Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Roger DaltreyMovie nights return to the Mary Pickford Theater with the first in a series of Friday evening programs at the Library of Congress, presented in association with DCist and Brightest Young Things. This month the Library presents four evenings of Ken Russell’s most outrageous musical films, hosted by Music Division staff member and DCist’s chief film critic, yours truly. Tomorrow night I will introduce a DVD screening of Russell’s 1975 Lisztomania, a wildly inventive fantasia starring The Who’s Roger Daltrey as the nineteenth-century classical composer who anticipated Tom Jones mania by generations. All films will be shown in the Mary Pickford Theater, third floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building (101 Independence Avenue SE). Doors open 30 minutes before screening. Seating is very limited, but standbys are encouraged to line up starting at 6:30. In the likely event of a sellout, available seats will be released to standbys five minutes before show time. For information, call (202) 707-5502. Learn more about the Library of Congress’ 2014-15 concert season, which includes appearances by Mavis Staples, Nels Cline and Stew, among many others, here. Note: the film will be projected from a DVD.
View the trailer.
Friday, September 5 at 7 p.m. at the Mary Pickford Theater. Free, but tickets are recommended and are available from Ticketmaster here for a $3.00 service charge. Advanced tickets are sold-out, but people can get in free at the door. The standby line forms at 6:30 p.m.
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Blake Rayne (Freestyle Releasing)What if Elvis Presley’s twin brother had not died at birth? The Identical doesn’t name names, but the fictional story of Drexel Hemsley and his separated-at-birth twin, Ryan Wade, asks this question with a lot of painfully awkward filmmaking. But the movie is so sincere that I reluctantly admire it. The Hemsley family are unable to care for their twin infants, so they pretend to a bury one but instead leave it in the care of a tent-revival preacher and his wife (Ray Liotta and Ashely Judd). The film is shot nicely, but the music, written by director Dustin Marcellino’s father and grandfather, does not suit the era at all. Supposedly written in the vein of the period, the musical production sounds more like something out of the ’80s. Between problematic soundtrack and the anachronistic magazine design, this fantasy isn’t grounded in anything that seems remotely accurate to the time. But I have some sympathy for Elvis impersonator Blake Rayne, who stars as the twins. Rayne, essentially playing himself—a creative professional fated to look like a celebrity whose career is restrained by an impersonation industry, one that discourages him from finding his own voice. (After all, the movie would be better if his music actually sounded like Elvis’, wouldn’t it?) The lead performances are wildly inconsistent—Liotta a formidable fire-and-brimstone preacher at one moment, and then carrying himself like Dana Carvey’s church lady character at another. Judd generally phones in a series of smiling and concerned reaction shots. But character actors help ground the fantasy, from Seth Green as Wade’s sometimes bandmate, to Joe Pantoliano as a mechanic who hires him for his shop. For all its flaws, The Identical sells some of the resonance in its concept, reaching a kind of self-reflexive peak in a scene where Wade, winner of a Drexel Hemsely impersonator contest, performs for the real Hemsley, who endorses the man he doesn’t know is his own twin brother.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at AMC Loews Georgetown, Regal Majestic, AMC Courthouse, Regal Hyattsville and other area multiplexes.
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Alec Guinness and Maureen O’HaraThe AFI’s celebration of Alec Guinness’ centennial continues with a 35mm print of this 1959 spoof, which was the third collaboration between director Carol Reed (The Third Man) and novelist Graham Greene. Guinness stars as Jim Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba recruited by Noël Coward for service in MI6. Wormold soon embellishes his reports to make up for this uneventful career change, with thigh-slapping results. Co-starring Ralph Richardson, Burl Ives, and Maureen O’Hara, with Ernie Kovacs as Batista henchman Captain Segura.
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Friday, September 5-Sunday, September 7, Tuesday, September 9 and Thursday, September 11 at the AFI Silver.
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The Freer Gallery presents the new film from director Tsai Ming-liang (The Hole) as part of the Second Biennial DC Chinese Film Festival. The Freer calls Stray Dogs, “a poetic portrait of an alcoholic father (played by Tsai’s longtime partner Lee Kang-Sheng) and his two young children surviving in modern-day Taipei. They eat food left over from supermarkets and seek shelter in abandoned buildings—until one stormy night when they encounter a woman from the past.” Producer Vincent Wang will appear in person at the screening. For a full schedule of DC Chinese Film Festival programs, visit the festival website. Note: the film will be presented in D-Cinema format.
View the trailer.
Friday, September 5 at 7 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
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A giant conquistador held in suspended animation is released from his centuries-old prison by a lightning bolt and proceeds to terrorize a small California town. The Washington Psychotronic Film Society presents this 1958 B-movie directed by She Demons auteur Richard Cunha, starring Buddy Baer, a one-time heavyweight boxing contender whose brother was champion Max Baer and whose nephew, Max Baer, Jr., played Jethro on the Beverly Hillbillies.
View the trailer.
Monday, September 8 at 8 p.m. at McFadden’s.
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Also opening this week, Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men‘s Peggy Olson) are a couple in crisis in the domestic drama The One I Love. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
