What I’m Seeing This Week: Poor Things, which opened at Cinemapolis yesterday, is one of my most anticipated new movies of the year. We’ll be on the road all week, so I won’t be able to see it here, but I’m hoping to catch a screening at the Charles Theatre in Baltimore during our travels.
Also in Theaters: My top recommendation is The Boy and the Heron, which is at Cinemapolis until Saturday and at the Regal Ithaca Mall one day longer, albeit only with subtitles. Maestro is already available on Netflix (which is why I ended up choosing Dream Scenario over it last week), but you can see it on the big screen at Cinemapolis until Sunday. My loving wife, who is a rower, is excited to see The Boys in the Boat, which opens at Cinemapolis and the Regal on Christmas Eve. Ferrari, which opens at the Regal then as well and at Cinemapolis on Christmas Day, is directed by Michael Mann, which makes it an event for me. Last but not least, I’ve heard good things about The Iron Claw, which is at both Cinemapolis and the Regal all week.
Home Video: Michael Fassbender’s eponymous main character from The Killer and Alain Delon’s Jef Costello from Le Samouraï would probably enjoy not talking to each other over dinner. They’re both in the same line of work, are clearly intelligent, and appear to live according to a strict code. So why is one considered the epitome of a certain notion of “cool” while the other comes across as sort of a doofus? Part of this is attributable to costume design: the clothes they wear may both be precision engineered to blend in to their respective milieus, but it seems unlikely that The Killer’s German tourist attire will still regularly garner attention from fashion writers they way Costello’s perfectly calibrated fedora and trench coat do more than fifty years later. More importantly, though, we can hear The Killer’s thoughts and thus are privy to the DETAILS of his philosophy of life as opposed to just having a brief quote from a made-up samurai text to go on. And so it is that one man’s escape from the suddenly undeniably corrupt world he inhabits registers as noble and pure while the other’s decision to permanently retreat to an island paradise very much doesn’t. I revisted Le Samouraï as recently as just the other day and it remains one of the most icily beautiful films I’ve ever seen, but there’s a lot more going on in The Killer. I particularly enjoyed the main character’s fondness for Amazon lockers, Egg McMuffins, and rideshare scooters, which in addition to being character note are a reminder that an average middle class person in 2023 has access to luxuries that would be the envy of wealthy monarchs from centuries past. Meanwhile, Erik Messerschmidt’s cinematography is ostentatiously spectacular, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have once again produced one of my favorite scores of the year, following up their work on Empire of Light with something similarly spare, but much different in tone. The Killer is now streaming on Netflix with a subscription. Highly recommended!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 