LIMITED RUN
SAM's Audrey Hepburn series continues with this Stanley Donen film from 1963, in which Hepburn stars as a Parisian widow who is pursued by money-grubbing bad guys... and Cary Grant. Museum of History and Industry, Thurs July 27 at 7:30 pm.
Seattle filmmaker B. J. Bullert's documentary on Seattle's first and most famous fucked-over citizen. A fundraiser for the Duwamish tribe. Environmental Learning Center at Camp Long, Thurs July 27 at 7 pm.
The third in director Victor Nunez's Panhandle trilogy (following the higher-profile Ruby in Paradise and Ulee's Gold), Coastlines is a drip-dry drama about avoiding temptation and then succumbing to it. There are striking passages about male bonding in the face of sexual rivalry, but too much of the movie is strung out along a bland subplot about a drug-trafficking outfit at a local marina. The bad guys are ugly and evil, and more to the point, the protagonist (played by Timothy Olyphant) is handsome and totally blank-eyed. The charisma deficit means Coastlines moves very slowly, and not even the two gigantic fireballs in the second and third acts speed things up. (ANNIE WAGNER) Grand Illusion, Weekdays 6:30, 8:45 pm, Sat-Sun 4:15, 6:30, 8:45 pm.
See review this issue. Northwest Film Forum, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 5, 7, 9 pm.
The Death of Mr. LazarescuSee Stranger Suggests, page 19, and review this issue. Varsity, Fri-Sun 1:45, 4:45, 8 pm, Mon-Thurs 8 pm.
Tim Burton's ode to the man who launched the paper-plate UFO. Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight.
A horrible movie with shitty songs written in a vaguely '50s idiom but produced for maximum late-'70s disco-shadow airplay. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! I love it, too! (SEAN NELSON) Fremont Outdoor Cinema, Sat July 30 at dusk.
A 1966 William Wyler film starring Audrey Hepburn as a statue-thievin' charmer. With Peter O'Toole and Eli Wallach. Museum of History and Industry, Thurs Aug 3 at 7:30 pm.
InterkosmosSee review this issue. Northwest Film Forum, Tues Aug 1 at 8 pm. Director Jim Finn in attendance.
Robin Williams is trapped, this time not in a bottle or a lady's dress, but in a board game. A wee Kirsten Dunst co-stars. Sidewalk Cinema (West Seattle), Sat July 29 at dusk.
Kaleidoscope Eyes: Songs for Busby BerkeleyA series of 16-mm film segments directed and/or choreographed by cinema genius Busby Berkeley, scored with new songs written by the beloved-and-acclaimed Seattle composer (and first Stranger Genius award winner for Theater) Chris Jeffries. Jeffries sits at a piano below the screen alongside a small chorus of singers, many of them esteemed Jeffries vets, who deliver their songs from behind music stands. There are some klunky moments and a couple numbers feel extraneous, but on the whole, it's delightful, and its best moments are near-transcendent. Jeffries's deep love of Berkeley's work is clear, and in the best numbers, the amazing screen images mesh with Jeffries's Stephin Merritt-meets-show-choir songs in dazzling and hilarious ways. Also, sitting in a deeply air-conditioned room watching 50 identically beautiful women plunge one after the other into a vast cool pool on a black-and-white screen is the most effective heatwave-escaping maneuver this side of suicide. (DAVID SCHMADER) Northwest Film Forum, Thurs-Sun 8 pm.
A documentary about the largest gathering of people anywhere ever. (It happened in 2001.) Central Cinema, Wed-Thurs 7, 9:15 pm. Director Nadeem Uddin in attendance Wed.
David Lynch horror film featuring desperate men, faithless women, expensive cars, and cheap motels. Museum of History and Industry, Fri July 28 at 7:30 pm.
"This is a fuck!" South Lake Union Discovery Center, Fri July 28 after dusk.
The classic kid's film about not fitting in, written and produced by Harry Nilsson. Keystone Church, Fri July 28 at 7 pm.
Stooges-A-Poppin!! Weeks 1 & 2A program of 3 Stooges shorts, including Disorder in the Court, Hoi Polloi, and No Census, No Feeling. Free! Grand Illusion, Fri 11 pm, Sat 1, 11 pm, Sun 1 pm.
Welcome to the DollhouseSee Stranger Suggests, page 19. Todd Solondz's best movie is about a girl named Wiener Dog, brilliantly played by Heather Matarazzo. Central Cinema, Fri-Sun 7:15, 9:30 pm. (Late show 21+.)
Now Playing
With Pixar movies, you know the story is going to be bursting with loveable characters housing their own endearing little quirks. Toy Story had Buzz Lightyear, Monsters, Inc. had Mike Wazowski, Finding Nemo had Dory and those awesome stoner turtlesâbut who do we get in Cars? Just a bunch of stupid cars! Cars are machines. Metal, plastic, rubber... just machines. Even with a face painted on them, they're not warm. You don't wanna cuddle with a car. You don't want a car for a friend or even a pet. You kinda just want 'em all to drive themselves off of a cliff so they can be scrapped and turned into something cool. Like Transformers. (MEGAN SELING)
Set once again in Smith's beloved Red Bank, New Jersey, the story finds the original film's convenience-store counter monkeys making the lateral move to a fast-food joint, with maturity nipping unwanted at their heels. There are a few amusing moments to be found between the speechifying and belabored craft-service zingers (the extended sight of Rosario Dawson bopping along to a Jackson 5 song is, for once, a reason to celebrate the filmmaker's inability to move the camera), but Smith's calculated return to his roots feels, for the most part, like a pre-moldy artifact that has lost most of its freshness or shock value in the era of YouTube and message boards. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Everything about this movie is boiled until tough. Only Ian McKellen wrings any fun out of the plot, but then again, he gets two crutches to play with. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Is Meryl Streep afraid of Anna Wintour? There's something weirdly soft in her portrayal of the "dragon lady" that completely contradicts the spirit of the movie. But to be fair, it's not her fault: Streep can't help but play a human being, and the characters in The Devil Wears Prada are not human beings. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Friends with Money atones for its shortcomings in the plot department by kicking unprecedented ass in the great-actress-triumvirate-of-delight department: Joan Cusack, Frances McDormand, and Catherine Keener. But it's still a movie about the emotional pain of building an addition to one's house. (LINDY WEST)
Since being picked up by Miramax, The Heart of the Game has become a big, fat juggernaut modeled after Hoop Dreams and narrated by Ludacrisâbut it began as a scrappy, no-budget local movie about the girls' basketball team at Roosevelt High School. (ANNIE WAGNER)
An Inconvenient TruthAn Inconvenient Truth is workmanlike and clumsy at timesâbut it's also hugely invigorating. Tracking Al Gore's global-warming lecture as he schleps his Apple laptop across the country and to China, it's a collection of scientific facts and correlations made urgent through human drama and low-tech slide-show magic. It should be required viewing for every American citizen. And if it kicks up a storm of speculation regarding Gore's political prospects in 2008? So much the better. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Holy shit. Everything is wrong with this picture. Everything! The photography is exceptionally dullâM. Night Shyamalan managed to do what even Barry Levinson couldn't do: make the work of the most intoxicating cinematographer alive today, Christopher Doyle, look and feel absolutely sober. The story has nothing new to reveal. A water nymph rises out of a swimming pool to tell humans how to make the world better. But the humans cannot hear her. Only a child can receive her message (through the unlikely medium of cereal boxes). At the level of ideology, the movie ends up supporting exactly what it intended to denounce: war. The director clearly had a plan to make an antiwar film, but he made this huge mistake: He imagined the enemy of the delicate water people in the same way that Bush and other warmongers imagine their enemiesâas pure evil, evil incarnate, evil for no other reason than being evil. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
Leonard Cohen: I'm Your ManIt's one thing to hear longtime fans prattle on about how great Leonard Cohen's music is, and another thing entirely to hear him speak for himself. In this uneven music documentary, two movies fight for dominanceâone full of cover songs and effusive testimonials, the other dominated by the man in the Armani suit. Loosely based around the "Came So Far for Beauty" concert at the Sydney Opera House in 2005, the music segments feature Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, Beth Orton, Antony, and the Handsome Family. But director Lian Lunson also includes interviews with Cohen, and this is where the documentary takes off. With his growling voice and bright eyes, Cohen brings the movie into focus. Self-deprecating where others are fawning, he talks about how long it takes to get a song just right, how "Chelsea Hotel #2" really was about a fling he had with Janis Joplin, and how his reputation as a ladies' man caused him "to laugh bitterly on the 10,000 nights I spent alone." (ANDY SPLETZER)
Mission: Impossible 3J. J. Abrams's script, cowritten with Alias cohorts Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, finds Tom Cruise's IMF hotshot semi-retired to instructor status and on the cusp of settling down with adorable nurse Michelle Monaghan. Before long, however, circumstances draw him back into the field. Stuff goes boom. This rather A-to-B plot is fleshed out with a number of killer supporting acts, including Laurence Fishburne, Shaun of the Dead's Simon Pegg, and especially Hoffman, who makes for an amusingly direct, pissy supervillain. It's with Cruise, however, that the director pulls off his biggest coup. Pesky personal matters aside, there's always been something uncomfortable about Cruise's screen presenceâthat feeling that he's always blaringly on, giving even the quietest moments 140 percent. Abrams's solutionâsteadily jacking up the emotional and physical intensity to match the starâpays huge, pleasantly exhausting dividends. He's got game. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Mongolian Ping PongMongolian Ping Pong contains shades of The Gods Must Be Crazy: A foreign object from the modern world upends the lives of rural people. But this film (last seen at SIFF 2005) is more about the friendship between three boys growing up on the steppes than the trouble the plastic wrought. Young Bilke finds the titular ball floating down the river by his parents' yurt and thinks it's a glowing pearl sent by the gods. Then he learns that the ping-pong ball is China's "national ball." Burdened by civic responsibility, he and his pals decide to ride their horses to Beijing and give it back. The pleasure is in watching the boys, who are good-hearted but badly behaved (they run away, hide from the state vaccination men, steal bottles of beer from their parents); and the great final scene, in which the film suddenly changes from a soft, charming Mongolian bildungsroman to a sharp parable about how modernity can steal all the magic out of life. (BRENDAN KILEY) Varsity, Fri-Sun 2, 4:30, 7, 9:20 pm, Mon-Thurs 7, 9:20 pm.
Monster HouseOld Man Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi), like all neighborhood coots, really, really wants you to stay off his lawn. He screams and howls, threatens bodily harm ("You want to be a dead person?"), and he will not give you your ball back. But it's for your own good, really, considering the giant carnivorous child-gobbling monster (Kathleen Turnerâno, seriously) masquerading as Nebbercracker's house. Across the street, neighbor kid DJ peers through his telescope, suspecting foul play, determined to get to the bottom of things. Leafless trees flank the house like sad, dead fingers. Grasping tendrils of lawn drag unsuspecting trespassers to their doom. Long story short, I now have nightmares from a movie meant for babies. Fortunately, Monster House has jokes, tooâgenuinely good onesâand an awesome cast (Fred Willard, Jason Lee, Maggie Gyllenhaal). Its exploration of the house's anatomy is an unexpected delight. Of a globby, chandelier-like thing, one of the kids observes: "That must be the uvula!" "Oh," responds her pal, "so it's a girl house." A girl house, indeedâone that can breathe and blink and vomit and hate. It will scare the shit out of you. (LINDY WEST)
Nacho LibreGosh! Rip off my frickin' movie why don't you, Jared Hess! This is pretty much the worst movie ever made. I mean, I guess it's an okay movie. It's pretty funny. Now that I think about it, it's pretty much my favorite movie ever. (NAPOLEON DYNAMITE)
The owner of the Cosmosâa soccer team floundering in the mid-'70sâgot the idea that the team (and the league) would attract more fans and generate higher profits if it had the greatest player of the sport on its roster. For seven million dollars, the Cosmos brought in PelĂ©, who, though in retirement at the time (age 34), was still considered a national treasure by the Brazilian government. The dream worked. PelĂ© came to the U.S. and instantly drew fans. But Mr. Moneybags wanted more. So he bought Giorgio Chinaglia, from Italy, and German superstar Franz Beckenbauer. The result was phenomenal. At their peak, the Cosmos filled Giants Stadium with 77,000 fans and soccer was on the verge of becoming an American sport. Then things feel apartâPelĂ© retired, Chinaglia got greedier and seedier, and Americans proved to be capable of watching anything on TV except soccer. The team and the league folded, but the idea of a club buying players from any part in the world became what it is today: the standard. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
This movie is about cartoon animals with feelings who learn lessons about junk food and waste and suburban sprawl. There are three funny parts. The restâdespite an all-hits-no-misses cast and an awesome Ben Folds soundtrackâis a shrill combo of recycled jokes, less than hilarious mayhem, and demonic porcupine babies. (LINDY WEST)
The first Pirates of the Caribbean film rose from the ashes of low expectations, dragged up from its dubious theme-park origins by a subversive and hilariously twisted performance by Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. What should have been un film stupide turned into one of the few surprises of 2003. Now comes the midsection of the trilogy, which picks up shortly after the first film ended. Capt. Jack remains a truly weird invention, but now everyone around him is trying desperately to keep up, and what's left is a film so amped up it flirts with being cartoonish. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is the expected romp: swords are clashed, cannons are fired, and many a quip is unsheathed. But what's missing this go-around is the genuine surprise of the first film. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
It's sad to see Garrison Keillor making miscalculations about the nature and appeal of his own creations. Such are the perils of adapting a radio program to film. (ANNIE WAGNER)
What is the core truth of this film based on a Philip K. Dick short story of the same name? That capitalism is not progressive; it does not move from a lower condition to a higher and better one, but is circular. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
Strangers With CandyStrangers with Candy is basically just an extra-long, perfectly passable bonus episode of the original TV series, which means, of course, that it's fucking hysterical. (LINDY WEST)
For a movie featuring a hero who can conceivably give God a wedgie, there's precious little zowie to be found. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Thank You for SmokingAs a work of satire, Thank You for Smoking is safely and securely dated. The book it's adapted from (by conservative novelist Christopher Buckley) was published in the mid-'90s, when tobacco lawsuits were flying fast and loose and the word "probe" was rampant in headlines in the Washington Post. But what the movie loses in relevance, it gains in absurd comedy. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Who Killed the Electric Car?If this lively agitdoc is any indication, early adopters of environmentally friendly technology are a bunch of stubborn children. When General Motors rolled out its ice-blue, all-electric car in California in 1996, celebrities and subcelebrities and dot-com arrivistes (including director Chris Paine) snatched them up like candy. But the EV1, as the model was called, was only available for lease, not for sale, and when GM decided (with the help of the state of California) that electric vehicles were not in fact the wave of the future, it took them all back. Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, washed-up Baywatch actress Alexandra Paulâall talking heads in this movieâwere crushed. Systematically working through such potential "suspects" as SUV-minded consumers, battery capacity, oil companies, car companies, federal and state governments, and rival technologies (particularly the hydrogen fuel cell), the documentary crafts a compelling case that the decline of the electric car was misguided, collusive, and premature. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Compared to the several Scrabble documentaries that came out a few years ago, Wordplay is conspicuously lacking in crazy characters. But the interviews with Shortz are dorky-adorable. (ANNIE WAGNER)
It's a shameful way for the trilogy to end. Director Brett Ratner has given us the summer blockbuster he wants to seeâunfortunately, most everyone who enjoys movies has better taste. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
