April 3, 2008
Popcorn & Candy: Rebel Girls
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
In the summer of 2001, the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls started up a camp in Portland, Oregon for girls ages 8-18 to learn to be rockers. It was about more than just music; girls were shown that not only were they just as able as boys to be in bands (no matter what stereotypes the prevailing rock and roll culture of decade after decade might have instilled in them), but they were also encouraged to reject the constant pop culture barrage of negative female stereotypes. The organization used Rock 'n' Roll as the pathway to self-esteem, well-rounded individualism, and liberation among girls who would otherwise be made to feel bad about how they look or about standing out.
Since that summer, the Portland program has grown by leaps and bounds to become a year-round operation, and has inspired like-minded girls' rock summer camps nationwide (including D.C.'s own Girls Rock! DC, which had a benefit concert on Sunday with The Andalusians and Carol Bui at the Black Cat). Girls Rock! the film follows one year's camp, focusing on just a few of the girls as they learn how to be rockers from the likes of Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein, in a film that is reported to be equal parts inspiring, invigorating, and tear-jerking. Not to mention sporting a kick-ass soundtrack (just listen to the tunes featured in the trailer).
View the trailer.
Opens Friday night at the Avalon Theatre. Friday night's 8:00 p.m. screening also includes live music from Girl Loves Distortion, Blue Black Betty, and DJ Natty Boom. Saturday's 10:00 a.m. matinee also has live music with Odd Girl Out, along with an instrument show and tell.
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One of the great unsolved mysteries of the movies, and one of the most elegant and darkly romantic films ever made, Alain Resnais' Last Year At Marienbad still stands as the director's crowning achievement. Marienbad takes place in a luxurious hotel, where three characters, none of whom are ever named, work out the relationship they may (or may not) have with one another. The film's narrator insists to the woman that they had an affair the year before and arranged to meet here. She remembers nothing of it. Her companion, an authoritarian husband/boyfriend, seems unaware, but what he knows or doesn't (or what he might have known of the affair the year before, if it even existed) is a mystery as well. The characters dance around each other in this surreal fantasy, and in the end, there are more questions than the film started with. Resnais, along with cinematographer Sacha Vierny, who cannot be left out when admiring the look of the film, created a stately and dreamlike world for these indefinite interactions to carry themselves out in. You may exit the theater with your head spinning from the infinite permutations and possibilities the film presents and stubbornly refuses to resolve, but it's the same pleasant swimming consciousness one feels from a few too many glasses of a fine champagne.
View the trailer.
Begins a special one-week run of a brand new 35mm print at the AFI tomorrow.
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Can Clooney manage the trifecta? The actor's first two films as a director were far better than anyone probably expected, the second earning him a nomination for Best Director from the Academy that, frankly, the first probably merited just as much. A lot of people draw parallels between Clooney and Cary Grant, but as an actor with matinee-idol good looks with behind the camera talent to go with it, maybe Robert Redford is the more apt comparison. This time around the director turns his sights away from true stories (or, in the case of Chuck Barris, alleged true stories) to a 20s-set screwball comedy about a football hero trying to save his team and an early pro league by recruiting a dashing young war hero and Ivy League player (John Krasinski; ladies, you may commence to sighing heavily now) to bring some marquee value to the franchise. A spunky female reporter (Renee Zellweger) looks to make her name covering the story, both men fall for her, comedy ensues. Whether Clooney can successfully navigate the genre shift is probably less in question than whether audiences will connect with a type of movie that probably seems hopelessly dated to audiences that would likely rate Talladega Nights a better comedy than The Philadelphia Story.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at theaters all over the area.
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While his output in the area of music documentaries may be short, Martin Scorcese is probably as well regarded in that genre as in his narrative films, considering the stature of the two music docs he's made. For his third outing, he's chosen to profile perhaps the most enduring band in rock and roll, the Rolling Stones. Scorcese's film focuses on a two night stand of shows at the Beacon Theatre in NYC, and the director not only charts the preparation for the shows, but becomes an integral part of the planning process, and, by extension, one of the stars of his own film. Which might come across as narcissitic or self-indulgent from anyone else, but the always engaging, fast-talking Scorcese is the kind of character who can make it work. Archival footage is used to give some historical background, but the focus is really the Stones as the band they've become, now improbably into their fifth decade. Fair warning: Christina Aguilera (along with other musicians, including Jack White and Buddy Guy) join the Stones on stage, and she does some bumping and grinding up on stage with the grandfatherly Jagger that really is enough to make a grown man cry. Or throw up.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the Uptown and at the Majestic in Silver Spring. The IMAX version of the film opens at the Udvar-Hazy Center IMAX theater in Chantilly.
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Serious avant garde art? A reaction to the get-up-and-go-go-go 60's that the artist saw all around him? An unsubtle "fuck you" to any school of conventional or unconventional filmmaking you can name? Or is Andy Warhol's first movie simply the artist capitalizing on notoriety and seeing just how far he can push people and still retain an audience? An exercise in patience, and grand test for restless leg syndrome sufferers, Warhol used the first movie camera he ever acquired, a 16mm Bolex, to film his then lover, the poet John Giorno, sleeping. And sleeping. And sleeping some more. And that's all Sleep is, over five hours of a man sleeping. Which might be a cinematic endurance Grail of sorts if not for the fact that Warhol made the eight-hour Empire later the same year. It's easy to dismiss the whole exercise as pretentious, self-indulgent, masturbatory, and many do. Whether you can find something more in the work is up to you; and no one says you have to stay for the full running time. In addition to the screening this weekend at the Hirshhorn, for those inclined to think that Warhol may have been up to more than just being provocative (or those who want to argue that that's all he was up to), the museum is hosting a discussion of the film works of the artist tonight.
Screens (in its 5 hour, 21 minute entirety) Sunday at noon at the Hirshhorn. Tonight at 8:00 p.m., Warhol film scholar Callie Angell will lead a discussion of Sleep as well as other of the artist's movies.
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Perhaps the most enduring band in rock and roll? Really, now. Who would the other candidates for that title be?
This looks like a great week at the movies. Gonna skip the Warhol (I watched about four minutes of the excerpt from it that's included in Part I of "The Cinema Effect" at the Hirshhorn, which was plenty) but I'd happily take a chance on any of the others.
True enough, Chris. I have a phobia about making absolute statements, I think. Besides, as soon as I call them the most enduring, someone's going to pop up and tell me about some band that formed in '62 and has been performing consistently (albeit in obscurity) for the past 46 years. :-)
If it's pure endurance that you're asking about, obviously no one beats Chuck Berry, who still plays (of course, Les Paul still plays. Weekly. But he doesn't play rock 'n roll, despite the indebtedness the genre has to him). Of course neither Paul nor Berry is a "band" (in fact Berry never toured much with a band in his later years, and relied on local bands to back him up).
As for strictly bands, you're right to think there's some obscure band that's older than the Stones. According to wikipedia, that band is Golden Earring.
Of course, I suspect there are plenty of bands that tour right now with the name, and perhaps a few members, of a 1950's rock band, like the Crickets. But I'm not sure that counts as "enduring" if it's almost more of a really authentic tribute band than a continuation of the original band.