Popcorn & Candy: Other Fish In the Sea
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Hayao Miyazaki proves again and again, with each film he makes, that you really don't need an army of computers to make an incredible animated film, and that hand-drawn animation can be just as dazzling as anything a computer can generate. Western audiences at large were slow to come around to the idea that one of the finest animated storytellers of the 20th century didn't actually work for Disney — though the company rather shrewdly bought up U.S. distribution rights to his back catalog once he did break through here after the release of Princess Mononoke. Miyazaki's work is anime that doesn't just appeal to a niche audience of geeks and fanboys. He writes and breathes life into fairy tales that bear his unmistakable stamp of love for nature, feminist undercurrents, and a hallucinogenic imagination.
In his latest, Ponyo, Miyazaki tells a story loosely based on The Little Mermaid, of a fish girl who runs away from home and washes up on shore to be rescued by a young boy. She falls in love with him, and when her father takes her back into the sea, she vows to become human and return to her love. The film was a massive hit in Japan on its release, and was well received at the Venice Film Festival, where it had the rare distinction of screening in competition despite the fact that it had already had a commercial release. Miyazaki dials back the more epic tendencies he's shown in his last few films for a far simpler approach to both story and visuals, which some critics have said hearkens back to his earlier work, but with an effect that is no less magical. The film technically doesn't open until next Friday, but for those who can't wait, there's an early screening this Wednesday at the Embassy of Japan.
View the trailer.
Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. at the Japan Information & Culture Center in the Embassy of Japan. Free, reservations required. RSVP to jiccrsvpsummer09@embjapan.org. Opens next Friday in theaters.
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Over the next week, E Street will host this series, which highlights films by Latino filmmakers, featuring the local premieres of eight different films, shown on a rotating schedule during the course of the series. The theater is generally showing four or five out of the eight on any given day of the week. While none of these are by filmmakers whose names you'll recognize (yet), you'll recognize some of the actors, particularly in the U.S.-produced title, The Line, which stars Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta, Danny Trejo, Armand Assante and Esai Morales. Liotta plays an assassin going after the head of a crime cartel (Garcia). There are a few other U.S. productions in the mix, along with some from Mexico, one from Peru and one Brazilian film. Check out E Street's website for a full listing of films and a schedule.
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This documentary had its premiere to much acclaim at this year's SILVERDOCS festival, and now begins its highly anticipated theatrical release. After the suicide of one of the dolphins he had trained on the 1960s TV series Flipper, Richard O'Barry devoted himself to stopping the capture and training of dolphins for entertainment purposes. In this documentary, O'Barry teams with National Geographic photographer and first time documentarian Louie Psihoyos and a crew of filmmakers and environmental activists to go undercover in order to expose and find an explanation for the annual slaughter of thousands of dolphins in the waters off of Taiji, Japan. In order to document the ugly practices of this segment of the Japanese fishing industry, the team employed high definition underwater cameras disguised as rocks, and often put themselves in dangerous positions to get the footage. This was a film that required the orchestration of a heist, as the team often worked in defiance of local law enforcement, risking arrest and personal harm.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Bethesda Row and E Street.
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The AFI's excellent retrospective of 1980s films continues to roll along, with one of the best cult flicks of that decade getting multiple screenings over the next week. Escape From New York was the movie that John Carpenter had wanted to make for years, ever since he wrote it just after the Watergate scandal, but it took the success of Halloween to give him the clout to bring his dark, dystopian vision to the screen. It depicts an America ravaged by a third world war with the Soviets, the island of Manhattan reduced to a giant, open-air prison camp. When Air Force One crashes into the island en route to a summit meeting, the government hires a former special forces soldier who's also a prisoner in New York to rescue the president and get him out of the city in exchange for a pardon, provided he can do it before the summit is to start in 24 hours. Kurt Russell stars as the prisoner, Snake Plissken, and manages to create one of the greatest tough guys the movies have ever seen. The movie features an incredible cast, including Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasance, Harry Dean Stanton, and Isaac Hayes back when he still had a sense of humor. It's a super-fun action flick, but also a fascinating look at the national mood in the post-Watergate Cold War years. And it's scary to think that the city of East St. Louis was able to double for a post-apocalyptic New York with minimal special effects or set dressing.
View the trailer.
Friday, Saturday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at the AFI.
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The Perfect Drive-In Double Feature
The drive-in is great, but not really a place to see great films. It's a fantastic experience, but not an ideal movie-watching environment, which is why the perfect drive-in movie is a far from perfect film. Big and dumb plays surprisingly well on that massive screen, with the sound coming through your car's audio, faintly echoed from hundreds of other cars around you. It combines the ability to heckle — as you'd do when watching bad movies at home — with the communal atmosphere and big screen thrill of the theater. And you don't feel so bad about missing a few minutes to go to concessions, since for some reason being at the drive-in feels like an excuse to eat stomach-churning amounts of junk food. Popcorn, candy, and a whole lot more. I'm happy to report that The Bengies, the best drive-in anywhere near D.C., has put together the two biggest, dumbest movies of the summer of 2009 for a double feature just made for that environment: Transformers 2, and the brand new G.I. Joe movie, the latter of which got some of the worst audience test scores in the history of Paramount Pictures. The evening is actually a triple feature, but it almost seems like a movie as good as Up is slumming it to act as the lead-in for these two, so we'll treat that as a separate event. You do need something for the kids, after all. So load up the car, get your snark on, and prepare for the best explosions and worst writing Hollywood has to offer on the largest movie screen in the country.
View the trailers for Up, G.I. Joe, and Transformers.
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at The Bengies Drive-in. $8 per person, and be sure to read Bengies' rules if you've never been there before. They take this stuff seriously, and that's why we love them.