Popcorn & Candy: Men of Constant Sorrow
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Major Release: No Country for Old Men
We'll be covering the latest release from the Coen Brothers in more depth tomorrow, but in the time being, we'll tell you this: not only have the filmmakers recovered from the mediocre doldrums of their last couple of outings, but they have returned with a bloody vengeance with a film that is a serious contender for the best film they've ever made. It's also easily the best movie I've seen this year. The brothers replicate the tone of Cormac McCarthy's lean and brutal novel with frightening accuracy. Ostensibly a simple tale of a drug deal gone wrong, subsequent hunt by the police and a terrifyingly remorseless bounty hunter, McCarthy's novel and the Coen's film turns an ordinary potboiler into a complex meditation on fate, good & evil, and the world's tendency to slip away from our control and our understanding as we grow older. Why make the effort to go to the one theater in the area that's playing at this week when it'll expand to theaters around the area the week after? Because you're going to want to see this one early, and often.
View the trailer.
Opens Friday only at E Street Cinema, expands to more theaters around the area next week.
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Special Event: Homefront: Stories of America at War
We're all about the cinema experience here at Popcorn & Candy, and so we're reticent to recommend staying home and turning on the television when there are so many good movies out there you could be watching. But we'll break with tradition just this once to plug the work of a group of local student filmmakers from American University who have produced a documentary on the effects of the war in Iraq on people back home. With seven segments looking at soldiers after their return, families with sons and daughters on the front lines, and the lives of Muslim Americans during the war, it has the potential to be a powerful film. The film is hosted by NPR's Bob Edwards, also an AU alumnus.
Airs Saturday at 8 p.m. on MHz Network, which is broadcast on the air on channel 56, and offered by most local cable providers.
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Indie: Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten
If the Clash were the only band that mattered, that may make Joe Strummer the only rock star worth caring about. Julien Temple, resident documentarian for the Sex Pistols, has been hanging around Strummer with a camera since time out of mind, and this puts him in a better position than any other would-be film biographer to paint a cinematic portrait of the complex and often contradictory character that was Strummer. Like the recent Kurt Cobain documentary, Temple's film has enough interview footage with its subject to nearly make him live again onscreen. To that he adds the usual cast of celebrity interviews talking about what the man meant to them, as well as his own distinctive style of documentary montage, using clips from pop culture, animation and other unrelated films to try to make sense of just who the punk hero was.
View the trailer.
Playing at E Street Cinema for one week only starting tomorrow.
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Repertory: Backstairs and Variety
The Goethe-Institut kicks off a three week retrospective on German silent film this Monday (with additional programs on each of the two subsequent Mondays), in conjunction with the publication of a new book by the Library of Congress, Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture. The book, released last week, seeks to be the most comprehensive look at the earliest days of the art form through an exhaustive study of the LOC collection. And, of course, there's a foreward by Martin Scorsese, who's participation in film preservation documentaries and books is pretty much at Zelig-like proportions these days. The first night of the Goethe-Institut's retrospective includes a romantic tragedy (Backstairs) by two of the biggest figures in German expressionist film, Paul Leni and Leopold Jessner, as well as a chance to see just what 1925 America considered controversial, with an uncut version of E.A. Dupont's Variety, which had nearly half of it's footage cut by the censors of the day.
Playing at the Goethe-Institut on Monday at 6:30 p.m., free of charge. RSVP to 202-289-1200 ext. 166.
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Foreign: Pigs and Battleships
The Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries are co-sponsoring, with the Northwest Film Forum, a traveling retrospective on the work of Japanese director Shohei Imamura, who died last year. Imamura left a legacy of 20 films, in both narrative and documentary style, that often looked at the Japanese lower classes with a frankness and candor that could sometimes be shocking. Pigs and Battleships, one of his earliest masterpieces, looks at the devastation of post-war Japan in an American-occupied coastal town. Imamura points his finger at both the Americans and at his own country as the culprits for a society reduced to its basest levels, a haven for prostitution, thuggery, and subjugation of the bottom rungs of Japanese society to the worst whims of the powerful, no matter what flag that power flies under.
Playing at the Freer and Sackler's Meyer Auditorium tomorrow at 7 p.m.