Popcorn & Candy: Modern Life is Rubbish
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
French director Jacques Tati's Playtime was a flop of colossal proportions. The most expensive French movie ever made at the time, it took a decade of Tati's life, bankrupted him, claimed his house, and after all that, failed miserably at the box office. Its dismal commercial run was only balanced by its glowing reputation among critics. Popular opinion took a great deal more time to come around, but now the film is regarded as a singular masterpiece. It lacks a plot, a protagonist, and for the most part, dialog, at least as it is traditionally rendered. For many audiences at the time, Tati's grand statement on the place of humankind in an impersonal and technical modern world was too alienating. And for the young revolutionaries of late-60s France, it seemed passe and obvious.
They couldn't have been more wrong. Playtime is subtle and complex in ways that render it impossible to absorb in a single viewing. Tati shot the film in grand and highly detailed 70mm, filling the massive frame of his wide shots with multiple meticulously choreographed sight gags that often overlap or play alongside one another; they have a surreal hilarity that makes it easy to understand why Tati was such a big influence on Monty Python. Scenes often lack a definite focal point, and action and dialog are in many cases relegated to the background. And its episodic format doesn't tell a story so much as it sets forth a way of seeing the world. A way that belongs uniquely to Tati, as no film remotely like it was ever made again.
View the (french) trailer.
Monday at 6:30 p.m. at the Alliance Française. $8 ($4 for members).
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Nothing But a Man was practically lost for the better part of three decades, fading into obscurity after its much heralded (for a low-budget independent film in the 60s) release. Revived in the early '90s and released to DVD a few years ago, the film is far easier to see than it was for many years, though still goes unheard of by many. Its story is the stuff of standard relationship dramas, rough guy from the wrong side of the tracks (taken rather more literally here: he actually works and lives in the rail yard) falls in love with the clean-cut, well-educated girl from the good family that strong disapproves of the union. There are a number of factors that make this familiar setup remarkable in this case, chief among them the fact that the context of the film is an African-American community in the south on the cusp of the tumult of the civil rights movement. Writer/director Michael Roemer never takes his eye off the human drama while creating a film that is loaded with insightful commentary about race relations and the difficult transitions that America was just beginning to go through.
View an interview with the film's star, Ivan Dixon.
Two screenings only, this weekend at the AFI. Friday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 3 p.m.
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The AFI's Max Ophüls retrospective draws to a close with the director's final — and finest — film. Lola Montès is a film as lavishly over-the-top as its subject, a 19th-century cabaret dancer who carried out affairs with a host of the noble and artistic classes of Europe. Ophüls always had a flair for the dramatic and for onscreen elegance, and in his swan song he brought all of the qualities that typified his career together into a grand and colorful biopic, a look back at the performer's life from her last years working in the circus. Many different versions of the film floated around in the years after its unsuccessful release. In an effort to mitigate the film's failure, the studio re-cut it to minimize the flashback effect of Ophüls' framing device, but a version more accurate to the original eventually returned to favor. The AFI lists the running time at 110 minutes, which means that it would appear that they're not showing the recent re-release that re-inserts five minutes of footage not seen in the film in the version generally seen in the past 40 years; we're not sure why they're electing to go with the older version, but no matter; it's a visually arresting masterpiece in any case.
View the trailer.
Plays Saturday, Sunday, and Thursday of next week at the AFI.
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With a focus as deeply varied as The Wire and the breathtaking pace and atmosphere of City of God, this Italian crime drama takes on the difficult task of detailing the country's intricate crime world, and the centuries-old Camorra organizations that have made Neapolitan suburbs like Scampia into practically lawless towns where the only rule is that of the crime families. Based on a book by Roberto Saviano that earned the author a price on his head from a number of those Camorra families, the film takes five tangentially related stories and cross-cuts them into an enthralling look at one of the world's most entrenched and ruthless criminal networks.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Bethesda Row.
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Hoax or not? Is Joaquin Phoenix' declaration that he's quitting acting to become Puffy's next protégé an earnest attempt to reinvent, or just the most committed celebrity stunt that Andy Kaufman never pulled? Or worse, has Phoenix just gone completely off the deep end, to a land where only magical fairies armed to the teeth with thorazine can touch him? Granting him the benefit of the doubt that he's actually serious — no small feat to start with — your last chance to see him onscreen as anything other than the unholy spawn of Rick Rubin and Jim Morrison opens this weekend. In James Gray's Two Lovers Phoenix plays an unstable young man fresh off a stint in a mental institution (we'll leave you to draw whatever parallels you deem necessary) who is torn between the nice Jewish girl his parents are rather ardently setting him up with, and the hot (and similarly nutso) neighbor he can see from his bedroom window, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Reviews are pretty wildly mixed, as seems to be the trend for Gray's films, but regardless of which side of that divide you fall on, there's no doubt that if Phoenix is on the up-and-up with his new ambitions, Two Lovers will at the very least be the answer to bar trivia questions for years to come.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street, The Avalon, and Cinema Arts.