So, last Sunday someone told me they religiously read this column every week.
And while this makes the readership quota rise to a total of 2, it still made my day.
Now, go and impress your pretty but possibly boring date with some of this inside knowledge of the inner workings of the miracle that are “free movie programs in DC”. Library of congress is to the overeducated in 2008 what sports clubs were to the gays in 2006-a meat market. Don’t even try to deny it.

Wednesday

The Kentucky Fried Movie @ Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse, 8.30pm

TKFM is the grandpappy of all modern day spoof/skit films, one of the bestest, and one of the funniest. Spoofing porn, blaxploitation films, kung-fu films, and more. Nothing’s too sacred when you got Gutt-busting comedy like the kung-Fu parody, “A Fistful Of Yen”, and Oh My goodness who can forget Uschi Digard’s shower scene in “Catholic School Girls In Trouble.” Cameo appearances by Bill Bixby and Donald Sutherland.

Jazz Film Series @ The Library of Congress, 7pm

Legendary jazz vocalist Anita O’Day (Anita Colton) became popular singing with the Gene Krupa and Stan Kenton Big Bands before carving out a long career as a solo artist. In this new documentary, the so-called “Jezebel of Jazz” looks back over her life and tells the story of her struggles in the music world and triumphs over addiction, with rarely seen film performances and interviews with Annie Ross, Margaret Whiting, Bill Holman, Johnny Mandel and Gerald Wilson among others.

Friday

Bitter Sweet @ The Library of Congress, 7pm

Noël Coward’s operetta gets its first big screen treatment by Irish-born British producer/director Herbert Wilcox. (As for the MGM version, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, released in 1940, Coward wrote, “It is, on all counts, far and away the worst picture I have ever seen.”) Wilcox intended Bitter Sweet as a star-making property for Anna Neagle, his lovely young protégée.
The depiction of café life in Vienna is full of charm, but with a slight tinge of menace, just like the name suggests

Saturday

The Mother and The Whore @ National Gallery of Art, 2 pm

Part of the Jean Eustache film series. One of the monumental achievements of midcentury cinema (and “an icy comment on the French New Wave”), this nearly four-hour film puts a magnifying lens on the tangled relationships between a self-absorbed young Jean-Pierre Léaud and the women in his life. As the viewer observes daily comings and goings, monologues and dialogues (culled, according to the director, from real-life conversations) form a large part of the soundtrack. “The same way that Flaubert’s novels gave a reading of a personal trajectory as well as a tableau of an era, La maman et la putain offers a close up of three individuals, a medium shot of a micro-society, and a wide shot of French society in the early 1970s,” noted one writer

Sunday

the Eustache series continues with

The Wasted Breath of Jean Eustache @ National Gallery of Art, 4:30 pm

Arguably one of the most intelligent biographies of a filmmaker ever produced, La peine perdue de Jean Eustache (The Wasted Breath of Jean Eustache) presents the artist through a series of interviews and readings by close friends and colleagues. Jean-Pierre Léaud leads the procession, reciting a text by Eustache from 1971. Eustache’s revolutionary ideas about his art, his background, and the major events of his life (he comitted suicide in 1981) are portrayed throughout the film. (Angel Díez, 1997, French with subtitles, 53 minutes)
In Numéro zéro Eustache set out to make a portrait of his aged and nearly blind grandmother. He simply placed her in front of a camera and asked her to recount her life. This deceptively straightforward premise became a stirring portrait of a strong woman. Eustache never released Numéro zero in its original format; instead, a truncated version was exhibited on French TV with the title Odette Robert. The longer original version was not released until 2003, nearly twenty years after the director’s death.

+ the Korean film festival, much like your heart, goes on:

Driving With my Wife’s Lover @ Freer Sackler, 2pm

A superb ensemble cast anchors this engrossing film from director Kim Tae-sik. When a mild-mannered man discovers his wife is cheating on him with a taxi driver from Seoul, he hires this adversary for a long trip so he can confront the man. What follows is a plot full of surprising twists and turns as the two men forge an unlikely bond. Intended for mature audiences.