The NY Film Festival and buffalo snacks
Everything x 2
Last month I had myself a bit of a White Lotus dilemma. I got married the day before the New York Film Festival started, which meant that press screenings would happen during the run up to the intimate and very scaled-back “big day” and continue throughout my honeymoon, should I choose to take one. I did, and my non-assholic husband didn’t care if I worked, though I did come to regret splitting my attention. With so few hours in the day, I skipped out on events like Dune and Todd Haynes’s Velvet Underground doc so my husband and I could catch them together at a later date. True love, delaying your cinema-viewing to experience the soft disappointment of over-hyped movies in unison.
Since I’ve been preoccupied, here is a nontraditional edition of this newsletter, filled with scattered thoughts and viewing notes (including a few words on Titane scroll down), as you cozy into fall however you like best. Regular programming soon.
A tale of two croissants
First a plain one from Breads Bakery, ripped apart while walking to the 9PM train. I panic-purchased this as a buttery ration to ward off any migraines during a day of press screenings on the basis that it contained less sugar than chocolate babka, the thing that Breads is known for and deservedly so, and came out the winner. The croissaint was flaky, soft, goddamn delicious even after holing up in my tote through two movies.
My attempt to re-experience the thrills of laminated pastry were brutally crushed the next morning when I arrived at the Time Warner Center. Expecting to be greeted by the pale green walls of Bouchon Bakery before another day of movies, I discovered Tartinery and their papery, wan croissant instead. To be fair I should’ve known when they asked if I wanted the thing reheated.
Youth in crisis
Futura: Three Italian filmmakers (Pietro Marcello, Franceso Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher) humbly hide any cinematic heraldry and markers of their style while interviewing the youth of their dearly beloved, but afflicted, bel paesa. The resutling documentary, a true collective film that tries to probe the state of today and tomorrow’s yotuh, is described in narration at one point as “diary of a gloomy mood,” but it’s more like a gentle canoe ride: a few ripples but never any waves, and you don’t glimpse too much below the surface.
C’mon C’mon: Joaquin Phoenix plays an NPR type who similarly pines for answers on youth and the future, interviewing kids in New York and beyond whilst temporarily caring for his young nephew, a precocious moppet, and treating him to the best slice joint in Manhattan. The aims of Mike Mills are less political than personal, per usual, mining parent/child relationships as he continues to draw a throughline to family themes presented previously in Beginners and 20th Century Woman. (This one is out later this year I believe, c/o A24.)
Buffalo snacks
On the drive west we scooped up snacks that neither of us had ever seen before, including a Buffalo Blue Cheese iteration of Combos, living up to its status as the most base of all rest-stop snacks. The blown up photo of wings emblazoned on the bag failed to stoke my salivation. In fact they made my tastebuds withdraw in fear at the prospect of a chicken-flavored version of these cylindrical nugget-crackers, which I otherwise don’t hate. These are as palatable as any other Combos flavor, but not as tasty as Snyder’s hot buffalo pretzels, which smartly advertised the heat, not the fowl, and came without the teasing threat of “cheese.” The ingredient list tells me that both of these snacks are run of the mill, gussied up with a straightforward but potent trifecta of cayenne pepper, vinegar, and garlic. I would eat the pretzels again.
Boutique hotels
Every four minutes begins the mechanical thwapping of the air conditioner, water boiler, or whatever monster machinery lies beneath the heated-concrete floors at the Wythe Hotel. I drift to sleep pretending I’m inside a Jim Jarmusch movie
Piaule: Little container boxes on the steep hillside. Perfect modular shipping containers full of rich people by the looks of the gravel parking lot. I spy Audis and Benz, Porsches of varying vintage— but I wagered this to be an all-Tesla affair to match the ethos of the place and it’s minimalist, no-extra-towels-until-asked-for-commitment to sustainability. My husband tells me that’s de rigeur now though. I still deem this glamping for the 21st century urbanite. A floor-to-ceiling picture window looking out onto nondescript forest serves as entertainment in the TV-less room, which is comparable in size to the average Brooklyn 1BR. Wake up to the sound of acorns plinking on the roof as they tumbled down to the forest floor.
Unlike my home, which is filled with hand-me-downs, ceaseless dirt carried in through a drafty window, and too many expensive chairs, Piaule cabins are decked out minimally with sleek furnishings and an impressive assortment of concealed doors, screens, and storage spaces that does make you feel like you’re somewhere special.
The on-site restaurant is staffed with inexperienced though well-intentioned youth who seemed harried when more than four guests showed up for breakfast at the same time. I would describe their service style as perpetually surprised. Speaking of the unexpected, the food surprised me by not being awful, as most restaurant food is upstate when it costs more than triple the average meal in the area. (I say that with tough love criticism since this where I’m from.) The porkchop was served with backwards-glancing apple-sauce, but every bit of fat was miraculously rendered. The edges of an ultra rustic fruit galette looked like my attempt to fold a fitted sheet, and more brittle than it should be, but I ate it all up. I had no other choice, unless I wanted to break open the $28 artisanal smores kit in my room.
While Piaule was all wood and smoked glass, the Lake House at Canandaigua is what would happen if the Barefoot Contessa’s children moved to, I don’t know, Cobble Hill. The aesthetic is nautical and lightly preppy, fresh enough for boomers, but touched with sufficient contemporary design choices (take the dripping floral arrangements, sumptuous but wild, as proof) to entice younger vacationers, who clearly haven’t caught on or heard of the inn’s recent facelift. We were the youngest guests by a few decades. The property is littered with fire pits and adirondack chairs, all empty. An urbanite’s joy, this ample seating.
Implausible breakfasts (no croissants)
Everywhere we went there were Brussels sprouts. Restaurant employees shilled for them left and right, and I began wonder if they were in actually in season or just the preferred side dish of Western New Yorkers. Google tells me it is indeed the szn. After turning them down at the satisfactory hotel restaurant, I ordered them at a local BBQ restaurant in addition to some heavily smoked chicken, impressively disintegrating brisket, and ribs. They were weighed down by heavy pours of balsamic and rivaled the cornbread in sticky sweetness. Seeking Brussels sprouts redemption and more roughage, I haplessly ordered them again with my spiedie (a difficult-to-despise sandwich of marinated chicken or pork) where they came blackened and damp.
The new flesh
What has the power to induce a full-body shudder or send a chill up your spine like nails on a chalkboard? French director Julia Ducornau has perfected a formula for so perverse a pleasure with her cinema that improbably infuses radical warmth and tenderness into a Saw-esque torture porn and body horror framework. Her debut, Raw, about cannibals circling metaphors about female sexual appetites left people woozy, and her sophomore effort TITANE, out now, doubles-down on its stomach-churning gore.
The movie, in short, is about a sociopathic murderer with a metal place embedded in her head who has sex with a car, gets brain damage (again), and pretends to be the son of a fireman. Under that all that shock-and-awe is a young person at odds with the world and without a family. The best I can describe this movie—which encompasses impregnation by motor vehicle, murder by hairpin, and more— is that it’s the sharp rip of a nipple ring. I do not have a nipple ring, nor have I pulled out someone else’s, but this is literally a scene in the film, indicative of the overall viewing experience, which elicits your extreme adrenaline matched by questions of “but why?” Mostly unclassifiable, Titane provides no answers and doesn't have a final destination in mind, but it is, forgive me, a thrilling ride that simultaneously sparks joy and confusion.
The festival’s closing night selection was Parallel Mothers by Pedro Almodovar, and I wanted to catch up with the director’s films so I watched THE SKIN I LIVE IN. To my ignorant surprise, this movie, like Titane, concerns “genderbending,” parent-child relationships, and bodily violence that’ll make you wince. An icy chic Antonio Banderas slinks around the screen as a cutting-edge plastic surgeon with an at-home clinic and a dark heart of secrets. Sparkling with operatic precision, this movie is, to put it crudely, a highbrow take on a B-movie plot: locked away in his well-appointed house of pain is a young gamine patient.
Her dungeon room is less concrete-and-chains and more sanitarium-cum-art gallery — a real low-to-the-ground living situation with minimalist furnishings, just a provocatively red comforter breaking up the walls scrawled over with Louise Bourgeois-esqe sketches. Instead of crumbs and cobwebs, food is delivered on a tray and there are books by Alice Munro, plus soft textile sculptures that are also like Bourgeois. This could be performance art, as the patient yogas around in a bodysuit, all the more when we see the doctor watching on full video display, transforming the confinement into its own proscenium.
While my threshold for such on-screen grotesqueries has been flexed as of late, the opposite can be said for my tolerance for spicy foods. In my past few dining experiences, several dishes gnawed away at my esophagus with unexpected heat. Usually a capsaicin hound, I found my senses dazzled by:
Coconut crab curry at Fish Cheeks, shared with an eternally luminous friend. Or was it the wok-roasted sirloin that forced my retreat into an entire bowlful of rice, which I typically shun.
Flyheads at Taiwanese spot 886, which took me eons to visit. Chilis strutting through bits of pork, they’re not safe either. My husband similarly smarted from the heat, so at least I know it wasn’t just me.
Baingan masala, Pakistani roasted eggplant, at The Tyger, where the server tried her best to upsell us into ordering six dishes minimum. We were full before four.
Spicy oil at Coco Pazzo, where they leave you a literful of the stuff to baste your pizza, vegetables, steak at your own pleasure, or risk. The robiola foccaccia, which looks like a papadias, is the snack of my dreams and feeds four.