What I’m Seeing This Week: I am going with Good One, which opens at Cinemapolis today.
Also in Theaters: My top recommendation is Between the Temples, which continues its run at both Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall. It stars Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane as student/teacher dyad (each plays both roles at different times) and features my favorite sound effect of Movie Year 2024, a defective door which swings open unbidden with an anguished wail reminiscent of someone being tortured on The Machine from Kane’s The Princess Bride, as well as one of the funniest and most original depictions of a drug experience that I’ve ever seen in a film from any era. I also enjoyed Twisters, Inside Out 2, and Trap, all of which are at the Regal Ithaca Mall, and Love Lies Bleeding, which is at Cornell Cinema on Saturday. New movies which I haven’t seen yet, but hope to before they leave theaters, include Sing Sing (Cinemapolis), Blink Twice (Cinemapolis and the Regal), and Dìdi (Cinemapolis). Finally, your best bets for repertory fare are two blasts from my past: Coraline, which is concludes its run at the Regal tonight, and 10 Things I Hate About You, which plays Cornell Cinema tomorrow. It has been a minute since I last watched either of them, but I enjoyed both when they were originally released 25 and 15 years ago respectively.
Home Video: One of my most gratifying cinephile parent experiences to date has been watching my kids grow up with the work of director Hayao Miyazaki, who *I* didn’t discover until college. When my oldest recently selected Howl’s Moving Castle as her Family (née Friday) Movie Night selection, I assumed that I had already seen it, but it quickly became apparent that I was wrong. Between the fact that it’s one of Miyazaki’s least schematic films and the capriciousness of the transformations that afflict so many characters, I suspect it feels like an allegory for whatever you went through most recently. I love the scene where Howl takes the form of a king and announces that they’re abandoning a military tactic because it exposes civilians to too much danger, then the real king comes in and obviously couldn’t care less about such things, and as someone who continues to enjoy each new stage of life as much as the ones which preceded it, I also dig the depiction of old age as a “curse” that also comes with plenty of benefits. Howl’s Moving Castle, like all Studio Ghibli titles, is exclusively available for streaming on Max with a subscription, but you can also easily find it on DVD and Blu-ray for not much money at all.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 