Photo of the Day: November 27, 2009
Car Pushed Into Anacostia River By Train
Morning Roundup: Black Friday Edition
Devendra Banhart @ 9:30 Club
Saturday Thanks Don't End At Thanksgiving Photo: November 28, 2009
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
One of the defining films of the '50s, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront stars Marlon Brando in one of his most mesmerizing performances, as a former boxer working as a longshoreman on the New York City waterfront. When he witnesses a crime that could put away the dictatorial mob boss who also runs the dockworkers union, he's faced with the choice of staying quiet for his own safety or squealing. Complicating matters is the fact that his brother also happens to be the boss's lawyer, pressuring him to zip it, and that a dead informant's widow and the waterfront priest are encouraging him to tell all. It's one of the grittiest studio pictures from that decade, and rightly regarded as among the career pinnacles for most of the major players, including Kazan, Brando, writer Budd Schulman, and the supporting turns by Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, and Karl Malden. Kazan ratchets up the realism by shunning sets in favor of location shooting in Hoboken, and hiring non-actor tough guys for a number of the film's thugs.
As great a film as it is taken purely on its merits, it's even more fascinating when not divorced from its real life context. Kazan, fresh from helping the HUAC blacklist a bunch of Hollywood commies, makes a film extolling the virtues of naming names to avert danger and strike down oppression. It might have come across in a more noble fashion had the film's mob boss been a better allegorical match for the kind of folks whose lives were damaged by Kazan's testimony — folks like Kazan's former pal Arthur MIller, who actually wrote the original On the Waterfront script only to get fired in favor of Schulman, who was, you guessed it, also a congressional informant. It was an ugly time, and there's little question that Kazan did some ugly deeds to help out some ugly people, at the expense of some of the greatest artists of the day. Still, there's no need to hold all of that against a great film. Even if On the Waterfront was made with an agenda, Kazan was smart enough not to let that mess with a good story told well, and his characteristic brilliance as a director infuses every frame.
View the trailer.
Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the National Portrait Gallery's McEvoy Auditorium. Free.
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Considering On the Waterfront's subject of laborers and unions, it might just as well be a post script to the annual D.C. Labor Film Fest, which opened last night and is screening worker-related films all weekend and into early next week. Last night's opening screened a couple of higher-profile films that already had theatrical releases earlier this year (to largely tepid reviews), so there wasn't much to miss there. The real attraction are the lower profile indie and foreign films the festival showcases, like Chop Shop, about a 12-year old orphan making a living at an auto body shop in Queens (which played for a week at the AFI back in April), or Man Push Cart, about a Pakistani immigrant who operates a Manhattan food cart. There are also a couple of silent classics on the bill, which look at the plight of workers in the early part of the 20th century, one (The Crowd) focusing on white collar workers, and the other (Chaplin's Modern Times) on the blue. And, of course, festival mainstay and cult classic Office Space will have screenings, tonight, tomorrow and Sunday.
Opened last night and runs through Tuesday, with all programs at the AFI. See the AFL-CIO's website for the schedule.
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American filmmakers have a long tradition of mining foreign films and stories for their movies, which is why what Chris Smith has done with The Pool is bound to throw people off balance at first. The director, who has spent most of his career on relatively quirky documentaries (American Movie), has taken a short story by an American writer (Randy Russell), set in Iowa, and made it into a Hindi-language film set in the Indian territory of Goa. Smith's decision to retell the story in a different setting came from his own experiences helping someone else shoot in Goa, and a desire to return there and tell this story through the people he'd met while there. The story concerns a young hotel worker who dreams of swimming in a pool owned by an upper class family. He could just sneak in when no one is around, but he's obsessed with being permitted to swim there, gaining acceptance into the world of the people the pool belongs to. He begins working for the family, but as he insinuates himself into their lives, the film becomes about much more than just taking a swim.
View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street Cinema.
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Performance artist Marina Abramović put together a show at the Guggenheim in 2005 that was sort of the equivalent of Cat Power's covers records: a well known artist reinterpreting the work that has had the greatest impact on her. In Abramović's case, this meant a seven-night stand at the museum performing pieces by five other performance artists as well as two of her own previous works. The Hirshhorn is screening a documentary on the series, but don't expect a simple recap of the show. The documentary comes from Babette Mangolte, a filmmaker who got her start as a cinematographer during the height of the French New Wave movement, and ended up emigrating to New York, where she became involved in experimental film. Her vision of Abramović's performances is likely to be just as much of an attraction as the performances themselves.
Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Hirshhorn. Free.
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We've been fascinated keeping an eye on the programming this year from the Washington Psychotronic Film Society, which has strayed a little from the mindbendingly and colossally weird fare of past years to films that actually cross over into the oddball fringe of respectability. We're not complaining; they were still screening wonderfully obscure films, but now they actually had recognizable actors and sometimes even bona fide stars in them. Imagine that! But then October's schedule came out and we see that we're back in more familiar (which is to say, less familiar) territory. And nothing screams psychotronic more than this week's pick, Miami Horror, also known as Miami Golem, a film which seems to be sort of what Miami Vice might have been like had it been about cloning aliens and made by a low budget Italian production company with filmmakers and crew being fed a steady diet of mescaline. The plot (really, you want to know what it purports to be about?) concerns a reporter investigating a scientist who is attempting to clone alien DNA retrieved from a fallen meteorite. You know this can't end well.
Wednesday night at 8:30 p.m. at the Old Arlington Grill. Free, $2 donation suggested.
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Special note: earlier this year we reported that the Arlington Cinema & Drafthouse was expanding to Maryland, taking over the old P&G Wheaton Plaza theater and transforming it into the Montgomery Cinema 'n' Drafthouse. The revamped theater is now open, with a full slate of movies and events on their calendar. Best of all, there's now a place much closer to a Metro stop than the Arlington Cinema 'n' Drafthouse to watch discounted movies while drinking. Cheers!
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Screw Kazan and his stoolie jeremiad. All On the Waterfront does for me is appreciate the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Ring Lardner Jr. and Edward Dmytryk, who had the balls to tell HUAC to go f**k itself with a white hot stick. Streetcar Named Desire was a better crafted film, anyway, with richer performances for the same bunch of actors.
I'll take Brando and a stick of butter over this stylized self-fellating.
I knew that would rile you up after the Trumbo thread a few weeks back, Monkey.
If I had to think about the personal life or politics of the people who make movies, I wouldn't be able to enjoy Airplane!, or Die Hard, or pretty much anything by Woody Allen. What fun is that? Besides, it's rather remarkable that Kazan could turn such a lame excuse for his deplorable behavior into such a great film. Sort of like what Woody did with Manhattan?