In Theaters: I will be in Chicago for the American Library Association Annual Conference until Tuesday, but I’m hoping to see Bouchra at the Siskel Film Center and make it to a 35mm screening of Rose of Nevada at the Music Box Theatre while there. I’m also going to try to catch Supergirl at the Regal Ithaca Mall and Leviticus there or at Cinemapolis after I return. This week’s other big new release Jackass: Best and Last, which opens at the Regal today, will have to wait, as will the rest of the first-run fare at Cinemapolis that I haven’t yet seen, The Death of Robin Hood and Girls Like Girls. Finally, the clear special events/repertory highlight is summer classic Do the Right Thing, which plays Cinemapolis twice on Tuesday.
Home Video Recommendation: While my religious beliefs haven’t fundamentally changed since the age eleven revelation I wrote about last week, my views on religion have evolved considerably during this time. To hijack a popular meme, the pithily wry short The Tomb now streaming on the Criterion Channel as part of their “Sudanese Film Group” collection (which is well worth watching in its entirety, by the way) represents “how it started” with its charlatan church built atop a bag of wheat. The Age of the Medici, which you can watch on the same platform, uses a variation of the same story (this time it’s about a chapel dedicated to the remains of a saint which turned out to be the bones of a dog) to pick up where the former movie’s cynical “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!” ending leaves off and suggests that maybe just maybe the wonders of art and architecture surrounding this preacher are ends that justify the means:
Tag Gallagher calls this “the greatest defense of capitalism ever filmed” in The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, but there’s a lot to love about this movie even if that doesn’t sound like your particular brand of vodka. As I recently said on Letterboxd:
Roberto Rossellini rewrites the Great Man theory of history as biochemistry. Almost the entirety of the final third of Cosimo de’ Medici’s story is devoted to cataloging the achievements of another, Leon Battista Alberti, who in turn would have seen far less were it not for his vantage point atop the pile of art and scholarship commissioned and collected by his patron. It is, in other words, a tale of enzyme catalysis. The brilliant forced perspective establishing shots of Florence keep the fires of activation energy burning.
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 