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Unimaginably Twisted

Unimaginably Twisted

A Quietly Harrowing Drama About a Terrible, Terrible Man


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Shouldn't music documentaries seek to kind of encapsulate a seemingly mythical aspect of a band? Not just "oh these guys are fun, maaaaaaaan...". Thank reality TV for this new cultural More …

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Monday, May 14, 2012

Does the World Really Need a Black Keys Documentary Yet (or Ever)?

Posted by on Mon, May 14, 2012 at 2:55 PM

Okay, okay, okay, everybody take a Time Out here. It's official, there are too many white kids running around with expensive video cameras and too much time (money) on their hands.

Continue Reading >>

Friday, May 11, 2012

Tim Burton Doesn't Know How to Direct Anymore

Posted by on Fri, May 11, 2012 at 5:30 PM

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I can happily report, at least, that Johnny Depp is physically aging well. Though he no longer looks like a 20-year-old (he turns 49 next month), his face and neck are thickening in an interesting way, and he looks more dignified, more statesmanlike for it. There are a few scenes in Dark Shadows where the makeup artist has gone a little nuts and painted Depp’s old cheekbones onto his pasty-white face, and it’s super-distracting. Rather than intimating the Depp of old, it looks like he lost a shit-throwing contest with a rhesus monkey.

Depp’s aging face is the most interesting part of Dark Shadows. In fact, it’s one of only two interesting things about Dark Shadows: The other is Depp’s performance as a 200-year-old vampire named Barnabas Collins. As Collins frees himself from the tomb where he’s been trapped for the last two centuries and makes his way back to his ancestral mansion, he bumps against the hippies and swingers of 1972 in amusing ways. Depp is acting like a classic overacting movie vampire, with an ancient vocabulary (“Fear me not, drunkard!”) and a comical sense of self-importance. He’s a crappy photocopy of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula performance in almost every way, and so those few scenes where he feasts on innocent victims—not with a genteel sip at the neck as you expect, but with a screaming, leaping, all-you-can-eat massacre—are wrought with a special kind of comedic terror.

But the rest of Dark Shadows is shit, and it’s all Tim Burton’s fault. Because the movie is based on a campy gothic horror soap opera with more than 1,200 episodes of material, the script is all over the map. Collins returns to find his name on the wane. His ancestors are losing the family fortune, the fishing industry his father left to him is in danger of going under, and the witch who imprisoned him in the first place is dismantling Collins’s legacy, brick by brick. There’s schlocky comedy, attempts at pathos, and flailings at romance. Family secrets—most of which make no sense—are unveiled in the last 30 minutes of the film in a clear attempt to seed sequels and build a franchise...

(Keep reading.)

Short Film Fridays

Posted by on Fri, May 11, 2012 at 4:36 PM

This week's shot is "Number 3 Acheron," a short by a director, Dalyce Lazaris, whose work and history is completely unknown to me. But the short speaks directly to my love for the highest form of transportation, public transportation.

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Government Endorses Movie Piracy By Warning Against Movie Piracy

Posted by on Thu, May 10, 2012 at 3:34 PM

Thanks to the U.S. Government, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs will soon display two warnings intended to educate viewers about movie piracy. Ars Technica writes:

Will the two screens be shown back to back? Will each screen last for 10 seconds each? Will each screen be unskippable? Yes, yes, and yes.

An ICE spokesman tells me that the two screens will "come up after the previews, once you hit the main movie/play button on the DVD. At which point the movie rating comes up, followed by the IPR Center screen shot for 10 secs and then the FBI/HSI anti-piracy warning for 10 secs as well. Neither can be skipped/fast forwarded through."

"Thanks for legally purchasing and not pirating this movie! Now please sit there while we tell you about how bad pirating movies is. Yes, you have to watch our warning every time you watch this movie that you legally purchased. How else will you know not to pirate movies?" Idiots.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

The Trailer for "Not Working"

Posted by on Thu, May 10, 2012 at 1:51 PM

Local theater director and actor MJ Sieber has been working on a documentary film called Not Working about the human toll of unemployment in America. (He also made the gorgeous and moving music video of Occupy Seattle's early days that was on Slog last October.)

MJ says the book version of Not Working will come out next month and the film should come shortly thereafter.

Want to Be an Extra in Atlas Shrugged, Part 2?

Posted by on Thu, May 10, 2012 at 8:05 AM

The Atlas Shrugged movie is trading a non-speaking extra role for social media cachet. If you want the ultimate bar story, you should follow these directions:

So, what do you need to do to get on set? You need to get busy...

1. Follow us on Twitter and retweet any of our tweets.
2. Like us on facebook and share any of our posts.

The more you tweet and share, the more chance you have to be cast so, tweet and share early and often.

We’ll be selecting an extra this Friday afternoon and flying the selectee and a guest to LA this coming Monday, May 14th - all expenses paid. Or, most expenses anyway - flight and hotel for two nights.

By the way, while you’ll definitely be an “extra” on set, we can’t really guarantee you screen time. But... we can certainly guarantee you a good time. We’ll make sure you get some cool swag too.

If you win, let me know and I'll give you some Stranger paraphernalia to try to sneak onscreen. Based on how poorly the last Atlas Shrugged film was produced, I'd bet it'll slip right past their crack production team.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Tacoma Will Not Forget; Tacoma Is Still Mad at Me

Posted by on Tue, May 8, 2012 at 8:44 AM

The News Tribune:

Well, lookee who braved the dark woods and made his way to Tacoma this week.

Screenwriter Charles Mudede, aka the columnist for Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger, was part of a movie crew hunkered down near Old City Hall to shoot a true story about a turn-of-the-century hobo outlaw.

Mudede claims the crew came here for the architecture. We think he came expecting a ready supply of hobo outlaws to cast as extras.

Thank you, Tacoma!” he gushed in a blog post Wednesday, like we’re suddenly sweethearts and his past is forgiven and forgotten.

Not so fast, Mr. Hollywood bigshot.

Recognize the name? “Mudede” was once spoken around these parts with irritation – a one-word oath, like when Jerry hisses, “NEW-man!!” in “Seinfeld” reruns.

Mudede’s film, “You Can’t Win,” sounds like the title he’d choose if he made a movie about Tacoma.

It was August 2000 when he wrote: “By all accounts, Tacoma is a failure. Every day it lives failure, sleeps failure, eats failure; this is part of its charm.” He also called Lakewood a “working-class neighborhood in South Tacoma.”

Mu-DE-de!!


The post then mentions my rather unkind piece for the New York Times, and feature about the Black Friday shootings, and so on and so forth. My problem with Tacoma? It wants to be what it can't be: Seattle. My problem with Seattle? It refuses to be what it needs to be: Vancouver BC. Tacoma needs stop trying to be Seattle; and Seattle needs to stop being Seattle.
Michael Pitt is Jack Black
  • Michael Pitt is Jack Black

Monday, May 7, 2012

The Avatar Bubble Will Never Burst!

Posted by on Mon, May 7, 2012 at 2:46 PM

Could James Cameron's ego finally be getting the best of him? JoBlo just ran a piece of an interview in which Cameron says he will only make Avatar movies from here on out:

Last year I basically completely disbanded my production company’s development arm. So I’m not interested in developing anything. I’m in the “Avatar” business. Period. That’s it. I’m making “Avatar 2,” “Avatar 3,” maybe “Avatar 4,” and I’m not going to produce other people’s movies for them. I’m not interested in taking scripts. And that all sounds I suppose a little bit restricted, but the point is I think within the “Avatar” landscape I can say everything I need to say that I think needs to be said, in terms of the state of the world and what I think we need to be doing about it. And doing it in an entertaining way.

Okay, I get it: Biggest movie of all time. Sure. But, Jesus, the moviegoing public is going to get tired of the Avatar universe sooner or later, aren't they?

New York Times Profiles Seattle Filmmaker Lynn Shelton (Again!)

Posted by on Mon, May 7, 2012 at 10:56 AM

Lynn Shelton got some love in the New York Times yesterday. The newspaper of record reports that Your Sister's Sister, which will open SIFF this year, is "her most sophisticated" film yet.

If you have been reading The Stranger for a couple years, you're probably sick of hearing about Lynn Shelton, who won a Stranger Genius Award in 2008. But there are a lot great details in the NYT piece: that she was inspired to go into feature films in part by seeing Claire Denis at Northwest Film Forum in 2003; that she learned how to raise money for film projects with a book called Shaking the Money Tree; and that she recently returned "a sack of DVDs by Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen" to Scarecrow Video. Read the whole thing here.

Saturday, May 5, 2012

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Friday, May 4, 2012

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Wednesday, May 2, 2012

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Thank You, Tacoma!

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Tuesday, May 1, 2012

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Monday, April 30, 2012

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Too Bad You Missed NFFTY

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Friday, April 27, 2012

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Short Film Fridays

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Wednesday, April 25, 2012

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