Popcorn & Candy: Kicking Around
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Over that World Cup hangover yet? Or perhaps you just want to erase the memory of some of the less appealing aspects of the tournament: namely, grown men -- and fabulously rich and famous ones, at that -- acting like children, taking dives and crying like babies about fouls that a quick review of the footage clearly demonstrates never happened. Not to mention the stubborn refusal of the sport's ruling body to actually use those tapes to dole out some much needed discipline that might help eliminate all that whining and get them back to actually playing some decent football. If you need a reminder that some people play the sport for the pure joy of it, this documentary travels around the world to watch and interview participants in one of the most universal sporting acts on earth: the pickup soccer game.
The film's title comes from what the Brazilians call these games; the word in Portuguese translates literally to "naked," implying that this is the game in its purest, most unadorned form. The filmmakers -- led by a pair of former college soccer players who missed the cut to go pro -- set out to see and participate in these games wherever they can find them. They end up finding games on grass, dirt, and concrete, played by men, women, and children, some with homemade balls, some with balls practically without any air in them. The film was a big hit at the South by Southwest festival this spring, and D.C. United is sponsoring a special one-night-only benefit screening in D.C. next week -- ticket proceeds from the screening will benefit the club's charitable wing, United for D.C.
View the trailer.
Tuesday at 8 p.m. at The Avalon. $15.
---
African Diaspora Film Festival
For the fifth year, the African Diaspora Film Festival presents a program of films that show the experience of people of African descent throughout the world, presented in partnership between the festival, the TransAfrica Forum, and National Geographic's All Roads Film Project. This year's festival got underway last night, and features ten programs through Sunday evening. Tonight's trio of films starts with a pair of movies about two griots -- African bards and respositories of oral histories -- one from Burkina Faso, the other a Nobel Prize winner for Literature from Nigeria. Also on tonight's bill is a film about the spread of reggae from Jamaica to the rest of the world. Programs tomorrow and Sunday present both documentary and narrative films, covering topics from Cuban and Haitian exiles to the diamond business in the Congo to the politics of African-American activism.
Going on now and continuing through Sunday at National Geographic. Check the schedule for complete details.
---
Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar follows up his acclaimed 2004 film, The Sea Inside, with his second English-language feature, a massive costume epic set in ancient Greece about the Greek mathemetician and astronomer Hypatia, who became one of the first prominent female mathematicians in history during the fourth century in Roman Egypt. Amenábar's film takes some fairly significant liberties with the known facts of Hypatia's life to tell a story that examines the clash between science and religion at a time when Christianity was on the rise in the Roman Empire. Rachel Weisz stars in the lead role, in a film that, despite having some trouble finding U.S. distribution, was the highest grossing film in Spain last year and won a slew of Goya awards (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars). Amenábar decided to go the old-fashioned route in the making of the film, avoiding CGI in recreating ancient Alexandria -- Amenábar built the largest film set ever constructed on Malta for the shoot.
View the trailer.
Opens today at Bethesda Row and Cinema Arts.
---
For those who grew up during the Cold War, the looming threat of nuclear annihilation was never far from many minds: with constant reminders in school, in the media, and in popular culture of just how easy it was to destroy huge areas with nuclear weapons, and how many times over the world could effectively be completely destroyed, given the number of such weapons at the ready in the U.S. and the Soviet Union alone. Since then, the nuclear threat has taken the backseat to other crises, from global warming to economic collapses. Countdown to Zero is a grim documentary that seeks to remind viewers that the issue of nuclear proliferation since the end of the Cold War not only has not eased, but has in fact gotten worse, given the increased ease of the creation of these weapons, and the efforts of terrorist organizations and unstable states to get their hands on them. The filmmakers manage to score interviews with an impressive array of former world leaders, including Tony Blair, Jimmy Carter, Pervez Musharraf and Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as former Secretary of Defense and Cuban Missle Crisis point man Robert McNamara, who presumably knows a little something about being on the brink of nuclear destruction.
View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street.
---
Dying Inside: Elderly in Prison
Brooks Hatlen was the kind old convict played by James Whitmore in The Shawshank Redemption, a man who'd spent the better part of his life in prison for a crime committed as a young man. As the years go by, long sentences handed out by the American justice system are making our prison population not only one of the most crowded in the world, but also looking more and more like Brooks, in age at least, if not demeanor. In this documentary produced by Al-Jazeera English, Josh Rushing (who will participate in a Q&A after the screening) travels to prisons around the country to examine the impacts of so many elderly inmates, who often must be housed separately, and at a far greater cost than their younger counterparts.
Monday at 8 p.m. at the 14th & V Busboys & Poets, including a Q&A with host Josh Rushing and producer Jeremy Young.