Popcorn & Candy: You're Getting Very Sleepy...
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The 1940s were unkind to Orson Welles. He started the decade with the opportunity to direct his first feature film for RKO and ended up making one of the best motion pictures ever made. Of course, critical opinion was still a couple of decades from coming to that conclusion, and Citizen Kane was just the first in a series of box office bombs for Welles that resulted in control of his films increasingly being in hands other than his own, when he was given the opportunity to make films at all. By the end of the decade, he fled Hollywood for Europe, and appeared in a number of films in order to finance his own low-budget, largely independent projects.
One of the first of these films was Black Magic, based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas, in which Welles stars as a conniving entertainment hypnotist who studied at the hands of Dr. Mesmer himself. Welles' "Count Cagliostro" gains fame across the continent before attempting to use his powers of mind control to enter into a plot with some gypsies to put an imposter in place of Marie Antoinette. If it sounds pretty outlandish, it is, and despite word that Welles himself directed some scenes, general consensus is that Black Magic is exactly the B-movie it appears to be. Regardless, this is a rare movie to be able to see at all, and Welles was such a magnetic presence onscreen that it's almost always worth checking him out, even in campy junk like this.
No trailer, but here's a quick scene to give you an idea.
Friday night at 7 p.m. at Films on the Hill. $5.
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Oscar Catch-up Programs
With just ten days left until the Academy awards, area screening rooms are awash with chances to get the leg up on your office Oscar pool. In addition to the short film programs that have been running at E Street, there are a number of Oscar-related series coming up in the next week and a half. The National Archives presents the most comprehensive set. Starting on Wednesday with a screening of Man on Wire (one of the best films we saw last year), the Archives will screen every single nominated documentary and every short in all three of the short film categories (E Street's collections skip the documentary shorts). Meanwhile, over at National Geographic, you can catch all five of the Best Foreign Film nominees, one tomorrow, and two each on Saturday and Sunday. And if you still haven't gotten around to the higher profile Best Picture nominees, on the day before the ceremony, AMC theaters is screening all five in a row for $30 for the whole day (including a bottomless bucket of popcorn) at a half dozen local AMC theater locations in the area.
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This Diana Ross-starring biopic on the life of Billie Holiday has met with sharp criticism in the years since its highly anticipated release in 1972, mostly due to the view that it sugar-coats her notoriously rough life. Which is saying something, considering that things still seem pretty rough, if with a nice romantic sheen, through the film's lens. Ross delivers the performance of her limited acting career, rounded out by a similarly notable supporting turn by Richard Pryor, who reportedly also coached Ross on how to act high. Billy Dee Williams would probably also be most remembered for his role here, had he not gone on to play Lando Calrissian and famously shill malt liquor. His portrayal of Holiday's last husband, Louis McKay, is also notable in that McKay's presence as a technical adviser on the film helped to revise his role in her life into that of a doting savior rather than the abusive thug that he was. Still, it stands as the most comprehensive narrative on Holiday's life, and there's plenty to recommend about it. Just don't take it as gospel.
View the trailer.
Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the National Portrait Gallery. Free.
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Talk about release date serendipity. The International may have started filming a year and a half ago, and been written even earlier than that, but it couldn't be coming out at a better time. Considering public perception of the banking industry these days, people are probably more than willing to flock to a movie that presents a massive worldwide bank as being guilty of not just bad business practices and doling out morally questionable bonus checks, but of a whole host of wrongdoing. Government destabilization and arms trading makes the subject of Bank of America's Congressional testimony yesterday seem positively quaint in comparison. In fact, if Ken Lewis was smart, he'd be using this to his advantage. "Which would you prefer, Congressman? That we misuse TARP funds for employee appreciation parties in Vegas, or to level third world economies?" Clive Owen stars as the INTERPOL agent on a personal mission to right the wrongs, and Naomi Watts is a district attorney helping him out. And Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer gets to showcase his considerable visual skills at the helm of a smart big-budget action thriller for the first time.
View the trailer.
Opens at a number of theatres throughout the area tomorrow.
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There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about this UK thriller, which takes place mostly in the Mediterranean off the coast of Mallorca with a cast of beautiful young Brits. You'll know within the first five minutes which character is going to survive to the end, and which one is going to die first. And knowing the premise going in—a debaucherous evening of hard drugs and casual sex turns sour when a girl dies via the violent titular sex act—probably means you're going to spend most of Act One bored as we get to know the cast of young, dumb, and privileged partiers (think people with annoyance levels on par with the cast of The Hills, but with British accents) and endure an over-extended group sex scene worthy of late-nite soft-core on Cinemax. You'll find yourself wishing someone would just belt the chosen victim in the back of the head already so we can get the plot moving. But once things do get set into motion, Donkey Punch is a pretty entertaining, over-the-top ultra-violent thriller. Just don't be fooled by the stylish European milieu; this is just as trashy as the Friday the 13th reboot that's also coming out this weekend; it may look glossier, and lack a supernatural aspect, but slasher genre conventions still apply: sex=death, and those deaths are going to come in increasingly creative and gruesome fashions.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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With this week's premature spring-like weather, many minds are surely turning to the upcoming outdoor activity season. The Capitol Riverfront is no exception. They'll be joining Screen on the Green and a number of other community-based outdoor film programs in showing movies under an open sky this summer, and they want your help with programming. They're doing nothing but 80s movies this year, and you can vote for your choices. You can pick your top ten choices from their pre-selected list, and throw in up to three write-in candidates as well. With the popular titles in the lists that are already there, it seems unlikely that a write-in candidate would make it, so we're suggesting a write-in campaign for a particularly messed-up 80s cult classic that they'd never in a million years show anyway. Popcorn & Candy has cast a vote for Blue Velvet just for fun. Just think of the costume contest tie in possibilities, with a dozen or two folks showing up dressed as crazed Dennis Hoppers with nitrous tanks in tow.