Popcorn & Candy: Biggest Gainers
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Sumo practice in Erez Tadmor and Sharon Maymon's 'A Matter of Size,' playing tonight and tomorrow at the Washington Jewish Film Festival.
Tonight marks the opening of the 20th iteration of the DC Jewish Community Center's annual film festival, with the mid-Atlantic premiere of A Matter of Size, an Israeli film about a group of men who, after many failed attempts to lose weight, decide to embrace their extra weight and form a sumo wrestling club. The Festival continues for ten more days after tonight, with screenings at eight venues around town, with over 60 features from 20 different countries.
Other festival highlights include the presentation of the WJFF Visionary Award to German filmmaker Michael Verhoeven; a screening of the award winning Argentinean film Camera Obscura; Ajami, a film about Jews, Muslims, and Christians coexisting in one neighborhood, and Israel's Academy Award submission for this year; the North American premiere of Marcel Reich-Ranicki - The Author of Himself, which will feature a panel discussion after the movie; the East Coast premiere of one of Patrick Swayze's final films, Jump!; and the festival's closing night feature The Gift to Stalin, about a young Jewish orphan in Russia during Stalin's reign. And that's just scratching the surface of a festival loaded with interesting titles.
View the trailer for A Matter of Size.
The festival begins tonight at the Embassy of France and continues through December 13. See the full schedule here.
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For the third year, the Brazilian Embassy and the Rio International Film Festival are presenting a festival of Brazilian films in D.C. The 2009 festival kicked off last night at American University's Greenberg Theater with Brazil's Academy Award submission for this year, Salve Geral, and there are more than a half dozen remaining programs between tonight and the festival's close on Sunday. Each feature will be preceded by a short film. Most of the films are brand new, and receiving their local premieres through the festival, except for a special 50th anniversary screening of Black Orpheus, which screens Sunday afternoon at the National Gallery.
Continues through Sunday, with most shows at American University's Greenberg Theater, and one screening at the National Gallery on Sunday. See a full description of the programs and a calendar here.
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A still from Marie Menken's short film, 'Arabesque for Kenneth Anger.'
In this "illustrated discussion," Princeton University professor of visual arts and film historian P. Adams Sitney will trace a long connecting thread between the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which established a singularly American aesthetic, and American avant-garde cinema, which Sitney argues represents the fulfillment of Emerson's ideas. Sitney was one of the founders of the Anthology Film Archives in New York, and has been one of the country's leading film theorists in experimental movie-making since the 70s. The lecture is followed by four films by some of the pioneers and leading practitioners of the abstract in American filmmaking: Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (Marie Menken), Visions in Meditation #2—Mesa Verde (Stan Brakhage); Gloria (Hollis Frampton); and Gently Down the Stream (Su Friedrich).
Sunday at 2 p.m. at the National Gallery. Free.
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For her latest film, French master of understated cinema Claire Denis chose to loosely adapt Yasujirō Ozu's Late Spring. Like that 1949 classic, Denis' film is about a widower living with his adult daughter, grappling with the question of whether they will continue their current arrangement, or if she will go out on her own. Even this simple description makes Rum sound more plot driven than it is, though. Denis' work is less about getting the characters to a narrative destination, and more about quietly examining the day to day events of their lives, which also involve a young man with whom the daughter has a relationship, and a woman who the father used to be involved with, both of whom live in the same apartment building. Her camera (operated, as usual, by the visually dazzling Agnès Godard) takes in everything, from the dramatic to the mundane. All of these fragmented scenes and moments add up to something; Denis leaves it to the viewer to piece it all together.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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This locally produced documentary, made with the assistance of the D.C. Commission for the Arts and Humanities as well as the National Endowment for the Arts, focuses on the lives of the area's many immigrant day laborers. The filmmakers followed a number of laborers over the course of a week, showing their lives both at work and at home with their families, in a film that goes beyond immigration rhetoric to show what life is like for these people.
Tuesday at 8 p.m. at St. Stephen's Church. Suggested donation $5-$10.
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In the wake of the massive success of Juno, director Jason Reitman was finally able to make a pet project he'd been working on for years, an adaptation of Walter Kirn's 2001 novel about a corporate downsizer who lives his life on the road, in hotels, and in the air. It's obvious that this was a much more personal project for Reitman, who also wrote the screenplay with Sheldon Turner. Just two years on from Juno, it feels like a massive leap in maturity for the director, and his emotional investment in the material makes the difference. Fun as Juno was, the self-conscious cleverness of Diablo Cody's script constantly drew attention to itself, away from the characters and the story; in this movie, the filmmaking melts into the background, and the result is a more artful work in which the characters feel more genuine, and one that will certainly age more gracefully. Clooney is perfect in a role that is made for him, as it necessitates an actor who can actually make you root for a guy who, on the page, is kind of a jerk. Most surprisingly, Reitman doesn't allow the movie to coast on its charm and natural humor. After lulling you into thinking it's going in one direction, it becomes an entirely different sort of movie in the last act, a fitting homage to the more fatalistic comic inclinations of Hal Ashby, whose Shampoo Reitman has cited as an inspiration.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Georgetown, expands to more theaters throughout the rest of December.