Popcorn & Candy: Black for Red
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
While not necessarily a household name when it comes to American patriots, novelist and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo earned the title. Caught squarely in the House Un-American Activities Committee's crosshairs during the early days of the red scare, Trumbo was one of ten industry figures jailed for refusing to give testimony before the committee. At a time when most with ties to Communist organizations were trying to bury those associations, Trumbo was unapologetic about his right to join any damn club he pleased, and to not give testimony as to others' involvement in those clubs. For his insubordination he was awarded Congress' contempt, an accompanying 11-month jail sentence, and a place on the Hollywood blacklist. Trumbo had a lot to lose in taking his stand: he was one of the most celebrated and highest paid screenwriters in the industry, writing films (and novels) that had both popular appeal and critical acclaim. After his exile, he was forced to write in secret, but his talent could not be repressed: twice he won Academy Awards for scripts written under names other than his own.
Five years ago, Trumbo's son Christopher debuted a play off-Broadway that was less a play than it was a reading of his father's letters, with his own narration interspersed. Director Peter Askin has now adapted this into a film, which keeps the younger Trumbo's basic framework, with a number of actors (many of whom also participated in the stage version) reading from Trumbo's correspondence. The letters are often incendiary, and always entertaining. The writer was a man who was never short of an opinion or an eloquent manner of expressing it. Askin uses the added capabilities of film to match these writings with news footage, interviews with Trumbo's family, archival video of the writer, and clips from the films he wrote to create a portrait of an artist who could not be contained.
View the trailer.
Opens tonight for one week only at E Street Cinema.
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We all remember that game that was popular to play in school, or around the campfire, where one person started to tell a story before passing it on to the next to continue, and so on. The proper nomenclature for the technique in its many versions is the "Exquisite Corpse". Understandably, they didn't tell us that was what we were playing back in the Cub Scouts. Now three Hong Kong directors, Tsui Hark, Johnny To, and Ringo Lam, have, for the first time, applied the technique to a film. The resulting corpse is Triangle, a crime thriller about a group of small time crooks looking to pull a heist that manage to stumble upon a buried treasure. And that's just one of a tangled web of subplots and odd left turns that, if memory serves, was always a characteristic of those campfire collaborations. While the directors don't neatly subdivide the story into three parts per se, don't expect a seamless narrative. Hark, To, and Lam are all extremely distinctive visual storytellers, and the varied styles set next to each other onscreen may be a little jarring, but it's all part of the fun.
View the trailer.
Tonight at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery's Meyer Auditorium, part of the 13th Annual Hong Kong Film Festival. Free, tickets required.
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Haven't yet had enough Christian Bale this summer even though you saw The Dark Knight multiple times (you had to see the difference between the IMAX and regular versions, after all)? The AFI is here to help with a screening of the film that made him a child star. In Empire of the Sun, Bale stars as a rich British child lost in Shanghai, separated from his parents during the evacuation precipitated by Japan's declaration of war on Great Britain in 1941. Years pass as he first wanders homeless, and then ends up in an internment camp with a number of American prisoners (including father figure John Malkovich), leading to an eventual conclusion at the end of the war. Empire pairs well with The Color Purple, two '80s projects from Spielberg in which he stepped away from more popcorn-oriented entertainments to make lengthy and serious adaptations of acclaimed novels. Bale's performance at the age of just 13 was so highly regarded that the National Board of Review came up with an award for Best Juvenile Actor just to recognize his performance.
View the trailer.
Tonight and Saturday at 7 p.m. at the AFI.
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If we had one wish for Tropic Thunder, it would have been more Steve Coogan. Those lamenting the small size of his role in that film, take heart: Coogan is the main attraction in Hamlet 2, where he plays a failed actor turned high school drama teacher, who attempts to rescue his school's soon-to-be-failed theater department by writing a sequel to Hamlet. As a musical. With a barn-burning centerpiece titled "Rock Me Sexy Jesus". If you're getting the impression that Hamlet 2 is going to be exceedingly silly and grotesquely unsubtle, you're probably on the right track. Take into consideration that one of the co-writers is frequent Trey Parker/Matt Stone collaborator Pam Brady, and you can bank on some of the most off-color humor of the summer. And mind you, this is the summer that saw Robert Downey, Jr. in blackface and Ben Stiller going "full retard." Mostly, though, we're just pleased to see Coogan in another project that allows him to fully submit to the sort of over the top character that made him a household name in Britain.
View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street and on Wednesday at the AFI.
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While Anthony Mann made his name mostly via film noir and westerns, his last film is neither. That may partly explain why it's treated by many as a throwaway footnote to his esteemed career. The movie is a Cold War spy thriller starring Laurence Harvey (The Manchurian Candidate) as a Russian double agent who has been living as a Brit for years (it also, until this year's new Bond film, held the title for most confoundingly titled spy movie ever). Harvey has fooled her majesty's secret service skillfully enough that when it's found out that the British have a mole in their midst, they assign him to find and kill the man, making it necessary for him to engage in a search for himself. Mann died during filming, so Laurence Harvey stepped up to finish the production. And while many critics find little to like about the film, it has a small cult of fans who think otherwise. Considering that it's only home video releases have been on long out of print video and laserdisc, this is a rare opportunity to check out Mann's final work, which includes an impressive supporting cast including Mia Farrow, the incomparable Tom Courtenay, and a rare turn in a drama from British funnyman Peter Cook.
Tonight at 7 p.m. at the Library of Congress' Mary Pickford Theater. Free.