Popcorn & Candy: Unfinished Business
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno
Lost in La Mancha proved that documentaries about aborted films could be compelling films in their own right. Failure is magnified when there are millions of dollars — and million-dollar egos — on the line, so it's no wonder that the drama of dashed filmmaking makes for compelling viewing. In that spirit comes Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's look into the collapsed production of Henri-Georges Clouzot's L'Enfer (The Inferno). Clouzot had made his name before and after the war as a solid director of French thrillers, the so-called "French Hitchcock." But by the early 60s, his work was seen as old-fashioned, as his generation of filmmakers quickly fell out of favor with the rise of the New Wave. Clouzot felt he could make a thoroughly modern film as well, and set out to break new ground with a story about a jealous hotelier and his young wife. The director was given a blank check by Columbia pictures, who were eager to cash in on the "New Wave" craze, and if they could do it with an established director, even better. But the shoot quickly spiraled out of control and was scrapped after only a few weeks. Clouzot would live for another 13 years, but only completed one more film. Bromber and Medrea managed to get access to all of the film Clouzot did manage to shoot, and show much of that footage to show what might have been, as they tell the story of everything that went wrong during the making of the film.
View the (NSFW) trailer.
Saturday at 4 p.m. and Sunday at 7:45 p.m. at the AFI as part of the European Union Film Showcase.
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Reel Portraits: John Ford's Frontier
One of the most prolific directors in film history, John Ford directed 140 movies, including over 60 silent movies during the first 11 years of his career alone. He pretty much defined the look of the American Western, bringing to life the dusty and exotic vistas of parts of the country many Americans had never seen with their own eyes. And few actor-director teams have been as fruitful as the director's work with John Wayne, with whom Ford collaborated on over two dozen projects, including the director's landmark "Cavalry Trilogy," two-thirds of which is screening at the Portrait Gallery this weekend. The first two legs of the informal trilogy are represented here, in Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon; in both, Wayne portrays a cavalry officer at western outposts. The Gallery skips over part three, Rio Grande, in favor of another Ford/Wayne matchup, and perhaps the director's greatest Western, The Searchers, a dark examination of racism and revenge, in which Duke plays a Civil War vet on a lengthy search for a niece kidnapped by Indians.
View the trailers for Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Searchers.
Fort Apache screens tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the National Portrait Gallery, with a double feature of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers on Saturday at 2 and 5 p.m. respectively. Free.
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While it appears that Eli Roth's Thanksgiving — which started as a joke trailer in the Tarantino/Rodriguez double shot Grindhouse — may actually become a reality, until that actually comes to pass, Blood Freak still stands as the closest thing there is to a Thanksgiving-themed horror movie. It's a tenuous connection, since all this classic bit of hilariously awful grindhouse gore has in common with the holiday is turkey, and lots of it. A cautionary tale about the dangers of drug abuse and of animal husbandry as practiced by the criminally insane, Blood Freak is surely the finest film ever made involving a drug-dealer-killing man-turkey hybrid. Forget tofurkey, and forget turducken. Beware the mankey. Or tur-man. We're still working out what to call it. In either case, this befowled biker wants you to say no to drugs, and isn't afraid to take a circular saw to your leg to make sure you get the message.
View the trailer.
Tuesday at 8 p.m. at The Warehouse. Free, $2 donation suggested.
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The Goethe-Institute's Wende Flicks series has been showcasing work by East German filmmakers from just before the fall of the Berlin Wall into the first years of unification. This week's selection comes from director Helke Misselwitz, who first received notice as the director of a documentary about women during the final years of the German Democratic Republic. In the early years of a unified Germany, she looks at a similar subject, through a narrative rather than a documentary lens. In Herzsprung, she creates a story about a young single mother in a small town who is a victim of the sharp rise in unemployment that plagued the former East Germany after unification. Misselwitz merges the economic commentary with a love story, as her protagonist falls in love with a young man ethnically different enough to cause the rest of the town to take notice.
Monday at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut. $6.
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Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
If you've watched the trailers for Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant — ostensibly (but not really) a remake of the Abel Ferrara cult classic from 1992 — you're probably thinking this looks like a pretty awful cop movie, and yet another in a lengthening line of awful over-the-top performances by Nicolas Cage. You'd be partly right on both counts. Bad Lieutenant is rather bad, but mostly because in making a satire of stereotypical bad cop movies, Herzog had to go a little native to get his point across. Similarly, Cage's performance, as a New Orleans cop with a taste for drugs, drink, gambling, and rape in the line of duty, seems like a hyper-aware parody of his own scene-chewing excess. The actor makes his own case for the notion that the line between a great bizarre Cage performance (Wild at Heart) and an awful bizarre Cage performance (The Wicker Man) might not be quite as distinct as we'd like to think. The film's distributors seem reluctant to admit that this is fully intended to be a comedy, but it is. Herzog picks an easy target in mocking the worst tendencies of the rogue cop genre, so sometimes it can come across as slightly mean spirited, but it's such a crazy, weirdly hilarious ride that it doesn't really matter.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street, Bethesda Row, and Shirlington.