3 Comments

🗣️ TO EAT GOOD FOOD IS TO BE CLOSE TO GOD 👏 Thank you for letting me write about this essential Tucci lore!

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I remember hearing about Big Night when it came out many years ago. Your essay has made me interested in looking it up again on a streaming platform. Thank you for that. There's a lot of junk to sort through on the streamers, and this type of essay helps curate the mess of media available.

Besides the love of fine cooking, it sounds like this film is about entrepreneurship and people being passionate about their work.

How do we get other people to pay attention to what we are doing?

If we love what we do and are extremely good at it, is that enough to get other people interested in what we do, even if it's different from what they're used to?

The way you've written your essay, it sounds like Big Night is also a book about leadership. I'll have to watch the movie to double-check, but Secondo sounds like the kind of self-sacrificing leader who puts his "team" first.

Your description of Secondo reminds me of the book The Captain Class, by Sam Walker. Walker looks at the greatest sports teams of all-time and identifies a "captain" from each of those dynasties. Rarely is the captain the best player on the team, and I'm curious to see if the traits Walker singles out in his book are the same traits that Secondo has in Big Night.

Cheers! Thanks for sharing your essay! I look forward to more reads about movies.

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I love this, that breakfast scene at the end is amazing. Interesting concept for a Substack, are you just doing film? Maybe crime TV isn't your thing, but Breaking Bad was notable (for many reasons, like, it's brilliant) for having a half dozen or so AMAZING scenes that play out over a meal, each very different from the others. I've never seen anyone write about that.

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