Popcorn & Candy: Music in the Time of War

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Indie: War/Dance

Sometimes you need an antidote before the poison even arrives. Next week Hollywood releases yet another of those diabetic-shock-inducing films about musically gifted youngsters and how they can be an inspiration to us all, designed to make soccer moms everywhere weep into their hankies. One week prior to that, though, comes a documentary from two local filmmakers that promises to hit those same points, except to do so with realism and honesty. War/Dance is the story of a group of kids in a Ugandan refugee camp who manage to qualify to compete in the country's national music and dance festival. The filmmakers, working under difficult circumstances in a dangerous region, show the inspirational power of music in the lives of youngsters who have seen the horrors of the Ugandan conflict firsthand, some even from behind the trigger before they reach their teens. The film picked up the documentary directing prize at Sundance earlier this year.

View the trailer.
Opens Friday at AMC Loews Dupont Circle.

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Major Release: Southland Tales

There's plenty to choose from coming from the major studios this week. Of course, there's Robert Zemekis' CGI Beowulf, which is garnering solid reviews, but the look of the thing just creeps me out. There's Brian DePalma's anti-war film Redacted, which has Bill O'Reilly frothing at the mouth and calling for boycotts, which is reason enough for me to want to check it out, even if most reviewers are saying it misses the mark. And, there's Mike Newell's adapation of Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, in which Javier Bardem shows he can play a restless lothario just as well as he plays a ruthless psychopath. In the end, though, I have to pay respects to far too many drunken nights spent at Visions Cinema on Florida avenue during the first half of the decade at their endless midnight screenings of Donnie Darko by recommending Richard Kelly's long awaited follow-up to his young cult classic debut. The film is an apocalyptic science fiction ensemble piece set in the near future (next July, actually) California. I'm thinking Robert Altman meets Robert Heinlein? Anyway, the plot summary sounds like the mad ravings of a room full of ADD-stricken typing chimps, but the New York Times' Manohla Dargis (aka the Best Film Critic Working Today), seems to think that it works, so we'll give Kelly the benefit of the doubt that he made some smart edits since the film's disastrous 2006 Cannes premiere.

View the trailer.
Opens Friday at AMC Loews Georgetown, and expands to more theaters next weekend.