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

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

So we're aware that none of you were planning on seeing any movies this week, as you're saving your money for at least a half-dozen viewings of The Dark Knight next weekend. Or was that just me? OK, the fact is that with two comic book movies already gone by this summer (one excellent, one decidedly less so), and with Batman tickets going so fast that theaters are adding 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. screenings, many may just not have time in their schedules for yet another movie from the spandex and superpower set.

Which would be a shame. While the first installment in the Hellboy series was only a modest success, probably just barely grossing enough to greenlight the sequel, the film was a fanboy's delight, perfectly capturing the dark and deadpan wit of the comics about a demon-spawned paranormal investigator with a stone fist and filed-down horns. It also didn't hurt that Ron Perlman was pretty much born to play the role. For round two, it appears director Guillermo del Toro has pulled out a hefty bag of monster tricks, and has let his gothic nightmares run wild. If the freakish visions in the trailers look vaguely familiar, it's mostly because the director has built a visual style that is now distinctively his own, combining modest amounts of CGI with impressive old school make-up and monster effects that give his dark and colorful creations a frighteningly realistic sheen. That, combined with a surprisingly lyrical storytelling style for someone so SFX-obsessed, should make for a flick that hopefully appeals to more than just the fanboy brigade.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at theaters all over the area.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains

You'll forgive us repeating ourselves, since we already mentioned this film in the context of the AFI's '80s retrospective in last week's column, but we really can't stress how disappointed you should be in yourself if you miss this. Sure, it'll finally be out on home video for the first time ever in the fall, but all that means is that this is one of the last opportunities to see a well-worn print of the film in a theater before just anyone can see a good quality copy of it whenever they please. You really can't overestimate the social capital something like that might have a few years down the road over an ice-cold PBR at the Black Cat, so best make plans to see one of the two not-quite-midnight showings now. This film, about a teenage girl-punk band, is a whole lot of scrappy low-budget fun, a cultural touchstone for the riot grrl movement, and a surprisingly biting satire of the music industry's and the media's fogeyish attitudes about punk rock in the early '80s.

No trailer, but here's a clip of one of the musical performances from the film.
Friday and Saturday night at 11:15 p.m. at the AFI.

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To Kill a Clown

Alan Alda, just on the verge of M*A*S*H* superstardom, stars in this early '70s thriller about an injured war vet (Alda), who goes a little nutso on a pair of hippies renting a house on the coast from him as they try to save their struggling marriage. While I'm sure we've probably all suspected Alda of well-hidden sociopathic tendencies, the opportunity to see them manifest onscreen is simply too good to pass up. The movie also features an extremely young Blythe Danner, who looked like daughter Gwyneth Paltrow's twin sister back then. Most of all, though, I think we can all get behind the idea of going postal on a hippie mime. Two birds, one stone there.

View the trailer.
Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. at the Old Arlington Grill (in the Arlington Cinema & Drafthouse). WPFS screenings are free, but a $2 donation is suggested. They want their two dollars.

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The Muppet Movie

As a child of six, I had a small collection of vinyl to play on the little blue record player in my room, which included quite a few LPs from the Sesame Street library and some old Pete Seeger 78s. But the disc that most frequently found its way under the needle was The Muppet Movie soundtrack. I knew "The Rainbow Connection" by heart, and often sang along. Maybe I was a weird kid; what can I say, we moved around a lot. But you have to admit, that Kermit the Frog has a lovely singing voice, whether on sentimental movie musical numbers, or even something a little darker. At any rate, the big screen debut of Jim Henson's variety show puppets was the best kind of kids movie, one that had just as much for the adults as the kiddies. A witty combination of show biz biopic and road adventure movie, the film charts the origins of The Muppet Show's performers, as the gang seek fame on their own terms even as their fearless leader is courted, then stalked, then hunted, by an evil restaurateur who wants Kermit to shill frog's legs in an ad campaign. The list of guest stars is huge, and includes no less than Bob Hope, Richard Pryor and Orson Welles among many others.

The AFI is engaged in no less than six retrospectives at the moment; in addition to the two we mentioned last week, there's are also series dedicated to Johnny To, Warren Beatty, and David Lean. The Muppet Movie belongs to the Jim Henson series, Muppets, Music, & Magic, which features the his best known work, including two Muppet Movies, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth, as well as a slew of lesser-known and infrequently screened shorts, experiments, and other work.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for a one week run at the AFI. Check the calendar for showtimes.

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23rd Psalm Branch: Part I

Stan Brakhage was a virtuoso with a camera and film, creating entirely visual poems that largely rejected the notion that film is at its best as a vehicle for story and narrative. One doesn't generally go to the symphony or an art opening to hear or see a story, so why should film, as a medium, be constrained by the expectation that a story will be told? Of course, that philosophy relegated Brakhage to a career in the avant-garde ghetto, making a career in academia to support the creation of the nearly 400 films that would define him as the most celebrated American practitioner of so-called "pure cinema" in history. His films are hypnotic to watch, and even today are eye-openers as to the true (and still often untapped) potential of the moving image. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum is kicking off a series next week on the films of both Brakhage and another groundbreaking video artist, Bill Viola. The first presentation is Brakhage's 23rd Psalm Branch: Part I (to be followed by Part II the following Wednesday), an 8mm film from 1966 that combines original visual material with newsreel footage from WWII to confront the filmmakers feelings on the war in Vietnam.

Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum's McEvoy Auditorium. Free.

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Two-Lane Blacktop

Yet another cinematic outsider who never quite got the recognition his prodigious talents should have warranted is Roger Corman protégé Monte Hellman. The director's spare style was always just a little too subtle for mainstream audiences, so while his films were usually genre exercises that should have had wide appeal (including one of Jack Nichoson's finest early performances in the quiet existential Western, The Shooting), they tended to miss the mark commercially. His finest work is on display in Two-Lane Blacktop, which, like so many of his films, failed on release only to become a cult classic. Hellmen cast two musicians who had never made a film before (or ever did again afterward); James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson play a pair of drag-racing drifters who end up in a cross-country race with a GTO-driving Warren Oates, with a hitchhiking Laurie Bird thrown in as a female point of contention between the drivers. In between the driving sequences, the film is meditative in the usual minimal Hellman style, and much of the meat of the film takes place not during the action but in the empty spaces between. More than that, it's a beautiful portrait of the road culture of mid-century America, of the drivers, hitchers, and road houses the defined the country's byways before the Interstates killed most of that off with their cold and characterless efficiency.

View the trailer.
A week from tonight at Video Americain in Takoma Park at 10:30 p.m. Free.