Capital Projections: Hell is other people (and sometimes rats) 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.
PARASITE
This sly thriller from South Korean director Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer) just broke box office records in New York City, where screenings for the entire opening weekend were sold out by lunchtime last Friday. I can’t reveal what makes the movie so fiendishly entertaining, but I can set it up. Song Kang-ho (a regular in Bong films like Memories of Murder and The Host) plays Kim Ki-taek, the patriarch of an impoverished family that lives in a grimy basement apartment. As the movie opens, his family is excited to get a temp gig folding pizza boxes. But one day his resourceful son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik) gets a job with the wealthy Park family to tutor their high school-age daughter. A sucker is born every minute, and when Ki-woo realizes this is a household filled with them, he helps wrangle jobs for the rest of his family — who resort to devious measures to get the Parks’ existing staff out of the way. But the Kim family scam gets them into more trouble than they bargained for.
To give you a sense of what’s in store, Bong has cited five films that inspired his inventive script, including the deliriously over-the-top 1960 melodrama The Housemaid and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. While his influences are evident, Bong doesn’t copy his sources so much as use them as a jumping-off point for a stylish tale of class struggle. His cast is uniformly excellent, from the reliable Song to Jo Yeo-jeong as a giddily gullible mother who’s convinced her son needs art therapy. Like a blood-sucking creature that can’t let go, the movie is patient and relentless, but unlike its namesake, this Parasite is hilarious, gory and, in the end, moving.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Oct. 18, at Landmark E Street Cinema, Landmark Bethesda Row and Angelika Mosaic. $12.50 to $14.50.
MIDNIGHT TRAVELER
The harrowing story behind this new documentary comes from the fact that director Hassan Fazili has a bounty on his head. After making a television documentary about a Taliban commander who wanted peace, Fazili was forced to flee Afghanistan with his wife Fatima (who’s also a filmmaker) and their two young girls. Using footage from three smartphones, Midnight Traveler — written, edited and produced by Emelie Mahdavian — documents the family’s escape from extremist forces. But the film’s mostly linear structure doesn’t do enough to capture the gravity of their situation. Early scenes show the family packing and moving from place to place, with captions announcing how long they’ve been on their journey and where they are at the moment. It isn’t until the travelers reach Bulgaria that anything dramatic happens — and that’s a husband and wife argument about the nature of cinema. As the filmmakers show more evidence of external conflict — between Afghan immigrants and aggressive Bulgarian gangs, for instance — Midnight Traveler becomes more effective in depicting a refugee crisis. For the most part, though, this is an important story that needed to be told in a different way.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Oct. 18, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.75.
PRIVATE HELL 36
This 1954 crime drama is soaked in the gas that fuels many film noir plots: a guilty conscience. Cal (Steve Cochran) and his partner Jack (Howard Duff) are Los Angeles detectives who track down a bank robber and steal his loot. Cal needs the money to impress a tough dame — played by Ida Lupino, who co-wrote the script and was at the time married to Duff. But when Jack’s wife (Dorothy Malone) gets second thoughts after worrying about the consequences, the chastened detective ends up in jeopardy. This gritty thriller is an effective early work from director Don Siegel, who spent much of his career exploring the dangers and temptations that face police officers — he went on to direct Dirty Harry, after all. The AFI Silver is screening the film as part of its continuing Noir City DC festival; read more about the series in my Washington City Paper preview.
Watch a clip.
Saturday, Oct. 19, at 1 p.m. (with special guest speaker Eddie Muller, TCM host and series programmer) and Wednesday, Oct. 23, at 9 p.m. $13.
THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES
A scientific exploration turns into an unsettling purgatory in this surreal 1964 drama based on a novel by Kōbō Abe. Eiji Okada (Hiroshima Mon Amour) stars as an entomologist looking for a new insect species in a small seaside town. After he misses his bus back to the city, he stays with a young widow (Kyôko Kishida) who lives in a shack at the base of a dune. To pay his room and board, the entomologist takes on a Sisyphean task: To keep his hostess’s home stable, he shovels the sand that threatens to engulf it on a daily basis. The Woman in the Dunes was director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s second collaboration with Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu. Roger Ebert, in one of his Great Movies essays, wrote that the film “retains its power because it is a perfect union of subject, style and idea. A man and a woman share a common task. They cannot escape it. On them depends the community — and, by extension, the world.” The Freer and Sackler galleries will be showing a 35-mm print.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, Oct. 20, at 1 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free,
DR. TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS
As a cinematographer, Freddie Francis wielded the camera for prestige pictures such as The Innocents and The Elephant Man. But when it came his turn to direct, Francis for the most part took on low-budget genre pictures like Trog, The Deadly Bees and this 1965 portmanteau. The large cast includes seasoned horror icons like Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, as well as a young Donald Sutherland in only his second feature role. The film’s five ghoulish stories are linked via the mysterious Dr. Schreck (Cushing), who tells fortunes to the passengers on a spooky train. A contemporary Los Angeles Times review writes that the film “strikes just the right balance between the genuinely spooky and the blatantly preposterous.” The Library of Congress (note: I work there, but didn’t program this fim) will be screening a 35-mm Technicolor print, made with a vivid color process that guarantees any dripping blood will shimmer in rich red hues.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, Oct. 24, at 7 p.m in the Mary Pickford Theatre on the 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.
RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR
The seasonal anxiety continues next week with the Washington Psychotronic Film Society’s presentation of this 1984 Italian horror movie set in a post-apocalyptic future, where scavengers find an abandoned laboratory stocked with food and water. The catch? As the WPFS puts it: “Now they must face a swarm of super-intelligent mutant rodents with a ravenous appetite for human flesh.” Alex Sendell of Juicy Cerebellum writes, “It’s there to watch once, laugh at and then use the DVD for a coaster.” The feature will be shown with a more respected vision of the future, director Chris Marker’s classic 1962 short “La Jetée.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Oct. 21, at 7 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
This post has been updated to correct references in the Midnight Traveler review that misidentified the devices used to shoot the film, as well as the director’s relationship with Emelie Mahdavian.
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