LIMITED RUN


Bend-It Extravaganza
The film portion of the arts festival for queer young people is split into two nights. Both segments will be screened at Velocity Dance Studio 2. The Flaming Film Festival (from Minneapolis) is Sat June 19 at 6 pm, and the JUNK Film Festival (from San Francisco) is Sun June 20 at 6 pm.

The Bridge
A documentary chock-full of interviews with queer people of all generations. Richard Hugo House, Mon June 21 at 6:30, 9 pm.

Fox and His Friends
This 1975 film is Fassbinder's most autobiographical work. Movie Legends, Sun June 20 at 1 pm.

* Greendale
See Stranger Suggests. I'm not a fan of Neil Young's music, but his film is simply (in both senses of that word) wonderful (again, in both senses of that word). Greendale is not a work of art; it is a work of madness. A work of art is shaped by an artist (a conscious individual); a work of madness is shaped by a dreamer (an unconscious individual). Young's dream is political but, as Jameson once put it in another context, it is politically unconscious. The native people of Australia believe they are the awakened descendants of a people who lived in a dreamtime--a period of history that was one long dream. If one were to make a movie of this period in Aboriginal history it would look like Greendale, which is American primitivism at its best--meaning, its most dreamy. (Charles Mudede) Seattle Art Museum, Sun June 20 at 7, 9 pm.

I Live in Fear
In this 1955 Kurosawa film, an elderly Japanese man's nuclear paranoia prompts the family to try to have him declared incompetent in a court of law. Grand Illusion, Fri 5, 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm, Mon-Thurs 7, 9 pm.

Living Hell
A 2000 Japanese horror film in which a wheelchair-bound boy suffers at the hands of two sadistic female relatives. Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm.

New Voices
See review this issue. Seattle Art Museum, Sat June 19 at 7 pm.

* The Odds of Recovery
Many of Su Friedrich's previous films have been autobiographical in the way that novels are thought to be autobiographical--which is to say, obliquely. There is nothing oblique about The Odds of Recovery (2002), an experimental documentary chronicling the filmmaker's frustrating encounters with an imperceptive healthcare system, from surgeries to treatments for an ongoing hormonal imbalance. Friedrich's filmmaking is supple--the combination of sterile video from doctors' offices with lyrical 16 mm elsewhere is particularly nice--and the narrative is extremely moving. The most obvious legacy of the '70s feminist avant-garde that was so prominent in her previous work is the way text interacts with the images (well that, and the fact that Yvonne Rainer gets name-checked in the acknowledgments); the phrase "the patient tolerated the procedure well" kicked around in my head for days after I saw the film. (ANNIE WAGNER) Consolidated Works, Fri-Sun 8 pm.

The People Next Door
Odds are that the people who live next door to you look like happy families, but in reality the parents are alcoholics and the kids are dealers or drug addicts. That's what you learn from this 1970 film. When a hot-headed father (Eli Wallach) finds his daughter in her closet tripping on LSD ("I hear mountains," she says again and again), he goes on a reluctant journey of discovery about this whole drug culture. (ANDY SPLETZER) Linda's, Wed June 23 at dusk.

* Princess Mononoke
The craggy reality of his twisting tree trunks capped with windblown tufts of leaves; the weighty presence of the rocks, whether rough or slicked smooth by water; the breathtaking vividness of light when the clouds part; the crouched expectancy of animals at rest--all of these are rendered as gorgeously as any animation I've ever seen, and in fact make a better plea for ecological sanity than the sometimes heavy-handed script. (BRUCE REID) Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight.

* The Saddest Music in the World
See review this issue. Varsity, Fri-Sun 12:15, 2:30, 4:45, 7:15, 9:35 pm, Mon-Thurs 7:15, 9:35 pm.

Say Anything
The John Cusack classic gets an outdoor screening at the Fremont Fair. Fremont Outdoor Movies, Sat June 19 at dusk.

Visions of Utopia
A Geoph Kozeny documentary about "intentional communities" (is that what they're calling communes these days?). Phinney Neighborhood Association, Wed June 23 at 7 pm.

NOW PLAYING


Around the World in 80 Days
The only adults I can fathom wanting to watch this unfunny movie are masochistic Californians just dying to see their elected governor prance about in a hot tub and gaze lustily at pale French maids. The Jackie Chan action sequences are few and feel tacked-on, and the cheesy message about the evils of 19th-century colonialism is cheerfully undermined by the xenophobia in the rest of the picture (the aforementioned Schwarzenegger plays a ditzy, polygamous Turkish prince whose most prized possession is a Rodin sculpture of himself). (ANNIE WAGNER)

Baadasssss!
See review this issue.

* 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)

The Chronicles of Riddick
Vin Diesel and Judi Dench get their sci-fi on.

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 Corporation
See review this issue.

* The Day After Tomorrow
German director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla) has saved the disaster film. 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)

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
In this upstanding comedy, a group of friends enters a dodgeball tournament in order to defend their local gym from being turned into a corporate health club. What happened to the good old days, when dodgeball was about throwing a ball at someone's head?

Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut
Having studied the film carefully a few times, I still can't tell if the plot's weird calculus--what actually happens, to whom, and where, and when--actually adds up to anything more than a semi-random sequence of related but unconnected events. What I can say, however, is that the film resonates with a uniquely American kind of sadness. (SEAN NELSON)

Ella Enchanted
Ella Enchanted stars saucer-eyed Anne Hathaway as a young woman cursed with total obedience. A quasi-feminist fairy tale vaguely inspired by the story of Cinderella (Ella--get it?), the film follows its heroine's quest to remove the curse, which naturally results in the obligatory romance with the hunky Prince Charmont. As family fluff with a girl-power message, Ella Enchanted actually presents a more sophisticated argument than a "serious" movie like, say, Whale Rider. By making the restrictions placed on the heroine internal (sort of) rather than external (such as conservo-fascist parents and chauvinistic traditions), the movie inches toward a subject that has not really been dealt with in mainstream film: the subservience this society attempts to program into its women. To the film's credit, it keeps its woman on top all the way through, even at the expense of logic and narrative coherence. (ADAM HART)

* 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)

Garfield: The Movie
Bill Murray once starred in Stripes, Meatballs, Rushmore, and numerous other funny-as-shit classics. For those movies, we will always love him. But the next generation, the generation that is currently young and dumb enough to be easily entertained by a fat, computerized cat, what are they going to know Bill Murray as? The fuckin' voice of Garfield in Garfield: The Movie! I don't really understand why this movie had to be made. Obviously nothing interesting happens. It isn't funny. At the screening I attended, a part that drew a good amount of laughs was Garfield asking "Got milk?" after drinking some milk. I mean, is that funny? What? No. Stop it. (MEGAN SELING)

* Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Alfonso CuarĂłn, who has taken the directing reigns from Chris Columbus this time around, has not turned the Potterheads' god into bullshit. Early word on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was that it was the best of the series, and for once early word was correct; for the first time in the franchise's existence, a film has achieved the level of art. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Hidalgo
Hidalgo screams Disney with its Wild West adventure, and especially the hammy relationship between Frank Hopkins (Viggo Mortensen) and his horse, Hidalgo. (KATHLEEN WILSON)

I'm Not Scared
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. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Love Me If You Dare
See review this issue.

Man on Fire
Denzel Washington stars as a bodyguard in Mexico with a passion for vengeance.

* Mean Girls
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, 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)

Raising Helen
More than anything, actually, this movie feels like a PG-13 version of Sex and the City. (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. (MEGAN SELING)

Saved!
See review this issue.

Shrek 2
Shrek 2 can best be described with a shrug. As in: It's fine, no big deal, just what you would expect. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Soul Plane
An award from a discrimination lawsuit gives a lowly passenger the chance to create a new airline in his own funky image.

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)

The Stepford Wives
The original, 1975 version of The Stepford Wives was a dark, brilliantly creepy psychological thriller focusing on a small town's conspiracy against the wives of its inhabitants. Like The Shining without all the blood, the madness is subtle, edging into the plot with subtle clues but holding on to the story's gripping twist until the end. The bright and shiny new millennium edition not only completely changes the ending, it's also too campy, two-dimensional, and sanitized for what was a very chilling portrait of domination and control in a sci-fi war of the sexes. (JENNIFER MAERZ)

Strayed
See review this issue.

* 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. (EMILY HALL)

The Terminal
See review this issue.

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)

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)

White Chicks
The Wayans brothers protect the hotel-heiress Hilton--err, Wilson--sisters from a heinous kidnapping plot.