DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Think you have to have lots of money to be a serious art collector? Or lots of space? Or maybe some training? Megumi Sasaki’s documentary proves that with none of those things you can not only be a serious collector, but one of the most well-known and celebrated in the country. Sasaki profiles the titular Herb and Dorothy Vogel, postal clerk and librarian, respectively by trade, who spent the majority of their marriage amassing one of the most impressive collections of Minimalist and Conceptual art ever assembled. And they did it in a rent-controlled one bedroom Manhattan apartment. And all they had going for them was a genuine love of the art and their personal taste to guide them. Sasaki takes up the story as the Vogels were in talks with the National Gallery of Art to take their collection off their hands. Which were successful, as much of the work that once resided in their living quarters is now housed right here in D.C. Using this as her starting point, the director charts the course of their years of collecting, ending up with a warm profile of the unassuming pair.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street for one week only.
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A Whole Bunch of Great New AFI series
There’s a slew of new series kicking off this weekend at the AFI, most of which will carry the theatre through the rest of the summer. First up, there’s their celebration of day-glo clothing and Aqua-Netted hair, with the third annual summer installment of their Totally Awesome: Films of the 80s series. To borrow a phrase, it’s a totally awesome lineup that beats out any of the programming at the 80s themed outdoor film series around town, even taking the more “adult” themed programming that you can’t show at family events out of the mix. With over two dozen titles, from classic to cultish, it’s the best 80s popular film retrospective they’ve put on yet. This weekend they get started on the classic end with two movies celebrating their 25th anniversaries: Ghostbusters and Gremlins. The theatre also begins a second look back at Spielberg this weekend, this one concentrating on the most recent part of his career, from Hook through Munich. This weekend it’s Saving Private Ryan.
Also up for retrospective is Michael Douglas, who is receiving the AFI’s lifetime achievement award this year; but rather than just concentrate on his acting, they’re also looking back at Douglas’ career as a producer, and have put together a career spanning nine-film series that looks at Douglas as producer, and actor in comedic, action, and dramatic roles. This weekend features the Douglas-produced classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Then there’s the first of what will presumably be a two-part François Truffaut retrospective, covering the bulk of his work from his auspicious 1959 debut, The 400 Blows (screening this weekend), through 1970. This includes the next two installments of the Antoine Doinel series that followed Blows.
Still not enough for you? Fine. This weekend also marks the start of a series that includes all six of the Thin Man movies, which offer some of the funniest detective comedy ever seen on screen. The series, based on a Dashiell Hammet novel about a hard-drinking, wisecracking husband and wife detective team, is hugely entertaining. And while the quality dropped off a little by the end of the run, the early films, the first particularly, stand, even 75 years later, as some of the funniest movies Hollywood has ever produced.
Starting this weekend at the AFI.
