Capital Projections: Sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll 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.
HER SMELL
Director Alex Ross Perry, with his regular cinematographer Sean Price Williams, has made a career out of claustrophobic indie movies that immerse you in a world of largely unpleasant characters for 90 minutes — and that, for the most part, keep you mesmerized. While Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss played an obnoxious (more of an observation than a judgment), self-destructive character in Perry’s 2015 drama Queen of Earth, she turned in a performance you couldn’t look away from. Unfortunately, her latest film with the director is more grating and less successful. In a rock ’n’ roll movie that opens sometime in the ‘90s, Moss stars as Becky Something, the lead singer for Something She. Becky has a devoted fan base that puts up with her unreliable behavior. Unfortunately, when Becky fails to show up for a concert, her bandmate Marielle Hell (Agyness Deyn) is left to pick up the pieces and young musicians like Crassie Cassie (Cara Delevingne) disillusioned with their idol.
The movie plays like a grunge-era version of the perennial tortured artist arc — imagine Inside Daisy Clover starring Courtney Love. But while Moss is perfectly convincing as a troubled backstage figure, she doesn’t quite have the presence to lead a grunge band, and her vocals lack the conviction of a true rocker. Any charge one might get from her opening number “Another Girl, Another Planet” is thanks to memories of the Only Ones’ original. Perhaps surprisingly, Delevingne, who didn’t leave much of an impression in such blockbusters as Suicide Squad, has a more potent stage presence, and Deyn conveys so much emotion with her restrained acting style that one wishes that the film had centered on her rather than Moss’ grand gestures. Every new film from Perry is a must-see for audiences looking for something outside the mainstream, but Her Smell, while it doesn’t exactly stink, is no cinematic bouquet.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, April 19, at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
LITTLE WOODS
Indie director Nia DeCosta, whose next project will be a “spiritual sequel” to the 1992 Clive Barker thriller Candyman, examines a different kind of horror in her self-assured first feature. Little Woods observes the struggles of a working-class boomtown in which Ollie (Creed’s Tessa Thompson) makes a living selling provisions to construction workers employed on fracking sites in the Great Plains. She did some prison time after selling OxyContin (procured across the border in Canada) to workers in dire need of medical care. But, encouraged by regular meetings with her parole officer, she’s trying to build a more stable and legal life. But trouble finds her nonetheless, thanks to her unreliable sister Deb (Lily James), whose mother adopted Ollie when she was a child. Deb has lost the family home to foreclosure, and the only way Ollie can pay the mortgage is to again resort to drug dealing. DeCosta paints a convincingly desperate world based on Williston, North Dakota, whose ragged economy she likens in press notes to “a modern Wild West.” Thompson and especially James play terrifically against their typically glamorous type. DeCosta’s script feels a little underdeveloped; the movie builds a tension that isn’t entirely resolved, with too many loose ends left hanging. Yet the performances alone make this worth watching.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, April 19, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.75.
BOY HOWDY: THE STORY OF CREEM MAGAZINE
“We made beautiful words out of sheer terror and codeine.” That’s how Creem co-founder Jaan Uhelzski describes working on one of the most celebrated and most notorious publications in rock journalism. Director Scott Crawford, who made the local punk doc Salad Days, here chronicles the rise and fall of a masthead that included the legendary (and self-destructive) irreverence of such writers as Lester Bangs. Named after the magazine’s mascot — an anthropomorphic bottle of beer — Boy Howdy doesn’t whitewash the editorial team’s penchant for attitudes that would get most of them ostracized in today’s cultural environment. “Was it offensive? Always!” Uhelzski explains. “There weren’t the same filters there are now. I mean, kill me.” If, like me, you miss the glory days of Creem, you will love this film. The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center presents the documentary’s local premiere, introduced by DC writer Dave Nuttycombe and followed by a Q&A with director Crawford moderated by WTOP’s Neal Augenstein.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, April 20, at 7:45 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
HAVE A NICE DAY
The Freer and Sackler galleries’ series Crazy Broke Asians, which runs through April 28, continues this weekend with a 2017 neo-noir that has been favorably compared to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. The animated thriller follows what happens after a young thug Xiao Zhang (Zhu Changlong) steals money from his mob boss in order to pay for doctors to undo the mistakes of his girlfriend’s plastic surgeon. Writer-director Liu Jian spent nearly three years on the movie, animating much of it himself. Simon Abrams of rogerebert.com gave Have a Nice Day a four-star review, writing that Jian “has taken familiar stylistic elements, and made them feel fresh, and exciting.”
Watch the trailer.
Friday, April 19, at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
MO’ BETTER BLUES
Director Spike Lee followed up his 1989 breakthrough Do the Right Thing with this drama set in the world of jazz. Lee plays Giant, the Napoleonic manager of a jazz group that includes sax player Wesley Snipes and trumpeter Denzel Washington. But the focus seems less on the music than on the complicated dynamics as a power struggle erupts between players — and between the women they love. Roger Ebert recommended the movie with reservations, writing when it came out that Lee’s film reflects “the pressure on an artist to follow up a great triumph. But it’s a logical film to come at this point in Lee’s career, since it’s about the time and career pressures on a young artist.” Smithsonian Theatres is screening a 35-mm print of Mo’ Better Blues as part of its Music Movie Mondays series, which runs through April 29 at the Warner Bros. Theater at the National Museum of American History.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, April 22, at 5 p.m. in the Warner Bros. Theater at the National Museum of American History. $12.
GOODFELLAS
Launching a thousand Joe Pesci impersonations, Martin Scorsese’s 1990 crime drama is one of the great gangster movies, careening with a violent, infectious energy that suits the drug-addled figure at its center. Based on Nicholas PIleggi’s nonfiction book Wiseguy, about a mafia figure turned informant, Goodfellas changes some names but dramatizes real events. The film tells the story of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), who rose to prominence in organized crime but turned stool pigeon in order to avoid a jail sentence. Liotta holds the film’s gory threads all together, but the cast of supporting characters may be the bigger draw. Robert DeNiro is great as the ambitious JImmy Conway, leading his crew to ever more daring jobs that drew the ire of rival families. Yet the most memorable performance here is Pesci’s volcanic turn as the unpredictable Tommy DeVito, which has become the standard for the hot-tempered criminal. Smithsonian Theaters is screening a 35-mm print as part of a True Crime series that runs from April 18 through 21 at the Warner Bros. Theater at the National Museum of American History.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, April 20, at 5 p.m. in the Warner Bros. Theater at the National Museum of American History. $12.
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