Popcorn & Candy: Taking Out the Trash
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Next week the Freer Gallery will start what promises to be one of the most fun collections of the summer, the Asia Trash! series. Every Thursday starting next week until August 20th, the museum will screen some of the goriest, campiest, and must cult-tastic celluloid freakouts Asian cinema has to offer. Future offerings include the surprise 2006 international hit from Korea, The Host (which, honestly, as good as it is, is a little on the classy side for this series), the Thai kitsch-fest Tears of the Black Tiger, and bucket upon bucket upon geyser upon gusher of blood in the aptly titled Tokyo Gore Police.
This week, however, the series gets started with Versus, the most convoluted mish-mash of sci-fi, zombie, martial arts, and yakuza gang movies ever concocted. Director Ryuhei Kitamura has since made the leap to American B-movies with last year's Midnight Meat Train — which, in true grindhouse fashion, boasted a title more entertaining than the movie itself. But in 2000, he put together this phantasmagoria of ultraviolence, about an escaped convict who gets into an altercation with a group of gangsters in a remote wooded spot that no one on hand realizes is some sort of portal to "the other side". The dead start getting up to fight again, and the orgy of violence that follows is like the martial arts showdown movie George Romero might have made if he was really into samurai movies, with plenty of highly stylized martial arts fighting that really occupies the bulk of the screen time. Some critics chided the film for being a Matrix ripoff, and the parallels are certainly there. Versus is hardly groundbreaking, but to be fair, Kitamura is borrowing from the same Asian-cinema sources the Wachowskis were ripping off themselves. Only he never takes himself so seriously, making Versus a lovably mindless exercise in pure hack-and-slash eye candy.
View the trailer.
Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery's Meyer Auditorium. Free, tickets required.
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The African Diaspora Film Series is over in a flash, but has a lot of content for a three-day, one venue film festival. The series began last night, and screen ten films from last night through tomorrow. This is the first year of the collaboration between National Geographic's All Roads Film Festival, the African Diaspora Festival, and the transAfrica Forum to present the series at National Geographic's Grosvenor Auditorium. And if you haven't yet been there, it's almost worth going just for the theater, which is perhaps the nicest non-commercial screening room in the city. Tonight's three programs include a study of African dance from across the continent, Movement (R)evolution Africa, to be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Joan Frosch. Tomorrow features five films, including two local premieres and one U.S. premiere.
Now playing at National Geographic's Grosvenor Auditorium, and continues through tomorrow. See the schedule for full listings. Tickets are $10 for each program.
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What's the best performance Al Pacino ever delivered? Most votes probably go to his subtle and nuanced portrayal of Michael Corleone in The Godfather, and plenty might go for the always entertaining grandiose heights of Tony Montana in Scarface. (I swear the latter is on cable on at least a weekly basis, and if you happen to come upon it, it's nearly impossible to turn off.) For my money, though, Pacino was never better than as the desperate and hapless small time crook and would-be bank robber Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon. The actor finds the perfect balance here between the quiet intensity and raging bombast that are his trademarks. It doesn't hurt that its the centerpiece of a near-perfect film, Pacino hitting a peak just as director Sidney Lumet was doing the same — he followed this with Network, giving him perhaps the best one-two punch of any American director in the 70s. Wortzik's bank heist goes wrong in nearly every way imaginable, yet he becomes an unlikely folk hero to the Brooklyn neighborhood that watches his standoff with the police — who they mistrust far more than him. Dog Day Afternoon works as pure thrilling crime drama, but it's the vivid rendering of an America willing to back an armed, hostage-taking criminal over any kind of authority figure that makes it a classic.
View the trailer.
Monday at dusk at Screen on the Green, on the Mall between 4th and 7th Streets. Feature starts between 8:30 and 9, get there early to snag a good spot.
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Since I'm already pointing you towards one extremely trashy title this week, I might as well recommend that you really roll around in the filth with Washington Psychotronic Film Society's offering for the week. But don't you dare call Hellhole an exploitation film. A women in prison film is exploitation. This is a women in a mental institution flick, which is, I think you'll agree, an entirely different and far classier animal. Our poor heroine (Judy Landers, of B.J. and the Bear fame) loses her memory after the murder of her mother, and in just the first of what I expect are many highly questionable plot points, gets sent to the nuthouse to "treat" her amnesia. Only the killer (Ray Sharkey, TV's Wiseguy, another gem for all you 80s television fans), is still after her. If that wasn't trouble enough, a mad asylum scientist wants her for experimental lobotomization. Cult movie queen Mary Woronov, always the best thing in whatever piece of trash to which she was loaning her scene-chewing talents, and really the only reason to even think about seeing this movie, stars as the diabolical scientist.
Tuesday at 8 p.m. at the Warehouse. Free, $2 donation suggested.
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Smart and genuinely funny cinematic political satire seems to come around infrequently, so its best to savor it when one does finally make it to theaters. Scottish comedian Armando Ianucci's In the Loop, a spinoff of his own BBC political comedy series The Thick of It, imagines a world in which the U.S. and the U.K. are conspiring to develop an excuse for a new war in the Middle East. A gaffe by a British official sets into motion international incidents and misunderstandings of hilarious proportions in a film that looks ready to capitalize on the increasing appetite of Americans for British-style absurdity in their humor.
View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street and Bethesda Row