Popcorn & Candy: How Does it Feel?
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Martin Scorsese's love of '60s and '70s rock music frequently works its way into his films, and also led to the seminal rock performance documentary of the '70s, his concert film of The Band, The Last Waltz. When Scorsese next headed back to the world of music documentaries, it was more than 25 years later, but his subject was one of the memorable guest stars of that 1976 concert: Bob Dylan. Scorsese's film fixes its sights on a short, but important segment of Dylan's career, his movement from West Village Guthrie-worshipping folkie to electrified bona-fide rock star, during the years 1961-66. It was a potentially risky venture: this period of Dylan's career has already been subjected to endless chronicling and analysis, and one undeniably classic documentary had already come out of this period, D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back.
Scorsese's picture could have been a tired retread of the same old archival footage we've seen a hundred times before, but the director did an impressive amount of legwork, assembling a roster of interviewees essential to understanding Dylan's private, public, and musical life at the time: Dave van Ronk, Allen Ginsburg, Joan Baez, and many others. But most importantly, the film features the voice of Dylan himself. Though usually interview-shy in later years, Dylan's manager convinced him to sit for ten hours of audio interviews, which form the basis for much of the film. Using modern-day hindsight to give meaning and context to not only Dylan's early years, but also to America in the 60s and the crossover of folk and protest music into rock and roll, Scorsese turns simple biography into an essential cultural study.
View the trailer.
Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the New York Avenue Metro. This is this summer's first screening in the NOMA Summer Screen outdoor film series.
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One of my favorite entries in last year's SILVERDOCS documentary film festival was this Czech film about a tourist who finds a bag of undeveloped film in a discarded suitcase in Sweden. When the film was developed, it revealed a series of pictures depicting a group of Asian men travelling through Scandinavia, but with no real clues as to who they were or why they were there. The filmmakers wondered whether it might be possible in the modern, interconnected world, to track down this group of men armed only with these prints. This self-described "detective documentary" is whimisical in its approach, and the particulars of the search are entertaining enough that it really doesn't matter whether or not they actually track down the men in the photos. But the movie takes dramatic narrative turns near the end of the sort that documentaries only rarely luck into, and the filmmakers nimbly remove tongue from cheek as they react to the unexpected way in which the climax of the film unfolds. What began as a lark becomes a fairly serious and nuanced political documentary that delivers far more than the audience — or the filmmakers — ever expected. It's a shame the movie never found U.S. distribution for a proper theatrical release, but documentaries can be tough sells as they are, let alone foreign ones. It's nice to see The Avalon is picking this up for its ongoing "Lions of Czech Film" series, even if it's just for a single screening.
View the trailer. A working knowledge of Czech helps with this clip; the actual film is subtitled.
Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Avalon.
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The Hirshhorn has consistently been responsible for providing one of the most fun — if too short — summer film series in D.C. with their annual three-film "Summer Camp" series. The emphasis here is on the "camp," with past series devoted to stop-motion Harryhausen monster movies, or glammed-up sci-fi femme fatales. This year, the series is titled OMGodzilla,and OMG does it ever look like tons of fun. With 28 Godzilla films to choose from, stretching across 50 years from 1954 to 2004, the brevity of this series is only highlighted, but the Hirshhorn wisely uses their limited schedule space to bypass well worn-classics in favor of a trio of lesser-seen titles featuring the giant radioactive lizard with a penchant for destroying Tokyo buildings under his flat, rubbery feet. First up, next week, is his 1991 battle with King Ghidorah, one of his most formidable enemies over the years, a three-headed flying beastie that Godzilla usually needs assistance to best, but in this outing, must face on his own. After that the series goes way back to 1966, when Godzilla's foe goes by water rather than air in Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, and after that it's the more recent 1999 Godzilla 2000, which rebooted the series for a few more films until Toho Studios put the character on hiatus after his 50th anniversary in 2004. Film scholar David Wilt will be on hand at the screenings to give background and context to the mayhem and reptilian destruction.
View a video on the making of the movie.
One week from tonight at 7 p.m. at the Hirshhorn. Free.
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In 1925, film was still a young art. There was much yet to be discovered about the basic capabilities of the medium. Like the first painters to discover how to use perspective to give their two dimensional images depth, early filmmakers were still figuring out how to use the editing room to create emotional impact (and manipulation) in their stories. Sergei Eisenstein's work in developing the filmic concept of the montage (long before Matt Stone and Trey Parker famously lampooned it) to string together independent shots, creating relationships between them to elicit an overall emotional response, was nothing short of revolutionary at the time. What comes simply and easily to modern filmmakers was still in the realm of theoretical academic discussions in Russia in the 20s, and Battleship Potemkin was the film in which Eisenstein put those theories into practice, in a propaganda film that dramatized the famous mutiny of a Russian battleship against the czars in 1905. Not very popular at the time of release, the film grew in stature as critics realized its landmark status, and it became essential study for anyone wanting to make movies — including Joseph Goebbels, who made Eisenstein's techniques the template for much of the Third Reich's filmed propaganda.
View the trailer.
Tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery's Meyer Auditorium. Free.
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The traditional male pre-marriage rite of passage has been firmly entrenched as a film genre all its own for over half a century now, though filmmakers now tend to set their sights a little lower than the Paddy Chayevsky-penned, Golden Palm-nominated film that got things started back in 1957. It probably has something to do with the fact that most real bachelor parties seem to shoot for debauchery of mythic proportions, yet rarely go much farther than public drunkenness and a few too many crumpled dollar bills tossed in the direction of scantily clad women. The genre-defining 1984 Bachelor Party became a classic mostly by virtue of telling the sort of story bachelor parties are supposed to leave their participants with. Since then, it's been less about living vicariously as much as upping the ante: but how do you really top a quaalude-popping, coke-snorting donkey that O.D.s at the party? The answer from 1998's Very Bad Things? Jeremy Piven accidentally kills a Vegas hooker during rough bathroom sex. And that movie was still ostensibly a comedy. Which brings us to The Hangover, which appears to continue to one-up past antics while backing away from the dark place Piven & co. went in the 90s — the bachelor party wakes up to find themselves in possession of a baby, a tiger, and wedding bands, and minus a tooth and a groom. Todd Phillips' name at the helm promises lowbrow fun in the vein of Old School, and new lows for a new generation of bachelors to dream of living down to.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at theaters across the area.