Fin: Brutalist, Brutalist, Brutalist!

I saw the best movie of the year on Wednesday. In this week's notes column, I also discuss the return of Mickey 17, the disappearance of a documentary, a Wing Bowl movie, and much more.

It’s not too often that I go to another city to see a movie. Still, I did that on Wednesday, when I made a one-day Amtrak sojourn to the New York Film Festival to see a pair of press screenings, including Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which ever since Venice and TIFF has been drawing best-movie-of-the-year buzz. I even did my usual NYFF routine of walking from Penn Station to Lincoln Center while listening to one of the TIFF editions of the Film Comment podcast. 

After spending an entire day nervous that I wouldn’t get into the screening — and indeed, I’m told there were lines around the block, and quite a few people were turned away — I took in the film. And I feel awful for the people turned away since I’ve been in that position at NYFF before. 

And yes, it is a masterpiece. The Brutalist is three and a half hours long and full of big ideas about architecture, the Holocaust, assimilation, American Jewish identity, marriage, the American dream, and so many other things. It’s also gorgeous, filmed in a 35mm process called VistaVision, and features one of the best scores of the year by Daniel Blumberg. 

And I didn’t even like Corbet’s previous film, Vox Lux. 

I will write a more complete review later. Given the film’s many Jewish and Philadelphia (and Bucks County!) references, I expect to write quite a bit about The Brutalist over the next six months or so, sort of like Maestro last year. This is one of those movies that I can’t wait to argue with people about, whether it’s about certain scenes, the film’s relationship with Zionism, or whether or not it matters that Brady Corbet, Felicia Jones, and Adrien Brody aren’t Jewish. 

The Brutalist ends the nearly year-long reign of Hit Man—which I saw in the same theater last fall, also at the New York Film Festival, but knew wouldn’t be out until the new year—as my favorite film of 2024. 

Wing Bowl: The Movie 

The Inquirer reports that another nonfiction film touches on Philadelphia sports: Yes, they’re making a documentary about Wing Bowl. It’s from documentarians Frank Petka and Pat Taggart, called No One Died: The Wing Bowl Story.

Wing Bowl was one of those things that, if you’re not a Philadelphian, doesn’t seem like it could be real. It was an annual chicken wing-eating contest conducted through the WIP sports radio station, always held starting at 6 a.m. on the Friday before the Super Bowl. Over the years, it grew from a hotel lobby to the city’s sports arena and tended to draw celebrity guests, from Ric Flair to Snooki. 

Competitors would qualify with test-eating stunts, like eating a sandwich with a pizza wrapped around it in ten minutes, and let me tell you, those tests were always fantastic radio. Once the event rolled around, the competitors dressed in pro-wrestling-style costumes while a different strip club sponsored each competitor. 

And yes, strippers were always a big part of the show, with the not-so-well-behaved crowd – much of whom had been drinking in the parking lot all night — often demanding to see in-person nudity. And then, since the competition would wrap up at about 10 a.m., different strip clubs would host early-morning “Wing Bowl afterparties.” To this day, one of the strip clubs keeps the tradition alive with an annual wing competition called “Wing Pole,” in which my brother-in-law has competed several years in a row.

Angelo Cataldi, the retired sports radio host, and Wing Bowl ringmaster, is interviewed in the film, although WIP did not officially cooperate with it.

I once attended Wing Bowl, in I believe 2006, even covering it as credentialed press, but let’s say once was enough. It’s not often I’ve had the occasion to interview someone who had visible vomit on his person, but that day was one of those times. A couple of years later, I interviewed five-time Wing Bowl champion Bill “El Wingador” Simmons upon the publication of his memoir about both Wing Bowl and his later arrest and imprisonment for selling drugs. 

In the post-#MeToo environment of 2018, a decision was made, likely at the radio station corporate level, that Wing Bowl was too disgusting to continue, and that year’s event had been the final one.

And since the Friday morning event was always meant as a consolation for the Eagles not playing that Sunday, it was apropos that Wing Bowl died the same year the Eagles ended their Super Bowl drought. And let’s say both of those things have helped bring about a happier, less angsty version of Philadelphia sports fandom. 

There’s another new documentary, a short called The Turnaround, which focuses on the time in 2023 that Phillies fans reacted to the slumping $300 million player Trea Turner, not with boos — the way they would have for much of the previous decades — but rather with a standing ovation, and it turned Turner’s season around. 

I’m on board with the Wing Bowl doc and can't wait to see it. Just as long as it doesn’t begin with someone in a heavy Philly accent declaring, “You gotta understand- we’re a blue-collar town! We’re tough!”