Morning Roundup: Local Ties Edition
DCist Preview: Thao & Portland Cello Project
Overheard in D.C.: A Strange World
D.C. Cutting Back its H1N1 Vaccine Clinics
The Weekly Feed: Running from Pigs Edition
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Duncan Jones can hardly be accused on trading on the name of a famous parent. After all, he could still be going by the moniker Zowie Bowie that his father David stuck him with as a child, deciding instead to return to his rather less ostentatious original name. But he seems to be daring journalists to use "Space Oddity" in titles of pieces about his debut feature, which is about, well, odd events in space. Sam Rockwell stars (and is largely the only actor on screen) in a role written specifically for him, as a blue-collar space worker, the sole occupant of a mining operation on the Moon which is digging up Helium-3 from beneath the Moon's surface for delivery as a fusion fuel back on Earth. But after an excursion out of his bunker ends in an accident, it seems he's no longer alone up there. Only his new companion appears to be him, and it's unclear if he's just gone batty only weeks shy of the end of his three-year stint up there, or if there's something stranger going on.
While the setting is space, and the story is technically sci-fi, this isn't a big-budget, effects-laden film. Jones made Moon for a mere $5 million, and favored models and practical effects over CGI. That, combined with its solitary and contemplative tone, makes it much more a companion to the more spartan sci-fi pieces of the 1970s — such as Silent Running, which Jones cites as an influence, and from which he even hired some of his special effects team — than Star Trek or Terminator. And since space is going to be a place where mankind first has to deal with crushing loneliness and empty desolation long before we ever fight epic laser battles, films like Moon have the potential to feel far more relevant, despite their unfamiliar settings.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at a number of theaters around the area.
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Made in Hong Kong Film Festival
The tenth 14th iteration of the Freer's celebration of Hong Kong cinema presents nine titles over the next couple of months, mixing contemporary with classic and favorites with lesser-known titles. Every weekend for the rest of July and August will feature a different film, including Stephen Chow's massive hit Kung Fu Hustle, and the classic 1960s precursor to the beautifully choreographed martial arts fight scenes of Hero and Crouching Tiger, King Hu's gorgeous Come Drink With Me. The festival opens this week with a screening of Hong Kong master Johnnie To's 2004 Kurosawa tribute, Throw Down, which manages to combine judo, alcoholism, and the seedy neon underbelly of Hong Kong into a straight-faced comedy. Mea culpa everyone, we referenced an archived schedule from a previous year of the festival. The 2009 festival schedule is here, and features titles like Yau Na-hoi's Eye in the Sky and Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time Redux.
View the trailer for Throw Down.
Various Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays beginning this weekend until the end of August at the Freer Gallery's Meyer Auditorium. See the schedule for upcoming programming.
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Breakin', Breakin' 2 and the Electric Boogaloo Party
Cannon Films never missed an opportunity to make low-budget campy films that capitalized on existing cinema and social trends, whether with mindless action flicks like Delta Force or endless Death Wish sequels. Thing is, as bad as the movies usually were, they epitomized the spirit of so-bad-they're-good so thoroughly that they often were even more enjoyable than the movies they were exploiting, particularly in the case of the Xanadu/Rocky Horror ripoff The Apple. When faced with the question of how to make some money off of the burgeoning hip-hop culture of the early 1980s, the answer was clear: 1) take a German documentary about breakdancing; 2) combine it with a classic plot — in this case Romeo & Juliet by way of West Side Story; 3) use the actual people from the documentary as the primary cast to keep costs down; 4) profit! And apparently they did, because they rushed into production on a sequel, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, a film notorious for its exquisite awfulness, in which the warring factions from the first movie must band together to stop an evil developer from destroying a rec center that everyone in the community uses. Both films are screening as part of the AFI's '80s festival, and Saturday night's screening of Breakin' 2 will be followed by an "Electric Boogaloo" party. Keep your eye out in the first film for an appearance by Ice-T as a club MC (he was one of those cast from the documentary), and he plays an even larger role in the sequel.
View the trailers for Breakin' and Breakin' 2.
Breakin' screens at the AFI tomorrow and Tuesday, and Breakin' 2 Saturday and Wednesday, with the Electric Boogaloo party following Saturday night's show.
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The Iraq War has been going long enough that we've had no shortage of films about that conflict, but most of them have fallen flat. And not just because Americans aren't yet ready to see this ongoing and controversial conflict depicted on screen. As a rule, they simply haven't been very good, ranging from gung-ho action pieces to annoying liberal-guilt-induced hand-wringing. But with The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal have fashioned not only the best movie about that war yet released, but hands-down the finest American film about war in at least 20 years. Small in scale, the film focuses on a three-man army bomb squad working in and around Baghdad to defuse the many explosives planted by insurgents. Bigelow's talents as one of Hollywood's most skilled (but under-utilized) action directors combine in surprising ways with Boal's script, written based on his own experiences as a journalist embedded with an EOD squad in Iraq. Bigelow's talents make for a gripping, at times gut-wrenching time, while Boal's writing manages to convey the horrors of war while working in many standard action-movie tropes that usually don't have any place in a film this intelligent, yet work all the better for their unusual placement.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street and Bethesda Row.
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Sacha Baron Cohen is the master of the stupid human trick. The tricks aren't stupid, mind you. It's the humans. Ever since his humble beginnings on his BBC-based Da Ali G Show, Cohen has excelled at playing the fool and provoking people into showing the worst sides of themselves on camera, like some chameleonic blend of Andy Kaufman and Art Funk. Brüno may mark the end of the phase of Cohen's career that began with that show, as it represents the third feature film based on one of the three major characters he created for the show, starting with the somewhat disappointing Ali G Indahouse, and followed by the crassly brilliant Borat. Brüno is the polar opposite to Borat in some aspects: as gay as Borat was homophobic, as worldly as Borat was provincial. What the characters share is a forced naivete to the effects of their idiosyncrasies on those around them, which somehow comes off as a kind of innocence that allows Cohen to draw his unsuspecting subjects into traps so embarrassing that lawsuits ensue. The litigation over Brüno is already underway, and the movie hasn't even been released yet. Cohen's objective being essentially the same with both characters, we can probably expect more of the same of what we got with Borat, but that's hardly a bad thing.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at theaters all over the area.
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I see that picture of Sam Rockwell and all I can think of is: UFC in Space.
Baddass.
Just watched Silent Running last month. It really holds up, both in the story department and the special effects. But man, Bruce Dern just chewed up the friggin scenery, and the Joan Baez soundtrack was distracting as all get out. Like being trapped in a dark room with...uh...Joan Baez. At least I had a mute button.
Reminds me of that fake Julia Roberts--err...Anna Scott movie in Notting Hill...
the Hong Kong film fest schedule posted is from 2005. The current schedule is at http://www.asia.si.edu/events/films.asp
um, i think you're reviewing movies and citing the schedule of the 2005 HK film festival (all the dates are screwy). it's the 14th annual festival and the schedule can be found here: http://www.asia.si.edu/events/films.asp
I can't blame Ian for being nostalgic. The 2005 vintage was magnificent. Structured and balanced, with a creamy texture, mildly salty flavor and mellowing elderberry aftertaste. It paired extremely well with Bolognese sauce and roast duck goatse.
My mother smelled of elderberry... sigh. Now bring me... A SHRUBBERY!