Popcorn & Candy: Peanuts & Pratfalls
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The AFI opens up a Charlie Chaplin retrospective this weekend, and while the program is certainly heavy on all the accepted must-sees of Chaplin's career -- City Lights, The Great Dictator, Modern Times -- it's nice to see them kicking things off with a movie that really ought to be mentioned in the same breath as all of those, but for some reason gets relegated to a second tier. Of course, even if this was second-tier Chaplin, it would still rank as an unadulterated masterpiece for most other directors, so maybe we're splitting hairs.
The Circus is Chaplin's last truly silent work -- subsequent films might have lacked spoken dialogue, but still employed sound cues, as the director made his difficult and gradual transition to the sound era. Like much of his work, it buries its darker, sharper edges beneath slapstick. And in the case of The Circus, some of the best-choreographed and funniest slapstick Chaplin ever put on film, starting with the chase sequence that opens the film, in which his Little Tramp character is chased under the big top by police who think he's a thief. When the audience find him far funnier than the circus' actual clowns, the ringmaster hires him, only to find out he can't be funny on command. Put him on a high-wire, pantsless, with a bunch of monkeys, however, and you've got comedy gold. But despite all the (metaphorically) noisy action, the Tramp starts and ends this film alone -- left behind by the circus that tried to give him a home, but in which he never quite fit in.
There's a powerful sense of loneliness that pervades the film. As writer, director, producer, and star, Chaplin's films rose or fell on his back and his alone. As he faced the challenge of maintaining his creative edge in an industry that was rapidly leaving his chosen medium behind (a challenge he rose to, and then some), he must have feared that Hollywood would leave him behind, just as the circus does the Tramp, making this one of the most personal and poignant moments in Chaplin's career.
View the first few minutes of the movie.
Opens tomorrow and plays through next week at the AFI. Screens with the short, The Idle Class.
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Fragments of Conversations with Jean-Luc Godard
The Centre Pompidou, the modern arts complex in Paris, recently had an exhibition dedicated to the work of iconic New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Artist, photographer, and occasional filmmaker Alain Fleischer, who has also previously produced a film about director Atom Egoyan, took the opportunity of Godard's appearances at the exhibition to produce a film composed of, as the title indicates, bits and pieces of the talks and exchanges engaged in by Godard over the course of the event. This includes the director talking about art, artists, and cinema, as well as having discussions with other filmmakers such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Fleischer claims that the enigmatic figure has "never exposed himself as he does here."
Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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It seems entirely appropriate that the first filmed version of Oscar Wilde's controversial dramatization of the biblical story of Salome was the brainchild of one of the most controversial figures of the silent era. Alla Nazimova was one of the original single-named celebrities, a Russian-born actor who was known simply as Nazimova at the height of her career. Nazimova gained notoriety not just for her onscreen performances, but also for her wild, tabloid-baiting lifestyle offscreen. She might be better remembered today if not for the failure of this film, which she produced and hired her husband Charles Bryant to direct. (Nazimova's marriage to Bryant was entered into mainly to deflect attention from both parties' less socially acceptable sexual orientations.) The film was hardly what 1920s audiences were used to, with minimalist sets, extravagant costuming, and lighting that was only exceeded in dramatic effect by acting that was over-the-top even by the unnatural standards of the day. Not to mention the eroticism, inherent in Wilde's work that comes through in the movie, that would soon be banned from cinema screens in the U.S. with the institution of the production code in 1930. Nazimova cast herself, then 42, as the 14-year-old royal stepdaughter who would demand John the Baptist's head on a platter in exchange for a dance. This weekend's Smithsonian screening will be accompanied by a live performance by the Silent Orchestra.
View a series of clips from the film.
Saturday at 3 p.m. at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Free.
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Piano tuners may never be seen onstage, but this German documentary shows just how vital their meticulous attention to detail and patience are to any performance. The film focuses on Stephan Knüpfer, the chief technician and head tuner at Steinway & Sons' Hamburg headquarters, watching him work closely with a group of acclaimed concert pianists as they collaborate to get the precise sound they desire out of these masterpieces of musical engineering. When not with the artists, the filmmakers show the inner workings of the headquarters, where piano makers descended from generation after generation of piano makers continue to ply this very specialized trade. The Goethe-Institut's screening of the film is the first in their month-long For the Love of Sound series, which will screen a different German documentary about music and musicians every Monday through the end of August.
View the (German-language) trailer.
Monday at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Insititut. $6.
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Just when you thought Oliver Stone was the biggest conspiracy theorist to make a movie about Jim Morrison (though, to be fair, his Doors movie was pretty free of black helicopter speculating), along comes this gem of a tall tale told by 70s schlock director Larry Buchanan. Buchanan specialized in taking existing concepts and completely trashing them -- The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde, Mistress of the Apes...you get the picture. In this film, he takes the real life deaths of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, and posits that they were victims of a secret government plot to do away with high profile "subversive" types, claiming that the feds offed the three of them and made it look like overdoses. A quick look at the production values in the clip linked below should give you a good sense of just how quick and dirty this flick is. On top of it all, given that no record label in their right mind would have granted them rights to the actual music, the filmmakers actually wrote a dozen songs meant to mimic the style of the performers in question for the Morrison/Hendrix/Joplin stand-ins to perform during the film. Awful hilarity ensues.
View the first few minutes of the movie.
Tuesday at 8 p.m. at The Passenger. WPFS screenings are free, but a $2 donation is suggested.
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Also opening tomorrow is Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz's sequel to his 1998 transgressive masterpiece, Happiness, which rejoins the same characters years later, but with an entirely new cast. In addition, there's The Wildest Dream, a visually stunning IMAX documentary about mountaineer Conrad Anker's attempt to recreate the conditions of one of the first attempted (and possibly the first successful) Mount Everest ascent by George Mallory, the British mountaineer who died in 1924 trying to best the mountain. Anker was the man who found Mallory's body frozen in the snow on the mountain in 1999, 75 years after Mallory's death. We'll have full-length reviews of both films tomorrow.