DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
We’re issuing a challenge to Popcorn & Candy readers this week: attend this week’s featured film. Sound easy? Well, there’s a catch. Our first pick this week is Berlin Alexanderplatz, the magnum opus of German filmmaking maniac Rainer Werner Fassbinder, an adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s epic, Ulysses-esque 1929 novel about a small time crook’s descent into the criminal underworld of Weimar-era Berlin. There are few things Fassbinder ever did without some degree of excess: he wrote and directed over 60 movies, plays, and television series in the less than 20 years of his career, which he ended in typically Fassbinder fashion with an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills at the age of 37. And in adapting Döblin’s daunting novel, Fassbinder’s baroque tendencies were in grand flourish, as he made the book into a 15+ hour TV mini-series that is generally regarded more as one episodic film than a television series in any traditional sense.
The view of the work as a single, gargantuan film was supported by a theatrical release in the U.S. in the early ’80s, where theaters would screen a number of episodes each night over the course of a week, and in some cases, marathon one or two day screenings, which quickly earned the film a cult reputation as an endurance test if nothing else. Not that it was a huge hit or anything, but considering that Steven Soderbergh’s new Che Guevera biopic has found it nearly impossible in 2008 to gain distribution as a mere 4+ hour film, one wonders what this says about the deterioration of the collective attention span over the last quarter century. But the Goethe Institut is saying attention deficit be damned, and screening the entire film in just two days this weekend.
Of course, you could just add all six discs to your Netflix queue and watch them at your leisure, but where’s the challenge in that? What do you get if you manage it? Well, we’ve been procrastinating on the production of official Popcorn & Candy T-shirts, and we thought giving away some genuine Berlin currywurst—which the Goethe Institut will serve along with other snacks at Saturday’s 11-hour screening—would be too obvious an homage to David Letterman’s old practice of doling out canned hams, so the prize will likely just be our undying admiration. Just what you were looking for, right?
View a clip.
Parts 1-9 on Saturday from noon-11pm, and 10-18 on Sunday from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. at the Goethe Institut. $12 per day or $20 for both, and some delicious Berlin currywurst will be served on Saturday to get you through that day’s marathon 11-hour screening.
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XIX Latin American Film Festival
Once again this year, the AFI teams up with the Ibero-American Cultural Attaches Association and Inter-American Development Bank to present an impressive collection of films from all over Latin America. The festival has nearly 40 features from 17 countries from the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe, plus a collection of shorts. It’s the most comprehensive collection of Latin American film that D.C. sees every year, and well attended, with nearly 10,000 people turning out for last year’s festival. Check out the schedule to find something that strikes your fancy.
Opened last night and runs through October 7 at the AFI and Gala Hispanic Theatre.
