What I’m Seeing This Week: The snow on Tuesday waylaid my plans, so catching a screening of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery at Cinemapolis is still my number one priority. I’m excited to finally see Hamnet there as well!
Also in Theaters: Sentimental Value (Cinemapolis) remains my top new movie recommendation. Other first run fare I’m interested in but haven’t gotten to yet includes Rental Family (Regal Ithaca Mall), Wicked: For Good (Cinemapolis & Regal), and Zootopia 2 (Regal). I mentioned Now You See Me: Now You Don’t and Sisu: Road to Revenge, both of which continue their runs at the Regal, in this space previously, too, but my loving wife and I have pretty much made up our minds to save them for future movie marathons which also include their predecessors. Special events highlights include a free screening of an award-winning new documentary called Remaining Native at Cinemapolis on Sunday and Cornell Cinema‘s traditional end-of-semester “mystery screening” tonight. Finally, noteworthy repertory options include Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair opening at the Regal today and another batch of holiday classics appearing there throughout the week, among them personal favorites December 2023 “Drink & a Movie” selection National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation on Saturday, Love Actually on Tuesday, and The Christmas Chronicles, which features an energetic performance by Kurt Russell in the role of St. Nick, on Wednesday.
Home Video Recommendation: The Teachers’ Lounge was recently featured in the New York Times’s “Watching” newsletter, which reminded me that I somehow never got around to revisiting it despite the fact that it has been available on Netflix with a subscription for ages! Here’s what I said on Letterboxd back in February, 2024:
Features some of the Movie Year’s most excitingly thought-provoking final shots. Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch) solves the Rubik’s cube that Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) lent him earlier, confirming that like her he speaks the language of logic and mathematics. Which: compare her loyalty to him to her earlier refusal to speak Polish with her colleague Milosz Dudek (Rafael Stachowiak). Anyway, we then survey the empty rooms of the school where the drama has taken place before ending on a shot of Oskar being carried away by the police. The latter establishes the two characters as being united in their respective failures to unlock the escape room they have found themselves trapped in, but then the end credits roll to the strains of Mendelssohn’s overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, underscoring the sense of enchantment and theatricality pervasive throughout the entire film (most palpably in the protest or hallucination of the whole school wearing Eva Löbau’s Friederike Kuhn’s distinctive blouse). I’ll need at least one more viewing to figure out what exactly, but there’s definitely a lot going on here and I dig it!
After a second viewing I think what the Mendelssohn overture, which George Grove once wrote “stamps the fairy character of the work” from its opening four chords, brings to the party is the sense that “the world is turned upside down” as John McTiernan put it when writing about the influence of the Shakespeare play it was composed for on this month’s “Drink & a Movie” selection Die Hard. If anything I underrated this film by only ranking it seventh on my “Top Ten Movies of 2023” list, so do check it out!
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 