Popcorn & Candy: Tell-Tale
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Danny Boyle's award season joyride, courtesy Slumdog Millionaire, has landed him an AFI retrospective of all of the director's films, and this week the theater screens his 1994 feature debut. The movie introduced not only Boyle to the world, but also Ewan McGregor, who made the leap from British television and bit movie parts to a his first starring role. McGregor plays a cocky young newspaper writer who shares a flat with two other young professionals (an accountant and a doctor), who together are perhaps the most brutally sardonic flatmates to ever find one another. The hilarious cruelty of their interviews of applicants for their empty fourth bedroom is is enough to recommend the film on its own, but the real attraction here is the dark Hitchcockian turn the movie takes when the trio suddenly find themselves in possession of a huge pile of cash. It's theirs if only they're willing to dispose of the (already dead) body that comes with it.
Dismembering and burying a body is bound to have different effects on different personalities, and the accountant (a brilliantly psychotic turn by Christopher Eccleston) begins to fall apart from the guilt and paranoia, not unlike the narrator of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart". Meanwhile each member of the group begins to question the motivations of each of the others until it's every man for himself. Shallow Grave features the same creative team behind Boyle's next movie, Trainspotting, and while it's never as flashy as that film, it's every bit as good.
View the trailer.
Tonight, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at the AFI.
---
Ana Sofia Joanes' wants to motivate you. Joining the ranks of a bunch of recent documentaries that exhort us to think about where the products we buy come from rather than buying them blindly, Fresh looks at the damage done by factory farming, to the land and to our health. The film isn't just polemic, though: Joanes presents a possible alternate future, celebrating farmers and businesses that are seeking to make more sustainable farming and food production the norm rather than the exception. The documentary is currently touring the country, and comes to D.C. next week with a screening at the Avalon, to be followed by a panel discussion with Joel Salatin (Polyface Farm), Will Allen (Growing Power), Bernadine Prince (Freshfarm markets), and Katherine Ozer (The National Family Farm Association). Allen and Salatin will also be at a reception before the film at the Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church, where attendees can enjoy family farm raised/grown foods and fair trade coffee and chocolate with the farmers. It will be held from 6 p.m.-7:30 p.m. at the Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church (http://www.chevychasepc.org), 1 Chevy Chase Circle
View the trailer.
Tuesday at 8 p.m. at the Avalon. $15. Pre-screening reception from 6-7:30, $15 donation requested. If you'd like to attend the reception, you should RSVP by email to lisa@nffc.net or by calling 202.543.5675 today.
---
Steven Soderbergh continues to refuse to conform to any kind of expectations of how a Hollywood director should construct a career. After the big budget Oceans 14 and the sprawling historical epic Che, the director has swung back around again to minimal budget experimentalism with The Girlfriend Experience. Working quick and dirty with a cast of mostly non-professionals, and citing meditative European classics like Antonioni's Red Desert and Bergman's Cries and Whispers as influences, this film should recall Soderbergh's last foray into this territory, 2006's Bubble. Like that film, the director and producer Mark Cuban are engaging in an alternative distribution strategy, allowing audiences to see it at home via pay-per-view on demand before and during its theatrical run. Among the cast of mostly novice actors, Soderbergh casts in the central role 21-year-old Sasha Grey, an actor who is at once a seasoned veteran — with 150 movies to her name — and just as much of a novice, since this is her first appearance in a non-adult film. Soderbergh doesn't require her to step too far out of her comfort zone, though, casting her as a $2,000-per-hour call girl trying to balance her career with her personal life (she has a boyfriend) and dealing with the shadows of uncertainty that difficult economic times cast on the market for the luxury item she provides: herself.
View the trailer.
---
Arnaud Desplechin is a respected French director of narrative films, including last year's acclaimed A Christmas Tale, but the film he did immediately prior to that one was a documentary, and an unusual one at that. When his aging father sells the family house where he grew up, the director films himself and his father on a nostalgia trip through the memories that are unearthed as the contents of the house are packed up or discarded. The deeply personal work kicks off a series of three examples of filmmaking as memoir, with screenings of Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg and Agnes Varda's The Beaches of Agnès next weekend.
Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art.
---
Director Rian Johnson's Brick was one of the best surprises of 2005, a modern noir that was very serious about recreating the mood (and language) of a classic hard-boiled crime drama, but never took itself so seriously that you weren't allowed to laugh at the odd juxtapositions of 1950s genre conventions with 21st century high school. For his followup, Johnson lets the humor fly even more freely in The Brothers Bloom, a wild ride of a heist movie about two grifting brothers (Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody) who decide to engage in the "one last job" that always gets crooks in trouble in the movies. Their mark is Rachel Weisz, a filthy rich heiress with no responsibilities and way too much time on her hands, time she fills with all manner of oddball hobbies. What made Brick such a fun ride was the fact that at its core, it was a fantasy: nobody talks like those characters do, and it doesn't resemble any kind of real world as much as it does an amalgamation of realities only ever created in film. Johnson plays with similar material here, using heist and caper movies as the jumping off point for a film that is itself more firmly rooted in the movies than the world.
View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street, Georgetown, and Bethesda Row.