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DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Charlotte Gainsbourg takes a reflective breather between bouts of bloody mayhem in Von Trier's Antichrist.
Lars Von Trier must really hate his therapist. That's the only definite message I can glean for sure from Antichrist, based on what he puts the movie's resident psychologist, played by Willem Dafoe, through. The doctor and his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, have recently lost a child, a toddler who accidentally falls out a window at the start of the movie while the pair are mid-coitus, during the gloriously shot and scored black and white segment that opens the film. Gainsbourg's character is bereaved to the point of complete physical collapse, and her husband decides, against his own better judgment, to take on her treatment himself. The pair retire to "Eden," their secluded cabin in the woods, where the healing process goes about as poorly as it possibly could, but about as you'd expect from an October release that takes place in a creepy forest. That's about the only way in which it meets horror-movie preconceptions, though.
Von Trier famously made this movie following his own nervous breakdown. Frankly, it shows. It feels as much like the filmed equivalent of primal scream therapy as it does like the "horror" movie it pretends to be, pained outbursts of a mind desperately attempting to cast the demons out. The director goes beyond his reputation as provocateur here. If you've read accounts of the film's disastrous Cannes premiere, everything you heard is true. Graphic sex acts. Graphically depicted genital mutilation. Both at the same time. It's all there, shot with operatic grace by Von Trier and Oscar-winning cinematographer (for Slumdog Millionaire) Anthony Dod Mantle. It's twice as stomach turning as anything the sick minds over at the Saw series can dream up with, and perhaps even more shocking than Takashi Miike classics like Audition or Ichi the Killer. Woe to the poor moviegoer who shows up at E Street this weekend and says, "Hey, look, there's a new Willem Dafoe film, let's see that!" without any warning of what's in store.
So, OK, fine, it's shocking, it's in your face, it's bloody. Is it any good? I'm still not sure. There are times when it's certainly bad, such as the now-signature moment when a demonic fox growls "Chaos reigns" at the good doctor. (It's so laughable that the first YouTube parodies have come out before the film has even been released.) But Von Trier's pervasive use of symbolism renders the whole thing nearly impenetrable, and extremely difficult to evaluate. There seems to be plenty he's trying to say, but he appears to have little interest in anyone actually understanding it. That's certainly his prerogative, and I've rarely criticized other directors (David Lynch springs to mind) for similar inscrutability. Still, I can't necessarily say I enjoyed Antichrist, and neither could any of the other five people I watched it with. But at the same time, it's a movie that made a strong impression on all of us, that we were all glad we'd watched, and which prompted nearly an hour of discussion afterward. On that basis alone, I have to say that there's something to this nightmare, but I still can't say for sure what it is. And I'm not sure I'm strong willed enough to subject myself to it a second time to find out.
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On its surface, Tom Hooper's The Damned United is a fantastically bleak period piece, a vision of the pre-Hillsborough Thunderdome that was English football. But moreso, the film is a lesson of how one's obsessions – no matter the stature of who holds them or the purity of their intentions – can crumble the firmest of philosophies if one allows them. Centering around legendary English manager Brian Clough's disastrous 44-day spell at the helm of Leeds United, Hopper leaps across time, laying a foundation for Clough's rapid ascension, similarly rapid decline, and tortured "relationship" with rival manager Don Revie. Of course, it's easy for the audience to empathize with Clough's cocky smile, fancy suits, and devil-may-care persona, especially in the able hands of Michael Sheen, adding another prominent British figure to his repertoire alongside David Frost in Frost/Nixon and Tony Blair in The Queen. It's not too difficult to understand why Clough likely means more to Sheen, who grew up on Merseyside in the midst of Liverpool's glory years and was even offered a trial at Arsenal before going into acting. Did that last sentence fly over your head? No worry: vital to any potential success the film would hope for, Hooper and Peter Morgan (adapting David Peace's novel for the screen) admirably handle the tender balance between viewers who immediately recognize names like Brighton and Hove Albion and Billy Bremner, and those of you who haven't the slightest clue why Derby is pronounced dar-by.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Gallery Place, Bethesda Row and Shirlington.
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Chris Marker's cat Guillaume-en-Egypte listens to music in the first installment of the director's Bestiaire trilogy.
There are few in the history of the cinema as enigmatic as Chris Marker. The reclusive french filmmaker – who rarely allows himself to be caught on film, and generally responds to press requests for photographs with pictures of a cat – has quietly changed the idea of what film can be with his work over the latter half of the 20th century. His most famous film, La Jetée (on which Terry Gilliam based his Twelve Monkeys) is a motion picture with no motion, a post-apocalyptic science fiction piece that consists almost entirely of still photographs. In other work during his long career, Marker has consistently blurred the lines between fiction, non-fiction, and essay filmmaking. Tonight's collection of shorts from Marker at the American Art Museum moves beyond the usual double shot of La Jetée and Sans Soleil that dominate one-off Marker retrospectives to cover a trio of mostly less familiar works, Tokyo Days, Prime Time in the Camps, and a trilogy of shorts about animals, Bestiaire.
Tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's McEvoy Auditorium. Free.
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For those looking for an anti-capitalist documentary this fall without the aww-shucks, gee-whiz earnestness of Michael Moore, this second feature film outing by guerrilla satirists The Yes Men might be the way to go. The duo have gained cult fame by going undercover as corporate representatives, perpetrating hoaxes once they've convinced folks that they're the real deal. The fact that they can get adults, in broad daylight, to buy into their ludicrous stunts is both hilarious and moderately disturbing. For instance, in this collection of tricks, the pair successfully convince a convention of insurers that they're Halliburton reps selling an inflatable protection device called a "Survivaball," and in another, convince the BBC (via a fake website) that they're with Dow Chemical, and announce the company will be compensating, to the tune of $12 billion, the victims of a deadly pesticide accident in Bhopal in 1984. The lasting impact of any of their antics is debatable, since most of their targets have weathered worse PR disasters than the ones the Yes Men force on them. But impact or not, it sure is fun to watch.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the Avalon.
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Documentarian Joe Berlinger takes a more serious approach to bring attention to corporate wrongdoing. In Crude, the director covers a lawsuit brought by 30,000 Ecuadorians against oil titan Chevron, claiming that the company negligently polluted vast stretches of populated Amazonian rain forest land. Berlinger has a talent for finding topics that provide the maximum amount of drama; with subjects like famous murder cases, Metallica in therapy, and now wholesale environmental destruction and yet more courtroom battles, the director can practically turn on the camera and watch things unfold. Of course, in reality, there's plenty more to it than that, and Berlinger's investigative talents are put to work here on perhaps one of his most important subjects yet.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
Aaron Morrissey contributed coverage of The Damned United to this week's Popcorn & Candy.
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It's been said that the problem with making films about fin du ciecle ennui is that they end up pretty f**king boring. Check any of Antonioni or Pasolini's films if you've got terminal insomnia. I submit that films that try and emulate the nightmarish qualities of the human condition may succeed in being nightmarish, and the viewer may end up wanting to forget them just as quickly.
HA ha on Monkeyrotica! He didn't realize he was commenting logged in as me. Hoo, I'll bet y'all could tell.
Yeah, I figured that was him, since taking shots at Antonioni is sort of an occasional pasttime for him in this space. :)
It occurred to me after reading that comment that he must REALLY despise Salò.
You know that saying "You always hurt the one you love?" Well, it works both ways.
And actually my favorite Pasolini film is "The Third Test Match."