Popcorn & Candy: Super-Toy Super-Hero
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga, Father of Anime
The Smithsonian has assembled an excellent career retrospective of Osamu Tezuka, generally acknowledged as the greatest innovator in Japanese anime and manga, hence the title of the series opening tomorrow at the Freer. Influenced early on by Walt Disney, there is some bitter irony in the fact that his greatest reach into American culture was via a work that was never credited to him: Disney's blatant rip-off of Tezuka's Kimba the White Lion, in The Lion King.
Kimba doesn't find his way into the nine programs that the Freer will screen over the course of the next month, but many of Tezuka's other famous works do, including the enduring and well-known Pinocchio-as-android story of Astro Boy. A big-budget American CGI version of little Astro is currently tanking in theaters, but you can see the real deal on a big screen at the kick-off of the retrospective tomorrow, as the Freer screens four original Astro Boy shorts. Manga scholar and Astro Boy expert and essayist Frederik Schodt will be on hand to talk about the program. Schodt will reappear throughout this weekend's Tezuka programs, along with a number of other speakers who have studied and written extensively on the subject.
The Astro Boy program screens tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Freer, with the rest of the Osamu Tezuka series continuing until December 13. All programs are free.
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Guerrilla Film Fest
The GFF took a breather last year, but is back in 2009 under the banner of the Washington Film Institute. This year the festival, which tends to favor ultra-indie and underground fare, screens 20 shorts in four programs over two evenings, tomorrow and Saturday. There is also a reception each night that runs from an hour and a half before the first program starts, and continues until 10:30 p.m.
Tomorrow and Saturday at the Goethe-Institut. Programs begin at 7:30 and 9 p.m. each night. $16 for each program, which also includes admission to the reception on Saturday.
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Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
Precious has quickly become the darling of the festival circuit, and, especially after winning the People's Choice Award at Toronto this fall, has moved into front-runner status for a Best Picture Oscar. Last year's winner of that award, Slumdog Millionaire, won the big prize, and like Millionaire, Precious is a low-budget struggling-against-adversity story, starring the unknown Gabourey Sidibe as Precious, a poor, illiterate, and obese 16-year-old who suffers intense psychological abuse at the hands of her mother and repeated rape and impregnation from her father. Based, as the unwieldy title points out, on a best-selling novel, the film's production had considerable starpower behind it, with both Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry's companies assisting with promotional duties. The supporting cast is similarly heavy on recognizable faces, including Lenny Kravitz as a nurse, Mo'Nique as Precious's mother, and Mariah Carey, who, if you can believe it, is being seriously discussed as an Oscar contender herself.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Bethesda Row and Largo.
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The Boy with the Green Hair
The National Gallery is in the midst of a month-long look back at the work of American expatriate Joseph Losey. The director did most of his best work in Britain, after being blacklisted in the McCarthy era and heading to Europe so he could continue working. It was probably just as well: Losey's auteurish tendencies and penchant for constantly challenging the status quo would have made it hard for him to fit into a Hollywood studio in the '50s anyway. Even in Britain he didn't really hit his stride and begin making his best work until the '60s caught up with him. This weekend's feature predates all of that, in one of the final American movies Losey made. This cult fantasy from 1948 features a very young Dean Stockwell as the titular boy, a war orphan who wakes up one morning to find that his hair has turned green, and is subjected to merciless ridicule for the oddity. Losey was allegorically addressing racism and Cold War paranoia, neither of which were exactly what audiences might have expected from a studio fantasy flick. The Cold War themes were probably more than enough to put him on the HUAA's radar, and it's no surprise that Losey was but three years from exile when this was released.
Saturday at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery. Free.
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Screenwriter Oren Moverman, best known for his collaborations on the excellent 1999 adaptation of Denis Johnson's short story collection Jesus' Son, and Todd Haynes' brilliant Bob Dylan anti-biopic I'm Not There, makes the move to the director's chair this year with The Messenger. The release during Veterans' Day week is appropriate, as the film follows two soldiers (Woody Harrelson and the phenomenal Ben Foster) who are tasked with notifying the next of kin upon the death of soldiers in the line of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moverman ignores politics and concentrates on the real and psychological tolls of war on those who fight it and those who are left behind. The result is not only an engaging drama about these two men specifically, but also a moving — but never maudlin — tribute to the sacrifices made by men and women in uniform, and their families, for generations.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street and Bethesda Row.
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Rashomon
Rashomon has been written up in this space before, and it's only been a year since the last time it was on a big screen in the area. However, It's worth mentioning again so soon, because tomorrow E Street is opening up a brand new 35mm print of Kurosawa's breakthrough classic. This print is only two degrees removed from the original negative, and has been so meticulously restored that this will probably look and sound even better than if you'd walked into the Japanese premiere in 1950. Which can only serve to accomplish the task of making an already perfect film even better.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for one week only at E Street.