DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
In the summer of 2001, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls started up a camp in Portland, Oregon for girls ages 8-18 to learn to be rockers. It was about more than just music; girls were shown that not only were they just as able as boys to be in bands (no matter what stereotypes the prevailing rock and roll culture of decade after decade might have instilled in them), but they were also encouraged to reject the constant pop culture barrage of negative female stereotypes. The organization used Rock ‘n’ Roll as the pathway to self-esteem, well-rounded individualism, and liberation among girls who would otherwise be made to feel bad about how they look or about standing out.
Since that summer, the Portland program has grown by leaps and bounds to become a year-round operation, and has inspired like-minded girls’ rock summer camps nationwide (including D.C.’s own Girls Rock! DC, which had a benefit concert on Sunday with The Andalusians and Carol Bui at the Black Cat). Girls Rock! the film follows one year’s camp, focusing on just a few of the girls as they learn how to be rockers from the likes of Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, in a film that is reported to be equal parts inspiring, invigorating, and tear-jerking. Not to mention sporting a kick-ass soundtrack (just listen to the tunes featured in the trailer).
View the trailer.
Opens Friday night at the Avalon Theatre. Friday night’s 8:00 p.m. screening also includes live music from Girl Loves Distortion, Blue Black Betty, and DJ Natty Boom. Saturday’s 10:00 a.m. matinee also has live music with Odd Girl Out, along with an instrument show and tell.
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One of the great unsolved mysteries of the movies, and one of the most elegant and darkly romantic films ever made, Alain Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad still stands as the director’s crowning achievement. Marienbad takes place in a luxurious hotel, where three characters, none of whom are ever named, work out the relationship they may (or may not) have with one another. The film’s narrator insists to the woman that they had an affair the year before and arranged to meet here. She remembers nothing of it. Her companion, an authoritarian husband/boyfriend, seems unaware, but what he knows or doesn’t (or what he might have known of the affair the year before, if it even existed) is a mystery as well. The characters dance around each other in this surreal fantasy, and in the end, there are more questions than the film started with. Resnais, along with cinematographer Sacha Vierny, who cannot be left out when admiring the look of the film, created a stately and dreamlike world for these indefinite interactions to carry themselves out in. You may exit the theater with your head spinning from the infinite permutations and possibilities the film presents and stubbornly refuses to resolve, but it’s the same pleasant swimming consciousness one feels from a few too many glasses of a fine champagne.
View the trailer.
Begins a special one-week run of a brand new 35mm print at the AFI tomorrow.
