Popcorn & Candy: A Goblin By Any Other Name
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Before you head out to an Oscar party on Sunday, you may want to take a little time to appreciate filmmaking on the opposite end of the quality spectrum. Troll 2, which currently resides at #58 on the IMDb's user-voted worst 100 movies of all time list, has developed a cult following dedicated to its special brand of ineptitude; such a significant following that a documentary, Best Worst Movie, was made about the film's deeply committed (and quite possibly deeply disturbed) cult. (DCist's Chris Klimek reviewed that movie at SILVERDOCS last year.)
Don't worry about going into this and being lost for having never seen its predecessor. The main claim to fame of the original, forgettable 1986 Troll is that it has not one, but two main characters by the name of Harry Potter (Jr. and Sr.), and is now the subject of a potential legal battle over the name, as the director of that film is looking to remake his own movie with a bigger budget. But that's an entirely different train wreck. The sequel was picked up by an Italian director, Claudio Fragasso, who practically made a career in the '80s out of low budget sequels to existing B-horror franchises, and tells the story of a family that accidentally goes on holiday to a goblin kingdom. Note that's goblins, not trolls: Troll 2 is a sequel in name only; apparently the cash-in value of the original movie was high enough in 1990 to justify attaching the name, even though technically, Troll 2 doesn't even have any trolls in it. (If you're not confused yet, just wait until you see Troll 3, which is actually about murderous plantlife.) Just how laughably bad is the movie? Is it awful enough to bear the cashmere mantle of Ed Wood? To make Tommy Wiseau step back in glassy-eyed yet virile awe? That's for you to judge this weekend. If you feel compelled to host subsequent personal screenings to share the debacle with your friends, that'll be your answer.
View the trailer.
Friday and Saturday at midnight at E Street.
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National Archives Academy Award Nominee Screenings
The other thing to do before throwing/attending your Oscar party is to finish watching the last of the nominated films. Of course, there's no prize for watching each of the 43 nominated features and 15 shorts competing Sunday night, but the hallucination-inducing case of sleep-deprivation you'll take from the experience is its own reward. At least, that's what I'm telling myself. As for your remaining options, apart from the various marquee titles still playing around town, E Street is still running both the Live Action and Animated shorts nominees, and as of last night, the National Archives has commenced their screenings of four groups of nominees. Those groups include both of the shorts programs that are currently at E Street, as well as the slate of documentary shorts, the only screening of that category playing anywhere in D.C.. In addition to the shorts, the Archives is screening all five documentary feature nominees, winding up with Which Way Home on Sunday evening, which they promise will be over in time for Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin's opening duologue.
The Archives screenings are going on now through Sunday. They're free, and tickets are first come, first served, given out one hour before each show. See their site for the schedule.
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The always quotable Jean-Luc Godard once famously said that "all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun." (Actually, Godard claimed he was quoting another outsized cinema personality, D.W. Griffith, but it has been suggested that Godard made that part up.) Though Godard's tendency toward provocative hyperbole is well documented, the auteur actually made good on that claim throughout much of the early portion of his career. Indeed, a look back at film history in general shows that he's right quite a lot of the time. Of course, in the larger sense, Godard was really talking about sex and death, and those defining characteristics of film are what Gustav Deutsch and Hanna Schimek set out to examine in this installment of their "Film ist" series. The pair went through over 2,000 films, from the very earliest days of the moving picture through the 1940s, to come up with a mesmerizing feature length montage — soundtracked by Christian Fennesz — visually exploring the implication of that statement throughout the first half-century or so of film.
View a clip from the film.
Tonight at 8 p.m. at the Hirshhorn. Free.
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For the fifth year, the Men of Strength Club, the youth development arm of the Men Can Stop Rape organization, is sponsoring a brief afternoon film festival at the AFI, designed to show films that present positive role models to young men. This is part of MCSR's mission "to mobilize men to use their strength for creating cultures free from violence, especially men's violence against women." There will be two films shown this year, both documentaries. Say it Loud focuses on the importance of education for African-American boys, with appearances including Ludacris, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Master P. Men II Boys looks to give advice and inspiration through the delivery of bits of wisdom, particularly to boys growing up without their fathers in their lives. Janks Morton, the director of the latter film, will also be on hand for a Q&A after the screening.
View the trailers for Say it Loud and Men II Boys.
Saturday from 12-5:30 p.m. at the AFI.
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The American Institute of Graphic Arts is sponsoring a special screening next week of Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard's documentary about the 1990s Lower East Side art scene, as seen from the modern perspective of where those artists have gone since emerging from that place and time. A lot of people have been critical of a lot aspects of the film, especially by those inclined to scoff at the idea that graffiti can be art, or sick to death of hearing the name Shepard Fairey, or those with misgivings about the work or aesthetics of Harmony Korine, Mike Mills, or Geoff McFetridge, or any of the other artists covered here. That's potentially a lot of people: the spinoffs of that scene are diverse and cover a lot of artistic ground, and I know I have a tolerate/hate relationship with the work of at least one person on that list, and that's probably true of a lot of people. The more interesting aspect is the film's examination of the commodification of art, and the blurring of lines between what appears in galleries and in advertisements. Many of the artists here have met with great success — McFetridge was responsible for a huge Pepsi One campaign — and the transition from underground to mainstream as well as the effects of that transition on the arts and the artists gives this the opportunity to be more than just an appreciation by contemporaries of that scene.
View the trailer.
Tuesday at 7 p.m. at E Street. $12 for AIGA members, $16 for non-members.
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The event movie of the spring is Tim Burton's vision of Alice in Wonderland, filmed in 3-D and with Burton's signature dark, candy-colored acid trip aesthetic. For the seventh time, Johnny Depp serves as his leading man, this time as the carrot-topped, gap-toothed Mad Hatter who is helping Alice to defeat the Red Queen's Jobberwock. What? Don't remember that plot point from the books? Well, the original stories have been done and done again, so for this go round, Burton has decided to fast-forward a few years to join a 19-year-old Alice as she accidentally stumbles her way back into the wonderland she visited as a child. All is not right in the kingdom, and Alice needs to help the Hatter get things back to whatever passes for normal there. If you're still skeptical, then the news that professional oddball Crispin Glover is heading up the Red Queen's army in a dark turn as the Knave of Hearts might sweeten the deal.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at theaters all over the area.
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Also opening tomorrow is the Red Riding Trilogy, three films made for British television based on a group of four novels by David Pearce (who also had his book The Damned Utd adapted into an excellent film last year). The three Red Riding movies share overlapping storylines and characters, and were all written by Tony Grisoni, but filmed in fairly distinct styles by three different directors. The trio are now in limited theatrical release in the U.S., a year after they aired in Britain. We'll have a full-length review of the trilogy tomorrow, as it plays at E Street through next week.