DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Indie: Lake of Fire
Michael Moore may have grabbed all the press where high profile documentaries are concerned, but it’s Tony Kaye’s Lake of Fire that is being quietly talked about as the most powerful documentary of the year. Which is remarkable considering its subject is one of the most talked about and analyzed issues on the American political stage. Finding a fresh perspective would seem difficult at best.
You may remember Kaye as the British director who famously trashed his career after the release of his debut feature, American History X, trying unsuccessfully to remove his name from the film and placing ads denouncing the final cut of the movie. He retreated back into an exile of music videos, commercials, and the occasional obscure ultra-indie feature. All the while, though, and even before the AHX debacle, he was working on Lake of Fire, a sprawling two-and-a-half hour documentary, self financed and made over the course of 17 years, that attempts to frame the abortion debate in purely non-judgmental terms, giving equal screen time and equal weight to both sides. It’s a move bound to anger strict adherents to either position, but may have resulted in the definitive work examining the issue. Shot entirely in black and white and mostly on film (a documentary rarity anymore), the film looks to display Kaye’s meticulous visual sense, and, from the sweeping strings in the trailer, his tendency to flirt with melodrama.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the AFI Silver Theatre.
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Special Event: Robert Altman, Edward Hopper, and the Spaces of Unease, a lecture by film historian Robert Kolker, and a screening of Altman’s Short Cuts
As we mentioned earlier this month, the National Gallery of Art is in the midst of an Edward Hopper exhibit. Hopper’s work, his inventive use of moody light and shadow, his ability to convey emotions and suggest the stories of his subjects through a single image, dovetails nicely with both the cinema of his era and those filmmakers who have consciously taken his work as inspiration. This weekend the museum presents the first in a three-part series examining Hopper’s relationship with the world of film, kicking off with a lecture by film historian Robert Kolker on one relationship in particular, Hopper and his influence on Robert Altman. Following the lecture, perhaps Altman’s most Hopper-esque work (and, in this writer’s opinion, his greatest), Short Cuts. The film weaves a web of interconnected vignettes out of the short stories of Raymond Carver, a writer who, in his melancholy snapshots of working and middle class America, probably owes a bit of a debt to Hopper’s legacy as well. Altman’s film charts a path through joy and tragedy (but shading more towards the latter), exploring every corner of Los Angeles with a huge ensemble cast that includes great turns by Jack Lemmon, Frances McDormand, Lily Tomlin, Tom Waits (in perhaps the greatest role of his quirky and unpredictable acting career) along with a host of others.
View the trailer.
Playing at the National Gallery of Art‘s East Building Auditorium on Saturday at 2 p.m. Admission is free.
