Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Elizabeth Olson and Aubrey Plaza (Neon)
After inheriting money from her late mother, Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) moves to Venice Beach to pursue her latest Instagram obsession, viral celebrity Taylor (Elizabeth Olson). Surprisingly, they become friends, but Ingrid’s tenuous grasp of social graces doesn’t hold up for long. This is the first feature for Matt Spicer, who also co-wrote the script, but even though the film is sharply written and well acted, it doesn’t tell us anything we couldn’t learn from a Buzzfeed article, and its tone is perhaps too comfortable for the anxieties at the heart of the situation to really bear dramatic fruit. Maybe 30 years from now it will tell us something about the era that we can’t see right now, but as its protagonists might say, “OMG hashtag no duh!” Visit SFist for a full review.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at area theaters.
(Kino Lorber)
RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD
One of the musical highlights of this year’s AFI Docs starts a commercial run this week. As I wrote before its festival premiere, “This solid rock documentary about the unsung role of Native Americans in pop music history takes its name from the signature instrumental hit by Link Wray. Born in North Carolina in 1929, his family moved to the D.C. area in 1955; but that’s a story for another film. Wray is profiled alongside artists like The Band’s Robbie Robertson, jazz singer Mildred Bailey, bluesman Charley Patton, and others. The movie doesn’t seem to have much of a common thread until the penultimate profile; in contrast to celebrating Wray’s impact on rock ‘n’ roll, the story of ’70s guitarist Jesse Ed Davis is a more cautionary tale of a musician with Comanche and Kiowa roots whose time as a session musician led him on a destructive path to drug addiction, which ended his life in 1988. Rumble is not comprehensive—it doesn’t tell the stories of Alaska soul man Archie James Cavanaugh, or the artists compiled on Light in the Attic’s essential Native North America anthology, but this will introduce you to some new faces and recontextualize old ones.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels (Criterion Collection)
The movie world lost one of its most generous, humane spirits this year with the death of Jonathan Demme. This weekend the AFI Silver remembers the late director with a handful of career highlights, not least of which is this 1986 quasi-rom-com starring Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels as a pair who travel through the heart of America to find … well, America. As I recently wrote for Spectrum Culture, “Part screwball comedy and part thriller, the unpredictable turns of Something Wild indeed chart its characters’ untamed, untapped inner resources. But the movie is also about that simple openness to another human being, no matter what their station in life, no matter if they seem different from us. Charles and Audrey have to leave the melting pot of Manhattan to really learn about the richness of the American tapestry, and they return to New York at the end of the movie forever changed, their character development not the arc of transformation so much as revelation: this is what life can be if we allow ourselves, not necessarily the spirit of wild rebellion, but of a genuine acceptance of people and their varied songs and eccentricities.”
Watch the trailer.
Friday, August 25 at 7:20 p.m. at the AFI SIlver.
(Drafthouse)
RAIN THE COLOR OF BLUE WITH A LITTLE RED IN IT
Ahead of local performances by its star, guitarist Mdou Moctar, Suns Cinema screens a Nigerien music drama that is a loose retelling of Prince’s 1984 feature film Purple Rain. As I wrote before the film’s premiere during the AFI’s African Film Festival, “First time director Christopher Kirkley is the music archivist behind the great record label Sahel Sounds, which specializes in vinyl releases of contemporary African music like the compilation Music from Saharan Cellphones, which documents the kinds of West African musicians that consumers share and listen to on the 21st century equivalent of the transistor radio. Among those musicians is Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar, who stars as a version of himself, a talented guitarist whose father forbids him from playing music. Despite a font scheme taken directly from Purple Rain and a rival musician who’s essentially playing Morris Day, the most dramatic element of the movie, aside from Moctar’s excellent playing, may simply be the lifestyle of people who wander among a very different world. Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai, as the film is also known, is more neorealist meditation than pop melodrama, and is a must for fans of African music.” Read more about the film here.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, August 31 at 8 p.m. at Suns Cinema.
(Collection Musée Gaumont)
The National Gallery of Art’s series Gaumont at 120: Twelve Unseen Treasures continues this weekend with a 35mm print of this 1937 drama from director Max Ophuls. Set in 19th-century Japan, the film tells the story of Kohana (Michiko Tanaka), who’s sold as a geisha to help support her aristocratic family. Despite her lot, she finds protection with a Russian officer (Pierre Richard-Willm) and a family servant (the prolific Sessue Hayakawa, who later starred in The Bridge on the River Kwai).
Sunday, August 27 at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, East Building Auditorium. Free.
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Also opening this week, Birth of a Dragon, a dramatization of the legendary 964 fight between Bruce Lee and Grandmaster Wong Jackman. Stay tuned tomorrow for a feature on Sifu Scott Jensen, a disciple of Jackman.
