* Benny, Marty, & Jerkbeast
See review this issue. Oliwood Theater, Fri June 4 at 7:30 pm.
The Blob
The 1988 Chuck Russell remake of the original sci-fi classic. Fri-Sat 11 pm.
A Bucket of Blood
"The last time I saw Phyllis, she exploded." Movie Legends, Sun at 1 pm.
Bush in 30 Seconds
The winning entries in MoveOn.org's anti-Bush advertising contest. 911 Media Arts, Wed June 9 at 7:30 pm.
Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story
A documentary by Jordan Meecher about the former Chavez Ravine community on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Chavez Ravine, which was made famous by the Seattle-based documentary photographer Don Normark in the late 1940s, was razed by the city of LA in 1950. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs June 3 at 7:30 pm.
A Closer Walk
A documentary by Robert Bilheimer about the global AIDS epidemic. Kane Hall Room 220, Fri June 4 at 6 pm.
Cremaster 2
Finally! The best Cremaster, with cowboys and bees and Mormons all wrapped up in one gloriously messy package, is here! Grand Illusion, Fri 5, 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm, Mon-Thurs 7, 9 pm.
Exterior Night / Rock Hudson's Home Movies
Mark Rappaport is a filmmaker with grand ideas but occasionally poor execution. Case in point: Exterior Night, which delves into the richness of film noir like no other film you're likely to see, but which also has a story about as flimsy and unengaging as a filmmaker is likely to deliver. By shooting his script in front of projected clips from classic Warner Bros. noir, Rappaport immerses his story deeper than any standard homage could ever approach--it's just too bad that you don't really care about what you're watching. Slightly better than Exterior Night is Rock Hudson's Home Movies, which muses over the gayness--be it intentional or otherwise--to be found in Hudson's films, using an actor playing Hudson himself to adress us in the audience directly. Much of the end result is smart and well thought out, with Rappaport using the Hudson clips not just to examine, but to occasionally crack wise as well. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER) Consolidated Works, Fri-Sun 8 pm.
Gappa the Triphibian Monster
With a title like that, who needs plot summary? Linda's Summer Movie Madness series kicks off this week. Linda's, Wed June 9 at dusk.
Sneak
The Sneak series of film previews continues its third season. For more information, see www.sneakfilms.com. Pacific Place, Sun June 6 at 10 am.
Strong Roots: Brazil's Landless Workers Movement
A documentary about the movement for land redistribution in Brazil. Keystone Church, Fri June 4 at 7 pm.
Women in Love
Ken Russell directed this 1969 adaptation of the D. H. Lawrence novel. Featuring Alan Bates and Oliver Reed wrestling each other in the nude. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs June 3 at 7:30 pm.
NOW PLAYING
13 Going on 30
As you could probably gather on your own, this movie is dumb, dull, and lacking any sort of charm. And besides that, the stupid 13 Going on 30 promo package that the movie people sent got stupid "wishing dust" all over my stupid desk. Fucking glitter. (MEGAN SELING)
Bon Voyage
Bon Voyage has a big theme (Germany's invasion of France), big actors (in terms of reputation), and big emotions (a young man's eternal love for a famous but shallow movie actress). The speed of the film's narrative is always high, and the characters are kept in constant motion, rarely stopping to rest and look at the big world around them. If this were an American movie, it would have been described as intelligent and even profound; but as a French movie, it is big, dumb, and lots of fun. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
Breakin' All the Rules
Jamie Foxx gets dumped by his girlfriend and then writes a book about it.
Coffee and Cigarettes
Meandering has always been one of the major tools in Jim Jarmusch's arsenal, but here it is taken much too far. In the past, people have been known to complain, rather wrong-headedly, that Jarmusch pictures are dull and unengaging; with this film, sadly, their complaints finally hit the mark. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
* Cold Mountain
Anthony Minghella steers the film into a few minor rough spots (including a somewhat clumsy beginning, and an occasionally annoying performance by Renée Zellweger as a lodger who helps Nicole Kidman on her farm), but the picture as a whole delivers a big, heartfelt epic. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
* The Day After Tomorrow
German director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla) has saved the disaster film. It again has a future; the spell of 9-11 is undone. Hollywood has returned and reestablished its rule over the domain of the spectacle. Hollywood, however, is a soft regime; it is ruled by and for the people. This is not the case with 9-11, which is presently under the hard regime of a few. Bush and the Republicans have a monopoly on the spectacle of 9-11. They have used it to gain political power, to pass terrifying laws, to instigate massive wars, and are soon to hold their presidential convention around the site of their disaster. The Day After Tomorrow returns the spectacle back to we the people. For the first time since 2001, the spectacle of mass destruction is the source of pleasure rather than terror. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
* Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut
See review this issue.
* Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Whereas the last Michel Gondry/Charlie Kaufman collaboration, Human Nature, eventually crumbled under its own quirkiness, Eternal Sunshine finds director and scribe fitting perfectly together. This is a film that travels far beyond most of our imaginations. It is also one of the most beautifully assembled romances you will ever see. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
* Good Bye Lenin!
Because of Christiane's exceptionally delicate condition, her son Alexander cannot inform her that East Germany is no more, that the party and the socialist ideals that consumed much of her adult life are now a thing of the past. To protect her nerves as the outside world becomes more and more like West Germany, the inside of Christiane's room is maintained in the state of East Germany. The trick, and it is a trick devised by the clever director (Wolfgang Becker), works. In other hands it would have been silly and exhausted in a matter of minutes, but Becker manages to get over an hour's worth of comedy and drama out of it. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
* Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
See review this issue.
I'm Not Scared
Soaring across plains of southern Italy, Michele is a coming-of-age hero waiting to happen, and happen he does when he comes across a hole in the ground behind an old, abandoned villa and spies a kidnapped child. Complicating matters, meanwhile, is the mounting certainty that Michele's own father is implicated in the abduction. These vectors are both the bane and the salvation of this picture, which successfully transcends genre, only to suffer under the weight of its own unlikeliness. (SEAN NELSON)
Kill Bill Vol. 2
As a whole piece (as it was originally intended), Kill Bill would've toppled over, eventually landing with a thud upon its inevitable anti-climax. There are some surprising fits to be found in Vol. 2 (including the Uma Thurman squaring off with Elle Driver, a romp that owes much to the Coen Brothers' Raising Arizona), but the final tally fails to shatter the earth--a shame, since Vol. 1 built hopes up so high. Lest we forget, Kill Bill, at its heart, is little more than a stock revenge flick--so why then does Tarantino waste so much of our time, and put forth so little apparent effort, in bringing the tale to a close in Vol. 2? I can hazard a guess: His desire to make something far more important than it should be trumped his ability to make something great. The resulting film is, when spackled together, one-half genius and one-half a failure. This half is the failure, and, in the end, it taints the genius. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
* Life of Brian
Originally released (with all the expected controversy) in 1979, The Life of Brian has been puffed and polished for its 25th anniversary. And though it's not quite as funny as The Holy Grail, the film still holds up; smart, quick, and untroubled by the possibility of offending, Python's slapping about of organized religion may be the perfect afterwash to Mel Gibson's epic. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Man on Fire
Denzel Washington stars as a bodyguard in Mexico with a passion for vengeance.
* Mean Girls
Mean Girls is no Heathers--it lacks the surreal quality of the teenage years, the quality that's found a strange but correct analogue in supernatural teen dramas like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sabrina the Teenage Witch--but it's pretty good. Really, when you think about what sort of crap is out there for teenagers, about how teenagers live and interact and what Hollywood thinks is at stake for them (Chasing Liberty, anyone?), Mean Girls starts to look great. It's funny, lively, and smart, with a couple of characters who seem realer than not, and had I seen it as a teenager it might have changed something for me. (EMILY HALL)
The Mother
A familial love triangle from the UK, featuring Anne Reid as the grandma who sleeps with her married daughter's lover, a carpenter named Darren.
Raising Helen
More than anything, actually, this movie feels like a PG-13 version of Sex and the City, where instead of the cherubic moneybags Carrie Bradshaw you have the fairly well-off and cherubic Helen Harris, both of whom everyone always adores. Even Sex and the City's John Corbett has a role (as a Lutheran pastor) to save the day in the romance department. (JENNIFER MAERZ)
Sacred Planet
No one who has graduated from the fifth grade ever goes to see IMAX movies. So I can't imagine that it's worth my time to tell you about the latest IMAX addition, Sacred Planet, because what do you care? You don't want to go see a beautifully filmed educational movie showing some of the most breathtaking areas of the world (like Namibia, Thailand, and Borneo). Even if it is narrated by Robert Redford, you're still not gonna go! But I went. And I'm glad I did. Because besides it being all pretty and stuff, there's this really funny part when a big dumb bear is trying to catch a slippery little fish in the shallow part of an Alaskan river. And no matter how much he paws and pounces around in the water that dumb bear just can't catch that damn fish. Hahahaha. Stupid bear. (MEGAN SELING)
Shrek 2
Shrek 2 can best be described with a shrug. As in: It's fine, no big deal, just what you would expect. It is a harmless home run--uninspired, for the most part (especially when compared to the original), but certainly watchable. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
A Slipping-Down Life
An adaptation of an Anne Tyler novel about a provincial Southern town and its insistently quirky residents, including an amusement-park employee (Lili Taylor) and her rockstar love interest. (Guy Pearce)
* Soul Plane
You know if Snoop Dogg's the pilot, the plane's gonna be high class all the way--emphasis on "high." And in this spoof of Airplane, the skies have never been friendlier, as the newest black-owned airline in the country, NWA, takes off from Terminal X and goes on a bumpy maiden voyage. Although most of the laughs fall back on crude, slapsticky stereotypes of racial and sexual identities, for a breezy comedy Soul Plane is still a fairly funny ride. (JENNIFER MAERZ)
* Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
The five seasons are governed by very different generic conventions--meaning it's entirely possible to enjoy one and abhor the next. The opening parable "Summer" is successful, but the next two episodes (a coming-of-age vignette and a cop drama) come up short by comparison. Then "Winter"--by far the most successful segment, and the only full episode to feature director Kim Ki-duk as the main character--explodes into an astounding ode to labor and atonement. (ANNIE WAGNER)
* Super Size Me
It is uncannily hard to watch the preparatory stages of Morgan Spurlock's diet experiment in Super Size Me, the stage during which he visits doctors and nutritionists who calibrate, in every thinkable way, the ways in which he is perfectly healthy. Watching this man--all happy, puppyish energy and handlebar mustache--prepare to throw himself under the wheels of the fast-food juggernaut has the eerie air of readying for sacrifice. Why would a person do such a thing? Don't we all know that fast food is bad for us? Well, apparently we don't know, or didn't know, precisely the horrifying extent. And lest you think that this film is only for Fast Food Nation types, that it's aimed only at those who already have the information, remember that Spurlock put his own body on the line to get your attention. That's why he did it. He did it for you. (EMILY HALL)
* This So-Called Disaster
In the end, though we never see Sam Shepard's play, we're afforded huge insight not only into The Late Henry Moss, but into the mind of a fascinating American artist at work. Best of all is the documentary's neat trick of making theater seem like an entirely worthwhile endeavor, which is no small achievement. (SEAN NELSON)
* The Triplets of Belleville
Writer-director-animator Sylvain Chomet invokes the same absurdly entertaining nostalgia that Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro tapped into for Delicatessen and City of Lost Children. The world Chomet has created contains the same deadpan sadness that lies at the base of those films--the world may be a cold and lonely place, but with a little inventiveness you can prosper. (ANDY SPLETZER)
Troy
Bland, but pretty--a fairly solid description of Troy on the whole. Wherever Wolfgang Peterson's talent ran off to, I'm sure he'll pay a handsome reward for its return, for Troy is far too stock and far too obvious to be a success. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Van Helsing
Monster huntin' was better back in the 19th century.
What the #$*! Do We Know?!
I never got around to figuring out what a quantum leap is, but now I think I know: It's when you make a short jump from quantum mechanics to New Age self-help kookiness. That's what happens in this ungainly, inane film, which purports to be about quantum physics but is really about the power of positive thinking, with a midlife-crisis plot (starring Marlee Matlin) and some childish cartoon figures and a series of talking heads who can't stop using the word "paradigm." (EMILY HALL)
