Popcorn & Candy: Oath of Office
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Presidential Films at the Smithsonian
The big weekend is finally here. And your tiny one-bedroom is about to be overrun with family, friends, and some person who messaged you on Facebook two weeks ago who you think you remember going to high school with. The only thing you know for sure you're all doing is walking down to the Mall to check out Barry's Big Day Out on Tuesday morning, which leaves you with a whole lot of time to kill, lest you kill all those guests instead. Luckily, there are plenty of movie options this weekend expressly designed to soak up vast swaths of time, and many of them are free of charge. We'll start with the biggest potential time killer, the Smithsonian's "Presidential" films series, which offers up six movies split between Sunday and Monday, which gives you over 12 hours of potential crowd control pleasing entertainment.
And the Smithsonian series does concentrate on well-known mainstream crowd-pleasers. Sunday's program starts with Oliver Stone's exercise in either tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorism or hard-hitting quasi-journalistic provocation, JFK, depending on your perspective. Then there's Rob Reiner's presidential romantic comedy (written by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin) The American President, featuring Michael Douglas as a widowed president even more prone to wide-eyed idealistic oratory than our incoming chief executive. Stanley Kubrick's darkly comedic Cold War masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove closes out the day. Monday kicks of strongly with the only non-presidential pick of the bunch, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; but who are we kidding, with speaking skills like those possessed Jimmy Stewart's earnest Mr. Smith, we know that guy is headed to the White House eventually. This is followed by the unimpeachably brilliant Woodward & Bernstein Watergate procedural, All the President's Men, and the whole thing concludes with My Fellow Americans, Jack Lemmon and James Garner's 1996 screwball road comedy about two ex-presidents attempting to unravel a vast conspiracy while avoiding assassination. This is the weakest link of the bunch, but surely you'll have found an early inaugural-themed happy hour to occupy your time by Monday evening.
Sunday and Monday at the Ripley Center. See the Smithsonian's Inaugural activities page for the schedule. All programs are free.
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Clocking in at nearly four and a half hours including a 15 minute intermission, Steven Soderbergh's biopic about the iconic Argentinian revolutionary will certainly eat up plenty of time for you and the out-of-towners. But while the length may be daunting, those with the stamina to watch from start to finish will find it more than worth it to spend the time. And this is an unexpected opportunity to see the film locally all in one sitting. Imagined and filmed as two separate movies (one on the successful Cuban revolution, the other on the failed Bolivian campaign), Soderbergh and the film's producers only realized how well they played as a single piece after completion. But booking a 4.5 hour spanish-language historical film into theaters is no easy task, so they determined to keep the film split up, but to take the double-feature version on an old-fashioned movie roadshow. Still running into some difficulties with this concept, they decided to only show the roadshow version in NYC and LA, but just after new year's it was announced that E Street would get a one-week run of this version. If it's anything like the NYC screening, the film plays without credits, and audiences are given a nice little commemorative book with production photos and a printed version of the credits. The film itself more than lives up to its epic ambitions, with Benicio del Toro giving the definitive portrayal of Guevara and Soderbergh creating a portrait that is remarkably evenhanded considering the polarizing nature of his subject. Those going in hoping for a movie with an agenda to lionize or condemn the man will be disappointed; those looking for a meticulously researched and expertly presented accounting of the man's actions, strengths, and failings will find much to like here.
View the trailer.
Full 4+ hour roadshow edition of the film starts tomorrow at E Street with two screenings daily for the next week (with a special admission price of $15). After that, the film will be shown as two separate movies (at standard admission).
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Just before Jean-Luc Godard was preparing to turn European cinema on its ear with the debut of Breathless, a charismatic young New York actor did much the same on this side of the Atlantic. Godard's film ended up having more widespread impact, as it didn't have the crowded American movie market that greeted Shadows to compete with, but John Cassevetes' debut was no less revolutionary. And in the same way that Godard's film changed the rules for the artistic side of filmmaking, Cassavetes' ushered in a new business model, practically inventing the independent film industry as it existed for decades. The film, which began as an acting exercise in Cassavetes' own upstart actors' studio, tells the story of a light-skinned black woman who "passes" as white, and the fallout that results when she begins a relationship with a white man who only finds out about her race after meeting her brothers. This was incendiary stuff for the late 50s, and Cassavetes, in what would become a personal trademark throughout his career, never shies away from the most difficult aspects of relationships and friendships. Springing as it does from an acting exercise, all the dialogue is improvised. Shot on the fly and written just as spontaneously and raggedly, Shadows' energy is just as breathlessly invigorating as Charlie Mingus' jazz score.
View a scene from Shadows.
Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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In what has become a tradition at the AFI, the theater is once again screening Montomgery to Memphis, essentially a three-hour clip reel documenting Martin Luther King's leadership of the civil rights movement from his earliest days until his assassination. Celebrities turned out in force to narrate the film, and directors Sidney Lumet and Joseph Mankiewicz painstakingly compiled the footage. For years it was only available in a heavily edited, narration free version, but this is the full three-hour version as originally put together. The theater doesn't charge for the screenings, and distributes tickets (four per customer) on Monday. This program serves as an appropriate lead-in for Tuesday's inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation's first African-American president, an event that the AFI is also presenting on screen for those who don't want to venture down to the Mall. That screening is already sold out, but since scalping tickets to that isn't a federal offense as it is with the real deal, maybe you can find someone with an extra ticket or two.
Monday at the AFI at 9:45 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Free, tickets available from the AFI box office on Monday only, limit four per person.
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An American Journey
In 1958, Swiss photographer Robert Frank published The Americans a book of photos taken over the course of two years traveling to every corner of the nation. Jack Kerouac, appropriately, penned an introduction to this visual documentation of the ultimate road trip. Frank subsequently became the de facto in-house filmmaker (trading in his still camera for a motion picture one) for the Beats. His book was celebrated as a keen outsider's view of mid-century America. The National Gallery has an exhibit celebrating the photographer's work opening Sunday and running through April, and on Sunday, coinciding with the opening of the exhibit, they'll screen An American Journey, French filmmaker Philippe Séclier's homage to Frank's work. The filmmaker travelled 15,000 miles around the country, to many of the same places Frank visited, showing on video rather than photograph how we've changed in the last half century. If you're planning on heading over to catch Cassavetes in the late afternoon (and you should be), you might as well get there a few hours earlier to see this as well.
Sunday at the National Gallery of Art at 12:30 p.m. Free.