Popcorn & Candy: Not to be Confused With…

Posted by Tom in DC Life on 07 30th, 2009 | no responses

DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Flesh Gordon We have fully forgiven E Street. When they started their midnight movie series, it was usually barely worth mentioning, concentrating way too much time on well-known (and often oddly family friendly) crowd-pleasers during a time slot that is supposed to be reserved for trashy cult picks that are enhanced by substance abuse and late night punchiness. But they’ve been coming around this year, with recurring Rocky Horror screenings, and titles more suited to the lateness of the hour, like The Warriors . The 180 degree turnaround is completed this weekend, as E Street screens a camp classic that in the more genteel days of 1974, could actually fairly be described as pornography. Everyone knows the story of Flash Gordon. Heroic, handsome, athletic Aryan-youth poster boy is kidnapped by a mad scientist and flown into space to fight in an intergalactic war against the evil Ming the Merciless, effectively ending his prospects back on Earth for the plutocrat’s life of comfort, for which his square jaw was destined. Flesh Gordon spoofs on all the conventions of the super-hero comic, throws in a lot of bare breasts and hefty doses of double entendre, and a rather unusual amount of stop-motion animation for an erotic film. For the trivia nuts, you can enjoy one of the earliest screen “appearances” by Craig T. Nelson, as the voice of the demonic monster awoken by Ming stand-in Emporer Wang the Perverted to do battle with our stalwart savior Flesh. Stupid hilarity and wildly unlikely sexual situations ensue. While it would be irresponsible of us to condone public drunkenness, you probably don’t want to see this stone-cold sober. Which, as noted above, is sort of the point of the midnight movie. View the (surprisingly, safe for work) trailer . Friday and Saturday night at midnight at E Street . Rated X, no one under 18 admitted. — Burma VJ As ubiquitous as video recording devices are in the U.S., with thousands of new clips of everyday life being uploaded for public consumption daily, it’s easy to forget just how revolutionary the idea of being able to freely record your surroundings can be. Technology also now allows the people to be the watchdogs of government and public servants, which seems to be increasingly necessary for some institutions determined to downplay their failings. Burma VJ takes footage shot under the most difficult of conditions in 2007 by members of the Democratic Voice of Burma during uprisings against the military junta currently in control of the country. These video journalists are risking more than just being yelled at by irate Metro operators caught talking on cell phones or sleeping on the job; if they get caught capturing images of the uprising, they risk imprisonment, torture, and worse. Which makes the film not just an important document of conditions within a rigorously closed society, but a vital reminder not to take our own freedoms for granted. View the trailer . Opens tomorrow at E Street , with Dr. Sein Win, President of the Burmese government in exile in attendance for tomorrow night’s 7:35 p.m. screening, along with Jeremy Woodrum of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, who will be in attendance both Friday and Saturday. — Vampyr America is now fully vampire-crazy, midway through another season of the popular True Blood series on HBO, and on the verge of the second filmed version of Stephanie Meyer’s sparkly Twilight vamps. Not to mention the repeated home viewings of Buffy and Angel re-runs happening in America’s geekiest households (this writer’s included) on

a daily basis. So whether by intention or not, the first entry in the National Gallery’s survey of the later sound works of Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer is quite timely. Vampyr was the silent film master’s first foray into sound film, and he doesn’t fully make the leap; much of the film is still silent, and he still uses intertitles to explain the story amid minimal recorded dialogue from his characters. Dreyer’s vampire tale confounded audiences and critics in the 1930s, who didn’t know what to make of the film’s surreal and dreamy atmosphere, which made even Murnau’s expressionistic Nosferatu seem like a grittily real vision in comparison. The story, of a young man who finds himself in a nightmarish village where he must save himself and two women from a local creature of the night, is really secondary to Dreyer’s mesmerizing imagery, which isn’t scary so much as it is deeply, subconsciously unsettling. View the first few minutes of the movie. Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery ’s East Building auditorium . The feature is preceded by Dreyer’s 1948 short, They Caught the Ferry . Free. — Funny People King of comedy Judd Apatow’s third directorial effort is a gut-bustingly hilarious film about a man dying of an incurable blood disease. OK, so maybe that’s not really the funny part. Funny People is still ostensibly a comedy, but like other films about stand-up comedians, tempers the laughs with a hefty dose of darkness. If movies like Punchline , Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling , and Mr. Saturday Night are to be believed, making people laugh for a living can be a pretty depressing business. Adam Sandler, edging his way back toward the serious waters he tested in his surprisingly beautiful performance in Punch Drunk Love , plays a famous stand-up who discovers he’s going to die within a year. His assistant and opening act, played by Seth Rogen, helps him deal with his impending demise. Despite less of a laugh-a-minute premise than Apatow’s previous outings, the usual elements of emotionally stunted, lonely men continues to be a strong theme. Whether in changing up his delivery Apatow can also write some stronger female characters into the mix — his wife, Leslie Mann, has a large role as Sandler’s former love interest — is the other big question mark, as well as whether audiences will go for heavy dramedy from a guy we’re used to going to for off-color humor and dick jokes. View the trailer . Opens tomorrow at theaters all over the area. — Lights, Camera, Bark! Stuck trying to find activities for the kids as summer wears on with no return to school in sight? The National Gallery has a film series just for kids, for an alternative to 3-D super-heroic guinea pigs . Featuring shorts for kids from around the world, each month the museum collects films on a different theme. For August, it’s dogs, and this month’s program, which screens four times between now and Aug. 12, collects three titles: the 6-minute U.S.-made Bark, George , about a puppy who needs to learn how to make the appropriate vocalizations, an 8-minute Canadian film, I Want a Dog , which will speak to anyone whose parents stubbornly refused them a puppy as children, and William Wegman’s creepily anthropomorphic weimeraners in the 30-minute Alphabet Soup . View the trailer for Alphabet Soup . Saturday and the next two Wednesdays at 10:30 a.m., and Sunday at 11:30 a.m. at the National Gallery ’s East Building auditorium . Free.