What I’m Seeing This Week: I wasn’t able to make it to Mickey 17 last week after all, so seeing it at Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall is my first order of business. My loving wife and I are also planning a “date night” (we’re probably actually going to hit a matinee) outing to Black Bag at one of those two theaters as well.
Also in Theaters: The best new film now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen is Close Your Eyes, which screens at Cornell Cinema on Sunday. No Other Land, which continues its run at Cinemapolis, made my “Top Ten Movies of 2024” list too, and I recommend Best Picture Oscar winner Anora (Cinemapolis and the Regal) as well. I’m also intrigued by Toxic, which is at Cornell Cinema tonight, and am looking forward to selecting Paddington in Peru (Regal) and The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (Cinemapolis and the Regal) for Family (née Friday) Movie Night later this year. Noteworthy special events include an event called “Nosferatu x Radiohead: A Silents Synced Film” at Cornell Cinema and a free Pi Day screening of the documentary Counted Out at Cinemapolis tomorrow; a free “Family Classics Picture Show” screening of An American Tail at Cinemapolis on Sunday; and a free screening of Alien at Cornell Cinema on Wednesday. Finally, your best bets for repertory fare are Peeping Tom and The Red Shoes, which play Cornell Cinema tonight and Saturday respectively.
Home Video: It recently occurred to me that The Crowd, one of my favorite movies of all time, has now been in the public domain in the United States for more than a year. I was utterly shocked to discover that it nonetheless remains unavailable on a good R1 Blu-ray/DVD release. It can, however, be streamed on Watch TCM until March 21. Here’s what I wrote about it on Letterboxd after revisiting it there last week:
John Sims (James Murray) stars as a man who inherits the vision of exceptionalism his father (Warner Richmond) had for him and learns the hard way each time how to fall in love with first the mother (Eleanor Boardman) of his first child (Freddie Burke Frederick); then Mary, the actual flesh-and-blood woman who occupies that role; and finally the life they’ve been really living all the while he was dreaming, hopefully just in time to finally lay a foundation before the Great Depression that not even the filmmakers know is barreling down upon them hits. Mary’s brothers (Daniel G. Tomlinson and Dell Henderson) are perfectly dour avatars of bourgeoisie judgmentalism, and the depictions of the titular urban masses constitute all-time great cinema images which clearly inspired David Lynch, Jacques Tati, Orson Welles, and any number of other giants who followed.
The Welles film most commonly associated with this one is The Trial, but the Crazy House sequence in The Lady from Shanghai, which I wrote about in January, was clearly inspired by it as well. The works by Lynch and Tati I mainly have in mind are Twin Peaks: The Return and Playtime, which I wrote about in December.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 