In Theaters: As you have no doubt noticed if you live in Ithaca, the “collegers” (as my girls call them) are back and that means so is Cornell Cinema! They kick off their fall lineup with a new 4k restoration of Thelma & Louise this evening in honor of its 35th anniversary. I’m going to catch the final screening of The Wrong Girls at Cinemapolis before it closes myself, though, then follow it up with Buddy and/or It Ends at the Regal Ithaca Mall later in the week. We’re also hoping to see Coyote vs. Acme as a family there or at Cinemapolis but not until after next Thursday.
The holdover I’m highest on is Mutiny, which continues its run at the Regal. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd:
Jason Statham in non-mythological mode. The film takes advantage of the agoraphobic/claustrophobic contrasts afforded by a cargo ship on the high seas: an open-air showdown in the former register lets us feel the full heft of a fire axe, and while the close-quarters fight choreography typical of the latter might not be flashy, it does rank among the year’s best. I don’t know if Mutiny will still be on my top ten list come Oscar night, but Adrian Lester’s U.S. Navy captain who leads by looking away is the excuse I’ve been waiting for to write about the lessons I learned as a manager from Damian Lewis’s Major Dick Winters in Band of Brothers, so stay tuned to ye olde blog around then for more!
I also enjoyed The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and Tony, which wisely leans into the hagiography inherent in most biopics. All three movies likewise remain at both Cinemapolis and the Regal. I wasn’t as keen on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which continues its run at the same two theaters, but it does feature some beautiful matte paintings.
Special events include a screening of Project Hail Mary at Cornell Cinema tomorrow introduced by Lisa Kaltenegger and Abigail Bohl from the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science and followed by an open telescope night at the Fuertes Observatory. Finally, noteworthy repertory options include Terminator 2: Judgment Day (which like Thelma & Louise also turns 35 this year) at the Regal Saturday-Wednesday and a celebration of the letter “P” at Cornell Cinema on Saturday that consists of first The Producers and then Perfect Blue.
Home Video Recommendation: Speaking of films from 1991, even with the fall semester in full swing, now is a fine time to watch A Brighter Summer Day. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd earlier this month:
Perhaps the shortest four-hour-long movie ever made. Every single scene contains an object or a line of dialogue that anticipates a later event and/or echoes an earlier one, but like the works of Hawks and Tolstoy that we are explicitly invited to compare it to, Brighter Summer Day‘s construction feels organic, not mechanical.
Great art might also follow a blueprint, but it can’t be taken apart and put back together again the way Chi-tsan Wang’s Cat does with the radio that belongs to his friend Xiao Si’r (Chang Chen). Take the advice that Si’r is given by his father (Kuo-Chu Chang), for instance: “a person who’ll apologize for wrongs he didn’t commit is capable of all sorts of terrible things.” It indicts the state he works for when it demands this very thing of him later and resonates with Honey’s (Hung-Ming Lin) observation that Shandong (Alex Yang) doesn’t “seem the type that’s not afraid to die.” But look how far these insights get each of them!
Director Edward Yang clearly hopes that *we* will be able to make more out of his grand design than Honey took away from War and Peace, but it’s hardly as if he fancies himself Lao Tzu at the Han-ku Pass. While he knows the flashlight he wields is better than a knife and while he hopes the path he’s lighting leads to a better world than the one he’s depicting, the burden is on us to follow it and find out.
Current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students have access to A Brighter Summer Day on Kanopy via a license paid for by the Library. It’s also available on the Criterion Channel with a subscription, for rental or purchase from a number of other streaming video platforms, and on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.
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 