The Manhattan Project
Morning Roundup: Second Helpings Edition
Compromise Uncertain on Same-Sex Marriage Law
Fire at 17th and L NW Forces Evacuations
Sculpture Garden Ice-Skating Rink Remains Closed
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Foreign: This is England
After receiving accolades galore at a number of major film festivals, British director Shane Meadow's autobiographical film is receiving a limited one week run in D.C. starting on Friday. Based on his own experiences coming of age in the UK in the early 80's, This is England follows 12-year old Shaun, a target for bullies and lacking a father figure since the death of his own Dad in the Falklands, as he hooks up with a group of skinheads who take him under their wings. A disturbing look at both the adolescent search for a place to belong as well as a turbulent time in Britain, and by all accounts a film that is not to be missed.
View the trailer.
Playing at E Street Cinema for one week only, starting this Friday.
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Major Release: Superbad
Judd Apatow has finally cracked the code. After being the guiding force behind a number of excellent, critically acclaimed, but publicly ignored television series, Apatow has found the success denied him on the small screen on the silver. Which, on the one hand, is a shame, since it would be nice to see him try to capture the brilliance of Freaks & Geeks or Undeclared again, only this time with, well, an audience. On the other hand, wildly funny comedies like Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin more than made up for it. For Superbad, Apatow takes the producer's reins, buddy and frequent actor Seth Rogan co-writes with former Ali G writer Evan Goldberg, and Greg Mottola, director of quite a few episodes of Undeclared (not to mention Arrested Development) takes the helm. We're hoping that this story of a high-school graduation party gone horribly awry has all the laugh-til-you puke potential the creative team promises.
View the trailer.
Opens on Friday at a number of area theatres.
Random note: Last week the commenters took me to task for disparaging the film version of Neil Gaiman's Stardust based just on the trailer and some advance reviews. After seeing the film, I stand by my non-recommendation. Stardust works for only about 30 minutes of its two hour running time. When it works, it's wonderful, which only makes the fact that the rest is such a clumsy mess even more disappointing.
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Repertory: Cléo from 5 to 7
The AFI's Janus Films retrospective continues to bring out amazing film after amazing film. This weekend it's Agnes Varda's masterpiece which shows, in real time, an hour and a half in the life of an aspiring pop singer as she wanders around Paris awaiting the result of a medical test. Cléo is either a hypochondriac or possessed of amazing powers of self-diagnosis, as she very much believes she is dying of cancer. As she waits for the doctor to confirm or deny her suspicions, she meets a number of friends and characters around the city, and confronts her mortality. Elegant, charming, and thought provoking, Varda's film ranks among the best of the burgeoning French New Wave.
Playing at the AFI Silver Theatre on Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday.
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Special Event(s): The Good the Bad and the Ugly & Unforgiven
Two films that bookend the two extremes of Clint Eastwood's career in westerns are screening this week as part of the Georgetown Film Fest's Clint Eastwood Summer Film Festival. First up, on Friday, is Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the third appearance by Eastwood in his iconic "Man With No Name" character, and considered by some to be the best of the trilogy. And where Leone's film revels in blood-soaked violence, Eastwood's own redefining of the Western genre nearly 30 years later, Unforgiven, turns its eye inward, and examines just what all that violence means. Its conclusions aren't too pretty.
View the trailers: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Unforgiven.
Playing at "Hang 'Em High", the Clint Eastwood Summer Film Festival. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly screens this Friday at dusk in Gateway Park near the Rosslyn metro stop. Unforgiven is Monday at dusk at 18th & Bell in Arlington, at the Crystal City metro stop.
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Independent: No End in Sight
Charles Ferguson's maddening look at the war in Iraq has been playing for a good while now, but if you haven't had a chance to see it yet, you should make the trip before its run ends. Ferguson, a former supporter of the war, began rounding up others like himself, who started out supporting (or in many cases orchestrating) the war, and eventually becoming disillusioned with an administration determined to make the truth fit its goals. Populating his film with former insiders and Bush boosters who have left the fold lends Ferguson's work a gravity that might be lost with the usual administration critics from the left, and shows how the administration willfully ignored those who wouldn't toe the party line.
View the trailer.
Playing at Fairfax's Cinema Arts theatre tonight and tomorrow, E Street Cinema now through next week.
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You're simply wrong about Stardust, and helping Hollywood enforce its celebration of the middlebrow. It's been rather funny this week, watching all of the premature glee in deriding this film as a flop for not featuring people getting kicked in the groin.
Clearly, Stardust isn't for everyone. The movie for "everyone" is Rush Hour 3. This is the movie for everyone else.
Saw "Superbad" a month ago at a MySpace preview at Union Station; 3 Words: Funny As Hell!!! Apatow & Co set their sites on high school, should be this generation's "Fast Times" but funnier. The world will know, and much respect, the name "McLovin".
Stardust was fantastic dammit.
Guest #1, I think I've made my distaste for middlebrow Hollywood fare pretty clear in this column and in the movies I've reviewed so far on DCist. I'm not helping them to do anything, and I take no "glee" in the fact that Stardust was a major disappointment. I absolutely adore Neil Gaiman, and I hope someday he gets a film adaptation that lives up to his writing, but this wasn't it. The ultra-low-budget BBC version of Neverwhere even beats out Stardust.
Vaughn spends the first hour searching blindly for a tone (and trying, painfully at times, to be the second coming of The Princess Bride), then after finally finding it, abandons it for an ending that is even more saccharine than that of the second Harry Potter flick. No fantasy film should ever call to mind anything by Chris Columbus, least of all one made by someone who has proved himself as talented as Matthew Vaughn. If anything could be described as "middlebrow Hollywood fare", it was that ending, which was loaded with the standard quest movie cliches, and which was telegraphed like an aging boxer's punches. Even audiences unfamiliar with the book could have picked out exactly what was going to happen within the first 20 minutes.
I wonder what folks are seeing if they thought Stardust was fantastic. It wasn't awful, not like Bicentennial Man awful, but it didn't do anything to make me or my friend who saw it with me care about any of the characters. At all. And that's exactly what's wrong with half the stuff coming out of hollywood - lack of ability to illuminate, inspire, highlight common ground, basically a failure to get audiences to engage. -KD