DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Jack Rebney doesn’t really care if you care about him. Or so he’d have you believe. And in denying his interest in your interest, he’d probably use some pretty colorful language. Rebney is the star of one of the most famous viral videos in history, a series of NSFW clips so powerfully hilarious that they went viral back in the days of VHS. The clips, outtakes from the shoot of a Winnebago promotional video show Rebney in various stages of profanity-laden anger, as he forgets his lines, gets attacked by flies, and endures a particularly hot day.
Documentary filmmaker Ben Steinbauer was fascinated by the footage, and wanted the backstory. But when he set out to find Rebney, the Winnebago salesman was nowhere to be found. The first portion of Winnebago Man documents Steinbauer’s search, during which he muses on the nature of this kind of fleeting celebrity as he looks at what happened to other people made famous on the wings of clips that depicted them in less-than-flattering lights. When he does track down Rebney, living as a recluse in the mountains of Northern California and only just barely aware of his fame, Steinbauer attempts to bring him back to the world, and to introduce him to his fans. Both men have an impressive stubborn streak, and the resulting standoff supplies the film with plenty of drama, while Steinbauer’s quest, which seems foolhardy at times, proves more meaningful than probably even he would have guessed.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at The Avalon. You can read my full-length review of the film here.
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Frank Capra, while best known for his work through the 30s and 40s in Hollywood, got his start in the silent era — first working in prop departments, before working his way up to the director’s chair, primarily behind the lens of silent movies for the first five years of his career, before making the leap to talkies in 1929. Those silent films aren’t seen much, given the fame of the work that followed, but the National Gallery is screening one of his final silents this weekend as part of their Cinema Ritrovato rarities series. Their selection is a 1928 feature, The Way of the Strong, which features Mitchell Lewis as a bootlegger involved in a gang war with a rival bootlegger. Mitchell was a career supporting actor during the twenties who then logged dozens of uncredited bit parts after sound took over; he was never a star, due to his fairly unremarkable looks; Capra bucked the system by not only casting Mitchell in a leading role, but making his spectacular ugliness part of the plot — Mitchell is also trying to woo a girl that he rescues from the streets. Capra would become known for his optimistic and cheery outlook, but The Way of the Strong shows an alternate, much darker path that the director of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful life could have taken.
Saturday at 2 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
