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Tucker’s Cover

January 11, 2026
# 1748
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Thoughts from Dom’s Porch
Cover: National Spaghetti Week

National Spaghetti Week is basically a playful, comfort‑driven ritual where people cook spaghetti more often, try new twists, revisit classics, bake casseroles, experiment with sauces, and celebrate the dish’s history.

**Spaghetti al Pomodoro —** A bright, elemental bowl built from tomatoes, garlic, basil, and olive oil, letting the pasta itself speak. It’s the purest expression of spaghetti’s Italian lineage and a perfect reset for the palate.

**Baked Spaghetti Casserole —** A layered, bubbling dish where spaghetti becomes comfort architecture under ricotta, mozzarella, and slow‑cooked sauce. It turns a simple pasta into a warm, sustaining winter ritual.

**Lemon‑Pepper Cream Sauce Spaghetti —** A playful, weeknight experiment that lifts spaghetti with citrus, cracked pepper, and a touch of cream. It’s bright, silky, and just irreverent enough to feel new.

Hand‑rolled Fresh Spaghetti with Olive Oil + Parmesan — A heritage gesture that honors the dish’s origins through texture, simplicity, and restraint. Fresh pasta, good oil, and aged cheese create a bowl that feels both ancient and immediate.

Love making pasta
It’s not a formal holiday — it’s a cozy, kitchen‑based celebration.

Pictures below from Gorvardhan Eco Village, just outside of Mumbai

Kat and Dom's Revue

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Tucker’s Corner

Marty Supreme

Timothée Chalamet is so electric in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme that it takes a while before you realize that he’s playing a total shit. As Marty Mauser, a brilliant, young working-class table-tennis player in 1952 New York with dreams of becoming the world champion in his sport, Chalamet nails the mouthy, rapid-fire confidence of a con artist who knows that reality will catch up with him if he dares to stop. When we first see Marty, he’s sweet-talking a customer at the shoe store where he works, going over variations in sizes from different brands; then his married girlfriend, Rachel (played by the lively Odessa A’Zion), comes into the store, and he takes her out back to the storage room for a quickie. This being a Josh Safdie film, we now get a clinical, X-ray look at the impregnation process over the opening credits, as an army of microscopic sperm swims its way toward a giant egg. When the camera closes in on the little sperm that manages to race ahead of the others and fertilize the egg, we get the idea: The world runs on and for those who go fast, break walls, and never look back.

Maybe “con artist” was the wrong word. Marty is in fact a great table-tennis player, fiercely competitive and fun to watch, the kind of guy who will contort himself into all sorts of crazy positions in his sincere efforts to hit the ball; when he tells people that table tennis is going to take off as a global sport, we believe him because we’ve seen him play. But his self-assurance also makes him a cheat, a liar, and a sore, bloviating loser, and it can be hard to tell if his more detestable qualities are just necessary features of his act or evidence of a genuine inner rot. When Rachel later shows up eight months pregnant, Marty vehemently insists that the baby isn’t his. Does he do this because he knows he can’t handle such responsibility or because he is careless, destructive, and cruel? If he was a middle-aged man (or, God forbid, a fast-talking boomer politician with a history of reckless duplicity and incessant self-promotion), he’d be absolutely insufferable. But he’s not. He’s Timothée Chalamet, charming as hell and giving the best performance yet of his still-young career.

Marty Supreme is enormously entertaining on a basic cinematic level. Safdie keeps pace with his chatterbox protagonist, jumping from scrape to scrape, ruse to ruse, as Marty attempts to raise enough money to make it to a championship in Japan. The setting might be the early 1950s, but the soundtrack is ’80s pop and New Wave, electronic visions of the half-century to come — a wise decision, expanding the picture’s aesthetic scope and giving it an even quicker heartbeat. Still, we might wonder if the director himself is pulling a fast one on us, stringing together all manner of unlikely events and incoherent character decisions without ever allowing us to stop and think about why everybody in this film is acting like a lunatic. After Marty spies Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a retired actress now married to a wealthy businessman, and convinces her via phone to have a hotel room tryst with him, his successful seduction of her makes no actual sense other than the fact that the movie needs their coupling to happen. That Paltrow plays Kay with a constant look of half-disgust makes her interesting, to be sure — it’s a lovely performance by an actress we started taking for granted long ago — but their relationship feels manufactured.

Similarly, when Marty agrees to take care of the dog of a gruff small-time gangster (Abel Ferrara), it’s pretty clear that the film will find a way for our hero to screw things up; how this happens is so comically far-fetched, so reliant on a series of spectacular and unconvincing absurdities that we might wonder if Marty Supreme might have made more sense as one of those dumb zany studio comedies that run on improv bravado and little else. Is this a bad thing? Maybe it’s not a bad thing. The ride is part of the point, and it feels churlish to complain that a movie this fast and fun almost never feels like it’s showing us anything resembling real human behavior.

Marty Supreme is packed full of potentially rich ideas: about Jewish assimilation, about the postwar landscape, about domesticity, about the intoxicating salve of acceptance and applause. (Paltrow has one quick close-up — you’ll know it when you see it — that might be the most arresting thing in the movie.) And it glances past a lot of them as it charges along its raucous path. There’s a hollowness to the film, which may well be intentional and that we often see in stories about hustlers: Their emptiness is their essence, which can make them interesting. Or maybe one day Marty will succeed and slow down and transform into the sinister Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), Kay’s pen-mogul husband, whose laconic sadism suggests a past far less boring than the stuffed shirt he’s now become.

Marty is inspired, amazingly, by a real guy: a real table-tennis champion and hustler named Marty Reisman, a legend of the sport. So, perhaps it’s extra strange that he never really comes alive as a person in this fast, feral, occasionally exhausting movie. Despite Chalamet’s blazing brilliance, we don’t particularly root for Marty, or feel for him, or even hate him; he feels like a plot device in his own story. And yet there’s something there. Maybe the fact that this tale of constant forward motion has little room for humanity or reflection or reason says something about Marty and his times — which of course are ultimately our own.

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Chuckles and Thoughts

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Last Comment
So, 2025 was dominated by bodily issues. Among the flurry of malfunctions I experienced, two stood out for their successful and impactful resolutions. The first was the repair of my longstanding damaged glutes and hamstrings. I used heating pads, physical therapists, masseuses, stretching, weight-lifting, and walking to restore them to health. The second was the successful adoption and tweaking of gummies to establish a fail-safe sleep routine. Together, they changed my life.

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Jan 6 January 11, 2026

Marty Supreme