DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Foreign: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Imagine writing a book when your typing speed is roughly half a word per minute. That picture of painstaking persistence only scratches the surface of the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French Elle magazine editor who suffered total paralysis after a stroke that left him only able to communicate by blinking his left eyelid. It was by this method, blinking when an assistant who recited the alphabet reached the next letter of whatever word Bauby was trying to spell, that Bauby wrote his story, giving rare insight into the life of a person imprisoned within their own body. Julian Schnabel’s filmed version of Bauby’s memoir is Schnabel’s third biopic in as many films. The director seems to have a unique gift for making the lives of others into beautiful films, having already done so with artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and the poet Reinaldo Arenas. This latest has been earning him the highest honors yet, including a best director prize at Cannes, a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign film, and a lot of Oscar buzz for best picture, foreign or otherwise. Schnabel takes on the difficult task of showing the world through Bauby’s perspective for much of the film, through either his one good eye, or through the active life of his mind and memories. His commitment to the source material was such that he learned to speak French specifically for the making of the movie, despite pressure from American producers to make the film in English. The result has become one of the most hotly anticipated films of the year.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Bethesda Row.
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Major Release: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Don’t like musicals? Don’t worry, neither does Tim Burton. Or Johnny Depp. Which may make them odd choices to adapt Stephen Sondheim’s classic retelling of the popular English folk tale of a vengeful barber slitting throats and supplying the meat pie business of his downstairs neighbor. Hardcore Sondheim fans may balk at the casting of actors with little to no musical theater training in many of the primary roles, and at the truncating or cutting altogether of some of the songs, but its hard to deny that taken on its own, Burton’s vision works wonderfully. It’s the best collaboration the pair have done since Ed Wood, playing to both of their strengths without ever descending into the caricatures of which each have been somewhat guilty lately. Depp’s performance is a picture of searing rage, drawing on the wordless acting of classic horror actors; screenwriter John Logan has cut most of the character’s non-sung lines, leaving him glowering and brooding when he’s not breaking into song. And oh, how Depp glowers and broods. And he’s a more than passable, if unremarkable singer. But as Sondheim himself said, playing Todd is more about acting than singing. As for Burton, in addition to nailing the macabre atmosphere of the material, he takes mischievous glee in spraying buckets upon buckets of vividly colored blood as Todd slashes his way through the jugulars of Fleet Street.
View the trailer.
Opens (veins) tomorrow at theaters all over the area.
