DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Eight years after Y tu Mamá También made international stars out of Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, the two have paired up a second time for the feature directing debut of Y tu Mamá co-writer Carlos Cuarón (who is also the brother of the earlier film’s director, Alphonso Cuarón). In that time, Luna has bounced back and forth from Spanish language productions to American films of both the indie and big-budget variety, including playing Harvey Milk’s lover in last year’s Milk. Meanwhile Bernal has done much the same, except has also, along the way, become an international sex symbol of a magnitude equal to his great talent as an actor. I’m quite certain my girlfriend would leave me for Bernal in a heartbeat, and chances are good yours would too. Can you blame her?
The reuniting of the pair is nominally a buddy comedy, with the two playing bickering brothers who both work harvesting bananas in a rural Mexican town. Both also play in a local soccer team and have the sort of rivalry that only two men who share common DNA can withstand without writing off their friendship entirely. But they’re both also actually good, and when a recruiter pulls them out of the sticks to become professional footballers, their tempestuous relationshop is amped up a few dozen notches when they begin playing for competing teams. With the stakes raised significantly, fame starts going to both their heads. The movie was released in Mexico last year, and was nearly as successful as Y tu Mamá. Based on the aggressive release schedule here in the States — the last foreign film I can remember opening on nearly this many local screens was Pan’s Labyrinth — the U.S. distributor is hoping for a similarly enthusiastic response here.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at a number of theaters in the area.
—
It seems unlikely that a documentary about a middle aged metal band might be talked about as one of the early favorites for best non-fiction film of the year, but that’s the kind of praise that’s being heaped onto Anvil!. Screenwriter Sacha Gervasi was a roadie for the band early in their career, when he was still in his teens, and here he travels with the band once again, now on an ill-fated European tour and recording another album (their 13th) as they attempt to claim the success that has eluded them for so long. Anvil aren’t just some obscure metal band: they were in the vanguard of ’80s hair metal along with acts like the Scorpions, Quiet Riot, Bon Jovi, and Metallica, many of whom they toured with, and many of whom appear in the film singing the band’s praises. Yet household name-recognition never quite found them, and nearly 40 years after making a pact with each other as teens to rock out for life, the band finds themselves playing to crowds of tens rather than tens of thousands. It’s reportedly funny enough that some early audiences wondered if it was a mockumentary (much the same as that other great documentary about super-committed metal-heads toiling away in obscurity to make their art, American Movie). But along with the laughter is plenty of genuine heartbreak, because these are real people still going after — and falling short of — their dreams.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Cinema.
