• "Top this, bitches!"

Everything you need to know:

William Friedkin, aka the guy who directed the best horror movie EVER, is coming to SIFF this year to receive a lifetime achievement award. We DARE you, Seattle, to make a short video that will entertain us so severely that it causes our heads to spin around and green soup to shoot from our mouths fire-hose-style.

RULES OF THE CONTEST

Your film must be 30 seconds or less.

Your film may be live-action and/or animation.

You may not simply edit together fragments of scenes from The Exorcist.

Points will be awarded for originality.

Deadline for entry is June 4, 11:59:59 p.m.

Upload your video to a site with no password restrictions. (YouTube, Vimeo, your own website, etc.) After you have done this, e-mail the link and your contact information to promotions@thestranger.com with the subject “exorcist.”

The Stranger will use this link to show off your work to our readers! We will announce the winner on June 5 on SLOG!

Get hopping, and may God have mercy on your souls.

Highly recommended for tonight, Mike Birbiglia's entertaining mashup of reality and fiction, Sleepwalk with Me.

This American Life regular Mike Birbiglia writes/directs/stars in a dramatization of stories from his own life. He plays Matt, a guy working as a bartender and trying to start a comedy career; his longtime girlfriend (played by the adorable Lauren Ambrose) is ready to grow up and get married. As his anxiety about his life gets worse, he develops a sleep disorder where he acts out his dreams physically, eventually resulting in the infamous “La Quinta Inn incident.” The film is funny and interesting and full of cameos by some great comedians.

Sleepwalk with Me plays tonight, Wed May 23, SIFF Cinema at the Uptown, 9 pm. Tickets here.

As I noted on Twitter, standing in line to see a Bobcat Goldthwait movie today says something very different about you than standing in line to see a Bobcat Goldthwait movie in the 1980s. Goldthwait is way better behind the camera than he is in front of it. His best movie, Sleeping Dogs Lie, is at once a rude, raunchy sex comedy about a woman who gave a blowjob to a dog in college and a quiet character study exploring why you shouldn't be completely honest in relationships. It's very much the work of a writer/director, and it doesn't feel quite like any other movie.

Goldthwait's new movie, God Bless America, is already available on pay-per-view and through various online rental services, but seeing it as a midnight movie at the Egyptian as part of SIFF was the perfect viewing experience for the film. The premise is Idiocracy meets Falling Down: A man named Frank gets fed up with how stupid the world has become. With a teenage girl as his improbable sidekick, he decides to do something about it, by killing idiotic reality-show "celebrities" and people who talk in movie theaters. Occasionally, Frank would go off on a rant about civility and shame and dignity, and the packed-out Egyptian audience would loudly applaud those monologues with such obvious excitement that the violent revenge sprees that followed the applause made the whole house feel complicit in Frank's crimes. (It helps with Seattle audiences that Frank is the rare left-leaning movie killer—targets of his rage include a Fox News riff and teabaggers.)

This isn't Goldthwait's best movie. It stalls out in the middle and doesn't have much to do once it establishes its premise. But it's a lot of fun—a road-trip movie, a Bonnie and Clyde riff, and a plea for civility disguised as a serial killer flick. In your living room, I expect the flaws would be magnified. In a theater full of people who sympathize with Frank's schlubby outrage, it's a wonderful treat. God Bless America is playing one more time at SIFF, this time at SIFF Cinema at the Uptown at 9:30 tonight. Rumor has it, it'll be back at the Uptown next month, just in time for the 4th of July.

Sometimes SIFF's late-spring run forces citizens to choose between a day outside in rare sunny weather and a day inside at the movies—but not today. Among the highlights of today's SIFF offerings: Megan Griffiths's deservedly well-hyped Eden, the ACT-UP documentary How to Survive a Plague, and the Iranian drama Goodbye, praised by Jen Graves below.

For full SIFF info, go here.

This film is based on a true story and was hugely popular in France. Philippe is a super-rich white guy who is quadriplegic after a paragliding accident. He lives in a giant house in Paris with an accommodating staff. Instead of the same old stuffy male nurse, he hires a street-savvy African immigrant named Driss to be his caretaker/companion. Philippe likes that Driss is straightforward with him instead of pandering. The two need a bit of time to get used to each other and their ways of living, but they end up sharing their interests (classical music and art appreciation; pot smoking and Kool and the Gang) and pushing each other's boundaries. The film includes plenty of irreverent humor that only the French can get away with.

It plays again Sunday, May 20, Egyptian Theatre, 4 pm.