What I’m Seeing This Week: I didn’t make it to Relay at Cinemapolis last week, so it remains first up on my list. I’m hoping to see Caught Stealing there or at the Regal Ithaca Mall as well.
Also in Theaters: In addition to the titles above, I’m also going to try to catch Honey Don’t! at Cinemapolis and The Roses there or at the Regal before they close. The best new movie now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen remains Highest 2 Lowest, which continues its run at Cinemapolis. I also enjoyed Weapons, which is there and at the Regal; The Fantastic Four: First Steps, The Naked Gun, and Superman, all of which are just at the Regal; and Sorry, Baby, which plays Cornell Cinema (welcome back!) on Friday. Local screenings of 35mm films are sadly become quite rare, so the presentation of a new restoration print of Donnie Darko at Cornell Cinema on Saturday definitely qualifies as a “special events” highlight! Finally, your best bets for repertory fare are the 50th anniversary screenings of Jaws at Cinemapolis and the Regal all week, It Happened One Night at Cornell Cinema on Sunday, and The Dark Knight at the Regal on Tuesday.
Home Video: If you are drafting a fantasy football team this weekend, consider unwinding afterward the way we did with The Dirty Dozen, which is available on Watch TCM until September 15! I had completely forgotten that I briefly broke down this Last Supper reference back in 2006 until we got to it:
But was glad to be reminded, because although I question my overreliance on reading this as a nod to the mural by Leonardo da Vinci specifically, I think it still contains some good thoughts. First off, the original screengrab is lost to time, but I believe this must be the “joke” I refer to:
The bit about Telly Savalas’s Maggot not being in the position of Judas is nonsense, but I do like my suggestion that the overhead shots may represent the filmmakers inserting themselves into the scene, especially in the context of an observation in one of my loving wife’s old art history textbooks about Tintoretto’s Last Supper, which like Robert Aldrich’s sets the table at a diagonal, that it “used two internal light sources: one real, the other supernatural.” I wonder if this is meant to make us conscious of the presence of studio lights:
I could write a whole post on the results-oriented leadership style of Lee Marvin’s Major John Reisman in the face of orders from a “someone up there” (another possible reading of the previous image) who is “a raving lunatic,” but it might get me in trouble at work if misinterpreted, so instead I’ll note that the film’s position on capital punishment echoes those of the texts I wrote about in my July, 2025 Drink & a Movie blog post. And, right: football! The connection there is of course running back-cum-actor Jim Brown’s dramatic death scene at the end a heroic first down-length dash through enemy gunfire:
I concede that I may have overstated my case a tiny bit by calling it “the rare World War II film not afraid to acknowledge the sins that we the victors conveniently leave out of most of the rest of our official histories” on Letterboxd, considering that it’s obviously really about Vietnam, but this absolutely is still one of my favorite examples of that genre.
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 