Home Video Recommendation: While my religious beliefs haven’t fundamentally changed since the age eleven revelation I wrote about last week, my views on religion have evolved considerably during this time. To hijack a popular meme, the pithily wry short The Tomb now streaming on the Criterion Channel as part of their “Sudanese Film Group” collection (which is well worth watching in its entirety, by the way) represents “how it started” with its charlatan church built atop a bag of wheat. The Age of the Medici, which you can watch on the same platform, uses a variation of the same story (this time it’s about a chapel dedicated to the remains of a saint which turned out to be the bones of a dog) to pick up where the former movie’s cynical “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!” ending leaves off and suggests that maybe just maybe the wonders of art and architecture surrounding this preacher are ends that justify the means:
Tag Gallagher calls this “the greatest defense of capitalism ever filmed” in The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, but there’s a lot to love about this movie even if that doesn’t sound like your particular brand of vodka. As I recently said on Letterboxd:
Roberto Rossellini rewrites the Great Man theory of history as biochemistry. Almost the entirety of the final third of Cosimo de’ Medici’s story is devoted to cataloging the achievements of another, Leon Battista Alberti, who in turn would have seen far less were it not for his vantage point atop the pile of art and scholarship commissioned and collected by his patron. It is, in other words, a tale of enzyme catalysis. The brilliant forced perspective establishing shots of Florence keep the fires of activation energy burning.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
Religion stopped working for me sometime between the age of ten and eleven. Born and raised in a part of Pennsylvania that my father used to refer to derogatorily as “fundy country,” it took me that long to realize Christianity wasn’t the only game in town; as soon as I did, I started to have trouble sleeping. Everyone seemed to agree that admission into heaven was dependent on living a good life, but how was it possible to determine which system of keeping score was the right one? Eventually I decided that it wasn’t, labeled myself agnostic, and haven’t had any issues getting eight hours a night ever since.
This is also when I discovered that my family owned a VHS copy of the original Star Wars trilogy taped off the television by someone who occasionally forgot to hit the “stop” button during commercials like this one. By the dawn of the day I piled into a friend’s mom’s car to wait in line for an hour to buy tickets to the theatrical premiere of the “special edition” of A New Hope in 1997, I must have watched it 150 times easy. Although I distinctly remember declaring that “this was the closest thing to a religious experience I’ve ever had!” afterward, I don’t think I connected these two events until just last year when I read Lauren Jackson’s New York Times article “Americans Haven’t Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion.” Upon doing so I immediately made a note to myself to explore whether or not George Lucas’s tale from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away functioned for me as a sort of dietary supplement that supplied the “three B’s” Jackson mentions (belief, belonging and behaviors) which otherwise would have been missing from my life.
That prospective blog post was still languishing on the back burner when I saw My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow at Cornell Cinema last year and was struck by how often its characters mention Harry Potter. A few weeks later I watched Best Documentary Feature Oscar nominee (and eventual winner) Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which includes shots featuring this toy in the foreground:
And of these posters adorning director/narrator/subject Pavel Talankin’s office:
There are, in fact, a total of 12-15 Harry Potter references in My Undesirable Friends depending on how you count, beginning with Joker James performing a song live on TV Rain that contains lyrics about “deaf dementors” near the start of chapter one “The Lives of Foreign Agents.” About ten minutes later the children of primary subject Anna Nemzer ask to watch one of the movies, there’s a Harry Potter advent calendar at the beginning of chapter two “The Town Crazies,” and toward the end of it Alesya Marokhovskaya and her girlfriend prepare a birthday cake for their friend Ira Dolinina modeled after the one Hagrid makes Harry:
Ksenia Mironova displays a picture she paid to have taken with Tom Felton, the actor who plays Draco Malfoy, in chapter three “The Holiday Special,” then she mentions “a lecture about why Putin’s Russia is like Harry Potter” about two-thirds of the way through chapter four “The Expected Impossible.” There’s a close-up of a paperback edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone about ten minutes later, and Olya Churakova listens to a voicemail from her podcast partner Sonya Groysman a few seconds after that in which she describes feeling like “this whole time we’ve been in some Harry Potter book and now it’s the moment when the Ministry has fallen and Ron, Hermione, and Harry leave school to look for Horcruxes”:
About ten minutes into chapter five “Don’t Say War” there’s a sequence in which Ksenia notes that her TikTok “is filled with comparisons between Harry Potter and Russia,” followed by a suggestion that “Harry Potter is [opposition leader Alexei] Navalny,” followed by a note that “I watched Harry Potter as a kid and couldn’t understand why so many people can’t overthrow one bald guy who’s been ruling for 20 years but now I get it,” followed by an observation that “Navalny is always quoting Harry Potter in court,” and concluding with her friend holding up a wand bought in London:
A few minutes later her friend says that she has lots of foreign friends who write her, “you can stop this: go out and protest!” and laments the fact that “clearly [they] haven’t lived in Russia, especially recently,” to which Ksenia replies, “let’s go back to talking about Harry Potter.” She makes another reference to how her social media feed consists of “nonstop Harry Potter” about ten minutes after that while waiting for a colleague arrested at a protest to be released from prison, and finally appears wearing this Hogwarts jacket about 30 minutes before the end of the film:
Meanwhile, while there’s only one additional Harry Potter reference in Mr. Nobody when Pavel rhetorically asks, “is Severus Snape our new headmaster?” after stumbling upon students marching through the hallway:
Shots of the posters above reappear multiple times. So what’s going on here? To start with the obvious, My Undesirable Friends director Julia Loktev observed in a 2025 interview with Michael Sicinski for In Review Online that for her characters, “Harry Potter is a framework for understanding good and evil and a framework for understanding Putin’s Russia.” Jackson (who interestingly notes that she first encountered the work of Richard Dawkins at a Barnes & Noble in middle school when she went there “to buy the latest Harry Potter”) supplies a possible reason why in the form of a long-term study that found “women who attended religious services once a week were 33 percent less likely to die prematurely than women who never attended.” She quotes one of its authors, Tyler J. VanderWeele, as explaining that this was because “they had higher levels of social support, better health behaviors and greater optimism about the future,” which sounds a lot like the advice Navalny gave his fellow citizens in a speech appealing his conviction for violating the terms of a previous suspended sentence. “It’s important not to feel lonely, because if I were Voldemort I would like you to feel lonely,” he said. “Obviously, our ‘Voldemort’ in his palace also wants it.” He quoted the Bible in the same speech: “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.”
The Church of Dumbledore actually isn’t the only secular religion My Undesirable Friends proposes for Russia. Anya calls New Year’s Eve the country’s “one religious holiday” in chapter three and TV Rain’s lawyer Dima laughingly suggests that “Russia’s real religion is, what’s that Phoenician religion, the cult of Baal” in chapter five:
“There is some divine boss whom no one has ever seen,” he explains, and “it’s always, ‘I don’t make decisions, the boss does.'” The punchline: “Baal in Phoenician just means ‘boss.'” They are, of course, both joking, but there are also three other references that I find significant. The first comes just six minutes into chapter one: “this is really Mordor,” Anya says about a building that to her embodies the worst tendencies of the Putin regime:
“Where else can you find a Mordor like ours?” Lena Kostyuchenko asks about halfway through chapter two. “We have the most Mordorous Mordor!”
Finally, in a cab home from an airport with Lena and her newly-arrived American girlfriend, Loktev herself asks, “how is it ‘Mordor’ in English?” from offscreen as they pass the Kremlin, and is answered with solemn nods.
Whatever comfort and community Harry Potter provides for Loktev’s subjects and Talankin, I can’t help but wonder if they all wouldn’t have been better served by The Lord of the Rings. Consider Ksenia and her friend. “We have a Harry Potter but he’s in prison,” they lament in chapter five.
J.K. Rowling’s tale is just as much a product of the “John the Baptist complex” I wrote about in my Movie Year 2025 top ten (percent) list entry for L’Empire as Star Wars. I have no doubt that My Undesirable Friends‘ dissident journalists knew exactly what they were fighting for and I can’t imagine it would have made a whit of difference in the end, but it seems to me that humble, persistent Frodo Baggins and steadfast Samwise Gamgee would have made for more empowering role models than “The Boy Who Lived.”
In Theaters: Every year there’s at least one movie that everyone else absolutely loves which I merely like. It Was Just an Accident held this distinction last year, and in 2024 it was Hundreds of Beavers, both of which I found . . . fine. The new incumbent is shaping up to be Blue Heron, which reminded me of two recent films I really liked, Petite Maman and All of Us Strangers, but with all the magic schematized out of them. You should go see it at Cinemapolis anyway, though, because it has a 97% grade on Rotten Tomatoes, is averaging four stars from the people I follow on Letterboxd who have rated it, and will almost certainly end up in the top ten of the 2026 IndieWire Critics Poll, all of which means you’ll probably disagree with me, too. Leave me with a comment if you do and tell me what I’m underrating!
Obsession, which continues its runs at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall, is an exploration of the impossibility of ever actually getting what you wish for as an example of the Lovecraftian sublime that is much more on my wavelength. I also hear good things about holdovers Is God Is and The Sheep Detectives, but I’m going with new releases In the Grey and I Love Boosters. All four films are at the Regal, and Boosters opens at Cinemapolis tonight as well. We’re saving Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, which probably doesn’t have anything new to say about endowment spending, for a family matinee outing to the Regal next weekend.
Special events include a free screening of The Warrior Tradition at Cinemapolis on Monday. Finally, the cream of a weak crop of repertory options is The Blues Brothers, which has a number of showtimes at the Regal on Monday.
Home Video Recommendation: Prismatic Ground, as its website says, “is an annual festival in New York City centered on experimental documentary and avant-garde film.” It started life in 2021 as a virtual event, but appears to have evolved into a first truly hybrid, then mostly in-person one which still retains a virtual component over the past five springs. Last year was the first time I remember hearing about it, and this year I almost remembered to check the festival website in time to catch some of the “wave ∞” films, but was a day or two late. Luckily for me, 31 selections from the first five editions are now available on the Criterion Channel with a subscription as part of their “Prismatic Ground Presents” collection, which I recently finished working my way through.
Genuinely boundary-pushing art is just as likely to irritate as it is to awe you, sometimes even within the same work. Hinkelten, for instance, was probably my least favorite movie of the lot, but it also opens with a starkly Arctic horizontal composition that I’d love to frame and hang on my wall so that I can stare at it without the distraction of gratingly slowed-down voiceover dialogue that I found nearly unbearable:
Other titles such as As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night, which is meant to be “presented in black and white as a three-screen projection,” didn’t work for me because they seem to have lost a lot in translation from installation setups like this one to the small screen. Quite a few are worth mixing in with your feature film viewing, though! Here are five of my favorites:
5.Exterior Turbulence. This richly-textured (even in its interstitial white text-on-a-black-background title cards!) dream diary directed by Binghamton University professor Sofia Theodore-Pierce won Best in Show at the 2023 Ithaca Experimental Film Festival, an annual event that I’m now extremely embarrassed not to have made it to yet. Next year!
4.L’Éscale. I still get a big kick out of flying, and this movie’s deceptively simple window seat visuals tap into that same “surly bonds of earth” sense of wonder. It pairs them with voiceover dialogue describing a Kafkaesque stopover, though, foregrounding a different way international aviation is a miracle: successfully navigating past multiple interstitial spaces where you can be made to disappear without anyone knowing until they receive a ransom demand.
3. Yaangna Plays Itself. One of our local movie theaters recently introduced a well-intentioned but overlong and repetitive land acknowledgement which now precedes most of their screenings. This dynamic experiment in filmic terroir models a materialist approach to setting the celluloid record straight that I’d love to see them look at as inspiration for future efforts. Especially if they created a series, perhaps corresponding to the changing seasons, it would be much more engaging!
2. Tuktuit: Caribou. Astonishingly resourceful 16mm cinematic ouroboros created with developers and emulsion made from the same lichen and fleshed-down caribou depicted in the movie. Which is also beautiful and mysterious in a way that reminded me of Movie Year 2025 favorite 7 Walks with Mark Brown! If I was organizing a screening of Nuisance Bear, I’d want this to play before it.
1. Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction. The oldest film here, a 2024 wave ∞ online exclusive from 1984, is at its best in classroom scenes that suggest intonation as an antidote to Orwellian doublespeak. It also uses speeded-up archival footage to a similarly understated subversive effect and features a juxtaposition of a mural aide de mémoire against travelogue footage from a visit to a place that doesn’t exist anymore which certainly anticipates and maybe even directly inspired a number of other works in this collection.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
I served on the University Senate at the University of Maryland from 2016-2019 and the Faculty Senate at Cornell University from 2022-2025, where I listened to many debates about endowment spending. They invariably began with one of my colleagues suggesting that doing more of it seemed like an obvious solution to a funding problem that troubled them, continued with someone else (usually an administrator) patiently explaining that this wasn’t as easy as it sounded and would be foolhardy in any case, and ended in stalemate because neither side ever came close to convincing the other.
We meet the Mandalorian “covert” just 18 minutes into season one. Bounty hunter Din Djarin aka “Mando” (Pedro Pascal) looks around to ensure the coast is clear, ducks into a doorway, and descends a staircase:
He makes his way past other helmeted figures to the Armorer (Emily Swallow):
And places an ingot of Beskar steel from their ancestral homeworld that he received as pre-payment for a new commission before her:
“This is extremely generous,” she says as she melts it down. “The excess will sponsor many foundlings.”
“That’s good,” he replies. “I was once a foundling.” As the Armorer hammers the steel into a pauldron, violent scenes from Mando’s childhood flash before his eyes:
Two episodes later his captured quarry Grogu becomes fascinated by the metal knob atop a lever in his starship, which for some reason easily screws off:
A crowd forms when he delivers the bounty to the Armorer, who informs him that it’s enough for a full cuirass:
But not everyone is impressed. Paz Vizsla aka “Heavy Infantry” picks up an ingot and studies it contemptuously:
Then initiates the following exchange with the Armorer:
HEAVY INFANTRY: These were cast in an Imperial smelter. These are the spoils of the Great Purge. The reason that we lie hidden like sand rats.
THE ARMORER: Our secrecy is our survival. Our survival is our strength.
HEAVY INFANTRY: Our strength was once in our numbers. Now we live in the shadows and only come above ground one at a time.
Mando asks the Armorer to reserve some excess Beskar for the foundlings, to which she replies, “the foundlings are our future.”
A few minutes of screentime later, Mando is getting ready to set off on a new adventure, when a rack focus suddenly alerts us to the fact that he never reinstalled the knob Grogu liked to play with:
He undergoes a change of heart and embarks on a rescue mission which goes well until it doesn’t. Just when all hope seems lost, Din Djarin’s fellow Mandalorians descend from the sky to save him and his new ward:
“You’re going to have to relocate the covert,” Mando says to Heavy Infantry, who answers with the words of their creed: “this is the Way.”
In his seminal Journal of Legal Studies article on the topic, Henry Hansmann argued that while university endowments “are now so familiar that their purpose is seldom questioned,” upon close examination “it is not obvious why they are accumulated.” On the one hand, as Hansmann notes, it’s quite simple: “the accumulation of endowment is, in effect, a form of saving, presumably for expenditure in the future.” But because “each dollar added to endowment represents a dollar less for current research or for educational services to current students or a dollar more in tuition that must be charged current students in order to provide them with the same level of services,” it only makes sense to refrain from spending this money if the amount saved will “be used to provide more research, more education, or lower tuition in the future.”
Universities concede by their actions that they can dip into their endowment each year: per Hansmann c. 1990, his home institution Yale was typical in adopting a policy whereby expenditures should not exceed the long-run real rate of return of its endowment investments to ensure that the real value of the endowment does not decrease. The only question, then, is how much is appropriate? Hansmann devotes 25 pages considering eleven common justifications for rules favoring endowment accumulation in turn before concluding that while ideas such as that they “serve as a financial buffer against periods of financial adversity” and/or “assist in passing on values prized by the present generation” are compelling, there’s little evidence either that they actually explain university behavior or “that the sizes of existing endowments, and the ways in which they are managed, are well chosen to serve these goals.”
As a staunch believer in the old adage “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” I confess that during my time as a senator the administrator argument that, as Karen W. Arenson quoted Princeton president Shirley M. Tilghman writing to her Senate Finance Committee, “the endowment does not function as a ‘piggy bank’ or ‘rainy day fund’ waiting to be used or allocated” rang true to me. And indeed this pile of armor initially suggests that the Mandalorians made a mistake by revealing themselves:
But season three dawns on Paz Vizsla’s son Ragnar Vizsla being initiated into the relocated covert, proving that their gamble did in fact pay off:
One consequence of using popular culture texts to explain concepts like endowment spending is that they’re often persuasive in ways you didn’t anticipate. That isn’t quite what happened here for me, but I do find myself pretty well convinced by Conti-Brown’s “cultural theory of endowment accumulation,” and The Mandalorian is a good illustration of one of its central points: the danger of confusing the means for the end. As Conti-Brown notes, an endowment “can be a point of reference and pride akin to a winning football team, the prominence of a faculty member, or the ranking of the university” because its absolute size “provides a clear criterion for objective ranking.” The problem arises when protecting it at all costs entails withholding benefits from the students of today in the name of the students of tomorrow–after all, that’s who they were when the bargain was struck!
Bernard observes that “the choices universities make now will also affect the future composition of the professoriate,” and it isn’t a coincidence that when the ceremony above is interrupted by a Dinosaur Turtle attack:
It’s Din Djarin and Grogu who arrive in the nick of time to play hero:
To put it in terms they would appreciate, this is the Way.
TARAN: They’re dreaming of two stories now. You were successful! You set them all on their feet.
NEETA: Father!
TARAN: Why stay any longer? Now they just pity you. You weren’t up to carrying the burden, yet you were forced to. Now you yourself have become the burden.
“‘But surely you must have heard of Captain Loosestrife? He was an officer of the Owsla in the fighting.’
“‘What fighting?’ asked another buck.
“‘The fighting against King Darzin,’ replied Rabscuttle.
“‘Here, do me a favor, old fellow, will you?’ said the buck. ‘That fighting–I wasn’t born when it finished.’
“‘But surely you know the Owsla captains who were?’ said Rabscuttle.
“‘I wouldn’t be seen dead with them,’ said the buck. ‘What, that white-whiskered old bunch? What do we want to know about them?’
“‘What they did,’ said Rabscuttle.
“‘That war lark, old fellow?’ said the first buck. ‘That’s all finished now. That’s got nothing to do with us.’
“If this Loosestrife fought King What’s-His-Name, that’s his business,’ said one of the does. ‘It’s not our business, is it?’
“It was all a very wicked thing,’ said another doe. ‘Shameful, really. If nobody fought in wars, there wouldn’t be any, would there? But you can’t get old rabbits to see that.’
“‘My father was in it,’ said the second buck. ‘He gets on about it sometimes. I always go out quick. “They did this and then we did that” and all that caper. Makes you curl up, honest. Poor old geezer, you’d think he’d want to forget about it. I reckon he makes half of it up. And where did it get him, tell me that?”
When I interviewed Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival Co-Directors Michael Richardson and Andrew Utterson last month, they explained that their ideal FLEFF theme “will resonate with a range of different films, but not be too determining of how we think about them.” It perhaps therefore shouldn’t be a surprise that only two of the 12 movies I saw at this year’s edition directly address “Migrations” in the most obvious sense of animals or people moving from one geographical location to another. Appropriately for an opener, that’s how Clash of the Wolves, a Rin Tin Tin vehicle (my first) from 1925 accompanied by event mainstays L’il Anne and Hot Cayenne, begins: the famous canine’s Lobo leads his wolf pack down from forest fire-ravaged mountains to the desert, where borax prospector Dave Weston (Charles Farrell) earns his loyalty by removing a cactus thorn from his paw. Hijinks ensue when Dave brings Lobo, who is known throughout the region, to town in a bizarrely effective beard disguise that makes him look like Dr. Fido Freud:
Per Utterson, “connecting the early 20th century with debates that resonate 100 or so years later” is one of the reasons FLEFF continues to include silent films in their programming each year, and the intersections between Clash and winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at Sundance 2026 Nuisance Bear are a great example of what this looks like in practice. Co-directed by hometown hero Jack Weisman, the latter drew one of the biggest crowds of any event I attended, and just as the fest’s first audience applauded when Lobo’s pack mauled Pat Hartigan’s villain in the final reel, these folks were audibly Team Ursine. But while the box office draw of animals may not have changed much in the past hundred years, the tone of the narratives they appear in definitely has, and where the earlier picture celebrates Dave for taming Lobo, Bear‘s subject is the dangers of disrupting the natural order. Both films are also noteworthy for their cinematography: intro speaker Thomas Bohn described the Joshua Tree National Park locations as something that set Clash apart from the backlot and studio sets the major studios favored at the time, while the best thing about Bear are its horizon line widescreen compositions and the way it zooms out to expose the “human infrastructure” deliberately hidden by other arctic photographers.
Utterson’s “historical vectors” are also at work in the way Seeds, which won the prize for Best Documentary at Sundance last year, can be read as having the same relationship to restored 1978 fellow black and white stunner Northern Lights as the antiwar classic Come and See has to Agnieszka Holland’s 2024 movie Green Border. Just as the descendants of Belarusians victimized by the Nazis went on to use Middle Eastern refugees as sacrificial pawns in a chess match against the European Union a few generations later, so too will the sons and daughters of the Scandinavian immigrants in Lights become the tormenters of Seeds‘ Southern Black family farmers who stayed behind during the Great Migration. The plainspoken lessons about economic power structures from Robert Behling’s labor organizer Ray Sorensen must have rubbed off in more ways than one!
My biggest disappointment was Our Land for reasons I detailed on Letterboxd, but mainly just because it pales in comparison to director Lucrecia Martel’s fiction films. The Blue Trail didn’t quite live up to expectations raised by its status as the festival’s closer either, although the conclusion reminiscent of Abe Simpson’s reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “If—” was a cheerful note to go out on. Mare’s Nest also brought a classic Simpsons episode to mind, but its post-apocalyptic world populated only by children is more comically uncanny than Trail‘s “Logan’s Run with a walker” take on the end times it often feels like we’re living through the beginning of. Dessert is fine and good, but dark resonates more with the anxious absurdity of the present moment than an optimistic ending.
While nothing I mentioned in the previous paragraph has more than a tenuous connection to the theme, that also describes the two titles in this year’s lineup that I enjoyed most. The bigger stretch was Faust, a rewatch for me which was accompanied by an excellent (portentous at the beginning and appropriately big throughout) live score by Cloud Chamber Orchestra, another friend of the festival. Richardson’s introduction identified plagues as one throughline from the medieval milieu of the setting to the 1920s when it was shot to today, and I suppose you could argue that Faust’s personal growth is a migration of sorts? Or not. But who cares? The glint in Faust’s eye early and off the ring he gives Gretchen later rank among the most ingenious uses of lighting in all of cinema, and it was awesome to bask in their big screen splendor. Meanwhile, my favorite new movie, The Love That Remains, is an Icelandic “Break Up in a Small Town” that features a flock of migrating geese responsible for a morbidly hilarious plane crash, an artist who works in weather and rust, and striking seasonal landscapes, but is far more Scenes from a Marriage than Koyaanisqatsi.
One highlight among the more traditional “environmental film” fare was the ethnographic agitprop The Falling Sky. It occasionally comes across a bit too much like Twin Peaks: The Return: The Documentary, but opens with an incredible reset-your-clock long take and a dramatic turn to the second person that reminded me of In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, which I saw at Cinemapolis a week before the festival started. Silent Friend advocates even more effectively for thinking and feeling on a slower timeframe by grounding its three era-spanning narratives set at a German university (shades of Sound of Falling) in the perspective of a giant gingko tree in its botanical garden. But the biggest surprise at all was A Life Illuminated. While it touches all the biodoc bases, the movie is interestingly much more about Dr. Edith Widder’s work than her life and as the father of two girls whose creative ambitions often outpace their patience, I appreciate the way it presents failure as a disappointing but unavoidable and even necessary part of scientific progress. It’s also a wonder to see how far deep-sea marine biology has come during Widder’s lifetime, a tale initially told through archival footage that graduates first to grainy but beautiful black-and-white recordings of bioluminescence which could stand alone as an awesome experimental film, then to astonishingly beautiful capstone original images that capture one of her crowning achievements.
I didn’t originally include A Life Illuminated on my viewing schedule, and my biggest takeaway from 2026 is that it’s safe to trust the good people programming it and take a flyer on things! This edition is the first one I’ve gone whole hog on since moving to Ithaca, and more movies also meant more fun connections with the non-FLEFF films playing local theaters at the same time like Alpha, another diary of a plague year, and the kiddie and grown-up sci fi adventure stories about suddenly inhospitable ecosystems Hoppers and Project Hail Mary. Here’s to doing it next year when the festival turns 30!
Previous film festival dispatches canbe found here.
24 minutes into The Devil Wears Prada, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is welcomed home from a long day at work by her boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier) with a grilled cheese sandwich:
This scene commences with a “J cut” (Wikipedia link because I was “today years old” when I learned this term, as the kids say, so maybe it’s new to you too) that cleverly uses the sound of sizzling to signify how badly she has just been burned by her boss Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), editor-in-chief of Voguestand-in Runway magazine, who delivers a showstopping monologue while putting the finishing touches on an outfit for an upcoming issue with the help of her art director Nigel (Stanley Tucci).
As Rebecca Traister described it in an article for Salon that was published on the day the film premiered:
In a matter of seasons, she explains, a particular shade of blue trickles from her office to magazine pages to couture collections, moving down the fashion food chain until the hue is all the rage in plain-Jane department stores and outlying retail outlets, finally winding up in “some tragic Casual Corner bargain bin,” the very bin out of which a holier-than-thou shopper like Andy has fished the blue sweater she’s wearing. Andy may find her boss’s attention to accessories beneath her but she should understand that on her back she sports a garment that would not have existed save for the decisions made in this very office, by the very person she’s sneering at.
It made such an impression on me that shortly after seeing Devil for the first time I decided the time had finally come to stop dressing like a gutter punk and enlisted the aid of a fashion-conscious friend to help me overhaul my entire wardrobe! But while this explains how the DVD that provided all the screengrabs in this post found its way into my collection, and although it’s almost certainly the shoutout to it in I Love You, Man that prompted My Loving Wife Marion and I to first watch it together, the grilled cheese is what makes it one of “our” movies. The close-up at the top of this post is part of a six-second-long shot that ends with a quick pan up to Nate’s face as he turns to look at Andy:
This is followed by a four-second-long shot of Andy coming toward him from their bedroom ranting about work:
Cut to Nate for three seconds as he laughs sympathetically at her story:
Then back to Andy for eight as she complains that Miranda isn’t happy “unless everyone around her is panicked, nauseous or suicidal”:
Mentioning “the Clackers” in the process, which draws a questioning, “the who?” from Nate.
We return to Andy two seconds later for her explanation that it’s an onomatopoeic reference to the sound of stilettos in the marble lobby, a throwaway description that was the best thing in the book the movie is based on, and which the singer Raye recently co-opted for a studiously cinematic collaboration with Hans Zimmer. After four seconds we cut back to Nate, who pours two glasses of red wine:
And hands one to her two seconds after that:
The camera starts to follow her as she turns to walk away, but to no purpose, and five seconds later we’re with Nate again as he flips the sandwich over with a deft flick of his wrist:
The rhythmic alternation between shots four- to six-seconds-long with shorter ones continues a few more times as Nate hands Andy the grilled cheese:
And she laments the fact that she doesn’t even want to eat it because “that is why those girls are so skinny,” prompting him to rush over because “there’s, like, eight dollars of Jarlsberg in there!”
The scene ends with a helpfully expository declaration by Andy that she just has to “stick it out for one year” and won’t let Miranda get to her in the meantime as Nate chomps on the grilled cheese:
Followed by another J cut to a montage of her boss dropping a series of fashionable coats on her desk:
And that’s it! No food porny oozing cheese or unconventional ingredients, just that initial close-up of a sandwich already on the verge of being over-browned and an admittedly enticing crunch as Nate bites into it later. So why did this become the only way I ever made grilled cheese for over a decade? Simple: it’s good! And simple! You can get great results by mixing and matching aged and mild cheddar or Gruyère, but if you only want to grate once, you aren’t going to do much better than Jarlsberg, which is both flavorful AND melts beautifully. Which is also true of mild Gruyère, to be sure, but Jarlsberg has the advantage of being less expensive, and if it’s not quite as strong, that’s arguably a feature not a bug: just as Nate’s sandwich isn’t actually the focus of this scene, I invariably eat grilled cheese with either Cook’s Illustrated‘s aptly-named ultimate cream of tomato soup (which Deb Perelman also swears by) or Michael Symon’s spicy tomato blue cheese soup, which are respectively extremely rich and rather pungent and therefore cry out for a textually-satisfying supporting player, not a co-star.
The problem with all this is that Marion doesn’t like Jarlsberg. And this is the story of the film for us, because I persisted in making sandwich after sandwich for her anyway in the hope that she’d eventually realize that Nate and I were right. She didn’t, and the joke became that if I Love You, Man was the movie most emblematic of our courtship, this one would be responsible for our divorce. Eventually I wised up and gave in, but even if we’re a cheddar family now, we still talk about Devil every time grilled cheese is on the menu.
We rewatched the film the other day for the first time in awhile and it holds up pretty well, albeit not for reasons that make me excited for the sequel which opens nationwide next week. Miranda’s monologue may no longer strike me as particularly revelatory, but I still find Nigel’s argument in a subsequent scene that the designers featured in Runway created something greater than art “because you live your life in it” compelling.
“Well, not you, obviously, but some people,” he adds, referring to Andy, and this dressing down is actually more narratively significant than its more famous counterpart, given that it’s the one that finally convinces Andy to start putting effort into her attire. If as Martha P. Nochimson put it in her Cineaste review Miranda is “feminine magic,” then Nigel is “Miranda’s human interpreter, wittily explaining her protocosmic mysteries and daring us to deny her importance.” Hideki Fujita also reads the work as a modern fairy tale, noting in his article “The Initiatory Experience of a Fashion Novice” that Miranda’s insistence on calling Andy by the name of her previous second assistant Emily echoes the treatment of Chihiro in Spirited Away, and like her what Andy ultimately learns is how to be her own self.
While many of Devil‘s critics lament Andy’s choice of what Nochimson calls the “dowdy track,” it’s clear to me that in the final scene our hero is indeed “not quite the old Annie” anymore as director David Frankel says in his DVD commentary track. The jeans are back, but “she has more style from having gone through her experience at Runway.”
Even more interestingly, the quiet laugh and small smile Miranda allows herself in the shot immediately after the one above shows that she is both conscious and proud of having mentored Andy.
In the very last moment of the film, a softer side of her emerges. Although silent in her thoughts, she appears happy for having contributed to Andy’s career as a journalist. However, to emphasize that this outburst of sentimentality is unusual, Miranda aggressively and rudely commands her driver with a sharp, “Go!” Thus, in the final scene, Miranda appears slightly more nuanced, with her character’s portrayal diverging from the flat, one dimensional image of the woman manager.
But herein lies the problem. Our last viewing of Devil came mere weeks after the New York Times published Julia Moskin’s exposé of René Redzepi’s abusive managerial practices at his restaurant Noma and I couldn’t keep it out of my head. The article begins with a vivid depiction of Redzepi publicly shaming a sous-chef for daring to “put on techno music, a genre that Mr. Redzepi disliked, in the production kitchen” that doesn’t seem too far removed from some of Miranda’s behavior up until the point where Redzepi throws a punch. The question is: where do you draw the line? If it’s at physical abuse, Priestly gets a pass, but Moskin goes on to note that the 35 former Noma employees she interviewed “described lasting trauma from layers of psychological abuse, including intimidation, body shaming and public ridicule.” If that isn’t just a problem because it’s part of a pattern, then what does it say about the offices of Runway where Nigel can get away with “affectionately” calling Andy “Six” after her dress size and where Miranda is able to refer to her even more simply as “fat” without anyone blinking an eye?
A really good sequel would delve into this question, especially one coming out now. Something tells me The Devil Wears Prada 2 won’t, but either way, we’ll always have Jarlsberg.
What I’m Seeing This Week: We’ll be out of town for the next few days, but My Loving Wife and I are planning to see Hokum with friends at the Philadelphia Film Society’s SpringFest during our travels. I’m hoping to catch The Christophers at Cinemapolis and Normal at the Regal Ithaca Mall after we return as well.
Also in Theaters: My favorite new movie now playing Ithaca is The Drama, which continues its run at Cinemapolis and the Regal. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd earlier this week:
Captures the kaleidoscopic mélange (!) of assumed intent, other people’s actual and imagined reactions, and imagined futures that we’re actually reacting to when someone does or says something that upsets us. Which is to say that, for better or worse, this is much, much less about the big plot twist (which traffics in a taboo that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die already cathartically allowed me to laugh at earlier this year) than Robert Pattinson’s Charlie’s response to it. Which was designed to be chewed on with post-movie cheeseburgers in Andy’s Diners the world over.
Special events include 3D presentations of Jurassic Park and Dial M for Murder at Cornell Cinema on Saturday and Sunday respectively. There are too many free events at Cinemapolis and Cornell Cinema this week to list, but highlights include a “Family Classic Picture Show” screening of one of my childhood favorites Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, at the former on Sunday and a “Collaborative Filmmaking; Indigenous Media” program at the latter on Monday featuring Mobilize, Doing the Sheep Good, Ringtone, and Ghosts. Finally, on the repertory front Bigger than Life is playing Cornell Cinema tonight and Fight Club screens at the Regal on Wednesday.
I made a point of mentioning how grateful I was to Cinemapolis for programming this film in every single one of my conversations with someone who works there for a solid month because I didn’t think it was high-profile enough to *ever* play here, let alone during its first run in theaters! Like 28 Years Later it is, for me, first and foremost a quasi-adaptation of a great science fiction novel I never expected to get to see on the big screen, in this case Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, which postulates that if just one or two things had gone differently, we could easily be living in a world where Mesoamericans “discovered” and subjugated Europe instead of vice versa. Here Gael García Bernal’s titular explorer is depicted as not much more than a crab in a metal carapace, washed up on a beach at the beginning of the film and ready for the boil by the end of it.
And here’s a screengrab from the first stunning crustaceous tableau to further whet your appetite:
Now go watch it!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 