Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
—
Menahem Golan and Yoram GlobusElectric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films
Director Mark Hartley has made a cottage industry of exploring the varieties of exploitation cinema, surveying the pulp movies of Australia (Not Quite Hollywood) and the Philippines (Machete Maidens Unleashed!). (But stay away from his awful remake of the Ozploitation classic Patrick—read my Spectrum Culture review of that here). Hartley’s film is one of two recent ones to document the notorious schlockmeisters, director Menahem Golan (who passed away last year) and his cousin producer Yoram Globus. I haven’t had a chance to see Hartley’s film, but it’s probably even more entertaining than Hilla Medalia’s The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films, which played the Jewish Film Festival earlier this year. Don’t miss this special event tonight at E Street Landmark Cinema—they’re only showing it once.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, September 17 at 7 p.m. at E Street Landmark Cinema.
—
Ravi, Champa, Geeta and Vasant PatelA twenty-something son of Indian immigrants breaks up with his girlfriend and tests the waters of the traditional arranged marriage in this “real life rom-com” from the brother-sister directing team of Geeta and Ravi Patel. In my Spectrum Culture review, I wrote that the film “is a straightforward documentary about cultural differences and dating. But pulsing underneath it is a sibling rivalry that gives the film enough tension to make it more than just a fluff piece about modern relationships. [It’s not] just about dating. From the first frame, it’s about co-directors Geeta and Ravi Patel’s relationship as siblings … Ironically, since Ravi is Geeta’s subject, she’s the one who calls the shots. Geeta appears briefly in the film and, of course, had gone through the same dating issues, but this entertaining narrative of her brother’s struggles is a clever way of shifting attention from her own dating woes. It’s kind of a brilliant ploy to deflect family pressure by making a movie.” Read the rest of my Spectrum Culture review here.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row and Landmark West End, though Ravi Patel will appear at the West End for a Q&A after tonight’s 7 p.m. screening
—
Black Panthers from Sacramento at a Free Huey Rally at Bobby Hutton Memorial Park in Oakland, CA, USA, 1969. Photo courtesy of Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
Documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson assembles archival footage and contemporary interviews for this vivid history of the controversial movement, with supporters and detractors from within and without the organization. I haven’t had a chance to watch the whole film, but it’s got good buzz, and its huge cast of characters and timeline is rapidly edited into a montage that’s straightforward enough but still conveys the Panthers’ startling image, an image that one elder journalist admits manipulated the media as much as the media exploited them. But the film opens with the apt metaphor that the group was much like the tale of the blind man and the elephant; its members could only see the part of the organization that they were involved in.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
—
Gabino Rodríguez in LUCIFERThe 26th annual survey of films from Latin America (and Spain and Portugal, and a new Peter Greenaway joint for good measure), includes over 40 films from 20 countries. This weekend’s highlights include Lucifer (September 21 and 30), the final installment of director Gust Van den Bergh’s religious-themed trilogy. Filmed in Tondovision, a circular format that occasionally makes use of a fisheye lens, the film uses mostly non-actors to depict Lucifer’s hold over a Mexican village on his way to the underworld. It’s a bold visual concept, and its sole professional actor has a long Boschian face that suits his sinister role, but the director doesn’t get much out of his non-professional cast. Also screening is the comedy Cats Have No Vertigo (September 19 and 20), the winner of nine Portuguese Academy Awards, one for each life.
Watch trailers for Lucifer and Cats Have No Vertigo
September 17-October 7 at the AFI Silver. See a complete schedule of festival screenings here.
—
This weekend, the Freer launches a series on prolific Turkish filmmaker Ҫağan Irmak. This 2014 drama is about a pair of singing sisters. As the Freer describes it, “Hatice, an aspiring singer in a conservative small town, runs away to Istanbul in the 1970s, stealing from her sister Hanife both the dashing musician son of a local politician and Hanife’s poems, which Hatice transforms into hit songs. After forty years without contact, Hatice, now an aging diva showing early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, visits Hanife, who has become an embittered spinster, to make amends and ask for her help. While scenes set in the past revel in nostalgia for 1970s kitsch, the sisters’ late-in-life reunion is a touching story of sacrifice, forgiveness, and the endurance of family bonds. The director will appear in person at this weekend’s screenings.
Sunday, September 2 at 2 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
—
Director George Romero’s 1978 sequel to his groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead was a scathing consumerist critique about survivors of a zombie apocalypse who take shelter in a shopping mall. The Washington Psychotronic Film Society massages your consumerist needs but never lets you forget that you are all zombies. Read Ian Buckwalter’s 2010 DCist interview with director George Romero here.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, September 21 at 8 p.m. at Acre 121
—
Also opening this week, masters of disguise: Johnny Depp’s makeup stars as South Boston kingpin Whitey Bulger in Black Mass; and Romain Duris has a novel way of mourning his wife in director Francois Ozon’s The New Girlfriend. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
