Ballou HS Rocks the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
Photo of the Day: November 27, 2009
Morning Roundup: Black Friday Edition
Car Pushed Into Anacostia River By Train
The Saturday Morning Post
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Repertory: Halloween Screams at the AFI
Perhaps my favorite part of this time of year is the fact that on any given night, you can turn on the television, and somewhere on the dial you can find a movie about things that go bump in the night, creatures from the depths of Hell, or your garden variety psychopathic masked murderer of libidinous teens. It really is the most wonderful time of the year. Let's not forget the pleasure of watching horror movies in big groups in the theater, though. Should the onscreen zombies break through into our world, much better to have a large group of human shields fellow fighters around than to be at home alone.
To that end, the AFI is screening three classics in the lead up to Halloween next week. First up, tomorrow night only, are two screenings of Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau's classic 1922 unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. While later depictions of the Count played up his suave GQ style and way with the ladies, Murnau's vision was far more monstrous, and the face of his Count Orlock has become an iconic horror image. Eighty-five years after its release, it's still a dark and creepy experience. The AFI's screenings also include live music accompaniment from the Silent Orchestra.
Filling out the remaining days until Halloween are two more recent classics, The Wicker Man and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Both of these have been seen as remakes in recent years. The Chainsaw remake was not particularly horrible, just rather pointless, as it ignored the fact that part of the original's fright factor is firmly entrenched in its dim lighting, grainy film stock, and production values that contributed to it feeling less like a movie and more like something that was actually happening in front of you. The glossy sheen of the remake made it into a snoozefest. As for Neil Labute's ill-advised Wicker Man remake of last year, if you had the good fortune to miss it, all you really need to know about the film can be viewed in a handy YouTube condensed version that highlights the unintended hilarity. We suggest getting the bad taste of both of these remakes out of your mouth by catching the originals in the coming days.
Nosferatu trailer. Texas Chainsaw Massacre trailer.
Nosferatu plays two shows tomorrow night only, while Wicker Man and Texas Chainsaw Massacre play Saturday through Halloween night.
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Foreign: C'est Chic D.C. French Film Festival
Tuesday night in Georgetown the C'est Chic French Film Festival had its official kick off with the musical Love Songs (if you missed it, don't worry, there are more screenings later in the festival), and continues through November 1. The 2007 festival presents 16 features and a number of short films, most screening at The Avalon Theatre in Chevy Chase. Highlights include: a "Stars Ceremony" on Saturday night hosted by Arch Campbell, and featuring acclaimed director Claude Lelouch and a dozen of France's best young directors and actors; a women in film event at the National Gallery featuring Emmanuelle Cuau's Trés Bien, Merci followed by a discussion; the local premiere of Hor de Prix, the newest film starring Audrey Tatou, who we'd pretty much watch in anything from a feature film to home movies.
Most programs at the Avalon Theatre, with selected events at E Street Cinema, The National Gallery of Art, and the French Embassy. See the schedule for all times and locations.
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Indie: Kurt Cobain: About a Son
One of the most anticipated films at this year's SILVERDOCS festival was A.J. Schnack's Kurt Cobain documentary, About a Son. Those expecting a traditional rock doc may have been disappointed, but those open to a different kind of experience were richly rewarded. Schnack, in collaboration with Cobain biographer and friend Michael Azzerad, used audio from Azzerad's interviews to essentially have Cobain narrate his own story. As Cobain talks, Schnack puts onscreen montages of the places he's talking about. It's a simple concept, but has been described as "experimental" since it differs so greatly from our usual conception of the music documentary. And, since it's a documentary that is largely about who Cobain was, in his own words, and what made him into the man he became, instead of filling the soundtrack with Nirvana songs, it is instead largely populated by a great collection of the music that shaped him.
Opens Friday at E Street Cinema.
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Dog fighting has been all over the news this year, what with federal and local legislation on the issue, and the high profile conviction of NFL star Michael Vick. Vick did have a high profile defender, in the form of Jamie Foxx, and also Whoopi Goldberg, who stopped short of defending him, but did indicate it shouldn't come as a surprise considering Vick's background. Off the Chain examines that background, not Vick's specifically, but the culture in which dog fighting thrives. It screens as the conclusion to the Black Docs film series tonight, for one night only. The screening is presented by the Humane Society of America, and director Bobby J. Brown will be on hand for a Q&A.
Tonight only at E Street Cinema at 7:30 p.m.
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Major Release: Dan in Real Life
It appears no one wants to compete with the release of Saw IV the weekend before Halloween, so the only other major release for the week is Peter Hedges' Dan in Real Life, a romantic comedy starring Steve Carell as an advice columnist who falls for his tool of a brother's girlfriend (Dane Cook and Juliette Binoche, respectively) and wins her over during the course of a few days spent at a quirky family reunion. Yeah, the setup makes us want to run for the hills, too, but Hedges has a way of making contrived and saccharine sounding setups work surprisingly well, having scripted What's Eating Gilbert Grape and making his directing debut with 2003's excellent Pieces of April.
View the trailer.
Opens at theatres all around the area on Friday.
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This scene from Salem's Lot still scares the ca-ca out of me, with the "poetry scene" from Willy Wonka a close second.
student bodies.
what's going on in my house for 65 cents an hour???
I could be wrong, but as regards the Cobain documentary it's likely that the director didn't have any choice as to whether or not to use Nirvana's songs in the film -- Courtney Love has a controlling share in the rights, and has in the past had a conniption anytime someone has tried to use them to tell Kurt's story.
Good point...I get the sense Schnack probably wouldn't have even if he could have though, since he doesn't even use Cobain's image until the final scene of the film.
Either way, by design or by necessity, it was probably the best way to go.
I can't believe you left Ridley Scott's final-final cut of Blade Runner -- now appearing at the Uptown under the informative title Blade Runner: The Final Cut -- off of your list for this week, Ian. Unforgivable!
Incidentally, Blade Runner has always been one of my favorite scary movies -- when I was a kid, it's depiction of the um, far-off future of 2019 frightened me plenty. With Alien, Mr. Scott gets credit for two of my favorite scare-flicks. Gladiator schmadiator; he's never been this good again.
I'd have to include Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now on my list, and Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone. Coppola's Dracula from 1992 is no more a horror film than Blade Runner, probably, but I'm one of its apparently very few defenders.
Yeah, it's a shame the release coincided with more traditional Halloween-y fare, as Blade Runner is a fave of mine, too, but I wanted to cover the AFI stuff under repertory. I went Saturday morning to see it, and it looks beautiful on the Uptown screen. The changes are pretty subtle, not a very drastically different cut from the previous Director's cut, but definitely worth seeing on a gigantic screen.
The Shining tops my horror list, but those ones that you mentioned would be far up there, too...well, I think Coppola's Dracula is a little overwrought, but enjoyable.
I agree that Coppola's Dracula is overwrought, which is to say that it is stylistically (as it is narratively) the most faithful of all the film versions of Bram Stoker's novel, including Nosferatu. Romantic literatre = overwrought. I love the way screenwriter James V. Hart incorporated Vlad the Impaler, Stoker's historical basis for the character, into the film. And the way Coppola casts the movie's 15th-century prologue with the same company of actors who inhabit the roles in the main action of the film, set 400 years later. And the way the picture's visual effects were created in-camera using technology that existed in the 1920s. And Gary Oldman's performance as the titular bloodsucker, and Anthony Hopkins's hambone turn as Van Helsing.
I could go on.
Of course, the faithfully operatic apporach can go horribly awry, Exhibit A being Kenneth Branagh's 1994 Frankenstein, although I would say director-star vanity was the culprit there.
Neil Jordan's adaptation of Interview with the Vampire from the same year is another one that, although not based on a Romantic source, might just as well have been. Like the others, it's gothic, operatic, frequently goofy, and not the least bit scary. I do wish Jordan had stuck around to adapt some of the other Vampire Chronicles novels. I'm not sure why that franchise died; Interview was a pretty big hit, I thought.