Popcorn & Candy: Skating Away
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Gus Van Sant must feel like he has a lot of artistic penance to pay. Ever since the backlash over his remake of Psycho and the tired, sickly sweet inspirational sports/school clichés of Finding Forrester, the director has retreated into a self-imposed anti-commercial exile. The three previous features he's made during the '00s have all been minimalist, languorous affairs, short on plot and traditional drama, long on beautiful cinematography and slow, meditative pace. They're not for everyone: audiences who went to Last Days anticipating a Kurt Cobain biopic or to Elephant waiting for a thrilling Columbine recreation were sorely disappointed, and audiences expecting traditional narrative may have to wait for next year's Harvey Milk biopic. Paranoid Park fits squarely into the hypnotic mold of those previous films. Van Sant returns to the high school world of Elephant, though the death that is central to Park is accidental. And rather than the whole movie leading up to that death, it is the event that triggers the rest of the movie, as a young skateboarder who is involved in the killing struggles to deal with the tragedy amidst the usual angst of girls, parents, and school. The final product, shot by the mad genius of cinematography Christopher Doyle (responsible for the gorgeous visuals in most of Wong Kar Wai's filmography), is sure to be divisive and difficult, yet a beautiful and haunting film to immerse oneself in.
View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street.
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After spending much of the winter highlighting directors, the AFI is starting the first of a couple of spring series concentrating on the works of classic actors. First up is Robert Mitchum, one of the most dangerous leading men to emerge from the film noir era. Though he made his name playing dark and mysterious characters, he managed, in his later career, to become far more versatile, often playing against the type he established in the '50s. We're really looking forward to the chance to see the original Cape Fear; if you think DeNiro is scary in the Scorcese remake, Mitchum will give you nightmares for weeks. And his murderous preacher in Night of the Hunter is one of the great villains in film history. Both of those films screen in April. This week features one of the great film noirs, Out of the Past, in which Mitchum stars alongside Kirk Douglas, and which contains all those great old film noir staples, from love triangles to duplicitous women to our hero's doomed attempts to escape what fate has in store. Also on the schedule is a noir double feature of Otto Preminger's Angel Face and the D.C.-set post-WWII thriller Crossfire.
The retrospective begins today and runs through May 5 at the AFI.
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Military Intelligence and You!
"What sort of nation would we be if we just went around sending in the troops just because we thought something might be there," asks an Army general with a furrowed brow during the trailer for Military Intelligence and You!. It's the sort of over the top, hopelessly goofy satire that typifies the feature debut of television writer Dale Kutzera. After five years of a pointless war from an administration with a delusional attachment to its version of the truth, if you're of the mind that all you can really do is laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all (lest you cry instead), then this is probably your movie. Disguised as a WWII training film ("from the makers of Syphilis: The Enemy Below!"), Intelligence relentlessly lampoons American arrogance and war time public relations. Predictably, producers were never able to secure much distribution for the film; high minded and serious treatments of the war have had enough trouble finding an audience, and irreverent low-budget humor about it is even less likely to strike box office gold, regardless of how genuinely funny or timely it might be.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow, for one week only, at E Street.
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Just look at what a Best Foreign Film Academy Award can get you. This German dramatization of a true story about a Nazi-sponsored counterfeiting operation in 1930s Berlin is opening in four local theaters, more than we can remember any foreign language film in recent memory opening at the same time. It's a shame that the too-little-seen Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days couldn't get the same bump. But period pieces about Nazis are always going to play better to aging Academy voters than jittery and expectation-dashing abortion thrillers. Grousing about that aside, The Counterfeiters is still an excellent film, and while not as fresh or groundbreaking as the contenders the Academy forgot, does manage to approach pretty timeworn material through a new perspective. The Nazis' attempt to destabilize the British economy with a flood of bogus cash tends to get less press, since not only did it never come to anything, but it lacks the more dramatic touch of pure unadulterated evil that typified their later work.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the AFI, Bethesda Row, Shirlington, and Cinema Arts in Fairfax.
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Sunset Boulevard
The AFI's Mitchum retrospective isn't the only source for your film noir fix this week. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum will have a screening of another giant of the genre, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, on Wednesday. The film is surely the greatest early example of that long tradition of reflective Hollywood films that seek to deconstruct the bizarre and murky world of the Southern California film industry. It stars William Holden as a screenwriter who can't get a job, who hooks up with a delusional, once-great actress who can't get hired, either. That things are going to go downhill is never in doubt: we see our narrator, Holden, face down in a pool at the very start. It's the twists and turns of the flashbacks that get us there that are fascinating, along with the parade of Hollywood luminaries that file in front of the camera during the course of the movie, including Buster Keaton and Erich von Stroheim, among others. Cecil B. DeMille even shows up playing himself in the scene that birthed that now famous line, "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close up."
View the trailer.
Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, McEvoy Auditorium.