DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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(Cinema Guild)Shot off the New Bedford, Massachusetts coast that inspired Moby Dick, Leviathan documents life on a commercial groundfish trawler. Through the eyes and ears of tiny GoPro cameras, the film creates a beautiful abstract canvas of sight and sound that induces the best kind of cinematic seasickness. Directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgrass) and Véréna Paravel (Foreign Parts) set out to sea with big digital video cameras that were lost in the tumultuous waves, but the smaller cameras survived and were traded off between the film makers and the ship’s crew. This creates a startling immersive imagery in which up is down and cameras bob in and out of the sea to reveal gulls that fly sideways on a nightmarish horizon. The sounds of nature and machine, much of them taken straight from the camera, are magnified in these setups, simple yet profoundly different from your typical nature documentary. The GoPro cameras are a favorite of extreme sports nuts, and their use for art is probably limited. Leviathan‘s images demonstrate that filmmakers are only just beginning to take advantage of the new technology in ways that don’t involve a lot of post-processing. Part of the Environmental Film Festival, the film does not yet have a commercial release date in DC. I only watched it on a screener, but it’s best experienced on the big screen. So if you’re looking for a disorienting, gorgeous barrage of images that comes off like a Stan Brakhage adaptating Melville, don’t miss it.
View the trailer.
Saturday, March 23 at 6:15 at the AFI.
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Alice Englert and Elle Fanning (Nicola Dove/A24)Sally Potter’s coming of age movie opens with footage of the bomb dropping on Hiroshima, which happens to be the very day that childhood BFFs Ginger and Rosa (Elle Fanning and Alice Englert) were born in London. This is just the first in a series of ham-handed contrivances in which the girls predictably navigate the apocalyptic anxieties of 1962. A typical line of dialogue comes from Annette Benning: “I gather you might be a militant like me. Good for you, Ginger!” Beautifully photographed but forced (much like Potter’s art-house hit Orlando and her flop The Tango Lesson) Ginger and Rosa is self-congratulatory and self-conscious, and if Fanning’s performance comes off as navel-gazing I totally blame Potter. And yet, what starts as a stylish but tepid grocery list of 1960s tropes eventually develops into an indictment of the era’s self-indulgences in the form of Ginger’s activist father Roland (Allesandro Nivola, who last played a bad father in Janie Jones). When Roland throws a cog into the titular friendship (which doesn’t have much chemistry to begin with), things get more interesting, and a few scenes resemble actual human relationships. It’s not enough to save the movie, but it’s not the complete eye-roller I expected. Also starring Man Men’s Christina Hendricks as Ginger’s ginger mother.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema
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Sylvia Fine and Danny Kaye. Metropolitan Photo Service. Kaye/Fine Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress Danny Kaye at the Library of Congress
In conjunction with the exhibition Danny Kaye and Sylvia Fine: Two Kids from Brooklyn, the Library of Congress will screen some of Kaye’s most popular films this weekend. This means a return of 35mm film to the Mary Pickford Theater, once one of the area’s premiere repertory programs (and one which I used to help program). Titles screened in the Coolidge Auditorium will be from DVD, and include The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), with an introduction by Dena Kaye and Q&A session before the film; and Hans Christian Andersen (1952). Titles screening at the Pickford Theater will be from 35mm archival prints, and include The Court Jester (1955), Knock on Wood (1954) and The Five Pennies (1959). Disclaimer: These opinions do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, the Library of Congress.
All screenings are Saturday, March 23. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty screens at 11:00 am, with an introduction and Q&A with Dena Kaye. Hans Christian Andersen screens at 2:30 pm. At the Coolidge Auditorium, Jefferson Building, Library of Congress. Free. The Court Jester screens at 9:00 am. Knock on Wood screens at 12:30 pm. The Five Pennies screens at 3:00 pm. At the Mary Pickford Theatre, Third Floor Madison Building, Library of Congress. Free.
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The best known films of the Czech New Wave range from the avant-garde feminist Benny Hill (Daisies) to the beautifully dreamlike (Valerie and her Week of Wonders). The Embassy of the Czech republic closes out a series of Czech New Wave titles with director Juraj Herz ‘s darkly expressionistic The Cremator. The titular craftsman lives in Nazi occupied Prague and believes that creamting bodies frees the souls of the departed. Based on a novel by Ladislav Fuks, the movie was banned shortly after its release and was not released in its native land until 1989.
View the trailer.
March 28, 7 pm at the Embassy of the Czech Republic, 3900 Spring of Freedom Street, NW. Opening remarks will be presented by Czech Ambassador Petr Gandalovič. Free, RSVP to czech_events@yahoo.com with “Cremator” in the subject line.
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A loan shark makes good on bad loans by brutally crippling his debtors and making off with the insurance money. Then one day a woman shows up claiming to be his mother. The films of Kim Ki Duk (3-Iron) are among the most violent of a national cinema known for blood, and accusations of misogyny from Korean critics led to the director’s self-imposed exile. Pieta is Kim’s first film upon emerging from that exile, and its themes of abandonment and viciousness seem like a natural for his return to filmmaking. The film was a hit on the festival circuit, but the maternal theme that swings so violently from a loan shark’s base instincts may lead to extreme sentimentality. Elsewhere in the Korean Film Festival next week, Helpless (Angelika Mosaic, March 27 and 28), about a man’s search for his missing fiancée.
View the trailers for Helpless and Pieta, or don’t view the latter, because it’s loaded with spoilers.
Pieta screens Friday, March 22 at 7 pm at the Freer. Free.
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Also opening this week, Die Hard goes to the White House in the Gerard Butler action spectacle Olympus has Fallen; Disney stars go to the beach in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers; and Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami goes to Tokyo in Like Someone in Love. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
