Popcorn & Candy: A Dish Best Served Cold
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Quentin Tarantino has been talking about making a World War II movie for a good ten years now. If you know anything about the director, you know that amounts to a lot of talking. And I hope, for his sake, that it's good; after multiple scripts, claims that it's some of the best writing he's ever done, and his own opinion that it's his best since Pulp Fiction, he's not exactly downplaying expectations. And Harvey Weinstein better hope things go well at the box office too, since he was recently quoted as saying that if he doesn't get a hit out of somebody soon, he'll be chauffeuring or making burgers for a living. I've got bad news for Harvey: Inglourious Basterds looks like a hell of a lot of fun, but I'm not sure how much of a market there is for a violent R-rated 2.5 hour period piece about Jewish soldiers scalping Nazis. Maybe if the soldiers were exacting revenge for the Nazi position in the health care debate. That seems to bring people out in droves.
Still, I'll be there Friday night, if only because no one classes up trashy subject matter quite like Tarantino. His take on exploitation cinema has begun to take on a nearly operatic scope, and at this point his work is more than just a pastiche of endless homage. Even if he does claim that Basterds is his own attempt to graft gritty 1960s & '70s war movies to bloody spaghetti westerns, his output shows that as much as his works can be stitched together, like Frankenstein's monsters, they have a personality and a consciousness all their own. Basterds looks like no exception, but even if it isn't, watching Brad Pitt ham it up as the cocky, bloodthirsty hick in charge of this unit looks like a pretty good time.
View the trailer.
Opens throughout the area tomorrow.
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When they weren't subjecting their population to the evils of universal health care, the Nazis also liked to fund films, and not just masterpieces of propaganda. Münchausen was designed to show the world that Germany could compete with the most opulent cinema, but the producers managed to hire a staunchly anti-fascist writer, Erich Kästner, to pen the screenplay. The result was a richly colorful fantasy on the imagined life of the famous Baron, who had already once been tackled in film by none other than moving picture pioneer Georges Méliès, and much later (and closer to the memory of most reading this) by Terry Gilliam. Kästner's version, while not overtly political, manages to take subtle swipes at the Third Reich, which is no small achievement for a movie produced by Joseph Goebbels.
View a clip from the movie.
Wednesday at 6:30 p.m .at the Goethe-Institut. $6.
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For someone with the reputation of Brian De Palma, a quick look at his filmography reveals that surprisingly, his truly awful films actually outnumber his great ones. A look at the last 20 years suggests maybe he should have quit while he was ahead in the '80s. And for all the fanfare over The Untouchables and Scarface, he's still at his best as a director of taut, Hitchcockian thrillers, and of those films, none is better than Blow Out. De Palma's style is, on its own, a demonstration for his love of the mechanics of moviemaking, sometimes to a fault. So it stands to reason that his most beautifully crafted film is itself about the craft of the movies. John Travolta plays a sound man who, while out recording sound effects for a trashy exploitation film, witnesses a car carrying the governor have a blow out that sends it into a lake. But when he plays back his tape later, he clearly hears a gunshot before the tire goes out. When he starts making noise about it, the same plot that killed the governor begins to close in on him, led by John Lithgow in one of the most chilling performances in all of cinema.
View the trailer.
Saturday, Sunday, and next Thursday at the AFI.
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John Hughes Film Series at Asylum
Not long after John Hughes' recent passing, I had some friends over for a screening of The Breakfast Club. I hadn't seen it in a while, but it had always been my favorite of his string of '80s classics. Like most of his work as a director, it's visually flat, he gets uneven performances from his actors, and even in this simple, play-like film, his tendency toward haphazardly inserting somewhat irrational and unexplained fantasy amid the mundanities of suburban life are still apparent. Yet I still couldn't shake the sense that I was watching a kind of masterpiece.
Maybe it was the overriding sense of nostalgia borne out of dozens of repeated viewings as a middle schooler. But rather, I think I think there really is a subtle genius in Hughes's best work that is clearest in that film, and it's not his gift for the one liner — though few films are as quotable. It's that Hughes realized that high school really isn't about us versus them, insiders versus outsiders. Without making excuses for people who were unrepentant assholes, Hughes was able to recognize that the essence of adolescence is that we all feel like "them," that we're all outsiders. Andrew's essay at the end of The Breakfast Club spells that out explicitly, but what's far more affecting are the insecurities the director drops into the conversations throughout the movie, or the genuine fear in Bender's eyes when he drops his tough guy façade. It's a quality that's present in all his best work, and that's why we still watch him, not just for the nostalgic slice of '80s life.
View the trailers for Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Five of John Hughes' best known films screen Sunday, Tuesday, and next Thursday at Asylum. Check the bar's events page for the schedule. Free.
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Based on this first feature, French filmmaker Sophie Barthes may have a bright future ahead. It's not that Cold Souls is startlingly original; the quirky film is right out of the Charlie Kaufman handbook, with Paul Giamatti playing himself (shades of Being John Malkovich), and engaging a company to provide an unusual scientific service designed to ease his troubled mind (much like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). In this case, the service is soul removal and storage, which the folksy doctor in charge (played perfectly by David Strathairn) tells Giamatti will help him in his onstange portrayal of Uncle Vanya, which is causing the actor a great deal of psychological difficulty. Unfortunately, his soul gets sold on the black market while it's supposed to be on ice. Comparisons to Kaufman are inevitable, but not entirely fair, because Barthes' film, while it does go a little nutty in the third act just like Kaufman's, has a gorgeously understated tone often missing from Kaufman's work. Barthes is less showy, and it pays off in a quietly ambiguous last shot that beautifully ends things, without ever really trying to explicitly answer the film's underlying question of what the soul is.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street and Shirlington.