DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
It warms our hearts that on this, that most romantic of holidays, George Romero has constructed another bloody festival of the undead. Because nothing says “I love you” quite like biting social commentary buried under multiple layers of rotting flesh, dismembered limbs, and rampant lust for fresh braaaiiiinns. For the fifth entry in his …of the Dead series, Romero does a little bit of a reboot, working outside the world of the previous films. In the movie, a group of young filmmakers is shooting a horror film when zombies begin attacking, and they turn the cameras on the carnage, making an impromptu documentary of the disaster. Which, of course, sounds remarkably similar to the concept of Cloverfield, but before anyone accuses George of ripping off J.J. Abrams, let’s remember that Dead went into production before the monster blockbuster was even greenlit. Romero’s films, while great fun on a purely visceral level (literally: there tends to be a lot of onscreen viscera, after all), have mostly risen above comparable films due to his keen sense of how to weave in social criticism. Having covered topics from consumerism to class warfare to the military-industrial complex, Romero now sets his sights on the modern obsession with maintaining a visual record of our entire lives. Or, in this case, our entire deaths. We can surely expect poor special effects and worse acting, but Romero’s movies have always been about the ideas; and the idea that we’re drowning ourselves in media seems particularly timely.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Chinatown, the Majestic in Silver Spring, and the Hoffman in Alexandria.
—
Oscar Nominees at National Geographic, the National Archives, and E Street:
Huzzah! The writer’s strike is over! Which means that the Oscars, which film geeks look forward to like the rest of the world does the Super Bowl (even though we steadfastly deny that they actually mean anything) can go forward as planned, with all the lame jokes we’ve come to expect and cherish. Of course, we all know the nominees in the major categories and have had ample opportunity to see the movies in question. But every year, glamorous celebrities stride confidently onstage to read off nominees in categories that none of us (or, more than likely, them) have ever seen, or even had the opportunity to see.
Luckily, there are three D.C. venues that are offering the chance to see every nominated film in all of the shorts categories (documentary, live action, and animated), as well as all of the nominated feature docs and foreign films. The National Archives is handling the Feature and Short Subject Documentary nominees, as well as the Live Action and Animated shorts, from February 20-24. National Geographic is screening all of the nominees for best Foreign Language Feature, starting tonight and running through Sunday. And E Street is screening the live action and animated shorts for one day only, tomorrow. Archives screenings are free, National Geographic screenings are $7 (or $25 for all five), and E Street’s standard pricing applies.
