Category: Screengrabs

My favorite thing in the whole entire universe, after my family, might just be the black raspberry bush growing in my back yard. It only produces fruit for a few weeks each summer, but those are some of the best days of the entire year because they begin with a harvest of berries that find their way into nearly every meal we eat during this time. They make terrific muffins and pies, are a brilliant addition to salads and yogurt parfait, and can even be converted into a wide range of savory condiments like barbeque sauce or salsa. They also go great in cocktails, of course! Raspberries freeze well, and thusly preserved can be made into tasty syrups all throughout the year, but my favorite way to use them is fresh off the vine in a modified version of the Knickerbocker in Dale DeGroff”s The Craft of the Cocktail. This drink, which DeGroff notes is adapted from Jerry Thomas, is emblematic of the fresh fruit-forward concoctions he and restauranteur Joe Baum championed it at New York City’s Rainbow Room in the 80s when nearly everyone else was relying exclusively on commercial mixes. Here’s how we make it:

2 ozs. Appleton Estate Signature rum
3/4 oz. Lemon juice
1/2 oz. Orange curaçao (Cointreau)
1/4 oz. Honey syrup
10-12 black raspberries
Lemon wedge

Muddle 7-9 raspberries with the lemon juice and curaçao in a mixing glass. Add ice and rum. Squeeze the lemon wedge into the glass, drop it in, shake well, and double strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with three fresh berries on a pick.

Appleton Estate Signature is a workhorse rum that’s perfect here because it isn’t showy and this drink is all about the berries; if you have another go-to for mixing, I’m sure it would work fine as well. DeGroff calls for 1/2 oz. raspberry syrup in lieu of fresh berries when they’re out of season, but our “blackcaps” are more tart than red raspberries, so we like to add a bit of 1:1 [water to] honey syrup to add sweetness even when they are. I’d normally reach for Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao in this situation, but it hasn’t been in stock in Ithaca the last few times I looked. Based on comparisons to the other orange liqueurs we do have on hand, though, Cointreau works just as well or possibly even better. Last but not least, we’ve tried this both with and without the lemon wedge, and it definitely is worth the extra step: versions that include it are discernably more complex than those without.

The movie I chose to pair with this showcase for upstate New York produce is famous Knicks fan Spike Lee’s underrated heist film Inside Man. Here’s a picture of my Universal Pictures Home Entertainment DVD release, which is suddenly a bit worse for wear after some recent shabby treatment by the baggage handlers at BWI airport:

It can also be streamed via Netflix with a subscription or most other major platforms for a rental fee.

Inside Man opens with a credit sequence set to the song “Chaiyya Chaiyya” from the Indian film Dil Se. Contemporary reviewers mostly saw this as a nod to New York City’s multiculturalism, but with the benefit of hindsight it is obviously significant that the latter movie is an extremely political: it starts out like a simple love story, but ends with the protagonist blowing himself and the woman he is infatuated with up to prevent the latter from committing a suicide bombing. Similarly, although the beginning of Inside Man appears at first glance to consist of nothing more than a simple series of establishing shots, R. Colin Tait argues in Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader that it in fact is “confronting [viewers] with the early iconography of the financial origins of New York City” through images of ships:

“Gargoyles” (I believe this is actually technically a grotesque because it isn’t a waterspout):

And the New York Stock Exchange:

By the time it ends, we will have learned that one of the motives for the robbery that the film is about is to expose banker Arthur Chase (Christopher Plummer) as a war criminal who made his fortune by selling his friends out to the Nazis. In addition to making the film more interesting, this also provides an explanation for how Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) came to know about his target, safety deposit box 392, in the first place. After all, one of his accomplices (Bernard Rachelle) is a professor at Columbia Law who specializes in genocide, slave labor, and war reparation claims and who also has a nephew who is a jeweler.

This seems like exactly the kind of person who might be able to track down a Cartier ring missing since the French Jewish family it belonged to was shipped off to concentration camps during World War II:

But this is all window dressing. What makes Inside Man noteworthy is the way Russell Gewirtz’s screenplay turns out to be an ideal showcase for Lee’s signature style and themes and performances by an outstanding cast led by Denzel Washington. His Detective Keith Frazier has great chemistry with his partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and its tons of fun to watch them riff off each other and Peter Gerety’s Captain Coughlin:

Frazier is also one of cinema’s great people managers, with a judo-like preference to let his adversaries and co-workers make the first move that works wonders on Willem Dafoe’s initially standoffish Captain John Darius:

Jodie Foster’s stylish fixer Madeline White, whose condescending smiles turn to an icy stare when she realizes he has beaten her at her own game:

And even Russell, who secretly slips a diamond into his pocket as a token of gratitude (paid in advance) for bringing Case to justice and sign of respect:

The dialogue is full of lines that might not have worked if other actors were reading them, but that I’ve been quoting regularly since 2006 because of how they sound in this film. My favorite belongs to Washington: “thank you, bank robber!” he replies when Russell tells him that if he and his girlfriend really love each other, money shouldn’t get in the way of them getting married. But the best example of what I mean might be Al Palagonia’s construction worker Kevin, who identifies the language being spoken in audio footage the cops record from inside the bank as being “100% Albanian.”

Neither really makes sense unless you’ve seen the film, but if you have they work beautifully in all manner of situations! Similarly, Inside Man features some wonderful reaction shots, including Captain Darius’s puzzled response “five bucks?” to a cryptic reference by Frazier to the “last time [he] had [his] Johnson pulled that good” and this look that Victor Colicchio’s Sergeant Collins gives everyone else in the Mobile Command Unit following a clueless comment from a not-yet-disgraced Arthur Chase, who thinks their only problem is that they can’t afford a jet:

Sergeant Collins, along with his fellow police officers, is also a vehicle for Lee’s typically nuanced treatment of racial tensions, here in a specifically post-9/11 America setting. They are all clearly competent and apparently decent, but their speech is nonetheless peppered with unequivocally racist language. Additionally, Lee adds a Sikh character named Vikram Walia (Waris Ahluwalia) to the film who wasn’t originally in Gewirtz’s script. “Oh, shit! A fucking Arab!” a SWAT team member shouts when he emerges from the bank with a note asking for food for the other hostages. Darius will later say “I don’t think you heard that” to him in a conversation that begins with Walia refusing to talk to the police until they return his turban, but ends with him laughing at a Mitchell’s joke that although he can’t go through airport security with being “randomly” selected for a security check, at least he can get a cab.

And stages a conversation between Frazier and White in front of this mural:

Lee is, I think, drawing a distinction between personal and institution racism. He doesn’t let people guilty of the former off the hook: Frazier calls Collins out for his “color commentary,” and I don’t doubt that Detective Mitchell really will help Walia file a formal complaint against the NYPD for the way they treated him. But Case walking around free is a bigger problem than any of this, and if even he must ultimately be held accountable for his misdeeds, it’s evidence that the long arc of the moral universe really does bend toward justice.

Inside Man also contains multiple examples of one of Spike Lee’s favorite techniques, whereby both the actor and camera are placed on a dolly to create the effect of a character gliding through space. In his book Rumble and Crash: Crises of Capitalism in Contemporary Film, Milo Sweedler describes the function of the first and last of the four such shots he catalogs, which depict Dalton Russell in his “prison cell,” as establishing and then confirming that “things are not what they appear to be in this movie, where appearances are perpetually deceiving”:

They also connect the character that most people who write about this film assume is the “inside man” of the title and Sweedler’s nomination, Arthur Case, who gets the double dolly treatment during a scene in which Russell describes his ruthlessly selfish actions during World War II to Madeleine White:

In his monograph Spike Lee, Todd McGowan suggests that this shot reveals that “what defines [Case] as a character–what gives him his singularity–is his act of profiteering on the Holocaust” and that “[n]othing can remove this singularity, not simply because of the horror of the act itself but because he continues to enjoy the monetary gains from it.” McGown also writes at length about the last remaining double dolly, which shows Detective Frazier moving toward the Manhattan Trust Bank following what he believes is the execution of a hostage:

Per McGowan, “Lee opts for the signature dolly shot here because Frazier’s anger separates him from his context. Though his anger is justified (unlike Case’s profiteering on the Holocaust), it nonetheless exceeds the context in which he is located. He can no longer act in the objective capacity of the negotiator but now has a passionate investment in the situation. His singularity at this moment comes to the fore.”

In other words, there’s much more to Inside Man than meets the eye! In this respect it’s actually quite different from the Knickerbocker, which is very much a case of what you see is what you get. But contrast is a perfectly legitimate basis for a pairing, and the main thing here is that the two together constitute a fine way to spend a warm summer evening. Like the carefully-adjusted hat that Detective Frazier wears:

Which casts a perfect Sam Spade shadow:

They’re cool. Ya dig?

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.

My loving fiancée Marion became my loving wife on August 9, 2014. We really wanted to make something for our wedding guests, and given our interests a cocktail was an obvious choice, so we infused Woodford Reserve bourbon with local Ontario peaches, prepared some homemade vanilla bitters, taught our younger brothers the correct ratio of these ingredients to sparkling white wine, and asked them to make sure they were ready in time for the toast. When one of these brothers (mine) announced that he was getting married this month, I knew exactly what my corresponding Drink & a Movie pairing would be. To start with the second half of the equation, here’s a picture of my Milestone Film Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection DVD release which includes My Brother’s Wedding:

It can also be streamed via the Criterion Channel with a subscription, and some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

As far as the drink goes, I’d long been meaning to explore what else The Twentieth Century Guide For Mixing Fancy Drinks by James C. Maloney had to offer aside from the “bell-ringer” (his term for an apricot liqueur rinse) drinks that inspired me to purchase this book in the first place after Frederic Yarm mentioned them last year. The Peach Blossom caught my eye because it features a prominent flavor from the cocktail we served at our wedding, but like many pre-prohibition recipes it struck us as far too sweet. A gratifyingly small amount of tinkering fixed that right up, though! Here’s our version of this forgotten classic:

1 1/2 ozs. Smith & Cross Jamaica Rum
1/2 oz. Cornelius Peach Flavored Brandy
3/4 ozs. Lemon juice
1/2 oz. Rothman & Winter Orchard Apricot Liqueur
1/2 oz. Pineapple syrup
1 oz. Roederer Estate Brut
12 drops Fee Brothers Peach Bitters

Shake rum, brandy, lemon juice, apricot liqueur, and syrup with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail class. Top with sparkling wine and garnish with 12 drops of peach bitters.

Veteran mixologists may have already realized that this is the same 8:4:3 ratio of strong to citrus to sweet utilized in a Gold Rush as adapted by Jim Meehan for The PDT Cocktail Book, which in my opinion is a perfect drink. I thought of Smith & Cross Jamaica rum as my base spirit because it works great in David Wondrich’s Fish House Punch, which also contains peach brandy. For pineapple syrup, we use the recipe from Employees Only’s Speakeasy book which produces a fresh, pure fruit flavor. Last but not least, the idea for the peach bitter garnish comes from The Bartender’s Manifesto, which uses this technique to great aromatic effect in the Woolworth Manhattan and elsewhere. Throw them all together and you get a balanced concoction that showcases the rum and is full–but not too full–of peachy flavor.

I believe I saw My Brother’s Wedding for the first time in 2007 at the Three Rivers Film Festival shortly after the long-overdue first theatrical run of director Charles Burnett’s debut feature Killer of Sheep. Although the latter is almost universally regarded as the superior movie, I’ve always thought of the former as my favorite. I realize now that this is due in large part to its central character Pierce Mundy, who is played by Everett Silas, and the way he relates to his family, friends, and neighborhood of Watts. According to James Naremore Silas delayed production by disappearing in the middle of the shoot (Naremore also notes that he reappeared “wearing a Dracula cape and demanding more money”), which perhaps explains why this is his only film credit, but I think his performance is terrific. Like the brothers in The Flowers of St. Francis, he and his best friend Soldier (Ronnie Bell) are perpetually in a hurry to get from point A to point B:

In an interview with Monona Wali published in a book by Robert E. Kapsis, director Charles Burnett describes this as a metaphor:

In My Brother’s Wedding, three different things are going on at the same time: the wedding, his friend getting killed, and Pierce’s promise to his mother. The conflict evolves: Pierce has got to be at his brother’s wedding at the same time as his friend’s funeral, and he can’t decide which is most important. So, he’s no help to anybody. It creates a conflict–a crisis–because he’s not able to evaluate things. If he had made a decision and not made promises he couldn’t keep, he wouldn’t have created a sad situation. […] The metaphor is running blindly–a man who refuses to take control of his life. These guys are rushing into life with limited knowledge. No, it’s not so much knowledge they lack, it’s wisdom.

This explains why Pierce runs in the scene which I think depicts him at his very worst, when he chases after a woman (Julie Bolton) that Soldier has forced himself on:

Running is also associated with tragedy: after Pierce finds out that Soldier has died, Burnett (who is also the film’s cinematographer) shoots him from so far away that it initially seems like he’s stuck in one spot:

Finally, in my favorite running scene of all, Pierce and Soldier don’t just chase a would-be assassin (Garnett Hargrave) through the streets, they hurl themselves after him with utter disregard for their bodies or the law of gravity, skidding across and careening off features of the urban landscape:

Although elsewhere the behavior is more innocent and pure, the multiple instances of roughhousing are probably even more reminiscent of the simple enthusiasm of Francis’s followers. Wrestling seems to be Pierce’s love language. Here he grapples with Soldier:

And here his father (Dennis Kemper):

This and his mother (Jessie Holmes) swatting him hard on the back in one scene and shoving him down a short flight of steps in another lets us know that it runs in the family. But the strongest indication of all that, despite his complicity in Soldier’s misdeeds, Pierce is at heart a good person can be found in the way his neighbors regard him. The narrative begins with a woman trying to recruit him to be the father of her sister’s baby:

Later, Pierce is unable to find Soldier a job, but it’s clear that any of the prospective employers he talks to would hire him in a heartbeat. His mother may not be able to look past the fact that he isn’t a lawyer like his brother, but everyone else in Watts seems to see him as a pillar of the community. This is, by the way, a neighborhood in transition: it’s becoming a much more dangerous place. Everyone who lives there keeps a gun handy, including Pierce’s mother:

His Aunt Hattie (Jackie Hargrave):

And the owner of the yard he and Soldier are wrestling in above:

My Brother’s Wedding doesn’t include any individual images to rival those in Killer of Sheep of children gliding from rooftop to rooftop or chasing after a freight train, but it does include a number of memorable compositions. My favorite is this one of Pierce lost in his worries:

The opening shot of a man playing the harmonica (Dr. Henry Gordon) is also striking:

As is a later shot of Pierce and Soldier talking about how all their friends are dead or gone:

Other pictures worth a thousand words include Mrs. Mundy sighing over split pants:

Aunt Hattie’s bottle of vodka:

And the look on Mr. Mundy’s face when Mrs. Dubois (Frances Nealy) hisses “where is your son?” at him:

This is so different from her conduct up until now that it suggests that Pierce wasn’t entirely off-base when he referred to his future sister-in-law Sonia (Gaye Shannon-Burnett) as being “as fake as a three-dollar bill.” I’m not sure whether the best thing about the scene where the two families eat dinner together (which Amy Corbin calls “Brechtian”) is this wallpaper and tablecloth:

Or the glances Maria (Margarita Rodríguez) and Pierce exchange after he makes an obsequious show of thanking her in an attempted gesture of working class solidarity:

My Brother’s Wedding ends with Pierce unhappily stuck at the titular event while Soldier’s funeral takes place across town. He tries to take advantage of a delay caused by the late arrival of Sonia’s favorite uncle by borrowing a car from someone, but by the time he gets to the mortuary, the mourners are all gone:

The movie ends with a slow-motion zoom in on the wedding ring which Pierce suddenly realizes he still has, concluding with an out-of-focus freeze frame:

Marion commented that this is a good example of a scene that wouldn’t make sense in the age of cell phones the last time we watched it together. While she’s obviously right that the execution would be different, I don’t think it would need to substantially alter the meaning. Instead of blindly rushing off from one event to the other and missing them both, perhaps Pierce foolishly tries to time everything perfectly and still gets stuck in traffic. Either way he is still impulsive and immature and relatably stranded between mutually exclusive life choices.

It doesn’t ultimately matter whether or not My Brother’s Wedding is a *better* film than Killer of Sheep, just as I could care less if the Peach Blossom in this post is superior to the drink we served at my wedding or the ones James Maloney mixed back in the 19th century. There’s a time and a place for all of them, which: I actually believe that may be the whole point of this series!

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.

Bacurau is one of my favorite movies from the past few years, so it was always a candidate for a “Drink & a Movie” post, but it became a mortal lock a couple of months ago when I was flipping through the PDT Cocktail Book. I could hardly have failed to notice the drink called a Rio Bravo before because that’s also the name of a Howard Hawks film I love. It never jumped out at me as something to make, though, because while I’ve been a fan of the Brazilian spirit cachaça since my friend Thiago introduced me to it in college, it isn’t something I typically stock. This time, however, I was struck by an amazing coincidence. Hawks is one of the chief influences on John Carpenter, who was such a big inspiration to the makers of Bacurau that they named a school after him:

And cachaça is, of course, the national spirit of Brazil, so I picked up a bottle of Novo Fogo Silver and started mixing. When the Rio Bravo unsurprisingly turned out to be delicious (everything in PDT is!) the only thing left to do was to get writing. The drink, which was created by Nidal Ramini in 2006 while he was working at the London bar Dusk, is made thusly:

2 ozs. Cachaça (Novo Fogo Silver)
3/4 ozs. Lime juice
1/2 oz. Orgeat
3 quarter-sized slices freshly peeled ginger

Muddle the ginger and orgeat in a mixing glass. Add remaining ingredients, shake with ice, and strain into a vessel like the one Lunga (Silvero Pereira) drinks out of in Bacurau. We call them “pizza glasses” since we usually have red wine in them when that’s what is on the menu.

In addition to serving his rendition in a chilled coupe, Ramini also employs an orange twist garnish, but we omitted both to better match this image:

The glassware is pretty close, yeah? The orgeat in the drink also evokes the cashew milk that Domingas (Sonia Braga) serves Michael (Udo Kier) later in the film:

Anyway, my favorite thing about the Rio Bravo is probably the ginger, which gives the drink a real kick. This is a great showcase for orgeat as well. We use a recipe from Smuggler’s Cove that contains both orange flower and rose water, which complement the floral notes in the cachaça. The orgeat contributes sweetness and a creamy texture to balance out the acid from the lime juice and vegetal qualities of the spirit as well. Overall, the Rio Bravo is a refreshing, invigorating concoction that is perfect for sipping outside on a spring or summer afternoon. Or inside while watching a movie! Speaking of which, here’s a picture of my Kino Lorber DVD release of Bacurau:

It can also be streamed via most major platforms for a rental fee, and some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library.

In addition to the school, John Carpenter is also directly referenced in Bacurau via the song “Night” from his excellent Lost Themes album which plays over a capoeira scene in advance of the film’s climactic showdown:

His presence can be felt all throughout the movie, though, most interestingly to me in its setting “a few years from now.” Carpenter’s Escape from New York, which was made in 1981, begins with a title informing us that in 1988 “the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent.” That film’s action takes place about a decade later after the American government has responded by turning the island of Manhattan into a giant prison, but the plot of Bacurau seems to be unfolding *during* society’s dystopian transformation. There are a few overtly sci fi touches, such as its opening in space:

The retinal scanner which corrupt mayor Tony Jr. (Thardelly Lima) offers as an alternative to going to the polls to vote for him in person:

Or a UFO-shaped drone:

Mostly, though, this mood is created via small touches at the edge of the frame like this television news broadcast about public executions resuming in São Paulo:

Bacurau culminates in a bloody confrontation between the inhabitants of the eponymous village and a band of foreigners led by Michael who have apparently paid Tony Jr. for the right to hunt them down as part of some sort of twisted “The Most Dangerous Game” fantasy camp. In typical ugly American fashion, everything they see and hear only confirms their preconceived notions about the place they are visiting. Thus, they fail to correctly interpret things like this bullet-riddled police car as signs of Bacurau’s rebellious past until it’s too late:

This leads to one of the movie’s most darkly humorous moments when Tony Jr. comes to collect them. He knows that they have literally wiped Bacurau off the map, as teacher Plinio (Wilson Rabelo) and his students discovered when they attempt to locate themselves using Google Maps:

I love the kid on the left who is staring directly at the camera! Anyway, Tony Jr. arrives in a luxury van complete with complementary bottles of spring water:

But instead of thirsty “gringo tourists” eager to return home after a massacre, he encounters the wrath of a populace which is still very much alive led by Lunga and his no-longer-former comrade in arms Pacote (Thomas Aquino), who Manohla Dargis memorably describes as having “bedroom eyes”:

This does not end well for Tony Jr.:

The most enjoyable part of Bacurau are the glimpses into the town’s unusual social dynamics and traditions, including funeral rituals like singing Cinema Novo director/composer Sérgio Ricardo’s haunting “Bichos Da Noite” during the procession:

Or waiving white handkerchiefs in unison during the burial:

A museum celebrating the village’s defiant history which gets a new permanent exhibit to commemorate its most recent violent episode:

And of course the psychotropic seed they all consume:

As a librarian I applaud this film for making the shabby treatment of books synonymous with villainy:

And as someone who has a deep, decades-long relationship with The Searchers, I feel compelled to call out the startling three-shot sequence in which Joshua (Brian Townes) appears out of the darkness, which directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles have confirmed is a deliberate reference to Scar abducting Debbie:

Speaking of westerns, I very much hope this dog received hazard pay for being placed directly in the path of stampeding horses:

And whoever designed these outfits hopefully saw an enormous uptick in sales following the release of this movie:

Finally, I’m an absolute sucker for beautiful sunrises and sunsets, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight two additional three-shot sequences, this one:

And this one:

Above I talk about some of the affinities that I think a Rio Bravo has with Bacurau. One thing I did not mention is that homemade orgeat doesn’t like to STAY mixed with things. You probably won’t have problems with it separating unless you, too, are trying to get a perfect photograph of whatever you put it in. But this definitely is a cocktail to drink, in the immortal words of Harry Craddock, “quickly, while it’s laughing at you!” In this it is quite *unlike* Bacurau, which only gets better the longer you spend with it.

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 night I moved in with my loving wife (then girlfriend) Marion in Baltimore in 2011 we went out to dinner at a place down the street called B&O American Brasserie. I don’t remember what anyone ate, but I’ll never forget my first sip of a concoction called a B&O Manhattan, an original creation by bartender Brendan Dorr (now co-owner of Dutch Courage, which I hear raves about and am determined to visit the next time I’m in town) that contained maple syrup and port in place of the traditional sweet vermouth, or the clever dehydrated orange wheel garnishes. I knew immediately that I had probably lucked upon the city’s best cocktails and I never went anywhere in the subsequent eight years I lived there that came close to changing my mind.

I can’t swear that Dorr’s El Oso was on the menu that evening, but I’m certain I had it there more than once. I found myself thinking about this drink the other day and was pleased to discover that it appears in Gregory and Nicole Priebe’s book Forgotten Maryland Cocktails: A History of Drinking in the Free State, so I bought a copy and whipped a couple up. The Priebes note that El Oso was created for the 2010 U.S. National Bärenjäger competition and that the judges who awarded it first prize called it “perfectly balanced” and “an instant classic.” We very much concur! Here’s how you make it:

1 3/4 ozs. Añejo tequila (Espolón)
3/4 ozs. Bärenjäger
1/3 ozs. Maraschino liqueur
2 dashes Jerry Thomas’ Own Decanter bitters
Dehydrated orange wheel (we used this recipe by Martha Stewart)

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a rocks glass which contains the orange wheel and one big ice cube.

Maraschino is to me the flavor of sophistication, but only if you don’t overdo it. Here, as in a Martinez made with barreled gin (my favorite is Ransom Old Tom), the warm and lively base spirit and distinctive bitters keep it in its place. The drink has a great texture as well.

El Oso is Spanish for “bear,” and between that name and the fact that Bärenjäger hails from Germany, it felt obvious what movie I should pair with this drink. Here, then, is a picture of my Lions Gate Home Entertainment DVD release of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man:

It can also be streamed via most major platforms for a rental fee.

Grizzly Man‘s most famous scene is without doubt the one in which Herzog listens to audio tape of the film’s subject Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard being mauled to death by the bears they visited Alaska each summer to study and protect:

The person holding the camera in this screengrab is Jewel Palovak, Treadwell’s friend and collaborator and an executive producer of Grizzly Man. “Jewel, you must never listen to this,” Herzog says as he puts down his headphones. “I’m never going to,” she replies. It’s tempting to read this scene, which is positioned halfway through the film, and this extreme close-up of a bear which appears near the end as comprising a thesis statement of sorts.

“What haunts me is in that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy,” Herzog says in voiceover during the latter. “I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.” These moments seem to hearken back to beginning of the movie and suggest that the “story of astonishing beauty and depth” that Herzog found in the 100+ hours of footage that Treadwell shot during his last five summers in Alaska before his death is, to paraphrase Herzog’s “Minnesota Declaration,” a mysterious and elusive one that cannot simply be shown straight-on, but only fully apprehended via imagination.

Upon revisiting Grizzly Man, though, I found myself thinking that Herzog is perfectly serious when he suggests the part of his mission is to defend Treadwell “not as an ecologist, but as a filmmaker.” A comment that his footage contains “such glorious improvised moments the likes of which the studio directors with their union crews can never dream of” is accompanied by this delightfully abstract shot of the inside of a tent while a fox climbs on top of it:

Herzog includes others criticizing Treadwell in Grizzly Man on the grounds that “he was acting like he was working with people wearing bear costumes” and didn’t sufficiently respect nature, but also demonstrates that however rightfully or wrongfully distraught Treadwell was by the violent acts that occurred around him, he didn’t shy away from filming things like the skull of a cub that starved to death which had been picked clean by its fellow bears in a matter of days:

Or the severed limb of one killed by a male that wanted its mother to stop lactating so that he could “fornicate” (Herzog’s word) with her:

Treadwell clearly intended to eventually assemble his videos into a cohesive work. Herzog calls him “methodical” as a filmmaker and reports that he often repeated takes up to fifteen times. Some of this footage presumably wasn’t meant to be included in this project, such as a lengthy tirade against the National Park Service:

Treadwell may have filmed the dead bears just for himself as well, but he was always going to have to work with a professional editor and it’s not at all hard to picture this material finding its way into whatever they created together. In fact, Jewel Palovak’s comment in Eric Kohn’s 2020 oral history of Grizzly Man that “Timmy would’ve really liked the movie” invites one to imagine a world in which the person Treadwell collaborated with somehow turned out to be Werner Herzog, who presumably would have insisted on it. And maybe scenes like the one in which Treadwell turns his ire on the gods (“Let’s have some water, Jesus boy! Let’s have some water, Christ man or Allah or Hindu floaty thing. Let’s have some fucking water for these animals!”) as well:

Meanwhile, the bear fight that Treadwell captures is every bit as astonishing and dramatic as anything you will ever see in any nature documentary ever:

I always thought of Grizzly Man as a great film that Werner Herzog made out of Timothy Treadwell’s footage, but now it seems to me more of a sincere attempt by the former to finish the latter’s work. Of Herzog’s original content, my favorite is probably this interview with Willy Fulton, the pilot who dropped Treadwell off at Katmai National Park at the beginning of each summer and picked him up again in the fall. What appear to be flashes of light in this screengrab are actually flies:

The air is thick with them and as they flit about the camera they make little pinging noises. Maybe more than anything else in the film, this constant sound and motion illustrates just how uncomfortable the life Timothy Treadwell chose was.

Also deserving of mention is the music improvised by an ensemble led by Richard Thompson and the excellent DVD extra In the Edges: The “Grizzly Man” Session which documents its creation. By drawing my attention more explicitly to touches like the ominous cello tones present during this scene it increased my appreciation for how music shapes our perception of Treadwell’s footage and elevates it:

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Timothy Treadwell is wearing a Cornell t-shirt in a photograph from his youth:

Finally, Grizzly Man contains some terrific landscapes including these aerial shots of the areas where Treadwell camped at the beginning and end of each summer respectively which are effective at establishing a sense of space. Here’s the plain he called the Sanctuary:

And here’s the “densely-overgrown” Grizzly Maze:

But even better is this nearby glacier “in turmoil” which Herzog calls a metaphor for Treadwell’s soul:

Which kind of reminds me of the album cover for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures? Normally I’d conclude this post by circling back to the drink and talking a bit more about why I think it pairs well with the movie I chose, but this month it really isn’t any more complicated than just “bears.” I’ll therefore instead leave you with this image of coroner Franc G. Fallico:

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 started my Drink & a Movie series last January as motivation to write more. I quickly discovered another reason to keep it going, which was as a convenient excuse to spend time with films I love but haven’t seen recently. I’m happy to report that thus far not a single one has disappointed! In fact, I’ve been discovering all sorts of new things to admire about them. Case in point is this month’s selection, Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us. I remembered it for Behzad Dorani’s madcap (Kent Jones described him as “looking as if he had been drawn by Chuck Jones” in a 2000 Film Comment review) dashes through the streets and alleyways of the Kurdish village of Siah Dareh:

These scenes are some of the cinema’s finest dramatizations of how technology is simultaneously liberating (Behzad never would have traveled to such a remote place if he wasn’t able to remain in contact with his home base of Tehran) and binding (but every time his phone rings he needs to drop what he’s doing, run to his car, and drive to a place where he has better reception), but they’re far from the only reason to watch this film. First things first: the drink I’m pairing it with is the Hurricane, which has a surprisingly murky provenance. It is popularly believed to have been invented at the New Orleans stalwart Pat O’Brien’s in the 1940s in order to put their excess quantities of rum to good use and named after the lamp-shaped glass it was served in. Others trace its origin to the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, New York where there was an establishment called the Hurricane Bar. The problem with both of these theories is that a drink called a Hurricane was apparently served in a 1939 movie I haven’t seen called Naughty but Nice which per IMDb was in production from October-December, 1938. Whatever it’s origins, one thing is for certain: the Hurricane is a delicious cocktail! The ingredients and proportions below are taken from Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log by Jeff Berry and Annene Kay, but can be found reprinted in all sorts of other books including Smuggler’s Cove, whose passion fruit syrup recipe (equal parts passion fruit puree and 2:1 simple syrup) is just about perfect in my opinion. Here’s how we make this drink:

2 oz. Dark rum (Gosling’s Black Seal)
1 oz. Lemon juice
1 oz. Passion fruit syrup

Fill a 10 ounce hurricane glass with crushed (use of a “Schmallet” is highly recommended!) ice, add all ingredients, and gently stir a few times to combine. Garnish with a lemon slice.

Most Hurricane recipes call for at least four ounces of spirits (according to Wikipedia the one in Naughty but Nice uses a whopping six!), but that’s a bit much for a single serving under normal circumstances, yeah? You’ll also find recipes for it which include additional ingredients like fassionola and Galliano, but for me it’s all about the brilliantly simple combination of passion fruit (a personal favorite), a bit more tartness from lemon juice, and the molasses and vanilla notes of a good dark rum. Our go-to in this category is Gosling’s Black Seal, which we keep on hand for Dark and Stormys.

The screengrabs in this blog post come from my trusty 2002 New Yorker Video release of The Wind Will Carry Us:

Gary Tooze and Jordan Cronk both say the version you want is the 2014 Cohen Media Group Blu-ray, though. Sadly, both are out of print, but the film can be streamed via Amazon Prime for a rental fee.

The Wind Will Carry us opens with an extreme long shot of a car traversing a winding road as the inhabitants argue over directions.

This may not resonate with anyone else, but revelation number one for me was that this sequence ties The Wind Will Carry Us to another one of my all-time favorite movies, Groundhog Day. Here’s how Ryan Gilbey describes the beginning of that film in his BFI Modern Classics monograph on it:

The first thing we see is a completely blue screen. Phil’s opening line gives a hint of what lies in store for him. ‘Somebody asked me today: “Phil, if you could be anywhere in the world, where would you like to be?” And I said to them, “Probably right here.”‘

On ‘here’, his hand moves into view. He is gesturing at the middle of the vast blue void. The place where he would most like to be is in that void: the middle of nowhere, off the map.

Now consider the opening dialogue from The Wind Will Carry Us:

BEHZAD: Where’s the tunnel then?
CREW MEMBER: We’ve passed it.
BEHZAD: When?
CREW MEMBER: Someone’s been sleeping!
BEHZAD: Where is it?
CREW MEMBER: We’ve passed it, back near Biston.
BEHZAD: We’re heading nowhere.

The two films are similar in the way they depict the repetitious events that comprise the core of their respective narratives. Just as we only need to see Phil Connor’s morning routine once in its entirety to understand the subsequent reappearance of bits and pieces of it to mean that he’s living the same day over and over again, so too is Kiarostami able to rely just on shots this increasingly well-traveled road to depict Behzad’s second through fifth phone calls:

Both films also advance their plots at crucial moments via characters quoting poetry, and even their endings have the same bittersweet flavor. Despite everything they’ve learned, Phil’s final line is “we’ll rent to start” and Behzad snaps a few photos of the mourning ritual he came to Siah Dareh to film on his way out of town:

More relevant to this month’s pairing is the cellar scene which takes place just over halfway through the film. Behzad goes looking for the home of the woman he has spied bringing milk to the ditchdigger named Yossef he has befriended from afar, ostensibly because he wants some for himself and his crew, but more likely in the hope of seeing her close up. Upon arriving at the correct house, he is directed by an offscreen voice to go down to the cellar.

“Why is it so dark here?” he asks. “There’s a hurricane lamp (Ed: !), it’s not dark,” the voice answers. “Is there someone down there?” Behzad asks. “Yes, Miss Zeynab,” is the reply. “Zeynab, come here, this gentleman needs milk,” the voice continues. Despite what the voice (which we will soon learn belongs to Zeynab’s mother) says, it is dark in the cellar: in fact, the screen goes completely black for about fifteen seconds after Behzad enters it. But then we hear a cow low and the same woman Behzad glimpsed earlier appears holding a lamp:

“Can you milk the cow for me?” Behzad asks. Then: “It’s so dark. How can you milk in here?” Zeynab replies, “I’m used to it. I work here.” He asks her age (16), whether or not she has been to school, and if she knows the poet Forugh Farrokhzad. Then, as Zeynab milks the cow, he flirtatiously recites one of Forugh’s poems, stopping occasionally to offer unsolicited interpretations of its meaning.

The poem concludes with the line, “the wind will carry us!” Behzad tells Zeynab that he is Yossef’s boss and attempts to command her to raise the lamp so that he can see her face. She freezes. After a few seconds pass, Behzad says, “at least light the ground so I don’t trip.” She rises and they exit the cellar together. As they walk, she asks how long Forugh studied. “You know, writing poetry has nothing to do with diplomas,” Behzad tells her. “If you have talent, you can do it too.” When they reach the door he asks how much he owes her. “Pay my mother,” she says, but as he walks away after completing the transaction she calls to her mother, “why did you take the money? Go and give it back to him.” She briefly peeks around the corner to make sure he turns to come back:

Scholar Hamid Dabashi famously called this scene “one of the most violent rape scenes in all cinema” in his 2001 book Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future but this is difficult for me to square with the fact that it’s tonally very similar to a later one in which a frustrated Behzad kicks over a tortoise:

That scene ends with the tortoise righting itself with little effort as Behzad drives away, and in a 2009 Journal of Film and Video article scholar Chris Lippard argues about the cellar scene that “[i]f there is much of the feel of a seduction here, there is also, to extend the metaphor, a firm and decisive no.” To me Behzad’s admittedly aggressive behavior is reminiscent of the petulant outbursts of a bored child. Because he does not appear to cause any lasting damage, it seems fair to say no harm, no foul.

Zeynab’s job as a basement milkmaid is just plain bizarre, but in other moments The Wind Will Carry Us definitely seems to have something to say about gender roles in Iran at the turn of the millennium. A spirited argument breaks out in a café when the proprietor Tajdolat observes that “[a]ll women serve. They have three trades: by day, they’re workers. In the evening, they serve and at night they work.”

To which her husband offers the rejoinder, “don’t men have a third job, too?” Later, Behzad’s hostess resumes her waiting on him and his crew one day after giving birth to her tenth child:

It also absolutely must be noted that the village of Siah Dareh is a character in its own right and looks fabulous in shots such as this night/morning dissolve:

Finally, another reason to pair this film with a Hurricane is because the color of the drink closely matches the amber hues of the barley fields that Behzad rides through on the back of the motorcycle of the doctor who attends to Yossef when the hole he is digging caves in:

The Wind Will Carry Us ends with Behzad washing the windshield of his car, then throwing a femur bone from a nearby ancient cemetery that he has been carrying around on his dashboard since the beginning of the film into a creek:

The final images follow the bone as it floats downstream accompanied by the film’s first non-diegetic music:

I mentioned a number of similarities between The Wind Will Carry Us and Groundhog Day above, but left out the most obvious one. Behzad and Phil Connor both work in television, travel from the city to the sticks, get stuck there much longer than they intended to, and leave transformed. How exactly and to what extent they are different is largely left to viewers to decide for themselves, which is one of my favorite things about both movies. The universe holds Behzad and Phil in place until they start to truly see what’s all around them. We can learn from their example to do so of our own accord and reap the same rewards. No one trip or cocktail is likely to change your life, but each has the potential to make it better as long as you’re paying attention. So, in the doubly apropos words of Omar Khayyam as quoted in The Wind Will Carry Us:

They tell me she is as as beautiful as a houri from heaven!
Yet I say that the juice of the vine is better.
Prefer the present to these fine promises.
Even a drum sounds melodious from afar.

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 Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual credits a recipe in Louis Muckensturm’s Louis’ Mixed Drinks as the inspiration for bartender Jack McGarry’s Massagrand:

When Jack first read Muckensturm’s recipe, he was reminded of the famed Café Brûlot, a postprandial staple of the grand French-Creole restaurants of New Orleans. Consisting of coffee, spices, sugar, and cognac, that drink is ignited tableside and ladled from a silver bowl.

The Massagrand has similar constituents, but is not intended to combust. The flavor structure is the same, but with stone fruit notes from eaux de vie and liqueurs, plus calamus, an interesting botanical that combines the qualities of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger.

Which, cool! But I happen to own a copy of Louis’ Mixed Drinks. Here’s what it lists as the ingredients for a Massagrand:

• Take one teaspoon of sugar,
• One-half a bar-glass of Kirschwasser, and
• One breakfast-cup of strong black coffee

That’s it! But in McGarry’s hands this simple concoction became a cocktail with no less than nine ingredients including the (two) garnishes and a calamus tincture that needs to be prepared at least three days in advance. This is simultaneously exactly why I dig Dead Rabbit and why I don’t make drinks from it all that often: although it’s frequently the first place I turn when preparing for a special occasion, it isn’t a volume I reach for when I’m mixing just for me and my loving wife. The Massagrand may turn out to be an exception that proves the rule, though. Here’s how we make it:

1 1/2 ozs. Caffè Americano
1 1/2 ozs. Cognac (Rémy Martin VSOP)
1/2 oz. Cherry Heering
1/2 oz. Kirsch Eau de Vie (Alfred Schladerer Black Forest Kirschwasser)
1/2 oz. Mirabelle Eau de Vie (Trimbach Grande Réserve)
2 dashes Bittermens Transatlantic Bitters
2 dashes Angostura Bitters

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled wine glass. Garnish with freshly grated nutmeg and the oils from an orange twist.

I was originally drawn to this drink by the combination of coffee, cherry liqueur, and bitters which I enjoyed in Rafa García Febles’s Dale Cooper. According to Dead Rabbit, “[i]f espresso for caffè americano is not available, your favorite strong coffee will do,” but it seems hard for me to believe that someone able to source all the other ingredients wouldn’t also have access to a Starbucks! One thing that really might be hard for you to come by is the Mirabelle eau de vie, which we had to special order.

The Massagrand is impressively balanced considering how many assertive components it has. Coffee and kirsch in particular tend to take over a drink, but play together nicely here. The word which immediately springs to mind as soon as I take a sip is “sophisticated”: you can tell that the Massagrand has been around, but it isn’t desperate to show off. And it isn’t nearly as hard to make as the long ingredient list might imply, either, especially assuming you’re substituting something else for the calamus tincture, which is classified as a “substance generally prohibited from direct addition or use as human food” by the FDA and thus isn’t easy to obtain in the United States. The team at Dead Rabbit responded to an email I sent them inquiring about alternatives within 24 hours (!) to recommend Bittermens’ Transatlantic bitters, a neat product that their website describes as follows:

We’ve merged the great bitters of the world to create an aromatic bitter that is useful in such a wide array of drinks.

• From the most classic Aromatic bitters of Venezuela and Trinidad, we created a base that includes gentian, clove, allspice and cinnamon
• From New Orleans style bitters, we blend in angelica and anise seed
• From the iconic Italian Fernet, we fortify the bitterness in a touch of aloe and chicory
• From the Alpine Amaro tradition, we add in chamomile and dandelion
• From the tradition of German digestives, we incorporate cherry bark and licorice

In total, sixteen botanicals make up this unique aromatic offering.

If I had any doubts about what movie to select for this month’s pairing, this substitution clinched it. Dead Rabbit actually specifies eaux de vie by F. Meyer, a distillery in France, which is also of course where cognac hails from. The addition of Cherry Heering reminded me of The Passion of Joan of Arc, a French movie with a Danish director (Carl Theodor Dreyer) that also figures prominently in Jenny Hval’s song “American Coffee”! As if that wasn’t already enough, here’s how scholar David Bordwell describes the film in a 1973 monograph: “[i]n the context of film history, then, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc becomes significant as a summation of many major film styles of the silent era.” Sounds like the movie version of Transatlantic bitters, right? What could be more perfect?

Anyway, here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD release of The Passion of Joan of Arc:

It can also can also be streamed via both the Criterion Channel and HBO Max with a subscription and on most other major streaming video platforms for a rental fee. Some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well. It will be interesting to see how many more places it might pop up next year when it enters the public domain (along with Steamboat Willie, by the way!) in the United States on January 1.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of just a handful of films that I know for certain I would have included on my hypothetical Sight & Sound Critics Poll ballot. In the book I quote from above, David Bordwell also notes that “[m]any viewers erroneously remember Jeanne d’Arc as a film composed entirely of close-ups,” which: this was definitely true for me for a long time! And to be sure, there are many such shots. Of Joan (Maria Falconetti), “suffering in black and white” (to quote Hval):

The priests and soldiers who sit in judgement over her:

And the people of France who watch her burn at the stake then rise up afterward:

The latter are almost exclusively shown as part of camera movements which include more than one person, whereas Joan and her tormenters are frequently depicted in single shots. These images are powerfully moving and/or disturbing, especially when faces seem to lunge at Joan like this soldier (whose uniform, according to scholar Stephen Larson, bore enough of a resemblance to those worn by British soldiers during World War I to upset that country’s censor) does:

Following my last few viewings, though, I’ve found myself thinking more about shots like the one of these mismatched windows:

Or this warped doorway, both of which show the influence of German Expressionism:

The Passion of Joan of Arc might be the most thorough application of the advice that John Ford (David Lynch) gives Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) in The Fabelmans that when the horizon is at the bottom or top of the frame, it’s interesting, but “[w]hen the horizon’s in the middle, it’s boring as shit.” The fate of the lone priest who dares to defend Joan, for instance, is depicted by alternating shots of just the helmets and spears of the soldiers leading him away and the horrified reactions of his fellow judges:

Or behold this shot of onlookers with Catherine Wheel:

There are interesting anachronisms like this fella’s glasses:

And this cannon which swivels not because 15th-century cannons were actually able to do that, but rather because the ones in Battleship Potemkin could:

We are also occasionally treated to multi-level compositions like this one which shows off the skills of legendary cinematographer Rudolph Maté as well as anything else in the film:

Finally, for my money the film’s most haunting moments of all are images like this one:

Now of course none of this is to say that The Passion of Joan of Arc‘s close-ups aren’t every bit deserving of their legendary status! Here are the lyrics from the “American Coffee” verse about the film:

I give you that time at the cinematheque (Give you that time)
I was watching La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
While I was having a UTI
I stared into Jeanne’s face, suffering in black and white
I’m sure I saw her wink at me
Then I peed blood in the lobby bathroom
The blood color seemed so insanely alive
Too alive, too alive to be just mine

Like Anna Karina’s Nana in Vivre Sa Vie, Hval feels connected to Falconetti’s Joan (who is also the subject of her earlier song “Renée Falconetti of Orléans”). I think the wink she imagines is interesting because this is how the characters in The Passion of Joan of Arc communicate with one another throughout Joan’s trial, with winks and nods and other small gestures:

One of the things that keeps me coming back to this film again and again is the mystery of when exactly the narrative shifts. Is this the precise moment when Joan realizes that Loyseleur (Maurice Shultz) is not really her ally or is the Kuleshov effect just doing its thing?

But here’s the verse from “American Coffee” which immediately precedes the one excerpted above:

I wonder who I’d been if I never got to go
Get a fine arts degree and American coffee
With irrelevant quotes from French philosophy
And we’d meet in the climax of a clever sci-fi movie
But that would just be, but that would just be, be stupid

The Passion of Joan of Arc is often described as an emotional experience, but it’s an intellectual one, too. One doesn’t really happen upon a silent film in this day and age–you have to seek them out. Part of what makes The Passion of Joan of Arc great is that it provides a lot of bang for your buck. It’s a master class in the film traditions of the early 20th century, just like Transatlantic bitters are a world tour in a bottle. But your initial reaction to it is liable to be the same one-word sentence I predict you’ll speak after you try a Massagrand for the first time: “wow.”

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 subject of my first Drink & a Movie post of 2023 is brought to you by a character in Vincente Minnelli’s The Clock identified simply as The Drunk:

Played by Keenan Wynn, he appears in a single long take positioned halfway through the film. Our heroes Corporal Joe Allen (Robert Walker) and Alice Maybery (Judy Garland) and their milkman friend Al (James Gleason) encounter him in a lunch room that they’ve ducked into to call for help with a flat tire. “Would you care to join me in a vermouth, cassis, or champagne cocktail?” he asks despite the fact that alcoholic beverages aren’t actually served in this establishment. This makes his suggestion inappropriate for their setting, but the latter two ingredients go together perfectly in one of my favorite cocktails for January, a very slightly original drink made entirely with local spirits that I call a Finger Lakes Kir Royale. Here’s how you make it:

1/2 oz. Finger Lakes Distilling Cassis Liqueur
4 oz. Dr. Konstantin Frank Winery Célèbre Rosé

Add the cassis to a chilled champagne coupe and top with the sparkling rosé. Garnish with a lemon twist cut (we use linzer cookie cutters) in the shape of a fireworks burst.

Célèbre Rosé was part of a case of local wines handpicked for us by David Sparrow shortly after we moved to Ithaca and has been a staple in our house ever since. It’s quite delicious, and together with the cassis it gives this drink a lovely pink color, but any good dry sparkling wine you have left over from the holidays will do just fine. This drink doesn’t necessarily improve upon a glass of plain bubbly, but it does take it in a bit of a different direction, which can be nice in the days and weeks after New Year’s Eve. Anyway, my screengrabs from The Clock are taken from my copy of the Warner Archives Collection DVD release of the film:

It can also be streamed via Amazon Prime and Apple TV for a rental or purchase fee.

Joe is a soldier from Indiana spending a two-day leave in New York City before he ships out to Europe who reacts to the Empire State Building a bit differently from Buddy the Elf:

Specific references and impressively accurate studio sets aside, the New York of The Clock is more of a generic Big City than a specific place and unlike Buddy, Joe doesn’t know what he’s looking for when he arrives there. He soon discovers that it’s Alice after she trips over his foot and loses the heel of her shoe:

He convinces a cobbler to keep his shop open late to fix it:

And she agrees to show him the sights in a sequence that features some pretty impressive back projection work:

Joe spends the first third of the film’s ninety-minute run time being just charming enough to convince Alice to make and keep (over the warnings of her roommate about the dangers of being “picked up”) a date with him “under the clock at the Astor at seven.” They spend the next fifteen minutes falling in love, culminating in a kiss that Sheila O’Malley describes as having World War II in it:

Frightened by what she is feeling, Alice hesitates. “I don’t know whether we ought to see each other again at all,” she tells Joe. Enter The Drunk. Alice and Joe realized that they’ve inadvertently stayed out past midnight and that the buses have stopped running. Luckily, Al appears and offers to give Alice a ride home in his milk truck. Alas, no good deed goes unpunished, and he winds up getting smacked in the face:

As described by Emmanuel Burdeau (via a translation by Bill Krohn) in Joe McElhaney’s book Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment, Keenan Wynn’s main function in the film is to provide Joe and Alice with an opportunity to “act as a team to save Al”: with him grappling with the effects of what in 2023 is obviously a concussion, they decide to work together to complete his shift. What makes The Drunk and to a large extent The Clock itself memorable, though, is Vincente Minnelli and company’s decision to give him three whole minutes of screen time to build up to this moment. Just for good measure, much of his rambling discourse is delivered around or to this lady (played by Moyna Macgill) who could care less because she is utterly lost in her own thoughts and rapturous enjoyment of her plate of food:

The scenes which follow the one in the lunch counter are some of my favorites in the entire film. As the city’s working class bemusedly look on, Alice and Joe deliver milk:

Per Burdeau, by the time the sun rises they will have shown “what they could be as a man-and-wife team performing a job together, making money, being economically grounded.” With their hearts and heads now in alignment, they decide to spend Joe’s final day of leave together, which is when the city that has brought them together conspires to show them what life apart would now feel like. Over breakfast with Al and his wife, both Joe and Alice express skepticism about servicemen getting married immediately prior to a tour of duty:

This all changes after they get separated on the subway a little while later:

Joe tries to meet Alice at her next stop, but mistakenly boards an express instead of a local train. She is trying to find him as well and has left by the time he gets there. Joe’s face records his horror at what has befallen them:

A window display proudly announcing the population of New York as 7,454,995 underscores the odds against them ever finding each other again:

Especially when, as Alice humiliatingly admits to the USO official she seeks help from, they don’t even know each other’s last names:

They finally do rediscover each other at the spot where they first met and realize that they already have all the information they need to decide to spend the rest of their lives together. The next six minutes of the film are another reason it reminds me of New Year’s Eve, featuring as it does shots of at least five different clocks, with one appearing in a shot every 30 seconds or so on average. Alice and Joe race all over town to successfully navigate a thicket of red tape and secure all the paperwork they need to officially wed at literally the last possible moment–the city clerk who performs their ceremony is getting into the elevator to leave for the day when they arrive.

The Clock concludes with Joe and Alice enjoying their first morning together as man and wife. The scene is nearly two and half minutes old before either of them speaks a word, which is not to say they aren’t communicating the entire time:

This sequence, too, is another reason The Clock strikes me as a perfect movie with which to ring in the new year. It’s a time both for making bold, potentially life-changing resolutions, and for coming up with a plan to keep them; for marrying the man of your dreams, and for figuring out how he likes his coffee. Or, if I may, both for stocking up on champagne, and for finding creative uses for the bottles you don’t drink.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

As anyone who knows me would presumably tell you, I am not a sentimental person. It may therefore surprise some readers of this blog to learn that I am absolutely nuts about Christmas music! My family maintains a holiday playlist on our home computer which has grown to include nearly a thousand songs that we add to every year, and I turn it on every time I go downstairs in the morning and come home from work in the evening from the day after Thanksgiving clear through the end of the year. We’re also big on Christmas movies in our house. There are about 20 that we watch every single year, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for other films during the month of December.

I actually think this is part of the appeal for me–I try to keep up my one theatrical screening per week regimen, but otherwise am happy to take a bit of a breather from new movies. The very fact that I’m *not* super emotional is also a factor: cinema provides a safe space where people like me can experience feelings like hope and and sadness and goodwill for our fellow human beings without fear that letting our guard down in such a way will immediately lead to our inevitable demise. Christmas movies are particularly well-suited to this sort of thing–the fact that they often reference one another and are chock full of holiday music creates a sort of “force multiplier” effect.

There are plenty of drinks that I make this time every year as well, and in keeping with last month’s resolution to continue highlighting local spirits, my December pairing features my favorite way to use Finger Lakes Distilling’s Riesling Grappa, a concoction by Boston-based bartender Misty Kalkofen (creator of the In Vida Veritas cocktail I wrote about in March) called The Grinch. As fellow Cornellian Frederic Yarm notes in his Cocktail Virgin Slut post about it, Kalkofen actually renamed it Mistaken for Strangers in order to prevent it from being confined just to holiday menus, but I prefer the original appellation, not least because it really is the same color as the Dr. Seuss character! Here’s how to make it:

1 oz. Grappa (Finger Lakes Distilling Riesling Grappa)
1 oz. Green Chartreuse
1/2 oz. Lime juice
1/2 oz. Simple syrup

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled rocks glass. No garnish.

Finger Lakes Distilling’s grappa is flavorful, but pretty mellow compared to some I’ve known (such as the one responsible for me and my loving wife flipping a canoe in the middle of the night the evening we got engaged–but that’s a story for another day!) and it shines in mixed drinks like this one because it’s substantial enough to stand up to other potent ingredients, but doesn’t take over. The first thing to hit you here are actually herbs and sweetness from the Chartreuse and syrup, and I believe it might make The Grinch a perfect introduction to grappa for people who think they don’t like it. The movie I’m pairing it with is one of my two or three Christmas movies of all time, Jon Favreau’s Elf. Here’s a picture of my copy of New Line Home Entertainment’s “Infinifilm” (the less said about that terrible idea, the better) DVD release of the film:

Elf can also be streamed via HBO Max with a subscription and can be rented or purchased from most major consumer platforms, including Amazon Prime and Apple TV.

My love affair with this film goes all the way back to the first time I saw it in either 2006 or 2007. My roommates and I got to the end and immediately watched it again! There are five main things that make this a legitimately good movie. First, there are the gorgeous North Pole costumes, sets, and old school special effects. The film opens with a dissolve from a children’s book-style rendition of Bob Newhart playing Papa Elf to the man himself:

He is, of course, wearing an exact replica of the clothes the Head Elf wears in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and like all the elf costumes it looks outstanding against the monochrome gray stone and wood that the elves apparently use for all their non-toy construction projects. This is followed by an opening credits sequence that features these delightful stop-motion animated arctic creatures, including one (the polar bear cub) voiced by legendary special effects artist Ray Harryhausen:

The film proper begins with the story of how Will Ferrell’s Buddy the Elf, who is actually a human, climbed out of his crib at an orphanage and into Santa’s sack of presents, in which he was transported to the North Pole and ultimately adopted by Papa Elf. Forced perspective is used effectively throughout this whole opening sequence, and although it occasionally looks obvious in freeze frame:

Elsewhere the joins between the human- and elf-sized sets are nearly impossible to spot even upon close inspection:

The next great thing about Elf is Will Ferrell’s acting. You could write an entire blog post just on his reaction shots. Here he is devastated to find out that his biological father is on the naughty list:

And here entranced by the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree:

Here he is utterly disgusted by an imposter Santa:

And here smiling is his favorite:

The rest of the casting is brilliant, too. If Ferrell is the grappa in The Grinch, James Caan’s Walter Hobbs is definitely the lime, adding an essential astringent element to the proceedings:

That’s as far as I’m going to take this analogy, but Ed Asner’s down-to-earth Santa also deserves a shout out:

As does Zooey Deschanel’s portrayal of Buddy’s love interest Jovie:

And Mary Steenburgen in the role of Walter’s wife Emily:

Deschanel and Steenburgen play their roles more or less straight, which in the latter case makes Walter’s eventual redemption believable, since we presume she never would have married him if he was really a bad person. But both help us see the practical value of Buddy’s irrepressible enthusiasm.

Memorable performances are also contributed by Peter Dinkledge as children’s book author Miles Finch, Amy Sedaris as Walter’s secretary Deb, Peter Billingsley (of A Christmas Story fame) as Ming Ming the elf, and my personal favorite Faizon Love as a department store manager named Wanda:

Oh! And who could forget this guy?

Praiseworthy element number four is the music, both the soundtrack and John Debney’s underrated score. I’m particularly fond of “Buddy’s Theme,” which I consider to be one of our best contemporary Christmas melodies alongside John Williams’s “Somewhere in My Memory” from Home Alone. Last but not least, when Papa Elf hands Buddy an Empire State Building snow globe and says his biological lives in “a magical land called New York City,” it isn’t just a joke!

Jon Favreau has spoken in interviews about how Elf was filmed not long after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center as being part of a deliberate effort to “reclaim” Manhattan, and a huge part of the movie’s charm for me is its obvious affection for the city. There’s both an appreciation for its grandeur:

And even more importantly a successful effort to look at its more quotidian wonders through fresh eyes that see the buttons in an elevator as beautiful:

Escalators as a challenge:

and classify taxi cabs as “yellow ones” that “don’t stop”:

I would in fact submit that the montage sequence set to Louis Prima’s “Pennies From Heaven” is one of the best cinematic representations of New York ever, without any additional qualifications. Which, this is a excellent example of what makes Elf stand out from some of the other movies I only watch in December: like The Grinch/Mistaken for Strangers, it deserves to be appreciated year round!

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 enjoyed highlighting local (upstate New York) spirits in each of my last two “Drink & a Movie” posts, and have therefore resolved to keep the streak going through January! I talked about Harvest Spirits’ Cornelius Applejack in September and Myer Farm Distillers‘ Cayuga Gold Barrel Gin in October; this month’s drink features Glen Thunder corn whiskey, which the Finger Lakes Distilling website describes as having an aroma “reminiscent of pulling back the husk from an ear of sweet summer corn.” My mind goes more toward popcorn, but whatevs: the distinction doesn’t really matter in my favorite concoction to use it in, cereal milk punch. The recipe for it appears in this New York magazine article, which attributes it to mixologist Jeff Bell of one of this blog’s favorite bars, PDT in New York City. Here’s how to make it:

2 oz. Momofuku Milk Bar cereal milk
1 1/4 oz. Bernheim wheat whiskey
3/4 oz. Glen Thunder corn whiskey
1/2 oz. Bärenjäger

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled rocks glass containing one large ice cube. Garnish with grated nutmeg. 

You might be able to buy genuine Momofuku Milk Bar cereal milk wherever you live, but we prefer to make our own using this recipe published on Serious Eats. If you have a dog, don’t neglect the parenthetical note about what to do with your cornflake remains–they’re one of the four-legged member of our family’s favorite treats!

I love how this drink combines cereal milk with spirits that taste distinctly like different grains to remind the imbiber what the stuff that comes out of the box was originally. It’s also so good that you may be tempted to say you want to bathe in it, which brings us to this month’s movie, Souleymane Cissé’s masterpiece Yeelen. Here’s a picture of my copy of Kino Lorber’s DVD release of the film:

Although Yeelen doesn’t appear to currently be widely available to stream, some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library.

Early in the film, the hero’s mother (Soumba Traore) wades into a marsh and pours a bowl of milk over her head as part of a ritual prayer for her son’s protection:

“Do you hear this forlorn creature?” she cries. “Goddess of the waters! Hear me, mother of mothers! Hear this helpless mother. Save my son! Keep him from harm! Save this land from ruin! Don’t let the weeds overgrow the house of the Diarra.” Then she lets the contents of another bowl rain down over her:

Milk appears in the very next scene as well. Our hero, whose name is Nianankoro (Issiaka Kane), has been captured as a suspected cattle thief:

The leader of the men taking him to their king lifts a gourd canteen to his lips and takes a swig:

He turns to a comrade and says, “here is milk. Drink it.” This guard hands it to another member of the band:

And so on until only Nianankoro is left to go thirsty:

Contrast this with the third appearance of milk a little while later, when the same king (Balla Moussa Keita) Nianankoro was being taken to as a prisoner personally offers him a drink:

What has changed in the intervening scenes is that Nianankoro has revealed himself to be a powerful sorcerer and, using the right leg-bone of a horse:

That he buried in a termite mound:

Has conjured bees and fire to defeat an invading army:

This is another reason for this month’s drink and a movie pairing: cereal milk is the Proust madeleine of my generation, with power to transport people back to the breakfast tables of their childhoods. In other words, it’s magic! The passage of time factors into Yeelen‘s narrative strategy as well, as represented by the image of a boy (Youssouf Tenin Cissé) who we eventually realize is Nianankoro’s son and a goat that appears at both the beginning and end of the film:

The best part of Yeelen has got to be the epic wizard duel between Nianankoro and his father Soma (Niamanto Sanogo), who has spent the entire movie trying to track him down and kill him. It contains some stare songs (to bastardize a lovely turn of phrase by Richard T. Jameson) straight out of the oeuvre of Sergio Leone:

And two killer dissolves:

Before concluding with both characters being subsumed into the “brightness” (the English translation of the Bambara word “yeelen”) of the film’s title:

Another one of my favorite moments in Yeelen is this closeup of Nianankoro’s future wife Attu (Aoua Sangare):

They meet when the king mentioned above asked Nianankoro to cure her of infertility. Which he certainly does do, but then he and Attu give into their lust for one another, ultimately leading to their exile. This single beautiful load-bearing image tells an impressively large portion of that story. And then, finally, there is the movie’s ending. Years (I assume) later, Attu returns to the scene of Nianankoro’s battle with Soma to retrieve the Kore wing (the scepter of the 7th and final Bambara initiation society per the titles which precede the film) which was her husband’s weapon during it:

Meanwhile her son finds two ostrich eggs buried in the sand nearby:

He retrieves one and presents it to his mother:

She re-buries it at the spot where the Kore wing stands, then gives it to her son along with Nianankoro’s clock. They walk away together bearing both objects:

There is a closeup of the remaining ostrich egg alone in the sand:

And then a shot of Nianankoro’s son striding confidently into the future with the Kore wing and his father’s cloak:

For a breakdown of exactly what’s happening here, see Suzanne H. MacRae’s Research in African Literatures article “Yeelen: A Political Fable of the Komo Blacksmith/Sorcerers.” It doesn’t take extensive knowledge of Malian history to understand that this represents Nianankoro’s triumph over Soma, though. Or, to translate this into cocktail terms: like cereal milk punch, it’s good on both the sip and the swallow!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.