DCist’s highly subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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(IFC Midnight)Like great literature, great movies can be open to multiple, conflicting interpretations. They can also be the focus of people with a lot of time on their hands who cherry pick details that fit their existing world view and pet conspiracies. Rodney Ascher’s documentary offers up the theories of would-be-critics obsessed with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The Stephen King adaptation is discussed as a platform to address issues ranging from the Holocaust to the slaughter of Native Americans to the faking of the moon landing. The fact that any or maybe all of these ideas about Kubrick’s film (many of which you can find better presented online) may be completely unfounded is beside the point. The half-baked ideas of lunatics could be fascinating material if it were presented with just a modicum of flair. Goddammit, I could make a more interesting movie about Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants conspiracy theories and how when you run the movie backward and forward at the same time Amber Tamblyn looks like Hitler. The problem with Room 237 isn’t that the theories are bullshit. The problem is that the filmmaker takes obsession and makes it deathly dull. Clips from Kubrick’s other films and public domain titles are used in the most obvious, unsurprising juxtapositions, and the godawful original soundtrack sounds like the worst of 80s horror and seems to be used without irony. I love The Shining and was looking forward to Room 237, so I’m as disappointed as you are that it’s not worth the buzz. For a free look at some of the spatial issues with The Shining, as well as with the impossible Manhattan sets Kubrick built for Eyes Wide Shut, see this post on Scouting NY.
View the trailer.
Opens today at West End Cinema, which will be showing the movie on a double-bill with The Shining (on DVD).
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Harrison Ford and Chadwick Boseman (D. Stephens / Legendary Pictures Productions LLC)42: The Story of an American Legend
Howard University grad Chadwick Boseman plays the legendary Jackie Robinson with plenty of charisma and intensity in writer-director Brian Helgeland’s 42. This being a baseball biopic, you can expect cornball lines like “Dollars aren’t black and white. They’re green.” These are delivered by hammy Harrison Ford, who chews up the part of Branch Rickey, the general manager who signed Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Such folksy lines declare Rickey’s bold social experiment as a business decision, but naturally, he has a heart that’s more than just gold. Helgeland’s most acclaimed credit to date was the script for L.A. Confidential, and like that noir throwback, 42 is an efficient old-fashioned entertainment. It doesn’t hold any surprises, but it sets moviegoers on an occasionally inspiring ride with villains and heroes with baseball scenes set up like a finely-tuned action movie (read: unlike any action movie this year).
View the trailer.
Opens today at a multiplex near you.
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Midnight’s ChildrenThe 27th annual festival kicks off this weekend with more movies than I had time to preview. Some of the more promising titles on view this week include the bored youth drama Beijing Flickers (April 12 and 13 at the Avalon); Easy Money II (April 12 at AMC Mazza Gallerie), a sequel to last year’s excellent Swedish crime drama; In the House (April 12 at the Avalon; opens at E Street May 10), the latest comic thriller from director Francois Ozon; the Oscar-nominated adventure Kon-tiki (April 12 and 13 at Mazza Gallerie, probably a better venue than E Street, where it opens May 3); Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (April 13 at National Geographic, with Mehta and Rushdie in person; April 14 at E Street with no special guest both shows are SOLD OUT; opens commercially May 3); Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours (April 13 at the National Gallery) and the provocative Paradise trilogy (April 16-20 at E Street).
View trailers for Beijing Flickers, Easy Money II, Midnight’s Children, and Museum Hours
At area venues. Check the festival website for a full schedule.
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“They’re here” is one of the iconic lines of 1980s horror, all the creepier when spoken by a little girl — and creepier still when you know actress Heather O’Rourke died at a young age, which some say is due to a curse surrounding the movie. Poltergeist can be read as a cautionary tale of too much television, but as with many other haunted house movies its displacement and unease speaks to the anxiety of an ongoing housing crisis. The AFI is showing a 35mm print of Tobe Hooper’s (or Steven Spielberg’s depending whom you talk to) Poltergeist as part of Reel Estate: The American Home on Film.
View the trailer.
Saturday, April 13 and Thursday, April 18 at the AFI
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(Two Lanterns Media)The year is 2019. America has suffered a dire economic collapse where a $90 beer counts as happy hour. Would you see an animated movie about such a national tragedy? Washington area native Pasha Roberts caters his debut to three specific audiences: comic book fans, gold/silver investors, and “the libertarian-esque crowd.” He recruited heavy metal guitarist Jon Schaffer for music and an animated cameo. The buzz is not good. In a 1/2 star review, The Washington Post‘s Michael O’Sullivan compares the look to Taiwanese news animation, which in theory sounds awesome, but maybe not at ideological feature length.
View the trailer.
Opens today at Regal Ballston Common
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Also opening this week, new work from two cinematic stylists: Terrence Malick’s twirling melodrama of faith and intimacy, To the Wonder; and Danny Boyle’s art-world heist-cum-psychological thriller, Trance. We’ll have full reviews this afternoon.
