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.
Concert films are a notoriously disappointing bunch, promising the excitement of front row tickets and a backstage pass to a band's live show, but usually just delivering yawns and the realization that there's no substitute for actually being there. And then there's Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense, a film which redefined the genre. When people say (and it's been said a lot over the years) that it's the best concert film ever released, it's less a statement about a ranked list of concert movies, and more a reflection of the fact that watching Stop Making Sense is an entirely different experience: it's at the top of a list of one.
The film's success lies at the center of a sort of perfect storm of elements. The Talking Heads were at a creative peak, six years and five brilliant records into their career, and managing the rather difficult feat riding their oddball art school tendencies to widespread commercial success. Similarly, Demme had established himself as one of the most promising of Roger Corman's protégés, a talented visual storyteller able to make Corman's kitschy low budget flicks accessible without softening their lovably rough edges. The band and director collaborated in choreographing a shoot over the course of three nights at the Pantages Theater in L.A., buildings sets and creating an environment for the shows designed specifically for the film. The result is a movie that is meticulously planned, but that feels effortless and simple. Demme and the Heads throw out nearly every tour film convention; no cutaways to the crowd, no quick cuts, no closeups of fingers on fretboards. It's a film born of a genius so subtle that it's been impossible to replicate; it might have changed the way these films are made if anyone else had ever figured out just how the director and the band managed it.
View the trailer.
Monday at 7 p.m. at the Library of Congress' Mary Pickford Theater. Free.
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While Wall*E is a shoo-in for the best animated film of the year (and I'm not going to begrudge the film that honor; it's one of the best of the year all around), once again some of the biggest critical praise of the year is also falling on a piece of foreign animation, in this case French director Michael Ocelot's Azur and Asmar. Now, while the film is 3-D computer animation, don't expect anything like Pixar. Ocelot's visuals are immediately distinctive, eschewing any of the usual computer animation tendency towards a sort of photo realism in favor of brightly colored two dimensional art that is layered to create depth. The art, as well as the fantastical story, relies heavily on Persian and Arabian folklore and visual style, telling the story of two young boys who are split apart to lead separate lives, and their journey back into each others' spheres, led by the fairytales they remember from childhood.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for one week only at E Street.
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Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas
It's a busy week at the AFI. You can catch a movie every day for the next seven, never see the same one twice, and never see anything that's less than excellent (though your opinion of Synecdoche, New York may swing back and forth for days between "excellent" and "what the hell did I just see?" before settling somewhere in between). In addition to the two new-ish releases, there's a week-long run starting tomorrow of a newly restored print of The Godfather, Part II, the requisite December screenings of It's a Wonderful Life, along with the cynical flipside of Bad Santa, plus screenings of Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling Los Angeles love-letter to Robert Altman, Magnolia. But if you're only going to make it up to Silver Spring once this week? It's gotta be for Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, the late, great Jim Henson's adaptation of the 1971 animal-based kiddie-lit spin on The Gift of the Magi. Emmet Otter and his mom each want to get something nice for each other for the holiday, but end up using much needed possessions belonging to the other to do so. Emmet forms the titular jug-band and competes in a furry battle of the bands that doesn't quite go as planned, but somehow, things have a way of working themselves out. Fans of a certain age will probably remember this from HBO and Nickelodeon as kids, and it's just as charming as it was 30 years ago. It's a perfect seasonal addition to all the rest of the Henson-centric media and museum exhibits that have come to town this year.
In lieu of a trailer, we'll link to this highly amusing blooper reel.
Early afternoon screenings on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday at the AFI.
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Two movies adapted from plays that have sights set on awards season glory come out this weekend. Frost/Nixon, which was on stage in D.C. just last month, opens on one local screen with the same leads in the title roles as were in the original production of the play: Michael Sheen as British talk show host David Frost, who spent hours interviewing Richard Nixon (and getting surprisingly candid responses) post-Watergate, and Frank Langella reprising his Tony Award-winning performance as Nixon. Playwright Peter Morgan wrote the screen adaptation, and the film already cleaned up in this morning's Golden Globe nominations. We tend to be leery of anything with Ron Howard's name on it, prone as he is to the sort of maudlin melodrama that is a hit at awards season but is completely devoid of substance. But considering the players involved here, not just the writer and lead actors but also a supporting turn by Sam Rockwell, who we'll watch in just about anything he appears in at this point, we're inclined to have high hopes.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Georgetown.
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The other stage adaptation is Doubt, which also features a playwright, John Patrick Shanley, rewriting his own work for the screen. Shanley also directs, and while you may not recognize his name immediately, you're probably familiar with the one other directing credit on his résumé, the original Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan collaboration, Joe Versus the Volcano. Shanley's writing career has wound its way through an interesting path since then, from that romantic comedy to the true story of planewrecked Uruguayan rugby players resorting to cannibalism to a Michael Crichton jungle action flick. Shanley's stage work is a little more prestigious, and in 2005, the stage version of Doubt won the writer a Pulitzer and a Tony, among other awards. In the film version, Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays a Bronx priest suspected of abusing a young student. Leading the charge against him is Meryl Streep as the Sister in charge of the school, and the conflict between the two becomes a dizzying battle royale of philosophy, theology, and metaphor laden words. Watching Streep and Hoffman chew up the scenery with material like this should be worth the price of admission alone.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street and Bethesda Row.
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Popcorn & Candy answers your questions!
A reader wrote in this week to inquire as to whether any of the Smithsonian IMAX theaters would be screening the super-big-screen version of Keanu Reeves in The Day the Earth Stood Still. As of this writing, the Smithsonian's IMAX website has no mention of the movie, which releases tomorrow, on any of those screens. We like to think this might be the Smithsonian's subtle way of making the same recommendation to you that we will, which is that you skip throwing your entertainment dollars at Gort and Ted's Excellent Extraterrestrial Adventure and just rent the original 1951 version, which is one of the finest sci-fi flicks ever made.
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Why the big suit?
As pertinent a question today as when it was first asked in 1984. And we have yet to get a definitive answer.
why not the big suit?
dancing with a lamp? brilliant.
"Concert films are a notoriously disappointing bunch..."
Well, except those by Jonathan Demme. Rent "Storefront Hitchcock" sometime if you can get your hands on it...
ibc: Hulu has "Storefront Hitchkcock" weirdly enough. I had never heard of it before and can't wait to check it out- thanks!