DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Michelangelo Antonioni made three English-language films during the course of his career. These three were made from 1966-1975, as part of a contract with MGM undoubtedly designed to try to cash in on his popularity in the foreign art-house circles by making some higher-profile pictures with bigger English and American stars. And it worked with the first of the three efforts, as Blow-Up became one of the decade-defining films of the 1960s. The film stars David Hemmings as a London fashion photographer who snaps more than he bargained for when he takes pictures of two lovers in a park, and comes to believe he may have evidence of a murder on his hands, though his image, when blown up, is indistinct.
The film is probably one of Antonioni’s most accessible, even though it would be a mistake to characterize it as anything approaching a traditional narrative. It’s still self-aware enough to be off-putting to many audiences, but that didn’t stop it from being a pretty big success upon release. The celebrity cameos, glamorous swinging London fashion-world setting, and copious amounts of model nudity, including the first instances of full-frontal to ever appear in a British feature, probably didn’t hurt its receipts. Tomorrow begins a week of Blow-Up screenings at the AFI, which is doing a retrospective of all three of Antonioni’s English works over the next two weeks. Zabriskie Point, and the Jack Nicholson-starring The Passenger will follow. Tomorrow night’s premiere is followed by a party sponsored by our friends over at Brightest Young Things.
View the (marginally NSFW) trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the AFI and plays for most of the next week. BYT party follows tomorrow’s screening for all ticket holders.
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Every year The Avalon observes September 11 with a special screening of a film with a tie to the tragedy. This year they’ll show Bill Couturié’s History Channel documentary about firefighters, Into the Fire. Like any profession with such potential for drama, firefighting has seen plenty of treatments in narrative films, but seeing the lives of actual firefighters up close and personal, the day to day operations of and interactions in the firehouse is more of a rare opportunity. The screening is also a benefit for HEROES, a D.C.-based charity that assists the widows and children of firefighters and police who have been killed in the line of duty. The D.C. Firefighters Association and Ward 3 D.C. Council representative Mary Cheh are sponsoring the event, and Cheh will be on hand with filmmaker Aviva Kempel and a panel who will discuss the film after the screening.
View the trailer.
Thursday, September 11 at 8 p.m. at The Avalon. Proceeds benefit HEROES
