DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
While not necessarily a household name when it comes to American patriots, novelist and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo earned the title. Caught squarely in the House Un-American Activities Committee’s crosshairs during the early days of the red scare, Trumbo was one of ten industry figures jailed for refusing to give testimony before the committee. At a time when most with ties to Communist organizations were trying to bury those associations, Trumbo was unapologetic about his right to join any damn club he pleased, and to not give testimony as to others’ involvement in those clubs. For his insubordination he was awarded Congress’ contempt, an accompanying 11-month jail sentence, and a place on the Hollywood blacklist. Trumbo had a lot to lose in taking his stand: he was one of the most celebrated and highest paid screenwriters in the industry, writing films (and novels) that had both popular appeal and critical acclaim. After his exile, he was forced to write in secret, but his talent could not be repressed: twice he won Academy Awards for scripts written under names other than his own.
Five years ago, Trumbo’s son Christopher debuted a play off-Broadway that was less a play than it was a reading of his father’s letters, with his own narration interspersed. Director Peter Askin has now adapted this into a film, which keeps the younger Trumbo’s basic framework, with a number of actors (many of whom also participated in the stage version) reading from Trumbo’s correspondence. The letters are often incendiary, and always entertaining. The writer was a man who was never short of an opinion or an eloquent manner of expressing it. Askin uses the added capabilities of film to match these writings with news footage, interviews with Trumbo’s family, archival video of the writer, and clips from the films he wrote to create a portrait of an artist who could not be contained.
View the trailer.
Opens tonight for one week only at E Street Cinema.
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We all remember that game that was popular to play in school, or around the campfire, where one person started to tell a story before passing it on to the next to continue, and so on. The proper nomenclature for the technique in its many versions is the “Exquisite Corpse”. Understandably, they didn’t tell us that was what we were playing back in the Cub Scouts. Now three Hong Kong directors, Tsui Hark, Johnny To, and Ringo Lam, have, for the first time, applied the technique to a film. The resulting corpse is Triangle, a crime thriller about a group of small time crooks looking to pull a heist that manage to stumble upon a buried treasure. And that’s just one of a tangled web of subplots and odd left turns that, if memory serves, was always a characteristic of those campfire collaborations. While the directors don’t neatly subdivide the story into three parts per se, don’t expect a seamless narrative. Hark, To, and Lam are all extremely distinctive visual storytellers, and the varied styles set next to each other onscreen may be a little jarring, but it’s all part of the fun.
View the trailer.
Tonight at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery‘s Meyer Auditorium, part of the 13th Annual Hong Kong Film Festival. Free, tickets required.
