Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Natalie Portman (Fox Searchlight)
Hollywood saves some of its most prestigious Oscar hopefuls for December release, and Natalie Portman has already begun to earn praise for her performance of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie. At 99 minutes long, the film initially seems to depart from the usual bloated historical biopic. Chilean director Pablo Larrain (No, Neruda) comes at the material from a respectful distance, and composer Mica Levi, whose outstanding score for Under the Skin helped give that film its alien airs, here takes standard-issue melodramatic strings and makes them something original and unsettling. But while Portman’s expressions of silent grief are effective, her mannered, breathy impersonation of Mrs. Kennedy distracts from this portrait of a figure and a nation stricken by tragedy. If Peter Sarsgaard doesn’t quite attempt to mimic Bobby Kennedy, the actor’s naturally sour puss dooms the character years before his fate. Finally, the movie doesn’t even get its period details of old Washington right: as Jackie passes by what was then Garfinckels department store on 14th Street, we see mannequins arranged in a shop window that clearly reads The Hamilton, the restaurant/venue currently occupying the space. Unless the filmmakers simply wanted to further drive home some historical resonance, that would have been so easy to fix. Jackie at times admirably steers from biopic conventions; that is, until it dives headfirst into them.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema and Landmark Bethesda Row.
Paul “H.R.” Hudson. Courtesy the film’s Facebook page.
FINDING JOSEPH I: THE HR FROM BAD BRAINS DOCUMENTARY
Bad Brains was one of Washington’s eminent hardcore punk bands, and perhaps the best one operating outside the Dischord machine. Yet over the years, the behavior of charismatic front man Paul “H.R.” Hudson grew eccentric beyond the call of the crazy rock star lifestyle. Director James Lathos’ profile documents Hudson’s rise with the Bad Brains with unsurprising talking heads like Ian MacKaye and more surprising subjects like comedian Jay Mohr (who’s an executive producer along with wife Nikki Cox). The movie finds its footing late, when it chronicles Hudson’s struggle with schizophrenia, but students of the local music scene will find this a must see. Lathos and H.R. himself will be in attendance for a Q&A after Tuesday night’s screening of the documentary at the AFI Silver.
Watch the trailer.
Tuesday, December 13 at 7 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
John Larroquette. From the film’s Facebook page.
This labor of love from first time writer-director Scott Marshall Smith observes the comedy and drama around a shopping mall camera store run by Ray LePine (John Larrouquette). Set on Christmas Eve, 1994, not long before digital cameras would make such shops obsolete, the film means well as it charts a dying technology and its aging advocates (including John Rhys-Davies, giving his hammy all to the thankless role of a photoshop salesman). Unfortunately, the tonally inconsistent script seems torn from the ’90s as well. Customer vignettes set up potential regulars on a wacky sit-com, yet the film careens from flat comedy to a maudlin sequence about a war photographer desperate to retrieve images from his digital camera back—never mind that such technology wouldn’t be commonly available to photojournalists for several years. I admire the ambition of a movie like Camera Store, which I like to imagine was filmed in an abandoned mall (it was in fact shot at New Orleans’ active Esplanade Mall), but I wish it were a better film.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-up.
Catherine Burns and Richard Thomas
The monthly archival series at the Mary Pickford Theatre at the Library of Congress (disclosure: I work there, but this isn’t my series), digs up a beautiful 35mm Technicolor print of this rarely revived drama from 1970. Adapted from the coming-of-age novel by Richard Bradford, the movie was spurred by the New Mexico Film Commission, which encouraged Universal Pictures to shoot the film in their picturesque landscape. The film starred Richard Thomas, soon to be known as The Waltons‘ John Boy, and was shot by Hungarian expat Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the most favored cinematographers of the American New Wave.
Thursday, December 15 at 7 p.m. at the Mary Pickford Theater, third floor of the Madison Building, Library of Congress. Free. Seating is on a first-come first-serve basis. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
Next week the Washington Psychotronic Film Society present this bicentennial blaxploitation classic from 1976. Rudy Ray Moore returns as Dolemite, described by Psychotronic curators as “that jive-talking, butt-kicking, funky clothed pimp…with the law hot on his tail, Dolemite rounds up the toughest Kung-Fu fighting badasses in Southern California to take on the mob.” Can man be as ferocious as Mother Nature? Beer and barbecue will be available for purchase as you debate this perennial question.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, December 12 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel.
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Also opening this week: Isabelle Huppert stars as a philosophy teacher whose husband leaves her in director Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
