Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s highly subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg (Christian Geisnaes/Magnolia)“Sorry. I was just in too much of a hurry to get to the last chapter.” The second volume of Lars von Trier’s epic and sordid tale arrives this week with a thud, and von Trier’s own ironic commentary. In fact, the self-reflexive touches that made Vol. I a little self-serving (“By the way, I’m not anti-Semitic!” he seems to assure us through Charlotte Gainsbourg’s conversation with Stellan Skarsgård) become more heavy-handed in the last half of this four-hour slog (five-and-a-half hours if you know the right people and can track down the extended cut). I enjoyed the possibly inadvertent humor of the first half, but the inventive touches that made the project start so engagingly gave way to more self-reflection (“I’m not racist, and this is why!”) and typical von Trier self-indulgence. The framing dialogue goes so far as to offer it’s own exegesis, as if von Trier, failing to get Ellen Page to reprise her expository role from Inception, split her in two to better mansplain things. Still, this is von Trier, and there are batshit insane moments here, as well as all-too brief (and fortunately clothed) glimpses of Udo Kier and Willem Dafoe. There’s also a lot of punishment as Joe falls into sadomasochism at the hands of Jamie Bell, who has come a long way since Billy Elliot. It ain’t pretty and it mostly ain’t funny, that is until you hear what Gainsbourg sings over the end credits. Guess—you might be right! I still recommend Volume I for the intrepid movie-goer, but if that’s too much for you, better not stick around for the final act.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark CInema.
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Fat-tailed Dwarf lemurs reside in sleeping holes found in Madagascar in ISLAND OF LEMURS: MADAGASCAR (Drew Fellman/Warner Bros) Island of Lemurs: Madagascar and Too Many Other Documentaries to Watch in One Week
This weekend is a perfect storm of intriguing new documentaries that I didn’t have time to watch. The most promising is The Missing Picture, in which director Rithy Panh—who survived a rural education work camp under the Khmer Rouge when he was 13—cuts vintage propaganda footage with clay figures set up in dioramas. Also opening this week are documentaries on Donald Rumsfeld (Errol Morris’s The Unknown Known) and Anita Hill (Anita). I did have time to watch this 40-minute nature documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman. I only saw a screener of Island of Lemurs, but the documentary will be shown on the Natural History Museum’s ginormous IMAX screen, ensuring that you will dream of radioactive big-eyed and adorable creatures the size of Kansas.
View the trailer for Island of Lemurs: Madagascar.
Island of Lemurs: Madagascar opens tomorrow at the Johnson IMAX theater at the National Museum of Natural History. The Missing Picture and Anita open tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema. The Unknown Known opens tomorrow at The Avalon.
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This weekend, the National Gallery of art launches the series Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces: Experimental Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1960-1990 with an early film by one of my favorite directors. I wrote in my Blogcritics review of Criterion’s Eclipse Series 18: Dušan Makavejev, Free Radical that with this 1969 film, “Makaveyev lights the fuse that would explode with WR: [Mysteries of the Organism]. It is here that he hits his stride with his unclassifiable collage form—not quite fiction, not quite documentary. He takes as his starting point copious amounts of footage from the first Yugoslavian talking picture, the 1942 film Innocence Unprotected. With stock footage and a series of interviews, Makaveyev made something remarkable —and he was just getting started. He selectively tints and hand-colors sequences of a stiffly photographed, over-acted melodrama and frames it with interviews of surviving cast and crew members, and intercuts these with scenes of bombed-out occupied Belgrade. The effect is something like juxtaposing a Fred and Ginger movie with shots of bread lines. A hilarious work of brilliance and passion, sex and politics. The original Innocence was made under German occupation in 1942. It was written, directed by, and stars Aleksic Dragoljub, a stunt man and love interest. Contemporary footage of the grey-haired acrobat show him still unafraid to test the limits of physical endurance. At one point he takes a steel bar and bends it using his teeth as a fulcrum. He spits out a tooth or two that succumb to the show of strength. Cameraman and sound recordist Stevan Miskovic boasts “our modern cinema today came out of my belly button.” Makavejev’s most famous films are joyously sexual; Innocence may be less so, though it is no less a celebration of the human body. “
Saturday, April 5 at 2 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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“Once I trusted a dame…now I walk alone.” The AFI’s Burt Lancaster series continues this weekend with a 16mm print of this rarely screened noir. “After doing 14 years in jail, ex-bootlegger Burt Lancaster looks up his old partner Kirk Douglas to collect on his half of their operation, as they agreed before Lancaster got pinched. But Prohibition’s over and Douglas has long since gone legit, and isn’t about to cut a mug like Lancaster in on his swanky new nightclub now. Sultry singer Lizabeth Scott and Lancaster’s brother Wendell Corey, both on Douglas’ payroll, find their loyalties divided and allegiances in flux as the two former friends become bitter enemies.”
Saturday, April 5 and Sunday, April 6 at the AFI Silver.
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Also opening this week, a pair of action-packed sequels: The Raid 2 and Captain America: The WInter Soldier. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow
