What I’m Seeing This Week: I’m going with The Surfer and Thunderbolts*, both of which are at both Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall. My oldest daughter has chosen A Minecraft Movie for our next Family (née Friday) Movie Night, so we’re all going to see that at the Regal as well.
Also in Theaters: The best new film playing Ithaca RIGHT NOW that I’ve already see is The Shrouds, but after its final screening at Cinemapolis tonight, Sinners (which continues its run there and at the Regal) will reclaim this coveted title. In addition to everything listed above, I also hope to see Secret Mall Apartment before it closes at Cinemapolis. There don’t appear to be any compelling special events this week, but on the repertory front my May, 2024 Drink & a Movie selection Stalker is playing Cinemapolis on Wednesday as part of their latest “Staff Picks” series. I caught the 4k restoration they’re showing on the big screen at Kingston, Ontario’s The Screening Room last April and can assure you that you definitely don’t want to miss it!
Home Video: In my recent Drink & a Movie post about Masculine Feminine, I quote Penelope Gilliatt as calling it “the picture that best captures what it was like to be an undergraduate in the sixties.” This inspired me to finally revisit Funny Ha Ha, which current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students have access to through Kanopy via a license paid for by the Library and which can be streamed as a rental via a variety of commercial platforms as well, for the first time in twenty years. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd afterward:
When I saw Funny Ha Ha for the first time in 2005 I would have been less than a year into my first full-time job after graduation and still a couple away from enrolling in a master’s program and it hit me like a bolt of lightning because I finally got to experience something for myself that I had read other people describe: the shock of recognizing myself onscreen. Which even then I felt just a bit sheepish about; after all, American movies have always been chock full of white middle class young people. But they’d never before looked exactly like my friends, unglamorous yet always dressed in the perfect killer thrift store find t-shirt. They’d never before sounded just like us, smart but inarticulate and begging the god(s) we didn’t so much not believe in as rarely think about to please not let us be misunderstood. They’d never before drifted listlessly through the Kuiper Belt of planetoid hangouts that didn’t quite rise to the level of parties orbiting some other college town, helping themself the requisite meager offering of bottom shelf bottles en route to another hookup and maybe a deeper connection and eventually an actual adult life in an entirely different place. Because, to go back to Gilliat, Funny Ha Ha is the picture that best describes what it was like to be recently *not* an undergraduate in the mid-2000s but, like Kate Dollenmayer’s Marnie, not quite as far along the road to things like a career and a long-term relationship as your peers, many of whom were beginning to leave, leaving you behind.
I can confidently recommend this film to almost anyone as the rootstock of mumblecore, a historical record of the brief time when cellphones coexisted alongside answering machines, and a rebuttal to the “No Girls Allowed” sign outside Jean-Luc Godard’s Children of Marx clubhouse. You probably aren’t going to be gobsmacked by the scene in which Andrew Bujalski’s Mitchell impulsively drops a beer off a balcony unless you once did the same thing with an empty bottle of champagne for the same silly reasons, though.
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 