Memories of Latham, and Dan DiNicola

When I heard earlier this week that the Regal Cinemas at Latham Circle Mall had closed at last, my first response wasn't exactly sniffling nostalgia.

Dan, who died in March 2010 following a struggle with brain cancer, was a broadcast journalist and film critic (at WRGB and the Daily Gazette) of many years' experience.

When I first started writing about movies for the Times Union back in late 1994, he was the established and long-trusted local voice on matters cinematic.

Little films with little marketing budgets arrive on DVD (or, lately, in links to online screeners).

Big films with big marketing budgets get "promo'd," that is, screened in full theaters a few nights before release.

In-between films, or films with awards potential, get screened for press at nutty daytime hours — who but a critic sees a movie at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday? — in a theater occupied solely by media folk and, sometimes, the odd studio rep or security guy.

While we almost never compared notes on a movie right after seeing it (we tried to keep our opinions pure), we gabbed plenty later on.

[...] it was Dan who told me, in December 2008, to dig through my stack of year-end awards screeners — if you belong to a critics' group that hands out awards, you get piles of them — and find "Gomorrah," a brilliant, bleak Italian crime saga that landed on my Top 10.

Tolstoy's broad and compassionate embrace of humanity in all of its forms, all of its foibles, never waned as a source of wisdom and spiritual comfort for him.

Closer to the end, when Dan found it more difficult to leave Saratoga Springs, I met him for a few screenings up at Wilton Mall's Regal Cinemas — which also closed this week — or for lunch at one of his favorite haunts.

From Putnam Market he bought me gourmet black licorice, another shared enthusiasm of ours, and cupcakes to bring home to my kids.