What I’m Seeing This Week: It is officially the time of year when I can’t possibly keep up with all the movies I want to see before they leave theaters, especially for as long as the Mets’ World Series hopes remain alive! I think I’m going to go with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at either Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall while the original Beetlejuice, which my loving wife and I watched on Max just the other day, remains fresh in my mind.
Also in Theaters: The best new movie now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen is Megalopolis, director Francis Ford Coppola’s idea of a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney “let’s put on a show!” film filtered through the lens of Ayn Rand as interpreted by Cecil B. DeMille. It continues its run at the Regal this week. My family was collectively a *bit* disappointed by The Wild Robot, which is also at the Regal, but it’s nonetheless one of the best kid-friendly movies of the year. I’m not free at 5pm on Sunday, but if I was I’d be going to see Brazil’s official selection for the 2024 Academy Awards Pictures of Ghosts at Cornell Cinema. Other new films I’d love to see on the big screen include A Different Man (Cinemapolis), My Old Ass (Cinemapolis and the Regal), The Substance (Cinemapolis and the Regal). Noteworthy special events include a screening of Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom followed by a conversation with director Manthia Diawara and Cornell professor Salah M. Hassan at Cornell Cinema tonight and a free screening of The Settlers at Cinemapolis on Sunday. Finally, your best bets for repertory fare are definitely the screenings of Notorious and Nostalghia at Cornell Cinema on Saturday and the screening of Possession at Cinemapolis in Tuesday, but I’d remiss if I didn’t also call out the screening of The Mummy at Cornell Cinema tomorrow since it’s the movie that briefly made me want to become a filmmaker. Because I thought it was terrible and could do better, to be sure, but I revisited it for the first time since I was in high school a couple of years ago and it’s actually quite fun if you don’t take it seriously.
Home Video: While watching La Ciénaga on the Criterion Channel recently, I kept thinking of the following lyrics from the Los Campesinos! song “Feast of Tongues” off their recent album All Hell:
When the black cloud comes, if one flame flickers
We will feast on the tongues of the last bootlickers
To the tune of the National Anthem
Of a country that didn’t survive
In a language I’d learned and forgotten
I’ll stay home, keep the garden alive
The opening shots, including the zombie-like shuffling of drunk, overweight bourgeoisie sunbathers and the vaporous font of the credits, establish it as a ghost story, a reading confirmed by the ending which evinces the same attitude toward religion as las year’s When Evil Lurks: as David Oubiña wrote in an essay for the Criterion Collection DVD release, “Martel has created her own version of a world without God.” The sound design in both of these scenes and (as, Oubiña and many others have noted, all throughout the film) is brilliant, including clinking ice cubes at the beginning which sound like Jacob Marley rattling his chains and a cleverly-deployed dial tone at the end in the role of a flatlining heartbeat monitor. Lucrecia Martel remains one of my most glaring cinematic blind spots, but at least now I know why!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 