Capital Projections: Bad dads 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.
BEING FRANK
In her new domestic comedy, Miranda Bailey suggests — unconvincingly — that blackmail is a family value. Logan MIller (Love, Simon) stars as Philip, a high school senior who has been accepted to New York University. The good news turns sour, however, when his father, Frank (comedian Jim Gaffigan), refuses to let him enroll. But the teenager gets some leverage when he makes an alarming discovery: Frank has long told his wife and two kids that his job as a ketchup plant executive requires him to take long trips to Japan. Philip learns that dad has never been to Japan; Frank has instead divided his time between two families. Not to worry — Philip promises to keep dad’s secret if he sends him to NYU.
Bailey directed the documentary The Pathological Optimist, and as a producer she has a strong track record for quirky indie hits such as Swiss Army Man and The Diary of a Teenage Girl. But her narrative feature debut relies on the kind of comic deception that has been the staple of sitcoms for decades. Gaffagan and Miller turn in strong performances, especially as their relationship develops — who knew that extortion would bring a father and son together? But, as I wrote in my Washington Post review, “The fact that Frank runs a ketchup company turns out to be oddly apt. Being Frank feels more like a condiment than a main dish. There might be a decent movie somewhere under all this nonsense, but the cheap laughs overwhelm this Frank’s more subtle flavors.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, June 21, at Landmark Bethesda Row Cinema. $12.50.
MILES DAVIS: BIRTH OF THE COOL
One of the DC area’s most consistently rewarding film festivals, AFI Docs continues through Sunday with 72 nonfiction features from 17 countries over its five-day run. The 2019 slate includes this straightforward profile of jazz legend Miles Davis. The trumpet player was a pivotal figure in the development of the genre; more than once, an interview subject will note how Davis changed the sound of jazz, whether it was in the Birth of the Cool sessions of the late 1940s or Kind of Blue some 10 years later. Director Stanley Nelson has chronicled the African American experience in documentaries like Freedom Riders and Rise Up: The Movement That Changed America. Through candid interviews with Davis’ ex-wife, dancer Florence Taylor (whom he hit on more than one occasion), this new film doesn’t shy away from the artist’s volatile and violent personal life. But as fascinating and mercurial as its subject was, the film follows a fairly conventional narrative, with any sparks or insight arising from the music rather than talking heads like sidemen Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, June 22, at 4:15 p.m. at E Street Landmark Cinema. $15.
GRASS
The prolific Korean director Hong Sang-soo has made his personal failings a signature theme, and this 2018 drama delivers a potent, self-reflexive catharsis in a mere 66 minutes. Grass, like many of the director’s films, begins with a man and woman speaking in a cafe. But in one of the director’s typical narrative twists, the conversation seems to be the invention of an aspiring writer (Hong regular Kim Min-hee of The Handmaiden) who’s watching from another table and typing on her laptop. Hong’s films, which he’s been cranking out at an average of two per year, frequently include a character who’s a film director much like himself, and often feature Kim, an actress more than 20 years his junior with whom he had a much-publicized affair. That Hong’s films consistently address infidelity (and feature his own mistress) may seem like self-indulgence. Yet, as I wrote about Grass in my Washington City Paper preview of this year’s Korean Film Festival (which continues with this film), “with modest means and a stable of regular actors, the director has turned public confession into a fascinating cottage industry.“
Watch the trailer.
Monday, June 24, at 7:15 p.m. and Wednesday, June 26, at 7:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
1900
This epic from director Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris) covers 45 years of Italian history through the lives of boyhood friends who were born on the same day but grew up on opposite sides of the class divide. Alfredo (Robert De Niro) is the son of a wealthy landowner (Burt Lancaster, echoing his role in Visconti’s The Leopard). Olmo (Gérard Depardieu) is the son of a peasant (Sterling Hayden). The men grow up to be best friends despite their different social stations — until politics gets in the way. In its original U.S. release in 1977, the film was a four-hour sprawl, but it has since been restored to an even longer 320-minute version, which the National Gallery of Art will screen this weekend. New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “The film is appalling, yet it has the grandeur of a classic visionary folly. Next to it, all the other new movies are like something you hold up at the end of a toothpick.”
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, June 22, at 1 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium. Free.
THE MATRIX
Twenty years ago, when this thriller about a computer hacker (Keanu Reeves) was first released, internet access was a slow and relatively clunky thing far from the ubiquitous coverage we live with today. Yet the Wachowskis’ 1999 film introduced a phrase that more than ever reflects the sometimes conflicted line between reality and the virtual world: “a glitch in the matrix.” Roger Ebert wrote, “It’s kind of a letdown when a movie begins by redefining the nature of reality, and ends with a shoot-out.” But those shoot-outs were among the most energetic of the era — and remain far more visually coherent than the rapid-fire editing in most 21st-century action movies. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History will screen a 35 mm print of this cyberpunk classic as part of its Totally ‘90s Film Festival, which runs through June 30.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, June 23, at 7:15 p.m. at the Warner Bros. Theater, National Museum of American History. $12.
THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE
Before writers Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker hit the commercial jackpot with the 1980 disaster movie parody Airplane!, they developed their comic gifts in this 1977 anthology film directed by John Landis. The 83-minute grab bag strings together what are for the most part short send-ups of TV commercials, the nightly news and documentaries. But the 30-minute kung fu homage “A Fistful of Yen” at its center may have inspired generations of movie comedians. Noel Murray, in the sadly defunct website The Dissolve, wrote that the film “misses as often as it hits, but when the writers and Landis arrive at a great idea like [the segment] ‘That’s Armageddon!’ — a disaster movie that focuses on two corny lovers in the foreground while the world goes down in flames behind them — it’s like watching an entire fruitful comic perspective being spawned.” The screening is a presentation of the Washington Psychotronic Film Society.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, June 24, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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