DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The AFI’s retrospective of the films of Clint Eastwood as director is still going strong — they’ve got a couple of excellent options this weekend, with multiple screenings of Pale Rider, and High Plains Drifter. But in unrelated programming across town, the Smithsonian is showing one of the definitive performances from Eastwood as an actor. Sergio Leone’s classic A Fistful of Dollars served as a multi-purpose landmark that launched both Eastwood and Leone into stardom, as well as setting the standard for the Italian-produced “spaghetti” westerns that would become so common throughout the 1960s. All from a film directed by an unknown, starring a TV actor who was far down the list of candidates for the job, and plagued by the language difficulties of a tri-lingual production — the director and his star weren’t even able to speak directly to one another.
Eastwood plays the prototypical tough drifting stranger here, a “Man With No Name” — a character he would reprise (continuing to go nameless) in Leone’s two sequels to the film. Leone borrowed heavily from the plot of Akira Kurasawa’s Yojimbo, about a mysterious stranger who comes to a town torn apart by feuding factions, playing them against one other for profit. It was deemed similar enough that Kurosawa successfully sued for compensation (though it’s generally agreed that the Japanese director lifted Yojimbo’s plot rather liberally from other sources himself). That doesn’t detract one bit from what Leone accomplished here, though. The director took the darker tendencies that already existed in the background of some Hollywood Westerns — John Ford’s in particular — infused them with more violence and a more painterly, moodier visual palette, hired Ennio Morricone to create an unusual score, and with this film managed to change the face of the entire genre.
View the trailer.
Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. Free.
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Terra Cotta Warriors Film Festival
In the summer of 2008, National Geographic presented a triple feature of kung fu films in conjunction with an exhibit on the Shaolin temple, programmed and hosted by martial arts film expert Craig Reid, who we interviewed in advance of the screenings. Reid is back again with another kung fu triple feature, this time as a part of National Geographic’s popular Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit. Reid not only has a scholarly knowledge of the genre, but is an enthusiastic host, introducing the films and engaging in audience discussion and Q&A after each of his selections. The three films for this weekend’s screenings include: Zhang Yimou’s breathtakingly beautiful 2002 film Hero, in which Jet Li plays a warrior who thwarts three separate assassination plots directed at the man who would become the first emperor of a unified China; a Shaw Brothers classic, 1979’s Lao Tou Ho, which was marketed in the U.S. under the unfortunate (but very grindhouse-friendly) title of “Dirty Ho,” in which Gordon Liu (most recently familiar to American audiences in major dual roles in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill) plays an incognito prince who trains a vagabond to help protect him from assassins; and finally, another Shaw Brothers picture featuring Gordon Liu, 1982’s Legendary Weapons of China, a fantastical take on the Boxer Rebellion that Reid rates as the greatest kung fu movie ever made.
View the trailers for Hero, Lao Tou Ho, and Legendary Weapons of China.
Saturday beginning at noon at National Geographic’s Grosvenor Auditorium. $10 per movie, or $24 for all three. Tickets may be purchased online.
