DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
In 2002, Pat Tillman made headlines when he turned down millions of dollars to continue as a highly regarded NFL linebacker in order to enlist in the Army. Two years later, he was killed in Afghanistan. What followed was perhaps the most shocking, crass, and disrespectful display of U.S. government-sponsored propagandizing to occur in recent memory. Despite knowing nearly right off the bat that Tillman was killed by friendly fire — by at best recklessness and at worst intent (the inconclusive facts of the investigation remain in dispute) — the Army declared his death the result of enemy fire and arranged for posthumous medals and a full military memorial, despite Tillman’s family’s insistence that it’s not what he would have wanted. And that was before they discovered that the Army’s whole story was a lie.
Two books have since been released exploring who Tillman was, and investigating what really happened: one by his mother, and the other by Into the Wild auther Jon Krakauer. Amir Bar-Lev’s new documentary continues to shine a light on the whole sordid affair, using interviews with Tillman’s family to examine the character of a professional athlete who defied stereotype and the swirling mess of official documents, memos, and investigations to paint the picture of what really happened. It might never be known precisely what happened in the Afghan valley where Tillman was shot three times in the head by a fellow soldier, but the film aims to at least sort out what happened in the days, weeks, and months that followed in an angry indictment of the Army’s conduct.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Cinema.
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The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg
As the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition of the photographs of Allen Ginsberg draws to a close, the museum is also screening a documentary made as the poet’s life was doing the same. Jerry Aronson’s biographical documentary on Ginsberg seeks to be all-encompassing, looking at the Beat legend’s life via interviews with friends and admirers, from his youth through the time that the film was made, a few years before Ginsberg’s eventual death in 1997. In the intervening years, Aronson has revisited the project, adding new interviews and updating the film to reflect his death as well.
View the trailer.
Friday at 1 p.m. and Monday at 1 and 3:30 p.m. Director Jerry Aronson will introduce the Monday screenings. Free.
