* Army of Darkness
"Gimme some sugar, baby." Egyptian, Fri-Sat at midnight.
* Breathless
"C'est vraiment degeulasse." Rendezvous, Wed at 7 pm.
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie
See review this issue. Varsity, Fri-Sun at 1:40, 4:15, 7, 9:40 pm.
Derrida
See review this issue. Little Theatre, Fri-Sat at 7, 9 pm.
* Heartbreak and Triumph: The World of Douglas Sirk
The Grand Illusion's celebration of Douglas Sirk--the undisputed master of melodrama--begins its tragic incline this week with Tarnished Angels and Written on the Wind. Not to be missed. Grand Illusion, see Movie Times for details.
Kinetica 4
Film and music get all up in each other's business in this collection of 18 short works by some of the 20th century's most influential experimental filmmakers, including John and James Whitney, and Ed Emshwiller. (Jason Pagano) JBL Theater, Wed at 8 pm.
* The Lodger
Hokum W. Jeebs and his mighty Wurlitzer Pipe Organ accompany a rare screening of Hitchcock's breakthrough silent film, in which the master assays London under Jack the Ripper's reign of terror. Hokum Hall, Fri at 7, 9 pm, Sat at 2 pm.
Reel Noise
The Sunset presents its new monthly screening of independent shorts, in two installments. Sunset Tavern, Wed at 6, 9 pm.
Storm in a Teacup
The premiere of Seattle Art Museum's tribute to the cinematic exploits of those warmongering Brits, this 1937 comedy stars Rex Harrison, Vivien Leigh, and a dog. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs April 3 at 7:30 pm.
* The Sunset Movies Series
This week: Ben Stiller's lost TV pilot, Heat Vision and Jack, starring Jack Black as a Michael Knight figure, and Owen Wilson as the voice of his KITT. Funny, but not brilliant. Sunset Tavern, Mon at 8 pm.
* Urban Warrior
A surprisingly rational and evenhanded examination of the evolution of the modern police force from a protectionist to a military model. One expects an inquiry like this to be didactic and full of foregone conclusions (not to mention shaky DV camerawork), but the interviews maintain enough distance to sidestep the "pigs vs. kids" ghetto and engage in an interesting, enlightening discussion about contemporary city life. (SEAN NELSON) Independent Media Center, Wed at 7:30 pm.
NOW PLAYING
About Schmidt
I'm sorry, but this film is garbage. (SEAN NELSON)
* Adaptation
Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze have created a rich entertainment, stuffed with enough meta-plot twists to fuel half a dozen lesser movies, and bringing it to the screen with brilliant performances by Chris Cooper and Meryl Streep. (DAVID SCHMADER)
Agent Cody Banks
"When it comes to girls, I suck." That's the central conflict in this dumb movie about a smart teenager who leads a double life: He's both a regular kid and a top-secret CIA agent. Oh sure, there are some other conflicts here too, like saving the world from little ice cubes of nanorobots, hidden away in a snow cave run by faggoty, big-lipped, vaguely French bad guys. (CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE)
*All the Real Girls
See review this issue. Metro
Assassination Tango
See review this issue. Varisty
Basic
Remember when the prospect of Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta co-starring in a movie together would have be exciting? Yeah, me neither.
Bend It Like Beckham
Essentially a traditional coming-of-age story, though with a spicy ethnic twist: A hot Anglo-Indian teenage girl in outer London pursues her dream of professional soccer stardom against the wishes of her traditional Sikh parents--immigrants who, still steeped in Indian culture, are only concerned with her educational and marriage prospects, and consequently just don't get it. Stuff happens and challenges are overcome, and Mummy and Papa come around in the end, as we know they will, but the predictable conventionality of the plot structure is expertly obscured by the pleasures of the journey. (SANDEEP KAUSHIK)
Boat Trip
The film opens with a montage of Cuba Gooding Jr. dancing to James Brown's "I Feel Good." Seriously. I sat through 94 minutes of this shit, and for that I deserve a Pulitzer. (ZAC PENNINGTON)
Bowling For Columbine
For a while, Moore seems on to something--a culture of fear endemic to our country--but in the end, he shortchanges the psychological complexity in favor of cheap shots. He wants to say something great, but ultimately doesn't. Can't, maybe. Because he isn't really a social critic, he's a demagogue. (SEAN NELSON)
Bringing Down the House
For the majority of its journey across the screen, it is as expert as fluff gets. Queen Latifah and Steve Martin navigate the deeply familiar plot with enough wit and flair to keep the audience howling with glee, stumbling only in the final quarter with--I wish I were kidding--the bumbling kidnap of a wealthy dowager. (DAVID SCHMADER)
Catch Me If You Can
Long stretches of Catch Me If You Can are filmed so lazily that the entire enterprise falters. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
* Chicago
Basically, the last hour of Chicago is a mess. Nevertheless, I recommend it. it. (DAN SAVAGE)
*The Core
The Core is not as bad as you have undoubtedly assumed. Seriously. Is it smart? Not really. Scientifically sound? Absolutely not. But what The Core does offer is a perfect example of escapist entertainment--the thrill of a summer blockbuster released in the spring. And for that, the film is worthwhile. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Cradle 2 the Grave
With Cradle 2 the Grave, director Andrzej Bartkowiak dips into the same well of hiphop and kung fu that helped him make Romeo Must Die, but this time pulls up a muddy skeleton of a movie. (SCOTT McGEATH)
Daredevil
First some good news: Just four months until Ang Lee's The Hulk arrives. Now the bad news: Daredevil is stunningly bad. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Dreamcatcher
Why is it that every other movie I get sent to review is such piece of shit? The "evil bad creature" in Dreamcatcher, a new giant waste of time based on the Steven King novel, hinges on alien ass worms that shoot out like a bad case of the scoots. (JENNIFER MAERZ)
Dysfunktional Family
See review this issue. Lewis & Clark, Pacific Place, Redmond Town Center
* Far From Heaven
Todd Haynes' pitch-perfect inclusion of sexual confusion and racial bigotry into Douglas Sirk's original mix gives him the power to transcend his source material and create a melodramatic masterpiece all his own. (DAVID SCHMADER)
* Gangs of New York
Scorsese invests the picture with increasingly biblical gravity in an attempt to portray the birth of a nation as a violent, ritualistic collision between two men. Daniel Day-Lewis, meanwhile, gives the kind of performance that makes you feel proud to be a member of the human race. (SEAN NELSON)
He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not
How hysterical that as conservatives in this country denounce the French over Iraq (Freedom Fries anyone?), the French cinema machine releases a film starring Amelie's Audrey Tautou--probably the most beloved French export to come along since Le Car--in a fairly nasty role as a cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs Parisian woman in love with a doctor (Samuel Le Bihan). Politics (and possible bad timing) aside, however, is He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not any good? Oui. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Head of State
Chris Rock stars in a film about a Washington D.C. city councilman who yells a lot, turned unexpected presidential hopeful--who yells a lot. Scripted in part by Rock, the film is assured some semblance of humor--in spite of its preview's hint at some rather unfortunate rappin' granny potential.
* The Hours
I was prepared to hate this movie. I was so wrong. This is a really good movie. (BARLEY BLAIR)
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
The film is touching in those brief minutes when Kate Hudson and Matthew McConnaughey realize they might have feelings for each other, so long as the idiot soundtrack doesn't swell in and ruin the mood. (KATHLEEN WILSON)
The Hunted
A problematic soldier played by Benicio Del Toro is trained to be a killing machine for some elite army unit. The uneven story fails to properly explain why and how the once brave soldier went insane and started killing deer hunters in the woods; or why Tommy Lee Jones, an excellent killer and hunter, is also a pacifist who worries about the hunting of wild animals, refuses to use a gun, and has never killed a person. The movie, in a word, lacks everything that would make it reasonable. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
The Jungle Book 2
AKA Clear Cut!
Kangaroo Jack
If there's one thing that I love more than talking animals in sunglasses, it'd have to be Christopher Walken. Well I'll be damned! Two great tastes....
* Laurel Canyon
Thoroughly modern young lovers Sam and Alex (Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale) are stranded at the home of Sam's mother, Jane, a famous record producer, played by Frances McDormand. Though this set-up might lead one to expect a bedroom farce between hippies and yuppies, the film is in fact a smart, emotionally insightful exploration of the multigenerational consequences of the quest to live free. (SEAN NELSON)
* Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
The film resonates, despite its potentially embarrassing fantasy trappings, because it recognizes that violence and sacrifice are unavoidable aspects of the survival of civilizations. (SEAN NELSON)
A Man Apart
Vengence, violence, Vin: Hot dog-necked action hero returns, and this time (for a change) it's personal. Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Meridian 16, Woodinville 12
Morvern Callar
Morvern Callar is not an engaging film--it is precisely the opposite of engaging. It refuses to engage, stubbornly holding you at arm's length. Which doesn't mean it's not good--it is, but its truths are hard-won and not terribly pleasant. (EMILY HALL)
Nowhere in Africa
A rich Jewish family leaves Germany in 1938 and moves to Africa. There they can avoid the Nazis, but have to deal with some other issues like, oh, the lack of water. Naturally, the characters all experience guilt (you just can't have a Holocaust movie without guilt), but there are also things here you never see in any movie. The hazards of humanity and the hazards of nature are not dissimilar, this movie argues, though (at two-and-a-half hours long) not very succinctly. Thankfully, the actor Merab Ninidze, who's very sexy, is in almost every scene. (CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE)
Old School
Here's a film that relies on a whole list of old clichés (marriage is a ball and chain; the school losers vs. the campus suits) to deliver comedy that's actually really funny in a dumb kind of way. (JENNIFER MAERZ)
* Phone Booth
See review this issue. Factoria, Lewis & Clark, Neptune, Oak Tree, Pacific Place, Redmond Town Center, Woodinville 12
* The Pianist
Despite appearances to the contrary, the film is not about the indomitable spirit of a survivor. It's about how low a human being can sink in order to live, and the depths of abasement a race is capable of withstanding in order to avoid extinction. (SEAN NELSON)
* The Quiet American
The movie is worth seeing if only because it shows how America can do the wrong thing with the best of intentions. (ANDY SPLETZER)
* Rabbit-Proof Fence
Director Phillip Noyce makes all the right decisions in telling what could have (justifiably) been a big slab of moist, liberal liver and onions; a tale of indomitable metaphor and sackcloth villainy. Instead it is a measured tale of a secret history, and of basic human desires asserting themselves in the most inspirational of ways. (SEAN NELSON)
Rivers and Tides
Andy Goldsworthy, the subject of this documentary, makes things out of nature--icicles, shards of stone, leaf, thorn, tufts of sheep's wool--and lets nature take them apart. There is something both arrogant and humble at work here: the very Western wrestling of order out of chaos; the kind of acceptance of entropy associated with Zen. (EMILY HALL)
Spun
The latest take on addicts, Spun, chooses neither to pass judgment on narcotics nor make you care about the people who devour them, instead turning 96 minutes about crystal meth addicts into a harmless collage of rootless characters. (JENNIFER MAERZ)
* Talk to Her
Pedro Almodovar's latest film unfolds with grace and still manages to shock while being funny, strange, morally complex, and moving. (NATE LIPPENS)
Tears of the Sun
Directed by Antoine Fuqua, Tears of the Sun exists in a Hollywood foreign-policy pipe dream, as our indefensible policy of only interceding in atrocity when American interests are at stake is abandoned, and the American military does right by humanity for a change. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Ten
For an hour and a half, a dashboard camera is trained on one woman and the passengers she shuttles about in her car through the city of Tehran. Prominent Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami does very little visually, to wonderful effect. (CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE)
A View From the Top
This saccharine, low-rent version of Romy and Michele's High School Reunion is pure ocular wonderbread--featureless, familiar, and entirely inoffensive. (ZAC PENNINGTON)
What a Girl Wants
Amanda Bynes, Colin Firth, and Kelly Preston star in a film filed somewhere between "Coming of Age," "Fish Out of Water," and "Product Placement Opportunity." Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Majestic Bay, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place, Woodinville 12
Willard
The secret to Crispin Hellion Glover's crushing genius has something to do with the perverse sexual pleasure he seems to take within every twitch and stutter. That pleasure takes its purest form as Glover stars in this retread of the 1971 cult relic about a boy and his rats. Though he can't save it, Glover makes a backbreaking attempt to shoulder a film that might have been entirely insufferable. Oh, and his rendition of Michael Jackson's "Ben" over the closing credits is itself enough for a matinee ticket. (ZAC PENNINGTON)
