DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Take a few well known directors, give them a theme, and turn them loose to make short subjects to be released together. It’s an idea that always sounds great in theory, but they seem inevitably doomed to be extremely uneven, forcing audiences to sit through real clunkers to get to the gems. Sure, j’ai aimé Paris, Je T’aime, but I could do without having to sit through Elijah Wood’s huge-eyed vampire fawning again. Ditto for New York Stories, which would have benefited from being shortened from a triptych to a diptych by dropping Francis & Sophia Coppola’s sappy, sagging midsection. Nevertheless, I can’t help but get my hopes up when a new one of these comes out, as I adore short films but so rarely get to see them, particularly by established directors.
Tokyo! takes three rather unlikely directors to pay tribute to the titular city: not one of them is actually Japanese. There’s a Frenchman (Leos Carax, making his first film in a decade), a Frenchman by way of Brooklyn (master of fanciful quirk Michel Gondry), and a Korean (Bong Joon-ho, monsterrific director of The Host). And “pay tribute” might be the wrong phrase, since all three directors address the city in question with tales of alienation & loneliness. Gondry is up first with Interior Design, a story that begins conventionally, with a young film director moving to Tokyo with his girlfriend, who is tasked with finding them a decent apartment in a forbidding city. This being Gondry, there is a sharp left turn as things near the end. The second part is a monster movie, but not by the director you’d expect; Carax takes this one, about a bizarre monster from the sewers who begins attacking the people aboveground and is put on trial amid a media circus. Bong Joon-ho bats cleanup with a film about a shut-in whose solitary lifestyle is challenged when a cute pizza delivery girl faints at his door after an earthquake hits. It sounds like an oddball collection, to be sure, which just might (we hope) keep things interesting from start to finish.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Cinema.
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George Kuchar and Robert Downey Sr.: A Town Called Tempest
followed by Chafed Elbows
New York’s Anthology Film Archives is one of the country’s best repositories for rare, underground, and avant-garde cinema, and the National Gallery is kicking off a short series this weekend of films saved by the Archives. This weekend, there’s an excellent pairing of two directors who both shared a love of low-budget, no-frills filmmaking, amateur actors, and highly subversive parody. George Kuchar has directed over 200 films, and was popular in the same circles as Warhol and Kenneth Anger in the 60s underground film scene. The museum is screening A Town Called Tempest, a 1963 parody. The second director on the bill is well known for producing much more than Robert Downey, Jr. (and his son’s recurring drug problem). Downey transcended the underground after seeing great success with great and irreverent satires like Putney Swope and Greaser’s Palace, though he never really toned down his oddball sensibilities enough to really fit into the mainstream. Chafed Elbows is a blend of 35mm stills (famously processed at Downey’s local Walgreens) and some live action footage all telling the story of Walter Dinsmore, a man who “undergoes his annual November breakdown, impersonates a cop, has an affair with his mother, goes to heaven, and becomes a singer in a rock band — but not necessarily in that order.” Sounds like a good time. And no wonder Downey, Jr. was already using drugs as a pre-teen.
Saturday at 3:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
