DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
San Francisco resident and Annapolis native Joshua Grannell is better known by his drag persona, Peaches Christ. As Peaches, he’s hosted a long running midnight movie series, the Midnight Mass, which comes with an extensive pre-show that often features cult film icons such as Mary Woronov and John Waters. Peaches has also appeared in a number of films herself, but with All About Evil, Grannell makes his debut as a director.
He calls in some of that B-movie star power often seen onstage with him to co-star in the film, including John Waters mainstay Mink Stole and Cassandra Peterson (better known as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark). Beleaguered indie starlet Natasha Lyonne, who practically disappeared for much of the 00s with legal, health, and addiction issues, stars as a young woman who is a librarian by day, and runs her late father’s cult movie house by night — much to the consternation of her mother, who’d like to just sell the joint and get the cash, but can’t without her daughter’s consent. Lyonne’s character ditches her frumpy librarian persona when taken by a murderous rage that eventually leads her to become a cult filmmaking icon in her own right, in a film that pays tribute to the bloody 70s works of directors like Herschell Gordon Lewis with a few modern flourishes.
The movie closes out the AFI’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Showcase, and Peaches Christ/Joshua Grannell and Mink Stole are both scheduled to be at tomorrow’s one and only screening.
View the trailer.
Tomorrow night only, at 9:30 p.m. at the AFI.
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The stories in some documentaries are just as unknown to the filmmaker when they start rolling cameras as they are to the audience as the opening credits roll. New York-based documentarian Linda Hattendorf befriended an elderly Japanese-American street artist working on the sidewalks of her neighborhood in early 2001, only to take him into her own home once the aftermath of the September 11 attacks threatened his respiratory health. She discovered that the man, Jimmy Mirkitani, had been separated from his family while held in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, and sets out to help reunite him with lost relatives. The result is partly a biography of a remarkable and resilient character, as well as a look at the lasting legacy of one of the greatest injustices perpetrated by our government on its own citizens in the last century.
View the trailer.
Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery. Free.
