DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
What it is: The AFI’s tribute to the late Dennis Hopper continues with Francis Ford Coppola’s great folly.
Why you want to see it: It gave thirty-six year old Martin Sheen a heart attack. Rumor had it they used real bodies in a scene of corpse-strewn trees. (Which is partially true: they were live bodies.) Its troubled production was watched over by a megalomaniac who admitted that everyone involved went insane. However flawed and unforgivable, Apocalyspe Now continues to infect our dreams. Coppola was inspired by Heart of Darkness, but if the finished film had little to do with Joseph Conrad, the dark journey of its creators is palpable, horrifying, and by all accounts, absolutely real. From this darkness emerged some iconic images and performances: Marlon Brando’s horror, Robert Duvall’s napalm morning, Hopper’s crazed photographer. Character actor R. Lee Ermy, a Marine Corps vet famous for military roles in films from Full Metal Jacket to the Sarge in the Toy Story films, recently told the makers of Machete Maidens Unleashed (a documentary about exploitation films that, like Apocalypse Now, were made with cheap Filipino labor) that Coppola made the soldiers fighting in ‘Nam look like idiots. He has a point. But the film is so operatic that these are not idiots so much as fools, from the top down. Bombastic, ridiculous and finally unforgettable.
Note: The AFI will be screening it on Blu-ray. Why? “Because Francis Ford Coppola told us to.” Also note that this is the 153 minute edit of the film.
View the trailer.
At the AFI Silver on Saturday, July 23, Monday, July 25 and Tuesday, July 26.
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What it is: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s epic dystopia of virtual reality.
Why you want to see it: Fassbinder’s career as one of the voices of the German New Wave barely spanned sixteen years. But in that time he directed more than forty titles, including the great miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz and powerful melodramas like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. This three-and-a-half hour film made for German television doesn’t have the historical scope, rich cinematography or fifteen-hour running time of Alexanderplatz, but it’s a must see for fans of Fassbinder and dystopic visions alike. Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch, who later co-starred with Hanna Schygulla in Fassbinder’s masterpiece The Marriage of Maria Braun) has just been hired by the mysterious corporation developing Simulacron, a computer project made up of thousands of “identity units” that lead a life of their own. But this high profile position leads to friends’ strange disappearances and persistent strangers, many of whom, including uber-secretary Barbara Valentin (pictured), look like they walked out of one of Otto Dix’s grotesque Weimar-era portraits. If you’re familiar with The Prisoner or Philip K. Dick, you can probably see the plot twists coming a mile away, but Fassbinder gets good paranoiac mileage out of his low budget. Partly by taking advantage of banal modernistic furniture. Mostly because of those nightmarish faces which populate reality, whatever reality that may be. Kudos to West End Cinema for bringing such daring programming to Washington, and for providing three-and-a-half hours of air conditioned paranoia to beat the heat.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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What it is: The AFI’s summer screen remembrances continue with this look at the work of a classic comedy director.
Why you want to see it: Blake Edwards (1922-2010) is best known for lighter fare like Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Pink Panther (also screening next week). But 1962’s Days of Wine and Roses was a groundbreaking look at an issue that is no less a scourge on society fifty years later: alcoholism. The banal architecture and casual debauchery of Jack Lemmon’s office will look very familiar to fans of Mad Men — and as Don Draper struggles with the bottle, so do Lemmon and Lee Remick as besotted lovers. Their Oscar-nominated performances still have the power to move, but the predictable rise and fall may no longer have the jolt of realism it once had. For a look at that bygone world that is still devastating today, see Lemmon’s masterful performance in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. Although by some accounts a “comedy,” The Apartment, decried as immoral at the time, depicted an even more brutal world of abuse — of substances, and of people.
View the trailer for Days of Wine and Roses.
At the AFI Silver on Monday, July 25 and Tuesday, July 26.
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What it is: A symbol of life — this time in French!
Why you want to see it: 8-year-old Simone struggles with the sudden death of her father, and is soon convinced that he speaks to her through her favorite tree. Daughter of iconic French singer Serge (subject of a biopic that I hope will reach local theaters), Charlotte Gainsbourg returns to Washington screens for the first time since her brave performance in Lars Von Trier’s alternately heinous and hilarious Antichrist. And get this — her character’s name is Dawn. The titular Banyan (a Moreton Bay fig, for you arborists keeping score) is one of many species of leafy symbolism in what might be fairly called the magical arborealism movement. What it looks like to me is shade and an air conditioned theater, a weather-porn melodrama free from the emasculating, misogynist excesses of Gainsbourg’s last appearance at the Landmark. But just you wait: she has a part in Von Trier’s coming film, called, you guessed it: Melancholia.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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Gerhard Steidl (right) with Karl Lagerfeld and friend.How to Make a Book with Steidl
What it is: Behind the scenes with one of the premier publishers of fine art books.
Why you want to see it: Self-publishing has changed the way photographers make their work available. Books like Darius Himes and Mary Swanson’s Publish Your Photography Book and archives like the Indie Photobook Library offer ‘togs an outlet beyond the establishment. But oh, to win the imprimatur of one of the great publishing houses. Among the cream of that crop is the German company which has been run for the past thirty years by Gerhard Steidl. Steidl publishes many of today’s great photobooks, from replicas of Robert Frank’s iconic The Americans, to the catalog for the NGA’s masterful exhibit of Lewis Baltz’s Prototypes, to recent work from John Gossage, whose D.C.-centric The Thirty-two-inch Ruler/Map of Babylon we reviewed here. This documentary talks with Steidl as well as members of his all-star roster, including Frank, Martin Parr, Karl Lagerfeld, Ed Ruscha, Robert Adams and many others.
View the trailer.
Saturday July 23rd at 1:00 p.m. at the National Gallery’s East Wing Auditorium. Free.
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Also opening this week, Project Nim, a documentary about a chimpanzee taught to use language, and Captain America, which may or may not prove that man can be taught the same. We’ll have full reviews of both tomorrow.
