DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
What it is: The low budget sci-fi darling of Sundance — with a local connection.
Why you want to see it: Have you ever wanted another chance, and wondered if on some parallel universe, you didn’t make that horrible mistake? That is the premise of Another Earth, in which the discovery of the titular planet happens to coincide with (and indirectly cause) that horrible mistake. Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling, who also co-wrote the script) struggles with the memory of a tragic accident suffered at the hands of her distracted teenage driving. Marling and director Mike Cahill are graduates of Georgetown University, and one wonders if a Jesuit education informed Rhoda’s troubled conscience. (Then again, both were Econ majors.) This sci-fi drama left a strong impression at this winter’s Sundance Film Festival, and now local audiences can see for themselves if this is truly an indie sci-fi film, or if its familiar arc of guilt and redemption is just low-key Hollywood.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow and E Street and Bethesda Row.
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Marge Jetton, age 104.What it is: The meaning of life and the ways we deal with death.
Why you want to see it: The trailer for Mark Wexler’s documentary suggests a celebratory look at those who live life to the fullest. That’s not all it is. But one wishes it were a little bit more. The film takes promising detours about the way we package death. Early in the film, Wexler visits a funeral convention, where dealers of oversized caskets compete with pirate-themed vendors for your mortal coin. And a visit to a cryonics lab later in the film sounds juicy enough. But then there’s the Ms. Senior pageant, where contestants spout the kind of platitudes you hear in any beauty pageant: “Life is a journey, and I’m just enjoying the trip.” Sure it’s a celebration of the gracefully aging, but can we stop treating life like a horse race already? Isn’t life about more than a Chamber of Commerce slogan?
Wexler is the son of great cinematographer Haskell Wexler (he shot One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is Monday night’s Screen on the Green feature), and his previous documentary look at life under the shadow of an accomplished father. But Wexler fils doesn’t push the boundaries of non-fiction filmmaking as his father did in Medium Cool, and his work to date seems stuck in a navel-gazing loop of identity crises.
Which is too bad, because his material has potential, and asks serious questions. If, as one scientists predicts, the era of the ageless society is upon us, how will we deal with our new found vampirism? Where does Suzanne Sommers find the energy? Wexler knows something about a camera, but his setups are frequently banal; do we really need an establishing shot of him walking to Alcor, the cryogenics company? The film finally gets interesting in the final reel, when Wexler visits Japan, the site of a retiree who puts the sex in sexagenarian starring in “elder porn” films; and a nursing home where an animatronic baby seal is introduced to simulate the feeling of holding an infant.
Documentary filmmakers introduce themselves more and more into their films, but Wexler comes across as more Tim Allen than Werner Herzog. How to Live Forever ends with the suggestion that art is the answer to immortality, and that Wexler’s film is part of the legacy he’ll leave to posterity. It would have been more memorable if it had stuck to the lives of others. Which reminds me, among the interviews with the famous and not-so-famous who drink life to the lees – couldn’t he have spoken to Iggy Pop? Kids, start smearing peanut butter on your chest now, while there’s still time.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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What it is: Alfred Hitchock’s masterpiece of obession and illusion.
Why you want to see it: It’s one of the most bloodless titles in the Hitchcock filmography, but Vertigo‘s thrills are of the more psychological variety. Scotty Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) is forced to leave the San Francisco Police Department after his newly discovered fear of heights paralyzes him during a crucial chase. He takes on an private investigation for an old friend when he meets the haunted Judy (Kim Novak). Is he doomed to relive the past? Is he a puppet to his emotions? Where is the McKittrick Hotel? The dreamlike quality of Vertigo lends itself to the very nature of cinema: do we not all enter the theater in a fog, to be lifted suddenly when the lights go up?
View the trailer.
Saturday and Sunday at the AFI Silver.
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What it is: Ken Russell’s loopy, overstimulated vision of sensory deprivation.
Why you want to see it: Do science and shamanism mix? Director Ken Russell has spent much of the last few decades working on TV movies and music videos, but at his peak he brought a gothic spectacle to the big screen that is perfectly suited to this age of the short attention span. (Though I have mixed feelings about 3-D, a Ken Russell 3-D movie would be well worth the $15 ticket and the ensuing nightmares.) Altered States is not one of his best films, its ridiculousness only encouraged by screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s signature overheated dialogue. (An overacting Bob Balaban provides one of the films phenomenal howlers.) But if you thought the symbolic montages of Tree of Life were trippy, then strap yourself in for Russell’s over-the-top psychedelic fantasia. The big screen debut of both William Hurt and Drew Barrymore.
View the trailer.
Saturday and Thursday at the AFI Silver.
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What it is: A Blake Edwards comedy featuring Peter Sellers in brown face.
Why you want to see it: Aspiring actor Hrundi V. Bakshi (Peter Sellers in brown face) is cast as an extra in a Lawrence-of-Arabian-style epic, but he bungles scenes so badly he’s ordered never to work in Hollywood again. But he inadvertently ends up on the guest list for the titular party. If you think this sounds like a slim premise for a feature film, (and Peter Sellers in brown face), with sensibilities as outdated as colonialism, you’re right. But the sight gags and comic timing, combined with Lucien Ballard’s wide-screen cinematography (he shot The Wild Bunch the following year) and Mancini’s sitar-laden pop score makes this an unexpected delight for anyone willing to suspend political correctness. And the fish-out of water theme anticipates Sellers’ more celebrated work in Being There, one of the more worthy titles on Washington Life‘s list of 100 Best Washington Movies.
View the trailer.
Friday, Sunday, and Tuesday at the AFI Silver.
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Also opening this week: the crowdsourced documentary Life in a Day. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
