey, Kesey’s out for good, Kesey and the bathosphere brutes–but with a superheroic effort he begins. But by the time he gets himself remade, it is too much. It is overwhelming. He makes his car. He makes the parking lot and the beginning of the road out. He’ll make the rest of it as he goes along. Freak it! Split! Leave the rest of the known world to its own devices, out in the gasses. He jumped into the car and gunned off; and smashed it into a tree. A tree he hadn’t even put back yet. But the crash somehow pops the whole world back. There it is; back from the fat-bubbling ooze. The car is smashed, but he has survived. Survived!
Previous “Juxtaposition” posts can be found here.
Ithaca Film Journal: 9/24/26
In Theaters: I decided to wait on American Doctor a bit when Cinemapolis announced that they were holding it over for another week, so that remains my top new movie priority. Cornell Cinema Director Molly Ryan singled out Filipiñana and Levitating when I interviewed her earlier this month, so I’m excited to see the former there on Saturday; I’m going to wait on the latter, which screens this Sunday, until it returns on October 2. We’re also taking the whole family to the Regal Ithaca Mall for Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom this weekend, and I’m going to catch Resident Evil there or at Cinemapolis later in the week. Other new releases I’m interested in, but unfortunately don’t have time for, include If I Go Will They Miss Me, which opens at Cinemapolis tomorrow, and Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, which is there and at the Regal all week.
Of the stuff I’ve already seen, my favorite is The Odyssey, which continues its impressively long run at the Regal. I also enjoyed Spider-Man: Brand New Day, another summer stalwart still going strong at the Regal as we turn the corner into fall, and Chronovisor, which returns to Cornell Cinema on Saturday. Here’s what I said about that one on Letterboxd:
Highbrow Dan Brown that swaps long shots of the grand edifices that house the world’s secrets for extreme close-ups of the texts within, and which wears its 80s influences on its VHS sleeve. As a librarian, I appreciate its love for libraries and archives, but resent how it reduces the people who tend them to disembodied voices. Long live the old flesh!
Special events include three free screenings at Cornell Cinema: A Poet tonight, The Librarians (which has issues of its own, but does at least foreground my profession) on Tuesday, and Cinema Pe Cinema: The Theatres. The Movies. And Us on Wednesday. You can also see a 35mm print of Better Luck Tomorrow there tonight. Finally, additional noteworthy repertory options include North by Northwest at the Regal tomorrow, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior there on Tuesday, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.
Home Video Recommendation: Last week I compared Ross McElwee’s latest documentary Remake to Journey to Italy, which reminded me that it had been a while since I last watched the Roberto Rossellini film I’ve long thought of as one of my favorites! So long, in fact, that I’d forgotten some of the plot details and was therefore pleasantly surprised to discover that they dovetail with one of my recent fixations, trying to spot the influence of James Joyce’s “The Dead” on, well, everything. Anyway, here’s what I wrote on Letterboxd last week after revisiting it:
I had completely forgotten that the plot is largely set in motion by the tale of a rain-soaked admirer at the window who died young, and that the married couple played by Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders are named Joyce! I’m fond of reading the Beatles song “For No One” as an “adaptation” of Dubliners‘ “The Dead” because while I understand that it isn’t really, Paul McCartney’s lyrics might as well be about Gabriel. What I like best about Journey to Italy is how it does the same thing in reverse by letting us wake up with Gretta the next morning: in the story she falls asleep immediately after puncturing her husband’s bubble, and then “snow was general all over Ireland.”
You can watch Journey to Italy on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max with a subscription, buy or rent it from a number of other streaming video platforms, and it’s available from the Criterion Collection as part of “3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman” Blu-ray and DVD box sets.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
Ithaca Film Journal: 9/17/26
In Theaters: This is a truly excellent week for movies in Ithaca, and although I’m staying in tonight to watch football (Hail to Pitt!), I’ll be seeing something for six days in a row after that, which is a lot even for me! The one I’m most excited about is Chronovisor, which I started hearing great things about when it premiered at Rotterdam in January and have been tracking ever since. It plays Cornell Cinema tomorrow evening. I’ll be returning on Saturday to see the “2026 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour” and again on Sunday for the 35mm print of Vagabond screening in their “Wayfaring Strangers” series.
Speaking of Sundance, I’m also going to see The Weight, which got great reviews there, at the Regal Ithaca Mall. Last but not least, I’m hoping to catch both of the documentaries starting one-week runs at Cinemapolis tomorrow, American Doctor and The Cycle of Love. Other noteworthy new releases that I’m going to wait on a bit include Filipiñana, which screens at Cornell Cinema tonight but will return on 9/26, and Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, which opens at the Regal today and will hopefully stick around awhile.
So that’s what I’m up to. One film you should definitely check out at Cornell Cinema on Sunday if you missed its first screening there last week is Remake, which is easily my favorite documentary of Movie Year 2026 so far. Here’s what I recently said about it on Letterboxd:
“I used to be a filmmaker,” director Ross McElwee says in the aftermath of the death of his son Adrian, but not by way of declaring this to be his last movie. As he recently told David Schwartz in an interview for Film Comment, “that’s meant to be a kind of mournful acceptance of the fact that something’s different now. I don’t say what that is right away.” Although McElwee then immediately adds, “I didn’t really see how I could continue to be a filmmaker,” his practice of capturing big and small moments from his life on camera comes across here as compulsive and not entirely unlike the addictions that plagued Adrian.
This sense that this is something McElwee needed to do binds Remake to this year’s critical darling Blue Heron. Writing for Cahiers du Cinéma, Ariel Schweitzer described the goal of that film’s director Sophy Romvari as “reconstructing the past in order to better understand it, in the hope of healing the wounds of her childhood.” But where Romvari meticulously recreates the late 1990s to process a trauma that occurred then, McElwee is acting more like an archaeologist of his own autobiography. What he gives us, the audience, when he cuts footage shot by Adrian into his film is something akin to what Katherine and Alex Joyce experience in Journey to Italy when they witness a plaster cast being made from the cavity a Roman couple’s bodies left behind at Pompeii.
Holdovers I especially enjoyed include The Samurai and the Prisoner, a rangy period piece which features both a subtle tea ceremony smile and an equally delightful close-up of a spider that’s anything but, and The Odyssey, which I’ve already talked about in this space a bunch of times. They continue their runs at Cinemapolis and the Regal respectively.
Special events include four free Reproductive Rights Film Festival screenings at Cinemapolis tonight through Saturday, a free “Family Classics Picture Show” presentation of Akeelah and the Bee there on Sunday, free screenings of Overburden and The Message at Cornell Cinema tonight and Tuesday evening respectively, and a “Drag Movie Night” presentation of Steel Magnolias at Cinemapolis on Wednesday hosted by Tilia Cordata. Finally, additional repertory highlights include Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 at the Regal on Saturday, L’Eclisse at Cornell Cinema on Saturday, and Mad Max: Fury Road at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.
Home Video Recommendation: Last weekend I shared my Movie Year 2026 Mid-Point Top Ten (Percent) list on Bluesky and X, and while Power Ballad didn’t quite make the cut, I did list it as an honorable mention. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd in June:
I was so angry at this movie for not being more worthy of Paul Rudd and its promising I Love You, Better Man premise, until suddenly it was! Some of that trajectory is attributable to frontloading obvious jokes with no prayer of working before we’ve gotten to know the characters. In retrospect, though, certain aspects of its Candide-esque message about the importance of tending your own soundgarden may have also hit a bit close to home for this adamantly (TOO adamantly?) amateur film blogger. If Ballad doesn’t take home a Best Original Song Oscar, I give up, by which I am of course referring to the delightfully cheesy “Finishing Line”, not “How To Write a Song Without You”.
Power Ballad is now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Lionsgate, and can be rented or purchased from a variety of streaming video platforms.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
A Brilliant Psychological Essay
I started smoking my freshman year of college, as one does, and continued to inhale a pack or two a week for the next ten years or so. I stopped when my oldest daughter was on the way, but the first thing I do whenever she and her sister and My Loving Wife Marion go out of town for more than a few days is pop across the street to buy a pack of Pall Malls. The ability to “take it or leave it” that I tell myself this represents was always the ideal for my relationship with alcohol as well, but like many people I started to imbibe more during the pandemic and never recalibrated until the waning days of my “Drink & a Movie” project, when I decided that my liver had earned a six-month vacation.
In this regard I was not unlike the four friends in Another Round, which interestingly took home the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the ceremony most closely associated with COVID. Although it opens with a pre-credit sequence depicting inebriated high schoolers competing in a “lake race” that requires each team to consume an entire case of beer and wreaking havoc on Copenhagen’s public transit system:
The plot starts with Mads Mikkelsen’s Martin declining to drink at a 40th birthday celebration for his fellow teacher Nikolaj (Magnus Millang). It has previously been established that he has become a shadow of his younger self:
“Too bad you’re so sensible,” says their friend Peter (Lars Ranthe). “But the question is, what’s sensible?” asks Nikolaj and leaps into an account of what he describes as a “theory” by the Norwegian philosopher and psychiatrist Finn Skårderud that “humans are born with a blood alcohol content (BAC) that’s 0.05% too low.”
Which, Skårderud later told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, is “fake news,” although he noted in the same interview that he served “as a sort of consultant” on the film at the request of director Thomas Vinterberg and characterized its depiction of drinking as “balanced.” Anyway, Martin’s resolve breaks down during a caviar service that includes vodka that per their sommelier “would put a smile on the Tsar’s face”:
And after Nikolaj takes the liberty of ordering a “really, really good glass of wine for Martin” prior to the arrival of the main course, then another when he downs it in one gulp:
The evening turns into a bacchanal that’s more fun than he’s had in years. Martin decides to put Skårderud to the test the next weekday by bringing a fifth of Smirnoff to school:
Nikolaj finds out when Martin asks him for a ride home and immediately calls Peter and their fourth dinner companion Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen) to propose an experiment: they will drink during working hours in quantities that will help them maintain Skårderud’s supposed 0.05% BAC ideal, stopping each day at 8pm and taking weekends off, with the goal of collecting evidence of “increased social and professional performance.” They, too, decide to clothe their project in literary aspirations, although whereas for me “Drink & a Movie” was a means to the end of writing more, the “brilliant psychological essay” they are ostensibly going to produce is more transparently an academic justification for behavior their employer and families presumably wouldn’t approve of. Crucially, they also neglect to define a time limit like I did early on, and thus fail to pace themselves, first increasing their target BAC to .1% on a very flimsy pretext, and then impulsively deciding to “examine the entire spectrum of alcohol” by deliberately drinking to the point of “total oblivion,” which has predictable results:
My project never got out of hand like this, but I definitely was ready for it to be over long before it was scheduled to end. While my intention was never to quit for good, I hope I haven’t ever come off like Anders Mossling’s asshole art gallery owner from The Love That Remains, who ruins a business lunch by droning on and on about a research study that he claims proved that it was healthy to drink up to an entire bottle of wine a day, but remains virtually unknown because its findings are “politically incorrect.”
Alcohol is a vice, and much the same way that I don’t see a contradiction between betting on sports while supporting increased regulations, I’m glad to see society continuing to grow out of self-destructive norms like those depicted in the mid-century period piece Propeller: One-Way Night Coach:
Even as I’m envious of the drink service Kelly Eviston-Quinnett’s Helen receives while flying coach:
Just because I choose to drink doesn’t mean I feel the need to make a virtue out of it or that I’m entitled to do so whenever and wherever I want! After all, the main lesson my time off taught me is that much more of my caloric intake from alcohol than I ever imagined was truly “empty” in the sense that it wasn’t coming from beverages I prepared for myself because I wanted them, but rather ones I made simply as a result of not having anything better to do. What drove this home for me was a scene from Happy Gilmore 2. Adam Sandler’s titular protagonist has retired from golf and started drinking as an escape from accidentally killing his wife Virginia (Julie Bowen) with an errant drive. Forced to stop after an incident involving public drunkenness, he takes the sport back up again to earn money to put his daughter (Sunny Sandler) through ballet school when John Daly (who is hilarious playing himself) convinces him that it will be worth all the practice time required to shake off the rust by arguing, “what else are you going to do, sober boy? You can’t drink no more.”
I also discovered that not having the option of making a cocktail regularly led to me doing something completely unrelated and useful, such as going for a run. Again and again I’d find myself thinking, “I’d normally be drinking right now, but I don’t miss it.” Abstinence just as often resulted in me choosing to go with a sugary soft drink instead, though, and as Tony Leung and Sylvester Groth’s characters find in Silent Friend, there’s a lot to be said for the way booze can make boredom itself productive:
The main thing, I think, is not to deceive oneself, which is a note for the people behind the camera, too. François Truffaut famously once told Gene Siskel that “every film about war ends up being pro-war,” and to pick on a movie I like, the “Come Undone” sequence from Better Man is a good demonstration of how trying to make drinking look dangerous always carries the risk of portraying it as tragically glamorous instead:
To its credit, the film does course-correct by depicting Robbie Williams’ rock bottom as, in the words of Clint Worthington, “a monkey weeping over lines of coke while dressed in a space-age fat-sucking vacuum suit”:
Much the same way that Happy Gilmore 2 chooses to make its hero’s problem drinking into a running joke about how he can turn literally anything into a flask:
But while I absolutely do not mean to argue that the topic should be considered off-limits for any movie that chooses to tackle it, I am intrigued by the way Power Ballad replaces the spirits that would typically lead to its hero questioning his life choices with non-alcoholic beer, which pointedly renders booze irrelevant.
Such scenes are perhaps best saved for ones that take substance abuse as their actual subject, like If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which channels Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road in a cautionary tale I now take even more to heart about how there’s a proper time and a place to imbibe. That whole movie can be read as a feature-length gloss on these two sentences: “he’d found four quarts of bonded whiskey still in the paper bags in which they’d been purchased and he drank a little of it in a glass with water. It made him dizzy before he’d even finished it and he drank no more.” The argument of Legs being that when the time and place are never and nowhere like they are for Rose Byrne’s Linda, that’s a problem with the world, not any individual trying to live within it.
This thankfully isn’t the case for me, but even though my kids are getting older and don’t require constant attention like Linda’s daughter, I’m finding myself waiting until after they go to bed to fix a drink now that I’m no longer conditioned to head straight to our bar as soon as I hear the clock strike five. After all, as director Paul Feig said to the BBC last year, cocktails are one of the great perks of the adult world.
That word “adult” brings us back to Another Round and the binge-drinking youths it begins with. Supergirl similarly starts out with Milly Alcock’s Kara getting plastered as a rite of passage:
But where the only real consequences for her are hangovers that she can easily shake off with a shot of yellow sun, Martin and his pals represent a range of eventual outcomes for their students. Nothing all that bad ever happens to Peter, and he even helps a student pass his oral exams by irresponsibly (“don’t make a habit of it,” he says) encouraging him to take swigs from a bottle of “water” to calm his nerves:
On the other side of the spectrum is Tommy, who meets the same fate as Icarus:
Nikolaj’s incontinence leads to a separation, but he reports that in its aftermath he and his wife “have a new kind of connection”:
While Martin progresses in the opposite direction, first rekindling his own marriage and career, but then pushing his wife away and falling back into a malaise at work when the buzz wears off:
The movie concludes with him receiving a series of texts from her that say “I miss you too . . . a lot,” though, indicating that hope is far from lost.
In these final moments he reminds me a bit of Ralph Fiennes’ David Henninger from The Forgiven, who accepts an ice-cold beer from Mourad Zaoui’s previously skeptical butler Hamid as a reward for what they both see as a “noble gesture,” agreeing to accompany the father (Ismael Kanater) of the Berber fossil hunter he ran over with his car on a voyage to bury the boy in the deserts of southern Morocco where he was born. Along with the shirt David purchases on the way back and wears to dinner that night:
The greedy satisfaction he takes in this pint does a pretty amazing job of capturing the decidedly uncinematic note that Lawrence Osborne finishes the novel that the film was adapted from on: “it never occurred to him why he had not been forgiven, because he had forgiven himself.”
It’s too bad that director John Michael McDonagh didn’t have the good sense to realize it! But the Hollywood ending which follows doesn’t matter for our purposes. What does is the pleasure David so obviously takes in this would-be benedictory tipple. He is perhaps being too generous to himself, but this is in part because Hamid gives him permission in the form of a smile:
It’s an act of hospitality, which even more than wearing the right thing and having the right glass is what makes an adult beverage the special moment Paul Feig says cocktails in particular should always be. Such is the case with the Manhattan that Colman Domingo’s titular protagonist orders in Rustin to usher a drinking companion into a new world. “After two you’ll be a changed man,” he says:
To which Johnny Ramey’s Elias Taylor replies, “well in that case give me three”:
There have been at least that many great versions of this favorite concoction in my own life, most recently the “house” Manhattan that Marion and I finally perfected last month. Years in the making, it’s designed to be shared. We drink them plenty often when it’s just us, to be sure, but even then each one is cause for celebration.
Another Round ends with Martin sending his spouse one last text which reads, “I think Tommy is rooting for you.” When she replies with a message that says, “me too,” he joins his friends in celebrating their students’ graduation with them in the street, throwing himself into a euphoric dance that culminates in a leap into Copenhagen Harbour:
The movie leaves him suspended in mid-air because it’s too early to say whether or not he, unlike Henninger, has said what he had to. In this moment, it doesn’t matter. The lyrics of the Scarlet Pleasure song which plays over this scene go, “fuck what they are saying, what a life.” But there’s another way to express this sentiment, and it’s the same way I capped off all my Drink & a Movie posts:
Cheers!
Ithaca Film Journal: 9/10/26
In Theaters: This week brings two new movies to town that I’m pretty excited about. Although neither Hope nor The Samurai and the Prisoner generated quite enough buzz to crack my “Cannes 2026 Films That I Am Most Eager to See” list back in May, the trailers I’ve seen for both since then are intriguing. Samurai opens at Cinemapolis tomorrow, and Hope is already playing there and at the Regal Ithaca Mall. Other noteworthy new releases include legendary documentarian Ross McElwee’s latest Remake, which screens at Cornell Cinema on Sunday, and the well-reviewed concert film Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, which opens at Cinemapolis tomorrow. Our family is also finally going to go see Coyote vs. Acme, which continues its run at both Cinemapolis and the Regal.
My highest-rated holdover remains The Odyssey, which continues its run at the Regal, but I also enjoyed Spider-Man: Brand New Day (Regal), Tony (Cinemapolis), and Late Fame (Cinemapolis), which features Willem Dafoe as an Unfrozen Caveman Beat Poet. And although I personally thought Buddy tries way too hard to be weird, I note with interest that the number of screens it’s playing on at the Regal has been INCREASING as the weeks go by, which actually doesn’t shock me because the crowd full of young people I saw it with really seemed to be enjoying themselves. Here’s what I said about this one on Letterboxd:
Perverse in the manner of Meet the Feebles at its best, but unwilling to go all the way. Buddy is also hampered by a mise en abyme effect whereby even the ostensibly “real” scenes feel sitcom-artificial, masking what (if anything) might be at stake until the last shot. The idea in 28 Years Later that 90s children’s television could *spawn* evil is much more interesting than this film’s contention that it actually was the work of the devil, but Cristin Milioti has a moment of trippy brilliance as a brainwashed nurse in a blue uniform, and the kids are alright as well.
Special events include the start of the Reproductive Rights Film Festival and free screenings of The Eyes of Ghana and Cinema Nomad: Nepal at Cinemapolis on Sunday and Monday, and Huesera: The Bone Woman and American Experience: Bombshell at Cornell Cinema on Monday and Wednesday. The Cinema Nomad and Huesera events will both also feature “talkbacks” with the filmmakers.
Finally, it’s another great week for repertory fare! The highlight for me is a 35mm print of Vagabond, one of my favorite movies by pantheon filmmaker Agnès Varda, which screens tomorrow as part of the “Wayfaring Strangers” series that Cornell Cinema Director Molly Ryan talked about in my recent interview with her. You can also see a new 4K restoration of Days and Nights in the Forest there tonight; Rear Window at the Regal tomorrow; Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fast Times at Ridgemont High at Cornell Cinema on Saturday; and Duck Soup at the Regal on Monday.
Home Video Recommendation: Speaking of the Marx Brothers, the start of the NFL season always makes me think of my August, 2022 “Drink & a Movie” selection Horse Feathers, which I recently realized I’ve never mentioned in THIS space. Here’s how that post ends:
When I remember great NFL moments like Santonio Holmes’s game winning touchdown catch in Super Bowl XLIII, I don’t just think about the play itself, but also the drive that made it possible, the offseasons that brought the players involved in it to Pittsburgh, and the ruling on the field that yes, this really was a completion. But what counts as a catch and what doesn’t in the NFL is based on rules that at the end of the day are essentially arbitrary and subject to change, as indeed they have multiple times since that February night in 2009!
Horse Feathers understands this fundamental truth about football, even as it’s indifferent to it otherwise except as a platform for jokes. Baravelli announcing the play that Huxley is about to run (“Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, Professor Wagstaff gets the ball!”) is basically the exact opposite of Peyton Manning calling out audibles at the line of scrimmage. Either way, you’ve got adults play[act]ing something that started out as a children’s game. I’d argue that in both cases the principals have elevated what they’re doing to the status of art, but if you aren’t having fun watching them, you’re doing it wrong.
You can purchase or rent Horse Feathers from a variety of streaming video platforms, plus the Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection DVD box set I watch it on is still widely available.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
