LIMITED RUN
8th Annual Local Sightings
What makes this year's Local Sightings unusual is not its content (as always, some of the short films and documentaries are interesting, others are not so interesting), but the judges for the event: Michelle Satter (the Founding Director of the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program), Ted Hope (the producer behind Ang Lee's best work), Richard Peña (the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center), and Rebecca Campbell (Director of Austin Film Society). These first-rate men and women in the world of American independent filmmaking will look at what this city has to offer. To name a few: Driving Around, Following Strangers, which is about driving around, following strangers (in this particular case, young and attractive German women). Walking to Werner, which is about a young man who walks from Seattle to Los Angeles to meet Werner Herzog, and An Appetite for Bernard Brady, which is about a man, Bernard Brady, who desires to be eaten by another man. The worth of Seattle must now be judged. (CHARLES MUDEDE) All programs in this local film showcase screen at Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Thurs Oct 7-13. There's an opening party Fri Oct 7 at 7 pmâget there early, because Altoids is giving away one-year NWFF memberships to the first 100 guests. For a complete schedule of films, see www.nwfilmforum.org.
Blind Spot
Seattle Art Museum's film noir cycle continues with this 1947 thriller starring Chester Morris. SAM, Thurs Oct 13 at 7:30 pm.
Challenge of the Lady Ninja
A movie about "the deadly Japanese of ninja striptease." Sunset Tavern, Mon Oct 10 at 9 pm.
Deconstructing Supper
A documentary about genetically modified ingredients. Environmental Learning Center, Seward Park, Wed Oct 12 at 7 pm.
Halabad Blues
Nordic Heritage Museum's culture clash series continues with this film about forbidden love between a Danish woman and a Turkish man. Nordic Heritage Museum, Thurs Oct 6 at 7 pm.
Iden & Tity
It may sound like an ode to female nudity in a prelapsarian wonderland, but in fact Iden & Tity is a Japanese grunge movie inspired by Bob Dylan. Gowen 201, UW campus, Thurs Oct 6 at 7:30 pm.
Jalla! Jalla!
Mans, a muscle-bound Swede, and Roro, a scrawny émigré from Lebanon, are best friends and co-workers at a public park, happily doing dirty work until Mans suffers an extended bout of erectile dysfunction and Roro is forced to face the fact that his family has arranged a marriage for him despite the fact that he is madly in love with another woman. Candlelit picnics, penis pumps, and foolish fistfights clip briskly by in this charming and unaffected comedy about the unavoidable crashes, not just between East and West , but also between generations. (TAMARA PARIS) Nordic Heritage Museum, Thurs Oct 13 at 7 pm.
MirrorMask
See review this issue. Varsity, Fri noon, 2:20, 4:40, 7, 9:20 pm, Sat-Sun 2:20, 4:40, 7, 9:20 pm, Mon-Thurs 7, 9:20 pm.
My Man Godfrey
"All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people." Movie Legends, Sun Oct 9 at 1 pm.
Open Screening
Anything goes, so long as it's under 10 minutes and in VHS or DVD format. And it's only two bucks to get in. 911 Media Arts, Mon Oct 10 at 7 pm.
The Princess Bride
"You mock my pain!" Central Cinema, Sat-Sun noon, 2:15, 4:30 pm.
Red Orchestra
During the early gestation period of the Third Reich, a group of Berliners took it upon themselves to subvert the growing pull of Hitler, via propaganda and the occasional overt act of defiance. In the early '40s, the Gestapo retaliated. First-time director Stefan Roloff (the son of one of the group's oldest living members) has grasped hold of a story that screams to be told, using a series of devastatingly matter-of-fact recountings by survivors. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to trust the strength of the material as much as he should, throwing in a distracting flurry of morphs, zooms, and interminable animated reenactments in the style of an A-Ha video. Roloff's chosen medium doesn't wholly overwhelm the material, but it comes close. (ANDREW WRIGHT) Grand Illusion, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm.
Repo Man
"Goddamn-dipshit-Rodriguez-gypsy-dildo-punks! I'll get your ass!" Central Cinema, Fri-Sat 7, 9:15 pm, Sun 9:15 pm. (Later screening 21+ w/ ID required.)
Scarlet Street
SAM's film noir series continues with Fritz Lang's classic, starring Edward G. Robinson as an artistic cashier named Christopher Cross. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Oct 6 at 7:30 pm.
Tora San #2
A boy named Tora tries to find his mother, who abandoned him at a young age. Gowan 201, UW campus, Thurs Oct 13 at 7:30 pm.
W.O.E.
A locally-produced film about domestic violence. Wonder Bar, Thurs Oct 6 at 8 pm.
NOW PLAYING
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
The trailers for The 40-Year-Old Virgin promised yet another lame romp through sexual humiliationâLosin' It with gray hairs. The trailers, however, lied. Surprisingly smart and unashamed of a little jolt to the heartstrings, it's a sly movie, happy to shock occasionally, but happier still to bless its characters with the intelligence sorely lacking from most comedies. As Andy, Steve Carell may be the star of the film, but his performance is little more than the eye of the storm, with a stellar supporting cast (Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, and Seth Rosen as his co-workers; the great Catherine Keener as his would-be love interest) shouldering much of the comedic load around him. The result is a film that, for the time being at least, wrestles comedy from the pimple-faced masses and hands it back to the adults. It's also the funniest movie you will see all year. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
The Aristocrats
In The Aristocrats, a film co-directed by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette, dozens of legendary (and sub-legendary) comedians tell variations on the dirtiest joke in the world. At least, that's what the movie pretends to be. In the end, the joke is just a vehicle for allowing these humormongers the opportunity to flex muscles their entertainment careers seldom allow them to flex. Robin Williams hasn't been funny on screen in years, but he's unstoppably hilarious here. Likewise with Shelley Berman, Larry Storch, Rip Taylor, Phyllis Diller, and countless other comics from all strata of the business, who wring laughs from the sketchiest of premises. It's been at least two decades since Martin Mull has had a vehicle capable of expressing his brilliance, and he all but steals The Aristocrats. That honor belongs to Gottfried, whose performance of the joke at a Friars Club roast forms the soul of the film. (SEAN NELSON)
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Based on his bestselling novel, director Dai Sijie's deeply romantic nostalgia piece manages big magic with a few simple elements, chiefly a gorgeously primeval mountain landscape that belies the early-'70s setting. Amid the semi-absurd backdrop of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Dai fashions a memoir that earns its occasional lapses into sentiment. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Batman Begins
Taking equal inspiration from Sin City creator Frank Miller's Batman: Year One miniseries and artist Neil Adams' classic grim and gritty '70s run of Adam West apologia, the scenario circles back to the basics and has a ball reinventing the mythos. For the first time in a live-action recounting, the title character is actually allotted more attention than the inevitably showy villains. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Broken Flowers
This being a Jarmusch film, patience rules the day. Unfortunately, as with the fatally inert Coffee and Cigarettes, the style can't hold. Jarmusch's best films have always been built around an amicably aimless spirit, but Broken Flowers is undermined by a lack of drive comparable to that of its main character. It's one thing to watch someone wander for 90 minutes as long as we trust that he (and we) will eventually arrive at a destination. In this case, Jarmusch appears to have no real focus, and by the time the "mystery" reveals itself to be maddeningly inconsequential, the entire film borders on a malicious prank. There's slight and there's shiftlessâBroken Flowers, sadly, is the latter. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The moment Willy Wonka makes his big entrance, cheering as an "It's a Small World"âstyle diorama bursts into flames, it's plain to see that Johnny Depp is in a world, and indeed a film, all his own. Unfortunately, director Tim Burton either doesn't know or doesn't care that the source material is being undermined by Depp's inventions. (SEAN NELSON)
The Constant Gardener
Heavily reworked by director Fernando Meirelles, the stripped-down screenplay retains John le Carré's basic thrust: following the disappearance of his activist wife, a middle-rung foreign ambassador goes proactive on a global scale, uncovering all sorts of corporate malfeasance before eventually zeroing in on illegal drug testing in the slums of Kenya. As in the best adaptations, there's a sense that The Constant Gardener is hijacking the source material in order to feed the filmmaker's personal obsessions. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Corpse Bride
Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp) is about to marry a lovely young woman named Victoria (Emily Watson). Following a strange series of accidents, Victor instead finds himself hitched to Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter), a woman who died years ago on her wedding day. Victor is scared shitless, but Corpse Bride couldn't be happier. The wicked characters aren't nearly as wicked as they could've been, and the songs aren't particularly memorable, but the animation is classic Tim Burton (and absolutely stunning at momentsâhis use of shadow and light has vastly improved). Burton fans can finally take a deep breath. After years of waiting for a worthy follow-up, there's a good chance they'll be satisfied with Corpse Bride. (MEGAN SELING)
El Crimen Perfecto
El Crimen Perfecto, a film about a ladies' man who accidentally kills his rival, certainly has its moments. As a whole, however, it is not satisfying, as its theme and story is well-worn. (CHARLES MUDEDE )
Everything Is Illuminated
Perhaps it's unfair to ask this labor of love, with its obviously meager budget and dull cinematography, to try to match the fantastical dimensions of the Jonathan Safran Foer novel it's based on. But without the shtetl narrative, which takes up at least half of the novel, the road-trip story is fatally unbalanced. In place of sex, there is only neurosis. In place of imagination, we get literal compulsions. Even the shabbiest pass at grandiosity would have been more exciting than this tale of a young man gathering scraps of his past while eccentric locals look on. (ANNIE WAGNER)
The Exorcism of Emily Rose
Loosely based on a '70s German incident, the plot details the aftermath of the disastrous exorcism of a devout college student. The Exorcism of Emily Rose lacks the utter relentlessness of The Exorcist, thank God (or whatever), but it still manages to lodge under the skin. Until an unfortunate late morph into downright religious propaganda, it entertains suspicions of a new classic of the form. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Flightplan
A grieving widow wakes up at 30,000 feet to find her 6-year-old daughter missing, along with any sign that she ever stepped on board. As far as hooks go, this newfangled locked room story has a honey. The problem with fantastic premises, of course, is that they eventually have to be backed up. Despite Jodie Foster's beyond-the-call conviction in the lead role, Flightplan can't quite deliver on its promise, squandering some major paranoia with a disappointingly mundane third act. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Gospel
Another entry in the burgeoning black gospel genre, this Rob Hardy movie is about an R&B singer/prodigal son who has strayed from the flock of a his father, a bishop. Unlike the genre trailblazers Woman, Thou Art Loosed and Diary of a Mad Black Woman, however, this film does not star Kimberly Elise.
The Greatest Game Ever Played
After nearly three decades of playing indelible nutballs in films, Bill Paxton made a strong impression as a director with Frailty, a structurally flawed yet deeply weird B-picture. Expectations for his follow-up were high. Factor in a script by Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost, and rampant gonzohood seemed all but guaranteed. The biggest shock of the inspirational sports movie The Greatest Game Ever Played is how utterly square it is. But the old corn still sometimes has a place. Barring the occasional ripple, Bill Paxton has fashioned an all-ages movie with an admirable lack of pretense. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Green Street Hooligans
Newbie director Lexi Alexander, a former karate champion, manages to find a certain grace among the copious brick-hurling and headbutts. Between rumbles, however, her film is less sure-footed, with a tendency toward overt preachiness. (Violence is bad, apparently.) Thankfully, her occasional ham-handedness can't dispel the fascinating subculture on display, where a swing with a nail-studded two-by-four counts as a friendly man hug. Once it puts up its dukes and stops with the philosophizing, Green Street Hooligans intrigues. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Grizzly Man
Werner Herzog has always had a thing for the abyss, of both the inner and outer kind. The much-Googled true story of Timothy Treadwell, a self-fashioned nature expert who spent 13 seasons in close contact with wild bears in Alaska before he and his girlfriend were devoured in 2003 by a rogue grizzly, seems so far up the director's alley as to be a little dauntingâthe kind of career-defining summation that can easily tar-baby a filmmaker into submission. He nails it. For all of the film's considerable ingenuity and power throughout, the sink-or-swim moment for audiences ultimately may hinge on the late unveiling of an audiotape documenting the couple's death. Those familiar with Herzog's past tendencies toward boundary-busting may be forgiven for feeling queasy over the prospect of such a revelation entering the realm of the snuff film (see When the Green Ants Dream). The way he handles the evidence, however, proves to be one of the eeriest, oddly beautiful things I've ever seen on a screen. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
A History of Violence
A History of Violence looks like a straightforward mobster flick, but what keeps the film mesmerizing is Cronenberg's styleâat once detached and tenseâcombined with the brutal beauty of Viggo Mortensen as the stoic central character. There's a horrible splendor in his performance as a man in whom will and instinct merge into a simultaneously humane and amoral machine. (SHANNON GEE)
Into the Blue
A John Stockwell action flick with Jessica Alba as a deep-sea diver in a teeny bikini.
Just Like Heaven
Ăber-pert Reese Witherspoon plays Elizabeth, a frigid, workaholic doctor who crosses paths with a careening truck and winds up in a coma. While her mortal shell lies vacant in the hospital, Elizabeth's stylish and sassy spirit heads back to her apartment, only to find studly subletter David (Mark Ruffalo) failing to use a coaster. The dialogue surpasses clichĂ© to achieve total nonsense, the jokes are insultingly lazy, and even the ghost-movie inconsistencies are familiar (she can't touch a phone or a person, but she can ride in a car and stand on a floor?). (LINDY WEST)
Lord of War
Lord of War, Andrew Niccol's ambitious, blacknasty take on arms dealing, certainly has its share of niceties, most noticeably a wittily subdued performance by Nicolas Cage as Yuri Orlov, but it can never quite get a fix on the delivery of its volatile subject matter. When the film deals with the nuts and bolts of the weapons business, it carries a nifty, amoral charge. Where it falters is in the larger rags-to-riches-to-rags framework, which comes off as both moldy and maddeningly condescending. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D
This 3D movie, narrated by the ever-creepy Tom Hanks, purports to put you into the big white shoes of a moonwalker. While having fake moon dust kicked in your face may be some people's idea of fun, the real attraction of this film is, of course, the smale-scale, 2D footage from the actual Apollo landings. There's nothing like the real thing, however low-definition and staticky. (ANNIE WAGNER)
March of the Penguins
I have never liked penguins, and now that I've watched this documentary I like them even less. The creatures have ugly feet, and their awkward walk makes them look like sitting ducks. I'm surprised the penguin is not, like the dodo, extinct. The only animal worth making a documentary about is the human. (CHARLES MUDEDE )
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Miranda July's feature-film debut is delicate and tense, a movie with a visual language so powerful that it seems to expand out of the movie theater and onto the sidewalk. Against a waterlogged electronic score by Michael Andrews, her characters bubble-wrap belongings, eulogize goldfish, draw ASCII tigers, tap quarters against bus stop poles, wear inspirational shirts that can only be read in the mirror, press dot stickers for good luck, flash their underwear at leering guys, and light themselves on fire. The movie is set in Portland (characters refer to Burnside Street and Laurelhurst Park) but it was shot in L.A. (witness the palm trees), and the discrepancy serves to displace the story from either setting. July's is a fantastical world where the most important contours are human shapes, where intense sexual longing collides with the paradoxical wish to escape your own skin, where those who have power try to abdicate it, and those who are powerless act out in agonizing, self-deceiving ways. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Oliver Twist
Roman Polanski's newest film Oliver Twist begins and ends with engravings from Gustave DorĂ©'s magnificent 19th-century travelogue London: A Pilgrimage. Crossed by dark lines and darker characters, the street scenes teem with anonymous life and work. The pictures are strange bookends, not because they're inappropriateâthey instantly evoke the Victorian setting of the Dickens novelâbut because the film itself doesn't match their fascinatingly dark urban atmosphere. Oliver Twist was filmed in Prague, and it quotes London landmarks instead of orienting itself by them. Painted backdrops of St. Paul's and other picturesque vistas, cloaked in mist rather than industrial haze, pop up from time to time as Oliver Twist rounds a corner or scampers out of an oddly clean alleyway. These pearlescent vistas are the stuff of storybooks. Polanski is in the business of rescuing the orphan from DorĂ©'s vision of city life, not dangling him between its jaws. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Proof
Though it's not as grossly heavy-handed as A Beautiful Mind, this film suffers from a similar failure of specificity. Of course Jake Gyllenhaal isn't convincing as a math graduate studentâbut it's not because he's sexy. It's because his character never talks directly about math. Proof resonates emotionally, but the real achievement would have been sneaking some real math into a math movie. And no, name-dropping Sophie Germain doesn't count. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Roll Bounce
Bow Wow plays X, a young man in the 1970s who's dealing with the recent death of his mother via roller-skating. Since the local roller rink just closed down, X and his friends have to go to the swanky disco rink called Sweet Water if they wanna practice their moves. Sweetness (Sweet Water's skate god) and his glitter-pants wearin' crew have it out with X and his gang because, you know, some brats from the Southside just ain't gonna mesh with some dudes wearing half-buttoned disco shirts. It all works out in the end, though, but not before a barrage of life lessons, bad hair, and (of course) a skate-off. (MEGAN SELING)
Serenity
Speaking as someone who never quite managed to keep up with the TV show Firefly, I'll admit Joss Whedon may very well be a geniusâalbeit one possibly taken best in small doses. Whedon's concepts and riot grrrl tendencies are killer, but his hyperliterate, pop-slangy style wears thin after a while. The film's scenario makes only the barest effort to include those not already up on the characters: building on plot threads developed through the series, Whedon's script catches up mid-quest with a ragtag bunch of outlaws searching for the origin of their youngest crewmember. This six-gun space oddity comes recommended, but you may want to brush up on the series before venturing into the theater. For God's sake, don't let the hardcore fans smell virgin blood. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Episode III will, indeed, be impossible to resist. Like it or not, the Force is with all of us, and I for one am more than happy to have seen the series through. Though the film has its truly embarrassing elementsâromance, as always, remains an elusive creature to Lucas, and in the end the evil Sith lord's scheme to turn Anakin over to the dark side is hysterically obvious (who knew Darth Vader was such an easily manipulated dolt?)âat this point there's doesn't seem to be much of a reason to quibble. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Thumbsucker
Thumbsucker, Mike Mills's first feature film, is a sweet coming-of-age movie with a mildly Freudian catchâno more than that, but certainly no less. Justin Cobb (Lou Pucci, perfectly cast) is a high-school senior, and he still sucks his thumb. It's a quiet habit for a quiet kid, but breaking it unleashes all kinds of static on his family and friends. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Two for the Money
Al Pacino and Matthew McConaughey star in this movie about the sleazy world of sports betting.
Vikings: Journey to New Worlds
This 40-minute documentary about the legendary Norse invaders is big on spurts of dead-end facts (Viking helmets didn't really have horns! Thursday is really Thor's Day!) and endless reenactments featuring husky Scandinavians in furs. The kid-friendly film only skims the surface of the Viking influence on world culture, and the few scenes that justify the large film format are sweeping panoramas of Icelandic geysers and the sea ice off Greenland. But those frigid green vistas are amazing, and if March of the Penguins didn't chill your ardor for polar cinematography, you'll find plenty to satisfy you here. (ANNIE WAGNER)
War of the Worlds
Though I usually take his side, if only for sport, the first hour of War of the Worlds had me convinced that Steven Spielberg had finally proven his detractors right. Before the bad things start happening, the stage is set for the kind of soulless, CGI-driven family redemption saga that could only happen in a grillion dollar movie. But then something happens. The supreme achievement of the effects seems to galvanize Spielberg into earning them. (SEAN NELSON)
Wedding Crashers
Seemingly conceived, shot, and edited during a four-day weekend, Wedding Crashers, while occasionally amusing, is lazy enough to make '80s ass-gas-or-grass comedies like H.O.T.S. or Hamburger: The Motion Picture look like models of precision timing. In a nutshell: Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are lawyers who get their kicks by boozily infiltrating the nuptials of strangers, eventually meeting their match with a pair of Kennedyesque sisters. Christopher Walken drops by to do his thing. This is all likely to go over like gangbusters at the box office (the mere appearance of a certain super secret guest starâi.e., the guy in all these movies who isn't Ben Stillerâbrought the preview audience to hysterical tears, even before he opened his mouth), but the overall sloppiness and genial contempt for the viewer is tough to ignore. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
