Capital Projections: Difficult cats 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.
DAVID CROSBY: REMEMBER MY NAME
As a founding member of legendary folk-rock band the Byrds and supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, David Crosby has had the kind of colorful personal life that one expects from a rock star. What distinguishes him from most of his free-loving, drug-experimenting peers is that he’s still alive — and that he can tell an instantly endearing story with a curmudgeonly flair. Crosby was the most vivid figure in the recent film Echo in the Canyon, which documented the pop scene that emerged from the Los Angeles neighborhood of Laurel Canyon in the mid-1960s. In this candid profile from first-time director A.J. Eaton, the singer-songwriter has the spotlight all to himself, and the result is one of the best documentaries of 2019.
As he does on his Twitter feed, but with far more than 280 characters to work with, Crosby speaks his mind without a filter. For instance, he volunteers that he could not stand Doors frontman Jim Morrison, who was on the periphery of the Laurel Canyon movement. Crosby dishes it out, but he can take it too, admitting that selfishness and substance abuse made him “a difficult cat.” Vintage footage shows that bandmate Graham Nash and others were unable to hide their disdain for Crosby, and he doesn’t blame them. Yet, despite a troubled life, Crosby has won over fans with inventive guitar work and angelic harmonies that are uncharacteristic of such a devilish personality — and his candor is hilarious. Now, in his autumn years, Crosby has found a second creative wind after a history of addiction and health problems. Crosby will be performing in Roanoke, Virginia, on Aug. 15, and this film offers a welcome prelude — or, if you can’t make it to that show, a highly entertaining substitute.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Aug. 2, at E Street Landmark Cinema, AMC Shirlington 7 and Angelika Mosaic. $12.50 to $13.
MIKE WALLACE IS HERE
A new documentary about one of the most celebrated (and feared) names in journalism adopts — and adapts — a signature horror movie technique. Director Brian DePalma is known for using split-screen compositions that build the unique suspense of violent thrillers like Sisters; seeing the impending carnage from two different angles makes the tension that much more potent. Here, Tel Aviv-born director Avi Belkin — whose previous work includes Winding about Israel’s Yarkon river — uses the aforementioned horror-movie device throughout his effective profile of Mike Wallace, the longtime CBS journalist and one-time game show host. Mike Wallace Is Here unspools through dynamic contemporary interviews with Wallace and his peers, including the film’s opener — a combative encounter with Fox News primetime anchor Bill O’Reilly. But the real draw may be archival interviews drawn from the hundreds that Wallace conducted for 60 Minutes and other news programs over the years. Director Belkin and editor Billy McMillin use original footage, shot with two cameras, to find new and more visually arresting angles of Wallace’s fraught encounters with everybody from the Ayatollah Khomeini to Barbra Streisand. Yet the film’s impact doesn’t come just from its eye on history. Much as Wallace was known for badgering subjects about painful, personal matters, the tables are turned on the interviewer as Belkin (and even former colleagues like Morley Safer) coax the hard-hitting investigator to probe the tragedies in his own life. Who knew the life of a newsman was filled with so much drama?
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Aug. 2, at E Street Landmark Cinema. $12.50.
BLUE NOTE RECORDS: BEYOND THE NOTES
Director Sophie Huber, who helmed a 2012 documentary profile of actor Harry Dean Stanton, captures the current and historical vitality of the iconic jazz label Blue Note Records in this 2018 film. Beyond the Notes begins with an all-star session that features veterans like Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, who first recorded for the label in the 1960s, alongside younger artists like Lionel Loueke and Robert Glasper. Exciting musical performances by the multi-generational group demonstrate Blue Note’s continuing relevance today; from there Huber chronicles the company’s storied history, which began when Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff escaped Nazi Germany in 1939. Thanks to its well-recorded studio sessions, this is a terrific sounding movie, an apt tribute to an outfit known for the clarity and warmth of recordings made by engineer Rudy Van Gelder. Moviegoers may note that this was the second film about the label released last year, but this one’s the keeper; it’s best to ignore the glibly titled It Must Schwing: The Blue Note Story, which augments the interview/recording session format with hideous animated re-enactments.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Aug. 7, at 8 p.m. at the Avalon Theatre. $12.75.
PARIS IS BURNING
“Voguing” has been part of the pop vernacular for decades, and it’s fairly well-known that it emerged from New York’s drag ball scene in the 1980s. But did you know that the term “throwing shade” — making indirect and sometimes non-verbal insults — also comes from Harlem’s homegrown fashion shows of the era? These are just some of the cultural signifiers on view in director Jennie Livingston’s documentary, originally released in 1990 and newly remastered. Livingston spent seven years immersed in the lives of people like Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey and Venus Xtravaganza, misfits who found comfort and community in “fashion houses” that gave African American and Latino gay men a platform where they could pretend to be someone else: a celebrity, a white businessman, anybody accepted by conventional society. While the film captures a gritty, colorful underground, it’s also a time capsule of mainstream trends, as Livingston frequently contrasts her subjects’ outrageously campy outfits with straight-laced ’80s fashions that seem ridiculous today. Paris Is Burning is a fascinating and ultimately tragic look at a culture and a city that was irrevocably changing, even 30 years ago.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Aug. 2, at E Street Landmark Cinema. $12.50.
HIGH AND LOW
While best known for period pieces such as The Seven Samurai and Ran, director Akira Kurosawa was equally effective at turning his camera directly on contemporary Japan, and this 1963 crime drama is one of his best films. Loosely based on a novel by American crime writer Ed McBain, the film stars Kurosawa favorite Toshirô Mifune as Gondo, an ambitious shoe company executive who’s looking to take over a rival firm. Before he goes through with a leveraged buyout, he hears from a kidnapper who thinks he has abducted Gondo’s son — although the boy is in fact the son of his chauffeur. Mifune brings the intensity of his popular samurai roles to a midcentury police procedural that takes the kind of feudal-era conflicts that are most associated with Kurosawa and presents them in a modern world driven by the same kind of dark ambition that has plagued mankind for centuries. The Washington Post, reviewing the film upon its 1986 rerelease, wrote that “it’s Macbeth, if Macbeth had married better. The movie shares the rigors of Shakespeare’s construction, the symbolic and historical sweep, the pacing that makes the story expand organically in the mind.” The Freer and Sackler galleries, as part of the ongoing series Japanese Classics, will be screening a 35-mm print.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Aug. 7, at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
TWO-LANE BLACKTOP
Arthouse experimentation meets teen exploitation cinema in director Monte Hellman’s 1971 mesmerizing cult classic. A pair of aimless young people, known only as The Driver (singer-songwriter James Taylor) and The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys) travel from town to town in a souped-up Chevy challenging locals to drag races. When the two of them encounter an older gentleman (Warren Oates) with a Pontiac GTO, they challenge him to a cross-country competition ending in DC, with the winner taking the loser’s car. Two-Lane Blacktop provided the first acting roles for Taylor and Wilson (only Taylor would ever act on-screen again), and the director famously coached them in the manner used by French director Robert Bresson, who frequently worked with non-professionals. In this instance, Hellman demanded take after take from the inexperienced actors until, exhausted, they gave what he sought — flat, affectless line readings that express a profound fatigue and alienation. On the other hand, Oates, by then a seasoned film and television actor, recites his sports car’s factory specs with a weariness that subtly and heartbreakingly conveys his midlife crisis. Filmed in part along the iconic U.S. Route 66, this unlikely masterpiece was marketed as a thrilling portrayal of American car culture. But it was a commercial flop at the time, the somber yet compelling existential crisis that plays out on its asphalt stage perhaps contributing to its box-office failure. Today, its haunting performances and hypnotic depiction of America’s highways makes it an essential road movie.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, Aug. 3, at 11 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
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