DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Johnny Marr Last Shop Standing: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the Independent Record Shop
Saturday, April 20 is Record Store Day, and if none of the limited edition vinyl pressings call out to you like last year’s Buck Owens coloring book, Crooked Beat Records is sponsoring the D.C. premiere of a film based on a book by Graham Jones about the fall and rise of the record store. Director Pip Pier interviewed shop owners and musicians, including Paul Weller, Johnny Marr, Billy Bragg and others, about the importance of record stores to their musical education. Melody Records has been gone for a year, but used record stores have been on the rise in D.C., and nowhere is this more apparent than on a stretch of 18th Street that currently boasts four excellent shops: Smash, Joint Custody, Red Onion, and Crooked Beat, with Som Records a short walk away on 14th Street. See the movie tonight and visit a record store this weekend.
View the trailer.
Thursday, April 18 at 8:30 pm at Comet Ping Pong, 5037 Connecticut Ave NW . Free.
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Silent comedian Harold Lloyd did his own stunts, and none was more treacherous than the famous scene of a store clerk clinging desperately to the hands of a clock tower. Martin Scorsese paid loving homage to this iconic scene in Hugo, and to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the original film’s release, the AFI is showing a new 35mm print with live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton. If you want to find out how Lloyd pulled off this death-defying stunt, read this.
View the trailer.
Saturday, April 20 at 7:30 pm at the AFI.
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Maria Montez and friendWhen the beautiful Tollea is kidnapped, her fiancé heads for a remote Pacific Island led by a treacherous villainess with a no tolerance policy for strangers. Maria Montez plays a dual role as the innocent fiancée and the titular snake charmer. Director Robert Siodmak was best known for noirs like Phantom Lady and The Killers, but this is a delirious Technicolor camp classic that is reportedly avant garde filmmaker and Hollywood Babylon archivist Kenneth Anger’s favorite movie. Screened as part of the National Gallery of Art’s Universal at 100 series, which also offers the W.C. Fields classic Never Give a Sucker an Even Break this weekend.
View the trailer.
Sunday, April 21 at 5:30 pm at the National Gallery of Art. Free
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FilmFest DC: Paris Under Watch
FilmFest DC just announced that it’s so strapped for cash it may not happen next year. To be honest, the news isn’t that heartbreaking. I’ve seen great movies at FilmFest that never had a commercial release in DC, like Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Iruvar, but in recent years programming has been uninspiring. A case in point is one of the films selected for the series Sister Cities Through the Lens. This festival sidebar looks at three sister cities, so you’d think it would be a showcase for the best that city’s cinema has to offer. Paris is a cinephile’s heaven, so you’d expect a winner, right? Not so this topical French export. First time directors Cédric Jimenez and Arnaud Duprey used the found-footage language of surveillance cameras to look at the aftermath of a tragic explosion in a Paris train station. It’s an interesting concept, but from the electronic music that will make this movie seem dated in a few years, to the annoying ticking sound you hear whenever a camera zooms in on its subject (don’t the film makers know that digital zooms don’ have to make any sound at all?), the execution is hackneyed and sensationalistic. The plot heavily depends on stupid French perpetrators reading evidence and their names out loud in the privacy of their homes. Like, you know, most terrorists do.
View the trailer for Paris Under Watch.
Friday, April 19 at Mazza Gallerie. For more FilmFest DC options this weekend see the complete festival program here.
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The Freer Gallery shows off its new 3D projection system with a program of “amazing stories” commissioned by the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival, a South Korean festival that focusses on South Korean and other Asian horror and fantasy films. Part of the 2013 Korean Film Festival, which wraps up Sunday afternoon with a pair of well-acclaimed films, Sleepless Night, an intimate portrait of marriage, and Juvenile Offender, about a troubled teen.
Friday, April 19 at 7:00 pm at the Freer. Free.
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Also opening this week, Primer director Shane Carruth’s long-awaited followup, Upstream Color. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
