DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Filmfest DC is still in full swing through the weekend. There are plenty of highlights this weekend, including New Wave classic Six in Paris and Kiyoshi Kursawa’s Tokyo Sonata tonight, the economics documentary I.O.U.S.A. and Shunichi Nagasaki’s whimsical The Wicked Witch of the West is Dead tomorrow, just to scratch the tip of the iceberg. Now, normally I wouldn’t highlight the same thing for the second week in a row, except that Takeshi Kitano’s new film, Achilles and the Tortoise, which I saw on Tuesday night, just won’t get out of my head, and since it has another screening on Saturday night, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to encourage everyone to see this one.
The film represents the culmination of a loose trilogy of films in which the director has taken aim at himself, using vaguely surrealist films to examine his role as an artist, filmmaker, and personality. This third installment specifically targets the Artist’s life, following its protagonist, Machisu, a single-minded (and only modestly talented) painter through three stages of his life, childhood, young adulthood, and middle age. Its world is recognizably real, but Kitano skews the film into absurdist territory by making Machisu an oddly detached character, so intent on painting that he barely has time or regard for the world around him, including the wife he picks up along the way who is perhaps too sympathetic to his whims and the teenage daughter who openly enters into a life of prostitution after school to support the family. He often plays this detachment for laughs (even the prostituted daughter, with surprising success), and Machisu’s expressionless face perfectly complements Kitano’s trademark deadpan — often moving into morbid — humor. Achilles and the Tortoise is a biting satire of the art world, as well as a scathing attack on the singular preoccupation of the artist himself. That Kitano is able to balance this satire with both heartbreaking poignancy and laugh-out-loud hilarity is an impressive feat of artistry all by itself.
View the trailer (sorry, no subtitles in the trailer; the movie is subtitled).
Achilles and the Tortoise screens Saturday at 9:30 p.m. at Chinatown. See Filmfest DC’s site to see the schedule for the remainder of the festival.
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Last year’s Filmfest DC saw the premiere of a film by a local director centered on D.C.’s go-go scene. A year later, that film has picked up some limited distribution and is making its way around the country roadshow style. This week it returns to D.C. for an engagement at E Street Cinema. Jazz in the Diamond District tells the story of a young girl (“Jazz”) who throws herself into go-go following the death of her mother, determined to make it as a singer. You’ve seen this setup before, the young girl with a tragedy and a dream, the disapproving father, the path to greatness that’s a whole lot rougher than she might have imagined. But it’s not often that D.C. and go-go get such an authentic feature film spotlight. Wood Harris, who Wire fans will remember as Avon Barksdale, co-stars as the manager of the band that Jazz ends up joining.
