From the Jan 20 – Jan 26, 2005 issue

Film

Film Shorts

LIMITED RUN


Altered States
The Science Fiction Museum's winter Readings + Films series kicks off with this 1980 film about a scientist who uses a sensory deprivation tank and mind-altering hallucinogens to get at the ultimate truth. EMP's JBL Theater, Fri Jan 21 at 9 pm.

Big City Dick
See Stranger Suggests. You know Richard Peterson from urban memories of your nostalgic past. He is that local musician that you've seen playing a trumpet on the streets of Seattle, yet you never knew his story. Johnny Mathis- and local media personality-obsessed, Richard Peterson will capture your heart and mind in this wonderful doc, much like the film captured the grand prize at Slamdance this past year. (SHANNON GEE) Rendezvous, Wed Jan 26 at 7 pm.

A Canterbury Tale
SAM's Michael Powell series continues with this film about three secular pilgrims heading to Canterbury at the beginning of World War II. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Jan 27 at 7:30 pm.

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) Keystone Church, Fri Jan 21 at 7 pm.

Coonskin
Ralph Bakshi's animated feature about a Harlem ghetto. Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm.

Dolls
See review this issue. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sun 6, 8:30 pm, Mon-Thurs 6:30, 9 pm.

Fear and Trembling
Have you heard the one about the missing stapler? Between the growing popularity of the BBC's masterful The Office and Dilbert's lingering stranglehold on the Sunday funnies, cubical humor should be just about played out. Despite this, Fear and Trembling, director Alain Corneau's affectionate ode to foreign bureaucracy, somehow manages to find a few new facets in white-collar drudgery, mainly due to an exceedingly game lead performance. Based on Amelie Nothomb's novel, the film follows a Belgian idealist's nightmare year working in Japan, from the initial avalanche of unfamiliar paperwork and alien office politics, to her ultimate demotion to toilet duty by her gloryhogging superior (the ultra-gorgeous Kaori Tsuiji). This is all fairly innocuous stuff, but Corneau thankfully possesses a light touch and an admirable gift for understating the punchline. The lion's share of the credit, though, goes to actress Sylvie Testud. Graced with a face that goes from interesting to stunning with a shift of the light, she radiates an aura that elevates the slight material around her. Whether grunting like a sumo, grimly dueling with a copy machine, or cartwheeling naked across the office at midnight, she keeps the film firmly on the endearing side of quirky. (ANDREW WRIGHT) Grand Illusion, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm.

The Green Butchers
I don't know about you, but when I think of comedy, two things immediately spring to mind: cannibalism and Scandinavians. The Green Butchers has both of these elements, and even though the film itself doesn't really succeed, you have to give director Anders Thomas Jensen credit for at least making an attempt. The story: Svend (Mads Mikkelsen) and Bjarne (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), two hapless butcher shop employees, make a go of setting up their own shop. What starts out as a disastrous enterprise quickly turns into an absurd success, however, when Svend accidentally locks an electrician in the freezer and, in a panic, decides to serve up some human cold cuts. This is bleak and twisted stuff, to be sure, but there's a beating heart buried deep within it--a small heart, probably about the size of a prune, but a heart nonetheless. And when all is said and done, the film is nearly worth it for its hilarious moral alone: "You can't turn a turtle into a racehorse, but you can turn it into a fast turtle." Huh? (BRADLEY STEINBACHER) Varsity, see Movie Times for details.

Inside Autism
A documentary by Jason Boritz. Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, Thurs Jan 20 at 7 pm.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
A British war veteran fixated on honorable conduct must come to terms with the altered terrain of World War II. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Jan 20 at 7:30 pm.

Notre Musique
See review this issue. Northwest Film Forum, Daily 7:15, 9 pm.

Pirates of the Caribbean
Directed with a steady, if somewhat unflourished hand by Gore Verbinski, Pirates of the Caribbean is the best kind of escapist entertainment--enjoyable while the lights are down, and quick to vaporize once the lights have returned. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER) Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight.

The Rural Route Film Festival
A selection of short films shot in the back roads of Indiana, Montana, Missouri, Illinois, West Virginia, and upstate New York. 911 Media Arts, Thurs Jan 20 at 7 pm.

Seattle Environmental Film Festival
Thirst isn't a work of art, but it has a very import message concerning the privatization of water by multinational corporations. In Bolivia, India, and the United States, governments, at the pressure of the World Bank and neo-liberalists such as the mayor of Stockton, California, are being forced to turn over water management from public to private interests. This documentary draws a broad picture of the pressures and resistances in this global trend, with a regrettably New Age-like score. (CHARLES MUDEDE) All films screen at Seattle Mountaineers Clubhouse. Thirst w/ Turtle World, Wild America, Fri Jan 21 at 6 pm. Monumental, Fri Jan 21 at 8:30 pm. Environmental shorts, Sat Jan 22 at 1:30 pm. The Troubled Water of Puget Sound, Sat Jan 22 at 2:15 pm. Velocity w/ Fed Up, Sat Jan 22 at 6:30 pm. Being Caribou (which would be my leading candidate for Best Movie Title ever), Sat Jan 22 at 6:30 pm. Burning Barrel w/ Broken Limbs, Sat Jan 22 at 8:20 pm.

Tales from the Gimli Hospital
Guy Maddin's 1988 "tribute to optical crackle" is about two friends who meet during a smallpox quarantine and torture each other with nightmarish stories. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sat 11 pm.

Trouble in Paradise
Ernst Lubitsch's sophisticated 1932 comedy, with Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall as a couple of "elegant" thieves who plot to rip off a rich widow. Movie Legends, Sun Jan 23 at 1 pm.

Yes, Ms. Davis!
Self-described "punk rocker, performance artist, actress, filmmaker, and walking installation piece," Vaginal Davis counts herself among those art mavericks who "took the Warhol adage of everyone will be famous for 15 minutes one step further, by creating new movements every 15 minutes." Over the past decade, Davis appeared everywhere, from the 2004 Venice Biennial to Vanity Fair's list of the 100 Most Influential Celebrities of the '90s, while her brain racked up its own honors--a PhD in Psychology from Columbia University, postdoctoral certification and licensing in marriage and family therapy--elevating Davis to her unique stature as an outsider artist with insider credentials. This week, for one night only, Vaginal Davis appears at Northwest Film Forum to host a "retrospectacle" of her entire experimental cinematic oeuvre, described by the good doctor as "like getting sucked into a conceptual vortex where unleashed dementia and high delusion rule." She's right. Hovering somewhere between Andy Warhol, John Waters, and some drunk's home movies, Davis' films announce themselves with an off-putting ramshackle quality that steadily blossoms with wit, style, and smarts--Madame George with a PhD, directing her own freak shows. (DAVID SCHMADER) Northwest Film Forum, Thurs Jan 20 at 8:30 pm.

NOW PLAYING


Are We There Yet?
Ice Cube stars as a player/babysitter. Aw.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon
See review this issue.

Assault on Precinct 13
See review this issue.

The Aviator
It may be impossible to fully know Howard Hughes, but DiCaprio and Scorsese can only offer the broadest of paint strokes here. Scorsese attempts to cover up the lack of depth in The Aviator by focusing heavily on both Hughes' love life as well as his daring in the skies, but no matter how many romantic entanglements and spectacular crashes we see, the film itself remains superficial. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Bad Education
Bad Education announces itself with a rich melodramatic subject--Catholic clergy sex abuse--only to reject all predictable conflict for an emotional and thematic territory all its own. It's a brilliant maneuver, sending audiences traipsing down an initially recognizable path that soon splinters in directions they never could've dreamed. (DAVID SCHMADER)

Beyond the Sea
Some of you might be thinking about going to see Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey's tribute to nightclub entertainer/old-time rock 'n' roller/folk song dabbler/ sometime actor Bobby Darin. I'm going to do you a favor and urge you, unequivocally, not to bother, unless, of course, you like bullshit. (SEAN NELSON)

Closer
Viewed scene by scene, the unfettered, constant venom on display in this film is bracing, thrilling, and almost as much fun to watch as it must have been to perform. Taken as a whole, however, it proves to be a bit too much of a bad thing. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Coach Carter
Biopics, particularly when the subject is still around and willing to do promotions, can be a bit of a slog, often squelching essential complexities for easy stand-up-and-cheer moments. The heavily hyped Coach Carter tackles a worthy, deservedly inspirational story, about a tough-love basketball coach who turned his dead-ender squad into academic winners, but treats its subject in such a neutered, worshipful fashion that it ultimately does the actual accomplishment a disservice. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Elektra
Some ninja devil demon thing killed Jennifer Garner's mom when she was a kid and so she has these terrible nightmares and a pretty wicked case of OCD. Instead of going into therapy because SHE'S CRAZY, she lines up objects in exact patterns, counts every step she takes, routinely washes her DNA off of things, and kills people. Yup, crazy. Anyway, aside from being fucked in the head and having terrible social skills, she also has some special powers (which come in handy when she's killin'). Now these people have hired her to kill this little girl and her sexy dad. Without asking why she goes to do it, but then has a change of heart at the last minute, which opens up a huge fucking can of worms because now these people are pissed because it turns out this little girl is special too and they want her gone. Dammit! So shit hits the fan and the guy with the bad tattoos and the woman with the terrible breath are chasing after them, and now Jennifer Garner and her stupid cheeks have to save the little girl and her sexy dad while fighting her own inner demons. Oh the drama! (MEGAN SELING)

Hotel Rwanda
The crux of Hotel Rwanda is Europe's cowardly abandonment of defenseless Africans, and how, despite this great betrayal, Paul Rusesabagina did not surrender to the chaos, to the evil that had consumed his fellow tribesmen. He was Africa's Oskar Schindler. Unlike Spielberg's Schindler's List, however, Hotel Rwanda doesn't have a huge budget, which is the primary reason why it's not a great film in terms of both photography and casting (many of the extras do not look like Hutus or Tutsis). It's a film held up entirely by Don Cheadle, whose portrayal of an African is, for a black American, second only to Canada Lee's in the 1951 adaptation of Cry, the Beloved Country. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

House of Flying Daggers
House of Flying Daggers, director Yimou Zhang's much-anticipated follow-up to Hero, is an exceptional period martial arts movie, filled to the brim with equal doses of kicks to the head and pathos, which suffers by comparison only to its older, more ambitious, brother. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

In Good Company
In Good Company is a happily inoffensive, warmly predictable, wholly inconsequential comedy/drama from American Pie and About a Boy director Paul Weitz. The movie's surface-level themes--corporate takeovers, white-collar backstabbing, familial versus professional relationships, fucking people you're not supposed to--could make for interesting conflicts in the hands of a sharp satirist or incisive sociologist. But the increasingly bland Weitz is neither. (ERIK HENRIKSEN)

The Incredibles
The Incredibles is done in true and beautiful Pixar style, but the action sequences are far more exhilarating than anything seen in Finding Nemo or Toy Story. Plus, the humans aren't annoyingly unattractive, and it's pretty damn funny to boot. (MEGAN SELING)

Kinsey
The first half of Kinsey is exciting on a micro scale the way Kinsey's work was exciting on a grand one: It demonstrates that reason can prevail over mythology. Unfortunately, because it's a movie, the second half allows mythology--the mythology of narrative--to re-intrude, and the picture grows musty. (SEAN NELSON)

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
The movie is faithful to the books, mining the first three for settings, characters, and unfortunate events. Jim Carrey is perfectly cast as the evil Count Olaf, and the pair of roundups cast as the elder orphans, Jennifer Coolidge and Liam Aiken, more than hold their own against Carrey. (DAN SAVAGE)

The Life Aquatic
Unlike Wes Anderson's harshest critics, I've always been more than willing to accept both his otherworldly concoctions and his heavy lifting from Hal Ashby; this time, however, he delivers little else. Long stretches of The Life Aquatic feel malnourished, as if Anderson spent so much energy creating the film's distinct reality that he forgot to provide reasons for that reality to exist. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Meet the Fockers
Watching Meet the Fockers started out grating and ended up grinding my flesh off the bone. (JENNIFER MAERZ)

The Merchant of Venice
See review this issue.

Million Dollar Baby
As sappy and Lifetime-y as the plot sounds, Clint Eastwood's skill with the performers keeps Million Dollar Baby afloat. Both Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman deliver graceful turns that mesh perfectly with Eastwood's grave brooding, and by the time the film takes a brutally tragic turn you can't help but find yourself yanked along emotionally. Eastwood still keeps his films criminally under-lit, and his editing still plods, but his actors help to keep Million Dollar Baby burning bright. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Ocean's Twelve
The story is a mess, the scam is a fraud, and the performances are lazy and smug, but Ocean's 12 has one major plus: the return of Steven Soderbergh's creative pulse. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

The Phantom of the Opera
Even putting aside the unspeakably horrendous set design, this movie does everything wrong. Instead of exploiting the cheesy, populist songcraft of the 1986 musical, Joel Schumacher casts actors who wouldn't know melodrama if it smacked them in the face. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Racing Stripes
Shit yes! I've got it! I've come up with THE BEST MOVIE CONCEPT EVER! Listen up: It'll be a story about a zebra. A baby zebra who was abandoned by the circus in the middle of the night during a rainstorm, but then picked up by some retired and heartbroken racing horse coach guy who hasn't gotten over the fact his wife died during a horseracing accident. He'll bring the zebra home, his wannabe horseracing daughter with the bad hair will fall in love with it and raise it like a horse and everything. What's funny, though, is the zebra won't know he's a zebra! Hahaha! I know, right? Since he grew up on a farm around a bunch of racing horses, the zebra will think he too is a racing horse! Oh man! Hilarity abounds! (MEGAN SELING)

Ray
Despite a tendency to bathe in the molasses of sentimentality, Ray is a rich exponent of the biopic genre. 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)

Sideways
While Sideways is a road movie, it's a lazy one; the distance traveled, both physically and emotionally, is short. Blessed with pitch-perfect performances, especially by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church, Sideways is a slight film, to be sure, but it's also one of Alexander Payne's least snide efforts. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Spanglish
Spanglish is absolutely the worst film of the year, and much of the blame for the film's failure falls on the shoulders of poor Téa Leoni, whose performance is so grating, so irritating, that you cringe whenever she's on screen. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

A Tale of Two Sisters
This latest Korean horror import has everything: creepy sisters, an evil stepmother, demonic girls hiding beneath the kitchen sink, a mysterious sack that may or may not be leaking blood. The end result is a genuinely unsettling film, one that refuses the easy shock and instead relies on the audience to creep itself out. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Vera Drake
A bruising, classical tragedy about a woman whose passionate altruism brings pain and suffering upon herself and the people whom she loves. (ANNIE WAGNER)

A Very Long Engagement
I'm not saying it isn't corny. What I'm saying is that it's a fantastic movie, and unless you're the stated enemy of life and all that makes it worth living, you'll probably fall for it. (SEAN NELSON)

White Noise
A man's murdered wife speaks to him from beyond the grave.

The Woodsman
If kudos were awarded solely on intent, The Woodsman would be deserving of every critical hosanna in existence. As it stands, however, the combination of stupendous acting and awkward plot machinations ultimately land the film in a strange, frustrating place. It's just good enough that it should be even better. (ANDREW WRIGHT)