April 24, 2008
Popcorn & Candy: Baby Was a Black Sheep
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Tonight is opening night for Filmfest DC, which goes until May 3. The opening selection is French director Phillipe Faucon's Two Ladies, and over the next week and a half the festival screens over 70 features, plus shorts, at venues all over town. The international film festival has a concentration on Latin American film this year, but as usual the selected films are from all over the world, and there are new films from seasoned veterans such as Andrzej Wajda and Carlos Saura, and up-and-comers like Britain's David Mackenzie or Brazil's José Padilha.
There's also a thread of music related films running through this year's selections. The story of Saura's film sits squarely in the middle of Portugeuse Fado music culture. There are concert films of Bob Dylan (at the Newport Folk Festival) and James Brown (David Leaf's The Night James Brown Saved Boston). There's a locally based drama that immerses itself in D.C.'s go-go culture, Jazz in the Diamond District (starring Wood Harris, The Wire's Avon Barksdale), and an archival documentary covering the greats of jazz music and dance.
But there's no film in the whole festival we're looking forward to more than tomorrow night's Patti Smith: Dream of Life, an impressionistic take on the punk legend filmed over the course of more than a decade by fashion photographer Steven Sebring, narrated by the singer/artist/poet herself, and featuring both live footage and a more intimate look at her life outside the spotlight. Both Smith and Sebring will be at tomorrow night's 9:30 p.m. screening at the Lincoln Theatre, and as of this writing, tickets are still available, $10.
View the trailer for Dream of Life.
Filmfest DC runs from April 24-May 3; for a full schedule of films and ticketing, see their website.
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With the weather getting warmer, that can only mean one thing: time to start watching movies outdoors again. While we wait for this summer's schedule of movies at Screen on the Green, there's a more traditional venue for viewing movies under the stars, and that's the drive-in. The D.C. area's best drive-in isn't technically in the D.C. area at all, but in Baltimore, the storied Bengies Drive-In, which has been operating continuously now for over half a century. Bengies boasts the biggest movie screen in the country, and still maintains an atmosphere one imagines isn't much different than it had in the 50s, aside from the smaller, less Detroit-centric cars and the occasional bonehead flashing a laser pointer at the screen. The Bengies opened for the 2008 season last weekend, and is holding over the same triple feature from last weekend this week: the oddball Christina Ricci-James McAvoy fantasy rom-com Penelope, current box office champ The Forbidden Kingdom with Jet Li and Jackie Chan, and the highly entertaining Jason Statham Brit-heist film The Bank Job.
The Bengies has triple features (and sometimes more) on Friday and Saturday nights from now until well into October. It's worth the trip (and if you go once, you'll be hooked on the experience), just make sure you read the house rules before going, because The Bengies does not suffer fools lightly.
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Hong Kong filmmaking legend Wong Kar Wai's English-language debut is bound to come as a disappointment to fans hoping for anything up to the stratospherically high standards of his previous films. My Blueberry Nights is a sort of road movie, a voyage of self-discovery for Elizabeth, played by Norah Jones, trying to figure out her place in the world after a bad break-up. The script sends Elizabeth from New York to Memphis to Vegas, making semi-distinct short films out of each destination, with her ongoing correspondence with cafe-owner Jude Law back in NYC the thread that helps keep the whole operation together. Unfortunately Jones, in her acting debut, is completely unable to hold her own against heavy hitters like Law, David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz, and Natalie Portman, all of whom are given showy emotional roles that they excel in, while Jones flounders with leaden line-readings and a complete lack of life.
Still, for all its failings, the film is a joy to watch, as the director orchestrates elegant visuals (with the help of cinematographer Darius Khondji, filling in ably for usual Wong mainstay Christopher Doyle) to go along with deeply nuanced performances by everyone except his lead actor. Strathairn in particular is heartbreaking as an alcoholic Memphis cop unraveled by the wanderings of his tarty wife (Weisz); he befriends Elizabeth when it happens that she's pulling double duty working at both his working-hours diner and after-hours watering hole. His monologue detailing his unsuccessful stints in AA is worth the price of admission alone. The film should have been longer, and should have had at least one more destination on Elizabeth's journey. One almost gets the sense that Wong realized his star wasn't carrying her weight, and chose to leave the film as more of a sketch than a fully realized idea; but a Wong Kar Wai sketch is still worth more than the best films of most other filmmakers.
View the trailer.
Now playing at E Street, Shirlington, and Cinema Arts in Fairfax.
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D.C. doesn't get too many glizty Hollywood-style world premieres. We did have a huge one, though, even if it only has that stature in retrospect, as Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece was first shown to audiences at the Uptown back in April of 1968. If memory serves, the Uptown did a short run of the film to celebrate its 30th anniversary in '98, but now that the theater traffics pretty much exclusively in current blockbusters, don't look for a return now that the 40th has rolled around. That distinction goes now to the AFI, which is screening the movie for a week starting Friday (though they also had a couple showings earlier this week as well). Chances are you've probably seen this one already, but seeing Kubrick's meditative take on science fiction on the big screen is really an entirely different experience. Especially when the screen is in the grand old historic Silver theatre.
View the trailer.
The AFI will screen a 70mm print in their big theater from Friday through Thursday.
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We'd like to publicly admit our addiction to 30 Rock, and pretty much anything Tina Fey decides to get involved in. It takes a mighty powerful gift for comedy to make one actually look forward to watching Alec Baldwin on a weekly basis. In her first lead role in a feature film, Fey has teamed with her former co-writer over at SNL, Michael McCullers, who makes his directorial debut with his own script about a working woman with a ticking biological clock who hires a bargain-basement surrogate, a white trash baby-making nightmare in the form of another SNL-er, Amy Poehler. We do fear that a script by the writer of the second two Austin Powers flicks can't possibly be as sharp as one written by Fey herself (all those with a guilty—or not so guilty—affection for Mean Girls, raise your hands). But hopefully McCullers has risen to the occasion and given the impressive cast—Steve Martin, Sigourney Weaver, Greg Kinnear are all also on board—something good to work with. If not, at least we'll always have Thursday nights.
View the trailer.
Opens all over the area tomorrow.
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Also probably well worth your ten bucks:
Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay — The duo from the smartest and most surprisingly topical stoner comedy of the decade are back, with the same writing & directing pair behind their first outing at the reins. The canvas may be bigger than just the wilds of suburban Jersey this time, but we think it's safe to assume they can milk just as many laughs out of the excesses of the Wars on Drugs and Terror. Opens wide tomorrow.
All About Eve — The AFI's Bette Davis retrospective hits on perhaps the finest movie she was ever in, the story of the calculated and meteoric rise of a young actress that set the record for most Academy Award nominations ever given to a film, and every one well deserved. At the AFI for a week starting tomorrow.
Zombie Strippers — If titles that brilliantly evoke classic grindhouse were enough to guarantee box office success, there would be two surefire blockbusters this year: Midnight Meat Train (out in August), and this reportedly hilarious sendup of zombies, strippers, and the Bush administration. We could tell you more about the plot, but it's pretty much all there in the title, isn't it? Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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The only thing better than Patti Smith being at FilmFest would be if she stopped at Ben's Chili Bowl afterwards.