Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Fugazi (Jim Saah photography)Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC.
Director Scott Crawford’s excellent documentary about Dischord Records and other D.C. punk milestones (but mostly Dischord) sold out four shows at the AFI in December. This time the Silver is running it for a full week. Like most such documentaries, fans may quibble about what was included and what was left out—in one instance, you hear the intro to No Trend’s “Teen Love” at a key moment, but nobody mentions them. Still, even if you think Henry Rollins has, like Bono, become a predictable fixture in music documentaries, here he comes across less like a prestigious talking head and more like a guy reminiscing about what D.C. used to be like. And that’s what makes the movie fascinating even if you didn’t grow up buying the Dischord catalog: the film is full of photos of D.C. before the prospectors descended upon us, at a time when downtown was a little dangerous and a lot more interesting.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the AFI Silver for one week only. Q&As with filmmakers Scott Crawford and Jim Saah at these shows: Friday, June at 7:15 pm, Saturday, June 6 at 2:30 and 7:15pm.
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The Our City Film Festival takes over the Goethe Institut this weekend with programs featuring homegrown documentaries about the real Washington, including Positive Force (June 6 at 2:00 pm), a more detailed look at a movement seen in Salad Days. But the festival’s real coup may be director Betsy Cox’s feature-length look at a part of the city that is seldom seen in historical footage. Cox contacted British filmmaker Peter Forbes, who worked on a documentary about D.C. that was never made—and left behind 60 hours of footage that languished in a Portuguese basement. Southeast 67 documents a program that promised to send 67 Anacostia seventh-graders to college, and combined 20-year-old footage with present-day interviews of the students and coordinators involved in the program. Read Clinton Yates’ Washington Post article about the film here. The feature will be screened with director Nasreen Alkhateeb’s documentary short, “Midtown Youth Academy,” about boxing hero/ex-con Eugene “Thunder” Hughes and his work with inner city youth.
Saturday, June 6 at 4:10 pm at the Goethe Institut. $10. Buy tickets here.
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Jean Dujardin (Drafthouse)Director Cédric Jimenez looks at the true story of The French Connection from the other side of the pond in this ’70s crime thriller whose native title is simply La French. The generic title suits this perfectly competent, perfectly ordinary genre picture. The Artist‘s Jean Dujardin stars as Marseilles magistrate Pierre Michel, hot in pursuit of of heroin kingpin Gatean “Tany” Zampa (Gilles Lellouche). Dujardin’s central performance makes the film watchable, but Lellouche is an unmemorable villain. If you’ve seen another drug war movie, you’ve probably seen a better one. Jimenez’s visuals and period detail are unexciting, and if the plot eventually elicits some sympathy for Michel, it’s thanks to Dujardin. The Connection never rises above the level of journeyman procedural, its 135 minute running time only managing a little bump at the end of a flat ride.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Angelo Jannotti, Kathee Collier, Y.K. Kim, and Vincent Hirsch. (Drafthouse)For a completely different and much more entertaining connection, see this Drafthouse midnight favorite at E Street this weekend. As I wrote in 2012, before I ever saw the movie, “Film archivists dream of unearthing the lost reels of Greed or the director’s cut of The Magnificent Ambersons. But a few years ago, Drafthouse Films archivist and programmer Zack Carlson discovered a less prestigious but equally lost film. Carlson paid $50 on eBay for a 35mm print of an unreleased film, and is now celebrating its earnest, low-budget virtues in a midnight tour. Tae Kwon Do instructor W.K. Kim made the film and cast himself as as a martial arts rock star who takes music and justice to the streets of a 1980s Miami overrun by motorcycle ninjas. Carlson takes pains to point out that he champions the film not out of irony, but of a genuine appreciation for the movie, whose director/producer mortgaged his house to get it made before letting it languish in obscurity. Movies like this and The Room —and the majority of what the Washington Psychotronic Film Society programs—are routinely dismissed as so bad they’re good, but Carlson defends the pure entertainment value of such movies, much as I defend The Room for Tommy Wiseau’s singular, strange vision. I have since seen the movie multiple times, and I guarantee you’ll enjoy this more than the French version opening this week.
View the trailer.
Friday and Saturday at Midnight at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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The Freer’s annual Korean film festival continues this weekend with a film by Snowpiercer director Bong Joon-ho. Adapted from a play based on a true story, this drama follows a fishing boat transporting illegal Chinese immigrants. The Freer writes that, “the title, which translates to sea fog,’ refers to a nautical phenomenon that can trap ships at sea; here, it serves as a metaphor for the moral fog in which its characters find themselves.” Hollywood Reporter critic Clarence Tsui calls Haemoo “a gripping ride … with powerful imagery, a simple and accessible story and a stellar performance from Kim Yoon-seok (the star of The Yellow Sea and The Thieves, no less) as a captain slowly spiraling towards madness.”
Watch the trailer.
Friday, June 5 at 7:00 pm at the Freer. Free.
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Also opening this week, mumblecore auteur Andrew Bujalski hits the gym in the comedy-drama Results; and John Cusack and Paul Dano take turns portraying Beach Boy Brian Wilson in the biopic Love and Mercy. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
