DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
This week in Popcorn & Candy, what’s old is new again. We’ve got Cold War satire that’s just as appropriate now, a TV series that was at its best in the ’90s reborn on the big screen, and ancient Rome through the lens of the mid-20th century. But topping the list is Alan Pakula’s 1970s political thriller The Parallax View, which offered a diabolical view of corporate tinkering in national politics that has steadily gained popularity with the modern conspiracy theorist set. Not necessarily the specifics of the film’s story, which centers on a massive plot by a mysterious corporation to systematically assassinate any politician or member of the media who might stand in the way of their goals. But the tone of justified paranoia and raw nerve terror in the face of a corporate culture with a Machiavellian lust for power is predicted with jarring prescience by the film.
Warren Beatty, who also co-produced, stars as a reporter attempting to investigate the link between the assassination of a presidential candidate (modeled on the RFK murder) and the Parallax Corporation. It stands out as one of his least marquee-idol performances, mostly because he lets Pakula and legendary cinematographer Gordon Willis go their own skewed way with the film. Their unusual compositions seem to keep the movie’s characters constantly in the periphery, much as Beatty himself is never really fully aware of what is going on as he heads down the rabbit hole and infiltrates Parallax’s assassin recruiting and brainwashing center. Central to that recruitment is a quick-cut still-and-text montage film, ostensibly prepared by Parallax to test its sociopathic soldiers, which can still be unnerving today, if you can manage to ignore how often you’ve seen poor imitations of it since. Most impressive is an ending that refuses to compromise the darkness that has preceded it, and one that you’d be hard-pressed to get a modern A-list actor to agree to film. The Parallax View is a discordant jumble of a movie, with a nervous rhythm that always seems just a hair out of sync. It may not always be as successful as Pakula’s more popular follow-up, All the President’s Men, but it’s a far more daring film, and one that’s a sight to behold, even if you’d do well to bring your anti-anxiety medication of choice to the theater with you.
View the trailer.
Today, Sunday, and Tuesday at the AFI as part of their Warren Beatty retrospective.
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Saturday’s double feature at the National Gallery is kind of a gutsy one. To celebrate what would have been Stanley Kubrick’s 80th birthday, the museum is screening one of the director’s most flawless works alongside what many would argue to be his weakest. The real attraction here may be to see what two Kubrick scholars, Robert Kolker and James Naremore, have to say about Eyes Wide Shut
that might shed some light on the much maligned film’s place in Kubrick’s filmography. The place of the first film on the agenda, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is less in question. If you’ve watched (or, more likely, re-watched) the film recently, it quickly becomes clear just how timeless a piece of satire it is. Nearly a half century may have passed, and the enemies and means of combat may have changed, but war-mongering officials in lofty places in government and complete incompetence and selfishness behind the closed doors of power? Oh, those never go out of fashion. As for Eyes Wide Shut, most have probably taken more of a once-and-done approach to Kubrick’s last film. But in hindsight, while the film is still a mess of pycho-sexual pseudo-intrigue, there’s a thread of truly elegant menace that, on a recent viewing, actually made it work better than I’d remembered. Its merits may be debatable, but that’s exactly what post-screening discussions are for.
View the trailers for Dr. Strangelove and Eyes Wide Shut.
Tomorrow at 1:30 (Strangelove) and 3:45 (Eyes Wide Shut) at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Concourse Auditorium. Free.
