What I’m Seeing This Week: It’s a close call for me between the documentary Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, which screens at Cornell Cinema on Monday, and Nicolas Cage’s latest film Dream Scenario, which opened at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall yesterday. I’m currently intending to go with the former, but reserve the right to change my mind at the last minute! My loving wife and I may also see Napoleon, which continues its run at both of those same theaters, with her history buff uncle depending on how many other relatives come to Ithaca this weekend for our girls’ Irish dance recital and how willing they are to babysit.
Also in Theaters: It has been a few years since I literally recorded music onto an actual audiocassette, but I still use the term “mixtape” for certain Spotify and iTunes playlists. The thing they all have in common is intentionality: I restrict them to a certain length and put thought into how the songs flow into one another and fit together as a whole. I’ve always believed that you can do the same thing with movies. A film studies course syllabus is one obvious example, and a film series is another. Holiday movie watching can be, too, if you approach it the right way. We binge on Christmas movies each December in our house, but I don’t want the exact same thing over and over again. The Holdovers, which continues its run at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall this week, has the potential to be a great “holiday mixtape movie” in that it’s set during a private boarding school’s winter break and features twinkling lights and Andy Williams singing “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” but also quite a few somber notes, making it a seasonally appropriate change of pace. More traditional holiday fare screening at local theaters this week includes The Polar Express and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (the subject of my next Drink & a Movie post!), which are at the Regal Ithaca Mall on Saturday and Sunday respectively.
Home Video: Another great holiday mixtape movie is Metropolitan, which a friend of mine mentioned in an email earlier this week. Although the 10-day period when it unfolds spans Christmas Eve and Day, its focus is specifically on the debutante parties which take place in Manhattan during this time. The Oscar-nominated screenplay is absolutely brilliant and contains one of my single favorite lines from any movie ever, Tom Townsend’s observation to Audrey Rouget that her behavior is “not something Jane Austen would have done.” Edward Clements and Carolyn Farina are terrific in those two roles, and the rest of the cast is great as well. Metropolitan is a Criterion Collection title and is now streaming on both The Criterion Channel and Max with a subscription.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 