Tools
* Blazing Saddles
Mel Brooks' masterwork about a black sheriff in the old West rides again. Outdoors, even. Fremont Outdoor Movies #1, Fri Aug 13 at dusk.
Classroom Classics #6
Educational films from the '50s, '60s, and '70s. Linda's, Wed Aug 18 at dusk.
* Dazed and Confused
"That's what I like about these high-school girls--I keep getting older, they stay the same age." U District Outdoor Cinema, Sat Aug 14 at dusk.
The Eagle
Rudolph Valentino stars in this silent adaptation of the Pushkin story set in Czarist Russia. Paramount, Mon Aug 16 at 7 pm.
The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream
The surburban way of life is being threatened by the end of cheap fossil fuels. (Tear.) Capitol Hill Arts Center, Tues Aug 17 at 7 pm. 21+ w/ ID required.
Felix the Cat Shorts
Otto Messmer cartoons from the 1920s. Rendezvous, Wed Aug 18 at 7:30 pm.
Fluid Drive
A surf movie starring Rory Russel, Peter Townend, and Ian Cairns. Rendezvous, Thurs Aug 19 at 8 pm.
* Home Movie Day
This celebration of amateur film takes submissions from the rabble--bring your home masterworks (originally shot on 8 mm, Super 8 mm, or 16 mm) to MOHAI in advance of the day itself. Museum of History and Industry, Sat Aug 14, 11 am-4 pm.
Ju-On
See review this issue. Varsity, Fri-Sun 12:30, 2:45, 5, 7:30, 9:45 pm, Mon-Thurs 7:30, 9:45 pm.
* Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring
Right down to Frodo's face on the poster, Fellowship is all about rising above doubts (rather than stepping up to convictions), and all the special effects in the world can't convey that. (SEAN NELSON) Seattle Center Outdoor Cinema, Fri Aug 13 at dusk.
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
After greeting the first two films with slack-jawed reverence, I found myself viewing the third with a kind of grumpy anticipation. What I soon discovered, however, was that the begrudging-ness of my affection for the film was no match for Peter Jackson's swashbuckling craft. If this is just a fantasy, Jackson seems to say, it's going to deliver on every level available. (SEAN NELSON) Seattle Center Outdoor Cinema, Sun Aug 15 at dusk.
* Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
The film resonates so deeply, despite its potentially embarrassing fantasy trappings, because the filmmaker recognizes that violence and sacrifice are unavoidable aspects of the survival of civilizations. (SEAN NELSON) Seattle Center Outdoor Cinema, Sat Aug 14 at dusk.
Mama Africa
Three short fables about resisting temptation, each introduced by Queen Latifah. Richard Hugo House, Sun Aug 15 at 4 and 8:30 pm.
Monkey Business
Cary Grant and Ginger Roberts star in this story of a research scientist messing with a formula to preserve youth forever. (Chimps, which are not monkeys at all, but apes, are the reserach subjects.) Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Aug 12 at 7:30 pm.
* The Mystery of Picasso
Most movies about artists gesture at the same ideas: the genius out of whack with the rest of the world, the self-destructive lifestyle, the cost of fame. But there is a perfect film about the artist, working, and it is The Mystery of Picasso (Le Mystère Picasso), made in 1956 by Picasso and the French director Henri-Georges Clouzot. While Picasso works in ink on a semi-transparent surface, Clouzot films him from the other side. The result is miraculous. It's widely known that all or most of the paintings created in service of this film were destroyed by the artist after the shoot, a reminder that Le Mystère Picasso is about process, not fame; about the act of painting, not the painting itself. (EMILY HALL) Seattle Art Museum, Fri Aug 13 at 7:30 pm.
The Neverending Story
Poor, oppressed dreamer Bastian finds solace--and then an intimidating dose of responsiblity--in a storybook about a land called Fantasia. Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight.
Pixote
Hector Babenco's 1981 film about a 10-year-old homeless kid named Pixote and his struggle to subsist on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Movie Legends, Sun Aug 15 at 1 pm.
* Tom Dowd and the Language of Music
Tom Dowd was a respected and extremely hardworking engineer and producer who collaborated with all manner of performers, from John Coltrane to Lynyrd Skynyrd. During his remarkable career, he helped popularize eight-track recording technology and implemented all kinds of little innovations that made the work of studio engineers more responsive to the music they were recording. All this turgid greatness-sans-stardom could have been rather dull for the viewer (save the biggest music geek), but there's a twist. Dowd spent some of his young adulthood in the physics lab at Columbia University--part of a network ultimately known as the Manhattan Project--helping to develop and test the atom bomb. So the producer who will later be praised as a "father figure," "coach," and "psychologist," the man whose contribution to Atlantic Records will be hailed as "inestimable," once contributed to the dawn of the nuclear age. The documentary doesn't dwell on this fact for long, but the levity that it introduces serves to complicate Dowd's life, and in doing so, invigorates what could have been a just another bloodless epitaph. (ANNIE WAGNER) Grand Illusion, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm.
Westworld
Michael Crichton wrote and directed this 1973 movie about robots. Suspiciously human-looking robots. Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm.
* Young Frankenstein
Gene Wilder--who built a career being both a sweet, composed gentleman and bug-eyed, raving lunatic--is perfect as the tortured Friedrich von Frankenshteen, and Marty Feldman certainly never did better. But it is the sweet-voiced Madeline Kahn who adds the vital third dimension to this comedy; a dimension that, since her untimely death, has only deepened to a softly tragic undertone. (Jamie Hook) Fremont Outdoor Movies #2, Sat Aug 14 at dusk.
NOW PLAYING
Alien vs. Predator
The title says it all. Except that said personages are in Antartica. Maybe they should have called it Alien vs. Predator in Antartica. Then they could have made Alien vs Predator in Borneo and Alien vs. Predator in Kazakhstan as sequels.
* Anchorman
Anchorman is one of the most inspired pieces of comedic surrealism ever to be released in the guise of a mainstream summer movie. (SEAN NELSON)
* Before Sunset
The best romances force you to care unreasonably about their characters, and watching Jesse and Celine reunited, I couldn't help but feel a bittersweet twinge; I was 21 when Before Sunrise was released--just as dreamy and dewy as I could be--and now, nearly a decade later, their return feels like the arrival of beloved, yet somehow forgotten, friends. I fell in love with them then and, as I found out, I'm still in love with them. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
* The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
Although "Beat" Takeshi Kitano's attempts at inserting choreography are probably better as an idea than they are in execution, the movie is still funny and light, and deliciously gory to boot. It is also deceptive. For one thing, it's a kind of quasi-musical. There isn't much singing, and the big dance number doesn't come until the very end, but Kitano most definitely had something musical in mind. (ADAM HART)
* The Bourne Supremacy
Forget the plot. Remember the dizzying fight scenes, the indefatigable cloak and dagger in which everyone is the smartest person in the room (and Bourne is the smartest of them all), and the best car chase ever filmed (fact!). (SEAN NELSON)
Catwoman
Halle Berry said in an interview that the role was "empowering." Now that's just embarrassing. (MEGAN SELING)
A Cinderella Story
So this girl and this boy meet online. They "chat" every night, text message all day, and while they know they go to the same high school, they're never really sure about who they're talking to. After doing this for quite some time, the stupid jerks are convinced they're falling in love with their computer companions but they never bother to ask who the fuck it really is?! Bullshit! I've been to high school, ain't nothing a secret in that place! Someone always knows someone else's business, so if Lizzy McGuire really wanted to know who her Prince Charming was, all she'd have to do is ask around and someone would put two and two together! Problem solved, movie over. Seriously. (MEGAN SELING)
Code 46
See review this issue.
Collateral
As polished and pleasant as all this scenery is (and as good as both Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx are), Collateral nonetheless fails, both as a thriller and as yet another entry into Michael Mann's brooding-men oeuvre. What may have been intended as a thinking man's thriller--patient, observant, character-driven--is thoroughly derailed by a surprising source: Mann's inability to shoot action. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
* Control Room
Like the recent documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Control Room offers us a look from the inside of the other side. Al Jazeera has 40 million viewers in the Arab world, and it shows its part of the world things that the American networks don't show their part of the world. The future may very well recognize Al Jazeera as the first genuinely global institution of the 21st century. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
The Corporation
Basically, the movie looks down upon the masses of people who thoughtlessly consume products made by corrupt corporations. But you know what? I identify more with the masses than I do with the filmmakers; if I want to spend 145 minutes being told I'm an idiot, I'd rather spend that time in the singles bars. (ANDY SPLETZER)
De-Lovely
The sub rosa insinuation of Cole Porter's homosexuality in the 1946 biopic Night and Day rings much truer to the life one imagines a gay man leading in the '20s and '30s, but the fine performances of Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd diminish De-Lovely's more troublesome liberties. (SEAN NELSON)
* Facing Windows
Throughout the film, Ferzan Ozpetek's golden light conveys romance and elegy at once, and several times he brings striking images of great beauty and depth to the screen. The film's opening sequence depicts a bloody handprint fading over time as dawn light illuminates the wall that carries it, moving the narrative forward by 50 years. The handprint faded from the wall but replayed in my mind long after the film's screening. (MIKE WHYBARK)
* Fahrenheit 9/11
Michael Moore is a propagandist, taking the fight to the opposition on their terms, and winning. Because of his motives and his audience, this propagandist is the most important filmmaker we have, and Fahrenheit 9/11 is the best film he's ever made. (SEAN NELSON)
* Garden State
See review this issue.
* Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
Those who smoke pot will laugh, those who smoke pot before the show will laugh harder, and those who don't smoke pot at all will wonder why everyone around them is laughing. Personally, I laughed hard on more than one occasion--not that I'm admitting anything. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
* Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
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)
I, Robot
This movie is not bad or good; it is what it is--a big summer movie with lots of special effects. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
Intimate Strangers
See review this issue.
King Arthur
Though the film is basically crap, it's tremendously entertaining and engaging crap. (SEAN NELSON)
Little Black Book
The premise, of a girl who snoops in her boyfriend's Palm Pilot to look up his old girlfriends, is lame enough. And the plot doesn't make it any better. (AMY JENNIGES)
* The Manchurian Candidate
The resulting film is far from flawless--silly flourishes include the painful cliché of the retired professor the hero turns to for advice, and a gross pantomime of mental illness that's lifted straight out of A Beautiful Mind--but it's just as mesmerizing and suspenseful as the original. Meryl Streep is brilliant in a role that's perhaps even more challenging than the twisted mommy caricature her counterpart Angela Lansbury blew out of the water in the original. And Liev Schreiber, who plays "the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life" (or some permutation thereof), is perfectly cast and coiffed with a more-'50s-than-the-'50s 'do. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Maria Full of Grace
Following an angelic (i.e., stunningly gorgeous) young woman--pregnant and sick of life in her one-factory town--who joins up with the local drug lord for a single trip across the Colombian border, this first film from writer-director Joshua Marston is an admirably restrained, even-handed debut that wisely avoids making sweeping societal pronouncements, shrinking Maria's world--whether she's in rural Colombia or big-city New Jersey--to the small circle of people who directly impact her life. He lets the subject matter speak for itself, without too many direct embellishments--besides thankfully subtle comments linking various kinds of legal and illegal exploitation, and a few stabs at the very idea of a reactive drug policy. (ADAM HART)
* Napoleon Dynamite
In this charming new film, 24-year-old writer/ director Jared Hess mines the nebulous area between popular chic and weirdo freak, where outcast attributes are both quality, subtle comedy, and a charmingly dark part of our collective high-school unconscious. (JENNIFER MAERZ)
The Notebook
The Notebook is based on a Nicholas Sparks tome, and it bears the mark of all his work. That mark is complete and utter bullshit. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
* Open Water
This year's Sundance bidding champ, Open Water, made with a skeleton crew and produced on a budget unfair to most shoestrings, has a central gimmick that's hard to trump: actors in the water messing around with real live sharks. Based on true events, the film follows a yuppie couple as they get separated from their dive boat and spend the next few days at the mercy of the currents. Where husband-and-wife team Chris Kentis and Laura Lau excel is in creating the steadily mounting feeling that something could go terribly wrong at any moment, both in front of and behind the camera. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Princess Diaries II: Royal Engagement
Now I just know that all of you have seen the first enthralling installment of Disney's Princess Diaries, so no need for me to bore you with any sort of back-story, right? So here in part two, the once very awkward and geeky Princess Mia is all growed up and graduated from college, and she's finally old enough to be crowned queen. Just so happens, the pretty princess' grandmother (the lady from The Sound of Music), who is currently queen, decides to "step down" (it's a Disney movie, brah, of course they're not going to kill anyone off), which would allow Princess Mia to be Queen Mia. Yippee! But there's a catch! Oh no! Mia can only be crowned queen, according to the rulebook, if she's married. And so if the very single Princess Mia can't bag a man in 30 days or less, a handsome and naíve jerk-off is gonna be crowned king! As it happens, though, Princess Mia has a little crush on the handsome and naíve jerk-off, making it difficult to fall in love with another man and marry before the deadline. How perfect for him, huh? Now with his charm the evil prince can foil Mia's wedding plans, make her miss the 30-day deadline, and be crowned king! Oooh, that bastard. (MEGAN SELING)
* Riding Giants
This fascinating exploration of the culture of big-wave surfing by the director of the skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys is distinguished by the quality of its footage. I have no idea how Stacy Peralta and his crew managed to get on top of the water the way they do, but the actual surfing in this movie is heroic. (SEAN NELSON)
She Hate Me
See review this issue.
Spider-man 2
In Sam Raimi's vision of Spider-Man, however, his normally manic camera joins with CGI to create a work that is often completely fraudulent. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
The Stepford Wives
This 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)
The Story of the Weeping Camel
Considerably less interesting than the human plot, the camel plot concerns a mother camel who rejects her baby camel. The baby wants mommy to feed her but mommy refuses to open her legs and feed the starving baby. If the mother were not a camel then one would understand why she wouldn't want that ugly little creature sucking on her breasts. But she is a camel, and all camels are ugly--her rejection of her baby makes no sense at all. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
* Super Size Me
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)
Thunderbirds
There are two important elements from the original TV series that the movie has retained. One is a distinctly sadistic bent, which requires that a member of the Tracy family has to pass out or suffer smoke inhalation or get thoroughly messed up before his brothers bring him to safety. The second element is the Thunderbirds themselves, which used to look like Hot Wheels on steroids (it was a puppet show, after all) and still look just like miniature models filmed in close-up. Fancy that. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Touch of Pink
Remember The Wedding Party? This is sort of like that, only the hapless, put-upon son is Muslim-Canadian, and his happy, super-gay life is in London. When his parents show up, absolutely intent on arranging a marriage for him, things get uncomfortable.
* The Twilight Samurai
Twilight Samurai stands out because it takes the samurai genre out of the semi-mythic setting that Western audiences are used to. It depicts the unglamorous daily routine of a samurai who doesn't actually do much fighting, even if he does always carry his sword on his belt. Seibei Iguchi (Hiroyuki Sanada), the twilight samurai himself, embodies the opposite of nearly everything Japanese society values in its males, then and now. Iguchi is an ideal family man, who loves his family in ways that his fellow samurai don't understand. (ADAM HART)
THE VILLAGE
Here's a twist: The Village is dull, painful, obvious, pretentious, and stupid. (Actually, thinking back on Signs, that's not really much a twist at all.) (BRADLEY STEINBACHER
Word Wars
It's a shame that the narrative of this documentary is so frequently disrupted by shoddy computer graphics and unfunny jokes by the directors, because the subject (and these four Scrabble players in particular) is fascinating. (CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE)
Yu-Gi-Oh!
The imdb.com message boards are all abuzz with discussion of the scintillating topic "Which is better? Yu-Gi-Oh! or Pokemon," if that tells you anything.
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