DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Presidential Films at the Smithsonian
The big weekend is finally here. And your tiny one-bedroom is about to be overrun with family, friends, and some person who messaged you on Facebook two weeks ago who you think you remember going to high school with. The only thing you know for sure you’re all doing is walking down to the Mall to check out Barry’s Big Day Out on Tuesday morning, which leaves you with a whole lot of time to kill, lest you kill all those guests instead. Luckily, there are plenty of movie options this weekend expressly designed to soak up vast swaths of time, and many of them are free of charge. We’ll start with the biggest potential time killer, the Smithsonian’s “Presidential” films series, which offers up six movies split between Sunday and Monday, which gives you over 12 hours of potential crowd control pleasing entertainment.
And the Smithsonian series does concentrate on well-known mainstream crowd-pleasers. Sunday’s program starts with Oliver Stone’s exercise in either tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorism or hard-hitting quasi-journalistic provocation, JFK, depending on your perspective. Then there’s Rob Reiner’s presidential romantic comedy (written by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin) The American President, featuring Michael Douglas as a widowed president even more prone to wide-eyed idealistic oratory than our incoming chief executive. Stanley Kubrick’s darkly comedic Cold War masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove closes out the day. Monday kicks of strongly with the only non-presidential pick of the bunch, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; but who are we kidding, with speaking skills like those possessed Jimmy Stewart’s earnest Mr. Smith, we know that guy is headed to the White House eventually. This is followed by the unimpeachably brilliant Woodward & Bernstein Watergate procedural, All the President’s Men, and the whole thing concludes with My Fellow Americans, Jack Lemmon and James Garner’s 1996 screwball road comedy about two ex-presidents attempting to unravel a vast conspiracy while avoiding assassination. This is the weakest link of the bunch, but surely you’ll have found an early inaugural-themed happy hour to occupy your time by Monday evening.
Sunday and Monday at the Ripley Center. See the Smithsonian’s Inaugural activities page for the schedule. All programs are free.
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Clocking in at nearly four and a half hours including a 15 minute intermission, Steven Soderbergh’s biopic about the iconic Argentinian revolutionary will certainly eat up plenty of time for you and the out-of-towners. But while the length may be daunting, those with the stamina to watch from start to finish will find it more than worth it to spend the time. And this is an unexpected opportunity to see the film locally all in one sitting. Imagined and filmed as two separate movies (one on the successful Cuban revolution, the other on the failed Bolivian campaign), Soderbergh and the film’s producers only realized how well they played as a single piece after completion. But booking a 4.5 hour spanish-language historical film into theaters is no easy task, so they determined to keep the film split up, but to take the double-feature version on an old-fashioned movie roadshow. Still running into some difficulties with this concept, they decided to only show the roadshow version in NYC and LA, but just after new year’s it was announced that E Street would get a one-week run of this version. If it’s anything like the NYC screening, the film plays without credits, and audiences are given a nice little commemorative book with production photos and a printed version of the credits. The film itself more than lives up to its epic ambitions, with Benicio del Toro giving the definitive portrayal of Guevara and Soderbergh creating a portrait that is remarkably evenhanded considering the polarizing nature of his subject. Those going in hoping for a movie with an agenda to lionize or condemn the man will be disappointed; those looking for a meticulously researched and expertly presented accounting of the man’s actions, strengths, and failings will find much to like here.
View the trailer.
Full 4+ hour roadshow edition of the film starts tomorrow at E Street with two screenings daily for the next week (with a special admission price of $15). After that, the film will be shown as two separate movies (at standard admission).
