What I’m Seeing This Week: I still haven’t made it to The Legend of Ochi, so seeing it at Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall is my top priority. I’m also hoping to catch The Surfer at one of those two theaters before it closes, but I’m going to take a gamble that it will stick around for more than a week and see La Haine at Cinemapolis on Wednesday instead.
Also in Theaters: I’m still processing The Shrouds, a typically visionary outing by director David Cronenberg which maybe didn’t come together in the final reel the way I was expecting it to? But that may well have been the entire point, and it definitely is my favorite new movie now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen. Sinners isn’t that far behind, though. Both films are at Cinemapolis and the latter is at the Regal as well. I also enjoyed Drop and One to One: John & Yoko, which continue their runs at the Regal and Cinemapolis respectively. Thunderbolts* doesn’t really seem like my cup of tea, but it’s garnering positive reviews, so I probably will see it at Cinemapolis or the Regal eventually. This week’s special events are highlighted by Cornell Cinema‘s traditional end-of-semester “mystery screening” tonight and a presentation of the “vegan horror” movie A44, which was shot in upstate New York, at Cinemapolis on Saturday followed by a Q&A with cash members. Finally, your best bet for repertory fare is Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is at the Regal on Sunday and Wednesday.
Home Video: I went on a Toots & the Maytals listening binge after the MUBI Podcast featured The Harder They Come as part of their “Needle on the Record” season a couple of years ago, but somehow never got around to watching the film itself until just the other day. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd:
Sun sparkling on the water straight out of Black Narcissus and one of the great movie soundtracks of all time. It isn’t just a *container* for great music, though: it’s a mischievously subversive acknowledgement that these songs are dangerous which works because director Perry Henzell & co. also successfully argue that suppressing them would be an even bigger mistake. Jimmy Cliff’s Ivan, who at his heart is apolitical, is a much bigger threat as a one-hit wonder revolutionary martyr than as a popular entertainer, because Lord help the establishment if someone comes along later and groks the FULL power of the lyric “they know not what they’ve done.”
You can stream The Harder They Come on Peacock with ads, but I sprang for the Criterion Collection Blu-ray, which is out of print but still readily available through Amazon and other retailers.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
If memory serves me right (as Chairman Kaga used to say), once upon a time the Food Network used to bend over backwards to avoid referring to Top Chef by name. I first noticed this begin to change in the waning years of Iron Chef America, when competitors started to call on people with TC experience more and more often to serve as their sous-chefs. Then, of course, TCS4 winner Stephanie Izard actually became an Iron Chef prior to the show’s final season. Today Top Chef veterans are everywhere on the channel: last week, for instance, Antonia Lofaso (S4 + S8) became the fourth to win Guy Fieri’s Tournament of Champions in six seasons, which is even more impressive when you consider that she beat Sara Bradley (S16 + S20) to do it, who in turn had to get past Lee Ann Wong (S1, S15, S17) in the semi-finals. Meanwhile, you couldn’t make it through a single commercial break without seeing an advertisement for shows hosted by Eric Adjepong (S16 + S17), Brian Malarkey (S3 + S17), and other alums.
This makes sense when you consider that while there’s a lot of overlap, the skillset of a successful chef isn’t exactly the same as that of a television cooking competition champion. Bravo figured out early that compelling back stories, diverse cooking styles, and telegenic personalities shine brightest in an evenly-matched field and has made an artform out of balancing these attributes with traits like the ability to handle adversity and work quickly, endurance, and familiarity with emerging cuisines and techniques likely to impress the judges week after week. As their casting improved, it created a virtuous cycle whereby appearing on the show has opened doors for a higher and higher percentage of people, giving Bravo an even more impressive field of applicants to select from, resulting in an even bigger hit rate, etc. Couple this with enhanced vetting introduced after allegations of sexual harassment against Gabe Erales surfaced shortly after he won season 18, which at least so far has worked as intended, and Top Chef is basically doing the Food Network’s job of identifying rising stars for it.
The elevated standard has had a discernable impact on the show. Most gratifyingly, with total duds now far less frequent, a decision was finally made to start showing every dish prepared in the Quickfire challenges starting in season 19, and I think this year’s new prize of getting to cook an exclusive dinner at the James Beard House is also a product of increased confidence that whoever wins will be worthy of the honor. It has likewise enabled Top Chef to survive the departure of longtime host Padma Lakshmi without skipping a beat by providing the producers with a deep bench of highly-qualified replacements to choose from (Kristen Kish, the one they chose, also deserves a ton of credit for rising to the occasion, of course) and providing a chance to introduce enough sensible tweaks to things like how “immunity” is awarded to create the sense that the show is continuing to evolve without moving too far away from what made it a hit in the first place.
It has, however, created a bit of a dilemma for me as well. Like Tyler Cowen and Matt Yglesias, I consider the opportunity cost of watching television to be substantial relative to that of movies and thus allocate the overwhelming majority of my viewing hours to the latter. After season 19, I wondered for the first time if a consistently high floor might actually start to get boring at some point and mentioned this again on X last year following S21E3 in a thread that also referenced the Top Chef “eras” I came up with in 2018. Here they are again in a revised version that I’m about to add to:
Seasons 1-3 = Early Top Chef
Seasons 4-8 = Classic Top Chef: “I suspect these are the seasons most fans of the show consider to be the best, but upon second viewing the top contenders benefit from less competition than the winners who will follow them.”
Seasons 9-10 = Baroque Top Chef: “It’s almost like the only way they could think of to top All-Stars was by going as big as they could with the challenges and setting, and then of course S10 features the biggest cast in series history. It’s all just too much.”
Season 11-15 = Neoclassical Top Chef: “You could drop S11, S12, and S15 into the Classic era and they would fit right in. S13 very intentionally reflects on the show’s history, and S14 of course brings back eight former contestants.”
Seasons 16-20 = Modern or “Nice” Top Chef: “As described by Michelle on S16, ‘We don’t bully each other, we lift each other up. We’re all extremely talented and we’re above all that.'”
At the time I thought season 21 fit into the final category, which would have made it the longest in duration in the show’s history. I now think that S20, the second All-Stars season, served a similar function as its predecessor S8, though, which was to put the capstone on an epoch. And so I give you era number six:
Seasons 21-present = Professional Top Chef. The final positive evolution of the show. TC now functions in reality as well as rhetoric to usher chefs into the national spotlight by funneling people into the competitive cooking circuit and, to a lesser extent, by providing national exposure for future industry thought leaders like Kwame Onwuachi. Minor tweaks to the rules to optimize entertainment value are welcome, but if it changes significantly again, look out for signs that it has “jumped the shark.”
This isn’t just a matter of deciding once and for all where to slot the most recent seasons in my schema–it represents a significant change in the way I’m thinking about it. Just as I’m not expecting the NBA or NFL or any other professional sports league I watch on TV to change from year to year, nor am I looking for Top Chef to continue to evolve. And while I still feel great about my decision to stop tweeting out reactions to each individual episode last year in favor of one or two blog posts per season, I’m no longer worried that I’ll eventually have nothing at all to say about each one. The Top Chef Pick’Em game I run for family and friends (and friends of friends) is now eight years old, and I can easily see it still going strong at twice that age if Tom Colicchio and company stick around that long.
It would be silly to publish a post about Top Chef on the very eve of Restaurant Wars without saying anything specifically about the current season! Tristen has established himself as the prohibitive favorite in my eyes, especially now that he has immunity going into the challenge which has been the bane of many a frontrunner in the past. Behind him César’s pickle dessert from episode six is the dish from this season that I’d most like to try, and I still consider Lana a contender even though she hasn’t actually won anything yet; however, there’s a big gap after that which no one except maybe Vinny has shown they might be able to close. I like this year’s challenges, which have showcased Ontario and given the chefs every opportunity to excel, and the production design is typically first class, if not necessarily noteworthy in any obvious way. In other words, long live “professional Top Chef“!
Links to previous posts about Top Chef can be found here.
Also in Theaters: The best new movie now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen is the blues-drenched People’s History of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles Sinners, which meets both of Fritz Lang’s requirements for widescreen cinematography (snakes and funerals . . . check and check!) and continues its run at Cinemapolis and the Regal. I also enjoyed Drop, which is down to one showing per day at the Regal, and One to One: John & Yoko, which remains at Cinemapolis. This week’s special events are highlighted by a bevy of free screenings, many of which feature panel discussions and Q&A sessions: The Brutalist and Machines in Flames at Cornell Cinema tonight, Beyond the Straight and Narrow at Cinemapolis tonight, Human Again and National Velvet at Cinemapolis on Sunday, Deaf President Now! at Cornell Cinema on Monday, and Fancy Dance there on Tuesday. Finally, Anora now counts as “repertory fare,” so the screening at Cornell Cinema on Wednesday is my top recommendation in that department.
Home Video: An old and new favorite that I mentioned on this blog in the past year are both among the films leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month. The Palm Beach Story, my “Drink & a Movie” selection for last April, begins with an all-time great opening credits sequence, ends with an impressively advanced special effect for its era, and features maybe my single favorite movie prop ever, he notebook in which Rudy Vallee’s J.D. Hackensacker III writes down all of his expenses, in between. Of more recent vintage, About Dry Grasses came in eighth on the top ten list I published in March. I don’t actually say much about it there, but as I noted on Letterboxd after my first viewing, Deniz Celiloglu’s Samet is one of 2024’s most compelling unlikeable protagonists, and as I added after a second one the subjective sound design that puts the viewer in his headspace right from the start is also interesting.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
Also in Theaters: I’d be prioritizing The Ugly Stepsister, which I heard intriguing things about out of Sundance, but it’s only playing the Regal and I’m without a car while the rest of the family spends spring break in Canada. Hopefully it will run for more than a week! The best new movie now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen is Drop, an extended metaphor for what it must feel like to re-enter the dating pool as a single parent in 2025, which continues its run at the Regal. I hesitate to say I “enjoyed” the brutal and intense Iraq War film Warfare, which is there and at Cinemapolis, but it’s definitely worth seeing if you have opinions about that conflict or any other one. Noteworthy special events include free screenings of Santo vs. the Vampire Women, The Dybbuk, and Remembering Gene Wilder at Cornell Cinema on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday respectively, and of The Empty Chair at Cinemapolis on Wednesday. Finally, your best bets for repertory fare are the screenings of Vengeance Is Mine, Parasite, and Star Wars: A New Hope at Cornell Cinema tonight, on Saturday, and on Sunday respectively. A New Hope might actually be the movie I’ve seen in theaters more times than any other, now that I think of it, and if you’re of my generation (X or Y depending on how you count) you really owe yourself the pleasure if you’ve never had it.
Home Video: I watched the biopic Better Man on Paramount+ (which I get for free through Spectrum) as part of my tantalizingly close to successful campaign to see very film nominated for one of this year’s Oscars (I caught 48/49) even though I honestly somehow didn’t know subject Robbie Williams as anything other than the fella who covered “Beyond the Sea” for the end credits of Finding Nemo and enjoyed it enough to go back and listen to everything he ever recorded on Spotify. I revisited it the other day and I’m happy to report that when you’re actually familiar with the songs, the way they’re presented in the film makes them even more interesting, especially the Baz Luhrmann-esque staging of “She’s the One,” acoustic retelling of the origins of “Something Beautiful,” and revisionist history of “Rock DJ” as a Take That track that Williams was actually permitted to write lyrics for. I still can’t (and probably never will be) recreate the experience longtime fans presumably had of seeing a familiar *face* in their lives replaced by that of a CGI chimpanzee, but even this works for me as speculation about where the trail blazed by last year’s documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin might lead in the future.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
When travelling to a library conference I always try to make time to see a movie at the local arthouse theater. Upon looking up my options during ACRL 2025, I was delighted to discover that the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival was opening the same day as my arrival! Despite the best efforts of United Airlines (5/6 flights I took on this trip were delayed) to derail my plans, I was able to see three movies at The Main Cinema, which has a pretty amazing Midwest industrial (neon signs advertise Gold Medal Flour and Grain Belt Beer) riverfront view of downtown Minneapolis. I actually want to begin this dispatch with a meal, though, because it was the best part of my experience.
Despite the fact that Owamni has been hailed by both the James Beard Foundation and the New Yorker as one of the best restaurants in the country, I was easily able to grab a seat at the bar as a walk-in by arriving between the lunch and dinner rushes. When Sean Sherman, aka The Sioux Chef, appeared on Top Chef last year as a guest judge, I noted that “if I could conjure up a Michelin-starred restaurant in Ithaca, it would serve food like what we saw on this episode,” which was devoted to indigenous American foodways. Owamni is even more impressive than what I imagined because it doesn’t just serve delicious, innovative food in a beautiful airy lightbox setting, it’s also approachable. Although the wait staff was still clearly getting to know the new spring menu, all of their recommendations were spot-on and they cheerfully tracked down the answers to all of my questions about unfamiliar preparations like ashela (a savory porridge) and ingredients. I started with “their version of bar nuts,” crickets and popcorn, and a pint of Lake Monster Brewing Company‘s Last Fathom Wild Rice Lager, which “came out like a stout” like my server said it would and went great with the sweet (from candied seeds) and savory (toasty dried insects flavored with, I believe, sumac) snack. I also loved the jammy blackberry mignonette that came with my oysters (from Washington) on the half-shell and the micro-carrot tops that garnished that dish and my vegetarian tartare, which also featured dried huckleberries, pickled juniper shallots, and fresh raspberries that brought everything together. The star of my meal was definitely the duck papusa, though, which sat atop an incredible red pepián mole that I couldn’t get enough of and which paired exceptionally well with a glass of Bruma Ocho Rosé from Mexico’s Valle de Guadalupe.
I don’t fault Quisling: The Final Days, the movie I saw after walking across the Mississippi via the Stone Arch Bridge, for failing to live up to this memorable repast, but I do object to its weak tea version of The Zone of Interest‘s fascination with the inner lives of demonstrably evil individuals in denial. It’s a thoroughly professional production anchored by strong performances by Gard B. Eidsvold in the title role and Joachim Trier’s muse Anders Danielsen Lie as the priest assigned to show him the error of his ways, which if successful would somehow benefit the church and Norway. The most interesting thing about it for me, however, was the palpably approving reaction of the (fairly large) audience I saw it with to a scene in the final reel immediately after director Erik Poppe’s own The Act of Killing reference, which served as a visceral reminder of how much pleasure people take in seeing the mighty humbled. I worry that it’s this more than the healthy fear that something rotten inside ourselves explains the sorry state that the world is in which accounts for its The Zone of Interest‘s success, but that may just be me being cynical.
Sister Midnight, a bizarro companion piece to fellow Cannes 2024 alum All We Imagine as Light (one of my favorite films of Movie Year 2024), was much more my speed. Both are about Indian women trapped in unfulfilling arranged marriages, but where Kani Kusruti’s Prabha adopts an alternative family of female friends in the latter, Sister Midnight‘s Uma (Radhika Apte) literally creates a pack of stop-motion vampire goats to run with. The late night double feature picture show vibe is further reenforced by an entertainingly eclectic international pop music soundtrack and a kitchen sink approach to horror comedy tropes, but what I enjoyed most were the Jarmusch-like rhythms of Uma’s game if resentful initial attempts to adapt to the tedium of her new life as a Mumbai housewife. Director-writer Karan Kandhari is very deserving of his BAFTA Film Award nominee for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director, or Producer for this movie and is definitely someone to keep an eye on.
The MSPIFF selection I enjoyed most was the first one I saw, The Things You Kill, which the programmer who introduced it explicitly identified as being indebted to the late great David Lynch by way of preparing us for a mid-film narrative logic curveball, but an even more salient influence is Asghar Farhadi, who numerous internet sources state that director Alireza Khatami worked under as AD (although none seem to indicate on which productions), specifically his magnum opus The Salesman. The Things You Kill is every bit as interested in how much an American text can teach us about another society and the people who belong to it, only here the object of scrutiny is a comparative literature professor who lived abroad for 14 years instead of a play. It also features breathtaking Anatolian landscapes and a short-tempered teacher that serves as a bridge between Khatami’s country of birth Iran (see Universal Language for a recent example) and Turkey (About Dry Grasses, another movie on my 2024 top ten list) where this film is set. I wish it delved a bit deeper into how frustrating and emotionally exhausting infertility issues can be for couples who want to have children, and I’m not sure how believable some of the actions of the protagonist played by both Ekin Koç and Ercan Kesal are if you’ve never known anyone who has struggled against them, but The Things You Kill is a first-rate psychological drama which is right up there with Eephus and The Woman in the Yard as one of the best movies I’ve seen so far this year.
All in all I was pretty impressed by MSPIFF’s lineup, venue and setting! I love a city that makes it cheap and easy to get from the airport to downtown via light rail, and the stadiums of a number of professional sports teams are all located within walking distance of the festival, so I could definitely see my my family returning as part of a vacation that also includes watching the Knicks play the Timberwolves or the Mets play the Twins, or maybe even a Minnesota Lynx game if the festival or the WNBA changes its schedule. I just might be more selective about who I choose to fly with, is all.
Previous posts about film festivals canbe found here.
Also in Theaters: Had I but world enough, and time, other FLEFF events I’d want to attend include the screenings at Cinemapolis of Sleep with Your Eyes Open tonight and The End of St. Petersburg (which includes live musical accompaniment by local legends Cloud Chamber Orchestra) on Saturday, and the live performance using 19th-century optical devices called “Elliott and Schlemowitz’s Magic Lantern Show” there on Sunday. My favorite new movie now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen is The Woman in the Yard, a well-crafted chilling psychological horror film about my greatest fear as a parent which continues its run at the Regal, but maybe only for one more week (it’s down to one showing per day). I also enjoyed Black Bag, which closes at Cinemapolis tonight, and A Working Man, which continues its run at the Regal. Noteworthy special events include free screenings of last year’s Best International Feature Film Oscar winner I’m Still Here at Cornell Cinema on Monday and Matter of Mind: My Alzheimer’s at Cinemapolis on Wednesday and free “sensory-friendly” screenings of the PBS children’s television program Carl the Collector at the Tompkins County Public Library on Wednesday. Finally, your best bets for repertory fare are the 4k restorations of North by Northwest and my November “Drink & a Movie” selection The Searchers at Cornell Cinema tomorrow and Sunday respectively as part of their “VistaVision!” series.
As a committed pacifist war films aren’t my favorite genre. It is the shame of our species that we’re still fighting each other at this point in our development, and there isn’t much else to say about the matter. Wooden Crosses is largely exempt from this argument, though, because of when it was made and because it isn’t so much anti-WAR as it is anti-war PROPAGANDA. While it has elements that are maybe more appropriate to the silent era like a double exposed dual parade of living and dead soldiers, it’s very smart about sound and neither of its most crucial scenes would work as well or even at all without it. First Corporal Breval (Charles Vanel), far from leaving his comrades with lofty sentiments or pearls of wisdom as he expires instead instructs them to make sure everyone knows what a slut his wife is. Then Gilbert Demachy (Pierre Blanchar) is denied a hero’s death and succumbs to a gutshot wound after an entire day spent whimpering pathetically in no man’s land as he waits for nightfall and the promise of stretcher bearers who never arrive. The point is clear: there is nothing ennobling about their “sacrifice.” Their stories were simply cut short and wasted, leaving behind a lifetime of unfinished business. Wooden Crosses is also justly famous for the documentary-style combat footage that is the reason 20th Century-Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck bought the North American rights to it (so that the footage could be reused in The Road to Glory), the maddeningly incessant sound of artillery is again the reason this is *effective*. I would even go so far as to say that it compares well to some scenes from Band of Brothers, which is impressive considering it preceded that work by nearly 70 years.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
I didn’t conceive of it as such, but my “Drink & a Movie” series is a fair approximation of my personal cinema and cocktail canons because (predictably, in retrospect) I have mostly chosen to write about my “go-to” directors and ingredients and scenes and techniques, the ones I’ve spent the most time thinking about and which have therefore played the biggest roles in shaping my point of view as a cinephile and drinker. My tastes are constantly evolving, though, and to conclude my three-post-long celebration of crème de cacao I’ve selected two new discoveries from the past few years.
Unfortunately, although I originally saw this film on the Criterion Channel as part of a collection called “Directed by Allan Dwan,” it doesn’t appear to be streaming anywhere right now.
One of the things I found so delightful about Black Sheep are the old-school drinks heroine Claire Trevor’s Janette Foster orders: she asks for, in sequence, crème de menthe, a crème de menthe frappé, and Dubonnet. I wanted to offer a more complex alternative to Janette’s usuals like I did with the sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist ordered by Andie MacDowell’s Rita Hanson in my Drink & a Movie entry for Groundhog Day, and I quickly settled on the Chapuline, a delightful variation on the grasshopper created by Toby Maloney of Chicago’s The Violet Hour. He specifically calls for green crème de menthe, but does so while making a joke related to presentation: “the white pales in comparison.” I’ve never been able to find the bottle by Marie Brizard he recommends and every verdant variety that *is* available in Ithaca tastes unbearably artificial in comparison to Tempus Fugit Glaciale, so that’s what we went with. In addition to tasting much better, I submit that it also looks just fine in this yellow glass we picked out to serve it in. Here’s how we make it:
1 oz. Crème de cacao (Tempus Fugit) 1 oz. Crème de menthe (Tempus Fugit) 3/4 oz. Pisco (Macchu Pisco) 1 oz. Heavy cream
Shake all ingredients vigorously with ice and double strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a spanked (to release its aromas) fresh mint leaf.
As he notes in The Bartender’s Manifesto, Maloney’s goal was “to prove that [he] could take a gauche drink and make it at least interesting, at best delicious.” Mission accomplished! The first thing you notice is its beautifully silky texture. The flavor that pops is peppermint immediately followed by chocolate–the effect would be almost exactly like eating a York Peppermint Pattie except that there’s also a burn which resolves into grape on the finish, as if the drink was morphing from a grasshopper to a stinger, the other classic cocktail most commonly associated with crème de menthe. You wouldn’t get this with a barrel-aged spirit like cognac, obviously, so the choice of pisco is quite brilliant!
Maloney’s recipe includes instructions to shake “like it owes you money,” which is actually a pretty excellent segue into discussion of Black Sheep since income, like the film’s camera movements, represents both freedom and confinement for its protagonist John Francis Dugan (Edmund Lowe) and the other characters. As Frederic Lombardi writes in his book Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, “the opening shots of the film give a full sense of the great breadth of the ship Olympus but as the story unfolds, there are increasing attempts to restrict the space in which Dugan can move, so that he must literally know his place.” To start at the beginning, an introductory montage provides a tour of the ship’s first-class spaces:
Before the gliding camera comes to rest on this sign:
And then goes tumbling down the stairs:
Moving at a much faster pace than it did earlier, cinematographer Arthur Miller’s camera now repeats its double-exposure trick to show us we’ve been taken down a notch to second class:
Before it finally stops on a sign and cuts to Dugan playing solitaire:
In just the first of many examples of what Fernando F. Croce callsBlack Sheep‘s “limpid storytelling,” our logical assumption that he must be one of the sharps that the people on board the Olympus are cautioned to be wary of is confirmed by the two shots which follow him looking up from his game at his fellow denizens of the second-class smoking room.
First a woman indignantly responds to her companion’s suggestion that they play bridge for a tenth of a cent per point by saying, “I should say not! I lost 55 cents at a twentieth last night. I’ll play for a fortieth or nothing.”
Then one man responds to another’s suggestion that they play checkers by saying, “I don’t mind if you don’t play for money.”
Dugan shakes his head and returns to his game, but is soon distracted by an offscreen clicking noise which a quick tracking shot soon reveals to be caused by Foster’s vain attempts light a cigarette:
And with that we’re off and running! Foster’s lighter doesn’t work because it isn’t supposed to: “that’s how I meet so many nice people,” she informs Dugan. It’s a toss-up for me whether the *very* best thing about Black Sheep is the dialogue by director Allan Dwan (who wrote the story that the movie is based on) and screenwriter Allen Rivkin or the chemistry between its stars, who David Cairns brilliantly describes as “so delightful together you long for a whole season of Thin Man type romps for them to connive through (as he says, “sometimes film history just misses a trick”) although these things are of course related. The snappy one-liners come fast and furious right from the start: when Foster asks if she can buy Dugan a drink, his reply is “I don’t know, can you?” A few beaters later she labels them “two good mixers with no ingredients.” Then a bit further on after the two sneak upstairs to “see how the rich people live,” Dugan condenses a whole lifetime of back story into just a handful of sentences. “There are two things that always floor me,” he tells Foster, “horses and dames. One keeps me broke, the other crazy, and you can’t depend on either of them.” When she quips, “don’t tell me a horse jilted you!” he replies in kind: “yes, and a girl kicked me.”
But then he adds: “that was twenty years ago. Forget it.” Speaking of coin flips, in addition to sharing a profession in common with the main character of last month’s Drink & a Movie selection Bob le Flambeur, Dugan similarly uses them as an external signifier of his deference to the Fates:
“Dugan and Foster stay in business,” he says after this one, referring to the partnership they have entered into to help a young man named Fred Curtis (Tom Brown) they observed getting fleeced in poker during their upper deck sojourn who also, as it happens, turns out to be Dugan’s son. This fact is revealed in a moment that Matt Strohl describes as “an emotional bolt of lightning in the middle of the film” which occurs after Dugan has helped Curtis win back some of the money he lost to Eugene Pallette’s and Jed Prouty’s buffoonish oil tycoons Colonel Upton Calhoun Belcher and Orville Schmelling by posing as his friend, but only at the expense of his own profits when he is forced to accept the checks Curtis wrote them as payment or risk giving up the ruse. He’s right in the middle of getting tough with Curtis (“I’ve got $1800 coming from you and I want it–in cash”) when suddenly he spots a set of framed photos:
“What’s the matter?” Curtis asks him after he notices the older man’s reaction:
“Oh, nothing, nothing–I probably had too much to drink or something,” Dugan stammers. He gives no further explanation, but immediately changes his tune regarding repayment. “Where’s that note for those rubber checks?” he asks, then looks on with what my daughter Lucy would call a “thin smile” while Curtis writes it:
As Strohl notes, although Dugan never reveals his discovery to Curtis even through the end of the film, “that one reaction scene reverberates and lends weight to everything that follows,” including what I think must be the romantic non-kiss in the history of cinema. It takes place about halfway through a 30-second-long shot that begins right after the coin flip depicted above when Dugan notices Foster’s hand on the lapel of his bathrobe:
They put their arms around each other and lean in, but suddenly he pulls back:
It’s just for a second and they lean in again, but the result is the same:
Foster is already smiling as he lets out a perplexed sigh and is laughing by the time he calls for the steward to “take this lady out of here”:
Destiny can bring lovers together but in my experience the key to a happy marriage is that you have to really like each other! Dugan is clearly wondering what the heck happened to him and there’s work still to be done, so the wedding bells will have to wait, but these two clearly have a future together and he’s earned it. And that brings us right back to where we started! The steward appears in this scene because Dugan is supposedly under lock and key, and as Lombardi notes “restriction of movement is a severe violation for a Dwan character and film,” but Dugan “uses his room arrest to serve his ends.” In other words, all those attempts to put Dugan in his place ultimately fail, which is another connection between him and Bob Montagné: they both remain true to themselves no matter how down and out they find themselves and are eventually rewarded. Which now makes three “exceptions to the rule” I wrote about in my February Drink & a Movie post about The Young Girls of Rochefort, suggesting that it’s time to update my notion that “the human experience of trying to become a better person” is a theme of this series. After all, resisting the temptation to change more than you need to can itself be a challenge. Which, come to think of it, is the secret to the Chapuline’s success, too, isn’t it? Toby Maloney elevated the grasshopper by tweaking its proportions just a bit and adding one single ingredient. Or, to reframe this in terms that Dugan and Bob (and Kenny Rogers) would appreciate, sometimes the highest form of wisdom is knowing how to quite when you’re ahead.
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.
Also in Theaters: If I was in Ithaca this week, I’d be prioritizing the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, specifically the screenings at Cinemapolis of Snow Leopard on Friday; Sleep with Your Eyes Open on Saturday; and Little, Big, and Far on Tuesday. The best new movies now playing local theaters that I’ve already seen are the enjoyable genre exercises Black Bag (spy film), which continues its runs at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, and A Working Man (Jason Statham), which is at just the Regal. This week’s special events are highlighted by free screenings of the movies Improper Conduct and The Accelerator at Cornell Cinema on Monday and Tuesday respectively. Finally, your best bet for repertory fare is Princess Mononoke, which is at the Regal all week.
Home Video: I’ve been digging the fact that there have been many pre-Code movies with ~60 minute runtimes featured on Watch TCM lately because they’re the perfect thing to watch when, say, we miraculously get the kids settled on Thursday night with about an hour to spare before Top Chef comes on. My favorite recent discovery is the 1933 film Female, which starts where Movie Year 2024’s Babygirl ends: with a girlboss CEO exiling an employee she has slept with to a faraway branch office. A lot of people seem to be hung up on the messaging of the climax, but the preponderance of available evidence suggests to me that whatever they say to each other in the final scene, Ruth Chatterton’s Alison Drake is much more comfortable in the board room than George Brent’s engineer Jim Thorne is ever likely to be. Anyway, the film also features delightfully profligate back projection and some outrageous wipes, so be sure to check it out before it disappears from the platform on April 9!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
What I’m Seeing This Week: I’m a single parent for the next four days while My Loving Wife is out of town, and I’m planning to take the girls to see The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie at the Regal Ithaca Mall while she’s away. I’m also going to try to sneak in a screening of A Working Man there during the brief window of time between her return and my departure for a conference in Minneapolis on Wednesday.
Also in Theaters: This week’s highlight is definitely the beginning of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival! For the reasons described above, I won’t be able to make it to any of the initial screenings, but some titles that jumped out at me include Little, Big, and Far; Snow Leopard; and Youth (Hard Times), which screen at Cinemapolis tomorrow, Saturday, and Tuesday respectively. Eephus is the first serious contender for my Top Ten Movies of 2025 list, but it’s sadly down to its last two screenings at Cinemapolis today at 5:50 and 8:20pm. Best Picture Oscar winner Anora closes there today as well, and there’s also a screening of Best Documentary Feature Oscar winner No Other Land at Cornell Cinema tonight at 7pm. After that my top recommendation will become Black Bag, a relationship movie disguised as a spy thriller starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett and shot by Steven Soderbergh (sorry: Peter Andrews) to look like a sleepy child’s view of Christmas lights out a car window. Finally, your best bets for repertory fare are The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which plays Cornell Cinema tomorrow, and Before Sunrise plus its sequel Before Sunset, both of which are at Cinemapolis all week.
Home Video: Speaking of Anora, it is now streaming on Hulu! Critic Noel Vera was kind enough to engage me in a back-and-forth in the comments section of his review last November about Ani, the character Mikey Madison won a Best Actress Oscar for portraying, and whether or not it’s believable that she falls so completely for Mark Eydelshteyn’s Vanya. To him Ani “feels too smart for that; at least as Madison plays her” and thus “the ending, glum as it is, doesn’t quite hit as hard” because the film “still feels every bit the fairy tale.” To me, though, that’s precisely the point. Ani may be clever and tough, but she still has Disney princess dreams that make her vulnerable. I rewatched Cinderella, the specific one she mentions, the other day, and it’s not like Prince Charming does anything to convince his bride that he’d be willing to stand up for her against his father the king if she turned out to be unable or unwilling to have children! Anyway, the mere fact that we spent so much time talking about this is a testament to how successful Madison and writer-director Sean Baker were at creating a memorable movie heroine and a world for her to inhabit.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
What I’m Seeing This Week: My top priority is On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, since it will be at Cinemapolis for one week only, and I’m planning to see Eephus there as well because I don’t want to risk missing it either. Finally, our plans for a “date night” outing to Black Bag at Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall last week fell through, so My Loving Wife and I trying again tomorrow.
Also in Theaters: The best new movie now playing Ithaca RIGHT NOW that I’ve already seen No Other Land, but its final screening at Cinemapolis is today at 2:50pm. After that it will be Anora, which continues its post-Best Picture Oscar run at Cinemapolis and the Regal. That should definitely be your first choice if you somehow haven’t already checked it out, but otherwise it’s all about special events and repertory fare this week. Highlights on the former front include free screenings at Cornell Cinema of an experimental short films program called “Matter Falling Out of Form” tonight, The Year Between on Monday evening and a shorts program called the “Women’s Adventure Film Tour 2025” on Wednesday, as well as a double feature of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and La La Land there on Saturday. My other “old movie” recommendation is Peeping Tom, which closes out Cornell Cinema’s “Powell and Pressburger: Titans of Technicolor” series tomorrow.
Home Video: My oldest daughter Lucy recently scored the first two points of her basketball career in the final game of her second season. We’re extremely proud of all the hard work she has put in on and off (her coaches think that indoor rock climbing has had a noticeable impact on her upper body strength) the court and have enjoyed watching her improve each week. In addition to the bucket, she also fought for rebounds and let her teammates know when she was open, which she attributes to our new pre-game ritual of playing the song “Defying Gravity” on repeat in the car so that she and her sister can lustily sing along to it to warm up her voice. In honor of this momentous event (which literally brought tears to My Loving Wife’s eyes!) in our family’s history, this week’s home video recommendation is Love & Basketball, which Cornell Cinema actually screened in February and which is now streaming on Peacock.
This film was released theatrically almost exactly one year before I officially became a diehard basketball fan during my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh when my soon-to-be-beloved Panthers went on a Cinderella run during the Big East (RIP) tournament. Although this wasn’t enough to secure an NCAA Tournament bid that year, they went on to appear in the next ten and came within a heartbreaking miracle Scottie Reynolds coast-to-coast basket of the Final Four in 2009. Throughout this run they always had great point guards, so I was delighted when this turned out to be the position that Love & Basketball‘s protagonists Monica Wright (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy McCall (Omar Epps) both play and in heaven when the movie’s pivotal moment turns out to be Wright taking a charge. It also features one of cinema’s great one-on-one games (along with Arthur Agee’s showdown with his father in my March, 2024 Drink & a Movie selection Hoop Dreams) followed by a heartwarming final scene celebrating the WNBA, which was still only in its third year of existence during shooting.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 