Capital Projections: Cause célèbre 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.
MAPPLETHORPE
Much as the 2013 film CBGB transformed a vital underground music scene into a slick commercial product, a new film reduces an iconoclastic New York artist to a series of biopic cliches. The late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was known for sexually explicit, homoerotic work that is still startling today. Yet despite showing her subject’s more provocative images, documentary filmmaker Ondi Timoner in her first dramatic feature couches Mapplethorpe’s groundbreaking work in a thoroughly conventional narrative. One-time Doctor Who star Matt Smith plays Mapplethorpe as something of a spoiled brat, coddled by patrons such as wealthy collector Sam Wagstaff (John Benjamin Hickey), and, once he’s made a name for himself, sexually exploiting African-American subjects. Although Timoner freely portrays her subject warts-and-all, her script, co-written with Mikko Alanne, is full of highly telegraphed big-screen moments. Early in the film, when a young Mapplethorpe is denied entry to the Whitney Museum of American Art because he can’t afford the admission fee, you know that the movie will end with a triumphant exhibition of his work at the same venue. Mapplethorpe’s strength was exquisite lighting, which lent a glow to traditional portraiture as well as to more scandalous material. Unfortunately, Mapplethorpe, the movie, turns the artist’s volatile life and provocative work into a tepid, polite snooze.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, March 15, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.50.
YARDIE
Actor Idris Elba (The Wire) makes his feature debut as a director with this adaptation of Victor Headley’s 1992 crime novel. Depicting a volatile period in ‘70s Kingston and ‘80s London, the movie tells the story of Dennis (Ami Ameen), who as a child saw his older brother killed in an attempt to foster peace among rival gangs in Jamaica. As an adult, a vengeful Dennis begins to cause trouble in Kingston, so he’s sent to London, where he finds he can’t escape his past. While its source novel became a literary sensation in England, sold primarily by word of mouth via such unfamiliar publishing outlets as hairdressers and nightclubs, Elba’s film depicts its blood-soaked milieu with familiar gangster-movie tropes. Still, Yardie — its name comes from British slang for Jamaican gang members — has a raw energy and a great soundtrack.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, March 15, at Landmark West End Cinema and the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $12.50 to $13.
SEW THE WINTER TO MY SKIN
This epic biopic from South African director Jahmil X.T. Qubeka tells the story of an outlaw frequently called his nation’s Robin Hood. In the ‘50s, John Kepe stole livestock from white Afrikaners and gave the animals to black communities that the apartheid government had evicted from their land. Kepe evaded capture by living in caves, and as the photo above demonstrates, this highly charged history lends itself to a thrilling if unusual kind of adventure. Variety writes that, despite framing the film “with all the iconoclastic, outlaw verve of its rogue antihero … the chopped-up, jerky structure never lets us get close to Kepe.” The film is part of the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center’s 15th annual New African Film Festival, which runs through March 17.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, March 17, at 7 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
DAMAGED LIVES
This month the National Gallery of Art presents a series dedicated to the unsung, shoestring genre pictures that came out of what was known as Hollywood’s Poverty Row. Edgar G. Ulmer, whose 1945 film noir Detour is one of the most celebrated of these low-budget productions, directed this 1933 melodrama that is essentially a feature-length public service announcement. The damaged lives start with Donald (Lyman WIlliams), who cheats on his fiancee with a young woman he meets at a lavish party. Months later, he learns that his indiscretion has left him with a sexually transmitted disease — and he has infected his wife. This campy cautionary tale will be preceded by a newsreel and cartoon from the period. Also screening in the series this weekend is a 35mm print of the plastic surgery drama False Faces (Saturday, March 16, at 2 p.m.), which the gallery describes as “a mix of sophisticated comedy and grotesque horror.”
Damaged Lives screens Saturday, March 16, at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN
The Library of Congress remembers the late director Penny Marshall with a 35mm screening of her 1992 film about the first professional women’s baseball league. Founded in 1943, when wartime efforts called male baseball players to serve their country, the 15-team league operated until 1954. A League of Their Own focuses on one team coached by a washed-up former player (Tom Hanks, before he became the go-to actor for American mythmaking). Geena Davis, Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell, among others, co-star as members of this pioneering roster. Roger Ebert wrote that, while the film’s baseball elements may be familiar from dozens of other movies, A League of Their Own stands out for its focus on “the personalities of the players, the gradual unfolding of their coach and the way this early chapter of women’s liberation fit into the hidebound traditions of professional baseball.”
Thursday, March 21, at 7 p.m. in the Mary Pickford Theater on the third floor of the Madison Building at the Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave. SE. Free. Seating is first-come, first-served. For the best seating options, patrons are encouraged to arrive 15 to 30 minutes before the scheduled start time.
AMERICAN POP
Director Ralph Bakshi made his name with the animated Spiderman television series and such counterculture features as Fritz the Cat, based on characters by cartoonist Robert Crumb. A more personal work, this 1981 film charts four generations in a Jewish musical family that moves from vaudeville to rock. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote admiringly, “How many other films have you seen recently that managed to include World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Kent State, Frank Sinatra, Eva Tanguay, the Sex Pistols, Allen Ginsberg, Benny Goodman and the Prohibition gang wars?”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, March 18, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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