DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Stefan KnupferWhat it is: The life of a piano tuner is more exciting than you might think.
Why you want to see it: Steinway technician Stefan Knüpfer may not seem an obvious choice for a documentary subject, but Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis’ Pianomania finds plenty of drama and tension in a field of precision and nuance. Knüpfer’s encounters with classical pianists Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and others provide a brilliant soundtrack as Pianomania watches its star craftsman meet the demands and challenges of musicians and matter, the latter in the form of a grand piano’s fragile, painstakingly shaped elements. Knüpfer is a character himself. He admits to feeling sad that the Vienna Konzerthaus sold one of their prized pianos, but it is with an undisguised glee that he recalls the moment he told Aimard that the pianist had played that Steinway for the last time. The film builds from a technician’s itinerant lifestyle (albeit among the great capitals of Europe) to a grand finale: the sequence of meticulous and constant adjustments made for Aimard’s recording of Bach’s The Art of Fugue, which aropriately requires Knupfer to run from stage to recording booth, a trip of several flights of stairs, whenever a challenge arises — which is often. Hand-held camerawork would seems antithetical to such technical and artistic precision, but the cinematography evokes intimacy and urgency — as does the music. With seasoned performers interpreting beautiful music by Bach, Mozart, and Elliot Carter, Pianomania almost makes you long for more documentaries about piano tuners. Or at least a playlist.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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What it is: A document of one of the world’s greatest and most unusual restaurants.
Why you want to see it: The popularity of culinary themed television gives foodies more entertainment options than ever — in between Restaurant Week menus and burger lines, that is. One of food culture’s holy grails was Spain’s El Bulli, whose short season (June through December) received more than two million reservation requests for a mere 8,000 spaces. The fabled restaurant and it’s star Chef, Ferran Adrià, was the subject of two Anthony Bourdain programs, and now Gereon Wetzel’s film El Bulli: Cooking in Progress takes an even closer look behind the scenes. The film begins with the restaurant El Bulli closing down for it’s standard six-month research period. (The restaurant closed for good at the end of July, to reopen in 2014 as a “culinary think-tank.”) A team of head chefs and assistants develop flavors and textures with a focussed intensity. Is it science or art? Adrià’s aim is to create cuisine that is “magical,” and I’d love to have tasted the ice and tangerine dish. But can a documentary convey this magic and make our mouths water for culinary mecca? Pianomania surveys a similarly rarefied subject but finds the natural drama and the charming eccentrics in the story. I’m sure it’s more exciting to work at and visit El Bulli than the film makes it out to be, but too often it’s static rather than dynamic. El Bulli: Cooking in Progress is documentary as procedural rather than character study, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but any magic will have to be left to our imagination. Bourdain and Adrià have both gained grey hairs since their first meeting, and in his cable programs the No Reservations host directly addressed issues only hinted at in this documentary: does science and technology aid creativity or stifle it? This film inadvertently raises another question: can television be better than cinema? If you’ve seen either of Bourdain’s visits with Ferran Adrià, you’ve seen a more compelling — and more insightful — documentary.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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Buster Keaton in Film.Waiting for Godot
What it is: A newly preserved television production of Samuel Beckett’s avant-garde masterpiece.
Why you want to see it: The National Gallery’s UCLA Preservation Festival continues Saturday with a program featuring the deadpan, existential humor of Samuel Beckett. The headliner began its life as an episode for the New York public television series Play of the Week in 1959. This production of Waiting for Godot stars Zero Mostel as Estragon and Burgess Meredith as Vladimir. Also shown with Beckett’s only screenplay, the short Film (1965), one of the last acting credits for stone-faced comic legend Buster Keaton.
Saturday, August 27th at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery. Free.
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What it is: An ’80s cult classic in a glorious 70mm print.
Why you want to see it: As anyone who saw the gorgeous print of Tron that the AFI showed earlier this summer can attest, watching a pristine 70mm print on the Silver’s huge main screen is one of the great pleasures of movie-going. As the 3D craze starts to tank, it’s time to revisit the movie theater experience at its finest. It almost doesn’t matter what’s playing, but Lifeforce is a force to be reckoned with. Director Tobe Hooper made his cinematic mark with the horrifying, low-budget Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and a decade later he took the helm of this big-budget B-movie starring the appropriately leather-faced Steve Railsback. With a plot that features the space shuttle, Halley’s Comet, vampires, and zombies and a supporting cast that includes Patrick Stewart, how can it miss?
View the trailer.
Friday and Saturday at the AFI Silver.
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What is it: Slumber party at the Goethe Intsitut!
Why you want to see it: The recent crowdsourced documentary Life in a Day condensed a single day into a feature-length higlight reel. But the Germans assembled a marathon variation in 2008, when eighty camera teams spilled onto the streets of Berlin to document twenty-four hours in the city. The resulting footage was edited into a 24-hour program broadcast on German television a year later. The Goethe Institut will be open continuously from Saturday morning to Sunday morning to present the entire film. Breakfast foods will be provided and lunch and dinner items will be available for sale. Bring your own teddy bear.
View the trailer.
Saturday, August 27 at 6 a.m. at the Goethe Institut. Free.
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Also opening this weekend, the Paul Rudd vehicle Our Idiot Brother. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
