Popcorn & Candy: High Water Mark
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
One of the hottest tickets of the SILVERDOCS film festival earlier this year was Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's moving documentary on Hurricane Katrina, which we reviewed in June. The buzz beforehand was that the pair had broken the mold in their look at the tragedy, giving viewers a rare look at things from the heart of the Ninth Ward as things unfolded. That look came via an extraordinary bit of amateur video taken by street hustler and aspiring rapper Kimberly Roberts, a unique and personal piece of filmmaking unfiltered by media analysis. But that footage was only the beginning of what Deal and Lessin managed to create.
After meeting Roberts and her husband by chance while engaged in a Katrina documentary with a different focus, the pair of filmmakers devoted their entire film to the couple. Through the course of the film, we return to the Roberts' decimated neighborhood with them and then follow them to multiple relocations. Their struggle is never easy, but Deal and Lessin's cameras never shy away from showing the couple's lows along with their highs. This may be only one story out of thousands of similar ones in New Orleans, but the human impact of the disaster and utter failure of the government to respond adequately is made more clearly and more eloquently via this singular focus than any broad view could ever hope to convey.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for one week only at E Street. The filmmakers will appear in person at tomorrow's evening shows, and all through Saturday's screenings.
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If last week's Fassbinder recommendation was a little on the daunting side, this week's is a little more manageable. Kamikaze 1989 is not one of the filmmaker's directorial efforts, but rather his final acting role. Director Wolf Gremm, who has done most of his work in German television, cast the workaholic director (as well as a number of actors from Fassbinder's own films) in a near-future sci-fi noir about terrorist activity in a totalitarian state where the only entertainment comes from inane reality television series and all media is centrally controlled. Gremm's remarkable scriptwriting prescience aside, the real attraction here is Fassbinder, quickly calling forth memories of Orson Welles in Touch of Evil with his turn as a corpulent, sweaty, scruffy police detective determined to track down the baddies. The star would die mere months after the film was shot, but of course, this being Fassbinder, that was plenty of time for him to finish two of his most highly regarded movies before he went. Rarely seen in the U.S., it's a chance to see the this riveting personality on screen in the prime—and sadly, the end—of his career.
View clips from the movie.
Friday at 7 p.m. at the Library of Congress' Mary Pickford Theater. Free.
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It seems odd that it's taken this long for another of Chuck Palahniuk's books to find its way to the screen. After the cultish success of Fight Club, one might have expected open season on his bibliography. But one look at the plot of Choke as a barometer of the author's mainstream saleability probably explains the decade-long gap. Sam Rockwell steps into a dark lead role as a cynical med school failure who trolls sexual addiction 12-step programs for his next conquest and has an ugly long term con going where he gets unsuspecting targets to save him from choking in restaurants and then hits them up for money regularly. It's a cruel capitalization of old piece of Eastern philosophy that states we're forever responsible for the lives we save. Despicable as he can be, he has noble intentions for...well, some of his actions, the reason he's in the sex addiction groups to begin with is that he obviously has a problem, and the money is to help keep his mother housed in a nursing home. None of this might sound very funny, but this is a comedy, albeit one with a heart of deepest, darkest black. Additionally, the fractured timeline the author employs isn't going to make the easiest transition to the screen. The biggest question is whether first time director Clark Gregg can do so effectively, while avoiding making the humor more flippant than its darkness can bear. But we're figuring Rockwell, who has quietly fashioned himself into one of the bravest and best actors of his generation, sinking himself into a character this messed up may be worth the price of admission alone.
View the trailer.
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Asian Pacific American Film Festival
It's officially autumn, which means film festival season in D.C. Last week it was the Latin American Film Festival, which is still going strong up at E Street for nearly another two weeks. This week sees the opening of the Asian Pacific American Film festival, which celebrates its ninth year of programming with a schedule that contains 14 features and more than 45 shorts, from a wide range of countries. The APA festival is concerned less with the geography of where the films come from and more with showcasing any films with ties to the APA community. So films might be set in India, like tonight's opener Amal, Korea, Japan, or even Peru (Ann Kaneko's documentary Against the Grain: An Artist's Survival Guide to Peru is look a look at countercultural forces in a country that happens to have been the first in Latin America to ever elect a head of state of Asian descent. Screenings are taking place all over town, at E Street, the Navy Memorial, the Freer-Sackler Galleries, the Goethe Institut, and the National Museum of Women in the arts, who are sponsoring the screening of Kaneko's film as well as the animated feature Sita Sings the Blues.
Opens tonight at E Street Cinema and continues through October 4th with screenings at a number of locations around town. See the schedule for a full rundown.
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Spike Lee's films, even when they fail, never cease to be fascinating, so don't let the mixed reviews for his latest turn you away. Miracle at St. Anna seeks to tell the often neglected story of black soldiers in World War II. There were half a million that served in Europe alone, yet the history of WWII in film (particularly in the early postwar years) hardly reflects that fact. Based on James McBride's novel, the film follows an all-black infantry group that gets trapped in a Tuscan village during the fall of 1944. Lee has been highly critical of WWII films lately, getting in a highly publicized war of words with Clint Eastwood earlier this year over the lack of black soldiers in Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, and continuing his criticism of Tarantino's depictions of African Americans, this time based on a leaked script from Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards, which hasn't even started shooting yet. It's likely Lee's own commitment to the facts will be highly scrutinized, but we're more concerned with how the film stands on its own.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at theaters throughout the area.
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The bulk of 2008 at the Hirshhorn has been dedicated to celebrating the art of the moving image. And so it seems completely appropriate that the first film program at the museum since before the debut of its seven month long Cinema Effect exhibit is essentially a highlight reel of LOOP, one of the world's largest festivals dedicated to the presentation of video art. Held every year since 2003 in Barcelona, the 12-day event presents the work of hundreds of artists at dozens of venues all around the city. On Thursday of next week, the festival director Maria Nacanor will host a screening of the best works from the 2008 edition.
Thursday, October 2 at 8 p.m. in the Hirshhorn's Ring Auditorium. Free.