DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
This week at Popcorn & Candy we bring to a close our completely unintentional three week series of leading with Communism-linked films. And Warren Beatty’s career-peak Reds is a fitting trilogy conclusion, as it combines elements from both featured films of the last two weeks. Reds and Zhivago share a common setting (the Russian Revolution) and genre (romantic historical epic). And both Reds and Trumbo feature American writers with a fascination with Communism as their protagonists.
The subject of Beatty’s film is John Reed, a young American writer who wrote a first-hand account of the Russian Revolution, in which he got caught up over the course of a couple of visits to Russia during the war. Reed’s own wide-eyed idealism is often characterized—perhaps not incorrectly—as an overriding naïvité, and today he’s not nearly as highly regarded as many of those in his Greenwich Village circle, including playwright Eugene O’Neill (portrayed in the film by Jack Nicholson) and feminist writer and Reed paramour Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton). Beatty’s movie is a study in ambition, as much (if not moreso) of Beatty himself than his subjects. Over three hours long, unapologetically romantic and political, and years in the making, Beatty used all the patience available to him from the studios to make the film that would become his crowning achievement, earning a dozen Academy Award nominations and a win for himself as Best Director (though the film itself lost out to Chariots of Fire for Picture). Beatty’s imaginitive, though sometimes overlong, vision includes a quasi-documentary inclusion of many of Reed’s surviving peers as “witnesses”, speaking to the camera in interviews about their (often fading) memories of the early days of the the American left. Due to Beatty’s refusal to submit to a TV edit, Reds went largely unseen for many years, and only two years ago was released on DVD. Whatever your opinion of Beatty’s politics, or the film’s, it’s an often overlooked American classic, as well as one of the final examples of the studio-sponsored auteurism of the late 60s and 70s, when major studios would willingly throw money at the grandiose, though often unmarketable visions of strong-willed filmmakers.
View the trailer.
Saturday at 12:30 p.m. and Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the AFI.
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The rise and fall of The Germs seems so cinematic that it’s really a surprise that it’s taken this long for a movie to be made about the band. One of the most important, influential, and popular bands of the late-70s L.A. punk scene, their rise was meteoric, their run a textbook case of rock ‘n’ roll excess. Particularly where singer Darby Crash was concerned. Crash is a study in alcohol-soaked, drug-infused lack of control, who sought to live fast and die young with a passion that could almost be admired if it wasn’t so colossally stupid. Music biopics have been popping up all over the place in recent years, with many of the results being fairly tepid formula pieces. Will director Rodger Grossman avoid the same fate? We hope so. Shane West seems like a rather pretty-boy choice to play the prodigiously damaged Crash, but the actor threw himself so hard into the role that the surviving band members invited him to join them in their reunion. Which we hope is a good sign that the movie he’s starring in won’t just be rock-biopic-by-numbers.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for one week only at E Street Cinema.
