DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Whenever I hear someone criticize Jack Nicholson as an overrated actor, just a crazy personality who repeats the same basic shtick again and again, I always point them toward this film. Nicholson plays Bobby Dupea, a shiftless early thirty-something who has forsaken his intellectual family of classically trained musicians in favor of a life of drifting aimlessly.
When we join him at the beginning of the movie, he’s working in California oil fields, shacking up with a waitress (Karen Black), and palling (and whoring) around with a small time crook. Sure, Jack still has his moments of unmistakable Jack-ness, such as the movie’s most famous scene, in which he engages in some menu-gymnastics in order to get around a diner’s refusal to allow substitutions or to order something as simple as toast. But look closely at the seams, into the quiet moments, and there’s an extraordinary performance here. Nicholson may excel at extremes of emotion, but pay close attention to the valleys on either side of those peaks: he inhabits this character, who is on the run from life, and hides a mountain of insecurity and uncertainty behind anger, sarcasm, and roguish charm.
The movie itself is a quiet, ragged masterpiece, a perfect introduction to the hangover that greeted America in the 1970s after late-60s idealism began to dwindle. The script, from director Bob Rafelson and Carole Eastman, feels like a sparse adaptation of a novel; these characters have rich inner lives only hinted at on the screen that one can imagine expanded on the page. But it’s an original work, and it’s to their credit that they allowed their performers the latitude to create characters that exist between the lines. Bobby isn’t the only one lost here; everyone here is a little wayward, and everyone has their own defenses up to deflect an overall anxiety that hangs over them all like a cloud, only ever literally expressed by a jaded anti-capitalist hippie who Bobby picks up on the side of the road. Gorgeous, heartbreaking, and thoroughly depressing, Five Easy Pieces is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a brand new print opening up at the AFI this week.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for one week at the AFI.
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Few film series in town combine high and low brow into a divine trash mashup quite as well as the Hirshhorn’s annual Summer Camp series. The museum chooses a theme, picks a few cultish, midnight-movie worthy flicks, and then balances out the ostensibly campy content by bringing in a film scholar for academic discussions of these films. Given my usual weekly goal of combining the classy with the trashy in this column, these events are pretty much perfect. This summer’s series gets underway tonight with Gorilla at Large, the first of three “Apesploitation” flicks featuring fearsome simian villains. Gorilla features quite the cast, with Ann Bancroft, Raymond Burr, and Lee Marvin all showing up for the B-movie fun. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for Konga and The Mighty Peking Man.
View the trailer for tonight’s movie, Gorilla at Large.
Starts tonight at 8 p.m. at the Hirshhorn, and continues each of the next two Thursdays. Free.
