Morning Roundup: Local Ties Edition
DCist Preview: Thao & Portland Cello Project
Overheard in D.C.: A Strange World
D.C. Cutting Back its H1N1 Vaccine Clinics
The Weekly Feed: Running from Pigs Edition
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Think you have to have lots of money to be a serious art collector? Or lots of space? Or maybe some training? Megumi Sasaki's documentary proves that with none of those things you can not only be a serious collector, but one of the most well-known and celebrated in the country. Sasaki profiles the titular Herb and Dorothy Vogel, postal clerk and librarian, respectively by trade, who spent the majority of their marriage amassing one of the most impressive collections of Minimalist and Conceptual art ever assembled. And they did it in a rent-controlled one bedroom Manhattan apartment. And all they had going for them was a genuine love of the art and their personal taste to guide them. Sasaki takes up the story as the Vogels were in talks with the National Gallery of Art to take their collection off their hands. Which were successful, as much of the work that once resided in their living quarters is now housed right here in D.C. Using this as her starting point, the director charts the course of their years of collecting, ending up with a warm profile of the unassuming pair.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street for one week only.
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A Whole Bunch of Great New AFI series
There's a slew of new series kicking off this weekend at the AFI, most of which will carry the theatre through the rest of the summer. First up, there's their celebration of day-glo clothing and Aqua-Netted hair, with the third annual summer installment of their Totally Awesome: Films of the 80s series. To borrow a phrase, it's a totally awesome lineup that beats out any of the programming at the 80s themed outdoor film series around town, even taking the more "adult" themed programming that you can't show at family events out of the mix. With over two dozen titles, from classic to cultish, it's the best 80s popular film retrospective they've put on yet. This weekend they get started on the classic end with two movies celebrating their 25th anniversaries: Ghostbusters and Gremlins. The theatre also begins a second look back at Spielberg this weekend, this one concentrating on the most recent part of his career, from Hook through Munich. This weekend it's Saving Private Ryan.
Also up for retrospective is Michael Douglas, who is receiving the AFI's lifetime achievement award this year; but rather than just concentrate on his acting, they're also looking back at Douglas' career as a producer, and have put together a career spanning nine-film series that looks at Douglas as producer, and actor in comedic, action, and dramatic roles. This weekend features the Douglas-produced classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Then there's the first of what will presumably be a two-part François Truffaut retrospective, covering the bulk of his work from his auspicious 1959 debut, The 400 Blows (screening this weekend), through 1970. This includes the next two installments of the Antoine Doinel series that followed Blows.
Still not enough for you? Fine. This weekend also marks the start of a series that includes all six of the Thin Man movies, which offer some of the funniest detective comedy ever seen on screen. The series, based on a Dashiell Hammet novel about a hard-drinking, wisecracking husband and wife detective team, is hugely entertaining. And while the quality dropped off a little by the end of the run, the early films, the first particularly, stand, even 75 years later, as some of the funniest movies Hollywood has ever produced.
Starting this weekend at the AFI.
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Sick of robots and explosions? Michael Mann looks to slip into the space left by The Dark Knight for serious-minded, adult-oriented summer blockbuster with his historical crime thriller about the 1930s organized crime wave led by John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd. Christian Bale, who just can't stay away from the opportunity to fight crime onscreen, stars as the FBI agent looking to speak gruffly and bring the baddies down, starting with the baddest of them all, the roguishly handsome bankjob puller John
View the trailer.
Now playing all over town.
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This seems, on the surface, an odd choice for the lovably trashy aesthetic normally espoused by the Washington Psychotronic Film Society. An award winning film by a prestigious, and multiply Oscar-winning director? Is an air of respectability creeping into WFPS's programming? Maybe a little, but not so much that anyone is going to accuse them of forsaking their mission for the sake of artistic pretension. Taking Off is the first American film made by Miloš Forman after a decade making movies in his native Czechoslovakia throughout the sixties. Putting its awards (Grand Prix at Cannes, a raft of BAFTA nods), it's just the sort of celebration of sex, drugs, and general off-kilter weirdness that is WPFS's stock in trade, albeit with somewhat better production values. The film tells the story of a group of parents who go on voyages of youthful self discovery while in search of their own children who have run away. Buck Henry stars, and Carly Simon and Kathy Bates can be seen in brief early-career turns, as well as cameos by Ike and Tina Turner.
View a (very NSFW, at least as far as sound goes) clip from the film.
Presented by WPFS at The Warehouse at 8 p.m on Tuesday. Free, $2 donation suggested.
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I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
Snooze on getting tickets to Wilco's Wednesday night show at Wolf Trap next week? Yeah, me too. The NOMA outdoor film series has an excellent consolation prize though, with a screening of Sam Jones' 2002 doc about the band's difficult road recording their landmark Yankee Hotel Foxtrot record. Jones had one of those happy documentarian's accidents where the subjects of his documentary suddenly provided much more drama than the material would have initially indicated, both in the unceremonious dropping of the band from their label in the midst of recording, and in the internal tensions that resulted in Jay Bennett's ouster from the group. With the sudden and untimely death of Bennett just six weeks ago of an accidental pain killer overdose, the film now takes on new facets, as it represents the beginnings of the acrimonious relationship between Bennett and Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy that culminated in Bennett suing the band for breach of contract not long before his death. What one thinks of Bennett after watching the film seems pretty subjective: I was new to the band when I watched it and came away thinking of him as an egomaniacal bastard, but I've known longtime fans who never felt the film was edited to present him in a bad light; that it was presented as just the normal tensions of differences between strong-willed artists. Regardless, the film serves as a remarkable inside look at how the creative process can be as destructive as it is constructive.
View the trailer.
Wednesday at NOMA Summer Screen, 7 p.m. at the New York Avenue metro station.
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