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DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
This week at Popcorn & Candy we bring to a close our completely unintentional three week series of leading with Communism-linked films. And Warren Beatty's career-peak Reds is a fitting trilogy conclusion, as it combines elements from both featured films of the last two weeks. Reds and Zhivago share a common setting (the Russian Revolution) and genre (romantic historical epic). And both Reds and Trumbo feature American writers with a fascination with Communism as their protagonists.
The subject of Beatty's film is John Reed, a young American writer who wrote a first-hand account of the Russian Revolution, in which he got caught up over the course of a couple of visits to Russia during the war. Reed's own wide-eyed idealism is often characterized—perhaps not incorrectly—as an overriding naïvité, and today he's not nearly as highly regarded as many of those in his Greenwich Village circle, including playwright Eugene O'Neill (portrayed in the film by Jack Nicholson) and feminist writer and Reed paramour Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton). Beatty's movie is a study in ambition, as much (if not moreso) of Beatty himself than his subjects. Over three hours long, unapologetically romantic and political, and years in the making, Beatty used all the patience available to him from the studios to make the film that would become his crowning achievement, earning a dozen Academy Award nominations and a win for himself as Best Director (though the film itself lost out to Chariots of Fire for Picture). Beatty's imaginitive, though sometimes overlong, vision includes a quasi-documentary inclusion of many of Reed's surviving peers as "witnesses", speaking to the camera in interviews about their (often fading) memories of the early days of the the American left. Due to Beatty's refusal to submit to a TV edit, Reds went largely unseen for many years, and only two years ago was released on DVD. Whatever your opinion of Beatty's politics, or the film's, it's an often overlooked American classic, as well as one of the final examples of the studio-sponsored auteurism of the late 60s and 70s, when major studios would willingly throw money at the grandiose, though often unmarketable visions of strong-willed filmmakers.
View the trailer.
Saturday at 12:30 p.m. and Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the AFI.
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The rise and fall of The Germs seems so cinematic that it's really a surprise that it's taken this long for a movie to be made about the band. One of the most important, influential, and popular bands of the late-70s L.A. punk scene, their rise was meteoric, their run a textbook case of rock 'n' roll excess. Particularly where singer Darby Crash was concerned. Crash is a study in alcohol-soaked, drug-infused lack of control, who sought to live fast and die young with a passion that could almost be admired if it wasn't so colossally stupid. Music biopics have been popping up all over the place in recent years, with many of the results being fairly tepid formula pieces. Will director Rodger Grossman avoid the same fate? We hope so. Shane West seems like a rather pretty-boy choice to play the prodigiously damaged Crash, but the actor threw himself so hard into the role that the surviving band members invited him to join them in their reunion. Which we hope is a good sign that the movie he's starring in won't just be rock-biopic-by-numbers.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for one week only at E Street Cinema.
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Seven years ago, Sandi DuBowski made the excellent documentary Trembling Before G-d, about homosexuals in the Orthodox Jewish community coming to terms with the conflicts between their sexuality and their religion. DuBowski now sits in the producer's chair for this similar documentary by Parvez Sharma, a Muslim Indian (and American University alum) who wanted to document the even more difficult road homosexuals of Muslim faith must travel. Despite Islam's treatment of homosexuality as a crime, and a condition of such shame that many might deny its existence within the faith, Sharma is careful not to go after his religion aggressively in the film, preferring to concentrate on the struggle of those forced to keep their sexuality a secret rather than vilifying the faith that forces them to do so.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for one week only at E Street Cinema.
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The AFI's review of the 80s at their kitschy best continues, and this weekend they'll screen one of the more obscure cult classics of the festival. Near Dark: part western, part vampire movie, all guilty pleasure. Director Kathryn Bigelow may have gone on to do much higher budget, higher profile work, but there's nothing else in her filmography that quite measures up to the gritty, bloodthirsty fun of this one. OK, so Point Break has its own guilty merits. The film follows vampire film convention to a great extent, with one central character turned against his will into a creature of the night, and having trouble making the transition from normal life to plasma-swilling murderer. But the modern western milieu makes for a unique experience, and the good old-fashioned 80s-style violence and tender love story between our hero and his undead beloved all team up for a trashy good time.
View the trailer.
Friday night at midnight and Sunday at 7:45 p.m. at the AFI.
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Marlon Brando's turn as Stanley Kowalski in this Tennessee Williams classic is so much in the collective consciousness at this point that you may figure you've seen this film by now even if you haven't. Even if you're sure you haven't seen it, chances are you still know the origin and cultural significance of a brutish cry of "STELLA!!!", and it probably calls forth an image of the barrell-chested Brando in all his white-tshirted 50s glory. If you haven't seen it, you owe it to yourself to go. If you have, I shouldn't need to convince you that it bears repeated viewings. Director Elia Kazan adapts his own original Broadway production, complete with most of its original cast of a play about...well, about a lot more than we have space here to blurb, but ostensibly about the culture clash between the old aristocratic south and the new working class south, represented by the story's leads, Stanley and Blanche. Williams' script is as heavy with symbolism and allegory as it is with gripping drama, the rare film that is as breathtaking to think about as it is to watch.
View the trailer.
Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's McEvoy Auditorium. Free.
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Aw, DCist. We were super optimistic about What We Do Is Secret, and then we saw it at the Philly Film Fest. And I really, really wish we'd stayed home. The movie actually made me angry. Too bad, because it's such an interesting story. Maybe someday, somebody will be able to do it justice.
Damn, really? How do you screw up a story that good? Thanks for the heads-up, Jillian.
it's an often overlooked American classic, as well as one of the final examples of the studio-sponsored auteurism of the late 60s and 70s, when major studios would willingly throw money at the grandiose, though often unmarketable visions of strong-willed filmmakers.
COUGH! Heaven's Gate. COUGH!
I loves to bash me some celebrity communists, but Reds is actually a gorgeous piece of revisionist agitprop. Michael Moore can learn a thing or two from this flick.
Unfortunately it's not playing anywhere downtown, but Transsiberian (at Landmark in Bethesda) is an absolutely masterful thriller reminiscent of Hitchcock. That and it has the lovely Emily Mortimer (of Woody Allan's Match Point)-definitely worth checking out!