Capital Projections: Happy face 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.
JOKER
Set in the fictional Gotham City in the early ‘80s, Joker tells the origin story behind one of Batman’s most formidable opponents. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a morose middle-aged man who lives with his sick mother in a run-down apartment building. He makes a meager living as a clown-for-hire, which leads to his brutal beating by a group of young thieves. One of his few pleasures — if you could call it that — is the talk show hosted by Murray Franklin (Robert DeNiro). Arthur daydreams of being on Franklin’s show; he also strikes up an unlikely relationship with a pretty neighbor (Zazie Beetz) he encounters on his building’s elevator. But is this romance all in his head? If only Arthur could get the world’s attention for real — but how?
Writer-director Todd Phillips, the auteur behind the Hangover comedy trilogy and its celebration of frat boys who never grew up, puts away such man-childish things for this dark, violent drama. He sets a unique tone that’s even grimmer than Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, but it’s thoroughly derivative. His protagonist’s tenuous grasp on reality is taken straight from Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy; DeNiro, who in that 1982 film was obsessed with talk-show host Jerry Lewis, is essentially playing the flip side of that role here. When Arthur turns vigilante, he’s regurgitating another Scorsese classic, Taxi Driver. Phoenix throws his entire body into the role. He brings Arthur to life so vividly that we can almost feel the physical pain of his uncontrollable laughter, which makes his descent into ultraviolence somewhat relatable and that much more disturbing. Even more so than a Quentin Tarantino film, Joker seems like a funhouse reflection of our worst, more vengeful impulses. (Phoenix, too, is repeating himself — the emaciated frame and physical gestures recalling the 2012 film The Master, the messianic complex echoing his intense stint as Jesus in the 2018 Mary Magdalene.)
The film is not without visual artistry, and Phoenix’s galvanizing central performance is likely to earn him an Oscar nomination. Yet Joker seems like little more than the bitter vision of an obnoxious, brooding teenager in arthouse clothing, as obvious as the on-the-nose soundtrack cues of seemingly every pop song featuring a clown. Exhibitors have expressed concern that the film’s violence will inspire real-life incidents, but it’s hard to imagine this dreary picture leading to much action of any kind, at the box office or on the streets.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Oct. 4, at area theaters, including the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center ($15), which is the only theater in the Washington area where you can see it on 70-mm film.
FIRST LOVE
With a title that seems like a 180-degree pivot from Joker, First Love may come across as an antidote to blockbuster nihilism, and in some ways it is. But if you’ve seen anything else by prolific director Takashi Miike, you might wish he’d had a crack at the star franchise. The romance is hatched when Leo (Masataka Kubota), a small-time boxer, meets Monica (Sakurako Konishi), a young woman who has been sold into prostitution to pay off her yakuza father’s debt. Given a dire medical diagnosis, Leo believes his days are numbered; he acts boldly to rescue Monica, which pulls him into a brutal underworld conflict between high-end drug dealers and corrupt police. In the middle of this blood-drenched mayhem, the young couple falls in love.
Miike, who has directed more than 100 feature films, may be best known for the 1999 thriller Audition, which seemed like a benign story of finding love through the personal ads before it took a tortuous turn. While the director has made more straightforward genre pictures, such as the excellent 2017 samurai film Blade of the Immortal, First Love gives Miike a chance to flex his more playful side, and its inventiveness makes you hope he can crank out another 100 movies.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Oct. 4, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.50.
ONE CUT OF THE DEAD
October means scary movies, and the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center is indeed hosting the 14th annual Spooky Movie International Horror Film Festival from Oct. 3 through 6. While the programming has been erratic in the past, this year’s slate, according to the Washington City Paper, may be one of the strongest yet.
One Cut of the Dead, an inventive 2017 horror comedy from Japan that became a hit on the festival circuit, probably won’t frighten you, but it’s worth its running time in chuckles. The movie begins in the middle of a low-budget zombie film shoot taking place in an abandoned World War II-era factory. A hot-tempered director (Takayuki Hamatsu) can’t get his lead actress (Yuzuki Akiyama) to show enough fear. What the cast doesn’t know is that the director has lured real zombies to the set.
At least, that’s the first act, which consists of a single uninterrupted shot that lasts more than a half hour. But writer-director Shin’ichirô Ueda, for his first feature, has something else up his sleeve; after that long introduction, the film pulls back in an attempt to chronicle the struggles that went into making the zombie movie. The result is more entertaining than the undead. The payoff doesn’t entirely make up for the sometimes tedious setup, but that seems to be the point. One Cut of the Dead is a clever look at the massive group effort that goes into producing even the most seemingly disposable movie product.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, Oct. 6, at 12:30 p.m. at the AFI Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
KWAIDAN
The Freer and Sackler galleries cater their monthly matinee series of Japanese classics to the spooky season with this ghost story anthology from 1964. Director Masaki Kobayashi is otherwise known for socially conscious dramas like Black River and The Human Condition, but here he adapts four stories written in 1903 by Greek-Irish folklorist Lafcadio Hearn, a one-time United States resident who became a naturalized Japanese citizen in 1895 and changed his name to Yakumo Koizumi. The film’s episodes tell of heartbroken samurai, hot-tempered warriors and a blind musician who loses his ears. Critic David Ehrenstein writes that “with beauty, subtlety, and shock [the film] draws the viewer further from the real world and closer and closer to the supernatural.”
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Oct. 9, at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art in the Meyer Auditorium. Free.
BLOODMARSH KRACKOON
If Joker’s Arthur Fleck is upset by a world descended into crime and incivility, what would he make of this 2010 horror comedy about a Bronx raccoon addicted to crack? Writer-director Jerry Landi began his career as a medical photographer before he started making B-movies in his native borough — see also his 2016 thriller Bronx Bigfoot. A presentation of the Washington Psychotronic Film Society, of course.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Oct. 7, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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