Tools
After the Thin Man
See review this issue. Grand Illusion, Weekdays 9 pm, Sat-Sun 5, 9 pm.
Angel Face
SAM's film noir series continues with this 1952 film by Otto Preminger about an ambulance driver played by Robert Mitchum. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Nov 11 at 1:30 pm.
Bauhaus in America
A documentary exploring the impact of the Bauhaus on American architecture. Discussion with filmmaker Judith Pearlman follows. Seattle Art Museum, Wed Nov 10 at 7 pm.
* Blues for Lovers
A genuine curio from 1964, this British-made vehicle for Ray Charles transforms its star into a magic Negro who touches the lives of a little blind ofay, his miserable mother, her snobby muso boyfriend, and, presumably, the hearts and minds of the United Kingdom in the process. From its opening scene of Charles singing "Hit The Road, Jack" to a roomful of pasty-faced little Brits (who sing the backing vocals in a chorale straight out of Oliver!), to its many "concert" scenes featuring the Ray Charles band at the height of its greatness, this movie is both ridiculous and rewarding, and highly recommended to anyone who loves Ray Charles or revels in the cinema of the misbegotten. One night only! (SEAN NELSON) Northwest Film Forum, Fri Nov 5 at 7, 9 pm.
A Bookshelf on Top of the Sky
A documentary about John Zorn. Northwest Film Forum, Tues-Wed 7 pm.
Bright Leaves
See review this issue. Varsity, Fri-Sun 1:50, 4:20, 7, 9:25 pm, Mon-Thurs 7, 9:25 pm.
Denis A. Charles: An Interrupted Conversation
A documentary about the avant-garde drummer. Tues-Wed 8:45 pm.
El Movimiento
A documentary about a Mayan shaman named Don Chabo and his only disciple, Chicago-based anthropologist William Hanks. Consolidated Works, Fri-Sun 8 pm.
Fourteen Hours
Film noir about a jumper on a ledge. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Nov 4 at 7:30 pm.
* Gattaca
In the sci-fi cinema of the '90s, DNA science replaced robotic science as the technology that enhances human performance. But whereas most films expressed anxiety about this new order of things, the movie Gattaca (1997) expressed a profound sadness. For the hero in Gattaca (Ethan Hawke), DNA technology was simply a new and improved mechanism for control. Instead, machines (the rockets of Gattaca) represented to him the means of liberation from a world dominated by the ideology of genetic perfection. My talk tonight at the Science Fiction Museum will elaborate on this reading of the best sci-fi film of the '90s. (CHARLES MUDEDE) EMP's JBL Theater, Fri Nov 5 at 7 pm.
Growing Up Fast
A short personal documentary, plus a discussion with filmmaker Joanna Lipper. On the Boards, Mon Nov 8 at 7 pm.
* His Girl Friday
This film is near the pinnacle of American cinematic achievement. (SEAN NELSON) Rendezvous, Wed Nov 10 at 7:30 pm.
Indie Music Video Festival
Tired of seeing the latest Britney Spears video when you turn on MTV? Looking for something edgier and more interesting, maybe in a bar setting? Well, do I have the event for you! Head out to the Sunset Tavern on Wednesday to catch the Indie Music Video Festival. The bands range from KMFDM to Luna, plus a bunch you've never heard before. The videos are the reason to be here, though. See what indie bands are doing on a variety of budgets, from animation to live action to all sorts of weird stuff in between. If you get bored by one, head to the bar for another Budweiser and wait for the next. There will be two different programs of videos, followed by live music by B. Amateur of Dorkweed. (ANDY SPLETZER) Sunset Tavern, Wed Nov 10. Part 1 at 8 pm, part 2 at 10 pm.
KPFA on the Air
A documentary about the nation's first listener-supported radio station. Capitol Hill Library, Wed Nov 10 at 6:30 pm.
Land in Black and White
A featurette comparing the plight of displaced South African villagers with the Palestinian people. Ethnic Cultural Theater, Sun Nov 7 at 7 pm.
The Last of the First
A documentary about the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, one of the longest running jazz groups in history. Northwest Film Forum, Sat-Sun 6:30 pm.
Masada Live at Tonic
Tonic is a New York nightclub. Masada is, in member John Zorn's words, "radical Jewish music." Northwest Film Forum, Sat-Sun 8:30 pm.
* Nina Simone: Love Sorceress
There are some (not many) people who, despite having being born in ordinary or impoverished circumstances, are in manner and mode innately aristocratic. These types have every right to look down on others (even their parents) because they are naturally better, made of higher moral stuff. Such a person is the American jazz singer and pianist Nina Simone, who died in France early last year. Love Sorceress, a documentary of a concert Simone gave in 1976 at the Earshot Jazz Festival in Paris, makes clear that she was a queen, but all that remained of her long lost country (its people, customs, cities, courts) was the beautiful music she composed and performed. (CHARLES MUDEDE) Northwest Film Forum, Tues-Thurs 7, 9 pm.
Penitentiary 3
Grand Illusion launches its Baadd Side of Black Action series with this 1987 film starring Leon Isaac Kennedy as a man wrongfully convicted of murder. Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm.
Shadow of the Himalayas: How People Live in Nepal
A locally produced short film about Nepal. Seattle Mountaineers Clubhouse, Thurs Nov 1 at 7 pm.
* Sweet Smell of Success
Two mediocre movie stars, Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, are set alight by the greatness of the film they were fortunate enough to star in, playing, respectively, a corrupt maven of a newspaper columnist and an up-and-coming publicist who can't wait to get his hands dirty and his feet wet. A deeply moral script by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets(!) and awe-striking cinematography by James Wong Howe make this film eternal. (SEAN NELSON) Movie Legends, Sun Nov 7 at 1 pm.
Sweetmoves
The premiere screening of a workout video that will make you a rock star in bed. That is, if you're in a famous band and if your bed is on stage in an auditorium filled with thousands of screaming fans. Otherwise, you can bounce and shimmy all you like, but I am afraid you still won't be a rock star. Sorry. Toys in Babeland, Sun Nov 7 at 11 am.
The Thin Man
See review this issue. Grand Illusion, Weekdays, Weekdays 7 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 7 pm.
Third Eye Cinema
A quarterly film program dedicated to experimental and personal cinema and curated by Jon Behrens. Mon Nov 8 at 7, 9 pm.
Where Are We? Where Are We Going?
Twenty seven short pieces combining film and live performance and exploring "the temporal nature of film and the timelessness of video." Or something. Northwest Film Forum, Thurs-Sun 8 pm.
NOW PLAYING
Alfie
See review this issue.
Being Julia
Annette Bening throws herself into each dizzying emotion with abandon, but the histrionics are so grossly out of proportion with the charm or threat posed by her schoolboy lover that the emotional center of the film is hollowed out. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Birth
The story may posit a slew of blather about soul transference and the world beyond, but, crucially, the film never quite comes off as believing its own pitch. One well-staged (and much hyped) bathtub encounter aside, there's nothing here that clammily lingers the way it should. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
* 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), the best car chase ever filmed (fact!). Remember director Paul Greengrass's masterful handheld choreography. Best of all, remember the supporting cast: Brian Cox, Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, Franka Potente, all of whom, along with Damon--whose robotic beauty has never better served a character than this one--help to elevate the Robert Ludlum pulp into a high lowbrow masterpiece. (SEAN NELSON)
* End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones
While this is hardly a gauche Behind the Music episode, Johnny's brusque temperament is never masked, and the band members discuss not getting along without any sort of nostalgic gloss (the moment when Johnny wonders why he felt sad after Joey's death when the two hadn't been friends for years is especially poignant). But unlike Hey! Is Dee Dee Home?, which focuses on the drug addictions that ripped through that scene, Century dwells on neither the high nor the low points of the band, instead offering a well-balanced and captivating look at a multifaceted, influential act. (JENNIFER MAERZ)
* The Forgotten
The Forgotten is a surprisingly strong mainstream thriller, with twists that are both implausible and utterly credible, thanks especially to the open-wound vulnerability of the great Julianne Moore. (SEAN NELSON)
Friday Night Lights
A working-class football movie starring Billy Bob Thornton.
* Garden State
Zack Braff's debut film, Garden State, which he wrote, directed, and stars in, may very well be a similar act of egogasm (when you put Simon and Garfunkel on the soundtrack of your examination of disaffected twentysomethings, you're just asking for it), but it features enough odd grace notes among the rampant navel-gazing to warrant a watch. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
The Grudge
The ghost in The Grudge is to horror films what Ebola is to pathology. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
* Hero
Hero is an awesome chop-socky epic with an honestly moving emotional backbeat. This time, at least, the hype can be believed. I could watch it every night. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
I * Huckabees
While there are many characters, themes, plots, and subplots in Huckabees, the real conflicts are all dialectical--existential detectives vs. nihilist temptress, surrealistic idealist vs. empirical purist, etc. And even though these precepts are embodied by famous actors, the entire film winds up feeling like an abstraction, rather than a dramatization, of a philosophical quandary. That doesn't mean Huckabees fails to entertain; it just means that the viewer is required to discern a pattern from a seemingly random blizzard of ideas blowing across the screen. (SEAN NELSON)
* The Incredibles
See review this issue.
* The Motorcycle Diaries
This is a film that should be taken for what it is: a beautifully constructed road movie with a dash of conscience on the side. There is much to despise about Che Guevara later in his life; these early adventures help us understand where the eventual fanatic was born. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
* 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)
Office Space
"This is a fuck!" Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight.
* Primer
Primer, the $7,000 debut from director/writer/editor/composer/actor/egghead Shane Carruth may very well be one of the best American movies of the year, and I'll be damned if I understood more than 40 percent of it. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
* Proteus
Thematically and aesthetically, Proteus owes an enormous debt to three directors: Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, and Todd Haynes. What these directors have in common is that their movies are preoccupied with what the French social historian Foucault once called limit experiences: the point at which stable identities (sexual identities, class identities, and racial identities--in that order) break down, and new sensations, perceptions, subjectivities are momentarily experienced. In the case of Proteus, it is sexual and racial identities (in that order) that are challenged and transformed. Set in 18th-century South Africa, the film is about a literate Hottentot named Claas Blank (Rouxnet Brown) who is sentenced to 10 years on the infamous Robben Island for a petty crime. While serving his sentence, he befriends a botanist (Shaun Smyth) and also becomes the lover of a Dutch prisoner (Neil Sandilands) who is doing hard time for sodomy. The prison officials are aware of the love affair but action is not taken against it for 10 years. What would seem impossible (gay interracial sex) at the time is possible, and to a certain extent tolerated. Based on a true story, Proteus is shot on digital video, and though most of the characters are dressed in what we in the 21st century would recognize as the threads of the 18th century, often characters in mid-20th-century attire (with mid-20th-century technologies--cars, radios, typewriters) appear and disrupt that illusion. However, the disruption (the penetration of the peak of South Africa's apartheid period into its deep and messy past) actually works because Proteus is, above all, about the forces, the passions, the bodies that apartheid-era South Africa brutally repressed to maintain the weakest semblance of sanity. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
* Ray
Despite a tendency to bathe in the molasses of sentimentality, Ray is a rich exponent of the biopic genre. It'd be crazy not to attribute the film's success to the brilliance of its subject, the inestimably great American composer Ray Charles, and the constant presence on the soundtrack of his songs, but the choices made by the filmmakers certainly don't hurt. Chief among them, the casting of Jamie Foxx, up to now a cloying black comic, and hereafter a dazzling performer capable of inhabiting one of the most recognizable faces of the 20th century in a mesmerizing feat of impersonation. Imposing a narrative on a life, especially one filled with so many contradictions (i.e. beloved entertainer/ abusive junkie cheapskate) may be a fool's errand, but this film is satisfying nonetheless. (SEAN NELSON)
Remember Me, My Love
See review this issue.
* Saw
To call Saw a study in "ham and cheese" (to steal a line from director Paul Thomas Anderson) would be a massive understatement. Cary Elwes doesn't just chew the scenery here, he fully consumes, digests, and ejects it, delivering a performance that would be sheer comic genius if he weren't so obviously sincere. A must-see comic debacle. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Shall We Dance?
In Shall We Dance?, an estate planner (Richard Gere) wants to fuck a mysterious dance instructor (Jennifer Lopez). His marriage is safe, dull, and very white; in a flash he sees the exact opposite of all that he is--a brown voluptuous woman. She thrives in the heart of the city (Chicago); he is imprisoned in the suburbs. She has passion; he has a pension. As always, the North wants to hump the South. He makes a cautious move toward his desire, but what he ends up with are a bunch of dance lessons instead of sex. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
Shark Tale
Dreamworks' newest faux-Disney offering is a drably animated parable about the perils of watching too much Cribs. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Shaun of the Dead
In the recent glut of financially successful zombie flicks--from 28 Days Later to the remake of Dawn of the Dead--the UK-made Shaun is the clear spiritual and intellectual winner, a film that simultaneously respects and satirizes the zombie genre. (ERIK HENRIKSEN)
* Sideways
See review this issue.
* Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Director Conran has managed to make something in Sky Captain that both harks back and leaps forward at the same time, and it is without a doubt, on a purely technical level, one of the bravest major studio pictures ever released. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Surviving Christmas
Surviving Christmas is like Gigli, but with Christmas. By that I don't mean that it's about a lesbian falling for a low-level mobster--I mean it's a piece of shit. (JENNIFER MAERZ)
* Tarnation
As the footage of his childhood reveals, Jonathan Caouette is a born performer with a commitment to self-invention that verges on scary. But the performance of Tarnation is much grander than its components. It's a heroic assertion of life that's accompanied by a chilling history of compelling arguments against it; the film embraces hope without denying the self-destructive impulse. In many ways, it's the story of a performer in search of an audience. The greatest irony of all is that its author has now found one, but only by tearing down all pretense of self-aggrandizement--Caouette achieves beauty by showing his ugliest self. (SEAN NELSON)
Taxi
My standards weren't set very high. Jimmy Fallon played Jimmy Fallon, Queen Latifah played Queen Latifah, and the supermodels wore a lot of short skirts. But I laughed, so, you know, it was fine. (MEGAN SELING)
Team America: World Police
Team America's comedy may run from inspired to painfully flat, and the politics may be far too simplistic, but Parker and Stone have done one thing better than anyone has before: They've made the greatest marionette movie of all time. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Undertow
The brutality in Undertow is blunt and real, but its logic is the stuff of dreams, specifically nightmares, and more specifically, the nightmares of young boys. Throughout the film people are beaten over the head with blunt instruments, throats are slashed, and rusty nails impale feet--the whole vibe is one of constant peril. Ultimately, Undertow evokes a peculiar inner and outer world, in which subconscious mingles with conscious and storybook escapades collide with grindhouse brutality. These contradictions would almost be reason enough to recommend it, if the film weren't so unrelentingly unpleasant to behold. (SEAN NELSON)
Vanity Fair
The problem with Reese Witherspoon as Becky is linked to the way this film tries to reinvent her character. Thackeray's secret sympathy for his conniving protagonist--who is so bad she even hates children--always seeps through the cynical narration. Becky Sharp is great because, no matter how much we admire her pluck from the safe distance of the 21st century, she was a terrible bitch. Mira Nair does not agree. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Vera Drake
The title character, played with impossible pathos and naiveté by Imelda Staunton, is a housekeeper, mother, visitor of shut-ins, and part-time abortionist. She is paid for polishing fireplace grates in rich people's homes, but the latter three functions--feeding and clothing her family of four, putting the kettle on in the cramped flats of various invalids, and pumping the uteruses of troubled women full of a noxious solution of carbolic soap--she performs gratis. The narrative is clearly engaged in modern political struggles, but at the same time it's a bruising, classical tragedy about a woman whose passionate altruism brings pain and suffering upon herself and the people whom she loves. (ANNIE WAGNER)
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