Morning Roundup: Goodbye, Abe Edition
Vegetate to Close at the End of the Month
D.C. Police Seek Suspect in Series of Bank Robberies
Suspect in 9-Year-Old's Murder Found Dead in D.C. Jail
Wizards Owner Abe Pollin Dies at 85
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Foreign: Ballad of a Soldier
The AFI's great Janus Films retrospective continues, and there is probably no title on the schedule this writer is more eager to see on the big screen. Grigori Chukhrai's 1959 classic takes a simple concept — the tale of a Russian soldier making his way home to see his mother during a brief furlough during his service in WWII — and turns it into a beautiful and tender meditation on emotional bonds, particularly in times of war. The movie is straightforward, yet deeply layered, and Chukhrai strikes a perfect balance between the needs of the story to continue its forward march, and his own objective to convey deeper meaning. Beautifully shot and artfully rendered, Ballad of a Soldier may be about as close to perfect as a film can get. Another great Soviet film from the same era is Mikheil Kalatozishvili's The Cranes Are Flying, also showing this week.
Ballad of a Soldier plays at the AFI Silver Theatre on Saturday and Monday.
---
Special Event: Casablanca
Screen on the Green comes to a close in grand style with one of the greats. Judging from the days we’ve made it down on the Mall to see films the past few weeks, attendance has been great, and with a title like this, we expect the space between 4th & 7th Streets to be packed. If you haven’t seen Casablanca, you owe it to yourself to go. And if you have, I don’t need to sell you on the movie. Show up early, enjoy the summer weather (which, by next week, may be back into a range one might consider enjoyable), and be sure to stand for the HBO Dance. It’ll be your last chance to do it for nearly a year.
View the trailer.
Playing on the Mall Monday night at sunset.
---
Indie: Interview
Steve Buscemi continues to expand his résumé as a director of offbeat and thoughtful indie films with this remake of Theo van Gogh's 2004 Dutch film. Van Gogh was set to direct this English language remake of his own film, much as Takashi Shimizu did with the Japanese and American versions of The Grudge, but was violently murdered by a religious extremist who was offended by a documentary van Gogh had made for Dutch television. Buscemi took over the project, in which he'd already been cast. The subject, an unlikely romance between a jaded journalist and a misunderstood starlet, still seems timely, and we hope Buscemi was able to do justice to both the source material and van Gogh's memory.
View the trailer.
Opens at E Street Cinema on Friday.
---
Repertory: Ferris Bueller's Day Off
There seems to be a lot of serious fare in the entries above. And I think Mr. Bueller himself would agree that life's too short not to laugh a little. Bueller came out in the midst of John Hughes' impressive run of mid-80's teen-themed hits, before he quickly jumped the shark by making the protagonists of his screenplays increasingly younger and younger, and holds up well, still generating laughs over 20 years after its release (and if you think that makes you feel old, just imagine how Matthew Broderick must feel).
View the trailer.
Playing at the AFI Silver Theatre Friday, Saturday, and next Thursday.
---
Major Release: We’ll take a pass.
Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth? Stay away from the studio releases this week. Chris Tucker will undoubtedly utter some variation on his famously improvised line in yet another Rush Hour installment from Brett Ratner, the biggest action hack the movies have ever known. There’s what looks to be a terrible Neil Gaiman adaptation; hopefully Coraline will get a better treatment. Cuba Gooding continues to let his career slip away in Daddy Day Care. And there’s an awful looking werewolf movie just to round things out. Welcome to the no-man’s land between summer blockbuster season and autumn Oscar-bait.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
You are, if anything, too kind to Mr. Ratner: Only he would be dumb enough to take one of the most brilliant physical performers the movies have ever produced, in Jackie Chan, and then shoot his fights in such a way that it looks like he's using stunt doubles even when he isn't.
But let's not write Stardust off just yet. Matthew Vaughn did make the fabulous Layer Cake, after all, and he had the good sense to walk away from X3 when Fox wouldn't give him enough time to make a quality picture. Of course, Action Hack No. 1 was only too happy to pick up the ball, and, one presumes, a hefty paycheck . . .
If the Gaiman adaptation is so terrible, why does he say about Stardust, "I think you'll be extremely pleasantly surprised. I think it's a lovely movie, and that it's a movie, not a book, and those places where they changed things to make it work as a movie, work just fine. And I think that it's nothing at all like the trailer."
Ah well, at least that's what I'll be seeing this weekend.
"And I think that it's nothing at all like the trailer."
Well, that'll be the key. Because the trailer really looks awful. The rest could easily be the sort of gritted teeth salesmanship routinely engaged in at press time for a movie, but that last sentence gives me hope.
I'll also add a(nother) plug for Stardust. In (more) words of Mr. Gaiman:
"If you're in two minds about Stardust, about whether or not to see it or even when to see it, please go and see it this weekend. Friday night if you can. Take friends. If necessary, take them at gunpoint. They will love the movie so much they will forgive you afterwards. And if they don't forgive you, you can dispose of them quietly -- you're the one with the gun, after all -- and you will have a wonderful time for the rest of your life with the new friends you made at the Stardust screening."
I'll be on a cross-country train on Friday or else I'd definitely drag my friends to the nearest cinema.
I hated the stardust trailer, but I went to a stardust screening last week anyway. Trust me, it's waaaaaay better than the trailer.
Another Stardust plug- it was adorable. Yeah, maybe not a summer blockbuster. But I came away feeling it was very Gaiman, and very sweet, and in no way a travesty.
What more do you want out of what is essentially a children's story?
"Van Gogh was set to direct this English language remake of his own film, much as Takashi Shimizu did with the Japanese and American versions of The Grudge, but was violently murdered by a religious extremist who was offended by a documentary van Gogh had made for Dutch television."
Is DCist afraid of a fatwah if they mention that Van Gogh was killed by a Muslim?
In the case of any violent crusading religious extremist, whether Muslim, Christian, or pick your religion, their defining characteristics are in most cases a subversion of what that faith is about. Islam is far too stigmatized already as a violent religion, and I didn't feel like piling on. I think there are constructive ways to criticise religions, and being lazy about how we describe the actions of people who aren't necessarily representative samples isn't one of them.
Van Gogh presented a lot of valid criticism about the treatment of women in Muslim societies. But he was also fond of publicly calling all Muslims "goatfuckers". How much of his message was lost in his confrontational stance, and how many progressive and liberal Muslims (who probably agree with him on most points) did he lose because of his tendency towards blanket statements? His obsession with the evil of religion in general, and Islam in particular, gave him some pretty severe blinders to subtlety and nuance, and if anything can be learned from his death, it's that no one is well served by that sort of simplistic reasoning.
Make no mistake, I was saddened to hear of his death, and the guy who did it was a sick fuck. But I had issues with van Gogh's eagerness to characterize an entire faith based on the actions of its worst members, and I prefer to conduct myself differently, which is why I highlighted "religious extremist" rather than "Muslim".