This year at Sundance, there was one film that seemed to blow everyone away: the first feature from director
Benh Zeitlin,
Beasts of the Southern Wild. If there’s a stereotype about the films that do well at the festival, it’s that they’re serious-minded, fairly realistic,
talky independents, often with a strong dark streak.
Beasts is something else entirely: a film of rare
ambition for a first feature, but also—even more rare—one that actually
succeeds
in manifesting the skill necessary to realize its outsize
ambitions. This is the best first feature you’re likely to have
seen from any filmmaker in a long, long time.
The film takes place in a fictional coastal Louisiana
island known by its impoverished local residents as “the Bathtub,” a
low-lying spot on the wrong side of protective levies should a
storm come through. Such a storm does, and leaves the Bathtub
largely submerged, its residents forced to fend for themselves.
The film concentrates on one particular resident: a little
girl who goes by the name “Hushpuppy” (Quvenzhané Wallis) who’s raised by a single father with mounting health problems.
If that sounds like a film with the makings of a
straight Katrina allegory or a political statement on the state of the
coastal
communities of Louisiana, it’s neither of those things. Zeitlin
shoots the film from the perspective of Hushpuppy, and the
result is a film that taps the waking-dream imagination of
childhood, as she combines elements of the world around her to
develop a magically realistic world of fantasy that both
reflects and distracts from her more earthly problems. Ebullient
and brimming over with imagination, this is easily one of the
year’s best and one of the most unapologetically (and earnedly)
joyful films you’ll see this year.
View the
trailer. Opens today at E
Street and Bethesda
Row.
The second small indie this week that’s garnering plenty of acclaim for being among the year’s best is the second directorial
effort from actor
Sarah Polley. The film is set in a quiet Toronto neighborhood where a writer (Michelle Williams) is having a marital crisis after developing feelings for a neighbor (Luke Kirby) that call into question her feelings for her husband (Seth Rogen). Reaction has been hugely positive
to Polley’s sensitive look at the complex inner workings of a marriage,
as well as to
the performances here. Of course, we know Williams is never
less than stellar in whatever she’s in, but many are suggesting
this is a revelation of previously untapped talent from Rogen.
View the
trailer. Opens today at E
Street
and the Avalon.
If you’d long ago written off
Oliver Stone, you’d hardly be harshly judgmental. Not only has the director not made a decent film since 1995’s
Nixon, he’s barely even made anything that could charitably be described as mediocre in that time.
World Trade Center is the one film made during that period to actually garner some positive reviews—but let’s be honest, few wanted to say
a bad word about a reverential tribute to 9/11 first responders. Taken objectively, without that context,
WTC is an awful film. So it comes as a big surprise that Stone’s latest is receiving notices that, while not glowing, are at
least skewing positive.
Savages, based on the novel by
Don Winslow and starring
Taylor Kitsch,
Blake Lively, and
Benicio del Toro, is about a Mexican drug cartel that kidnaps the girlfriend of two American marijuana growers, who are then forced to try
to take her back on their own.
View the
trailer. Opens today at
theaters across the
area.
The second of Stanley Kubrick’s two privately funded films before he graduated to studio filmmaking with
The Killing in 1956, this fairly straightforward 1955
film noir doesn’t immediately announce itself as an unmistakable Kubrick
production
the way his later films would. But despite its pulpy basis—a
boxer near the end of his run falls for the wrong girl, a dancer
with an abusive boss, and a string of bad luck, murder, and
mistaken identity follow—there’s a quietly restrained melancholy
to the film that gives it a more reflective mood than many of
its trashier contemporaries.
Killer’s Kiss still finds the young Kubrick (he was only 27 when he made it) working within established genre conventions, as he did with
his war movie debut,
Fear and Desire, and working out his own way of storytelling. While certainly not as notable or groundbreaking as much of his later work,
this is still essential viewing for anyone looking to see the early halting artistic steps of a later giant.
View the
trailer. Sunday and Monday
evening at the
AFI.
Fans of modern dance and of choreographer
Pina Bausch—or those whose interest in her work was piqued after seeing
Wim Wenders’s memorable 3D documentary about
her last year—should look to the Goethe-Institut on Monday for a rare
screening of the only
film Bausch ever directed. The 1990 German work finds the
choreographer bending cinema to meet her own will rather than the
other way around. Instead of trying to make a more easily
marketable narrative film that also includes dance, this is a collage
of dance scenes set in and around the city of Wuppertal, and is
just as evocative and symbolic as one of her stage pieces.
View a clip
from the movie. Monday at 6:30 PM at the
Goethe-Institut.
$7 (or $4 for members).
DVD Pick of the Week:
God Bless America
Bobcat Goldthwait’s latest directorial effort
blew through DC cinemas in a hurry just a couple of months ago, which
probably isn’t a surprise
given that it’s a film designed to make the viewer feel more
than a little guilty while they’re being entertained. The
writer/director
tells the story of Frank (Joel Murray), a down-on-his-luck former insurance salesman who with the goading influence of a teenage miscreant (Tara Lynn Barr) goes on a nationwide killing
spree taking out the worst examples of American culture, from reality TV
stars to cable news
blowhards. It’s almost impossible not to feel a spark of
empathy for Frank’s murderous quest; even when you know it’s wrong,
when you find these people on your TV late at night it’s hard
not to wish a little bad fortune on them. But that’s Goldthwait’s
trap, as he’s not trying to make a hero out of Frank. In
setting his protagonist up for a fairly significant fall, Goldthwait
does the same to us, and amid the murder, mayhem, and frequent
gallows humor, there’s some serious self-reflection he is trying
to initiate with the film.
You can read my full take on the film, including an
interview with Goldthwait, over at the
Atlantic.
Special Features: A making-of featurette, interviews, and deleted scenes.
