Popcorn & Candy: Things That Go Bump
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
If you want to know why it was that Spider-Man 3 was so awful, look no further than Sam Raimi. After spending over six years living and breathing nothing but Spidey as his primary creative pursuit, it's pretty obvious the guy had barely any interest in making that movie, which explains why it ended up being such a chore to watch. I can't help but think that the franchise should have been laid to rest right there, but what hope I do have for the fourth installment is based squarely on Drag Me to Hell. Raimi getting his mind off of web slingers for a little while and getting back to his roots with some good old fashioned horror can only be a good thing. And for a film in a genre that usually bypasses critics' screenings altogether, the movie's been drawing solid notices, even from reviewers at Cannes. Which is fitting, really, since Raimi's big break came when his first film, The Evil Dead sold at Cannes when no other distributor wanted to touch it.
In the film, Alison Lohman plays a loan officer who learns the hard way that when old gypsy women come in looking for extensions on their mortgage payments, you say "yes". Lohman, desperate for a promotion, picks the wrong moment to get stingy, and finds herself under attack by all kinds of evil dead things. Nothing too remarkable in the setup, but no one's looking for groundbreaking plotting in a horror flick. Considering the fact that modern scary movies are usually little more than low-budget nonsensical throwaways studios can easily market to teenage males before tossing them into the cinematic dustbin, it's nice to see an established, talented director looking to make a solidly crafted horror film for once. I would like to register one small complaint though: PG-13? Really? A director whose last three movies have grossed a combined 2.5 billion dollars doesn't have the clout to get the R-rated cut of a horror film released?
View the trailer.
Opens today at theaters all over the area.
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The programming at E Street's Midnight Movie series has been improving steadily, with screenings of films that, well, one might actually consider midnight movies. A couple of weeks ago, that meant The Warriors, and later this summer, we'll be treated to Flesh Gordon. Not Flash. Flesh. And this weekend, for those who didn't get quite enough Sam Raimi with Drag Me to Hell, or who prefer him without the CGI flourishes, they're featuring the last true horror film he directed until now (sorry, Army of Darkness doesn't really count). Evil Dead 2 is ostensibly a sequel to Raimi's low-budget schlocky-horror debut, The Evil Dead, but it happens in the same setting, with the same lead character, with essentially the same plot — a bunch of people trapped in a house in rural Tennessee as dark forces released from an old book attack and turn them all into zombies. Or, if you prefer, "deadites". As in the first film, the only hope of survival rests in Bruce Campbell, the lantern-jawed macho dude who looks more like a movie-star hero than he generally acts. Evil Dead 2 is generally forgiven for being essentially a retread of the first movie because it takes everything the first movie did and does it bigger, scarier, gorier, and funnier. After all, this is the movie in which Campbell quite memorably removes his own possessed hand with a chainsaw and then fixes the same chainsaw to the bloody stump to use as a weapon. And that's both badass and just plain goofy.
View the trailer.
Tonight and tomorrow at midnight at E Street.
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Götz Spielmann's tense crime drama was a huge hit on the European festival circuit last year, ending up with an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. The film centers on Alex, an ex-con working for the owner of a brothel who devises a plan to get that one big score, a bank heist, that will allow him and his girlfriend, a Ukrainian woman who works at the brothel, to get out of Vienna and start a life together. Things go badly awry at the robbery, and Alex's world begins to spiral downward as he realizes that those responsible for the tragic unfolding of the events at the bank are closer to him than he thinks, and that they're dealing badly with what happened from their own perspective as well.
View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street.
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It's testament to the audience that exists for short films that all six nights of the EuroAsia Shorts festival sold out well before the festival even started. But as is often the case with sold out festival screenings, there are almost always no-shows before the start, and if you get into the standby line early, your chances of getting in are usually pretty good. Each of the six programs is built around a central theme, from Cities & Urban Living, to Beauty, to Fears and Phobias, with shorts on those themes from Europe, Asia, and the U.S., using the different approaches to these themes in the films as a springboard to discussions of the different attitudes around the subjects from the various locales.
Monday, June 1 through June 6 at 6:30 p.m. at a number of theaters and embassies around town. All programs are sold out, but unclaimed seats will be released to standby patrons ten minutes before showtime every night. Free.
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Too much doom and gloom and disappointment for you, between horror movies, heady German neonoirs and shorts collections that are already sold out anyway? Wish you could just see a light, frothy musical concoction, the kind of old Hollywood Technicolor spectacle that would feature things like Gene Kelly dancing in roller skates and happy G.I.s dancing with garbage can lids cheekily strapped to their feet? Well, sailor, you're in luck. The AFI is right in the middle of a lengthy retrospective of the films of song & dance legend Cyd Charisse, and this week there are a few opportunities to catch this story of three G.I.s who come back from the war vowing to be lifelong friends only to find ten years later that maybe they're maybe not quite as close as the war made them. Now that I think about it, that actually sounds kind of a downer, too; but the music sure sounds happy! Other Charisse classics like Silk Stockings and Singin' in the Rain are yet to come at the AFI in June.
View the trailer.
At the AFI tonight, tomorrow, and Wednesday.
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Not a screening, but director Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me, 30 Days) will be delivering a lecture at the Corcoran on Tuesday evening. Despite the popularity of his filmed anti-fast food experiment, and the subsequent TV series for which it provided a framework, Spurlock has experienced a bit of a backlash from those who criticize his work for a simplistic, bludgeoning approach. Lack of subtlety aside, he knows how to get a point across (again and again), and more than that, knows how to promote himself and his work while doing so. And, what the cognoscenti generally miss when they dismiss Spurlock with a derisive "Well of course you'll get fat if you eat nothing but McDonald's for a month," is that he's not making documentaries for the usual documentary watching crowd. He makes documentaries for general consumption, and the popularity of Super Size Me — it was the first documentary to crack the weekend box office top ten — proves that he's effective at communicating with mass audiences. His last project, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden didn't strike quite the same chord, but in his next he teams up with a number of other documentary heavy hitters like Eugene Jarecki and Alex Gibney to bring individual chapters of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics, another project designed to bring normally academic subjects to a mass audience. Presumably he'll be discussing his methods, aims, and that new project next week at the Corcoran.
Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, $20-$25.