DCist’s highly subjective, entirely uncomprehensive guide to the most ungentrified, megalomaniacal, eco-disasterrific movies playing in town in the coming week.
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What it is: Come for the D.C. locations, stay for the gentle media satire.
Why you want to see it: The AFI Silver Theatre’s Shirley MacLaine series gives Washingtonians a glimpse at the city circa 1979 in Hal Ashby’s adaptation of the novella by Jerzy Kosinski, who wrote the script. Peter Sellers, in one of his final roles (we’ll try not to count the Fu Manchu picture with Helen Mirren), plays Chance, a simple-minded gardener left to fend for his own when his wealthy boss dies. The naif’s entire experience of life is expressed in terms of television and gardening, and his plain words are taken as political metaphor and voyeurism. Estate scenes were shot in North Carolina, but Chance walks out of a home on 937 M Street NW, and walks streets that have changed a lot in thirty years, including the median of North Capitol Street and the corner of 14th and Rhode Island NW.
View the Raphael scenes.
Friday to Sunday, Thursday at the AFI Silver Theatre.
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George C. Scott.What it is: The biopic of an oversized personality who happened to be a General.
Why you want to see it: George C. Scott’s recital of General George S. Patton’s iconic speech to the Third Army helped win him the Best Actor Oscar for this three-hour epic, but the flag hung behind him is hung like a movie screen. Patton is not just a flag-waving spectacle but is about the idea of America and military theater as big-screen entertainment. Why can’t we have actors like Scott anymore? Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay, and look for footage shot by Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! director Russ Meyer during his stint as a combat photographer. The AFI will be a showing a 70mm print.
View the trailer.
Sunday and Monday at the AFI Silver Theatre.
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Little Otik (Jan Švankmajer, Otesanek, 2000, 35 mm, Czech with subtitles, 132 minutes) Image courtesy of Athanor StudioWhat it is: A survey of the master animator whose work inspired Tim Burton and kicks his uncombed little ass.
Why you want to see it: The Museum of Modern Art hosted a blockbuster Tim Burton show in 2009, but if you ask me, it was Jan Švankmajer who deserved that treatment. Then again, with the possible exception of Damien Hirst’s formaldehyded tiger shark, standards of museum preservation are perhaps not ready to keep raw meat on display. Meat is just one of the media used in Švankmajer’s inventive short animations, whose stop-motion synthesis of distressed objects and pop surrealism has influenced Burton, Terry Gilliam, and the Brothers Quay, among others. The National Gallery’s representative program begins this weekend with a selection of his early short films on Saturday, as well as the feature Little Otik on Sunday. Keep an eye out for his quintessential Lewis Carroll adaptation Alice (June 2), and more of those amazing shorts.
View “Meat Love.”
Švankmajer: Shorts screens Saturday at 1 p.m.; Little Otik screens Sunday at 4:30 p.m.. At the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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From left: Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Nathan Phillips, Jonathan Sadowski, Dimitri Diatchenko, Devin Kelley, Olivia Taylor Dudley, and Jesse McCartney. (Warner Bros. Pictures)What it is: Extreme tourism as horror movie.
Why you want to see it: A group of annoying young people, led by boy bander and All My Children star Jesse McCartney, visit the Russian town abandoned in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Pripyat, the former home to the Chernobyl workers, has recently opened up to intrepid tourists, and parts of the movie were filmed on location, though one presumes other European locations with fewer liability issues stand in for more treacherous areas. Chernobyl Diaries is the first feature directed by visual effects specialist Bradley Parker. It’s produced by Oren Peli, writer/director of Paranormal Activity, and such lineage makes one wonder if this isn’t just a feature length version of immersive ghost-hunting shows like Ghost Adventures. The press screening is too late for me to file a review, and that could be a bad sign. But the premise is intriguing, and a magnet for anybody, like me, who isn’t tired of ruin porn.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at your local multiplex.
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Yaphet KottoWhat it is: Schlockmeister Larry Cohen’s social satire-cum-home invasion thriller.
Why you want to see it: A wealthy Beverly Hills couple (Joyce Van Patten and Andrew Duggan) are met with a mysterious but helpful stranger (Homicide’s Yaphet Kotto). But nobody is what they appear to be: stranger becomes villain and bourgeois comfort becomes a living hell. Bone, aka Housewife, was the first feature film directed by Psychotronic favorite Larry Cohen, and as in later films like The Stuff he tempers horror with social commentary. But that doesn’t mean it’s enlightened: in the unfortunate tradition of arthouse home invasions like Straw Dogs, the housewife falls for her rapist. With a blistering jazz soundtrack by Gil Melle, who played baritone saxophone on a series of classic Blue Note records before going on to compose dozens of film and TV scores (The Six-million Dollar Man) performed on electronic instruments he built himself.
View the trailer.
Monday, May 28 at 8 p.m. at McFadden’s. Free, suggested donation $5.
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Also opening this week, two very different answers to the question, “Do you know where your children are?” Polisse, a powerful look at the Child Protection Bureau of the Paris police; and I Wish, Japanese director Kore-eda’s wistful look at life in the shadow of a volcano. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.