Popcorn & Candy: Pottymouth
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Jack Rebney doesn't really care if you care about him. Or so he'd have you believe. And in denying his interest in your interest, he'd probably use some pretty colorful language. Rebney is the star of one of the most famous viral videos in history, a series of NSFW clips so powerfully hilarious that they went viral back in the days of VHS. The clips, outtakes from the shoot of a Winnebago promotional video show Rebney in various stages of profanity-laden anger, as he forgets his lines, gets attacked by flies, and endures a particularly hot day.
Documentary filmmaker Ben Steinbauer was fascinated by the footage, and wanted the backstory. But when he set out to find Rebney, the Winnebago salesman was nowhere to be found. The first portion of Winnebago Man documents Steinbauer's search, during which he muses on the nature of this kind of fleeting celebrity as he looks at what happened to other people made famous on the wings of clips that depicted them in less-than-flattering lights. When he does track down Rebney, living as a recluse in the mountains of Northern California and only just barely aware of his fame, Steinbauer attempts to bring him back to the world, and to introduce him to his fans. Both men have an impressive stubborn streak, and the resulting standoff supplies the film with plenty of drama, while Steinbauer's quest, which seems foolhardy at times, proves more meaningful than probably even he would have guessed.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at The Avalon. You can read my full-length review of the film here.
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Frank Capra, while best known for his work through the 30s and 40s in Hollywood, got his start in the silent era -- first working in prop departments, before working his way up to the director's chair, primarily behind the lens of silent movies for the first five years of his career, before making the leap to talkies in 1929. Those silent films aren't seen much, given the fame of the work that followed, but the National Gallery is screening one of his final silents this weekend as part of their Cinema Ritrovato rarities series. Their selection is a 1928 feature, The Way of the Strong, which features Mitchell Lewis as a bootlegger involved in a gang war with a rival bootlegger. Mitchell was a career supporting actor during the twenties who then logged dozens of uncredited bit parts after sound took over; he was never a star, due to his fairly unremarkable looks; Capra bucked the system by not only casting Mitchell in a leading role, but making his spectacular ugliness part of the plot -- Mitchell is also trying to woo a girl that he rescues from the streets. Capra would become known for his optimistic and cheery outlook, but The Way of the Strong shows an alternate, much darker path that the director of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful life could have taken.
Saturday at 2 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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Few true crime stories in American history seemed more suited to cinematic treatment than that of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who spent their early twenties terrorizing banks, general stores, and gas stations across the Midwest in a legendary three-year run of robberies and murders. Their youth, their romantic involvement, and the complicity of the media in sensationalizing their story virtually assured an eventual film adaptation. But it wasn't until the late 60s, as strict moral codes were finally loosening in Hollywood, that the film could become a reality, at least in the violent, sexually suggestive form it took.
At one point, the project was attached to each of the highest profile French New Wave directors, first François Truffaut, who actually worked on it before passing it on, and then Jean-Luc Godard, who producers likely realized would have an even more revisionist and avant-garde take on the material than what they already had on their hands, given the direction in which he was already headed by the mid-60s. So it went to Arthur Penn, who still displayed a heavy New Wave influence. Penn made a film that was shocking in its day for its violence and sexuality, particularly with major stars like Warren Beatty attached, and for an audience still used to decades of the restrictive Hayes Code. New York Times Critic Bosley Crowther, legendarily phobic about film violence, declared it to be "as pointless as it is lacking in taste." I wonder what Crowther might have said to the idea of a public screening on the National Mall; the film is the final installment of this year's Screen on the Green.
View the trailer.
Monday evening after sunset on the National Mall between 4th and 7th Streets.
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The Smithsonian's Latino Center is currently in the midst of a series of exhibits on Argentinean culture that started in the spring and extend through December. Ethnographic filmmaker Jorge Preloran has been making films about the people of Argentina for years, and recently donated his entire body of work to the Human Studies Film Archives. This weekend, the Smithsonian American Indian Museum will screen two shorts from this collection of 46 films. The first, Chucalezna, is a 1968 film about a small village on the Bolivian border which has a rich tradition of making landscape painters out of their children. This is followed by Señalada en Juella, a film about an annual festival in which residents of that same area offer goats and sheep up as sacrifices to the goddess Pachamama.
Saturday and Sunday at 11:30 a.m. at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Free.
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For the second year, the Maya Indie Film Series is presenting a collection of independent films that are touring eight American cities throughout the next few weeks. This week, it's D.C.'s turn, and the seven films in the series will all be showing on a rotating schedule at E Street Cinema. The films aren't exactly ultra-indie fare (and one wouldn't really expect it to be, given sponsorships by both Blockbuster and Verizon), with recognizable names including Martin Sheen, Jimmy Smits, Rory Culkin, Michelle Rodriguez, Diego Luna, and America Ferrara among the stars of some of the films. The connecting tissue is that all of these films are Latino-themed or about Latino characters. They include a film about a Mexican boxer (The Kid: Chamaco), one about Roberto Clemente (Chasing 3000), and another about a group of sisters standing up to the Haitian dictatorship in the 1950s (Tropico de Sangre).
Starts tomorrow and runs for one week, with seven films in rotation throughout the week, at E Street Cinema. See the series site for descriptions of all the films and the schedule.
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Also opening tomorrow is [REC] 2, the sequel to the surprisingly effective 2009 Spanish horror film. We'll have a full-length review tomorrow, as it occupies the midnight slot at E Street on Friday and Saturday nights.