What I’m Seeing This Week: I’m going with Americana at the Regal Ithaca Mall and Relay at Cinemapolis.
Also in Theaters: It seems fitting that a movie year which will see the Criterion Collection release The Beat That My Heart Skipped, one of my favorite remakes ever, also features Spike Lee repatriating Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of the Ed McBain novel King’s Ransom in Highest 2 Lowest, which continues its run at Cinemapolis. Similar to how director Jacques Audiard ran the plot of Fingers through his camera backwards and upside down, Lee relies on our familiarity with High and Low to appreciate the notes he’s not playing, most notably when he switches out Kurosawa’s wide-angle look at Japanese society for a close-up on one record mogul’s relationship with African-American culture. In the battle of new horror films, I prefer Together, which remains at the Regal (although it’s down to just one screening per day), to Weapons, which is both there and at Cinemapolis, but they’re both fun. Other first-run fare at the Regal I enjoyed includes Sketch, The Naked Gun, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and Superman in approximately that order. I’m also hoping to see Honey Don’t!, which opens at Cinemapolis today, and maybe Ne Zha II, which is there and at the Regal, depending on what I think about the original Ne Zha after I get a chance to check it out on Peacock. This week’s special events highlight is definitely the free “Silent Movie Under the Stars” screening of The Eagle in Upper Robert Treman State Park on Saturday, but the KPop Demon Hunters “Sing-Along Event” at the Regal on Saturday and Sunday may be of even more interest if that’s your thing. Finally, your best bets for repertory fare are Tampopo, which plays Cinemapolis on Wednesday as part of their “Food on Film” August staff picks series, and Ponyo, which has showtimes at the Regal on Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday.
Home Video: I recently reviewed Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming), the second and third installments in a nearly ten-hour-long documentary trilogy directed by Wang Bing, for Educational Media Reviews Online. To my very great surprise, this experience resonated with another time-consuming cinema project I was already in the middle of, working my way through the first decade or so of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with my loving wife. Did you know, for instance, that the collective runtime of the first four Avengers movies is almost exactly the same as the Youth cycle? And this isn’t the only thing they have in common! As I said on Letterboxd after re-watching Hard Times, it and Avengers: Endgame are each “more enjoyable if you also watch the movie that preceded it, but both also render that film largely superfluous.” Meanwhile, Homecoming is in a lot of ways an extended coda. The main challenge of “durational” cinema for me isn’t its length per se but rather the opportunity cost it represents, which as I mentioned a few months ago is the reason I don’t go for TV series–after all, including collections, I have almost a hundred films on my Criterion Channel watchlist that I could be watching instead. And so, just as I intend to propose a “cheater’s MCU” as soon as I’m caught up, I’m here today to tell you that if you’re merely *curious* about the Youth trilogy, you can totally get a good sense of what it’s all about just by watching Hard Times! And then, if you really dig it, you can go back and watch all three movies in a row, which even in the absence of definitive testimony from Bing (which might not alter my opinion regardless) is how I think they’re MEANT to be seen. Current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students have access to this film through a subscription to Docuseek paid for by the Library and it’s also available for rental from Prime Video.
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 