DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
We have fully forgiven E Street. When they started their midnight movie series, it was usually barely worth mentioning, concentrating way too much time on well-known (and often oddly family friendly) crowd-pleasers during a time slot that is supposed to be reserved for trashy cult picks that are enhanced by substance abuse and late night punchiness. But they’ve been coming around this year, with recurring Rocky Horror screenings, and titles more suited to the lateness of the hour, like The Warriors. The 180 degree turnaround is completed this weekend, as E Street screens a camp classic that in the more genteel days of 1974, could actually fairly be described as pornography.
Everyone knows the story of Flash Gordon. Heroic, handsome, athletic Aryan-youth poster boy is kidnapped by a mad scientist and flown into space to fight in an intergalactic war against the evil Ming the Merciless, effectively ending his prospects back on Earth for the plutocrat’s life of comfort, for which his square jaw was destined. Flesh Gordon spoofs on all the conventions of the super-hero comic, throws in a lot of bare breasts and hefty doses of double entendre, and a rather unusual amount of stop-motion animation for an erotic film. For the trivia nuts, you can enjoy one of the earliest screen “appearances” by Craig T. Nelson, as the voice of the demonic monster awoken by Ming stand-in Emporer Wang the Perverted to do battle with our stalwart savior Flesh. Stupid hilarity and wildly unlikely sexual situations ensue. While it would be irresponsible of us to condone public drunkenness, you probably don’t want to see this stone-cold sober. Which, as noted above, is sort of the point of the midnight movie.
View the (surprisingly, safe for work) trailer.
Friday and Saturday night at midnight at E Street. Rated X, no one under 18 admitted.
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As ubiquitous as video recording devices are in the U.S., with thousands of new clips of everyday life being uploaded for public consumption daily, it’s easy to forget just how revolutionary the idea of being able to freely record your surroundings can be. Technology also now allows the people to be the watchdogs of government and public servants, which seems to be increasingly necessary for some institutions determined to downplay their failings. Burma VJ takes footage shot under the most difficult of conditions in 2007 by members of the Democratic Voice of Burma during uprisings against the military junta currently in control of the country. These video journalists are risking more than just being yelled at by irate Metro operators caught talking on cell phones or sleeping on the job; if they get caught capturing images of the uprising, they risk imprisonment, torture, and worse. Which makes the film not just an important document of conditions within a rigorously closed society, but a vital reminder not to take our own freedoms for granted.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street, with Dr. Sein Win, President of the Burmese government in exile in attendance for tomorrow night’s 7:35 p.m. screening, along with Jeremy Woodrum of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, who will be in attendance both Friday and Saturday.
