LIMITED RUN

The Being
Though it may sound like an ontological query about our place in the universe, The Being is actually a 1983 horror movie about a creature who rises from the slime of a toxic waste dump. Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm.

The Best of Youth
Forty years of Italian history wrapped up into one pristine, melodramatic package. This six-hour movie (screened in two parts) has its contrivances and unfortunate narrative mannerisms (not to mention a few startlingly ineffective makeup jobs), but is addictively watchable and very rewarding. (ADAM HART) Varsity. Part 1: Fri-Sun 4 pm. Part 2: Fri-Sun 12:15, 7:45 pm, Mon-Thurs 7:45 pm.

Brian Wilson’s Smile
A free screening of the documentary/concert movie about the creation of Wilson’s most storied record. Triple Door, Tues May 24 at 7:30 pm.

Demon of the Derby: The Ann Calvello Story
A documentary about “Banana Nose” Calvello, 70-something roller-derby queen. 911 Media Arts, Thurs-Fri May 19-20 at 7 pm.

Diary of a Chambermaid
Nothing is worse than being subjected to a sequence of silly situations that add up to nothing. In Diary of a Chambermaid, an elegant Parisienne (Jeanne Moreau) goes out to the countryside to work for an aristocratic family and enters their disjointed medieval world: A macho laborer loves to torture geese before he kills them, an old man has a foot fetish, a sex-starved master of the house hunts wild animals, a girl was raped and murdered while collecting snails in the forest. Luis Buñuel’s films go on forever, like bad dreams—in fact, we never see the real lives of his characters, only their movements through levels and layers of dreams. Many will find this film challenging and difficult to understand, but it’s really neither because it doesn’t mean anything. This movie is not about the chambermaid and her deep secrets, but is just a nightmare raging in the head of a city woman who had too much to drink at a posh downtown party and is now passed out on her bed. (CHARLES MUDEDE) Seattle Art Museum, Thurs May 19 at 7:30 pm.

Elegy to Violence
A 1966 Japanese satire about a gang of proto-fas cist schoolboys. Savery Hall Room 239, Thurs May 26 at 7:30 pm. H Evil Dead Before there was Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness, there was Evil Dead, a murky, homemade work of horror comedy genius by the great Sam Raimi, before he became the mezzo mezzo Sam Raimi. (SEAN NELSON) Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sat midnight.

The Man Who Stole the Sun
A 1970 Japanese film about a science teacher who decides to build a nuclear bomb in order to hold the government ransom. Savery Hall Room 239, UW campus, Thurs May 19 at 7:30 pm.

Mississippi Mermaid
François Truffaut’s hommage to the French New Wave which he helped found, a twisted story of a classifieds love affair gone wrong—or is it so wrong it’s right? Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as a 37-year-old South African tobacco baron who orders himself a nice, spiritual mail-order bride. He gets Catherine Deneuve. The white lies he’s put into his letters are nothing compared to hers, and soon it becomes a Hitchcock-inspired thriller of obscured identity (especially with that icy blond!) and finally a love story about outlaws on the run. Made in 1969, 10 years after the first crest of the French New Wave, Truffaut seems to be trying to recapture the spirit and energy of off-the-cuff filmmaking, which could explain some of the disjointed plot twists and turns.  (ANDY SPLETZER) Seattle Art Museum, Thurs May 26 at 7:30 pm.

My Life to Live
A 12-part Godard film essay in which Anna Karina is saddled with the name Nana Kleinfrankenheim and plays a young mother who haphazardly becomes a prostitute. Movie Legends, Sun May 22 at 1 pm.

Seattle Student Film Festival
The third annual festival of films by students in or from the Pacific Northwest. Curated by Adam Hart. Northwest Film Forum, Thurs May 26 at 7 pm.

Tampopo
When a trucker in a cowboy hat ambles into Tampopo’s noodle shop, he dispenses some sage advice on noodle preparation before getting into a fight with some thugs. When he wakes up the next morning, Tampopo asks him to train her to be a master noodle chef. Reluctantly, he agrees. That’s the main storyline in a movie that goes down many divergent and often extremely funny paths. Even more than his obvious love of movies and filmmaking, director Juzo Itami infuses Tampopo with a love of food, from its noble preparation to its sensual consumption. Pushing that to its extreme, the movie also has an erotic scene with two lovers and some food which puts the eager wannabe 9 1/2 Weeks to shame. (ANDY SPLETZER) Ethnic Cultural Theatre, Sun May 22 at 6 pm.

Third Eye Cinema
A quarterly film program dedicated to experimental and personal cinema and curated by Jon Behrens. Northwest Film Forum, Mon May 23 at 7 and 9 pm.

Ucho (The Ear)
A story about a bureaucrat who discovers his house is being bugged, this Czech film noir was banned by the Soviet occupying forces upon its 1970 release. Grand Illusion, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm.

NOW PLAYING

Crash
Crash, the directing debut of Million Dollar Baby screenwriter Paul Haggis, certainly doesn’t want for hubris, but ultimately stands as a case of laudable ambition overwhelming still-developing narrative abilities. Although his would-be epic of race relations in Los Angeles sports a handful of genuinely searing moments, it’s hard to shake the sense of someone constantly rearranging three-by-five cards behind the scenes for maximum impact. The cast, led by Don Cheadle’s tragically clear-eyed central homicide cop, almost makes it fly, though, with special mention going to Ludacris (as a carjacker hilariously obsessed with the Man), and, especially, Sandra Bullock’s admirably against-type portrayal of an upper-class housewife with a major chip on her shoulder. Together, they can’t quite make Haggis’ preachy puppet show feel entirely organic, but they certainly take some of the glare off of the strings. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Dear Frankie
The moral of the story: Don’t tell your kid that his missing father is on a ship sailing around the world (and write him make-believe letters from Pop at sea) if you think there’s any chance of said ship someday docking in your town. (ANDREWWRIGHT)

Downfall
There are a lot of sentimental war moments in Downfall, and the conceit that we are watching through the eyes of Hitler’s sheltered and therefore ignorant (and therefore blameless) secretary, is flimsy on many levels. Because the characters are Nazis, their panic and its subsequent rash of suicides and murders are deeply satisfying. Because it’s a movie, however, you’re left with the unpleasant prospect of watching a bunch of rats slowly drowning for two and a half hours. There are better ways to go. (SEAN NELSON)

Dust to Glory
An exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) documentary from director Dana Brown (Step Into Liquid), Dust to Glory chronicles the Tecate Score Baja 1000 race, where lunatics onboard motorcycles, cars, and even motor homes spend 32 hours blazing through 1000 miles of Baja peninsula, rolling over, crashing, and sometimes dying. Shot with over 50 cameras, the film is a definite thrill to watch, masterfully edited and littered with interesting characters. And even though the music occasionally hammers home the heroics to an absurd degree, there’s no denying the ridiculous bravery—or is it psychotic lack of self-preservation?—that drives the racers, a bravery Brown manages to let himself, and his film, get caught up in. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
The scariest thing about Enron’s fraudulent business plan was this: The corrupt mastermind, CEO Jeff Skilling, was likely onto the future model of the American economy. With the collapse of traditional industry, it’s possible that 21st-century American companies—like Enron in the late 20th century—will be trading purely in abstractions, dealing in virtual commodities and virtual profits. Enron got caught first. And this accessible, damning documentary shows us the corporate double-speak in action. Problem is, while it’s certainly a pleasure to listen in on a conference call shortly before the gig was up—where a skeptical analyst demands that Skilling cough up a balance sheet (Skilling calls the guy an asshole)—I can’t help but think that Enron’s subterfuge was a prescient version of our future economy. (JOSH FEIT)

Fever Pitch
Fever Pitch isn’t as funny as other Farrelly classics. It still has that “cute as fuck” spin to it that is utterly unhateable (even if you usually don’t like the whole romantic comedy thing), but no nuts will be busted this time around. (MEGAN SELING)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I am not a Hitchhiker’s Guide nerd, but even I know that Ford Prefect is no American rapper, sir. Mos Def isn’t the only grossly miscast actor in this adaptation of Douglas Adams’ beloved novels; even the great Sam Rockwell is too much to take. The film suffers from the same problem as planet Earth: too many Americans. Still, whenever there are at least two British actors on-screen—especially Martin Freeman, AKA Tim from The Office, or the film-stealing Bill Nighy—the movie version mines big, warm, absurd laughs alongside its hyper-imaginative graphics, and quasi-mystical pop metaphysicality. How ironic that this, of all movies, would suffer from not being British enough. (SEAN NELSON)

House of Wax
Unsuspecting visitors to a small town (including Paris Hilton!) are waylaid and embalmed in wax (hopefully including the ever-waxy Paris Hilton!). The Interpreter The Interpreter turns what could have been a smart and twisty political thriller—with heavy emphasis on political—into a bogged-down and bland mulling over of wounded souls and suppressed sexual attraction. It’s hard to care about the characters played by Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, since the actors seems to care very little about the characters themselves (she hides beneath a weak accent; he is in full-blown Penn mumbling mode), and with their brooding relationship (kept chaste, thankfully) routinely burying the intricacies of the plot, interest easily wanes. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Kicking & Screaming
Kicking & Screaming stars Ferrell as Phil Weston, a grown man cowering in the shadow of his competitive father, Buck (Robert Duvall). Everything Phil does, Buck has to do one better; when Phil has his first child, Buck becomes a dad again the same day. But Phil gets backed into a corner when his dad coaches the local 10-year-olds’ soccer team, and with father and son’s kids on the same team, it’s Phil’s boy who stays a benchwarmer. So Phil decides to coach the opposing team (with his kid on it) and slap-your-forehead humor and Mike Ditka cameos ensue. Although some of the jokes are subtle enough to elicit snickering (i.e., Phil’s fumbling for words with the hot lesbian soccer moms), Kicking is really a kids’ movie with nothing for adults but the hope that Ferrell moves back into R country soon. (JENNIFER MAERZ)

Kingdom of Heaven
The dance between carnage and faith is a delicate one, and it’s to Ridley Scott’s credit that he doesn’t allow his film to be overcome with the thrills of gore. The spiritual tunnels the director mines are not terribly deep, but Kingdom of Heaven’s refusal to take sides—condemning neither Christians nor Muslims—gives the film a startling strength. Some may call this decision a cop-out, or even cowardly, and it may indeed be both. But it’s hard to argue that for an epic crafted around the spectacle of violence, the amount of attention Scott has given to the meaning of God (and, in the case of the film’s hero, the question of God), is surprising in these polemic times. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Kung Fu Hustle
Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle, in which snazzy ax-wielding mobsters find themselves thwarted by a slum in which virtually every single senior citizen possesses mad fighting skills, is a loving send-up of seemingly every martial arts convention in the book. If you’re in the mood for this sort of thing, the first 40 minutes or so are close to dead-solid perfect, culminating in an extended sight gag involving snakes and misthrown butcher knives which belongs in the physical comedy Parthenon. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Look At Me
The occasionally plodding yet mostly wonderful Look At Me revels in a series of similarly hard-to-guess Lockhorn pairings, the most intriguing of which involves a monstrously egotistical writer (co-writer Jean-Pierre Bachri, wonderful as a cackling bastard) and his fiercely body-conscious daughter. While the potentially hoary themes of self-worth and family foibles will no doubt have the remake police licking their chops, the breezy, hyper-literate vibe, which feels like it could peel out into pathos or screwball comedy at any moment, should prove much less replicable. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Melinda and Melinda
The tedious Melinda and Melinda is a return to two forms for WoodyAllen: the tragic and comic strands of marital fidelity that the auteur has tirelessly (and often tiresomely) been threading over the course of his once-brilliant, ever-increasingly meaningless oeuvre. (NATE LIPPENS)

Millions
Danny Boyle has crafted a kid-friendly fable with enough sly modern-day relevance to keep adults from checking their watches. An over-imaginative 7-year-old stumbles across a huge bag of loot in the field near his new house, days before the mandatory UK changeover to the euro. While the money initially brings nothing but good fortune, dealing with the newfound stash gets steadily more complicated as the deadline approaches. Teamed again with his 28 Days cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, Boyle successfully maintains a child’s eye visual sensibility throughout, in a miraculously noncloying fashion. Every blade of grass is a nuclear Jolly Rancher green, bad guys block out the sun, tract houses quick assemble around the oblivious tenants, and landscapes stretch out for eons. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Mindhunters
The only reason why you should enter a theater screening this film is if you are being pursued by the cops and need a dark place to elude them. As you sink into your seat, always keeping one eye on the entrance, the other eye might chance to see LL Cool J getting knocked on the head by a propane tank. Mama said knock you out indeed. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

Monster-in-Law
The beginning of this movie is so horrible, so bland, so curdled, so... well, typical, as romantic comedies go, that once the prospective mother-in-law (Jane Fonda) digs her claws into the bride-to-be (Jennifer Lopez), you can’t help cheering wildly. It’s like watching a bad movie eat itself. I’m not claiming the second half of Monster-in-Law will keep you from feeling ashamed of yourself. For example, there are not one but two walking-stereotype sidekicks: a sass-talking black assistant, played by Wanda Sykes, and a compliment-doling gay best friend, played by Adam Scott. But the thing is, it’s extremely satisfying to watch someone try to poison J. Lo. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Palindromes
It’s hard to know which facet of Palindromes is the most disquieting. Is it the fable-like atmosphere? Is it the sexual activity of the young girl? Is it the sexual activity of her partners? Is it the funny/sick dramatization of the pro-choice agenda? Is it the funny/sick dramatization of the Christian agenda? The nervous laughter that punctuates every scene? Yes, on all counts. Solondz’ gift lies in refusing to flinch at the collision of wild paradoxes. Aviva’s options, which Solondz recently characterized as “a pro-choice family that offers no choice at all, and a pro-life family that kills,” spell out a hopeless course for a girl who, at bottom, only wants what every kid wants: to be loved unconditionally. To get there, she suffers through all the cant, hypocrisy, and profound loneliness that contemporary life is made of. That the film can envision her journey as a folktale—in which poetic sequences like Aviva trudging with her wheelie suitcase across a glowing field of spinach trade off with the Swiftian satire of the Sunshine family—doesn’t diminish its power. On the contrary, it makes the point that the beef between the warring factions of 21st-century America is so irreconcilable as to constitute a kind of fantasy world. (SEAN NELSON)

Sahara
Thankfully, only the barest plot and character elements are held over from Clive Cussler’s virtually unreadable doorstop of a novel, which is the kind of tech-heavy, mondo-macho potboiler that stewardesses must get tired of sweeping up after every flight. What still remains: Matthew McConaughey is the wonderfully named Dirk Pitt, a ludicrously rad underwater explorer/rare-car enthusiast/secret agent/master of languages/all-around stud who, along with faithful companion/hetero life partner Steve Zahn, gets caught up in a sinister desert plot involving Civil War battleships, ocean-killing water pollution, toxic waste, slithery French industrialists, feuding generals, and Lord knows what else. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
In just over 80 minutes, the documentary Short Cut to Nirvana, by Maurizio Benazzo and Nick Day, offers what amounts to a snapshot of the infinite. The Kumbh Mela (the largest religious festival in the world) that is documented happened in 2001, and one imagines that the filmmakers’ first problem was finding a point to enter it, and then, once inside the spiritual city, locating an exit. The directors were rescued by a young monk, Swami Krishnanand, who wears wire-rimmed glasses and guides them through the gurus and their followers, the musical and theatrical performances, the street dancers, the dust, the heat, the cold, the tents, the religious robots, the Internet kiosks, the babble, chanting, singing, preaching, praying, and the burying of live persons. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
On paper, this documentary about the five-year relationship between a gentle, sporadically homeless hippie with no visible means of support and an unruly flock of birds sounds like a recipe for instant tooth decay. Darned if it doesn’t work, though. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

XXX: State of the Union
Ice Cube takes over for Vin Diesel as a special agent, blah, blah, blah, nation’s capital, blah, blah, blah, BOOM.