Popcorn & Candy: Easy as Breathin'
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
This appears to be, hands-down, the cutest movie that will be released all year. Two skinny British kids with an (unhealthy?) obsession with Stallone's second most famous alter-ego decide to make a Rambo-inspired action film of their own. It's the sort of thing that thousands of kids around the world probably did as home video equipment became easily accessible to households in the 1980s, when the movie is set. Witness the success of the most famous of all the child auteurs, the crew that remade Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot while they were teenagers and are touring with the surprisingly impressive result to this day. Garth Jennings (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) reportedly had been working on this project for years, basing much of it on his own experiences as an action-obsessed British youth with access to a camera. Plenty of us can relate. Once you combine those heady early days of home video with the Rambo craze (raise your hand if you donned a red bandana and a muscle shirt to become Sly for a Halloween 20-odd years ago), you get a nostalgia trip of mammoth proportions.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street and Bethesda Row
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In The Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins' character is imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, and when the real murderer starts bragging about the killing, the authorities pointedly ignore the new evidence. This sort of thing is horrific enough in a work of fiction, but what about when such an atrocity happens in reality? And what if the person in question isn't just imprisoned, but on the human processing line Texas likes to call death row? That's part of the focus of this documentary, made for the Independent Film Channel by Steve James, the director of the acclaimed Hoop Dreams and co-director Peter Gilbert. The story of Carlos de Luna, the innocent man that the state of Texas put to death, is told by Carroll Pickett, a minister who, in a parallel with another Tim Robbins film, Dead Man Walking, spent years as a chaplain to the condemned, spending final hours with nearly 100 men over the course of 15 years, and witnessing the first ever lethal injection. Pickett relates his experiences on death row both in general, and specifically related to the de Luna case, painting a grim picture of the practice of capital punishment. For a look at the death penalty without a position on the matter, you'll have to look elsewhere; the filmmakers firmly take up Pickett's cause: after his tenure, Pickett became an outspoken advocate for the abolition of the death penalty). Next week's screening at the All Souls Unitarian Church is also designed as an advocacy event, an opportunity for audiences to discuss the film, and the movement to end the death penalty, after the screening.
View the trailer.
Screens on Tuesday at the All Souls Unitarian Church's Pierce Hall (1500 Harvard St. NW) at 6:30 p.m. Also at the AFI Silver on Wednesday at 7 p.m.
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United Artists 90th Anniversary Film Festival
Universal Artists was once one of Hollywood's great old studios, until they fell on hard times; then they fell on even tougher times when Tom Cruise decided to breathe the life of Xenu into the company. But their run of classic films through much of the middle of the 20th century is practically unmatched. With the studio's 90th birthday coming up, they're partnering with theaters all over the country to celebrate their golden days. And if Lions for Lambs is indicative of the caliber of film the renewed UA is going to be releasing, continuing to keep their focus on the past is probably a good idea. The roster for the AFI's run of the Festival is an impressive collection of titles, and not a single film in the bunch is anything less than an all-out classic. This week they'll feature the debut bout of the Italian Stallion with Rocky, and the best comedy in Woody Allen's catalog, the hilarious and endearing Annie Hall, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and won Allen his only Best Director award (which he famously didn't show up to collect).
Opens this Saturday with Rocky and runs until July 2. See the AFI site for a full list of movies and showtimes.
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Last year the Georgetown Film Festival gave us an outdoor summer film festival in partnership with a couple of neighborhood business improvement districts that featured the films of Clint Eastwood. For 2008, they've picked a slightly more polished tough guy to project into the warm summer nights: Bond. (James Bond). The festival will screen 16 Bond classics over the course of the summer, starting this week with Dr. No, which already screened last Friday at the festival's Rosslyn site at Gateway Park, and screens tonight right across the street from the New York Avenue metro stop. And that's how the schedule will go all summer long. The same movie will screen twice during the week, first on Friday in Rosslyn, then on Thursday in NoMa, rain or shine. They're also promising character look-alike contests and the "James Bond Dancers." No, we don't know, either, so you'll have to show up to find out what that's all about. The festival will cover selected Bond films in chronological order from 1962 up through 2006. Connery, Moore, and Brosnan will all be represented; they're skipping over the Dalton years, which is forgivable, but we have to give a firm Colbert-esque wag of our finger to the festival for overlooking the most criminally underrated (and quite possibly best overall) Bond film, the one and only appearance of George Lazenby as Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. That glaring omission aside, this should be a great chance to sit out under the stars haze of the summery Washington night sky and enjoy all the action and implausible gadgetry you can get.
For 16 weeks starting this week; Fridays in Rosslyn at Gateway Park, Thursdays in NoMa near the intersection of New York and Florida Avenues NW.
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It's been nearly a decade since Harmony Korine released his last feature, the jarring first American entry into Von Trier's Dogme 95 club of Julien Donkey-boy. Of course, Julien wasn't really Dogme, and one suspects Von Trier only accepted the submission in order to award the work of another enfant just as terrible as himself. It was a difficult, and really not very good film, and made a lot of people wonder if Korine wasn't quite the eccentric rule-breaker his small cult of fans had made him out to be. Whether that contributed to the long gap between films, who knows, but he's finally back with a work that appears to find Korine finding softer edges as he presents his first feature out of his 20s. Softer edges, but still no less strange. Mister Lonely concerns a commune of celebrity impersonators in Scotland, trying to find identity and meaning in lives they've borrowed from others. It's a fascinating concept, and one we're eager to see if Korine can pull off, particularly after seeing the dreamy, sentimentally heavy visuals that he uses to tell the story. Admittedly, it'll take a lot to forgive Korine for giving David Blaine a film role, but with Samantha Morton and Werner Herzog on hand, we suppose it balances things out.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.