Popcorn & Candy: Hello, Lover
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Of all the museum film programs in town, the Hirshhorn is the best for a wildly eclectic mix of films, ranging from more high-minded programs like their stellar Cinema Effect exhibit to fun fare such as their screening of a remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark made by a group of teenagers in the the '80s on a camcorder. A healthy blend of art and entertainment is exactly what we seek to highlight in this space every week, and the Hirshhorn navigates that dichotomy quite effectively.
The museum's Summer Camp Film Series is all about celebrations of B-movie kitsch—last year they featured films featuring sci-fi femmes fatales. The series returns this summer with a trio of films featuring the 1950s work of master stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen. They cover the basic trinity of '50s sci-fi/monster fare: radioactive monsters, alien monsters, and just plain aliens. In the first, It Came from Beneath the Sea, which screens a week from tonight, an irradiated octopus rises from the Pacific deep to wreak havoc on San Francisco. The octopus (actually, a sextopus, as producers only gave Harryhausen budget enough to animate 6 arms) goes after that favorite target of evil-doers visiting the Bay Area, the Golden Gate bridge, before the government goes after the beastie with a jet-powered torpedo that doesn't quite work as planned.
View the trailer.
Screens a week from tonight at the Hirshhorn. 7 p.m., tickets free, first come first served.
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Third Annual Asian-European Short Film Showcase
The Goethe-Institut of Washington also has a solid track record of inventive programming, and their Asian-European Short Film Showcase is no exception. Kicking off on Monday, and screening at a number of venues all over town, each evening of the showcase takes shorts from two countries, one European, one Asian, and screens them all together. It's a fascinating and very direct way to compare the cultures of the the two countries and continents, via their filmmaking. At each program, a representative from each country will facilitate a Q&A and discussion about the films with the audience. This Monday's program features two films each from Germany and China; a writer from the Financial Times Germany and a representative from the Chinatown Community Cultural Center will be on hand for the discussion.
Begins Monday at the Goethe-Institut of Washington. Screenings start at 6:30 p.m.
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Fans of the dreamy visuals of director Tarsem Singh's music video work couldn't help but be a little disappointed by his feature debut, The Cell, which had less plot in two hours than most of his videos did in four minutes. Singh (who just goes by "Tarsem") returned to the realm of commercial and video directing, unable to attract much interest (or, more importantly, money) for his next project, which he ended up piecing together while on video shoots around the world. The project is loosely based on a fairly obscure 1981 Hungarian film, Yo Ho Ho, and uses the framing story of an injured man in a hospital telling a story to a little girl; the bulk of the movie is the story as seen in the fertile and colorful imagination of the girl. Shades of The Princess Bride? Without Jennifer Lopez in the lead to sell tickets, The Fall is being given a pretty limited release, but reviews this time, while mixed, are far better than what Tarsem saw for The Cell. The one thing that nearly saved his first film was Tarsem's dazzling visual sense; with that still intact, even a moderately engaging plot should make The Fall worth a look.
View the trailer.
Opens Friday at E Street, Bethesda Row, Shirlington, and Reston.
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Senior Week. That time honored right of Mid-Atlantic passage wherein thousands of area high schoolers celebrate their freedom by flooding Ocean City with as much illicit behavior as the beach town will bear. We'd say that if you've been, it's an experience you'd never forget, but that assumes you were sober enough to remember it in the first place. Two local filmmakers pieced together enough bits of memory to shape into their first feature, a loving tribute to the annual pilgrimage and the quest to score liquor, or to just plain score, down the shore. The film is the debut feature for two brothers from Columbia, MD, Matthew and Ryan Gielen, who sought to recapture their own memories of Senior Week via a story about four friends headed there after graduation. Considering that not everyone might be so keen on reliving some of their Senior Week memories, there probably is no better place to see it than the drunk theater Arlington Cinema 'n' Drafthouse, where it's playing in a free sneak preview tomorrow night. Which should leave you plenty of cash leftover for an extra pitcher or three.
View the trailer.
Free sneak preview tomorrow night at the Arlington Cinema 'n' Drafthouse. 9:30 p.m., free, first come first served.
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If last week's swashbuckling major release skewed slightly towards the testosterone-fueled end of the scale, this week's more than balances things out. Not that I haven't missed new urban adventures from Carrie Bradshaw and company just as much as my girlfriend, but according to Fandango, the overwhelming majority of advance ticket sales for the movie are from the fairer sex, and they're going together in large groups to see the movie. The rumor mill has been swirling for months as to what happens, whether Carrie will marry Big, whether Samantha's settling down can really last, and, in an oddly Harry Potter-ish bit of gossip, which character is going to die. Advance reviews haven't exactly been stellar, which is disappointing given the critical success the series was; we have to wonder if a romantic comedy that clocks in at an epic two and a quarter hours is perhaps pushing it just a bit. It is possible to have too much of a good thing, after all. We hope that with the larger canvas the producers can resist the urge to do too much shark jumping and keep the movie focused on the elements that made the series so enjoyable to begin with: primarily, the bond between its main characters.
View the trailer.
Opens everywhere tomorrow.