DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Photo courtesty of Magnolia Pictures.What it is: On hard work, family, and fish.
Why you want to see it: 85-year old Jiro Ono lords over the ten hottest seats in foodiedom in his tiny sushi-only restaurant modestly tucked into a Tokyo subway station. The chef has maintained a 3-star Michelin rating and spawned devoted followers despite dinner prices starting at 30,000 yen (about $360 at press time). David Gelb’s debut documentary is a stylish look at a craftsman who stills feels he has room for improvement despite all the accolades. Ono is at the top of his field, but with great craft comes hard work and sacrifice. His two sons have been strictly groomed to follow in his footsteps, but grew up thinking of their father as a stranger who left home at five in the morning and returned at ten in the evening. In this the sushi-chef has something in common with muppeteer Kevin Clash, seen in Being Elmo. But where Elmo provides comfort to millions while Clash was an absent Father, Ono nourishes a lucky ten at a time. The soundtrack, a combination of classical music and Phillip Glass that may make you wish the producers had just hired Michael Nyman, adds elegance to what one critic describes as a symphony in twenty pieces of fish. Foodies are guaranteed to enjoy the kitchen and fish market scenes, a rarefied procedural look at a strange world. Sushi-haters may not be convinced by the visual and aural delights that the filmmakers use to make up for not being able to supply a third sense. The environmentally conscious will nod at Jiro’s lament at overfishing, a consequence of sushi’s explosive popularity. But what draws this together is the portrait of a family dynamic, a dynasty ready to be taken up by the new generation but waiting for the elder to call it a day.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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Shlomo Bar Aba as Eliezer Shkolnik. Photo by Ren Mendelson. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.What it is: Israel’s nominee for Best Foreign Film Oscar, and this week’s second father-son feature.
Why you want to see it: Professors Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnik are Talmudic scholars and father and son. The senior Eliezer toiled for thirty years on a paper that was made irrelevant with the discovery of a long lost source. But Uriel has just received the Israel Prize, a mid-career award for scholarship that magnifies the rivalry between generations. Director Joseph Cedar cleverly treats the film like text come to life, bringing pages and the writing process to life with flashbacks, human maps and the film’s namesake. The titular footnote is a a minor acknowledgement of Shkolnik pere in a mentor’s scholarly work. The obsessiveness of such scholarship and the resting upon meagre laurels drives the film and the father-son rivalry, but those not versed in such scholarship may not find the cinematic flourishes enough to make the movie more than a footnote.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row and AMC Shirlington.
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© New Yorker Films/Photofest The Devil, Probably
What it is: Director Robert Bresson takes on the 1970s.
Why you want to see it: The National Gallery’s complete retrospective of the French director continues with this rarely screened study of anxious youth circa 1977. Paris student Charles (Antoine Monnier) is fed up with the modern world, and in a decision not unusual in the Bresson oeuvre, decides that suicide is the answer. As challenging as that may sound, this is actually more accessible than some of the director’s other films. Also showing this weekend is Bresson’s 1956 tale of imprisonment and release, A Man Escaped.
View a brooding clip.
Saturday, March 24 at 2:00 pm at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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What it is: The Nicholas Ray crime drama that inspired Bob Dylan’s “The Mighty Quinn.”
Why you want to see it: Anthony Quinn stars as the titular Eskimo who accidentally kills a missionary in Nicholas Ray’s tale of culture clash and adventure in the Arctic. The noble savage may be an outmoded concept, but the film has attained a cult status, and the AFI will be showing a rare 70mm 35mm print. With Peter O’Toole in one of his first feature films. This is one of two Ray films the AFI is showing this weekend in conjunction with the Environmental Film Festival. Wind Across the Everglades (Saturday March 24 and Tuesday March 27), which stars Burl Ives as a ginger-haired poacher and a young Christopher Plummer as the preservationist David to his Goliath. The film is notable for Technicolor photography of Florida’s natural wonders and progressive environmental themes, but little else.
View the trailer for Savage Innocents.
Sunday, March 25 and Wednesday, March 28 at the AFI.
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What it is: Roger Corman’s x-rated animated movie.
Why you want to see it: Who knew that the singers of “Happy together” would go on to make a pornographic musical about a duck? After the Turtles disbanded, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention as the Phlorescent Leech and Eddie. They recorded a handful of albums under the name Flo and Eddie and made the music for this poorly-received attempt to cash in on the market for raunchy cartoons opened up by Ralph Bakshi’s successful Fritz the Cat. The movie follows the ribald escapades of a lonely insurance salesman and the titular duck. The Los Angeles Times called Dirty Duck, “degrading to women, blacks, Chicanos, gays, cops, lesbians, and anyone with an IQ of more than 45.”
View a Trailers from Hell piece on Dirty Duck.
Monday, March 26 at 8:00pm at McFadden’s. Free.
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Also opening this week, two fights to the death: the highly anticipated adaptation of the young adult franchise Hunger Games; and the insane Indonesian crime dramaThe Raid: Redemption. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
