In Theaters: No movie can compete with the thrill of watching the New York Knickerbockers return to the NBA Finals for the first time since I was in high school. They don’t start until Wednesday, though, so I’m going to try to catch Tuner at Cinemapolis and both Backrooms and Pressure there or at the Regal Ithaca Mall before then. I’d like to see Manas at Cinemapolis on Sunday as well, but that’s already a busy day, so it probably isn’t in the cards.
Obsession, which continues its runs at Cinemapolis and the Regal, remains my favorite holdover. I also enjoyed I Love Boosters, a psilocybin-fueled Students for Socialism brainstorming session come to life that’s at both theaters as well, and if you’re looking for something for the whole family, The Sheep Detectives features the best counting sheep joke I can remember and a refreshingly matter-of-fact attitude toward death that has the potential to spark some interesting conversations in the car ride home. It’s at the Regal.
Special events include a “Drag Movie Night” presentation of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar at Cinemapolis on Wednesday. Finally, this week’s repertory highlight is Inside Llewyn Davis, which screens at the Regal throughout the day today.
Home Video Recommendation: I have a backlog of titles my buddy Scott and I watched for our two-person film club to talk about here! This week I’m going with The Gleaners & I, which is currently available on the Criterion Channel with a subscription, for rental from a variety of other platforms, and as part of the Criterion Collection’s The Complete Films of Agnès Varda Blu-ray box set. As I said on Letterboxd:
Her movie could be your life. When I was a Star Wars-obsessed teenager I owned a silly DVD-ROM that included brief parodies of A New Hope in the style of other filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino. Gleaners already contains at least one such “extra” in the scenes in which berobed barristers recite the French penal code amidst cabbage patches and junk piles, which you could drop into an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus as is without anyone noticing. It’s also fun to imagine what Thomas Pynchon or his cinematic interlocutor Paul Thomas Anderson might have done with this material.
Varda’s appropriative but not exclusively personal engagement with low- and high-culture original paintings and reproductions is my kind of art history. I love the brief shot of the manual for the DV camera she’s using, which is a perfectly incomplete metaphor for the film itself. It’s astonishing how many disparate threads scavenged from warehouses and waste bins she’s able to weave into such a concise essay. But actually, now that I think about it, I do have one “note”: how could she not make the amazing rap songs by Agnès Bredel and Richard Klugman available in their entirety somewhere!?
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 