What I’m Seeing This Week: Director Kitty Green’s previous film The Assistant was one of the last movies I saw in theaters before COVID. I remember that it definitely got to me, so I’m going with The Royal Hotel at Cinemapolis.
Also in Theaters: Cornell Cinema is screening The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at Cornell’s Sage Chapel on Wednesday with a live soundtrack by The Invincible Czars. I had a good time watching them accompany Nosferatu there last year. Drylongso, which got a Criterion Collection release in August, is playing their regular venue in Willard Straight Hall the following evening. Hocus Pocus wasn’t a big part of *my* childhood, but my kids love it and we’d probably be planning to catch one of the 30th anniversary screenings at the Regal Ithaca Mall this week if we weren’t heading north for the first half of it for Canadian Thanksgiving. Hopefully it will stick around for awhile!
Home Video: Black Sheep, which is now available on the Criterion Channel as part of their “Directed by Allan Dwan” series, is the most fun I’ve had watching a movie in I don’t know how long. Total catnip for me, down to the presence of Eugene Pallette, more or less realistic poker hands, and period (1935)-interesting drink orders like crème de menthe frappé and Dubonnet. David Cairns got it exactly right as he so often does when he noted that stars Edmund Lowe and Claire Trevor deserved a whole series of Thin Man-like films and lamented the fact “sometimes film history just misses a trick.” Highest possible recommendation!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 