DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Geoffrey Wigdor and Nick Thurston are White Irish Drinkers. Photo by Alan Tannenbaum.What is it: A tale of working-class Brooklyn circa 1975.
Why you want to see it: The words, “from the creator of The Ghost Whisperer” send this movie columnist into a cold sweat, but as long as Jennifer Love Hewitt doesn’t show up cooing to her carrier-pigeons with a fake brogue, I will try to reserve judgement. Writer-director John Gray cut his teeth making 8mm films in his Brooklyn neighborhood, to which he pays homage with this story of coming of age among alcoholics, mobsters, and The Rolling Stones. Does this melodramatic return to the borough of his birth mean a return to low-budget roots? Or has he never really recovered from that Jennifer Love Hewitt dream sequence with a white tiger?
What to expect: Highly coached Brooklyn accents.
What not to expect: Vajazzle.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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Dick Dyszel as Mayor Wicker in The Alien Factor.What it is: The 1978 debut of Baltimore’s B-movie monster maestro, Don Dohler.
Why you want to see it: The name Don Dohler may be unfamiliar to all but the most die-hard cognoscenti of Psychotronic Film. But anybody who grew up in Washington watching such movies on Channel 20 knows Dick Dysel, a.k.a. Count Gore De Vol / Captain 20. Dysel co-stars in The Alien Factor as Mayor Wicker, who presides over a town whose residents are checking off the “Mutilated” box on their census forms at an alarming rate. The Actor Formerly Known as Count Gore de Vol will appear at next week’s Washington Psychotronic Film Society screening to answer questions.
What to expect: Blood, monsters, and laffs.
What not to expect: CGI.
View a fan-made trailer.
Tuesday at 7 at The Passenger. Suggested donation $2.
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Lee “Scratch” PerryWhat it is: The AFI celebrates Carribbean Heritage Month with screenings from the 11th annual DC Carribean Festival.
Why you want to see it: Music, revolution and the joys and sorrows of life on the islands is on view in this selection of documentary films and one mythopoetic feature. The devastation of Haiti and the resilience of her people is studied in Lift Up, which follows two Haitian brothers who call Maryland home, but returned to face a homeland all but unrecognizable after the quake. (Sunday, June 5 at 5:30. In person: co-directors Huguens Jean and Philip Knowlton.) Music documentaries include Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae (Friday, June 3 at 9:30), which looks at the short-lived but influential genre that bridged ska and reggae; and The Upsetter (Saturday, June 4 at 9:30), a profile of legendary producer Lee “Scratch” Perry. The Black Power revolution in Trinidad and Tobago is vividly documented in ’70: Remembering a Revolution. (Friday, June 3 at 7:00). A 1987 film lensed by frequent Spike Lee collaborator Ernest Dickerson brings the folklore of Curacao to life in Almacita, Soul of Desolato (Monday, June 6 at 7:00).
What to expect: Windows into the rich culture and history of the Carribean diaspora.
What not to expect: Your horizons to narrow.
June 3-6 at the AFI Silver.
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What it is: A mid-career hit from the late Eric Rohmer.
Why you want to see it: A teenage girl (Amanda Langlet) spends summer vacation with an divorced female cousin (Arielle Dombasle). The American posters for Pauline at the Beach prominently featured the derriere of a blonde beachgoer in the foreground. To 1983 audiences, this may have promised the kind of low-brow and scantily clad hijinks of that year’s Spring Break — in French! But this tale of sexual awakening is told through Rohmer’s keen observational eye — as well as through the lens of virtuoso cinematographer Nestor Almenedros, who gives Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven, the last film the director made before his long hiatus, its unforgettable look.
What to expect: French mores, circa 1983.
What not to expect: Keg parties.
View the trailer.
Sunday, June 5 at 3:15; Tuesday, June 7 at 8:45; Thursday, June 9 at 7:00; all at the AFI Silver.
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Actresses [여배우들]
What it is: Director E J-Yong’s backstage look at six of South Korea’s most popular female stars.
Why you want to see it: The featured actresses played themselves and worked without a script in this semi-fictionalized look at a high-profile and high-pressure Vogue shoot. Does it reveal the true inner workings of a punishing showbiz industry, or is the back-stabbing environment staged? An American remake is inevitable. Place your bets now on who will star — besides Cher.
What to expect: A blurred line between reality fiction and reality.
What not to expect: Big game hunting.
View the trailer.
Sunday June 5 at 5:15; Wednesday, June 8 at 7:00 at the AFI Silver.
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What it is: Growing up in the 1970s — Czech style.
Why you want to see it: The Avalon Theatre continues its occasional Lions of Czech Cinema series this week with what may as well be a companion piece to last week’s Greek film Peppermint. Teenagers in any country ask universal questions like “who am I?,” “what will I do with my life?,” and my favorite, “why is my body changing?” But the trials of adolescence take on a socio-political angle in a country where turning 15 means a compulsory identity card — and turning 18 means compulsory military service.
What to expect: To identify with teenage troubles, even if you grew up on this side of the Iron Curtain.
What not to expect: Porky’s.
View the trailer.
Wednesday, June 8 at 8:00 at The Avalon.
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In Praise of Independents: The Flaherty
What it is: The National Gallery’s salute to the Flaherty Seminar, an annual forum for independent filmmakers that focuses on experimental and documentary work.
Why you want to see it: The theme of this year’s Flaherty is “work,” and how it shapes, enriches and frustrates us. This two-part program includes a selection of short films that observe how the experience of work transcends nationality, with contributions from Ukraine, Ghana, Thailand, Sweden and Mexico. In the 2001 feature La Libertad, Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso’s study of a migrant woodcutter lifts the tedium and loneliness of manual labor to the level of blistered, backbreaking allegory.
What to expect: Real independent cinema, minus the PBR.
What not to expect: Mumblecore.
Saturday, June 4 at 2:00 at the National Gallery. Free.
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What it is: The harrowing story of one Appalachian town’s life and death struggle with Big Coal.
Why you want to see it: Barbara Kopple’s classic 1976 film Harlan County USA documented a bitter coal miners’ strike. But did the coal industry ever learn from its mistakes? Almost forty years later, residents of Coal River Valley, West Virginia are faced with a ravaged natural landscape and criminally dire health issues. Director Bill Haney interviews those at the front lines of this latest battle, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
What to expect: To leave angry.
What not to expect: Corporations to be bothered by little things like cancer.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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Janine AntoniWhat it is: A documentary pieced together from hundreds of hours of interviews that director Lynn Hershman Leeson’s conducted with the leading lights of the Feminist Art Movement over the last forty years.
Why you want to see it: In 2006, a survey of Whitney Museum visitors found that most could not name three female artists. One wonders if that would happen at the Hirshhorn, who in recent years has featured major surveys of Anne Truit, Louise Bourgeois and Ana Mendieta. !Women Art Revolution traces the relationship of the Feminist Art Movement to the 1960s civil rights and anti-war movements, both of which were predominantly male. The emergence of alternative venues and major exibitions of women’s art in the 1970s is discussed by the artists who were there, like Janine Antoni (whose Lick and Lather — self-portraits made of, respectively, chocolate and soap — is in the Hirshhorn’s collection); Nancy Spero, founding member of the landmark A.I.R. Gallery in New York; and contemporary artists who have followed in their footsteps, like Miranda July. Carrie Brownstein composed the film’s original score, and music from her former bandmates Sleater-Kinney, as well as Laurie Anderson and Janis Joplin, can be heard on the soundtrack.
What to expect: A fascinating and provocative look at gender, sexuality and art.
What not to expect: The revolution to be over.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the West End Cinema.
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What it is: A festival of short films from around the globe.
Why you want to see it: Young couples, cantankerous elders, a planet where women are macho and men weak, and a clown that can’t make people laugh are just some of the subjects on tap in this sprawling survey. “Five nights. Nine countries. One Theme” — the last being Men and Women — is the focus here. How that relates to Cuore di Clown (Clown Heart), (Tuesday, June 7th at the Japan Center on 18th Street) is anyone’s guess, but it will only take 14 minutes of your time to find out.
What to expect: Where clown hearts beat, clown tears surely fall.What not to expect: God willing, Jennifer Love Hewitt.
At venues around town. For locations and detailed program information, visit the festival website.
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Also opening this week: The Tree of Life, Terence Malick’s career-summarizing, cosmos-questioning, often-impenetrable look at the enormity of the entire universe via the intimate snapshot of one 1950s Texas family led by Brad Pitt. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
