Capital Projections: Lifestyles of the rich and evil edition
This week’s openings include two movies that depict the evil that men do for the sake of money. Also on screen are a Polish drama of faith, an American buddy comedy about the Christian film industry, and a documentary about a Brussels beauty salon that caters to African immigrants.
GREED
A heavy-handed satire of the British fashion business, writer-director Michael Winterbottom’s latest film is much like its lead character: obvious and obnoxious. Yet, thanks to a colorful performance from comic actor Steve Coogan that celebrates the bad behavior, it’s consistently entertaining.
Fitted with gaudy prosthetic teeth, Coogan stars as British businessman Sir Richard McCreadie, who was born into wealth and has spent his life strong-arming his way through financial deals that make his fortune grow even bigger via his discount clothing stores in London. How did he become a billionaire? By finding cheaper and cheaper labor sources, like in Sri Lanka, where he goes from sweatshop to sweatshop until he finds someone willing to make a pair of cut-rate jeans for the ridiculously low price he demands. Greed charts McCreadie’s riches-to-more-riches story and centers on a lavish 60th birthday party on a picturesque Greek beach where Syrian refugees have set up camp — do you think Greedy McCreadie (Winterbottom isn’t exactly subtle) will end up finding a way to exploit the underprivileged?
Loosely inspired by real-life British fashion tycoon Philip Green, Greed invites us to cringe at its crude, Machaivellian protagonist and gasp at the statistics behind his commercial empire: one title card, for instance, notes that women working in garment factories in Bangladesh earn only $2.84 for a 10-hour day. Contrast that with the plans for McCreadie’s Roman Empire-themed party, complete with a Colosseum look-alike built just for the event and a live lion for a gladiator reenactment. But the film’s message is undercut by that very spectacle: One waits in a kind of eager anticipation for further evidence of McCreadie’s excesses, like seeking to hire Elton John, available for a million-dollar fee.
Cinematographer Giles Nuttgens — who shot David Mackenzie’s more subtle tale of financial crisis, the 2016 drama Hell or High Water — gives the film a dazzling look, and editor Liam Hendrix Heath helps keep it moving. But this is Coogan’s show; he doesn’t make McCreadie likable, exactly, but he does make this vulgar mogul compulsively watchable, even as he’s berating yet another underling. The film’s razzle-dazzle threatens to overwhelm its moral; it’s as if Winterbottom has chosen to make a scathing indictment of economic inequality by way of a professional wrestling match. Still, this is a villain you’ll love to hate, and you’ll love to see his inevitable comeuppance.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, March 6, at Landmark E Street Cinema, Angelika Pop-Up and Angelika Mosaic. $12.50 to $15.
EXTRA ORDINARY
In this indie horror-comedy, rural Ireland is a crucial battleground between good and evil. Fortunately, in their feature debut, writer-directors Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman overcome demonic forces with an endearing array of weapons from cold ectoplasm to heartwarming characters — and a generous dose of gross-out humor.
The supernatural plot unfolds around mild-mannered driving instructor Rose (Maeve Higgins). She inherited the ability to communicate with spirits — she calls it “The Talents” — from her father, who helped clients deal with the ghosts of loved ones. But Rose, who blames herself for her father’s accidental death, is reluctant to take on any ghost-hunting jobs. That is, until she meets Martin (Barry Ward), a single father whose late wife’s ghost won’t stop nagging him. Worse, his daughter Sarah (Emma Coleman) is being targeted by rock musician Christian Winter (SNL’s Will Forte), whose career waned after one hit single. To revive his fortunes, he has made a pact with Satan, but he needs to offer a virgin sacrifice — which is where Martin’s daughter comes in.
As Rose falls in love with Martin, the spiritual horror that surrounds them fuels a warm romantic comedy; it’s only by working together that they can cast away demons. While the selling-your-soul-for-fame subplot is so familiar it has become silly, it’s thematically appropriate. There’s no shortcut to success, the filmmakers seem to argue; hard work is the only path to victory, and if that involves Martin channeling dead spirits so he can vomit up their ectoplasm, then nobody said the road would be easy.
Higgins and Ward turn in warm, amiable performances, with the latter particularly effective when Martin begins to channel his late wife, and Forte is a compelling ham as the wannabe rock star. With its dark terrors taking place in a working-class milieu, Extra Ordinary recalls Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Cornetto trilogy, albeit on a more modest scale. Despite its small budget, this winning little movie is loaded with big charm.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, March 6, at Arclight Bethesda and AMC Hoffman Center. $12.49 to $17.50.
CORPUS CHRISTI
Poland’s official 2020 submission for Oscar consideration is a faith-based drama that puts familiar tropes of redemption into an uneasy situation — after all, who says forgiveness is supposed to be easy?
Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia) is a troubled 20-year-old about to be released from a juvenile detention center. He has played his part in hazing other inmates, but he’s also active in the prison’s Catholic liturgical services. In fact, he’d like to enroll in a seminary; as chaplain Father Tomasz (Lukasz Simlat) points out, however, no theological school would accept someone with Daniel’s criminal record. When he’s released from juvie, Daniel sows his wild oats but is soon drawn to a rural church. After the elderly pastor falls ill, Daniel tells the congregation that he’s a priest — and churchgoers soon prefer his enthusiastic homilies to those of the uninspiring elder. Daniel’s methods are unorthodox, but he maintains the ruse with a fervor that appears to be genuine. It gets more complicated when Daniel finds that the townspeople are still bitter about a widow whose husband they believe caused a car accident that killed six local teens years earlier.
With his sunken eyes and piercing stare, Bielenia has the striking features one might expect of a religious icon. He’s the embodiment of the sinner and the saint, a perfect match for this story of small-town faith and forgiveness. Screenwriter Mateusz Pacewicz based his script on an incident where a 19-year-old impersonated a priest for three months. As Pacewicz explained in a recent interview, “fake priests” have become something of a regular occurence in Poland. While such scandals could prove disastrous, director Jan Komasa uses Daniel’s deception to reveal something deeply broken in a small community.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, March 6, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.50.
FAITH BASED
Religion has inspired some of the great works of art. But when it comes to movies, after the 1928 masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc, the quality drops off, and despite the economic strength of today’s Christian film sector, the products are often pretty bad. In the indie satire Faith Based, when Luke (Luke Barnett) asks a film producer (played by Margaret Cho) why this has to be, she candidly explains, “They don’t have to be bad — they just don’t have to be good.” Director Vincent Masciale and screenwriter Barnett run with that premise in a buddy movie that fondly sends up a thriving industry that’s heavy on heart but light on art.
Luke and his longtime friend Tanner (Tanner Thomason) are in their 30s, but their career prospects look slim. Luke cleans pools for a living and has a side gig selling tea bags in a pyramid scheme created by entrepreneur Nicky Steele (Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander). Tanner has been working at the same bar for nearly a decade. At a family dinner, his adoptive father Pastor Mike (Lance Reddick) inadvertently gives Luke an idea: Faith-based movies cost little to make and have a built-in audience of parishoners eager for wholesome entertainment. Why can’t Luke and Tanner make one themselves?
Barnett, a native of Clinton, Maryland, grew up in the church, and in a 2019 interview said that he doesn’t think Christian films are all bad (or all good). So while Faith Based does poke fun at religious films, it comes from a place of affection. It would be a neat trick if this satire turned into something of a faith-based movie itself, but that doesn’t quite happen; Barnett is best known for his work on the irreverent comedy site Funny Or Die, after all. Yet it’s not dismissive of religion either. Although the strong language alone will keep this from playing church basements, it does become a kind of conversion story, celebrating a belief in a higher power and a belief in your own talents. The film has its local premiere this weekend as part of the DC Independent Film Festival, which runs through March 8.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, March 7, at 7:45 p.m. in the Root Auditorium at the Carnegie Institution for Science. $11.
CHEZ JOLIE COIFFURE
This 2018 documentary from Cameroonian director Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam looks inside a business model that seems ripe for high-spirited stories: the hair salon. But in the case of this Brussels shop, the narrative is more volatile than one might expect.
Sabine plays a crucial role for African immigrants in the Belgian capital. She shares news about changes in the community and helps them connect with one another in a welcoming space. No, she’s not an elected official — she’s the manager of a hair salon in a busy shopping arcade. In her second documentary feature, Mbakam (The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman) has found a working-class subject whose diligence and colorful fashion sense make her a vivid symbol of the immigrant experience.
When Sabine invites the director into her shop, the drama unfolds swiftly, as if the salon is a makeshift theater-in-the-round. The camera doesn’t merely look inside a cramped commercial space. Picture windows that surround the salon reflect the city life around it, including fights between rival shops and white tourists peering inside like they’re at the zoo. Sabine chats as she works, patiently braiding each hair strand as she describes her harrowing escape from Africa, traveling on foot and desperate to reach Europe. As I wrote in the Washington City Paper before the film’s screening at the 2019 AFI Docs festival, “Chez Jolie Coiffure is an anxious study of success, as police raids and the threat of deportation hang over the shop and its regulars.” The film will be screened at the National Gallery of Art with The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman as part of the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center’s 16th annual New African Film Festival, which runs through March 19. See my Washington City Paper preview of five more titles in this year’s lineup.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, March 8, at 4 p.m. in the East Building Auditorium at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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