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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Conrad Anker and Jimmy Chin (Renan Ozturk/Music Box Films)They call it the Shark’s Fin. It stretches 21,000 feet into the sky above the mouth of the Ganges, and mountain climbers—including Conrad Anker—have long been defeated by a peak that for its last 1500 feet is basically a steep granite wall. Directors Jimmy Chin (one of the team’s climbers) and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi document Anker and his crew in not one but two attempts to scale this forbidding skyscraper. If you’re like me, you don’t think much about climbing anything higher than broken Metro escalators, but the sight of Meru’s peak is stunning even on a computer screen. The film relies too much on talking heads that diminish the intensity of the alpinists’ determination and insanity, and if the personalities here aren’t as colorful as Sunshine Superman‘s Carl Boenish, that may be more due to distracted storytelling. Meru is full of thrilling material, but its editing is better suited for the early procedural scenes than for the sustained drama of an adventure. Still, these crazy bastards will make you wince.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row
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From Nina Paley’s segment (gKids)If you want to adapt Lebanese author Kahlil Gibran’s best selling inspirational verse, you might do well to enlist a team of inventive animators like Nina Paley (Sita Sings the Blues) and Bill Plympton to bring the work to life; but would you then hire Roger Allers, director of The Lion King, to wrap these animated segments in a cringe-inducing framework? I don’t know if Gibran’s prose would come off as platitudes if they weren’t voiced by Liam Neeson’s pretentious baritone, but the film might have been far more inspirational if it allowed for real poetry instead of the Disneyfied storytelling it passes off as deep thought. Time and again, inventive animation (Paley’s is the strongest segment) is stymied by a saccharine soundtrack, but Gibran may be best left for the printed page to put pictures in your head.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema
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Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mark Wahlberg and John C. RileyMany of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s films depict varieties of the dysfunctional family, and his 1997 breakthrough film found this tortured dynamic in the most unlikely of places: the porn industry. Anderson deftly wrangles an ensemble cast that includes Mark Wahlberg, John C. Reilly, the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds and, in my favorite performance in the film, Don Cheadle as Buck Swope, a performer trying to find his voice and always ending up a little behind the times. The AFI Silver will be screening a 35mm print.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, August 23 and Tuesday, August 25-Thursday, August 27 at the AFI Silver
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Courtesy of TitanusThe National Gallery of Art’s retrospective of films from the Italian production house Titanus Contineus this weekend with a 35mm print of this 1955 drama directed by Federico Fellini. Richard Basehart (who had starred in Fellini’s Las Strada the year before) stars as Picasso, one of a trio of con-men who prey on the poor. The Gallery notes that the film’s “black comedy merges with film noir.” Co-starring Franco Fabrizi, Broderick Crawford, and Guillietta Masina, with a score by Nino Rota. Also screening in the series this weekend is the 1952 drama Roma Ore 11 (August 22 at 2:30 p.m.), director Giuseppe de Santis’ neorealist drama about a group of women applying for a secretarial position in post-war Rome.
Watch the trailer for Il Bidone.
Sunday, August 23 at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, East Building Auditorium. Free.
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Herr Bueller!Suck me Shakespeer aka Fack ju Göhte
The Goethe-Institut launches a series of summer comedies next week with a German film so popular it has already inspired a sequel. The Goethe notes, “director and screenwriter Bora Dagtekin launches another attack on laughing muscles and against the smugness in German teachers’ lounges. Fack ju Göhte tells the story of swamped teachers and disturbed pupils, adding spice to this school comedy with crude dialogue. Prim teacher trainee Lisi has never before witnessed an assistant teacher like Zeki Müller: He is good-looking, has a bigger mouth than his students and controls the chaos of Class 10B with his gruff teaching methods. Who the heck is this guy? By the time Lisi discovers his secret, she is already under the spell of Zeki’s rough charm.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, August 24 at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut.
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Also opening this week: Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart star in the stoner action comedy American Ultra; and Ethan Hawke plays another bad dad in 10,000 Saints. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
