DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
During Spalding Gray’s life, director Steven Soderbergh worked with the actor/writer twice: Gray played a role in Soderbergh’s 1993 feature, King of the Hill, and then Soderbergh directed the fourth and final of Gray’s filmed monologues, Gray’s Anatomy that same year. After Gray’s death, from an apparent suicide in 2004, Soderbergh decided to direct him one more time, in a film celebrating his life and his work.
The idea of Soderbergh directing Gray after death might sound morbid, but that’s essentially what he accomplishes here. Choosing not to shoot this as a normal posthumous documentary — remembrances of friends and family punctuated with archival footage — Soderbergh instead decides that there’s only one person who can tell Gray’s story effectively. So he structures the film entirely out of footage of Gray himself, mostly from his primary work, those endlessly engaging monologues, with a handful of interviews thrown in. This is a film directed entirely from an editing suite, yet Soderbergh shows the same sensitivity to drawing out a story through the subtleties in these performances that he would if working with a live actor in the room. The result is a beautiful, bittersweet tribute.
You can read my full review of the film over at NPR.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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One of D.C.’s consistently most popular film festivals is the DC Shorts festival that has taken place every fall for the past seven years. Their screenings are always well attended, and their “Best of” programs consistently sell out. Given that popularity, the festival has instituted this Rewind event, a weekend-long celebration of the best films that the festival has seen throughout its entire history. The collections will be organized by genre, and they’ll end each of the two nights with the best films from this past September’s 2010 festival. One of the festival’s audience faves has also been awarded a high honor this year, with an Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short going to Luke Matheny’s God of Love, which can be seen in the Best of 2010 collections on both nights.
Friday and Saturday at the Atlas Performing Arts Center. $12 per program. See the full schedule here.
