Popcorn & Candy: The Real Real World
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
It looks like MTV's Real World is coming to D.C. just in time. With the new show set to start shooting during the closing weekend of SILVERDOCS, that gives the producers a solid week to head up to Silver Spring on a daily basis and see how reality filmmaking is done. Either that, or they'll spend the week arguing over which bedroom arrangement is most likely to result in the greatest number of cast member hookups.
Their loss. SILVERDOCS is not only far and away the best film festival in the D.C. area, but in just six years has become one of the premier documentary film festivals in the world. Many films that end up with Best Documentary Academy Award nominations screen at the festival, which is attended by some of the biggest names in documentary filmmaking. In short, if you live in or around D.C. and skip SILVERDOCS, it's akin to living in Cannes or Park City and skipping their festivals. (OK, not exactly, but you get the idea). There are well over 100 films to choose from, and don't be discouraged if your choices are sold out: it's almost always possible to get into sold-out screenings via the standby line, and even if you don't, there's surely something else of interest playing so you won't have wasted a trip.
What follows is, as is always the case with this column, hardly a comprehensive overview of the festival, but rather a rundown of some of the highlights, and the movies and events this critic would be sure to attend with unlimited time and no pesky day job getting in the way.
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High Profile Screenings
Opening & Closing Night screenings, as well as the Centerpiece film for any festival are usually big deals, and SILVERDOCS has an excellent trio lined up. Opening night features More Than a Game, a documentary ostensibly about LeBron James' rise to the NBA. But rather than a profile of the player, the film documents the entire team James played on in high school, which went on to win the national championship. Director Kristopher Belman began filming James and his teammates throughout their high school careers; this documentary is about all of them, and is the end result of years of work. The Centerpiece screening is of A.J. Schnack's Convention, which, despite the title, is not yet another political documentary, but a film about what it takes to mount the gargantuan effort that is the modern political convention. Schnack employed over a half dozen fellow documentarians to shoot behind the scenes in Denver last year. And finally, in the Closing Night choice, a subject near and dear to every Washingtonian's heart: Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer's The Nine Lives of Marion Barry examines a figure familiar to us all, from his rise as a genuine political hero in this city up to the present day. Barry himself will be on hand for next Saturday's premiere.
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Lifetime Achievements
This year's honoree at the festival's annual Guggenheim Symposium is the incomparable Albert Maysles. At the Symposium itself, a survey of the filmmaker's long career will be screened, followed by a discussion between Maysles, documentarian Barbara Kopple, and the artists Jeanne-Claude and Christo, who have frequently been subjects for Maysles' films. During the festival as a whole, there are a number of screenings of the films of Maysles, and his late brother David. These include their two best-known early films, 1968's Salesman, and 1976's portrait of Little and Big Edie Beale in Grey Gardens. There are brief biographical snapshots of Marlon Brando and Orson Welles, two complete short film programs, and the first of the half dozen Jeanne-Claude/Christo films, Christo's Valley Curtain.
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Ali
One of the special guests at this year's festival is Muhammad Ali, who will be here for Tuesday night's screening of Facing Ali, a new film by Pete McCormack that looks at the Greatest through the eyes of the men he faced in the ring. McCormack interviews ten of Ali's opponents, including Foreman, Frazier, Spinks, Holmes, and others, combining their insights years later with footage of all of these fighters in their prime. This film forms the first of a trio of Ali-related films at this year's festival. One of the others is the classic 1996 When We Were Kings, about Ali's famous "Rumble in the Jungle", in which he battled George Foreman in Zaire. But while that film concentrates on the fight, there was a music festival that preceded it that filmmaker Leon Gast also covered in depth. When he was finally able to complete his film, 22 years after shooting it, the concert footage never made the cut. Now, 13 more years down the road, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte has assembled that footage into a musical companion piece, Soul Power, which features an impressive roster of musicians including, of course, headliner James Brown, along with Bill Withers, B.B. King, the Spinners and African acts such as Miriam Makeba and Afrisa.
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Other titles of note:
- Afghan Star: an American Idol-like singing contest becomes hugely popular in a country in which, just a few years ago, music was entirely illegal.
- Best Worst Movie: a look at the cult that has grown up around Troll 2, one of the most deliciously, gloriously awful pieces of cinematic trash ever made. What we recommend is this: organize a group viewing of Troll 2 immediately prior to next week's Friday/Saturday screenings of the documentary. Alcohol is mandatory. Then pick up the whole party and go to the AFI to watch other people doing what you just did. You'll feel like you're part of the documentary.
- We Live in Public: Since we're on the subject of The Real World, we can't avoid mentioning this doc, which focuses on a social experiment/art project that was something like a cross between that show and Big Brother, with Dante serving as producer to this hellish re-imagining. Josh Harris' 1999 experiment had all the hallmarks of a combination of those reality shows: strangers coming to live together, a sealed-off NYC loft that no one could enter or exit, and cameras documenting the whole experience. Where it diverged was in the amount and quality of the mayhem Harris' scenario encouraged: 100 people were living in the loft; cameras in every corner ensured absolutely nothing was private; and just to up the chaotic ante, Harris provided recreational drugs and alcohol along with food. The whole thing became such a hellhole that FEMA stepped in and shut it down; undeterred, Harris tried again, this time with just him and his new girlfriend as the subjects. Ondi Timoner, director of one of the finest rock and roll documentaries ever made (Dig!, which is also about complete meltdowns of social ties), spent years documenting Harris' work on these projects.
- Long Distance Love: This Swedish doc looks at a young Kyrgistani couple on the cusp of starting a family, and the interaction of politics and economics with the daily reality of their lives as the husband is forced to live apart from his new, pregnant wife, and move to Moscow to find work to support them.
- Winnebago Man: The profane outtakes of a Winnebago pitchman's frustrated attempts to tape a series of RV commercials became a huge viral video hit on the internet, even spawning him his own fan site. Filmmaker Ben Steinbauer wonders about these anonymous internet celebrities, what they think of their fame, or if they even know about it, and goes in search of the Winnebago Man to make a film that seeks to find out who he is beyond a series of profane and grainy video clips on the web.
- The Cove: After the suicide of one of the dolphins he had trained on the 60s TV series Flipper, Richard O'Barry devoted himself to stopping the capture and training of dolphins for entertainment purposes. In this documentary, O'Barry and a crew of filmmakers and environmental activists go undercover to expose and find an explanation for the annual slaughter of thousands of dolphins in the waters off of Taiji, Japan.
For a full schedule and to purchase tickets, check out the SILVERDOCS site.
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What's that? You don't like documentaries? Lame. I guess if you don't want to venture up to Silver Spring this week there are other options. As far as major releases, I heard a report on WTOP recently that mentioned last week's "surprise" number one movie, The Hangover, was pulling down $7 million a day, and was going to make things difficult for the John Travolta/Denzel Washington remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. And here I thought that remake's failure was a foregone conclusion even in a Hangover-free environment. Also, can box office prognosticators quit being shocked anytime a raunchy, low budget, R-rated comedy winds up besting all comers? It's been, what, four years since The 40 Year Old Virgin and this is still coming as a surprise?
In more indie-ish fare, there's Away We Go at E Street. While it looks a little like a thinly-veiled Juno retread for thirty-somethings (plot built around a pregnancy, hand drawn promotional materials, loads of quirk), and it's directed by the decidedly hit-or-miss Sam Mendes, we have trouble arguing with John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph. Dave Eggers, who wrote the script with his wife Vendela Vida, may be the deciding factor on whether you want to see this one or not, since he tends to be one of those polarizing writers that everyone has a strong opinion on.
Elsewhere, on Tuesday night WPFS is firing up some Troma, always reliable for a psychotronic good time, with Ferocious Female Freedom Fighters, a high-concept comedy which takes an existing Filipino women's wrestling picture and dubs new dialogue onto it. And at the The National Gallery, two month-long series are continuing, one on Karel Valchek, as well as a lecture series on the use of color in the cinema.