Capital Projections: Kung fu zither 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.
SHADOW
The run-of-the-mill action movie doesn’t reach its peak with a tense zither competition. But Shadow, the latest from director Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern), isn’t typical of the genre. Set in an unspecified yet distant past, the film tells the story of a wounded commander and his body double (both played by Weng Chao) who plot to defeat a petulant young king (Zheng Kai). Zhang is known for lush visuals, and cinematographer Xiaoding Zhao depicts this brutal world in a palette that is for the most part black and white, the monochrome interrupted only by skin tones and, eventually, blood — lots of it. A striking score by Zai Lao (also known as Loudboy) makes a modern counterpoint to the stark, traditional setting and gives characters the opportunity to let the battle sparks fly with music in addition to fists. And those fists! The film’s limited color scheme provides a backdrop for some of the most gorgeous fight scenes in recent memory. While it can be hard to keep all the characters straight, the movie’s distinct look sweeps the viewer away on its violent journey.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, May 10, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.50.
DOGMAN
One of the highlights of last fall’s canine-heavy European Union Showcase is back in town for a commercial run. Marcello Fonte — winner of the Best Actor award at Cannes for this performance — plays Marcello, a dog groomer who goes through life with his tail between his legs. The long-faced animal lover operates his business in a dilapidated coastal town south of Naples, where he also runs drugs. His criminal side-gig bonds him with his best friend Simon (Edoardo Pesce), a local bully with a violent temper that nobody seems to be able to leash. The movie’s central relationship recalls George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men, but with a difference: After Marcello takes the fall for a robbery Simon pulled off, months of built-up resentment fuel the groomer’s own violent revenge. Director Matteo Garrone, who made the brutal Italian gangster drama Gomorrah, plots the shifting character dynamic with a visceral propulsion. As I wrote in my DCist preview of the EU Showcase, the movie “isn’t subtle about its central metaphor of man’s loyal — and beastly — nature, but Fonte and his various furry charges help make this a thoroughly satisfying tale of inhumanity.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, May 10, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.50.
WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY
One of Emily Dickinson’s most vivid poems inspires this bodice-ripping comedy from writer-director Madeleine Olnek (The Foxy Merkins), who contends that one of America’s greatest poets had a passionate love affair with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. Based on poems, correspondence and conjecture, the movie stars comedian Molly Shannon as Emily. Best known for her recurring Saturday Night Live character Mary Katherine Gallagher, an armpit-sniffing Catholic schoolgirl, Shannon largely plays the lesbian angle for laughs, which seems to undermine the gravity of the film’s literary scholarship. As I wrote in my Washington Post review, the film’s “cheeky energy … is a welcome corrective to the reverence of Terence Davies’s 2016 A Quiet Passion, which starred Cynthia Nixon as Dickinson. But Wild Nights goes too far at times, threatening to reduce the writer’s life to the punchline of a literary version of Rodney Dangerfield: She got no respect.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, May 10, at Landmark E Street Cinema and Landmark Bethesda Row. $12.50.
THEY LIVE
What if our news and entertainment were filled with subliminal messages able to turn us into a populace of obedient consumers? This 1988 thriller from director John Carpenter (Halloween) argues that we live in just such a world. Professional wrestler Roddy Piper stars as a drifter who discovers, through the help of special sunglasses, that Earth is run by aliens who control their subjects by means of mass media. It’s a prescient concept, but a conflicted one. The movie proposes that evil powers have planted seeds of division so that humans will simply fight each other to the death. But right in the middle of the movie, Piper and co-star Keith David brawl in what is essentially a wrestling match, as if Carpenter’s own film is fueled by the destructive bloodlust that his characters know full well is self-defeating. The fact that the movie is so entertaining seems to make it part of the problem, and one wonders what it would have been like if the director had cast his then-frequent star Kurt Russell, a far more expressive actor than Piper (alternately, I dream of Jerry Lewis in this role, if the film had been made decades earlier). But if They Live is a failure, it’s a fascinating one: Casting someone known for his stature in the scripted, theatrical battles of the WWE makes the film’s aspirations of truth-telling that much stranger. The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center is screening a new 4K digital restoration.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, May 16, at 9:45 p.m. and Saturday, May 18, at 10:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
WHO’S MINDING THE STORE?
Animal lovers who may be sheepish about the graphic violence of Dogman have a gentler option at the movies this week. This 1963 comedy stars Jerry Lewis as Norman, a dog walker who’s engaged to Barbara (Jill St. John), the daughter of department store owner John P. Tuttle (John McGiver). Scheming to put an end to the engagement, Tuttle hires Norman to work in his store, hoping that his inevitable failure will shake some sense into that foolish daughter of his! Director Frank Tashlin (The Girl Can’t Help It) navigates the chaos in an indictment of consumerism very different from the one in They Live. The Library of Congress will be showing a 35mm print of this Technicolor classic, and will precede it with Scrap Happy Daffy, one of the many Looney Tunes shorts Tashlin directed for Warner Bros. Disclosure: I work at the Library of Congress, but did not program this screening.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, May 16, at 7 p.m. at the Mary Pickford Theatre on third floor of the Madison Building at the Library of Congress. Free. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
QUEEN OF BLOOD
Astronauts (John Saxon and Dennis Hopper) rescue an alien (Florence Marly) from a dying planet. But the alluring green-skinned female turns out to be, in the words of director Curtis Harrington, “a vampiric creature who seeks a new food source … the human race.” Legendary exploitation-movie producer Roger Corman was impressed by Harrington’s 1961 thriller Night Tide, which also starred Hopper, but this project was troubled from the start. Most of the film’s budget went to Basil Rathbone, who was paid $5,000 a day to portray a scientist. To cut corners, Corman appropriated footage from a 1959 Soviet thriller and hired Harrington to fill in the rest. According to Harrington’s memoir, Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood, Rathbone complained bitterly to the filmmakers, declaring, “You would even feed a dog better than me!” Still, the film is an endearing mess, which is just how the programmers at the Washington Psychotronic Film Society like it.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, May 13, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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