Author: andyhorbal

For my first April Drink & a Movie post, my mind went to one of the rainiest movies I know, Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole. Pictured here is the copy of the Big World Films DVD I bought on Amazon a couple of months ago:

The film can also be can rented or purchased for Video On Demand viewing through the Big World Films website. Some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Despite Boston-based film critic Sean Burns’s eminently reasonable suggestion in a review published this past September that The Hole “might be the best film about how it feels to be alive right now,” the drink I’m selecting to pair with it is called the 20th Century, specifically the version in The PDT Cocktail Book which author Jim Meehan attributes to C. A. Tuck via W. J. Tarling (author of the Café Royale Cocktail Book where it was first recorded):

1.5 oz. Plymouth Gin
.75 oz. Marie Brizard White Crème de Cacao (Giffard)
.75 oz. Lillet Blanc
.75 oz. Lemon Juice

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled coupe (I used my favorite Nick and Nora glass). No garnish.

In addition to changing the glassware, I also used Giffard white crème de cacao instead of the Marie Brizard that Meehan calls for throughout this book, since I’ve never been able to find it. Honestly, though, I haven’t sweated this ingredient too much ever since a bartender at The Violet Hour in Chicago told me that *they* aren’t very picky about it a few years ago, and I’d advise you not to be either. Just go for white over brown for the sake of the appearance of the drink, is all.

As Meehan notes, the drink is actually named for “the 20th Century Limited luxury train that traveled between New York City and Chicago from 1902 to 1967.” Said train has appeared in many movies, including North by Northwest, The Sting, and of course Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century, but so far as I am aware no character ever orders the cocktail named after it. Which is too bad for them, because it’s one of my absolute favorites! One thing that makes it unique is its unusual combination of flavors that don’t seem like they should go together–chocolate, juniper, and lemon. This is why I chose The Hole to pair with it, because do you know what else doesn’t sound like it makes sense? A bleak depiction of life in a city beset by both an epidemic and a never-ending rain storm shot mostly in long takes and containing very little dialogue that also includes cheerful, lip-synched musical numbers based on the songs of singer-actress Grace Chang!

Both the drink and the movie absolutely do work, though. In the case of the former, each ingredient brings an important component of balance to the party: the crème de cacao supplies sweetness and texture, the gin gives the drink substance, and the citrus chips in acidity, all of which matter more than how each them tastes. Similarly, both the fantastical and realistic elements of the film are necessary to bring to life the surreal experiences of being isolated from one’s fellow humans even while being surrounded by them and trying to piece together a coherent narrative about the virus upending your life from one meager scrap of information at a time.

Like the train that the drink is named after, The Hole is meant to represent an aspect of the century during which it was created. It was commissioned as part of a series called 2000, Seen By…, and “eerily prophetic” (quoth Jeffrey M. Anderson of the San Francisco Examiner) though it may be, Tsai’s focus was very much on the present when he conceived it. As he told socialist film critic David Walsh, “[w]hen they first came to me with this project of making a film about the new millennium, I thought the end of the century was too close to describe a future predicament, so it’s actually a reflection of contemporary society.”

Last but not least as far as connections between this month’s drink and movie go, scroll up again and take another look at the picture of a 20th Century taken by My Loving Wife. Now dig this shot of Yang Kuei-Mei’s The Woman Downstairs from The Hole‘s penultimate sequence, which the brilliant Darren Hughes says “might be the most extraordinary of Tsai’s career”:

They both glow, yeah? Certainly each one is beautiful. As far as the rest of the film goes, it really is bonkers how many moments it contains that are likely to resonate with contemporary audiences. Take this shot The Woman Downstairs arriving home with a haul of toilet paper:

Or this use of a mask as an erotic device, our first indication that the Woman Downstairs is attracted to Lee Kang-sheng’s The Man Upstairs:

Or the fantasy world dramatization of the onset of the “flu-like symptoms” we’ve all been dreading for the past two years set to “Achoo Cha Cha”:

The rest of the song and dance sequences are quite wonderful, too. I particularly love the beginning of the one for “Tiger Lady,” which starts right after The Woman Downstairs defends herself against incursions into her apartment through the hole in her ceiling for the first time using bug spray:

This is superhero lighting! Another thing I get a kick out of is Tsai’s use of clocks, which are more often associated with his next film What Time Is It There? than this one. Here they seem to function as an index of how time has different meaning during a time of crisis. I count three of them. Number one can be seen lying on a table while The Woman Downstairs watches a news report about how long you need to boil untreated water for and how many days afterward it’s drinkable:

The Man Upstairs walks by clock number two holding a can of food for a stray cat he has been feeding:

As he rounds the corner, the number of empty cans strewn about cue us in to the fact that this has been part of his daily routine for quite awhile!

Finally, clock number three appears at the end of Tien Mao’s cameo appearance as A Shopper. He asks The Man Upstairs if his store carries a particular brand of bean sauce. “They stopped making it years ago,” is the reply. The Shopper stares at what he now realizes is his last can and then wanders off in a daze in a shot which lasts nearly a minute:

In all three instances, the point seems to be that you don’t mark time in seconds, minutes, or even hours when you’re living in quarantine and have no place to go.

I’m worried that I’m making The Hole sound more depressing than it is, so I will close by note that it ends with the Man Upstairs and the Woman Downstairs together:

And a signed note from Tsai preceding the end titles which says “in the year 2000, we are grateful that we will have Grace Chang’s songs to comfort us.” This is, ultimately, a film about getting through something. Be it a century, pandemic, cross-country train journey, or just a long day of work, how better to celebrate than with a drink and a movie?

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

The idea for my first Drink & a Movie post started with the beverage, while the inspiration for the second one was the film. This month’s edition is sort of a hybrid. I was cycling through possible hooks (lions, lambs, March Madness, etc.) when my mind lit on Pi Day. I immediately remembered the bottle of Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur of the Alps that I bought over the holidays, and suddenly I was all set! The drink I’m writing about today is a concoction by Misty Kalkofen of Boston, Massachusetts (whose name you’ll see again if I keep this series going) called In Vida Veritas. With a hat tip to the Haus Alpenz website, here’s how you make it:

1 1/2 oz. Del Maguey Vida Mezcal (Vida de Muertos)
3/4 oz. Zirbenz
3/4 oz. Nux Alpina Walnut Liqueur
1/2 oz. Benedictine
10 drops Xocolatl Mole Bitters (Bittermens)

Stir with ice, strain into a chilled Nick and Nora glass, and garnish with an orange twist.

The movie I’m selecting to go with it is Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale. Here’s a picture of the DVD I bought from the Criterion Collection Store during a flash sale of yore:

It’s still available there on both DVD and Blu-Ray, and can also be streamed via the Criterion Channel with a subscription or Amazon Prime for a rental fee. On a very superficial level, the drink (thanks to the pine notes of the Zirbenz) and the movie share a Yuletide vibe. They both also feature casts of eccentric characters that don’t seem like they should be able to co-exist in the same glass or house until they do, but afterward you almost can’t imagine them apart from each other. Here are the stars of In Vida Veritas:

Be forewarned: some of these ingredients may be hard to source. I had to ask the good people at Red Feet Wine Market in Ithaca to special order me a bottle of the Nux Alpina, for instance. That’s also the only place around here I’ve seen Xocolatl Mole bitters. The version of the recipe published on Kindred Cocktails calls for Fee Brothers Whiskey Barrel-Aged Bitters instead, which might not require as much of a search. No matter which one you choose, I like how the bitters bring a bit more CONCACAF thunder to the party to keep the mezcal company amidst all these Europeans. Speaking of which, Del Maguey Vida Mezcal is one of my absolute favorite value spirits. Where I live a decent bottle of single malt Scotch will set you back $80 easy, but even the 45 ABV Vida de Muertos special release pictured here costs half that and delivers something just as complex, smoky, and sippable. Anyway, whatever effort you have to put in will be amply rewarded! This exactly is the kind of deeply intriguing, miraculously balanced drink that made me fall in love with cocktails in the first place.

As far as the movie is concerned, the connection to Pi Day is a scene in which Claude (Hippolyte Girardot), a Fields Medal-winning mathematician, shows up to help his wife’s family decide whether or not their matriarch Junon Vuillard (Catherine Deneuve) should accept a bone-marrow transplant to treat the degenerative cancer that has a 75% chance of killing her or decline based on the fact that it could result in a condition called graft versus host disease or GVH that itself has a 35% mortality rate.

It begins not quite halfway through the film with a shot of a pile of books gradually coming into focus as seen through a frosty window pane.

Cut to Claude.

What he’s beholding here are the chalkboards and easel pads which his father in law Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) has been using to try to calculate the correct course of action. “What’s this?” he asks.

“I can’t remember what I wrote,” Abel replies. “There’s still a tiny chance that Junon’s not sick.” Claude taps the board.

“You’re pessimistic,” he says. “Survival increases life expectancy. This is what you’re scared of. The doctors kill a healthy woman.” “She’d lose five years without being sick!” Abel replies. So Claude goes to work. “You can’t keep reasoning in segments. Counting from one year to another. Junon is going to die at a precise moment. Not on an anniversary.”

“Getting hurt or dying are absolute events,” he continues. “You don’t die a 10 or 12% death. You get the entire event. The game is on, like it or not. You either treat it or you don’t. You die or you don’t. You’re playing the game. Go from the discrete to the continuous.” He grabs a marker.

“The ratio is not one half. 50% equals 1 minus exponential minus lambda. Lambda, the logarithm of 2. The survival formula is an integral from zero to infinity.” Abel takes notes on a pad while his wife and daughter Elizabeth (Claude’s wife, who is played by Anne Consigny) listen.

“1.45 years,” Claude declares, circling the answer.

He switches back to the chalkboard. “No transplant gets you six more months. In the same way, with treatment, this increases to 3.7.” He circles that number, too.

“Now weigh your living five fewer years with its low probability against 2.3 extra years with treatment weighed with a higher probability,” Claude continues. “And you get. . . . ” Abel interrupts him. “May I?” he asks. “Be my guest,” Claude replies. He approaches the board and solves the equation.

“Sick or not, if you’re treated you gain about two years,” Claude explains. “You’d rather pass. Your only freedom is to bet.” Abel’s response: “That’s better.” Although the expression on Junon’s face makes it clear that she is not similarly reassured, she, too, will eventually come to the same conclusion.

This scene resonates with me because it basically explains why I got a pi tattoo twenty odd years ago. The idea wasn’t that pi itself has any particular significance for me, but rather that it represents something that does. And this is it! When I first learned about irrational numbers as a child, I was captivated. The idea that you could spend a lifetime calculating, but never succeed in expressing them in decimal form fascinated me, as did the notion that from a practical standpoint, it doesn’t matter! Because pi can be represented by a single character just as surely as the numbers one, two, and three can: π. My twelve-year-old self saw this as inspirational: maybe you can’t ever figure out exactly who you are, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still be useful!

There’s a lesson in this for the Vuillard clan, I think. Each of them is a relentless seeker of meaning, whether they look for it in books, the bottle, or the bedroom. But that isn’t what makes them a family. Similarly, the numbers on Abel’s chalkboards and pads aren’t a perfect representation of reality, but they don’t need to be. Like Claude says, the game is afoot, and that means that even if Junon refuses to act, she is nonetheless making a decision, whether she realizes it or not. By showing her and her family this, Claude illuminates the path they are on and makes others visible. Seeing the paths laid out before them and where they lead, they can choose which one they want to take. Choosing sets them free. How cool is that?

A Christmas Tale is a dense film bursting with references and allusions, wonderful performances, and delightful cinematographic tricks. I could easily write a whole other post on any of those things, and maybe someday I will. For now, though, I’m going to close with an observation that surely must be trite by now, but is new to this blog. I didn’t think there was anything unusual about any of the scenes that featured Doctor Zraïdi (Azize Kabouche):

Or any of the scenes that included Henri (Mathieu Amalric):

Until very late in the film when they appear like this:

Which, this looks more normal to me now! But maybe not for much longer, though? One can hope.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

With the 2022 Winter Olympics now officially under way, the second installment in my new Drink & a Movie series was a no-brainer.

Pictured here is the Blu-ray copy of Michael Ritchie’s Downhill Racer I bought a while back from the Criterion Collection store, where it’s still available on both DVD and Blu-ray. The images in this post came from a Criterion DVD that I checked out from my library. Downhill Racer can also currently be streamed via the Criterion Channel with a subscription or Amazon Prime for a rental fee. The drink I chose to go with it is a Brigadier, which Paul Clarke attributed to San Francisco bartender Neyah White when he wrote about it for Serious Eats. Here’s the recipe as I make it:

8 oz. Hot Chocolate
1/2 oz. Green Chartreuse
1/2 oz. Cherry Heering
Sweetened, Chartreuse-spiked whipped cream

Add the booze and hot chocolate to a mug and stir to combine. Top with the whipped cream, being sure not to let the mug overflow, unless of course you like that sort of thing. Drink while piping hot!

Dead simple, right? I like the hot chocolate recipe on pages 172-173 of J. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab for this, both because it’s not too sweet (you get a lot of extra sugar from the spirits) and to keep things in the Serious Eats family. For the whipped cream, I made myself measure and it turns out that I use about two tablespoons of confectioners’ sugar and a 1/2 ounce (aka one tablespoon) of Chartreuse per one cup of heavy cream. The consistency doesn’t really matter, since the whipped cream will melt in the heat of the cocoa pretty quickly, but I go for something dollop-able. As far as ratios are concerned, Clarke mentions that you can use up to one ounce each of the two spirits, but I find that half is plenty, especially with the extra hit of Chartreuse from the whipped cream. I highly recommend experimenting, though!

This drink is exactly what I would want to be handed should I ever find myself stepping into a chateau in the French Alps after a day of downhill skiing. It’s warm and rich and the Chartreuse (one of my very favorite things in the whole world) hails from the Aiguenoire distillery in Isère, France, one of the locations where Downhill Racer was filmed. Speaking of which: Downhill Racer may be best known for the POV footage shot by Joe Jay Jalbert, which was cutting edge for its time (see this interview with him by Hillary Weston for more details).

Starting with the very first images, a close up of the wheels on a ski lift followed by dramatic mountain landscapes, Ritchie and his production team (including cinematographer Brian Probyn and editor Richard Harris) also do a wonderful job of capturing the experience of competing in and watching downhill skiing events by serving up grand and granular views of the sport in perfect proportion to one another:

The same attention to detail is brought to scenes of a skier being treated in a hospital following a crash:

And to the television broadcasts of the various skiing events shown in the film:

It’s the latter in particular that make this a perfect film to watch right now. Downhill Racer‘s subject isn’t just skiing or sports in general, but rather how sport is mediated through television, which is how I’m assuming everyone reading this blog will experience the 2022 Winter Olympics. It may be enough for a sports fan to say that the best athlete won the race, but networks pay a lot of money for the broadcast rights to events like the Olympics in the hope that they can convince more than just sports fans to tune in. The way they do this is by relentlessly mining for the meaning behind each gold. What I like most about Downhill Racer is the way it shuffles through the same sort of narrative explanations for Dave Chappellet’s (Robert Redford) eventual triumph that we’ll hear again and again over the course of the next two weeks without really appearing to subscribe to any single one. There are at least five by my count:

1. Chappellet is talking to his coach Eugene Claire (Gene Hackman) after the last race of the season. Chappellet, who had the best time through the first half of the course but then crashed, is saying that he could have won if he had been given a better starting position. “No,” says Claire. “What do you mean ‘no’?” asks Chappellet. “You just weren’t good enough, that’s all,” says Claire. “You lost your strength, and then the bumps took you out, that’s it. You’ve got to have your strength right up to the end. These guys aren’t amateurs, they’re national heroes. You’re trying to beat them out of their way of life. You’re just not strong enough.” The very next scene shows Claire’s fellow coach Alec Mayo (Dabney Coleman) making Chappellet run extra laps during offseason training. Chappellet starts to actually win races the following season.
2. Back home in Idaho Springs, Colorado, Chappellet’s father (Walter Stroud) says, “I just hope you don’t end up asking yourself the same question some folks ask me: ‘what’s he do it for?'” Chappellet says it’s because he’ll be famous and a champion. “World’s full of ’em,” his father replies.
3. Shortly before the Olympics, Chappellet’s girlfriend Carole (Camilla Sparv) abandons him over Christmas, prompting Chappellet to end things in a terrific bit of acting involving a car horn. Is this the moment when he finally dedicates himself fully to skiing?
4. Or is it maybe when Claire chews him out for challenging his teammate to a race after practice which results in the latter crashing? “It comes from a certain consideration for the sport,” Claire says,” a desire to learn. That’s something you never had. You never had a real education, did you? All you ever had were your skis, and that’s not enough.”
5. But no, it surely has to be when that same teammate crashes again during their next race and suffers an injury that will cause him to miss the Olympics, right? After all, what could be more powerful motivation than the desire to win one for the Gipper?

The film’s point isn’t that none of these explanations are true or that it doesn’t matter: it’s that it can’t possibly be so simple. At the end of the day all we really know for sure is that Chappellet didn’t win a championship during his first season in Europe because he crashed, and that he does win a gold medal two years later because an unnamed German fails to capitalize on his own blazing-fast start for the same reason. Chappellet briefly catches that skier’s eye after the race:

But the film ends with the crowd hoisting Chappellet on its shoulders:

It’s not so much that we only care about him because he won: rather, if it wasn’t for the good people at NBC, most of us wouldn’t even know that there was a human being named Dave Chappellet who we could choose to care about or not in the first place.

I would be remiss if I didn’t include at least one screengrab featuring Gene Hackman, since his smirks are one of my very favorite things about Downhill Racer. Here’s one:

And actually, here’s another one from one of the scenes showing him hustling for funding for the U.S. national ski team, which I also enjoy:

Last but not least, here’s Robert Redford contemplating a bidet:

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

I’ve always enjoyed creating New Year’s resolutions, and this year the choice was easy: blog more! When I started this site in 2018, it was important to me not to stress myself out by creating unsustainable expectations for how much content I was going to produce. I really do want to write, though, and it has become increasingly clear to me that one of my biggest problems is that I’m out of practice. While pondering this situation the other day, I found myself staring at this chalkboard in my dining room:

If you’re standing in my house, odds are you know that I love cocktails and that I don’t need much prompting to offer you one. This board, which I update once a month or so, is an invitation to ask me to do so and an order suggestion based on the spirits, syrups, and juices we have on hand. Currently it features a Corn ‘n Oil recipe from the Detroit cocktail bar Standby published by Imbibe Magazine a few years ago. This drink is the best application I’ve found for the Maggie’s Farm Falernum Liquor (made by a distillery located in my old stomping grounds of Pittsburgh) My Loving Wife got me for my birthday last year and a fine use for the bottle of Cruzan Black Strap Rum I always seem to have in my liquor cabinet as well. The clove notes in the falernum also create a bridge to the recently expired holiday season, while the tropical flavors are just the ticket for a brief respite from the cold of early January in upstate New York.

Suddenly it hit me: what if I picked a movie to go with this drink? And then came up with additional pairings and posted them monthly throughout the rest of the year? I was fond of the TBS television series Dinner & a Movie as a youngster and have always thought that as a person who spends most of my waking moments thinking about either food or film, there surely must be a way I could run with this basic concept. I’ve never had any luck coming up with anything before now, but maybe this was it? After all, I’m basically doing this all the time anyway, I just need to start showing my work.

So that’s the gimmick! Each month, I will highlight a cocktail and a film on this blog that I think go well together. Although in the future the inspiration for these posts could begin with cinema or spirits, I decided to stick with what was already on the board for the first installment. And so I bring you a drink, Standby’s Corn ‘n Oil:

1 oz. Dark Rum (Plantation Original Dark)
1 1/2 oz. Falernum (Maggie’s Farm)
3/4 oz. Lime Juice
1 dash Angostura Bitters
1 oz. Black Strap Rum (Cruzan)

Shake dark rum, falernum, and lime juice with ice until chilled and strain into a Collins glass. Add crushed ice, then float the black strap rum and bitters over the top to combine. Standby and Imbibe recommend stirring to combine before drinking, and I don’t disagree, but make sure you take a second to admire it first!

And a movie, Blake Edwards’s The Tamarind Seed:

Pictured here is the DVD I bought on Amazon. The film is also available on Blu-ray and can currently be streamed via Amazon Prime for a rental fee and the Roku Channel for free. The main reason I selected it is because it was shot on location in Barbados, birthplace of falernum. This is also one of the reasons I prefer to use Plantation Original Dark, since it hails from the same place. It’s also lighter in color than many dark rums, and although master distiller at R.L. Seale (creator of John D. Taylor’s Velvet Falernum, the most well-known version of the spirit) Richard Seale disputes the notion that the Corn ‘n Oil is named after its appearance (he believes it’s actually a biblical reference), the striking contrast between the dark and light hues in Standby’s rendition of the drink is one of my favorite things about it. The visual style of The Tamarind Seed echoes this in a red/blue two-color motif which first appears in the titles designed by James Bond veteran Maurice Binder and recurs throughout the film:

More importantly, this is a thoroughly grown-up film to enjoy with your adult beverage. Despite the fact that it’s a Cold War drama, characters are defined as “good” or “bad” based on how they treat each other and the world (I submit that the sign below which appears at around the halfway mark is a pivotal moment in the film) rather than which side they’re on, and their uncommonly intelligent dialogue reflects an awareness of the fact that this is a minority viewpoint.

The Tamarind Seed is quite lovely to look at, a few baffling (to this child of the ’90s) aesthetic choices aside:

I’m particularly fond of the use of mirrors and windows to create baroque compositions like this one:

And to foreshadow future plot developments:

Which, why yes, that *is* Omar Sharif in a bright yellow robe!

He dons it again near the end of the film in one of my favorite sequences, which builds tension through John Barry’s effective score, deep-focus photography:

And more reflections:

The supporting cast is terrific, especially Anthony Quayle, and it can even be quite funny at times (“Has it ever occurred to you that I might be slightly frustrated myself?” says Julie Andrews after almost two hours of refusing to go to bed with Sharif). Throw in a few breathtaking Bajan sunsets:

And you have the perfect companion to a tropical libation, not to mention a film that I’m surprised I haven’t heard more about.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Future entries in this series will be findable here as soon as they exist.