DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies coming to town in the next week.
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Timothy Carey in Paths of GloryOn the front lines in World War I, Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) refuses to let his men continue on a suicidal mission to take a German stronghold called “The Anthill.” But the lives of men don’t count for more than that anthill, and Dax’s men are brought to court-martial for cowardice. Stanley Kubrick’s late films are the pinnacle of a cool, detached style, but this 1957 masterpiece features the director at his most human. Kubrick’s famous control freakitude met its match in the irrepressible character actor Timothy Carey, who steals his scenes as Private Maurice Ferol. One of his unscripted improvisations made it into the final cut, to the chagrin of colleagues who understandably thought him a ham. If the picture on screen was all seriousness, the action behind the scenes was more playful. Carey was in Munich working on Paths of Glory when he staged his own kidnapping, leaving himself to be found gagged and handcuffed by German police. During the same period, Carey and his crew mates visited a local burlesque joint, and during a bubble-bath finale the gangly actor charged the stage to join the bubbly fraulien. Sadly, the actor never worked with Kubrick again, and one can only imagine how his distinctive presence might have worked in A Clockwork Orange or The Shining.
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Screens Saturday July 21-Sunday July 22, Tuesday July 24 and Thursday July 26 at the AFI.
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André Dussolier and Carole Bouquet (Strand Releasing)French director André Téchiné (Wild Reeds) uses the creative process as a jumping off point for love and suspicion in this compelling but uneven thriller. Crime writer Francis (Andre Dussolier) thinks that getting away from it all will help him work through his writer’s block. He wanders into an agency in Venice where he meets-cute with real estate agent Judith (Carole Bouquet) and soon convinces her to marry him. The movie begins and ends in her office, and the journey in between is as much emotional as geographical. When Francis learns about his new wife’s romantic past, which is colorful even for a Frenchwoman, his imagination takes him on a journey to dark places straight out of one of his novels. Unforgivable’s ensemble cast of characters treat Francis and Judith as a May-September romance, but Bouquet is only eleven years younger than her co-star, whose disheveled, appearance makes him look like a French Unabomber three decades her senior. The pieces don’t all come together, as if the blocked author himself was responsible for the uneven script, but the actors keeps things mostly plausible even if the script doesn’t.
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Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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Freida Pinto (Marcel Zyskind/Sundance Selects)Class conflict, rural versus urban, tradition version modernity. These are some of the key themes of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and director Michael Winterbottom has loosely adapted the tale to the struggles of modern India. Winterbottom’s clever script, his third adaptation of Hardy, replaces stalled horses with a jeep stuck in the desert, a carriage accident with a truck crash, and Angel Clare and Alec with the composite character Jay (Four Lions’ Riz Ahmen). Hardy’s source is loaded with melodrama and thematic richness, but despite a good script Winterbottom somehow makes it boring. The director fails to coax lifelike performances out of his young leads, who are nice to look at but lack distinctive voices. Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto stars as the titular tragic figure, and spends most of the movie sitting around looking pretty, and her co-star doesn’t fare any better. Roshan Seth, who was fantastic as a Reaganesque guru in The Buddha of Suburbia, livens up the proceedings in his brief scene — I could listen to him read the phone book. But Ahmen’s transition from good guy to cad is, like much of the film, unconvincing. For all the vivid possibilities of the setting, even the Bollywood sidebar comes off flat an uninventive. I can’t believe this is the same guy who made the vibrant, propulsive 24 Hour Party People.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Bethesda Row.
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On the Bowery (Lionel Rogosin/Milestone Films) Lionel Rogosin was heir to a New York textile business, but after a chemical engineering magnate, but political activism led him to a career as a filmmaker. On the Bowery was supposed to be a practice run for a film he wanted to make about Apartheid (Come back, Africa, which starred a then little-known Miriam Makeba), but his neo-realist inspired film about the New York street that was once synonymous with skid row went on be nominated for an Academy Award nomination. Rogosin died in 2000, and would shudder to see what gentrification has made of his Bowery. This weekend the National Gallery screens films by Rogosin, as well as a program by filmmaker Mark Street, in conjunction with their excellent exhibit I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street.
View the trailer.
On the Bowery, preceded by Broadway by Day and Astor Place, screens July 22 at 4:30 at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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The Freer’s Hong Kong festival continues with a parody of one of the defining genres of Hong Kong cinema: the triad gangster movie. Jordan Chan and Ekin Cheng star as a pair of rival gangsters who’d rather live the life of less dangerous pursuits as restauranteur and college student. The movie reportedly riffs on Hong Kong gangster hits like Infernal Affairs (the source of Martin Scorcsece’s much inferior The Departed), and its title is a play on John Woo’s Once a Thief, which cast Yun-Fat Chow’s gangter persona in a comic vein. The Freer is participating in the controversial practice of Tweetseats, which will be reserved for this screening for live, interactive tweeting.
View the trailer.
Friday, July 20 at 7:00 pm and Sunday, July 22 at 2:00 pm. At the Freer. Free. For information about reserving tweetseats, please contact publicaffairsasia [at] si.edu.
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Also opening tomorrow, the movie event of the summer, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Returns. See my review here.
