Capital Projections: Summer lovin’ edition
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting arthouse and repertory screenings in the coming week.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
What fools most Shakespeare adapters be. Director Casey Wilder Mott tricks out one of the Bard’s most beloved comedies (one particularly difficult to pull off) with distinctly millennial touches, feeding lines through text messages and voicemail and even staging Pyramus and Thisbe as a student film production. But for the first few acts, the bold recontextualizing works — it helps that Frank Kranz’s Bottom is so good (though that turns against him when the film takes his transformation into an ass too literally). Setting this fantasy in the world of Los Angeles film production (the iconic Hollywood sign cleverly replaced with “Athens”) is a mostly inspired choice, and if characters start spouting off Shakespeare’s greatest hits — the talent agent Demetrius shouts at a client, “Put money in thy purse!” — from different plays, it helps put the audience in an Elizabethan headspace. Unfortunately, by the time Act IV comes around, it misses more than it hits (my kingdom for a better Puck), and the plot totally derails when the student film-within-the-film resorts to easy Star Wars references. But enough of this Midsummer works that overall it does not offend.
Watch the trailer.
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema.
SCOTTY AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD
Scotty Bowers had an eventful young life even before he set foot in Los Angeles, serving as a Marine at the Battle of Iwo Jima. But it was as a gas station attendant on Hollywood Boulevard that he found his notoriety as a pimp to the stars, experiences which, long after the principals were dead, he documented in the 2012 memoir Full Service. Director Matt Tyrnauer has a dream subject; even when the movie shifts from its tell-all milieu, Bowers is a cheerful raconteur, his disposition slightly at odds with hoarded surroundings that provide a stark contrast to the glamorous life he seemed to lead.
Watch the trailer.
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema.
SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT
The National Gallery of Art’s celebration of Ingmar Bergman’s centennial year continues with a 35-mm print of his 1955 breakthrough. A comedy about infidelity, the movie takes place at a country house party whose female guests conspire against the men. Pauline Kael called it “an arabesque on an essentially tragic theme, that of man’s insufficiency, at the same time as it wittily illustrates the belief expressed fifty years ago by Hjalmar Söderberg that the only absolutes in life are ‘the desire of the flesh and the incurable loneliness of the soul.’”
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, Aug. 19, at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium. Free.
SOLARIS
The AFI Silver presents a new digital restoration of Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction epic. Adapted from the novel by Stanislam Lem, the movie follows a cosmonaut/psychologist sent to investigate the death of a doctor on a space station orbiting the planet Solaris; the surviving crew members seem to have gone mad, and the investigator himself may not be immune to their affliction for long. The AFI will also be screening a 35-mm print of director Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 remake Solaris (Aug. 19 at 3:15 p.m.), a moving drama that may have more in common with Alain Resnais’ Je t’Aime, Je t’Aime.
Watch the trailer.
Tarkovsky’s Solaris screens Friday, Aug. 17, and Saturday, Aug. 18, at 7:15 p.m.; and Tuesday, Aug. 21, and Thursday, Aug. 23, at 7:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver. $13.
THE LAST BAND IN LEBANON
This 2016 Israeli buddy movie set in 2000 follows the misadventures of three rock musicians in the army reserves. The men wake up in Lebanon to find that the Israeli army has abandoned them in enemy territory. An American remake is in the works, recasting the film as a story about U.S. Army musicians left behind in Baghdad.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Aug. 22, at 8 p.m. at the Avalon Theatre. $12.50.
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