YOUNG FILMMAKER AND screenwriter Harmony Korine has established himself as a grunge visionary with his films "Gummo" and "Julien Donkey-Boy." Cherished by art-house audiences but often leaving critics aghast, Korine's work has set itself up as antithetical to traditional notions of cinematic pleasure: pretty people, happy endings, moral redemption, plot.

It's a shame if audiences reject Korine's latest film out of hand on the assumption that it's as gristly a chew as "Gummo." "Mister Lonely" stars Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator hardly getting by in Paris. He meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) who tells him about a commune for their kind in the wilds of Scotland, where people who "live as," as the script delicately puts it, the famous can be free.

In between, a group of nuns in the South American jungle, under the tutelage of Werner Herzog — bear with us — attempt to jump out of airplanes, aloft on faith alone.

Korine found the image in his mind and it stayed. "I liked the image," he says. "I thought it was a test of faith."

Continue Reading "The Pitfalls of Faith: 'Mister Lonely'" »

IT'S BEEN NEARLY 20 years since the last "Indiana Jones" movie hit theaters. That's a long time to wait for a follow-up, but the fourth installment, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," is due out later this month. To commemorate the resurrection of the franchise, Paramount is releasing all three movies in a three-disc "Adventure Collection."

But it's been only five years since the studio released its previous collection of these films, with more in-depth documentaries and exhaustive features. In fact, the "Adventure Collection" will soon be obsolete: When "Crystal Skull" arrives on DVD, there will surely be a new and more thorough set of the quadrilogy.

As a result, the set feels more like a marketing endeavor than a cinematic one. Still, the new interviews with cast and crew (including, curiously, actors in the new film) reveal new trivia for die-hard fans, and short, informative documentaries re-create the movie's pre-CGI special effects. Toht's melting face in "Raiders"? Yarn and gelatin.

Continue Reading "Marketing Adventure: Indiana Jones on DVD" »

ENTERTAINMENT MOGUL SUMNER REDSTONE said Tuesday he has no objection to Tom Cruise starring in the next segment of the popular "Mission Impossible" movie series, despite cutting his relationship with the actor in 2006.

Redstone — executive chairman and controlling shareholder of Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp. — ended a 14-year relationship with Cruise and his producing partner in August 2006, kicking them off the Paramount Pictures lot and ending their lucrative deal to develop projects for the studio.

Despite the severed relationship, Cruise, 45, is in talks with Paramount to star in a fourth "Mission: Impossible" film. Viacom is Paramount's parent company.

Continue Reading "Redstone: Cruise Can Star in Next 'Mission Impossible'" »

POUR YOURSELF A BOWL of sugary cereal, get your feety pajamas on and settle in for "Hiya, Kids!! A '50s Saturday Morning" (Shout! Factory), a four-DVD set collecting 10 hours of children's programming from TV's early years.

Several of these shows, like "Lassie" and the long-running "Howdy Doody," will be familiar to even the youngest viewers, but others were popular only at the time and have since languished in obscurity.

Dr. Frances R. Horwich hosts "Ding Dong School" with gentle grandmotherly authority, and "Winky Dink and You" was an early interactive show, allowing children to participate with their own Winky Dink coloring kit. It's doubtful either show inspired its own lunchbox.

Rather than present these shows in dry chronological order, "Hiya, Kids!" organizes them as four blocks of programming, with each DVD representing a different Saturday morning. Younger children wake up early for puppet shows like the still-weird "Kukla, Fran & Ollie" and the zany "Time for Beany," which featured clowns, live audiences, and not much in the way of a plot.

Continue Reading "Strange, Sweet Serials: 'Hiya, Kids!!'" »

ADMIT IT: You've been so busy wonking out over the primaries that you forgot about Filmfest D.C. Sure, "Politics & Film" is one of this year's themes, but why not try something different for the fest's final weekend?

"Timecrimes" (Spain) gives us a man who, after spying on a naked girl in the woods and being attacked by a bandaged assailant, is then tricked into traveling back in time 90 minutes — whereupon he sees his past self spying on the girl. Paradox (not hilarity) ensues.

Call it "Rear Window" meets "12 Monkeys" but with a lower budget and some dark laughs. An English-language remake deal's already been signed, so see it before Hollywood screws it up.

Continue Reading "Politics, Film and Froth: Filmfest DC" »

"IN 'SHOOT,' I'm shot in the upper left-hand arm by a friend of mine with a .22 rifle."

So Chris Burden describes one of the most notorious actions in the annals of contemporary art, the 1971 piece that got even the most mainstream of media outlets to pay attention to this guy from L.A. who insisted on making life difficult for himself.

Screening on Thursday as half of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's splendidly provocative "Performance as Art" screening, "Documentation of Selected Works 1971-75" runs through nearly a dozen pieces, such as "Icarus," in which Burden, lying naked on his back, has two long, winglike panes propped on his bare shoulders, doused in gasoline and set alight, before he jumps to his feet, shattering the glass.

Some performances are over in an instant. For all its career-making iconicity, "Shoot" plays out rather plainly. Burden's matter-of-fact voice-over, which paradoxically combines utter earnestness with puckish irony, consumes more screen time than the film does.

Other pieces test both Burden's endurance and our own. "Through the Night Softly" is both beautiful and excruciating, as the artist crawls, nearly nude, hands clasped behind his back, across pavement strewn with broken glass.

Continue Reading "Burn to Shine: Chris Burden and Ant Farm" »

REVOLUTIONS GENERALLY BEGIN WITH TALK. In France, talk leads naturally to cinema. The National Gallery observes the 40th anniversary of the uprising of May 1968 with films that look back to the social changes seeded by the desires of horny students and fed-up factory grinds.

In Louis Malle's 1989 comedy "May Fools" (Sun., 4:30 p.m.), the death of old France is symbolized by a manor-house matriarch laid out on the cooling board. Gently satirizing the foibles of the landed class, as news from Paris comes crackling to the countryside over the radio, Malle has a high time, and nobody really gets hurt. Sexual quirks wriggle to the surface, threatening to rearrange family loyalties, only to be tamped back into place once the general strike has passed and everyone can return home with a portion of the take.

For 1972's "Tout Va Bien," (May 17, 3 p.m.) Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin hire Yves Montand and Jane Fonda to secure their funding, then treat them like puppets, chattering-class interlopers held hostage to the demands of meatpackers and theorists alike. Ultimately, it's the dollhouse-like factory set, with its tricolore decorative scheme that carries the day.

If religion is the opiate of the people, the opiate of the studentariat is opium. Except when it's hash. Philippe Garrel directs his son, Louis, through the casual experiments of that long-ago spring in 2005's "Regular Lovers" (May 18, 4 p.m.). The insurgency flared out quickly, and Garrel Pere, after barricade sequences that deliberately strip action from activism, lingers over the protracted aimlessness that haunted his comrades.

» National Gallery of Art, 6th Street & Constitution Avenue NW; through May 24, free; nga.gov/programs/film; 202-842-6799. (Archives-Navy Memorial)

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon
Photo courtesy AFI

FOR THE NEXT WEEK, get a little culture at Filmfest D.C.

Yes, film festivals have been a staple of hipster culture for long enough that they aren't cool anymore, but this year's Filmfest D.C. has a host of promising movies, including "Made in Jamaica," which is about reggae (if you couldn't guess; read our feature story here,) and "Basic Sanitation," about some do-gooders who make a horror movie to try to get their community to clean up the local river.

The festival's theme is "Latin American Cinema," and if you take your movie ticket to Ceviche or its sister restaurants, you'll get a free appetizer.

» Filmfest D.C., various theaters; $10, April 24 - May 4; 202-628-3456

Photo courtesy Lawrencepictures

BOURBON's monthly dance-night-disguised-as-a-salon, The Modernist Society, operates on a simple formula: Lure pseudo-intellectuals in with the promise of deep discussion with today's greatest thinkers, and then keep 'em there with dance music!

This month's guest is Josh Gilbert, who directed "a/k/a Tommy Chong," about the prison sentence of one half of the legendary stoner duo Cheech and Chong. There'll be a screening, a Q & A with Gilbert, and then . . . DANCING!

But, you know, intellectual dancing.

» Bourbon, 2321 18th St. NW; Thurs., 9 p.m., free; 202-232-0800.

THE WASHINGTON PSYCHOTRONIC FILM SOCIETY has a singular mission: to bring odd, creepy, or just obscure movies out of the closet and into the public consciousness. "The Driver's Seat" is a doozy: Elizabeth Taylor runs all over the European countryside searching for a lover, and periodically gets accosted by Andy Warhol. Yeah, that's right. You know you want to see that.

» Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse, 2903 Columbia Pike, Arlington; Wed., 8:30 p.m., free; 703 486-2345.