DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
What it is: When Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez made their grindhouse double feature tribute, Grindhouse, they ran a contest through the SXSW festival in which filmmakers could enter their own fake grindhouse-style trailers. The trailer judged to be the best would become part of the movie for certain Canadian screenings, as part of the fake trailers section that fell in between the two halves of the double feature. Director Jason Eisener managed to parlay that success into a feature version of the film, snagging Rutger Hauer for the lead role.
Why you want to see it: The two films that made up Grindhouse still bore the auteurial characteristics of Tarantino and Rodriguez, and, even with their forced rough edges, were far better films than most of the low-budget grade-Z trash they took as their inspiration. Hobo, on the other hand, feels like an authentic lost dispatch from around 1980, just as punk style was heading for the gutter and garish colors were coming into fashion. Eisener isn’t trying to riff on trash-cinema style: he’s trying to emulate it down to the minutest detail.
The result is an an orgiastic celebration of blood, sex, violence and more blood. Eisener and screenwriter John Davies place the titular indigent in the midst of a lawless city nearing the nadir of it’s urban decay, make him witness to unspeakable crimes against dignity and humanity, and then have him intersect with a pawn store shotgun at just the right time to start a vigilante justice campaign. Throw into the mix a comically evil crime syndicate, S&M clubs, a hooker with a heart of gold and more exploding heads and bloody entrails than you can throw a severed head at, then top it all off with an armor-clad cyborg-like pair of criminal enforcers known as “The Plague”, and you’ve got a film that, like the films it idolizes, thrives on its own excess. Don’t go looking for a self-aware commentary on violence in cinema or subtle re-examination of the genre; this is one that you watch for the same reason you’d have headed into a midnight screening in Times Square circa 1979 with a bottle of Night Train stuffed in your trenchcoat pocket: to have some stupid fun and see just how far the filmmakers can push you.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End. Friday’s 9:15 p.m screening will be followed by a Skype Q&A with director Jason Eisener and prize giveaways.
—
Washington Psychotronic Film Society Fundraiser Dance Party Celebration Anniversary Show
What it is: A benefit event for Washington Psychotronic Film Society, featuring dancing, auctions of rare movie posters and plenty of bizarre video stimulation.
Why you want to see it: While we’re on the subject of grindhouse cinema: WPFS is our favorite local purveyor of trashy movies and they’ve been at it for over 20 years. WPFS asks for minimal donations at their screenings, which doesn’t quite cover the cost of the umbrella license they get to show films every year. That’s where you come in. Throw $10 their way to hang out at The Passenger on Sunday evening, and you can enjoy the party and help make sure that they can keep showing up there every Tuesday night with a new and unusual lost cinema treasure for you to enjoy.
Sunday from 6-10 p.m. at The Passenger. $10.
—
What it is: A documentary about fashion industry giant Yves Saint Laurent, centering on interviews with his romantic and business partner Pierre Bergé, and on the 2009 auction of the massive art collection the two had pieced together over their years together.
Why you want to see it: Saint Laurent was famous for living life as large as his massive wealth would allow. Bergé, who was in a position to know more intimate details about Saint Laurent’s life than anyone else, provides most of the commentary on Saint Laurent’s character and temperament, a potential wealth of knowledge for those interested in who the designer was. Many critics tend to agree that even when he’s admitting to his partner’s flaws, he’s never quite as revealing or candid as Saint Laurent himself is during the retirement speech that opens the film, though. Still, director Pierre Thoretton’s method, using the auction of their art and as the entry point into their lives, is a potentially fascinating way of framing a biography, through an inventory of the items collected during a life.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
—
What it is: An 84-year-old Kenyan man goes to school for the first time in his life, finally seeking the education that poverty and war prevented him from having.
Why you want to see it: Kimani Maruge made headlines in 2003 when the Kenyan government announced that elementary education was now universally free to all Kenyans, and he enrolled. Marunge had been a freedom fighter during the mid-century revolt against British rule in Kenya, and director Justin Chadwick flashes back to that conflict and Marunge’s role in it frequently, concentrating attention not just on Marunge’s modern struggle to be free to finally learn to read, but his country’s struggle to be free from colonial rule.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Bethesda Row.
—
What it is: A 1972 documentary about the New York art scene of the late 1960s.
Why you want to see it: Director Emile de Antononio’s film goes directly to the artists themselves to examine the art world of the day, visiting some of the most prominent figures in abstract expressionism, pop art and minimalism in their studios. Interviewees include Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhold and Robert Rauschenberg, and the film also includes footage from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York Painting and Sculpture 1940-1970 exhibition. The film has only recently become available after many years out of circulation.
View the trailer.
Saturday and Sunday at 12:30 p.m. at the National Gallery. Free.
—
What it is: An Israeli dramatic comedy about twin brothers who both fall for the same girl; the triangle is further complicated when one brother, Erez, joins the Israeli commandos, which was the other brother, Ofer’s, dream. While Erez is off living his brother’s dream, Ofer is left at home to realize the dream of being with the girl they both love.
Why you want to see it: Director Reshef Levy’s film won 14 nominations at the Ophir Awards, Israel’s equivalent to the Oscars, garnering nods in pretty much every major category and winning four, including a best actor award for Michael Moshonov, the actor who plays Erez, the brother that the movie is primarily focused on. The Avalon presents this as part of their ongoing monthly Reel Israel DC series.
View the trailer.
Wednesday at 8 p.m. at The Avalon.
—
Also opening tomorrow: Meek’s Cutoff, director Kelly Reichart’s engrossing look at three families headed for the west coast in a wagon train and getting hopelessly lost in the desolate interior of Oregon; and the Best Foreign Film Oscar-nominated Incendies, Denis Villeneuve’s gut-wrenching film about a Canadian brother and sister trying to unravel the mystery of their origins and their mother’s secret past in Iran. We’ll have full-length reviews of both tomorrow.
—
And finally, one administrative note. After nearly four years writing this column, today’s edition is my last turn behind the wheel of Popcorn & Candy. This isn’t a farewell, as I’ll continue contributing individual film reviews every Friday, but as of next week, I’ll be starting up a weekly film picks series over at Washingtonian.
I’ll need to hand these keys over to someone after I’m done, so DCist is looking for someone to pick this column up going forward. Do you have an obsessive love of film? Do you pore over the screening schedules around town from the multiplexes to the museums every week? Do your tastes run the gamut from the classy to the trashy? Then this could be the gig for you. If you’re interested in writing about film for DCist, contact Editor-in-Chief Aaron Morrissey.
