Capital Projections: Why is my body changing in New Jersey edition
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting arthouse and repertory screenings in the coming week.
BLINDED BY THE LIGHT
The unifying power of pop music fuels this corny but endearing feel-good movie set amid the racial tensions of 1980s England. Javed (Viveik Kalra) is a Pakistani teen on his first day at a new school in Luton, a depressed factory town north of London. On top of the standard adolescent angst, he has to dodge neighborhood thugs who want people like him to “go home.” He fights a different battle with his emotionally distant father (Kulvinder Ghir), who pushes Javed to study economics and can’t understand why he wants to be a writer instead. What kind of music might speak to such an alienated young immigrant? The answer, surprisingly, is the working-class rock ’n’ roll of Bruce Springsteen, wildly out of fashion with big-haired classmates in thrall to synth-pop.
Adapting the memoir Greetings From Bury Park by British journalist Sarfraz Manzoor, director Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham) sets this coming-of-age story in 1987, but the era’s divisiveness, with increasing violence from the National Front, seems all too relevant today. Javed and his charmingly naive friends respond to hate not with violence, but with Springsteen lyrics, disarming young thugs with song. That might not seem like the most effective strategy in a heated cultural climate, but when a group of teens run down the streets of Luton to the swelling, anthem “Born to Run,” it’s hard not to smile at their goofy earnestness. You don’t have to love The Boss (I don’t especially) to enjoy Blinded by the Light, but if you still believe that music can bring the world together, you just might get swept up by its enthusiasm.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Aug. 16, at area theaters.
THE ANGRY BIRDS MOVIE 2
If the music of New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen can resonate with a Pakistani immigrant, can people from different backgrounds put aside animosities to fight a common enemy? This unexpectedly entertaining sequel tells us that animal species can. Based on the popular smartphone gaming app, this follow-up to a less-inspired 2016 film returns to Bird Island, where hot-tempered Red (voiced by Jason Sudeikis) saved his friends from green pigs that threatened to steal their eggs and eat their young. This time around, the pig’s leader (Bill Hader) is looking for a truce, as his friends are under attack from Zeta (Leslie Jones), a purple bird of prey who has launched weaponized ice balls at Pig Island and has her eyes set on Red and his friends.
The concept may not conducive to great cinema, but as I wrote in my Washington Post review, The Angry Birds Movie 2 has a lot more going for it than did its predecessor: “From its distinctive character design to its ambitious world-building, what might otherwise have been only a mildly diverting product tie-in is proof that video-game movies — just like video games — require a certain level of invention and novelty to keep players (and audiences) interested.“ That invention comes from director Thurop Van Orman, who worked on the Cartoon Network shows Adventure Time and The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack and who invests this film with something of the manic energy he gave to those beloved programs.
Watch the trailer.
Now playing in area theaters.
LINE WALKER 2: INVISIBLE SPY
Set in a world of terrorism and child trafficking, this Hong Kong crime drama is the sequel to a 2016 box-office smash, but you don’t need to be familiar with the original film to get caught in its web. The central figures are Tsai (Louis Koo) and Dee (Nick Cheung), boyhood friends who met at a Rubik’s Cube competition in a rural area of the Philippines in 1987. But the whiz kids were separated when Tsai was abducted by an international crime ring that trained its young victims to become guerilla agents — and infiltrate law enforcement. Now grown men, both Tsai and Dee are on a Hong Kong police force tasked with breaking apart the decades-old syndicate that captured one of them. Can the old chums still trust each other?
Director Jazz Boon and screenwriter Cat Kwan, who both worked on the first Line Walker, seem to pack too many characters and too much plot into this complex thriller. But well-choreographed action sequences keep things moving through elaborate twists and delightfully absurd plot devices. For instance, Tsai sends Morse code messages through a Rubik’s Cube, and it’s not just jet-setting intrigue that places a climactic scene at the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Line Walker 2: Invisible Spy may require more than the usual suspension of disbelief, but the breathtaking stunt work will keep viewers too busy to notice.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Aug. 16, at AMC Rio Cinema.
FULL CONTACT
When the Freer and Sackler galleries began their Made in Hong Kong Film Festival in the 1990s, the schedule usually included an action movie from director Ringo Lam. Along with director John Woo, Lam helped jump-start Hong Kong cinema’s 1980s renaissance of brutal gangster movies, many of which featured the charismatic actor Chow Yun-Fat. Lam died last year, so for the Freer’s 24th iteration of the popular series, they’re screening a 35-mm print of this 1992 crime drama that was an early career highlight for the director and his star. As sympathetic as he is tough, Chow stars as Jeff, a small-time criminal who talks to a rescue dog as easily as he guns down his enemies. After his friend Sam (Anthony Wong) runs afoul of a loan shark, the buddies team up with Sam’s sadistic cousin Judge (Simon Yam) to pull off a heist. When the plan goes bad, a frightened Sam runs away from a shootout, leaving Jeff for dead. But Jeff survives the carnage, and will have his revenge.
Full Contact lacks some of the poetry of Woo’s stylized gunfights, but to borrow a metaphor from a Saturday Night Live skit, Lam adds more cowbell — literally, on a bombastic rock soundtrack, and figuratively, with daring visuals like a camera shot that follows the trajectory of a speeding bullet. The film’s leads were all prolific contributors to a vital and violent new wave. Yam is perfect as a sleazy villain, and Wong is particularly effective playing against type; he’s usually the sadistic heavy, but here he’s more like a weak, back-stabbing Fredo. Yet it’s Chow who owns the movie, his boyish charm and moral steadiness sorely tested by the indignities around him, culminating in his classic kiss-off, “Go masturbate in HELL!”
Watch the trailer.
Friday, Aug. 16, at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL
William Castle knew how to play an audience. This 1959 horror classic, which he produced and directed, opens with a moment of apparent calm — but after a title card appears, the screen goes black, and out of the darkness a woman lets out a blood-curdling scream! It’s an effective setup for a tried-and-true haunted house concept: Millionaire Frederick Loren (Vincent Price) has invited five people (including character actor Elisha Cook Jr., whose big eyes make him look permanently spooked) to be locked up in his dark mansion overnight; if they survive the ordeal, they each get $10,000. Upon its original theatrical release, Castle, a master showman, introduced a gimmick he called emergo, which involved a pulley system that sent a glow-in-the-dark plastic skeleton flying through the audience. The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center will not be rigged for such extra terror, but television host Count Gore De Vol (Dick Dyszel) will be on hand to present the film, screening in a 35-mm print.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, Aug. 17, at 7:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
PLAY IT AS IT LAYS
California means rattlesnakes, pistols and nervous breakdowns in this rarely screened 1972 drama adapted from the Joan Didion novel by director Frank Perry, whose most notorious credit may be the campy Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest. Tuesday Weld stars as Maria, a former model-actress who’s struggling with mental illness. Her best friend B.Z. (Anthony Perkins) is a successful movie producer, but with a conscience, well aware that the industry peddles empty dreams. That makes this a perfect feature for the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center’s series The New Hollywood, which runs through Sept. 9 and showcases the often cynical, experimental Amreican cinema that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a four-star review, Roger Ebert wrote, “The material is so thin (and has to be) that the actors have to bring the human texture along with them. They do, and they make us care about characters who have given up caring for themselves.” The AFI is screening a 35-mm print.
Watch the film’s stream-of-consciousness introduction.
Tuesday, Aug. 20, at 9:30 p.m. and Wednesday, Aug. 21, at 7:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
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