Photo of the Day: November 27, 2009
Car Pushed Into Anacostia River By Train
Morning Roundup: Black Friday Edition
Devendra Banhart @ 9:30 Club
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Neil Gaiman writes scary stories. Honestly scary. Few writers working today are able to summon the eerie landscape of our nightmares better. These aren't the hokey bigtime evil scares that usually pass for modern horror. His are the quiet, personal, "things that go bump in the night and just might have nefarious plans" kind of scares. That much of his work is geared toward younger readers might be cause for consternation to some), but the best creepy tales have always been for kids, who still believe in the unseen enough to go along for the ride. In other words, they're not yet so stodgy that they insist on always allowing logic trump imagination. But we prefer our scary kiddie tales sanitized these days—we're just thinking of the children!!—which is why Gaiman couldn't even get one of his best stories published without a movie deal attached: Coraline was too horrifying for its target audience, publishers said.
Luckily, a movie deal was made, the book was published, and now, seven years later, animator Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) is ready to scare us all over again. In the story, Coraline is a willful little girl with an explorer's instinct and a profound distaste for her stick-in-the-mud parents. But she gets a little more adventure than she bargained for when she finds a secret passage from her apartment to one that is a mirror image of her own, complete with replicas of her parents. While they're much more fun loving than her real parents (who have disappeared from the other end of the passage), something's not quite right about them; besides just that they have buttons where their eyes should be. Selick has changed a few plot points (in frequent consultation with Gaiman) and moved the action from England to the States, but we're hopeful that this is just as cold-chill-inducing as the text.
Here's the official trailer, though we rather prefer this non-traditional one with author Neil Gaiman talking about...buttons.
Opens tomorrow at theaters across the area. Coraline was shot with a special process to allow for 3D presentation, though it appears Georgetown is the only local theater showing it in that format.
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Short films always get short shrift. With virtually no means of making back the money the makers put into them, most filmmakers have little motivation to even attempt the medium. While we long for a day when the screening of short films (and not Coca-Cola-sponsored long-form advertisements awarded to a lucky filmmaking contest winner) might be regularly shown before features, that day isn't coming anytime soon. Even Wes Anderson had trouble convincing his distributor that they should package his short Hotel Chevalier with The Darjeeling Limited, and that was a related prologue. Of course, web video has given makers of shorts more options for making their work accessible (though David Lynch does an excellent job of explaining why that's less than ideal). All of which is why you should take advantage of the opportunity to check out all of the short films that have been nominated for Academy Awards in the animation and live action short categories this week while they're making a rare appearance on a big screen.
Separate programs for animated and live action shorts begin screening tomorrow at E Street.
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Jess Franco is the king of eurosleaze filmmaking, a man who made his reputation making films about lesbians, vampires, women's prisons, the demonically possessed, and various permutations on those themes. Though I don't think he ever made a film about lesbian vampire exorcisms in prison. He's still active, so there's still hope. One of his most famous works is his 1970 adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, with frequent vampire-portrayer Christopher Lee in the lead, and Klaus Kinski playing to type as the lunatic Renfield. But Franco's cameras weren't the only ones rolling on the set. There was a documentary made about the shoot by Pere Portabella, an experimental filmmaker and sometimes producer for Luis Buñuel. Interesting trivia about Portabella, he's also is a politician and co-author of Spain's constitution. Can you imagine? We treat the idea of a culture/arts ministry like it's a radical idea, and Spain's letting surrealists write their founding documents. At any rate, Portabella's documentary is, by all accounts even more of a fantastical mind-bender than Franco's fiction film. Cuadecuc, Vampir screens as part of a month long retrospective at the National Gallery of Portabella and José Luis Guerín.
Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art's East Building Auditorium. Free.
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The Response is a short film made in conjunction with the University of Maryland School of Law, which uses transcripts from Guantanamo Bay to examine the trial process used by the U.S. military tribunals at the prison. What probably could have been a simple class exercise has been turned into something much bigger, as the project hired well-known actors (who deferred salaries), including Kate Mulgrew (Trekkies know who that is) and Daily Show "correspondent" Aasif Mandvi, to play roles from the transcripts. It provides an opportunity to look at U.S. practices at Guantanamo not just in theory, but in how they've actually played out in military courtrooms.
View clips from the movie.
Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the AFI. Free, RSVP via the Maryland University School of Law.
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Franco-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche's latest feature takes a look at Tunisian immigrants living in France. The family at the center of his film is facing crisis as its patriarch is losing his job after many years working on the increasingly economically depressed docks. His wife has an idea for a business, though, wanting to turn a dilapidated old boat into a floating restaurant featuring her specialty, a dish of cous-cous and mullet that is referenced more clearly in the film's French title, La Graine et le Mulet; we suppose the U.S. distributors were scared a literal translation might confuse viewers into thinking it was about the hairstyle? The film's centerpiece is the restaurant's opening dinner, which goes wrong in about as many ways as one can imagine.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for one week only at E Street.
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queued Coraline
Not previewed above, probably part of some festival, E St Cinema is showing a film called 'Tehran Has No More Pomegranates!' this weekend. Though I have no plans to see it, the title evokes a madcap foreign delight - the Middle Eastern response to Herbie Goes Bananas. I mean, how many pomegranates does Tehran normally have? What is a their baseline pomegranate number? My apartment has no more pomegranates, but I don't state that fact with an exclamation point and I doubt anyone is going to make a film about it. Of course, being Tehran its probably a maudlin tale about how headscarves rob a woman of her true identity or something. But if it in any way involves slapstick, monkeys or CB radios, somebody please let me know.
Correction, for anyone now rearranging their weekend schedule to find out what on earth has happened to all of Tehran's pomegranates, according to E Street's website, that movie is actually playing for two days only, but not this weekend. Mark your calendar for Wednesday and Thursday, March 4th & 5th.
Sorry for the misinformation Ian; perhaps the discovery of another month worth of pomegranates delayed the film?
The pomegranate harvest is notoriously difficult to predict.