Popcorn & Candy: Chances Are...
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Depression and anxiety forced Peter Sellers to spend much of his career trying to prove that he was more than just a funny guy. Even his most critically acclaimed roles, in Dr. Strangelove, or I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, didn't give him the sense that he was proving himself as a great dramatic actor. As a result, he spent a great deal of time in the 70's, when his career was flagging badly, working to get a film version of Jerzy Kosiński's novel Being There on screen with himself in the lead role. The project eventually came together, with Kosiński penning the screenplay and cult director Hal Ashby behind the camera.
The result was a brilliant social and political satire, with a stunning performance by Sellers as Chance the Gardener that may have come as a shock even to those who already believed him to be in a class by himself based solely on his comedic work. Chance is a man with a simple mind who has lived his whole life working for a wealthy man here in D.C., never leaving the grounds of the house and filling his days with a steady diet of television when he's not working in the garden. When his employer and guardian dies, Chance is suddenly homeless on the rough late-70s streets of D.C. Through an odd series of coincidences (his name is "Chance" after all), he is mistaken for an understated businessman, and unwittingly becomes an advisor to the powerful Washington elite, who search his odd mannerisms and homespun aphorisms for the economic and political metaphors they want to find in him. He becomes a national celebrity and is given an audience with the President, none of which appears to faze or impress him, furthering his mystique. Sellers' performance is as subtle and sensitive as his Dr. Strangelove was wild-eyed and over-the-top, while Ashby hits a career peak even higher than Harold and Maude.
View the trailer.
Washington Film Institute screening tomorrow night at Napoleon in Adams Morgan. 8 p.m. (Happy Hour starts at 6:30), $10.
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Something must be in the water, as we're being inundated with oddball metafictional films in which people are playing caricatures or thinly-veiled stand-ins of themselves or the filmmakers. There was Bruce Campbell's My Name is Bruce last week. Next month, Mickey Rourke stars as a wrestler whose self-destructive approach to his life and career may strike some as uncomfortably close to Rourke's own personal trajectory. In Synecdoche, New York, it's difficult not to view Charlie Kaufman's protagonist, an anxiety-ridden playwright, as an analog for himself. And this week, it's Jean-Claude Van Damme, the Muscles from Brussels himself, playing "JCVD", an action hero (like Van Damme) who is getting older and in a clear career decline like Van Damme). What's remarkable is that Van Damme is receiving some of the best reviews of his career (which isn't saying much) for his work here, critics praising the actor for having the good humor to be more vicious to his own persona than critics ever have been (which is saying quite a lot). French director Mabrouk El Mechri keeps his palette grim and practically monochromatic, making the world look nearly as dingy and worn out as Van Damme himself, who finds himself losing custody of his kids, ATM cards getting turned down, and then accidentally mixed up in a bank robbery. How strange that Van Damme's best shot at getting his career back on track is by portraying himself hitting rock bottom.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Cinema.
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Pardon me while I show my age for a moment. In my day, when it came time for class elections, a few of the most popular kids in school, along with some nerdy overachievers looking for college transcript padding, threw their hats into the ring for the largely ceremonial positions of class president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer. The geekier elements ran the more visible (but still generally lackluster) campaigns, and then the popular kids, campaigning on word of mouth and name recognition, won by a landslide anyway. Welcome to high school. Those were the days, no? Apparently, sometime since I got out, actual high school elections have become more like the cutthroat political microcosm of Alexander Payne's Election. Or at least, that's the case at the high profile math & science magnet school of Stuyvesant High in Manhattan. Here, class elections are as hotly contested as the national one we just endured, only on much smaller scale. Smaller, but if I remember high school correctly, no less dramatic. Documentarian Caroline Suh followed the kids around during the process for a verité-style look at the process in these alternate halls of power.
View the trailer.
Friday through Tuesday in a special engagement at the AFI.
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In yet another spin on the fertile Faustian legend, Klaus Mann's 1936 novel Mephisto puts a German actor, Henrik, into the Dr. Faustus role, who then makes a deal of sorts with the Mephistopholes of the Nazi party in order to get a career-making role as Mephisto in Faust. In 1981, Hungarian director István Szabó turned the novel into a film, leaving behind some of the satire of the source material to concentrate on the difficult decisions faced by the German people during the rise of the Third Reich. Szabó's Henrik isn't necessarily a bad guy, he just wants a career, and you don't do that by holding to your pre-Reich Communist leanings, right? Henrik's constant mantra that he's just an actor holds uncomfortable parallels with the old "just following orders" defense; the idea that he's not important because he doesn't pull any strings. Szabó isn't soft on Henrik; he's weak willed and fully to blame for his part in supporting the Nazi propaganda machine. But the movie doesn't go the easy route of vilifying him without reservation; Szabó humanizes his protagonist, forcing the audience to wonder nervously what they'd do if they were in Henrik's shoes, and whether the sense of moral superiority they want to feel would win out over the instinct for self-preservation.
View the trailer.
Monday at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe Institut. $6.
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Washington Psychotronic Film Society continues to hit the higher profile end of the psychotronic spectrum as they try to attract new converts to their new night and location at The Meeting Place. This week it's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Russ Meyer's first big hit film, and oddly enough, one of the few of his films to have no significant nudity. Which isn't to say that Faster, Pussycat is tame. The trio of buxom go-go dancers at the movie's center are out for some daytime thrills when they encounter a young couple. They kill the boyfriend (as one does in such situations) and kidnap the girl and bring her into their attempt to extract some riches from a creepy old man and his sons. While not as overtly exploitative sexually as many of Meyer's other films, it more than makes up for it with its sensationalized violence. Sexual innuendo, on the other hand, is sprinkled liberally throughout. Meyer's interesting plays on gender roles have made it a common subject of study for feminist scholars. But all you really need to know? John Waters called it "beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future." Now there's an endorsement.
View the trailer.
WPFSs' weekly screening on Tuesday at 8 p.m. at The Meeting Place. Free, $2 donation suggested.