Capital Projections: Life in these United States 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.
HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING
Offering up such intimate slices of life as a toddler running around his family’s apartment with glee and a woman telling of her long experience working at a catfish factory, this Oscar-nominated documentary is a startling, if occasionally frustrating, debut. First-time director RaMell Ross spent five years hanging out with two young African-American men and their families in rural Alabama. Hale County features an astonishingly rich, evocative visual poetry. Ross, who was also the film’s cinematographer, shot what may be the most gorgeous footage of basketball hoops in all of cinema, a time-lapse view of a dazzling starry night sky passing above the net. Yet he often turns his camera away from Hale County residents before we’ve had a chance to get to know them. Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul served as creative adviser on the project, and Ross’ film bears a passing resemblance to that arthouse auteur’s work, but with his own distinct vision. Yet this 76-minute movie seems overly abbreviated; it could have easily been twice that length — and all the better for it.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Feb. 6, at 8 p.m. at The Avalon Theatre. $12.75.
BLUE NOTE RECORDS: BEYOND THE NOTES
How many record labels are synonymous with a genre? Francis Wolff escaped Nazi Germany to join his friend Alfred Lion in New York, where they founded the label to record music they wanted to hear. But with a roster that included such iconic musicians as Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, distinctive artwork by such artists as Andy Warhol and a studio sound perfected by engineer Rudy Van Gelder, Blue Note became the stuff of legend. Sophie Huber, who previously directed a profile of character actor Harry Dean Stanton, checks in with the label’s current lineup at a recording session by young singer Robert Glasper — with label vets Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter happy to sit in.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Feb. 6, at 7:30 p.m. at the Landmark E Street Cinema. $13.50.
A MAN OF INTEGRITY
The 23rd annual Iranian Film Festival continues this weekend at the AFI Silver Theatre — and with the reopening of the government, it starts up at the Freer Gallery of Art. In this 2017 drama, a Tehran resident moves to the country to live a peaceful life as a goldfish farmer but runs afoul of the corrupt local government. Mohammad Rasoulof’s film won Un Certain Regard at Cannes, but the win was overshadowed when Iranian officials confiscated his passport. In the tradition of fellow Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who was imprisoned and banned from making movies, Rasoulof made this film secretly in Northern Iran. Barbara Scharres writes of the film’s title character: “Just as he sees accepting the status quo as the sword that will slice the Gordian knot, he discovers that he was never anything but a pawn in an even larger game.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Feb. 4, at 7:15 p.m. and Wednesday, Feb. 6, at 7:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre. $13.
THE SEA HAWK
Next week the Music Division at the Library of Congress begins a monthlong celebration of film composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who scored such classic Hollywood adventures as The Adventures of Robin Hood. (Disclosure: I work in the Music Division but did not work on this program.) The series offers some of the composer’s less-revived titles, and it begins with a 35mm print of this 1940 swashbuckler directed by Michael Curtiz. Errol Flynn (in one of 12 films he worked on with Curtiz) stars as an English privateer charged with protecting his country from the Spanish Armada. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther wrote that The Sea Hawk is an “overdressed ‘spectacle’ film which derives much more from the sword than from the pen” — as if that’s a bad thing.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, Feb. 7, at 7 p.m. in the Mary Pickford Theater on the third floor of the Madison Building at the Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave.SE. Admission is free. Seating is first-come, first-served. For the best seating options, patrons are encouraged to arrive 15 to 30 minutes before the scheduled start time. For information, call 202-707-5502.
PALE FLOWER
The Freer’s series of Japanese Classics is back next week with a 35mm print of this 1964 film that the gallery calls a “cool, seductive jewel of the Japanese New Wave.” Prolific actor Ryô Ikebe stars as a Yakuza who’s just finished a prison term and becomes involved with a beautiful young woman (Mariko Kaga) whom he meets on the late-night gambling circuit. Composer Toro Takemitsu, who scored such iconic Japanese films as Kurosawa’s Ran, provides music that’s alternately jazzy and discordantly experimental, creating a vivid sound for this black-and-white underworld. At a taut 96 minutes, It’s worth taking a long lunch for.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Feb. 6, at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
ROMEO IS BLEEDING
You can usually find Washington Psychotronic Film Society programmers in the most obscure and forgotten recesses of cinema history, but next week they tap the relatively mainstream fare of this 1994 neo-noir. Gary Oldman stars as a crooked cop who sells his secrets to mob boss Roy Scheider; already you can smell the violent ham cooking. Roger Ebert wrote that director Peter Medak (The Krays) “seems to have lost his bearings” and that screenwriter Hilary Henkin ”not only slathers on the recycled noir with heedless excess, but adds a portentous narration” with such lines as “God sends meat and the devil sends cooks.” Nevertheless, heedless excess is right up the alley of this weekly B-movie showcase.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Feb. 4, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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