What I’m Seeing This Week: I’m excited to finally see this year’s Palme d’Or winner Anora at Cinemapolis!
Also in Theaters: There aren’t any new movies now playing Ithaca which I truly adored, but as I mentioned last week I won’t be rooting *against* The Wild Robot, which is at the Regal Ithaca Mall, or Conclave, which is both there and at Cinemapolis, when they’re inevitably nominated for some of this year’s Oscars. If I wasn’t out of town, I’d be seeing Sugarcane at Cornell Cinema tonight, which is screening as part of a double feature with Cornell professor Jeffrey Palmer’s Ghosts. Other films I’m hoping to see in local theaters before they close include Here and Heretic, which are both at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, and Small Things Like These, which is at the Regal. Noteworthy special events include free screenings of Butterfly in the Sky at Cinemapolis on Tuesday and Oedipus Rex at Cornell Cinema on Wednesday. It’s a good week for repertory fare, with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Matrix screening at Cornell Cinema tomorrow, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial there on Sunday, and In a Lonely Place at Cinemapolis on Wednesday.
Home Video: I Saw the TV Glow has been streaming on Max for awhile now and I finally got around to rewatching it the other day. I’m pretty sure that it’s still my favorite film of Movie Year 2024. As I wrote on Letterboxd:
The key scene for me is the one in which Owen (Justice Smith) rewatches his favorite television show The Pink Opaque as an adult and it’s *completely different* from how he remembers it. Which: I don’t think we can write this off as “you can’t go home again” because, 1) he has ostensibly seen it a million times, and 2) we’ve seen clips from the show, too, and this isn’t the same program! The one we’ve caught glimpses of is a mash-up of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Adventures of Pete and Pete which veers on some seriously dark territory; the one Owen returns to is basically just a riff on the latter’s classic “What We Did on Our Summer Vacation” episode pitched at an even younger audience. Clues to what’s actually going on here are provided in the form of the games at the arcade Owen works at based on characters from the more grown-up version of TPO, which we could interpret as merchandizing, except that the lack of branding and fact that the show was cancelled decades earlier suggest that a more likely explanation may be that he invented the “complicated mythology” as a way of repressing what all those Saturday night sleepovers with Brigette Lundy-Paine’s Maddy were *really* about. This would presumably also explain how this supposed super fan somehow fails to comment on the fact that at one point he finds himself actually in the show’s Double Lunch hangout spot.
I suspect that by writing all of this out I’m exposing myself to a possible response of “well, duh, you dummy,” but what I find compelling is the way director Jane Schoenbrun presents it. Owen knows all of this, but he is unable to act. Like Arthur Hamilton/Tony Wilson (John Randolph/Rock Hudson) in Seconds, he sees the necessity for transformation, but remains tragically convinced that this is something he needs someone else to do *to* him. That film ends with the sound of a drill announcing that it’s too late for its hero; this one holds out the possibility that “there is still time.” It’s also quite a bit more sympathetic to both the mainstream and “counter” cultures it depicts, but that comparison might be a good place to start a deep dive.
P.S. I’m still a member of team “‘Claw Machine’ for this year’s Best Original Song Oscar”!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 