Capital Projections: True lies 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.
OFFICIAL SECRETS
This timely but tepid political thriller dramatizes the true story of Katharine Gun, who was working as a translator in a British intelligence agency when a pivotal email crossed her path. The film begins during the run-up to the Iraq War. In 2003, Gun (Keira Knightley) takes note of an alarming memo from the NSA that asks British agents to dig up dirt on U.N. Security Council members and coerce them to vote in favor of the war. Gun is torn about leaking the information, since doing so would violate the Official Secrets Act, and she tries to anonymously get the memo into the hands of the United Kingdom’s press. But questions about its authenticity prompt Gun to reveal her identity and stand trial, defended by barrister Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes).
Despite the thousands of lives at stake, Official Secrets plays like a dry procedural driven by behind-the-scenes machinations. It’s as if a conscious attempt was made to turn vivid history into inert entertainment, starting with a generic title, changed from the somewhat more dramatic marquee used in the source book by authors Marcia and Thomas Mitchell: The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War. Knightley does what she can with the role, but director Gavin Hood (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) proves unable to make his characters come to life as anything other than pawns on a global stage. Only Rhys Ifans (who was a more-than-serviceable villain in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man) breaks out of the reserved tone in a hammy performance as British journalist Ed Vulliamy. Will the world remember this whistleblower’s tale? Maybe, but it won’t remember this movie.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Sept. 6, at Landmark E Street Cinema and Landmark Bethesda Row Cinema. $12.50.
JAY MYSELF
Frequent visitors to New York City in the early 2010s may have wondered how the once elegant six-story structure at 190 Bowery had somehow escaped the booming real estate market. The 19th-century building was originally a bank, and while its run-down appearance made it look abandoned at first glance, it was home for decades to photographer — and hoarder — Jay Maisel. In this documentary, first-time director Stephen Wilkes (Maisel’s former student) offers an endearing portrait of an idiosyncratic artist and his one-of-a-kind home, which was finally sold in 2015 for a swell $55 million.
Jay Myself (the title comes from a mispronunciation of his name) follows Maisel as he gets ready to leave the place he called home for nearly 50 years. If you bristle at the thought ot packing up your house to move, you may find solace in the massive operation it took to clear out decades of clutter. Alongside invaluable photographic archives were countless objects — from compact blue glassware to huge pieces of scrap metal — that Maisel had collected over the years, confident that he would always have room to keep them. It all fed his art. As I wrote in my Spectrum Culture review, “Maisel sums up his aesthetic as simply, ‘Hey look!’ Better than nearly any other film about a photographer, Jay Myself gets at what makes its subject’s eye tick — which, long story short, is everything.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Sept. 6, at Landmark West End Cinema. $12.50.
MILES DAVIS: BIRTH OF THE COOL
Jazz legend Miles Davis reinvented himself and his music several times over a long, unpredictable career. From the early days of bebop and cool jazz in the 1940s to his exploration of modal jazz in the 1950s to a more experimental ’60s and divisive electric work in the ’70s, Davis was a restless innovator. This makes him a great subject, but filmmakers have not been able to match their subject’s creative fervor. In one misguided attempt, the largely speculative 2016 biopic Miles Ahead featured an action movie subplot that practically amounted to fan-fiction. On the other hand, this respectful if straightforward documentary errs on the side of caution.
In Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, director Stanley Nelson, who has chronicled the African American experience in films like Freedom Riders, profiles the artist through file footage and interviews with former band members. The movie doesn’t shy away from Davis’ volatile and violent reputation offstage; among the interview subjects is ex-wife Florence Taylor, whom he hit on more than one occasion. But, as I wrote in this space prior to the film’s screening at AFI Docs in June, “as fascinating and mercurial as its subject was, the film follows a fairly conventional narrative, with any sparks or insight arising from the music rather than talking heads like sidemen Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Sept. 6, at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
MIKEY AND NICKY
The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center’s series The New Hollywood, which wraps up on Sept. 9, brings a new 4K digital restoration of this 1976 crime drama from director Elaine May. John Cassavetes stars as a small-time bookie who is on the run from a hitman and enlists the help of his best friend (Peter Falk, a regular in Cassavetes’ films as a director). While the story on screen is that of a friendship gone wrong, the making of the film was its own kind of struggle. May shot a million feet of footage in order to capture her actors’ raw emotions, and she and Falk reportedly had to wrestle the film away from the studio in order to keep her vision intact. The AFI will be screening May’s preferred version of the film, which wasn’t released for years. Read more about the film and its troubled production at The Criterion Collection.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, Sept. 7, at 3 p.m. and Monday, Sept. 9, at 7:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
LESSONS OF DARKNESS
The National Gallery of Art launches the series Serious Games: Documentary Art Between Fact and Fiction, which runs through Sept. 28, with Werner Herzog’s 1992 film set in the burning oil fields of Kuwait. In visionary fiction films such as Aguirre: The Wrath of God, the German director immersed audiences in a semi-documentary world characterized by what he called “ecstatic truth.” With this nonfiction Gulf War film, Herzog observes the firefighters who tried to tame the flaming wells. But with footage of the conflagration that’s so atmospheric it nearly becomes abstract, this is far from a news report. As the website Birth.Movies.Death. writes, it’s also “a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie.”
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, Sept. 7, at noon in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium. Free.
DEVIL TIMES FIVE
This 1974 horror film, originally titled People Toys, co-stars a young Leif Garrett, not long before he became a teen idol. Here, he makes audiences scream with terror, not pleasure. The Washington Psychotronic FIlm Society puts it more vividly: “Darn kids! A group of bickering adults, snowed in at a lodge, take in five children who survived a bus crash. But these kids ain’t right in the head. One dresses like a nun, another like a soldier, one cross-dresses, and one is really into fire. And they wanna play. Pray you aren’t ‘it.’ ”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Sept. 9, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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