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DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
There are a lot of bad movies out there. Most fade into obscurity, as what makes them so awful is that they're simply forgettable wastes of time. Yet every now and then a bad movie comes along that becomes a timeless classic based solely on its staggering ineptitude. These films set the standard by which all other bad films of their time or genre will be judged. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians may be bad, but it still can't reach the depths of Plan 9 From Outer Space. And as cringeworthy as Ernest Borgnine and William Shatner are in The Devil's Rain, that film is Citizen Kane when put up next to Manos: The Hands of Fate. And so it is with The Room, which does for indie dramas what Plan 9 did for alien invasions and Manos did for satanic cults: demonstrate, hilariously, exactly how not to make these kinds of movies.
What makes these films truly fascinating – for longer than the unintended hilarity alone would warrant – is the thought that there are artists with personalities so strong and visions so clear that they can actually see these films through to completion. So, into the pantheon that includes Ed Wood and Harold P. Warren, let's also admit Tommy Wiseau, the writer, director, star, producer, and executive producer of The Room. And, based on these interviews conducted by the Onion A.V. Club and LAist, either a certified nutjob, or a modern-day Andy Kaufman.
Wiseau plays Johnny, a regular guy with a heart of gold and the most improbable head of hair ever found on a banker. His fiancée is a fickle creature, who no longer loves him. We know this because she tells her mother this fact in nearly every other scene, as if it's brand new information. Her mother may have other things on her mind, though; as she mentions offhandedly in one scene, she's just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Not that we ever hear mention of that seemingly important piece of information again. This just scratches the surface of the funhouse mirror of nonsense that is The Room, a cult hit on the west coast finally making it to E Street's midnight movie series for the next two weekends. This is best seen with a crowd, otherwise you might not believe that you just saw a pickup game of football in which four characters are inexplicably wearing tuxedos. Or a timeline that doesn't seem to follow conventional rules of time and space. Or a priceless scene in which one character is nearly murdered and admits to owing money to drug dealers, but, like mom's cancer, it is never brought up again. The list could go on and on. Cinematic travesties this complete only happen once in a generation.
View the trailer.
Friday and Saturday at midnight, this weekend and next weekend at E Street.
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La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet
Prolific documentarian Frederick Wiseman's latest film is a sprawling, 2 hour and 40 minute immersion in the Paris Ballet. Wiseman's signature style, which seeks to drop the viewer into a foreign situation and have the same experience he did while he was there, without narration or explanation, makes for something like cinéma vérité, only Wiseman fully admits to influencing the proceedings by the presence of his crew. Much of the film is devoted to rehearsals and performance footage, as Wiseman watches the ballet prepare and present seven different works, making it both an excellent primer for ballet novices, and a visual feast for aficionados.
View the trailer.
Opens Friday for only five days at the AFI. If you miss their run, The Avalon is picking it up on December 4.
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For a director as consistently accessible and brilliant as Billy Wilder, it's hard to pick a favorite film (though I usually default to The Apartment). Some Like It Hot is always a top contender for that title, and was named the number one comedy in the history of film by the AFI in 2000. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play a pair of musicians on the run from the mob after witnessing a murder. But the only job they can find open outside of Chicago is with an all girl traveling band fronted by Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), so the two get all dolled up for the trip, and both fall hard for Sugar. Hilarity, as one would expect, ensues. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film, the AFI is screening a brand new 35mm print.
View the trailer.
Opens today at the AFI and runs until Sunday.
Feel like something a little more bloody for the Thanksgiving holiday? The AFI is also screening a brand new print of this writer's favorite scary movie, Stanley Kubrick's epic adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining. Elevators of blood and Jack Nicholson await, starting today for one week.
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In making his first animated children's film, Wes Anderson has been no less idiosyncratic than is his habit. He wrote much of the script (with Noah Baumbach) from the same office on the Dahl estate in which Roald Dahl wrote the original book. That book serves as the middle third of the film, as Anderson and Baumbach expanded the brief tale into a story about a fox who gives up his dangerous days of raiding farms in favor of a more family-friendly life as a newspaper man before being tempted back into a life of crime; his actions prompt retaliation by the farmers that threatens the entire animal community. Once production started, Anderson continued doing things rather differently, recording the actors' voices on location at a farm in Connecticut rather than a studio, insisting on old fashioned animation techniques that would draw attention to the animation itself, and acting out scenes from his offices in Paris to send to the animators in England. His cinematographer, Tristan Oliver, famously made disparaging comments about his director's leadership by video conference in a hatchet-job article in the L.A. Times last month, including claiming the director to be a "little bit of a sociopath." Ouch. Since then they've publicly ironed things out, but Anderson may get the last laugh in any case: he might have directed from a different country, but Fox is garnering him some of the best reviews he's received since Rushmore.
View the trailer.
Opens today at theaters all over the area.
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The big question mark for this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's tough and tender tale of a father and son traveling through a post-apocalyptic America is whether or not the Weinsteins let director John Hillcoat make the best film possible. HIllcoat, director of the bleak and brilliant Aussie western The Proposition, is the perfect choice to direct this film, and while his go-to star Guy Pearce might have cut a more effectively gaunt figure as a starving man, I can't really argue with Viggo Mortenson in his place. But puzzlingly, the trailers make it look like Mad Max & son, and it seems odd for the producers to cut the trailer to make it look like an action movie, when the source material was an Oprah-backed mega-bestseller in McCarthy's dark and pander-free original form. Hopefully the film itself will retain the author's somber tone, which is what one would expect from Hillcoat. But with the Weinstein name on the opening credits, you should still brace yourself for the potential editing room ambush, and hope for the best.
View the trailer.
Opens today at a handful of area theaters.
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You can also check out an interview of Wiseau by DC's own Alan Zilberman here: http://www.brightestyoungthings.com/movies/byt-interview-tommy-wiseau-on-the-room/
I've always been partial to Sunset Boulevard, if anything because of the classic line about the cinematographer asking Wilder what he required for the Norma's pet monkey's funeral scene. Wilder replied, "You know, just your standard monkey funeral shot."
Now, I'm ready for my cumshot, Mr. DeMille!
Oh Hi Mark.
Everyone bring your spoons.