Popcorn & Candy: The Amazing Spider-Woman
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine
To go along with the Hirshhorn's current retrospective on the long career of Louise Bourgeois, the AFI is offering a number of screenings of Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach's 2008 documentary on the nearly 100-year old artist. Fifteen years in the making, the directors don't set out just to tell Bourgeois' story. With a career 70+ years in the making that touches upon a number of major twentieth century artistic movements, any kind of linear narrative would be a daunting — and likely tedious — prospect. Rather, they interweave extensive (and sometimes contentious) interviews with the artist done over the course of their years watching her work in and around visual examinations of the work itself. Rather than trying to guide the film, they let Bourgeois herself play ringleader, letting her talk at idiosyncratic length about the inspirations for her powerful and highly emotive works, and letting her paint the picture of why she has become such an iconic figure for surrealists, modernists, feminists, and just plain artists.
View the trailer.
At the AFI tonight at 7 and 9:15 p.m. and Sunday at 5:05 p.m.
---
Jazz in the Spring at the Nation’s Library
Every Wednesday in April, the Library of Congress presents a documentary on jazz history and personalities, curated by the museum's jazz specialist, Larry Appelbaum, one of the area's most talented jazz pianists in his own right. This week's film is The Jazz Baroness, a new BBC documentary (that actually doesn't air over there until later this year) about Baroness Panonnica Rothschild de Koenigswarter. Heiress to the massive Rothschild fortune, "Nica" (as she was called, and as she was remembered in song multiple times) became a huge patron of the New York bebop scene in the 50s and 60s, even giving Thelonius Monk — of whom she was a particular fan — a home during the final years of his life. The film is a video version of a radio documentary aired last year and directed by the Baroness' great niece, Hannah Rothschild, with Helen Mirren giving voice to the title role.
Wednesdays at 7 p.m. throughout the month of April at the Library of Congress. Free, call 202-707-5677 to reserve a seat in advance.
---
After a brief break to accommodate the Environmental Film Fest and the New African film fest, the AFI's Paul Newman retrospective is back in force with four 50s/60s Newman titles over the next week. There's not one among them that can't be considered classic, whether it's the Elmore Leonard western Hombre, the noirish detective story of Harper, or the southern-drama Faulkner adaptation of The Long Hot Summer, in which Orson Welles and Newman's future wife Joanne Woodward also star. But if we had to pick one, we'd probably opt for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play. The film earned Newman his first Oscar nomination for his unforgettable portrayal of the depressive alcoholic Brick Pollitt, a former football star dealing, with a pretty spectacular level of failure, with the ghosts of his past, dredged up as he's visiting his dad (Burl Ives) on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Elizabeth Taylor plays Newman's wife, who is rather unsuccessfully trying to woo him away from the bottle. The film, much to Williams' disappointment, downplays suggestions of Brick's homosexuality — but isn't the simple fact of turning down Liz Taylor in the late 50's pretty much evidence enough? The playwright's assertion that the film would "set the industry back 50 years" aside (he did have a penchant for the dramatic, after all), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a must-see classic.
View the trailer.
Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday at the AFI.
---
Remember that corporate training video that you and your coworkers tried desperately not to laugh during? The comically bad public access performer you happened upon while flipping channels late one night? Founded in 2004 by a writer for The Onion and a producer on The Late Show with David Letterman, the Found Footage Film Festival celebrates this kind of unintentionally hilarious video, which they discovered can be found in large quantities for low cost at flea markets, garage sales, and thrift stores across America. They've developed their clip collection into a touring show, with themeselves as emcees and commentators, that sounds a little like a live version of America's Funniest Home Videos if that show had ever been, you know, funny. If you only click on one link in this entire post today, make it the one to the FFFF trailer below. And be sure to watch all the way to the penis song at the end.
View some examples of what to expect tomorrow night.
Tomorrow night at 7 p.m. at the Arlington Cinema 'n' Drafthouse. $10.
---
National Cherry Blossom Anime Marathon
The trees that line the Tidal Basin aren't Japan's only eye-popping and colorful gift to the U.S. Their own distinctive brand of animation has had a following here for decades, and has long since left the realm of comic-convention exclusivity and stacks of carefully ordered shelves of videos in geeks' basements. Except the anime tentacle porn. That can stay in the basement. Please. It's now the subject of serious-minded museum exhibitions, including the Freer/Sackler's annual marathon of anime, scheduled to coincide with the Cherry Blossom Festival for the past seven years. This year's program features four films, starting with the kiddie-friendly Animal Treasure Island, moving on to a post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure in Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone, then the most "adult" selection of the bunch (well, PG-13 at any rate), a futuristic look at the pitfalls of biotechnology experimentation run amuck (Vexille, and closing on a lighter note with a teenage time travel comedy, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.
Saturday from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery's Meyer Auditorium. Free.
---
An evening with David Polonsky
While not a film screening, fans of Ari Folman's animated documentary Waltz With Bashir will want to check out this program at the Hirshhorn tonight, in which illustrator/animator David Polonsky, artistic director for the visually striking film, talks about the making of the film as well as the graphic novelization on which he and Folman are currently at work.
Tonight at 8 p.m. at the Hirshhorn. Free.