Popcorn & Candy: Death of the Cool
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Viewing director and photographer Bruce Weber's footage of Chet Baker just a year before his death, it's hard not to be reminded of William S. Burroughs. Baker's face, ravaged by years of heroin addiction, had that same quality of gaunt and sagging flesh as Burroughs'. Both artists aged prematurely thanks to the junk and ended up looking well into their 70s when they were but in their 50s. Perhaps if Baker hadn't tumbled from an Amsterdam window in 1988, he'd have defied the odds and lived to his 80s as Burroughs did, and become just as iconic. That was not to be, but at least we are left with his considerable body of work, as well as this beautiful document of his life, released just a few months after his tragic death at a time when he was again producing important work, and learning, it seemed, to at least live with and manage his addictions, even if he was unable to beat them.
Weber's documentary, shot in wonderfully moody black and white that dovetails nicely with much of the older archival footage of Baker from the 50s, incorporates interviews with a ton of Baker friends, lovers, ex-wives, and famous fans. But it's far from the average music biopic. Baker himself, interviewed on camera near the end of filming, said the process of making the film was "like a dream". And Let's Get Lost does have a cool and dreamy countenance, drifting in and out of the past and present, attempting to profile a man who appears to have spent much of his life just trying to get a handle on himself, and often failing, yet still managing to draw in closely those whose orbits met with his undeniably charismatic pull. Weber's film is one of the great music docs ever made, but has languished in relative obscurity for the better part of two decades. Hopefully this limited theatrical release of a restored print means a DVD is soon on its way as well.
Check out some footage from the film in this music video for "Almost Blue".
A brand new 35mm print begins its run at E Street for one week only starting tomorrow night.
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The D.C. Environmental Film Festival, quite possibly the area's largest film festival in terms of sheer number of movies and venues (115, and 45+, respectively), kicks off next week on Tuesday. As part of that festival, the Japanese Information and Cultural Center will be screening the original 1954 Godzilla. Of course, the movie itself is a lot of fun in its own right, but it's a fascinating film to view through the lens of the 50+ years of culture that have passed since the movies' most prolific monster made his debut. Few films have had the widespread and global pop cultural impact of Godzilla: in addition to the 28 films he's starred in (not including Roland Emmerich's lackluster American remake), there was the entire genre of Japanese kaiju, or monster, movie that Godzilla popularized. While he wasn't the first "nuclear monster" in the movies, he was the most successful of the early ones. In the U.S., where nuclear proliferation anxiety was also high (though no doubt from a slightly different perspective than in Japan) similar campy classics abounded in the 50s, only to be replaced by monsters created through other environmental accident, neglect, or tinkering in later years: Alligator, Piranha, Empire of the Ants, my personal favorite, Night of the Lepus, and most recently the excellent Korean entry, The Host; all of these movies owe a huge debt to the great big fire-breathing lizard. Opportunities to see the original King of the Monsters on a big screen are rare, though, and while everyone knows Godzilla, it's surprising how many people have never been exposed to his first movie.
View the trailer.
Screens a week from tonight, Thursday, March 13, at the Japanese Information and Cultural Center. The screening is free, but reservations are required. Call 202.238.6901 or email jiccrsvpspring08@embjapan.org for your seat.
And for more information on the D.C. Environmental Film Festival, check out their site.
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When I was a kid, my favorite movies were always the ones that made me walk out feeling like I wanted to be the hero I'd just finished watching. I think I wasn't alone in that sentiment, but three 12-year old kids in Mississippi in 1982 took it one step farther, deciding after seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark that they wanted to make it all over again. Shot for shot. On their own. On a camcorder. While I'd wager that they weren't the first kids in the home video age to have a similar idea, the difference is that, while it took them seven years to do it, they actually managed to finish the movie and have a screening for their hometown. And that might have been that, except that Eli Roth happened upon a copy of a copy of a copy of an old VHS while at NYU (where the movie's director, Eric Zala, also went to film school), and eventually tracked down the Zala and his partners in crime and organized some screenings. Since then, showings have sprung up here and there (with Spielberg's blessing; good thing they didn't remake something Harvey Weinstein owned), often with the filmmakers in attendance, bringing the movie to a growing cult of fans who have been pretty astounded at what three teenagers with no budget and no experience were able to pull together. We finally get our chance for a public screening here in D.C. next week.
View the trailer.
One screening only, one week from tonight at the Hirshhorn, including a Q&A with the filmmakers.
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The Environmental Film Festival isn't the only festival starting up this week. Beginning tomorrow night, the AFI is hosting (with presenting assistance from the TransAfrica Forum and afrikafe) the fourth year of the New African Films Festival, which seeks to bring more of the latest and best African films, a geographic area woefully underrepresented in the U.S. in comparison to European & Asian cinema, to larger audiences. The festival is screening ten films from nine different African nations (plus a U.S. documentary on Liberia), including the latest feature (made in Namibia) by Charles Burnett, whose AFI career retrospective just wrapped up yesterday. Tomorrow's opening night features a screening of Ezra, a Nigerian/French production about kidnapped children forced to become soldiers, with an introduction by Danny Glover (who also stars in the Burnett film, which plays on Sunday). In addition to the new films, the festival is also running a concurrent retrospective of the films of Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese novelist turned director who became one of the continent's most acclaimed filmmakers with classics such as Black Girl, Xala, and Ceddo, all of which are playing along with eight other Sembène titles.
Starts tomorrow at the AFI and runs through March 17. See here for a full listing of films and showtimes.
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Speaking of Roland Emmerich (as we were earlier in the column), I'd like to publicly make an embarrassing confession: I rather enjoy his shock-and-awe film stylings (his ham-handed Godzilla remake excepted). Sure, in his most over-the-top moments he makes Michael Bay films look like Merchant/Ivory productions. But that's part of the charm, watching something so fantastically and unrepentantly overblown. Movies like Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow aren't about little characters and stories. They're about the whole great big wide world. Well, the whole world and how it's likely to be completely annihilated. I just have to respect that kind of commitment to excess combined with a complete disregard for plausibility and coherent plotting. Plus, they really show off the surround sound (and piss off your neighbors) when you watch them at home with the subwoofer cranked, and that's an effect you just never get from Truffaut. Emmerich's latest appears to be a cross between Clan of the Cave Bear and Lord of the Rings, the tender tale of a caveboy and his woolly mammoth. And I'm assuming some sort of quest to save the world. Get the jumbo bucket of popcorn.
View the trailer.
Opens all over the entire world tomorrow.