DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Fat Mike of NOFX takes his daughter to school. Courtesy of The Other F Word.What it is: “A coming of middle-age story.”
Why you want to see it: Ever wonder what it would be like if Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers was your dad? Andrea Blaugrund Nevins’ documentary The Other F Word follows skatepunker/Pennywise singer Jim Lindberg and other maturing punk rockers as their life’s focus change from one F word to another: Fatherhood. Brett Guritz of Bad Religion admits “there nothing in the punk rock ethos that prepares you for being a dad,” and when you hear Fat Mike of NOFX wonder how he can explain the bondage tattoos to his four-year old daughter, you may want to call protective services. But despite the low expectations for their successful fatherhood, you can see how much the punk dads care. Shots of crowded concert venues and songs of anti-authority alternate with tranquil scenes of suburban homes, but really it’s the time spent with the fathers and their children that make this documentary sing. It’s more challenging stuff the attitude you’ll hear from them in concert. Punk dads include Flea, skateboard icon Tony Hawk, pre-Rollins Black Flag frontman Ron Reyes (with clips of the 1981 doc The Decline of Western Civilization that is begging for DVD release), Devo’s Mark Mothersbaguh, and more.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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An Encounter with Simone WeilWashington Jewish Film Festival
What it is: Celebrating the breadth of cinematic Jewish experience for 22 years.
Why you want to see it: From drama to rom-com to documentary, this year’s WJFF is a diverse bunch, with two special focus series. Jews at Work looks at how Jewish values influence career paths. This series includes Incessant Visions (12/4 @AFI), about Architect Erich Mendelsohn ; Breath Made Visible (12/5 @Embassy of Switzerland), about Dance pioneer Anna Halprin; Lia (12/6 at AU, 12/7 @ DCJCC), about cinephile Lia van Leer; and My Champion (12/6 @AFI), about Boxer Merhav Mohar. This year’s festival also focuses on women filmmakers, who helmed 19 of the program’s 47 films. These include Britta Wauer’s documentary In Heaven Underground (12/5 @ AFI), about Berlin’s Weissensee Jewish Cemetery, the largest Jewish burial ground in Europe; Julia Haslett’s An Encounter with Simone Weil (12/5 and 6 at Embassy of Italy), about the Jewish-born philosopher who became a Christian mystic; and Beverly Siegel’s documentary Women Unchained (12/8 at DCJCC), an ”informative primer on agunot, women trapped in dead marriages to spouses who refuse to grant them a religious divorce “ This would have been a nice excuse to bring Elaine May’s director’s cut of Ishtar to Washington, but we’ll just have to wait for the Blu-Ray. Also on tap this week; Reuniting the Rubins (12/5 at DCJCC, 12/8 at AFI), starring Honor “Pussy Galore” Blackman as Timothy Spall’s mother in this dysfunctional family farce; and the documentary My Sweet Canary (12/8 at DCJCC) , about Roza Eskenazi, a Greek-Jewish singer of folk music, including the style called rebetiko, also known as the Greek blues.
View the trailers for In Heaven Underground, An Encounter with Simone Weil, and Reuniting the Rubins
December 1-11 at venues around town. Check festival website for detailed listings.
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The Other Side of Sleep Capital Irish Film Festival
What it is: A program from Solas Nua, “the only organization in the US dedicated exclusively to contemporary Irish arts.”
Why you want to see it: The festival begins tonight at E Street with Alexandra McGuiness’s The Lotus Eaters, a drama about self-destruction among the beautiful people. Other features this week include The Other Side of Sleep (12/2 @Goethe), the story of a Midlands factory worker who wakes up in the woods one morning next to a dead body. The Runway (12/6 at E Street), a hit on the festival circuit, “is inspired by the true story of a South American pilot who had a bumpy landing near Mallow, County Cork in 1983.” Documentary programs include The Pipe (12/3 @ Goethe) , about the picturesque Broadhaven Bay, home to fisherman and, unfortunately, a siren song for Shell Oil; and on December 5th at E Street, a showcase for the short documentary work coming out of Northern Ireland.
View the trailer for The Other Side of Sleep.
December 1-10 at venues around town. Check the festival website for details.
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Mary Woronov and friends.What it is: Andy Warhol’s split-screen look at the women of the Hotel Chelsea.
Why you want to see it: Warhol and co-director Paul Morrissey (who went on to direct the series of films like Andy Warhol’s Bad that bore the artist’s name but not his directorial credit) filmed a series of vignettes in and around the fabled and beleaguered Hotel Chelsea, as well as at The Factory and the Velvet Underground’s Greenwich Village apartment. A six-and-ahalf hour first edit was effectively cut in half by Warhol’s split-screen presentation, which gets a rare screening at the National Gallery this weekend. Self-indulgent and decadent enough to get hit with a $500 obscenity fine, the film was an arthouse smash for Warhol, and quickly made it’s way from sold-out screenings in downtown art theaters to a month long commercial run uptown. A lot of attention for a film that critics Rex Reed called, “a three and a half hour cesspool of vulgarity and talentless confusion which is about as interesting as the inside of a toilet bowl.” With music by the Velvet Underground and appearances by Nico, Brigid Berlin and Paul Bartel regular Mary Woronov, (a segment starring ill-fated superstar Edie Sedwick was cut). The film, like all of Warhol’s features, is not available on DVD, so you might want to take a reaallly long lunch to see if the inside Rex Reed’s toilet bowl is more interesting.
View a boring clip.
Friday December 2nd at 1:oo pm at the National Gallery. Free.
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What it is: Drug-infused horror at the disco, courtesy of your friends at Psychotronic.
Why you want to see it: The title sounds vaguely like a lost adult movie starring Grover. Au contraire! The titutlar sunshine was a new form of LSD administered to a group of college kids in 1967. Ten years later, the participants are disco dancing as is the fashion. What is not the fashion is that they are going bald and homicidal beyond the normal ravages of time. Zalman King, an actor/director who is perhaps best known as executive producer of the Red Shoe Diaries, plays Jerry, wrongly accused of a triple-murder. Could it be one of those balding polyester hippies? Directed by Jeff Lieberman, who made the world afraid of worms with Squirm.
View the trailer.
Monday, December 5 at 8 pm at McFaddens. Free, suggested donation $2.
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The French Connection
What it is: The 40th anniversary of William Friedkin’s classic New York police drama.
Why you want to see it: New York bloggers lament what some call the Sex-and-the-Cityfication of Manhattan. But forty years ago, Starbucks, cupcakes and hipsters were not in spitting distance. Based on the true story of narcotics detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, The French Connection doesn’t have the stylish thrills or good looks of the Fast and the Furious franchise, or the excellent Drive for that matter. But it provides the kind of grit that the major studios don’t touch anymore, and gives you the chance to ponder the modest spectacle of Gene Hackman seducing a bicycle-riding hippie — and the major spectacle of an old-school car chase. The film won five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Gene Hackman, and best director for William Freidkin.
View the trailer.
Friday December 2 at 9:15; Sunday December 3 at 4:45 and 9:45. At the AFI.
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Also opening this week: Shame, Brit director Steve McQueen’s highly anticipated study of sexual addiction. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
