Thursday: Missy Elliott’s Out of This World Tour at Capital One Arena

It’s not often that an artist’s first headlining tour happens nearly 30 years after their debut album. But when that artist is Missy Elliott, one of the most original, innovative hip-hop artists ever, one can forgive her for taking her time getting to the road (she was too busy hitting people with the hee). The announcement of Elliott’s Out of This World tour, which will hit Capital One Arena on Aug. 8, was exciting enough. The fact that she’s performing with Timbaland, Busta Rhymes, and Ciara is enough to make Gen X squeal while running to find their shell toe Adidas and tracksuits. “I think it was divine intervention,” Timbaland, rapper and Elliott’s producing partner, tells City Paper of the tour coming together. “Everybody was ready to go on the road together. That’s what I believe. It was an idea that was maybe brought to Missy and Missy agreed … and good thing she agreed because she brought magic together.” While Elliott has performed at festivals in the past few years and had a guest spot during Katy Perry’s Super Bowl performance in 2015, her more recent public appearances have centered around accolades—including receiving an honorary doctorate from the Berklee School of Music and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. According to Timbaland, the tour is “a celebration of all our music throughout 30 years of what we’ve given to the game. It’s like giving back to the fans.” Both Elliott and Timbaland, who met in high school, hail from Norfolk, Virginia, and consider D.C. a hometown show. “It’s the DMV,” says Timbaland. “It’s definitely hometown. Everything about the DMV is hometown.” Missy Elliott with special guest Timbaland, Ciara, and Busta Rhymes play at 7 p.m. on Aug. 8 at Capital One Arena, 601 F St. NW. capitalonearena.com $59.50–$895. —Christina Smart

Friday: Sad Summer Festival at Merriweather 

You can see a pattern of seasonality in rock music. Winter is for metal or goth—all that leather gets pretty warm—while fall is more for singer-songwriter fare or gentle Midwest emo like American Football. With the days getting warmer and wedding season going into full effect, spring is for danceable music, whether it’s LCD Soundsystem or the Faint. But summer has always been about pop punk. Teenagers, or maybe the young at heart, are the target audience for music defined by fast beats, faster hooks, and short attention spans. Nothing beats driving around in the suburbs on languid, warm summer nights while you listen to another snotty vocalist scream about how they cannot wait to escape the mediocre suburb they’re stuck in. What better way to relive that precise feeling than Sad Summer Festival, a one-day pop punk showcase in Columbia? The planned community is arguably the apotheosis of the suburb, so bands like the Wonder Years and Mayday Parade will fit right into that feeling of angst that no afternoon at the pool or beach can solve. Other highlights include We the Kings, a band whose tune “Check Yes, Juliet” sounds like it was created in a lab for young fans to shake their fist toward the sky while holding back tears. Many years ago, I was once a teenage pop-punk fan in Columbia, or the “Columbubble” as it was widely known, and this lineup instantly transported me back to a period where teenage angst got in the way of what should have been the most carefree period of my life. Or maybe it was? Either way, all that’s missing is a trip to Double T diner after the mandatory noise curfew cuts off the music. Sad Summer Festival starts at 2 p.m. on  Aug. 9 at the Chrysalis at Merriweather Park, 10431 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia. sadsummerfest.com. $72. —Alan Zilberman

Saturday: Claire’s Camera at National Gallery of Art

Prolific director Hong Sangsoo seems to release movies on a schedule almost as frequent as the 42 bus. This month the National Gallery of Art provides local moviegoers with a seasonal sample that just touches the surface of his sprawling work, and Saturday’s program focuses on two of Sangsoo’s films made with the great Isabelle Huppert. One of Sangsoo’s more lighthearted films, the 2017 (mostly) comedy Claire’s Camera is nevertheless fueled by all sorts of meta-tensions. Huppert stars as the eponymous photographer, a teacher/poet visiting Cannes. Claire meets Manhee (Kim Minhee), a sales rep for a film production company who has been unceremoniously fired for unspecified reasons. However, she’s been sleeping with the director, who was involved with Manhee’s boss—both of whom Claire happens to run into on the same day. What makes this romantic entanglement so intriguing is that Min-hee, a frequent Sangsoo collaborator, was herself in the throes of a fraught affair with the married director. With such behind-the-scenes drama at play, the film before us is deceptively breezy, yet Sangsoo injects the easygoing plot with strange touches: In one close up of Claire walking with the amorous director, her heavy heels seem a meaningful contrast to the director’s casual shoes. Claire’s Camera was reportedly churned out in a few days while Huppert was in Cannes promoting the film Elle. Min-hee has explained that Sangsoo would write the script the morning of the shoot, and the crew and actors would scramble to get everything in place. But despite or because of its off-the-cuff origins, the film plays out like a spontaneous outpouring of creative energy. It lasts just 68 minutes, and in terms of surface narrative, not a lot happens, but Sangsoo lets us in on the layers of meaning that bubble under even the most seemingly ordinary encounters. The double feature opens with Sangsoo’s 2012 film, In Another Country, which stars Huppert as three different women. In Another Country and Claire’s Camera screen at 2 p.m. on Aug. 10 at the National Gallery of Art East Building, 4th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. nga.gov. Free, registration required. —Pat Padua

Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday: Godzilla Vs. Hedorah at AFI Silver

What if Godzilla was the heroic beast in an ecologically conscious psychedelic musical? That’s the improbable conceit behind this wild 1971 science fiction thriller that was the first and only Godzilla movie directed by Yoshimitsu Banno. Originally titled Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster for American audiences, this film offers a new kind of scaly villain, one who feeds on garbage and huffs smokestacks. The screaming, smoggy carnage creeps in on ginormous smog feet when Marine biologist Dr. Yano (Akira Yamanouchi) and his son witness a horrifying sea mutant that thrives on pollution—and, worse, makes a heavy metal mockery of the stages of insect life by morphing into different horrifying forms, from yeasty mega-walrus to a sleek flying craft emitting poison gas that leaves everyone in its wake dying an excruciating death. It’s a bleak outlook for humanity, but the apocalypse is leavened by Banno’s fertile avant-garde imagination. While Godzilla movies often lose steam when humans dominate the screen, here the human spectacle keeps up with the monster magic in vivid psychedelic dance sequences, from an underground rock club threatened by Hedorah’s primordial ooze to a protest party on Mount Fuji used to lure the ozone-destroying shape-shifter into a climactic battle with Godzilla. Director Banno got his start as a stage actor, and worked as an assistant to Akira Kurosawa on films such as Throne of Blood and The Bad Sleep Well. Godzilla vs. Hedorah reinvigorated a series that had gotten stodgy—the last thing you can say about this movie, which not only features rock music but hallucinatory animated interludes and one sequence that starts as a mere split screen and divides into a dizzying multicellular picture of a world in crisis. Naturally, Banno didn’t get to make another Godzilla movie. Godzilla vs. Hedorah screens at 9:40 p.m. on Aug. 10, 9:15 p.m. on Aug. 11, and 9:15 p.m. on Aug. 14 at AFI Silver, 8633 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring. silver.afi.com. $13. —Pat Padua

Wednesday: The Courettes at Pie Shop

At the middle of their worldwide tour, the Courettes, a rock band marked by the infectious doo-wop harmonies of the Ronnetes and the manic tempo of the Ramones, will make a stop in D.C. this week. The duo, made up of Brazilian vocalist and guitarist Flavia Couri and Denmark drummer Martin Couri, have already made a name for themselves across Europe following the release of their first album, Here Are the Courettes, in 2015. They’ve since played at Eurosonic in Holland and punk festivals in Germany, and headed back to Denmark for the Copenhagen Psych Fest. Now they’re looking to leave a mark in the U.S. The duo and couple have released three full studio albums (not including 2022’s B-sides and outtakes from their 2021 release Back in Mono). In 2020 they signed with the legendary British label Damaged Goods Records, where they share a home with seminal English punk band Buzzcocks and Australian punks Amyl and the Sniffers. Much of the Courettes’ music draws from the garage rock and girl group sounds from the ’60s and ’70s giving their sound a glimmer of nostalgia. Pie Shop has paired the Brazilian/Danish band well, billing them with D.C.’s own Cinema Hearts. Caroline Weinroth’s project blends a pageantry, dark doo-wop, and punk for a deeply alluring sound. The Courettes with openers Cinema Hearts play at 7:30 p.m on Aug. 14 at Pie Shop, 1339 H St. NE. pieshopdc.com. $12. —Heidi Perez-Moreno