Popcorn & Candy: Green Grow the Rushes
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The annual D.C. Environmental Film Festival is a massive collection of films, this year swelling to a total of nearly 140, with screenings at literally dozens of venues--places you'd expect, like E Street, the AFI, and the Avalon, but also a number of embassies, think tanks, libraries, and live theater venues. If they can set up a screening room, the D.C. Environmental Film Festival is probably having a screening there. The festival has a simple mission, highlighting global environmental issues through just about any film with an environmental theme of any sort. This year's special concentration is on films in which earth's oceans play a significant role.
With such a staggering number of films, it should come as no surprise that there's something (and usually more than one thing) here for everyone. Documentaries, kids programs (animated and otherwise), feature narratives, shorts, classics, works in progress, you name it. There's a screening of Azur & Asmar, which we loved last year. There's the D.C. premiere of Academy Award-nominated local filmmakers Sean & Andrea Fine's latest, Built for the People: The Story of the TVA. And most exciting for this writer, the festival is featuring an 11-film retrospective of the films of Werner Herzog, a director whose man-in-an-unforgiving-environment films have defined his career. The featured films include not just obvious choices like the classic Kinski collaborations Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and documentary masterpieces like Grizzly Man and the stunning Gulf War doc Lessons of Darkness, but also genuinely obscure titles from the director's past, like his 1991 Donald Sutherland-starring Reinhold Messner collaboration, Scream of Stone.
The festival kicks off next week with a festival pre-screening on Tuesday at the Warner, of Sharkwater (the title is self-explanatory), a number of kids' programs at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library on Wednesday during the day, and more than a half dozen films at various venues on Wednesday night alone.
March 10 through March 22 at dozens of venues in and around D.C. See the full schedule (or PDF brochure) for details.
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It should have come as a surprise to no one that the final slot in the Motion Picture Academy's annual In Memoriam section at the Oscars was given to Paul Newman. Newman had a rare combination of qualities for Hollywood: matinee-idol good looks, impressive acting skills that came from a dogged commitment to his craft, and a flinty work ethic. He also practiced a humanitarianism that was more than just talk, and was generally considered to be a nice, down to earth guy. We've been looking forward to the inevitable AFI retrospective ever since his sad passing, and they've come through with a two-month, 19-film collection that covers the impressive breadth and length of this movie giant's career. This week features the need-no-introduction classics Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Cool Hand Luke, as well as Newman's excellent late-career performance (which earned him his last lead-actor Oscar nomination) in Nobody's Fool. And mark your calendar for April 5: on that day, you'll be able to do a double feature of Newman's two performances (separated by 25 years) as Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler and The Color of Money.
View the trailers for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Cool Hand Luke.
Opens today at the AFI, and runs through April 30th. See the schedule for full listings, dates, and times.
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Director Nagisa Oshima is one of the most challenging directors in the Japanese cinema, famous for pushing the envelope in both his technique and his subject matter. He came of age as the cinema was revolutionizing itself in the late 1950s and early '60s, and his films led a New Wave of filmmaking in Japan that ran parallel with similar movements in Europe and the U.S. His films were often daring in their depiction and analysis of sexuality in response to newly liberalized Japanese censorship standards, and combined a realistic approach to examining human interactions with Brechtian theatrical devices that never let the viewer forget that this was a movie. This retrospective is so big (25 films strong) that no one venue can house it, so three are sharing the screenings, which will be split between the AFI, the National Gallery, and the Freer. Particular attention is paid to Oshima's seminal '60s work, but overall the scope is fairly comprehensive, carrying through to Oshima's final film, Gohatto (Taboo) from 1999. The next week holds five films, at all three venues, including the classics Pleasures of the Flesh and Cruel Story of Youth, and the highly controversial Night and Fog in Japan.
View the trailers for Three Resurrected Drunkards, Cruel Story of Youth, and Pleasures of the Flesh.
Begins Sunday and runs through April 26 with screenings at the AFI, the National Gallery, and the Freer.
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La Dolce Vita marks an important turning point for both Italian cinema and for its director, Federico Fellini. Up to that point, Fellini fit neatly into the camp of neorealist directors that typified Italian moviemaking, but it was with this film that he broke off to go in the wild and fantastical direction that made him a unique and powerful voice in European film. As with so many European films of this period, the movie is very much about the clash between old Europe and the crashing wave of modernism. Its principal character, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is a reporter on the forefront of this sea change; his beat is entertainers and socialites, the decadent classes of Rome, and while reporting on these people living the titular sweet life, he can't help but get caught up in it himself. La Dolce Vita is full of defining and classic moments, from Anita Ekberg's provocative nighttime romp in a fountain, to its coining of the term "paparazzo," to future Warhol protégé Nico's famous cameo. The film opens a month-long retrospective of Italian film at the Phillips Collection, with a different program every Saturday afternoon this month.
View the trailer.
Saturday at 1 p.m. at the Phillips Collection. $12 admission includes general museum admission, free for members.
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Geeks, nerds, and fanboys/girls (yours truly included) have been in anticipation and anxiety over this moment for 20 years now, the film of the unfilmable holy grail of comic literature, Alan Moore's alternate-reality Cold War antihero series Watchmen. After enough directors and screenwriters failed in the attempt to bring this story to the screen, it might well qualify as cursed, but last night at midnight, the faithful found out whether that curse carried through to the film that finally got made. No judgments here yet; my ticket isn't until Saturday night. So for those of you who didn't stay up late last night, the questions still remain. Is director Zack Snyder the cool-kid style over substance guy he often comes off as, or is there a secret fanboy at his core, as some of his comments sometimes allude to? Chief evidence against him is his painfully slick adaptation of Frank Miller's 300, until one considers that it's a pretty overrated comic to begin with, and that all of its testosterone-addled douchebaggery is really on Miller's head and not Snyder's. The director's adaptation remained faithful to that book's many weaknesses, so the hope is that that faithfulness will carry through to the brilliant dark satire of Moore's vision of deeply flawed costumed superheroes. We'll be watching.
View the trailer.
Now playing just about everywhere.