The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper: Film

Planet 51: Jessica Biel Doesn't Ruin It! Bravo!

editor@thestranger.com (Megan Seling) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

by Megan Seling Planet 51—an animated kids' flick about a human landing on a planet full of very nice aliens—could've been a huge waste of my time. Instead, with a balance of wit, humor, and cuteness, it not only avoids making Americans look stupid or superior but also manages to stay away from lame jokes about phallic antennae. In fact, there was only one antenna joke in the whole movie, it was at the end, and it was funny! Bravo! The movie successfully…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

The Twilight Saga: New Moon�In Which Bella Mopes for Hundreds of Pages

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

The Twilight Saga: New Moon�In Which Bella Mopes for Hundreds of Pages by Paul Constant Here�s the short version: New Moon is a much better movie than Twilight. Director Chris Weitz�s slick, showy visuals are the antithesis of Catherine Hardwicke�s awkward adaptation of the first book in the young-adult romance series, and slickness is what these books need to be translated to the screen. When Weitz throws the camera around�plunging off a cliff, or slowly circling Kristen Stewart�s sullen Bella three times to suggest the monotonous transition from fall to winter�you can almost forget the…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Art House

editor@thestranger.com (Charles Mudede) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

SIFF's New Italian Cinema Festival by Charles Mudede Two films are worth recommending in SIFF's New Italian Cinema Festival: one because it is actually good, the other because it has cultural value. The one that is actually good is Fortapàsc, which is based on a real story about a journalist who was murdered in 1985 for investigating local mobsters. The film has a strong cast, an excellent pace, some really startling moments, fluid photography, and great uses of bad '80s music and clothes. The other film, which has…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Lee Daniels's Imperfectly Brilliant Precious

editor@thestranger.com (David Schmader) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

by David Schmader As its subtitle laboriously makes clear, Precious is Lee Daniels's movie adaptation of Sapphire's 1996 novel Push, a controversial best seller that was, among many other things, the antithesis of made-for-Hollywood product. Set in the late '80s, Push chronicles the day-to-day existence of Precious Jones, an illiterate, morbidly obese Harlem teen enduring a life of extreme horror. Precious's curriculum vitae of victimhood is extensive: Twice raped into pregnancy by her father, she's subjected to continual brutal abuse at the hands…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Concessions

editor@thestranger.com (Lindy West) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

Strippers for Christ—for Real by Lindy West Good documentaries are so fortifying—real life, just the important parts, gathered up and organized into something meaningful and delivered unto your eyeballs. Because there are a lot of crazy people in the world doing crazy shit, and I can't be everywhere at once, you know? This column isn't going to write itself! These Doritos aren't going to eat themselves in their pajamas! So thanks, Grand Illusion, for hosting the Burning Fuse Film Festival—a touring fest of socially and politically minded…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Stingray Sam: Tiny Robots, Space Cowboys, and David Hyde Pierce

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

by Paul Constant If you're a fan of Cory McAbee's sci-fi rock musical American Astronaut (and if you're not a fan of American Astronaut, you probably haven't seen American Astronaut), you probably have a good idea of what to expect from Stingray Sam. McAbee stars as the titular space cowboy, who gets yanked from his new career as a lounge singer for one last job—to save a young girl from a creepy celebrity named Fredward who wears a tight red rubber suit. With…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

The Blind Side: White People, Very Pleased

editor@thestranger.com (Lindy West) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

by Lindy West The trailer for The Blind Side went around the internets the other month as a hee-larious meme. Remember? Was it for real, we wondered? Surely it was joking. Surely some WASPy bitch didn't just say to Sandy Bullock, "Honey, you're changing that boy's life!" and then double-surely Sandy B. didn't just whisper all misty-in-the-eyeballs, "No. He's changing mine." Who wrote that? The Original Kings of Comedy? The court jester? Of Chuckletown? The court jester in the throne room, standing before…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Pirate Radio: It's Almost Famous Meets Empire Records—on a Motherfucking Boat!

editor@thestranger.com (Eric Grandy) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

by Eric Grandy A sideways tribute to legendary DJ John Peel (whose name is never mentioned in the broadly explanatory intertitles that bookend the film), Pirate Radio fabulizes the real story of how pirate radio stations broadcasting from off the coast of England ushered rock 'n' roll onto the airwaves of the BBC. What could be a genuinely interesting historical piece is instead turned into fluffy, Rolling Stone–style "talkin' 'bout my generation" self-congratulatory baby boomer back-patting—did you know that rock 'n' roll changed…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

We Live in Public: How an Internet Visionary Went Bonkers

editor@thestranger.com (David Schmader) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

by David Schmader American entrepreneur Josh Harris has been an impresario of the internet almost since its inception. In 1986, a twentysomething Harris founded the online-research firm Jupiter Communications, which in 1998 very successfully went public and was ultimately sold, making its founder a very wealthy man. Harris then devoted himself to Pseudo.com, the company he founded in 1993, when Pseudo.com hyped itself as "the world's largest original producer of interactive streaming video programming." Nearly a decade before Big Brother, Josh Harris was…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

(Untitled): Isn't Art Just So Fucking Wacky?

editor@thestranger.com (Eric Grandy) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

by Eric Grandy Adam Goldberg is a brooding and failing experimental composer; his brother is a successful painter of institutional art. Goldberg makes crap that nobody likes: unlistenable avant-garde skronk-as-slapstick (his pieces involve, among other things, the sound of him kicking a bucket hanging on a string). His brother makes crap that lots of people like: gentle, inoffensive pastel abstracts that are all but designed for hotel and hospital lobbies. Neither is happy; both want to continue making crap yet be regarded as…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Art House

editor@thestranger.com (Charles Mudede) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

Araya by Charles Mudede Margot Benacerraf's Araya shared the 1959 Cannes critic's prize with Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour. The world has forgotten the former and remembers the latter. The latter is a love story set against the fresh memories and casualties of the second world; the former is a poem about people who spend every ounce of their existence collecting, carrying, stacking, and weighing salt, the main resource of a peninsula in northern Venezuela. Both films are beautiful. But in Hiroshima Mon Amour,…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Into the Wild

editor@thestranger.com (Sean Axmaker) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

Northwest Film Forum Brings Lisandro Alonso to Seattle by Sean Axmaker My films aren�t narratives. I observe people, different moments, and I put them all together in the film. The audience has to imagine or create something sitting in the chair. �Lisandro Alonso La Libertad (2001) observes a logger (Misael Saavedra) working solo in the forests of Argentina. He wanders through groves with a lazy gait, sizes up potential trees for his ax, and then chops, strips, loads, and hauls away his day�s harvest before heading for camp and dinner, which…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

2012: Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom

editor@thestranger.com (Andrew Wright) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

by Andrew Wright I enjoy the films of Roland Emmerich. Okay, okay, before you start reaching for the butterfly nets and/or comments section, let me clarify: It's a conditional kind of almost-love, with full awareness of the general dunderheadedness of the filmmaker's body of work. Considerable Velveeta factor aside, though, the guy's a visually gifted, unabashedly middlebrow director who consistently delivers big, goofy epics about things blowing up real good, without any of the casual misogyny, smarm, or Genuine Draft sheen espoused by…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Concessions

editor@thestranger.com (Lindy West) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

Couch Fest Films 2009 by Lindy West Full-frontal disclosure (boobies! Woooo!): I failed you guys on several fronts this week. Firstly, I beefed it completely in my recommendation of Saturday's Couch Fest Films (I described the thing as a "sweet little DIY idea" and implied that you should go to it), and for that I gravely apologize. Couch Fest is in no way as cute as I thought it would be. Nope. Because. It. Is. CUUUTER!!! And I should have insisted that you go to it! Upon…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Four Is Enough

editor@thestranger.com (Charles Mudede) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

35 Shots of Rum: Claire Denis Explores the Modern Urban Family by Charles Mudede The latest film by the great French director Claire Denis, 35 Shots of Rum, concerns family values. The family in the film, however, is not the traditional family—the family that's bonded by blood, the family whose roots are in agriculture and whose history predates the birth of the polis. Denis's family is strictly urban; meaning, its members have a cultural rather than a natural bond. True, two members of this family, Lionel (Alex Descas) and Joséphine (Mati Diop), are related…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Psychic Warriors

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

The Men Who Stare at Goats: Magnificent Idiots by Paul Constant You can forget about Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler and all the rest: George Clooney is the best actor in the world if you're looking for someone to play a credible idiot. A George Clooney idiot is shallow and utterly self-involved, but he is a complete person—a complete, shallow, self-involved person. Traditionally, Clooney has saved his best idiots for the Coen brothers—his doltish performance in Burn After Reading is a masterwork—but Clooney's Lyn Cassady, the psychic warrior who drives the…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

The Horse Boy: On Autism and Shamans

editor@thestranger.com (Sean Axmaker) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

by Sean Axmaker Rowan is autistic. At age 5, he's spiraling deeper into obsessive behavior, social disconnection, and daily tantrums that crash like waves and can last for hours. He's almost unreachable, but when he connects with animals he's calm and talkative and, remarkably, communicative. Taking Rowan from his Austin, Texas, home to the steppes of Mongolia—riding on horseback from shaman to shaman in hopes of some kind of spiritual cure—is a bit of a vague logical leap, but why not? Conventional medicine…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

The Fourth Kind: White Light, No Heat

editor@thestranger.com (Andrew Wright) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

The Fourth Kind: White Light, No Heat by Andrew Wright The Fourth Kind, a combination of (already pretty thoroughly debunked) �real footage� of alien abductions and soapy reenactments of the same, takes an initially novel approach to its hokum, but doesn�t amount to much. In terms of spooky, invasive xenophobia, Olatunde Osunsanmi�s new film isn�t a patch on 1993�s Fire in the Sky, or even 1989�s bug-fuck loopy Communion (aka the movie where Christopher Walken seems more normal after being probed). That said, genre fans missing their weekly Mulder fix…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

The Box: Um...We Really Liked the Wallpaper!

editor@thestranger.com (Brendan Kiley) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

by Brendan Kiley My, how the mighty have fallen—the mighty Richard Kelly, to be exact. Mr. Donnie Darko has written and directed a tremendously bad film—The Box—based on a Twilight Zone episode (1980s vintage) based on a short story by Richard Matheson (1970s vintage). A middle-class couple in '70s Virginia receives a mysterious present, a box with a button protected by a glass dome. A man with a big hole burned into his face explains the deal: Press the button and you get…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

A Christmas Carol: Motion-Crapture (Do You See What I Did There?)

editor@thestranger.com (Lindy West) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

by Lindy West Sigh. Sigh. Siiigh. Sss-motherfucking-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. Oh, sorry—did you say something? I was just over here. DEFLATING FOREVER. Who was it (and this is a rhetorical question—Robert Zemeckis, I am looking at YOU) that decided human actors just aren't enough anymore and need to be replaced with terrifying motion-capture drones? I mean, it's only 2009! Movies—regular motion pictures—were just invented, like, 100 years ago! Are we really tired of looking at humans on screens and listening to them talk? Really? We prefer…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Concessions

editor@thestranger.com (Lindy West) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

The Room Comes to Seattle by Lindy West Ooooo! I love it when crazy people get money! It's my second favorite thing (first favorite: fresh cow's milk, hot from the teat!), because, you see, money functions like a doctor who delivers crazy people's crazy-brain-idea-babies and knocks the mucus plugs out of their little slimy noses and gnaws through their figurative umbilical cords and then tosses them from the mountaintop into the gaping maws of hungry lions, just like in that opening scene from The Lion King, you know?…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Art House

editor@thestranger.com (Charles Mudede) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

The Great Sam Neill by Charles Mudede The first two-thirds of Skin, a movie set in the twilight of apartheid, are great because of Sam Neill. The last third of Skin is bad because of Sam Neill. The reason? Because in the first two-thirds, Neill is mostly present; in the last third, he is mostly absent. The film, which is based on a true story about a brown girl whose biological parents are white and very traditional Afrikaners, contains one of Neill's finest performances. He successfully interprets…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Concessions

editor@thestranger.com (Lindy West) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Gaping Eyeholes by Lindy West I know it's that one week a year when we semi-arbitrarily eat very small Three Musketeers bars and get all spastic about mummies, so one might expect me to devote this column to my top five ways for a hill mutant to rip out a sorority girl's eyeball (okay, fine: 5. grapefruit spoon, 4. mutant telepathy, 3. bug vacuum, 2. voodoo chicken bone, 1. prehensile toe). However! I have gone on record many times explaining that STRANGELY ENOUGH, I DO NOT…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Art House

editor@thestranger.com (Charles Mudede) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Beeswax by Charles Mudede You cannot get more art house than Beeswax, Andrew Bujalski's third feature. The film has no other home than the art house and the festival circuit. Who else could watch a film about twins who live in a bohemian world of postgraduate learning, vintage clothing stores, marches for gay rights, and so on and so forth? Only the people who love the art house with a passion. But the film is also an impressive work of new American cinema. Bujalski…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Provocaturd

editor@thestranger.com (Jon Frosch) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Antichrist: Lars von Trier's New Film Is All Stunts, No Sincerity by Jon Frosch Danish provocateur Lars von Trier has staged some sadistic bits of filmmaking in his time. Little blind Björk hanged at the end of Dancer in the Dark. Lovely Nicole Kidman raped in Dogville. Every excruciating minute of Manderlay. But the opening sequence of his new movie, Antichrist, which screened to gasps, guffaws, and a dry heave or two at Cannes last May, makes his previous work look like a Sunday stroll. Shot in voluptuous black-and-white slo-mo and set to a…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]