Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
—
Jean Reno and Michaël Youn helpful remind you where this movie is set (Cohen Media Group)Jacky (Michaël Youn) is a young chef whose talent is no match for an arrogant personality that makes it hard for him to hold onto a job. Alexandre Lagarde (Jean Reno) is a veteran chef in danger of losing his job to a young hotshot. Originally titled Comme Un Chef, which loosely translates to Like a Boss, this is a completely formulaic French comedy with terrible sit-com music and situations, and a predictable outcome. But thanks to Reno, who has gone on to mellower pastures after a career that usually found him in action movies, the movie is watchable, even if the creative tension between tradition and experimentation is lost on what’s essentially hackwork.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-Up
—
This weekend the Freer Gallery’s annual Hong Kong film festival presents a new horror film on a double bill with it’s classic inspiration. From my Spectrum Culture review of Rigor Mortis: “This bleak, atmospheric horror movie takes its premise (and male leads) from the popular Mr. Vampire franchise of Chinese hopping ghost movies, and the plot may be hard to follow even if, like me, you are familiar with the genre. While Mr. Vampire is a playful, humorous look at the supernatural, Rigor Mortis has a deadly seriousness that’s not typical of horror movies and certainly not of Mr. Vampire. Every death in the film is heavy with grief, every superhuman feat weighted with intense pain. The film oozes suffering, yet the heroes endure and push their superhuman-but-still vulnerable bodies beyond the limits of pain. The movie takes its time getting to the horrific mayhem that genre fans crave, but its first half gives audiences something they need: emotional catharsis. Chan gives a charismatic performance, and Hee Ching Paw brings a shaded, tragic presence to Auntie Mui, whose character shifts from gentle matron to grieving wife to maniacal conjurer of evil. This Chinese ghost story serves up plenty of gore, but it also faces a deeper horror head-on: the acute sense of loss that comes with the death of a loved one. I can’t entirely judge the film’s cinematography from the standard resolution viewing link I screened, but I can tell the film would look fantastic in a theater, with moody lighting, sweeping camerawork and frenetic action. Rigor Mortis doesn’t always make dramatic sense, but it always makes emotional sense, and sometimes that’s all I ask for in a movie.” Shown with the 1985 comedy that inspired it, Mr. Vampire. Both films will be presented digitally, but for your celluloid the Freer will be showing a 35mm print of Yasujiro Ozu’s 1957 film Tokyo Twilight on Friday, July 25 at 8 p.m.
View the trailer for em>Rigor Mortis
Mr. Vampire screens Sunday, July 27 at 1 p.m. Rigor Mortis screens Sunday, July 27 at 3:30 p.m. At the Freer. Free.
Director Jafar Panahi was arrested at a Tehran cemetery at the funeral for one of the protesters killed in the aftermath of the 2009 Iranian elections. The Iranian government sentenced Panahi to six years of house arrest and banned him from filmmaking for twenty years. But that hasn’t stopped him from working. The director made the autobiographical documentary This Is Not A Film in 2011 and returns with a work that the Freer Gallery called “a self-reflexive, Pirandello-like consideration of his punishment’s effect on his psyche. Shot in Panahi’s beach house, Closed Curtain begins as the story of a man (codirector and actor Kambozia Partovi) hiding his adorable dog from Iran’s recent ban on dog-walking. He is joined by a neurotic young woman who takes shelter with them during a storm—but when Panahi himself appears on screen, it becomes obvious they are just figures from his imagination.”
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End CInema.
—
Henry (Courtesy Bond/360)From my Spectrum Culture review: “When we meet Henry, he’s practically catatonic. His daughter tells us how vibrant he once was, and photos of the young Henry show a debonair, stylish man full of life. When an assistant at the nursing home where he lives fits headphones onto her patient and plays him some music, Henry starts vocalizing, at first painfully out of tune. This is one of the heartbreaking scenes in Alive Inside, a documentary about the use of music to reach elderly patients suffering from dementia. If the film were simply made up of sequences like this, it would be a harrowing and moving experience. But director Michael Rossato-Bennett all but ruins great material and good intentions with techniques that slather his inherently sympathetic subjects in cheap sentiment. In the hands of Werner Herzog, or even a journeyman documentary filmmaker who knew the meaning of directorial restraint, this could have been a four or five star documentary. But whenever the movie cuts away from its heartbreaking subjects to a chart or a diatribe or an “authority,” whenever you hear the Sensitive Narrator with the dramatic pauses who sounds like the hippie teacher on “Beavis and Butthead,” whenever the rippling piano score reminds you to feel sentimental (as if you didn’t already), the movie takes a horrible step in the wrong direction.”
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema
—
Bunny (Bette Davis) is a widow whose children have drained her savings and whose house has just been put in foreclosure by the bank. Bill (Ernest Borgnine) is a bank robber in cognito as Bunny’s handyman. The widow blackmails her employee, promising to keep his identity a secret if he helps her get back at the bank that ruined her. Davis sued American International Pictures for $3.3 million, claiming she signed on for social consciousness, not slapstick. The late critic Gene Siskel called it “Bonnie and Clyde for the preparation H set.” Thanks to the Washington Psychotronic Film Society for giving D.C. audiences a chance to view this hard-to-find title.
Monday, July 28 at 8 p.m. at McFadden’s. Free, suggested donation $5.
—
Also opening this week: Woody Allen retreats to a fantasy world in the period rom-com Magic in the Moonlight, starring Colin Firth and Emma Stone and Georgetown alum Mike Cahill releases another moody sci-fi drama, I, Origins. We’ll have a full reviews tomorrow.
