Popcorn & Candy: Four Sides to Every Story
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
After a decade of being largely recognized only in his native Japan, Akira Kurosawa's coming out party on a more worldwide scale was a monumental achievement. Rashomon's influence reaches far beyond just film, its name having long ago become synonymous with the idea of differing perspectives on a single event, which is the central point around which the movie revolves. It would have been a fitting entry in the Hirshhorn's recently finished Cinema Effect exhibit, challenging the nature of reality not only in our individual perceptions of it, but also in film's ability to distort that reality on its own.
The basic story is so slight it might barely fill out a short film: a samurai's wife is raped in a grove, and the samurai is killed. From this simple event, Kurosawa spins out a complex web of misdirection and ambiguity. When a woodcutter finds the body, the witnesses are gathered to give their version of events: the woodcutter, the bandit accused of the crime, the wife, and the dead samurai himself (who appears via a psychic medium). Predictably, each account is radically different. Further confounding the accuracy of events is the fact that the witness' accounts are, in turn, being recounted after the fact by the woodcutter and a priest who was on hand in a separate framing story yet another degree removed from the events in question. Kurosawa’s navigation around the labyrinthine permutations of the different accounts, and their overlaps and divergences, is a wonder to behold. It’s as breathtaking in its interlocking narratives and subtle manipulations as a well-choreographed action sequence. The director ends the film without ever tipping his hand as to the "reality" behind these accounts, instead leaving this open-ended while tying up his framing device with an ending that gives emotional import to what could have easily been an academic exercise in lesser hands.
View the trailer.
Tonight through Tuesday at the AFI, with one more screening as part of the Montgomery College Film Series in two weeks on September 24.
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After going deadly serious with last year's stunning return to (and surpassing of) their former brilliance, the Coen brothers strike while the iron is hot with a follow-up less than a year following the release of No Country for Old Men. But they've also left behind the Cormac McCarthy-esque bleakness, with a madcap crime romp that looks to be in the spirit of The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona. John Malkovich, whose deadpan comic abilities seem made for the Coens' sensibilities, plays a (forcibly) retired CIA operative whose estranged wife (Tilda Swinton) leaves a disk containing his secret-spilling memoirs at the gym. Brad Pitt, who appears to be channeling a youthful Jack LaLanne, is a physical trainer who finds the disk and embarks on a plot to blackmail Malkovich. George Clooney appears in his third Coen collaboration as a Department of the Treasury agent who is having an affair with Swinton. Hilarity, we're sure, will ensue. And since our fair city is the setting for much of the movie, there will be plenty of opportunity to play the old spot-the-error-in-geography game in between chuckles.
View the trailer.
Now playing at theaters all over the area.
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In the U.S., we tend prefer our political and historical epics to maintain a stoic face, particularly where World War II is concerned. Why we can't lighten up and occasionally leave behind the earnest and humorless for a lighter touch is the subject for a larger debate, but we could learn a lot from the Europeans, who are able to take a sly ironic grin (see Underground and Goodbye Lenin! as perfect examples) in the tragedies of their past. I Served the King of England is another in that vein, a comedy about the life of a Czech man who is remarkable mostly for his ability to climb the social ladder from lowly serving boy to wealthy businessman with remarkable and effortless ease. We're thinking Barry Lyndon in pre-war Prague. Jan has luck with the ladies and everything else in his life, and through his comedic rise, renowned director Jirí Menzel takes a serious look at Czech culture before, during, and after the Nazi occupation, in which the protagonist becomes a collaborator. If those sounds like heavy themes, they are; but that's no reason not to have a few laughs.
View the trailer.
Opens tonight at the Avalon.
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Why is it that every story told on film must run between 80 and 120 minutes and be packaged as a single serving? Because that's the most efficient way to make money with them, of course. But there are plenty of stories that might only need 30, or 15, or even just five minutes to tell, and are no lesser for their abbreviated length. The old myth about size not mattering actually holds true in film. It's a shame that there are so few opportunities to see shorts, much less incentive and support for people to make them. So we're glad D.C. has a forum for this kind of work in the D.C. Shorts Film Festival, which kicked off its fifth year at last night's opening, the first of a week's worth of programs, presenting over 100 short films that are in competition for the festival's prizes. Prizes that you, the audience members help determine, so it's up to you to go and watch.
Playing until September 18 E Street Cinema. See the schedule for a complete list of films and showtimes.
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It's been quite a few years since I've seen The French Lieutenant's Woman, and I'm actually kind of curious as to whether the movie has aged as badly as its horribly overwrought trailer. The film racked up an impressive slate of Oscar nominations, and even if it appears to lay on the romantic cheese with a large knife, it's still notable for the inventive screenplay by playwright Harold Pinter, which takes particular liberties with the structure of the book, changing author John Fowles' literary device of a modern narrator retelling an old story into a modern film production of the story. In the film within a film, Meryl Streep plays a woman involved in an ill-fated love affair with a French officer, played by Jeremy Irons. In the framing story, the two actors become similarly involved, as Pinter deftly plays the stories off of one another until twisting around Fowles' confounding ending into a similarly densely knotted resolution. The book was long called unfilmable, and there's an argument to be made that it still is, since the essential storytelling structure of the book was turned inside out in order to make the film. Either way, it's a fascinating look into the difficult task of making idiosyncratic literary material into film.
Tuesday night at 7 p.m. at the Library of Congress' Mary Pickford Theatre. Free.
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Two Movies We Really Want to Be Good, But We Suspect Will Be Big Fat Disappointments
Remakes of canonical classics are normally superfluous, but an update of The Women seems like it could have a lot of merit. Clare Luce Booth's original stage play and George Cukor's 1939 film were landmark works not only for their fairly shocking (at the time) decision to keep all men off stage and screen entirely, but also also for their biting satire of the lives of rich Manhattan socialites. A new version could go a long way towards an examination of what's changed and what's stayed the same in those circles in 70 years, as well as of Hollywood's ability to successfully break its continuing addiction to male-dominated storytelling. But by all advance reports, The Women is a barely watchable mess on screen, likely due in large part to, you guessed it, a lack of confidence from studios in a female-centered film that forced the project into a decade of development hell and eventual compromise.
Then there's Righteous Kill, which on the surface seems like a great idea, bringing together DeNiro and Pacino to play off each other for two hours the way they did for just one scene in their only other collaboration, Heat. But that one scene in Michael Mann's modern classic is a perfect piece for the pair all on its own. Should it have been left at that? Based on somewhat disastrous test screenings earlier this year where many audiences complained of a final twist that would have embarrassed even M. Night Shyamalan, and the studio's reluctance to let the film see a darkened theater with either audiences or critics since then, we're thinking maybe so.
View the trailers: The Women and Righteous Kill.
Both films are now playing at theaters all over the area.