DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Viewing director and photographer Bruce Weber’s footage of Chet Baker just a year before his death, it’s hard not to be reminded of William S. Burroughs. Baker’s face, ravaged by years of heroin addiction, had that same quality of gaunt and sagging flesh as Burroughs’. Both artists aged prematurely thanks to the junk and ended up looking well into their 70s when they were but in their 50s. Perhaps if Baker hadn’t tumbled from an Amsterdam window in 1988, he’d have defied the odds and lived to his 80s as Burroughs did, and become just as iconic. That was not to be, but at least we are left with his considerable body of work, as well as this beautiful document of his life, released just a few months after his tragic death at a time when he was again producing important work, and learning, it seemed, to at least live with and manage his addictions, even if he was unable to beat them.

Weber’s documentary, shot in wonderfully moody black and white that dovetails nicely with much of the older archival footage of Baker from the 50s, incorporates interviews with a ton of Baker friends, lovers, ex-wives, and famous fans. But it’s far from the average music biopic. Baker himself, interviewed on camera near the end of filming, said the process of making the film was “like a dream”. And Let’s Get Lost does have a cool and dreamy countenance, drifting in and out of the past and present, attempting to profile a man who appears to have spent much of his life just trying to get a handle on himself, and often failing, yet still managing to draw in closely those whose orbits met with his undeniably charismatic pull. Weber’s film is one of the great music docs ever made, but has languished in relative obscurity for the better part of two decades. Hopefully this limited theatrical release of a restored print means a DVD is soon on its way as well.

Check out some footage from the film in this music video for “Almost Blue”.
A brand new 35mm print begins its run at E Street for one week only starting tomorrow night.

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Godzilla

The D.C. Environmental Film Festival, quite possibly the area’s largest film festival in terms of sheer number of movies and venues (115, and 45+, respectively), kicks off next week on Tuesday. As part of that festival, the Japanese Information and Cultural Center will be screening the original 1954 Godzilla. Of course, the movie itself is a lot of fun in its own right, but it’s a fascinating film to view through the lens of the 50+ years of culture that have passed since the movies’ most prolific monster made his debut. Few films have had the widespread and global pop cultural impact of Godzilla: in addition to the 28 films he’s starred in (not including Roland Emmerich’s lackluster American remake), there was the entire genre of Japanese kaiju, or monster, movie that Godzilla popularized. While he wasn’t the first “nuclear monster” in the movies, he was the most successful of the early ones. In the U.S., where nuclear proliferation anxiety was also high (though no doubt from a slightly different perspective than in Japan) similar campy classics abounded in the 50s, only to be replaced by monsters created through other environmental accident, neglect, or tinkering in later years: Alligator, Piranha, Empire of the Ants, my personal favorite, Night of the Lepus, and most recently the excellent Korean entry, The Host; all of these movies owe a huge debt to the great big fire-breathing lizard. Opportunities to see the original King of the Monsters on a big screen are rare, though, and while everyone knows Godzilla, it’s surprising how many people have never been exposed to his first movie.

View the trailer.
Screens a week from tonight, Thursday, March 13, at the Japanese Information and Cultural Center. The screening is free, but reservations are required. Call 202.238.6901 or email jiccrsvpspring08@embjapan.org for your seat.

And for more information on the D.C. Environmental Film Festival, check out their site.