DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Next week the Freer Gallery will start what promises to be one of the most fun collections of the summer, the Asia Trash! series. Every Thursday starting next week until August 20th, the museum will screen some of the goriest, campiest, and must cult-tastic celluloid freakouts Asian cinema has to offer. Future offerings include the surprise 2006 international hit from Korea, The Host (which, honestly, as good as it is, is a little on the classy side for this series), the Thai kitsch-fest Tears of the Black Tiger, and bucket upon bucket upon geyser upon gusher of blood in the aptly titled Tokyo Gore Police.
This week, however, the series gets started with Versus, the most convoluted mish-mash of sci-fi, zombie, martial arts, and yakuza gang movies ever concocted. Director Ryuhei Kitamura has since made the leap to American B-movies with last year’s Midnight Meat Train — which, in true grindhouse fashion, boasted a title more entertaining than the movie itself. But in 2000, he put together this phantasmagoria of ultraviolence, about an escaped convict who gets into an altercation with a group of gangsters in a remote wooded spot that no one on hand realizes is some sort of portal to “the other side”. The dead start getting up to fight again, and the orgy of violence that follows is like the martial arts showdown movie George Romero might have made if he was really into samurai movies, with plenty of highly stylized martial arts fighting that really occupies the bulk of the screen time. Some critics chided the film for being a Matrix ripoff, and the parallels are certainly there. Versus is hardly groundbreaking, but to be fair, Kitamura is borrowing from the same Asian-cinema sources the Wachowskis were ripping off themselves. Only he never takes himself so seriously, making Versus a lovably mindless exercise in pure hack-and-slash eye candy.
View the trailer.
Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery‘s Meyer Auditorium. Free, tickets required.
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The African Diaspora Film Series is over in a flash, but has a lot of content for a three-day, one venue film festival. The series began last night, and screen ten films from last night through tomorrow. This is the first year of the collaboration between National Geographic’s All Roads Film Festival, the African Diaspora Festival, and the transAfrica Forum to present the series at National Geographic’s Grosvenor Auditorium. And if you haven’t yet been there, it’s almost worth going just for the theater, which is perhaps the nicest non-commercial screening room in the city. Tonight’s three programs include a study of African dance from across the continent, Movement (R)evolution Africa, to be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Joan Frosch. Tomorrow features five films, including two local premieres and one U.S. premiere.
Now playing at National Geographic’s Grosvenor Auditorium, and continues through tomorrow. See the schedule for full listings. Tickets are $10 for each program.
