Popcorn & Candy: While You Were Sleeping...
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Try as Paramount might, they just can't seem to completely screw up this movie, which is probably testament to just how good it is. So you can ignore their lame marketing campaign, which is using targeted late night screenings around the country to build interest and get people to go to a website and request that the movie come to their town. Reach a million total requests and we'll release it all over! You're in control! Uh, right. Unless Paramount execs are complete idiots (still a distinct possibility), they've been planning a wide release all along, and are just trying to goose the hype machine in advance of a well-timed Halloween weekend opening for this legitimately scary haunted-house thriller. You can also ignore the trailer, which has a certain nostalgic charm with its concentration on audience reaction rather than what's on screen, but which also manages to give away of the biggest shock moments of the movie. Does no one know how to cut a decent trailer anymore?
The movie also narrowly avoided disaster when Paramount dumped plans to have director Oren Peli re-shoot the film with a glossier sheen and name actors on a budget considerably bigger than the scant $11,000 he spent producing the version that was purchased at the Slamdance Film Festival two years ago. Part of the film's effectiveness lies in its low-budget, home movie quality, which is essential to the "found footage" aesthetic – an aesthetic it uses far better than most other films of this kind. They've also spent some extra cash on an added CGI final shot that is admittedly kind of dumb, but which still can't ruin what's come before. It obviously owes a great debt to Blair Witch, but is far scarier, mostly because Peli maintains greater control over the filming conditions. As much as it owes to Witch, and Robert Wise's classic The Haunting, the overwhelming dread actually reminded me even more of the terrifying first hour of David Lynch's Lost Highway. What Peli taps into nearly as well as Lynch does in that segment are deep-seated primal fears of the dark and our vulnerability in sleep.
The story is a simple haunting tale, about a young woman who has been periodically followed throughout her life by a malevolent spirit. It is now making its first reappearance in years, and her boyfriend buys a video camera to document the strange happenings. Peli builds tension by slowly ratcheting up the severity of the disturbances, and alternating the anxiety of daylight with the dread of night, forcing most of the scares into creepy static tripod shots of the couple's bedroom while they sleep, and using the audience's imagination against them to compensate for the lack of an effects budget. And for the most part, it works. One request, though: if you're steely-willed enough not to be scared in the slightest, like the guy sitting in front of me last night, try not to pull a Max Cady and laugh hysterically and loudly, particularly at the poor girl just a few seats away who is screaming in terror. We get it, you're not scared. Now shut up about it.
Currently only playing at Georgetown, but expanding beyond the one-show-a-day schedule it's been on all week as of tomorrow. I'm betting on a wider release by Halloween weekend.
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If you like the Coen brothers in their bleakest comic mode, and think that the dark laughs of Barton Fink represent the pair at their best, then A Serious Man is for you. If No Country for Old Men had never been made, this would quite easily be their best film in a decade. This is also their most autobiographical film, returning to the childhood Minnesota stomping grounds they lampooned so effectively in Fargo, but setting their sights more specifically on the heavily Jewish Minneapolis suburbs where they grew up during the late 1960s. In fact, Judaism itself is the subject of A Serious Man as much as anything else, as its protagonist, an anxiety-ridden physics professor, seeks the advice of a succession of rabbis as his marriage and his world fall to pieces and his son approaches his Bar Mitzvah. It's a fascinating examination of coincidence, the lack of structure in the universe, and our fruitless – but relentless – efforts to assign meaning to the meaningless, usually with religion as our guide. Which might be a chore if it wasn't so hilarious, and if it wasn't capped off by the most memorable and confounding final image in the Coens' filmography since the accidental bird diving into the sea at the end of Fink.
View the trailer, a brilliantly edited promo that proves you can market a film without giving it all away in a two-minute condensed plot summary. It's a compelling little mini-film all on its own.
Opens tomorrow at E Street and Bethesda Row, expanding to the AFI next Friday.
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The AFL-CIO's annual film festival has provided a reliably excellent collection of labor-themed films each fall, and this year is no exception. Old favorites like Office Space (celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, with Milton & Lumbergh live and in person), Bound for Glory, The Grapes of Wrath, and Slap Shot share time with newer titles such as Tokyo Sonata, The Philosopher Kings (which we reviewed earlier this year at SILVERDOCS), and a collection of six short films repeated throughout the festival. Also on the program is one sneak preview of a selection from this year's Toronto Film Festival due to air on HBO the week after next, Schmatta: Rags to Riches. The festival's opening night feature will be Jennifer Baichwal's acclaimed documentary, Manufactured Landscapes, about the photography of Edward Burtynsky (pictured).
Also worth noting is that the festival is sponsoring a brand new series this year at the Capitol Visitors Center. The "Whistleblower" series is "part of a landmark, nine-year legislative effort to restore credible whistleblower rights for government employees" and will feature famous films about whistleblowers every Thursday during the month of October. Tonight it's The Whistleblower, a short 2004 documentary on big oil whistleblower Charles Hamel, and next week, Silkwood with Meryl Streep. Films in this series are at 6:30 p.m. and are free of charge.
View the trailer for Manufactured Landscapes.
DC Labor Film Fest opens on Tuesday, and runs through October 19 at the AFI. The Whistleblower series is every Thursday through the end of the month.
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Autumn is the time when D.C. is overrun by specialty film festivals, so this week we have not just one, but two festivals to choose from. The second is the Arabian Sights Festival, which is run by FilmFest DC. Each year for the past 14 years, Arabian Sights has brought some of the best in Egyptian, Iraqi, Moroccan, Yemeni, and Syrian (and other nations as well) filmmaking to D.C. This year's program features 13 features over the course of nine days, and tomorrow's opening night at E Street has four titles, including Open Shutters in Iraq at 9 p.m., about a group of five Iraqi women living in Syria and learning photography. The film's director, Maysoon Pachachi, will be on hand for a Q&A.
Opens tomorrow and runs through October 18 with screenings at E Street and National Geographic. See the website for the full schedule and to purchase tickets.
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Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love
This film was one of the favorites at FilmFest DC, winning the festival's Circle Audience Award. Now it returns to the area for a theatrical run at the Avalon. The documentary about the international superstar Youssou N'Dour documents two years in the life of the singer, showing both the size and scope of his popularity and influence, as well as the difficulties faced by a Muslim singer whose music and messages aren't always readily accepted by some of the Muslim community.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at The Avalon. Director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi will be on hand for Q&As at the 8:15 p.m. screenings on Friday and Saturday.
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In Chris Rock's latest project, the comedian plays investigative journalist and looks into the culture of black women's hair, from the tools, products, and extensions that they subject themselves to in order to achieve the culturally defined "good" hair to health, economic and even political ramifications of the industry associated with this drive to achieve it. Rock recruits television writer Jeff Stilson (a veteran of Letterman, The Daily Show and Rock's own late 90's talk show) to direct his first feature and follow Rock as he interviews a slew of celebrities from Maya Angelou to Salt 'n' Pepa to Al Sharpton and goes into salons, beauty shops, and to Indian hair dealers to get the answers.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at a number of theaters throughout the area.