DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Ha-kyun Shin The Korean Film Festival continues this week with screenings of Stoker director Park Chan-wook’s uneven vampire movie Thirst (March 17 and 19 at the AFI) and Im Sang-soo’s stylish but empty A Taste of Money (March 20 and 21 at Angelika Mosaic). They’re also screening what may be the best movie playing in town all week. In Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), the first film in Park’s acclaimed vengeance trilogy, a deaf mute factory worker (Ha-kyun Shin) saves money for his sister’s kidney transplant and becomes involved in a complex and tragic cycle of revenge. Park’s visual style is accompanied by magnificent sound design, and this style with substance is one reason his American debut Stoker is so highly anticipated (I’ll review it tomorrow). The Freer will also screen the third film in the series, Lady Vengeance, this weekend. I’m sorry I didn’t get to plug last week’s screenings of the Twilight-ish A Werewolf Boy at the Angelika, but the movie’s coming to the AFI in April, so stay tuned.
View the trailer for Symapthy for Mr. Vengeance.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance screens Friday, March 15 at 7:00 pm. Lady Vengeance screens Sunday, March 17 at 2:00 pm. At the Freer. Free. See a complete list of Korean Film Festival screenings here.
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Kiki’s Delivery ServiceThe E Street Landmark converted to all-digital projection last fall but held on to one of their 35mm projectors just in case. Anime fans will be happy to know that just in case is now. All titles in E Street’s Studio Ghibli/Hayao Miyazaki series will be projected from 35mm prints in Japanese with subtitles. This weekend’s features are Kiki‘s Delivery Service (1989) and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984).
View the trailers for Kiki’s Delivery Service and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Kiki’s Delivery Service screens March 16 and 17 at 10:30 am. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind screens March 16 and 17 at 1:00 pm. At E Street Landmark Cinema. $8.50
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Chase Williamson and Paul Giamatti (Magnet Releasing)Bubba Ho-tep director Don Coscarelli adapted David Wong’s horror comedy fantasy novel with ‘tude about a mind-altering drug called Soy Sauce populated with actors with ATTITUDE MAN. Almost every line reading by Rob Mayes (John) and Chase Williamson (David) drips with sarcastic contempt for humanity and almost make me long to see 21 and Over again. The attitude overwhelms and suffocates any semblance of recognizable human behavior, which is too bad for actors like Paul Giamatti and Glynn Turman, who’s a long way from what should have been a career-making performance in Cooley High.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Gregory Crewdson, “Untitled (Ophelia),” from the Twilight Series (Zeitgeist Films)Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
This year’s Environmental Film Festival features a pair of documentaries about photographers. Genesis: Photographs by Sebastiao Salgado (March 17 at the Carnegie Institute) looks at the Brazilian photographer’s work in a lost, almost Edenic natural world. But Gregory Crewdson, the subject of the program’s other photography doc, works in an impoverished landscape that is man made. Crewdson declines to lay out an agenda for his photos, but writer Rick Moody points out the political element of a body of work that depicts a struggling America. But when the budget for a single one of Crewdson’s images runs to six figures, I smell something rotten. Crewdson works with a cast and crew and elaborate lighting that could feed an independent film. He has his own Director of Photography and Production Designer, and creates storyboards for his images. The idea of photography at that level of collaboration seems foreign outside the advertising and fashion world, and the resulting images are technically perfect, but perhaps too much so. That any artist can afford the privilege to micromanage the environment in which he shoots (in studio or on location) seems antithetical to many people’s ideas of photography. But the process is intriguing, and sometimes inadvertently funny. In the on location photo shoots Ben Shapiro’s film follows, Crewdson inevitably sends out a pickup truck with a fog machine. A young Crewdson made a brief musical splash in 1979 with his band The Speedies, who had a minor new wave hit with a song ironically written before he’d taken up the camera: “Let Me Take Your Photo.” It’s too bad the fog machine is the only thing rock and roll about his recent work.
View the trailer.
Sunday, March 17 at 4:30 pm at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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The Sistine Chapel of cinema (Millenium Entertainment)Adam (Jim Sturgess) is separated from Eden (Kirsten Dunst), the woman he has loved since they were teens—or if their names are any indication, since the dawn of time. But the laws of man and of nature conspire against them, as the doomed lovers live on twinned planets with opposite gravitational pulls that have turned their world into the movie’s title. Upside Down appears to require a lot of suspension of disbelief, and the buzz is not good. Director Juan Solanas hails from Argentina, home of the new pope and a cinema that, aside from the films of the Tom Jones-ish Sandro, I often find insufferably precious. But it may still be better than Jim Sturgess’s last major picture, Cloud Atlas. In an epic pan, Slant critic Calum Marsh said of the latter, “The problem isn’t that this is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen in my life; the problem is that it’s seven of the worst films I’ve ever seen in my life …” At its worst, Upside Down is just one movie.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Also opening this week, young women in crisis: The Exorcist meets the Romanian new wave in Cristian Mingu’s Beyond the Hills; and Park Chan-wook’s gothic thriller Stoker. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
