DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
It’s a shame that the Goethe Institut’s Michael Haneke retrospective (which, by the way, is still going on) didn’t include a screening of his bracing 1997 film Funny Games, if only to provide easy side-by-side comparison with the higher profile English-language remake hitting theaters today. Now, normally we have a built in skepticism when it comes to American remakes of brilliant foreign fare, but we’re willing to cut this one plenty of slack, seeing as Haneke has remade the film himself. His original was shocking by even the most desensitized measures, a dark and unforgiving piece in which a vacationing family is taken hostage in a lake house by a couple of sadistic lunatics who torture the family for sport, even as one of the characters slyly acknowledges his awareness that they’re being watched by the audience in the theater. The family is given the chance to play the “games” of the title for their survival, with the odds soundly stacked against them. Haneke delights in destroying the conventions of the movie thriller with the asides and the way he unfolds the story to its genuinely surprising (and for many, infuriating) ending. In anything approaching its original form, it seems unlikely that any major studio affiliate would finance even a language-accessible version with stars like Naomi Watts and Tim Roth playing the leads. Yet Haneke isn’t known for his tendency to compromise his famously bleak visions, so we’re inclined to show up even if just to see how the original work survived studio supervision. One thing is reasonably certain: the trailer, with it’s playful use of Grieg’s Hall of the Mountain King suggesting wry black humor, is most likely a bait and switch. It’ll be black, but these games are anything but funny.
If you’re feeling especially masochistic, we suggest moving the Austrian version to the top of your Netflix queue and having a double feature, at home and then the theater, of the old and the new.
View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street and Georgetown.
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Just as novels about writers occupy a genre all their own, so do movies about the love of movies; the makers of films like Cinema Paradiso, The Lovers, and even Cecil B. Demented can be assured that there’s a built in audience for their tributes, because they’re made to tap into the same overwhelming adoration for the flickering lights of a movie theater that inspired the filmmakers to go into that line of work in the first place. The first feature by Chinese director Jiang Xiao fits squarely into that mold, a soapy, often melodramatic, and unlikely love story in which the implausibilities of the connections that develop between the characters are easily overlooked due to the joyful thread of movies that holds them all together. The plot twists and turns, much of the film told in flashbacks from a journal kept by Ling Ling, a mute girl whose relationship with the delivery boy she bludgeons with a brick is best left by the movie to explain. Suffice to say, they’ve met before, their shared love of movies goes back to childhood, and in Ling Ling’s case is instilled by a mother who was so unable to keep herself away from the cinema that she delivers in a movie theater when she’s supposed to be traveling to keep her pregnancy secret. But there are dark sides to the characters’ obsessive attachments as well, and despite its overall sweetness, all is not sunshine and lollipops and big buttery buckets of popcorn. Electric Shadows is a promising debut, and a must for film lovers.
Screens tonight only (in association with National Women’s History Month), at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery‘s Meyer Auditorium. Free, but tickets are required, and are distributed one hour before showtime.
