Popcorn & Candy: Alien Nation
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Much like The Hurt Locker, another of the best reviewed films so far this year is a relatively low-budget picture that uses genre conventions to subtly address thorny political and social issues. District 9 takes place in an alternate present-day South Africa in which aliens landed, quite publicly, nearly 30 years ago. This wasn't an attack; the newcomers are working class refugees, neither a threat, nor able to provide scientific knowledge that might make them valuable. As a result, no one can decide exactly what to do with them, and the aliens are sequestered in the titular detention camp while endless international debate goes on to try to determine their fate, and a shady corporation has been given control of the camp and its residents in the meantime.
An employee of the corporation manages to activate one of the alien weapons that the visitors landed with, and as a result he begins to morph into one of them, making him a valuable commodity, for his newfound DNA has suddenly given him an understanding of much of the alien technology. With the encampment of the "others" and the location, it's easy to see what some of the themes are that director Neill Blomkamp is going after. Even the marketing for the film is pretty entertaining, as the producers have gone for a viral campaign that features an official website meant to look like a corporate site for the company tasked with containing the aliens, and a blog written by one of the aliens, advocating for equal rights for "non-humans".
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at a number of area theaters.
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Alfred Hitchcock could have quit filmmaking before ever making the move from Britain to Hollywood, and would still have been remembered as a popular and prolific filmmaker. As it is though, he became so famous after the transition that few of the over two dozen films he made before 1940 are still seen very often. And just as the director remade one of his silent films after he started working with sound, he also remade one of his British films after moving on to Hollywood. Most people are familiar with 1956's The Man Who Knew Too Much, which starred Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day as a couple vacationing in Morocco. They witness an assassination and have their child kidnapped in the aftermath as the assassins attempt to keep them quiet. But Hitchcock already did this story once before, 22 years prior, in a much leaner, more streamlined form with a 1934 feature of the same name. British acting legend Leslie Banks originates the Jimmy Stewart role, which is actually downplayed in this version in favor of a stronger role for his wife, played here by Edna Best. But the real attraction is Peter Lorre, as the leader of the assassins, in his first role in an English movie after he fled Hitler's Germany. Lorre didn't even speak English at the time of filming and had to learn all his lines phonetically, yet he still manages to get across all of the creepy menace he was such a genius at creating.
Tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum. Free.
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Yet another entry from this year's SILVERDOCS festival is getting a local theatrical release. Soul Power is a companion piece to the classic 1996 documentary When We Were Kings, about Muhammad Ali's famous 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle", in which he battled George Foreman in Zaire. But while that film concentrated on the fight itself, there was a music festival spearheaded by fight promoter Don King that preceded it. Filmmaker Leon Gast was covering both events in depth, but the drama of the fight ended up being so engrossing on its own that there was no room in When We Were Kings for all the concert footage. When he finally completed Kings, 22 years after shooting it, the concert was mostly left on the cutting room floor. Now, another 13 years on, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte has assembled that footage into a documentary just about the planning and execution of the massive, three day "Zaire 74" music festival, which featured an impressive roster of musicians including headliner James Brown, along with Bill Withers, B.B. King, the Spinners and African acts such as Miriam Makeba and Afrisa.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Bethesda Row.
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Before he began his career as a Hollywood filmmaker of lush, subtext heavy melodramas that were far more subversive than the 1950s critical establishment was able to recognize, Douglas Sirk was known as Detlef Sierck, and was a filmmaker in his native Germany. He left Germany a few years after the rise of the Third Reich, bound for a country with politics closer to his own and a government far less dangerous to his Jewish wife. While he made nearly a dozen films prior to leaving his homeland, much like Hitchcock's pre-Hollywood work, the director's pre-emigration output is rarely seen, so it's great to see the Goethe-Institut giving D.C. audiences the chance to watch this early film, which still bears the stamp of Sirk's trademark melodrama. There is the usual Sirkian female protagonist, in this case a Swedish woman who travels to Puerto Rico on vacation, only to fall in love with both the island and a man. And, also as expected from the director, she finds the domesticity of marriage to be stifling, largely because of a jealous and oppressive husband. Her salvation appears in the person of a doctor from back home who is visiting the island to research a budding epidemic, only to find himself pulled into a messy triangle with the unhappy couple.
Monday evening at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut. $6.
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The current pop culture obsession with vampires has clearly gone global. Last fall's Swedish entry into the bloodsucking genre, Let the Right One In, was one of the year's best films, and now we move to Korea for another international take. Director Park Chan-wook made a brief, head-clearing foray into romantic comedy following his acclaimed Vengeance trilogy, but now appears to have shifted back into the darkness with this tale of a priest who turns into a vampire via a medical experiment gone wrong. The newfound bloodlust, and newly strengthened lust of the good old-fashioned kind, prove more difficult to deal with due to his commitment to the frock, as he tries to find ways to feed his hunger without having to kill, and steals away his good friend's wife.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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We're throwing this one as an extra, sixth entry, because it's not really a recommendation. It's more a public commiseration with all the rest of you out there who read and loved Audrey Niffenegger's magnificently heartbreaking 2003 science fiction-laced romance. Like me, you may feel compelled to see the film version despite the suspicion that they've sucked all the raw, exposed heart out of the book in favor of treacly romance-by-numbers. The trailer is absolutely cringeworthy in its over-earnestness, and every single major player here seems woefully miscast. If it's as disappointing as it appears it might be (and as advance reviews are indicating), this would be the perfect opportunity to take the print version back down off the shelf to wash the taste of sickly sweet sentimentalism out of your mouth.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at a number of theaters throughout the area.