DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Opponents of Kirby Dick’s new documentary — we covered one earlier today — will say that people’s private lives should remain private. The subjects of the documentary are closeted elected officials who actively legislate against gay rights. So how much claim to privacy do they have when they push laws that block equal rights for people who engage in the same behavior they themselves are engaging in secretively? The real subject of Outrage is hypocrisy, of course. There’s no shortage of that on Capitol Hill, so Dick’s film focuses on this one particularly heinous manifestation.
Perhaps most surprisingly, it’s not a very partisan picture. Dick gives a great deal of screen time to openly gay Republicans (D.C. Council member and former GOP’er David Catania gets a lot of screen time), many of whom seem to feel even more betrayed by their closeted brethren than those on the left side of the aisle. Despite the potentially titillating subject matter, Dick isn’t interested in gossip or tabloid journalism, and doesn’t talk about anyone unless they both have an anti-gay record and there is significant evidence to suggest they’re doing so despite being gay themselves. And while the number of closeted gays in government may be no secret to those of us who live and work here, this has the potential to be a truly shocking documentary for those outside the beltway. More than just pointing fingers, the film serves as a compelling motivation for those in the closet to come out: a number of politicians who have done just that talk on camera about how liberating the experience was. It’s a powerful film, both in topic and in impact.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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A year after the passing of Charlton Heston, the AFI offers up this 10-film retrospective of the actor’s work. The series hits all of the Heston archetypes. There’s Heston in classical and biblical epics like El Cid and Ben Hur. Heston in westerns like Will Penny and The Big Country, the latter one of the titles being screened this weekend, along with the classic Orson Welles noir, Touch of Evil. And, of course, there’s a trio of films from his late 1960s/early ’70s dystopian work (Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green), highly political allegories that in addition to having broad appeal by virtue of their being great pieces of pure entertainment, also were well loved by left wing audiences who identified with their “man is his own worst enemy” messages—the same audiences who would later deride Heston for his dedication to the NRA. Whatever you thought of Heston’s politics, either in mid-life or in old age, there’s no denying the commanding presence he was on the screen, no matter what kind of film he was in.
The Heston retrospective starts on Saturday at the AFI and runs through the end of June.
