Popcorn & Candy: Mass Hysteria
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The words "animated" and "documentary" are not two one expects to see describing the same film. In fact, the combination seems to have confused Academy voters, who left Waltz with Bashir, a film that quite a few critics hailed as the best of last year, out of both of those categories in this morning's Oscar nominations. The Academy did manage to agree that it was a foreign film, though, and it took a nomination in that category. The film is a bit of therapy for its director, Ari Folman, who took part in a bloody battle at the age of 19, when he was in the Israeli Defense Force. Unable to remember the specifics of what happened, he meets another man plagued by nightmares connected to the same experience. Folman begins interviewing others who were there, trying to piece together the reality from his own memory and that of others. The animation is a combination of roto-scoping (a la Waking Life) and Flash-based computer animation, and, as in Waking Life, the use of the animation technique helps to blur the lines between reality and dreams.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street, Bethesda Row, and Shirlington.
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The Goethe-Institut sponsors, for the 17th year, its annual roundup of the best in German-language cinema, from not just Germany, but Switzerland and Austria as well. They've got some pretty heavy hitters in this year's lineup. The biggest is Wim Wenders' 2008 Cannes submission, Palermo Shooting, with a cast that includes Dennis Hopper, Milla Jovovich, and Lou Reed. It stars Campino, the singer from German punk band Die Toten Hosen, as a photographer looking to leave his life behind and start anew by moving to Palermo. Tomorrow's opening night feature (to be followed by a reception) is Christian Petzold's Jerichow, a noir-ish thriller about a German soldier back from Afghanistan to find himself dishonorably discharged and riddled with debt; he takes a job with a Turkish businessman that involves driving and providing some muscle, but in true noir style, when the woman enters the picture (in the person of the businessman's wife), things fall apart.
Tomorrow through Thursday at E Street. See the Film Neu site for a full schedule and descriptions of all the films.
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It's the most quotable movie of the 1980s (and maybe even ever). You've seen it more times than you can count, particularly considering all those times you've caught a half-hour here or there on TV. So what more can we tell you about one of the best and most universally loved comedies in the history of the movies? Not much, except to say that it's playing on a big screen this weekend, and seeing it with a big group of people is always more fun. The downside is that both screenings are at 10 a.m., and are being billed as family matinees, which means plenty of kids. We have to wonder, though; is this really a family film? I mean, c'mon. The keymaster and the gatekeeper? Who do they think they're fooling? And the funniest line associated with the guy pictured at right is, "This Mr. Stay Puft's okay! He's a sailor, he's in New York; we get this guy laid, we won't have any trouble!" Nothing like explaining a horny sailor on leave joke to your 7-year-old. Whatever. I'll just wait to see the "Overheard in D.C." from outside the Avalon on Saturday: "Mommy? What does 'dickless' mean?"
View the trailer.
Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Avalon. Family matinee to celebrate the film's 25th anniversary.
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Filmmaker Yunus Valley looks at the reach of apartheid into the sex lives of South African citizens by framing the story around his own sexual awakening in an extremely racially divided region during the height of the country's repressive policies. It's a serious subject, of course, the government dictating who one can or can't love (or just hook up with). But by filtering the issue through his own perspective while growing up, Valley makes it possible to address the issue both more personally and with a little more humor with regard to his own position as a black South African man with a verboten affinity for white women.
View the trailer.
Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the AFI. Free, tickets available on the day of the show only, limit four per person.
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One of my favorite moments in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis is when little Marji goes out and buys bootleg rock 'n' roll cassettes out on the street. It's played for some laughs, this little Iranian girl buying an Iron Maiden tape, but it's also powerfully symbolic, the music of the West breaking through the walls of this closed society. Of course, that was the '80s, and there are many more holes in that wall today with the many more ways information, media, and art can now travel unnoticed into Iran. That flow of information, and the Iranian government's difficult task in trying to restrict it, is the subject of Mohammad Rasoulof's documentary.
No trailer, but here are some audience reactions after the film played the Tribeca Film Festival last year.
Friday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery's Meyer Auditorium. Free.
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And, if you're one of the four or five people in America who didn't see The Dark Knight over the summer, tomorrow marks the official re-release of the film nationwide, including at a few theaters in the area. Most notable among those are the two IMAX theaters it will be opening, one at the Natural History Museum's Johnson theater, and the other at the Airbus theater at the Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly. We only mention it because if you only saw it in the regular theater over the summer, do yourself a favor and check out at one of these theaters. There's a reason the entire audience gasps as a single unit when the first IMAX shot hits the screen.