Capital Projections: Bad haircut 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.
THE FANATIC
Social media has given fans an opportunity to interact with their idols (or whoever manages celebrities’ online accounts) like never before. But as the line between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly blurred, such perceived intimacy can lead to dangerous confrontations. At least, that’s the premise of this so-bad-it’s-good thriller, the third feature directed by Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst. John Travolta stars as Moose, a movie addict saddled with an odd nickname and an even worse haircut. Moose lives in Hollywood, where he ekes out a living as a street performer in a Keystone Cops outfit. He’s excited to meet his hero, horror movie actor Hunter Dunbar (Devon Sawa), at a book signing. But after Dunbar’s ex-wife forces him to cut the event short, the slasher star rebuffs Moose’s awkward demands for an autograph. What is a superfan to do but track down the actor at his house?
Travolta’s once-dormant career got a boost in 1994 thanks to a comeback role in Quentin Tarantino’s breakout Pulp Fiction. But despite such subsequent highlights as John Woo’s thriller Face/Off, loved by many as a battle of hams with Nicolas Cage, the former Tony Manero has recently languished in throwaways like the misguided 2018 biopic Gotti. Here, Travolta takes a page from the Cage playbook, giving his all to a quirky, idiosyncratic and unhinged character whose inability to read social cues and tendency to rock back and forth combine to place him somewhere on the autism scale. If, as cynical wags have suggested, Academy Awards go not to the best acting but the most acting, Travolta would seem to be a shoo-in, his performance at once hilarious, heartbreaking and uncomfortable. It’s too bad the movie is otherwise so unconvincing. Sawa, as the object of Travolta’s leering obsession, seems unlikely fodder for the fanatic, although the unpleasant rogue may in part be a self-portrait by Durst, who based the film on his own experiences with a troubled fan. The Fanatic isn’t by any cinematic measure a good film, but all by himself, Travolta makes it thoroughly entertaining, which means there may be some life to him yet.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Aug. 30, at area theaters.
LOVE, ANTOSHA
In 2016, actor Anton Yelchin, best known as the young Chekov in the rebooted Star Trek franchise, became a tragic addition to the group known as the 27 Club: celebrities, most of them musicians like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, who died at that all-too-young age. While many such figures lived hard lives that led to deadly overdoses, Yelchin’s end seemed particularly senseless: His SUV rolled back to pin him fatally against a brick and iron gate. In the documentary Love, Antosha (its title taken from the adoring letters the young actor wrote to his mother), first-time director Garret Price creates a vivid portrait of this endearing, talented performer by mixing home video with footage from Yelchin’s many film and TV appearances and remembrances by friends and colleagues. The son of professional figure skaters who fled political oppression in Russia for a new life in Los Angeles, Yelchin early on demonstrated an ease in front of the camera and a flair for showmanship clearly inspired by his parents. From modest indie dramas to big-budget blockbusters, the actor brought an intensity to every role he took on, which makes it appropriate that Nicolas Cage was brought in to narrate some of Yelchin’s writings — including, most amusingly, a journal entry describing his first screen kiss. As I wrote in my Washington Post review, Love, Antosha “is less a somber memorial than a celebration of a life lived fully, if all too briefly.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Aug. 30, at E Street Landmark Cinema. $12.50.
BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA
Director Sam Peckinpah was best known for slow-motion footage of gunfights in such films as The Wild Bunch, which cemented his reputation as a poet of violence. Yet despite its lurid title, Peckinpah’s 1974 drama is at its core a highly personal love story. Warren Oates plays Bennie, a 40-something piano player working in a Mexican brothel where he has a volatile relationship with the prostitute Elita (Isela Vega). Bennie gets wind of a bounty placed on the titular head, and when Elita informs him that Garcia was recently killed in an auto accident, the two embark on an unusual quest that can come to no good end.
Like other Peckinpah characters, Bennie is a mercenary, his bloodlust fueled by money. But what sets him apart is an unlikely vulnerability and tenderness. He and Elita have each been around the block, and during a roadside picnic they discover something like love. The search for Garcia’s corpse becomes a battle for honor, especially when tragedy strikes. If the plot sounds overheated and absurd, the actors immerse themselves in their roles, the disappointment and agony evident in every grizzled line of Oates’ weathered mug. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia will make you want to take a bath long before its characters dig up their gruesome treasure, but it’s a messed-up masterpiece of the human condition at its most desperate.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Sept. 2, at 9:30 p.m. and Tuesday, Sept. 3, at 9:25 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
PITFALL
Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara called this 1962 drama, his first feature, a “documentary-fantasy,” but its black-and-white cinematography evokes the unmistakable anxiety of a nightmare. The film tells the enigmatic story of a miner (Igawa Hisashi) and his young son (Kazuo Miyahara), who wander among towns in a deserted landscape in search of work. Meanwhile, a stranger in a white suit follows the boy and his father from town to town, taking their picture. When the pair finds an inviting candy store in the middle of their bleak journey, it turns out to be the centerpiece of a ghost town. Novelist Kôbô Abe, who has often been compared to Franz Kafka, wrote the film’s screenplay, adapting his own story. (Abe would collaborate two years later with Teshigahara and composer Toru Takemitsu on the better known and similarly dreamlike The Woman in the Dunes.) For Pitfall’s Criterion Collection release, critic Howard Hampton described it as “the kind of semi-uncanny, equivocally realist movie you might hope to duck into in a strange city, stumbling across it in a low-rent theater while escaping a bad date or a debt collector.” The Freer and Sackler galleries will screen a 35-mm print as part of their monthly matinee series of Japanese classics.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Sept. 4, at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
RIKI-OH: THE STORY OF RICKY
Hong Kong action cinema is typically more kinetic and more brutal than its American counterpart, but the Category III designation, reserved for films that ratings board officials believe should not be seen by anyone under 18 years old, indicates even more copious buckets of blood. Cat III movies, as they’re called, require a strong stomach, which makes this 1991 prison movie a natural for the Washington Psychotronic Film Society. Based on a popular manga, Riki-Oh stars Ip Man franchise regular Fan Sui-Wong as Ricky, who has been imprisoned in a jail run by corrupt officials. Luckily, Ricky has supernatural powers, which he uses to defeat the bad guys by poking their eyes out and strangling them with their own intestines. Just what you want to see when you’re eating barbecue at the society’s current venue.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Sept. 2, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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