What I’m Seeing: Local theaters are full of intriguing options right now! I’m going with the movie of the moment Civil War at Cinemapolis because I enjoyed the first three films that Alex Garland directed and because national treasure Stephen McKinley Henderson is in it.
Also in Theaters: I hope to catch both Challengers, which is at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall, and The Beast, which is at Cinemapolis, before they leave Ithaca. Had I but world enough, and time, I’d see Monkey Man (the Regal) and Sasquatch Sunset in theaters as well, but it probably isn’t going to work out. Oh well. Following a lot of turnover on local screens, the best new movie in Ithaca that I’ve already seen is once again Dune: Part Two, which is at the Regal. Cornell Cinema is winding down their spring programming with Cléo from 5 to 7 on Monday, a free screening of Borders on Tuesday, and a Science on Screen event which includes a screening of Back to the Future and a lecture by Professor Eilyan Bitar on Wednesday. Your other best bets for repertory fare are Spirited Away, which is at the Regal in dubbed or subbed versions Saturday through Wednesday, and Alien, which opens at the Regal tomorrow and runs all week.
Home Video: The name of this blog refers to the fact that I took a roughly decade off from intensive movie watching between finishing graduate school in 2009 and the birth of my second child in 2018 to concentrate on my family and career. I’m sure I still saw more films than an average person during this time, but there were also a lot of prominent new releases that I completely missed. I finally caught up with one of them the other day after Jason Bailey noted in the New York Times that Whiplash is leaving Netflix on April 30. As you probably already know, it’s terrific! J.K. Simmons is a Best Supporting Actor of the Decade candidate for his performance as Terence Fletcher, I’ve been listening to the soundtrack nonstop on Spotify all week, and the final sequence is absolutely stunning. I think I like it best, though, for its treatment of art and sport as two sides of the same coin. Sport is the art of the body, and artists are competitors just as surely as athletes are–they just have different ways of keeping score. Whiplash is about how much we’re missing when we focus only on concerts and games and ignore the countless hour of practice and decision-making that preceded them: if we applaud the final performance without understanding what led up to it, who knows what kind of awful behavior we’re condoning? At the same time the only way to convincingly rebut Fletcher’s claim that his methods are necessary if we value greatness is with a thoughtful definition of what that word does and should mean.
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 