DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Totally Awesome 4: More Films of the 1980s
Plenty of venues try to do 1980s-themed film series (particularly among the various outdoor film series here in D.C.), but no one programs them better than the AFI, which debuts its fourth annual celebration of that decade this weekend. Of course, the 80s has no shortage of fan favorite films, and you can’t really go wrong with the programs of popular hits that most of these series put together. But what really sets the AFI’s programming apart is the way they blend the big names — the ones that are first to roll off your tongue when asked to rattle off a few titles that epitomize the decade — with a smattering of cult hits and great movies from the decade that you might not think of first, but that you’re likely to enjoy just as much (if not more) for not having seen them two dozen times already.
What that means this year is that you definitely have movies that you probably wore out on VHS during your wasted youth: The Lost Boys, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, The Neverending Story, Wargames, plus a group of seven John Hughes movies to memorialize the death of the teen angst auteur. On the cultish side, there are some real gems here: Re-Animator, horror director Stuart Gordon’s updated adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story about bringing the dead back to life; John Carpenter’s super-creepy The Fog, starring two generations of scream queens with both Jamie Leigh Curtis and her mom Janet Leigh; Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, which was, of course, far from the final chapter, but remains the most watchable and bizarre entry in the series — worth it just to see Crispin Glover as a collar-popping prep who also has some spazz-tastic heavy metal dance moves; and After Hours, one of the most consistently overlooked films on Martin Scorsese’s resume, a strange and hilarious foray into a near-surrealist territory never really approached before or since in the director’s career.
This week, there are three titles on tap. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the release of what remains the best of the Star Wars films, The Empire Strikes Back. Between bleak scenes on Hoth, including the great Tauntaun gutting sequence, the Leia-Luke kiss that would forever be rendered skin-crawling by the revelations in Return of the Jedi, Lando Calrissian bringing a taste of welcome cool to the series, and that final battle between Luke and Vader (I used to have nightmares about falling through those Cloud City chutes as a six-year-old), it’s the one film in Lucas’ saga I can go back to again and again. Also on the agenda is Ridley Scott’s dark fantasy, Legend, with a young Tom Cruise working to save the fair maiden (and the daylight itself) from the red-faced, bull-horned Lord of Darkness, and Clue (pictured), probably one of the few successful board-game to film adaptations in cinema history, a kitschy good time with an all-star ensemble cast of 80s comedy fixtures including Tim Curry, Martin Mull, Madeline Kahn, and Christopher Lloyd. When the film was released to theaters, it came with three different endings, so different theaters would have different versions of the film, just as the game could end in different ways. The cut that generally gets shown now includes all three.
View the trailers for The Empire Strikes Back, Legend, and Clue.
