Editor’s Pick: The Alamo’s Summer Attractions
The new Alamo Bryant Street is pulling out all the stops, with movie brunches, parties, and a tribute to John Carpenter.
Right now, you might feel as if we’re living in a “Summer of Darkness” — a bleak reality that at least can be rendered temporarily enjoyable from the air-conditioned confines of a darkened cineplex, such as the Alamo Drafthouse’s D.C. location, which opened last December in the Edgewood neighborhood of Northeast.
Coming attractions over the next month at the Alamo DC Bryant Street include a few John Carpenter horror classics as well as a handful of screenings of LGBTQ-popular classics offered either over Brunch or at special interactive “Movie Parties.”
Let’s start with brunch, which will be served on select Sundays during screenings of “films that pair perfectly with everyone’s favorite late morning weekend ritual.”
Of course, you don’t have to be gay to enjoy the upcoming Brunch Screenings lineup — just as you don’t have to be gay to read Metro Weekly — but it helps! Especially considering the lineup: A League of Their Own, a screening 30 years after the original starring Geena Davis, Rosie O’Donnell, Madonna, and Tom Hanks and two weeks before the TV series adaptation premieres on Amazon Prime Video (7/31); The Dark Crystal, the now 40-year-old otherworldly fantasy epic created by Jim Henson and Frank Oz (8/7); and the “loverly” classic movie musical My Fair Lady starring Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle (8/14).
You can enjoy those films over selections of brunch staples such as Egg BLT, French Toast, and Breakfast Tacos, as well as cocktails including Desert Spring Water and Italian 75.
At “Movie Party” screenings, fans are encouraged to vocally cheer their heroes, boo the bad guys, shout out favorite lines, even sing along to songs, all while making full use of themed props provided by the theater.
The upcoming lineup includes a screening of Quentin Tarantino’s iconic 28-year-old classic Pulp Fiction, starring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, enhanced by furnished fake “Red Apple”-branded candy cigarettes, a “Z” keychain to Zed’s chopper, and a yellow “Serious Gourmet Shit” coffee mug a la Jules (7/31).
Come August, the Alamo DC Bryant Street picks back up with its season-long “Summer of Darkness” celebration of John Carpenter, billed as “one of the greatest masters of horror.”
The first Sunday of the month ushers in a screening, also offered as part of the monthly Epic Sunday series, of The Thing, Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece of alien terror, inspired by Howard Hawks’ classic sci-fi thriller of the same name, in which a group of men working in Antarctica are plagued by an alien being that can take the form of any living creature, and features what the Alamo describes as “special effects from Robocop mastermind Rob Bottin that still shock to this day” (8/7).
It’s followed by 1987’s Prince of Darkness, which the Alamo aptly characterizes as “rooted in the existential angst of late ’80s America,” going on to describe it as “a sprawling, Lovecraft-ian folk epic about demons, science, and unseen evil,” and featuring “zombies who hijack souls, Donald Pleasance with an ax, and Alice Cooper as a homicidal hobo” (8/17).
Finally, 1988’s They Live is a conspiracy-laden sci-fi satire in which wrestling superstar Rowdy Roddy Piper plays an L.A. drifter out to save the American masses from reptilian aliens transmitting subliminal messages through televisions, magazines, and billboards (8/30).
Alamo’s DC Bryant Street is at 630 Rhode Island Ave. NE. Call 202-558-4341 or visit www.drafthouse.com.
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