Popcorn & Candy: Love Means Never Having to Put Your Clothes On
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Jean-Jacques Beineix managed to define an entire aesthetic of French cinema in the 1980s ("Cinéma du look," which featured highly stylized visuals and stylishly disaffected youth) through just two films, 1981's Diva, and 1986's Betty Blue. The latter won the director wide acclaim and awards recognition, as well as equal amounts of derision among some critical circles. If nothing else, Betty Blue was ostentatious enough to result in impassioned critical arguments — a quality of provocation sorely lacking in a lot of modern cinema.
The film is adapted from Philippe Djian's 1985 novel 37°2 le matin, about two young lovers bouncing around France trying to find their place in the world, as one of them succumbs to violent mental illness. Perhaps its most striking aspect – apart from the massive amounts of nudity and graphic sex, anyway – is just how much like a novel the movie feels. This is often a primary complaint: that no matter how skillfully the movie is directed, it can't compensate for a story that hasn't been adapted for the screen so much as it has been transferred.
The cut of the film currently making the theatrical rounds (for the first time) in the U.S. is Beineix's final cut of the film, which adds a full hour to the running time of the original release. Critics who found it tedious before will no doubt find it half again as ponderous now, while those who hailed it as visionary will get more of what they enjoyed to begin with. For those on the fence, what this cut offers is a great deal more character development, which might have been slightly sacrificed in the shorter version in favor of all the full-frontal and mid-coital shots of the film's distractingly attractive leads, Jean-Hugues Anglade and Béatrice Dalle. Don't worry, all that gaudy sex is still intact — just now with more talking! Expanded roles for the film's secondary characters also help to flesh out the story. From my seat, the film is hypnotically engrossing, and a visual masterpiece, even if Beineix does have a tendency to throw logic to the wind. It's unapologetically florid and poetic, as tragic romances often are; you may read that as pretension, or you can just let yourself get happily swept away in its sometimes ridiculously overreaching current.
View the (marginally NSFW) trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival
Tonight marks the start of the tenth annual DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, which, over the next ten days, features a diverse array of features, documentaries, and shorts from all over the world all tied together by artists and themes important to the APA community. Tonight's opening night feature has a decidedly local focus, though. Annabel Park and Eric Byler's 9500 LIberty looks at the issue of illegal immigration in the U.S. via Prince William County's controversial measures to round up illegal immigrants, which are some of the most aggressive – and, many say, invasive – in the country. Park and Byler examine the roots of the county's laws in the lobbying of national anti-immigration groups, the fierce battles between residents that have erupted in their wake, and their impact on the community as a whole. With so many incendiary issues, from immigration law to institutionalized racial profiling, the film is sure to be one of the most talked about of the festival.
View the trailer for 9500 Liberty.
The DCAPA Film Festival runs from tonight until October 10 at E Street, the Navy Memorial, the Canadian Embassy, the Goethe Institut, and the Freer. See the website for a full schedule. Tonight's opening night screening of 9500 Liberty is at 7:30 at E Street. Tickets for most features are $10 at the door, but there are tons of discounts available for advance and package sales.
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Zombieland
Ever since Shaun of the Dead I've firmly been of the opinion that further entries into the zombie/action comedy canon are mostly just pretenders to the throne. Zombieland may be no SotD, but it sure is a hell of a great ride. Sure, it suffers from the usual genre pitfalls. It tends to favor action over laughs to get us to the climax, though it still manages the balance better than most. And it's got the clichéd geeky guy going after the hot girl plotline, but Jesse Eisenberg is a likable enough comic nerd that it's easy to root for him in his pursuit of Emma Stone, whose character bucks vapid stereotype by being a whip-smart grifter. But it's just too likable for any of its minor failings to matter much. Woody Harrelson, in one of his funniest performances as a quip-happy vengeance junkie, and Abigail Breslin round out this foursome of travelers in a post-Zombie-holocaust American landscape dominated by fast-moving, blood-spewing undead ghouls.
The real attraction here, the reason the movie gets a full star more than it probably would otherwise, I can't even tell you about. The role that truly sets the flick apart and makes it worth more than a DVD rental is a celebrity cameo that the producers have wisely kept out of the spotlight, making no mention of it in the trailers or press for the film, much as was done with Kevin Spacey in Seven. I'm following suit and not even including the usual link to the IMDb page in this blurb, because reading the cast list would ruin the surprise. Do yourself a favor and check this one out as a blank slate; the 10-15 minutes this person is in the movie makes it worth the price of admission alone; the fun of the rest is just gravy.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow all over the area.
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In Bangor Maine, there is a trio of elderly residents who have made it their daily habit to go to the airport and give warm welcomes to the troops returning from overseas. Director Aron Gaudet's profile of these three greeters was a winner of the Special Jury Prize at the SXSW film festival this year, and has been acclaimed for its sensitive look at issues of both how we treat the men and women who serve, as well as how we treat our elderly. It's a deeply person film as well: Gaudet's mother Joan is one of the three central characters in the film. The director seeks to keep himself and his camera out of the way as much as possible, letting these people and their daily lives tell their moving story.
View the trailer.
The movie is screening this afternoon at 5 p.m. at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for service members, their families, and Walter Reed employees. For information on this screening, click here. The film begins a theatrical run tomorrow at Shirlington
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German director Ulrike Ottinger has long been fascinated with Eastern cultures — she once made an eight-hour documentary on Mongolian nomads, and in another she spends four and a half hours studying European Jews in exile in Shanghai. Her latest is of more modest length, a mere 83 minute look at the rituals of Korean weddings, particularly the carefully appointed wedding chest, filled with a specific array of symbolic items and delivered to the parents of the bride. Ottinger's narrative features are known for their non-linear storytelling, and in her documentaries she also refuses to be bound by explanatory conventions, preferring to let visuals tell what story they can, and using the colorful palettes of her subjects to create impressionistic portraits. The Goethe-Intitut and the National Gallery are working together to present this film as part of the Gallery's New Masters of European Cinema series.
View the trailer.
Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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Considering the media blitz that has accompanied Michael Moore's latest, which included a free screening at the AFI on Monday, a red carpet premiere at the Uptown on Tuesday, and appearances by Moore on just about any news or interview program willing to clip a microphone to his lapel over the past couple of weeks, it's unlikely you're unaware of this one, so we'll just make brief mention of it here. Joining in the overabundance of analysis & criticism, we'll have a more substantial review tomorrow.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street, Shirlington, and Greenbelt.