DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The Gates, with a post-screening discussion with Jeanne-Claude and Christo
Larger than life installation artists Jeanne-Claude and Christo are coming to D.C. this weekend. No, they aren’t planning to wrap the White House (even if sealing off the building until next January seems like not a half-bad idea) or drape Roosevelt Island in lime green nylon. They’ll be in town for a screening of Albert Maysles and Antonio Ferrera’s documentary, The Gates, about the multi-decade effort the artists went through to hang miles of saffron curtains along the paths of Central Park. The film screened last year at the SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary festival, but never really got a proper theatrical release, which is a shame. Maysles makes no secret of his affinity for the artists, and openly mocks those who find their work to be of questionable merit. The fly on the wall approach that made Maysles and his late brother David famous is subverted somewhat when the film’s subjects are interacting with the fly, but the movie rises above what should be a limitation by framing the back story of the installation as a classic battle between the quest to make something beautiful and the small-minded bureaucrats who do all they can to drag it down. In the end, of course, the artists win out (with the help of a more sympathetic bureaucrat in Michael Bloomberg), and the bulk of the last half of the film is dedicated to marveling at the simple and serene beauty of The Gates, rendered in lingering high definition shots that lovingly showcase the vivid color set against the unrelenting grey of February in New York.
View the trailer.
Plays Sunday at 5:00 p.m., discussion with the artists to follow, in the National Gallery‘s East Building Auditorium. Free.
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Francis Ford Coppolla returns to crafting film after a decade of crafting little more than wine. For his comeback, he’s chosen to adapt a 1976 novella by Romanian theologian and philosopher Mircea Eliade about a suicidal septuagenarian linguist who is struck by lightning as he is on the verge of offing himself. When his burns heal, he is miraculously 30 years younger and more intelligent than he ever was before. He’s been given a second chance at the life he failed at the first time, but as the second world war is on the verge of beginning, the scientists of the Third Reich are interested in finding out how to fend off death. Throwing in further complications is a run-in with a lost love who is also struck by lightning with her own aging running opposite to his own, and an unexpected side-effect of becoming spontaneously fluent in a number of ancient languages. The linguist finds this fascinating, of course. If it sounds like a metaphysical mess, by all accounts it is. The film is drawing some of Coppola’s harshest reviews since Jack, yet another film about fractured timelines. But even if that’s the case, it looks like a gorgeous mess, and one has to admire Coppola’s nerve in fashioning (and self-financing) such an impenetrable and difficult film at a stage in his life when he could have his pick of cushy larger budget studio-sponsored projects, or when he could just rest on his laurels and continue trying to build a better Cabernet.
View the trailer.
Opens today for one week only at E Street Cinema.
