DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Concert films are a notoriously disappointing bunch, promising the excitement of front row tickets and a backstage pass to a band’s live show, but usually just delivering yawns and the realization that there’s no substitute for actually being there. And then there’s Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, a film which redefined the genre. When people say (and it’s been said a lot over the years) that it’s the best concert film ever released, it’s less a statement about a ranked list of concert movies, and more a reflection of the fact that watching Stop Making Sense is an entirely different experience: it’s at the top of a list of one.
The film’s success lies at the center of a sort of perfect storm of elements. The Talking Heads were at a creative peak, six years and five brilliant records into their career, and managing the rather difficult feat riding their oddball art school tendencies to widespread commercial success. Similarly, Demme had established himself as one of the most promising of Roger Corman’s protégés, a talented visual storyteller able to make Corman’s kitschy low budget flicks accessible without softening their lovably rough edges. The band and director collaborated in choreographing a shoot over the course of three nights at the Pantages Theater in L.A., buildings sets and creating an environment for the shows designed specifically for the film. The result is a movie that is meticulously planned, but that feels effortless and simple. Demme and the Heads throw out nearly every tour film convention; no cutaways to the crowd, no quick cuts, no closeups of fingers on fretboards. It’s a film born of a genius so subtle that it’s been impossible to replicate; it might have changed the way these films are made if anyone else had ever figured out just how the director and the band managed it.
View the trailer.
Monday at 7 p.m. at the Library of Congress’ Mary Pickford Theater. Free.
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While Wall*E is a shoo-in for the best animated film of the year (and I’m not going to begrudge the film that honor; it’s one of the best of the year all around), once again some of the biggest critical praise of the year is also falling on a piece of foreign animation, in this case French director Michael Ocelot’s Azur and Asmar. Now, while the film is 3-D computer animation, don’t expect anything like Pixar. Ocelot’s visuals are immediately distinctive, eschewing any of the usual computer animation tendency towards a sort of photo realism in favor of brightly colored two dimensional art that is layered to create depth. The art, as well as the fantastical story, relies heavily on Persian and Arabian folklore and visual style, telling the story of two young boys who are split apart to lead separate lives, and their journey back into each others’ spheres, led by the fairytales they remember from childhood.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for one week only at E Street.
