Capital Projections: End-of-an-era 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.
ONCE UPON A TIME … IN HOLLYWOOD
Many raised eyebrows when writer-director Quentin Tarantino announced that his next project would be inspired by the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, committed in 1969 by followers of cult leader (and failed songwriter) Charles Manson. How would one of the most vital and divisive directors working today apply his signature ultra-violent pastiche to this horrific true crime? With surprising grace, it turns out.
The film’s famous, real-life figures are supporting players in a drama led by a pair of fictional characters. Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an aging actor who once starred in a hit TV Western called Bounty Law but has since found it harder to land good roles. Likewise, prospects don’t look good for longtime stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), whose career has been tethered to his buddy’s. The friends live next door to more successful neighbors, actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and her husband, director Roman Polanski (Rafał Zawierucha). As the entertainers make their way through Hollywood, they occasionally encounter a group of shaggy and somewhat menacing young people who live in an old movie ranch on the edge of Los Angeles County.
If you know what happened in August 1969, which is when the film reaches its climax, you know tragedy will strike. But to Rick and Cliff, the film’s tension is in their impending obsolescence. As they see Hollywood being taken over by hippies, it’s clear that not only are their jobs in danger, but also a glamorous golden era is about to come to an end. Tarantino immerses you in the time period, frequently showing his doomed charges driving through the architectural landmarks of late ’60s Los Angeles as current pop hits play on the radio. That may not sound much different from any other Tarantino film, but such scenes fuel a sense of mourning — not just for the celebrities that, you assume, will fall victim to the Manson family, but also for the passage of time. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is not devoid of the director’s irreverence, but this time there’s a touching idealism in his revisionist history. The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center will be screening a 35-mm print during the film’s commercial run.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, July 26, at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
THREE PEAKS
The Dolomites mountain range in northeastern Italy is a popular destination for hikers and skiers. In this drama from Berlin-born director Jan Zabeil, it’s a picturesque setting for domestic conflict. Aaron (Alexander Fehling of Labyrinth of Lies) is a German architect on vacation with his French girlfriend, Lea (Bérénice Bejo of The Artist). Aaron hopes this back-to-nature vacation will give him a chance to bond with Lea’s 8-year old son Tristan (Arian Montgomery), but the boy resists the friendly overtures of a man he sees as an interloper. When the architect tries to teach Tristan basic survival skills during their stay at a mountain cabin, the boy responds with hostility and an alarming violent streak. Three Peaks is the director’s second feature set in the outdoors. In this film and his 2011 debut, The River Used To Be a Man, about an explorer (Fehling) lost in the Botswana wilderness, Zabeil shows a proficiency for locations that convey the grandeur and danger of the natural world. Unfortunately, he’s not as effective at drawing out vivid performances, and despite a promising setup, Zabeil can’t get his actors to generate a human tension on par with the impressive and potentially deadly surroundings.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, July 26, at E Street Landmark Cinema. $12.50.
THE APARTMENT
The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center’s ongoing United Artists Centennial Retrospective continues with this emotionally devastating Oscar winner from 1960. Jack Lemmon, in one of his most celebrated performances, stars as C.C. Baxter, a low-level employee at Consolidated Life Insurance who’s essentially a doormat for womanizing executives like Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray, playing against his normally benign type) who borrow Baxter’s apartment for romantic trysts. Meanwhile, Baxter is sweet on elevator operator Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), whom he thinks is as innocent as he is. Director Billy Wilder co-wrote the bracing script with I.A.L. Diamond, populating midcentury Manhattan with world-weary cynics who all but destroy Lemmon’s naive, generous mensch. Although filed under comedy, The Apartment doesn’t tell jokes so much as present a bleak satire of a rat race in which humans are trapped in mazes of stark modern architecture and offices arrayed in dizzying rows that seem designed to suck the soul and integrity out of anyone who enters. And that makes the central performances much more heartbreaking: When Lemmon strains spaghetti on a tennis racket for his guest MacLaine, it’s a rare act of tenderness in a brutal world.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, July 27, at 2:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
MEN ON THE DRAGON
The Freer and Sackler galleries’ 24th annual Made in Hong Kong Film Festival continues this weekend with a 2018 comedy that depicts an office environment worlds away from The Apartment. Four veteran employees in a struggling company are looking at impending layoffs, but there is one way they can prove their value to the firm: by joining the office’s dragon boat racing team. The feature debut from writer Sunny Chan injects middle-aged crisis into a crowd-pleasing sports plot, which has been described as a feel-good movie for aging underdogs. Edmund Lee of the South China Morning Post calls it a “life-affirming gem of a film that, while never hesitating to milk its protagonists’ misfortunes for laughs, stays sympathetic till the end.” Director Sunny Chan, actors Jennifer Yu and Kenny Wong, and members of the DC Dragons boat club will appear at the screening; after the film, attendees can learn about dragon boat racing and try their hand on a rowing machine athletes use for training.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, July 28, at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
PRINCESS RACCOON
The National Gallery of Art’s film series Animals in Japanese Cinema, programmed in conjunction with the must-see exhibition The Life of Animals in Japanese Art, wraps up this weekend with a 35-mm print of director Seijun Suzuki’s 2005 operetta. The fairy-tale plot tells the story of a handsome prince (Joe Odagiri), who is banished to a sacred mountain where he falls in love with a shape-shifting princess (Zhang Ziyi of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Although Suzuki is known best for ’60s B-movies like Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill, his inventive subversion of gangster movies — which he’d inject with increasingly surreal touches — got him fired by Japanese studio Nikkatsu. Left to his own devices and without commercial pressures, the director could be indulgent at times, but Princess Raccoon, the last film he directed, is a late-career highlight. The Guardian’s Mark Kermode wrote: “What’s most extraordinary … is the manic level of energy which Suzuki sustains throughout this wild romp. Whether orchestrating the hoofed-up musical numbers or executing surreal battle scenes with a tendril-spouting sorceress (a scene-stealing Saori Yuki), the director turns every set piece up to 11.”
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, July 27, at 3:30 p.m. in the East Building Auditorium of the National Gallery of Art. Free.
THE STRANGE CASE OF SEÑOR COMPUTER
The Washington Psychotronic Film Society regularly plumbs the depths of obscure low-budget cinema. And the 2001 sci-fi comedy it’s screening next is particularly curious. Directed by a man who calls himself Tom Sawyer, who also provides the voice of the titular computer, the black-and-white video feature uses grainy, amateur-quality visuals to tell the story of an electronics whiz who develops a robot with artificial intelligence. As in any cautionary tale of technology, the robot soon grows more clever than his nerdy programmer (Rick Ziegler). The New York Times’ Dave Kehr wrote: “The crudity of its fabrication … is contradicted by the genuine sophistication of much of its wit, which is at least worthy of a Comedy Central special.”
Watch a clip.
Monday, July 29, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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