Coming Soon

Birthday Girl, Italian for Beginners, A Matter of Taste, Slackers


New This Week

Cannibal Holocaust
For years I had heard about this supposedly horrifying and disgusting Italian horror film called Cannibal Holocaust. A film so realistic in its portrayal of grisly murders that snippets of it on the Internet had raised flags of a possible snuff film. Imagine my surprise, then, when the film in question finally reaches my hands and it turns out to be nothing more than a precursor of the Blair Witch Project, only dubbed and (even more) ridiculous. There are disgusting parts, sure, but these moments are relegated mainly to the snuffing of various jungle animals, not actual humans. Not that I would want to see humans snuffed.... (BRADLEY STEINBACHER) Egyptian

* The Count of Monte Cristo
Reviewed this issue. A good old-fashioned retelling of the Dumas swashbuckler with strapping men (Jim Caviezel, Guy Pearce), virtuous hotties (Dagmara Dominczyk), and the great Luis Guzman. (SEAN NELSON) Metro

Dark Blue World
A love-in-the-midst-of-war deal by Jan Sverak (Oscar-winning director of Kolya), Dark Blue World is the kind of movie that wants desperately to touch your heart and won't take no for an answer. It's the story of Franta and Karel, two randy young fighter pilots from Czechoslovakia who are sent to England to help the Brits fight the Nazis. They become fast friends and soon fall for the same "beautiful" British ice princess. Karel goes ballistic when he learns that his comrade's been shtupping her, so they hate each other, and then one of them dies. This film has been called witty, which is additionally disappointing because the only humor to be found is strictly slapstick (e.g. variations on the "Guy Falling Down" string). I guess it's nice to see WWII from a European perspective for once, and it's got lots of havoc and dogfights and digital explosions, so maybe you like that stuff. But the film as a whole? Don't bother. You've seen it all before. (MEG VAN HUYGEN) Broadway Market

* False Promises: The Lost Land of the Wenatchi
911 Media Arts Center presents a sneak preview of this PBS documentary about the fruitless struggle of an American Indian tribe to claim rights granted to it by several legal treaties with the U.S. government. Director Rustin Thompson will be on hand to answer questions. 911 Media Arts Center

I Am Sam
Reviewed this issue. This Sean Penn-Michelle Pfeiffer bathos fest takes up a premise that only the most steadfastly nice person could fail to smile at: a retarded father fights for custody of his seven-year-old daughter. I'm not saying it's not possible for the mentally challenged to be good parents, it's just that I can't help thinking of the line in that old Mr. Show sketch in which a filmmaker wins an award for making a movie about the difficulty of growing up with Down Syndrome parents. Father: "My shoes hurt." Son: "That's okay, dad... my shoes hurt, too." (SEAN NELSON) Factoria, Guild 45th, Meridian 16, Woodinville 12

* JAZZ ON FILM
This week: Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise and Imagine the Sound, two documentaries about the avant garde jazz kook (his music, he claims, comes from another planet) whose allegiances date back to the mid-'60s free jazz scene and also include experimental art rock weirdos Lee Ranaldo and Sonic Youth. (SEAN NELSON) JBL Theater at EMP

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
A fake real pseudo-kung fu movie with (get this!) fake real pseudo-dubbing. Steve Odekerk, director of Patch Adams, took the 1977 film Savage Killers, chopped it up, threw himself in there, and made it with the jokes, yielding a concept somehwere between What's Up Tiger Lily? and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, but wound up with a film much closer to that one scene in Police Academy 2 where Michael Winslow does that funny bit with the funny talking thing. Varsity

Lantana
A lantana is a pretty pink flower. Lantana the film is a bud that never blooms. The long, slow film opens with a dead body and ends with a couple dancing, and in between are 120 minutes of middle-aged people living miserably. There is a story, sure--something about infidelity and a possible murder--but the bulk of the film is made up of pure misery, both for the characters and the audience. Then again, Australia is a former penal colony, so perhaps such punishment should be expected. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER) Harvard Exit

* A LAUREL & HARDY LAUGHATHON
Sugar Daddies and Love 'em and Weep accompanied by Eric Shoemaker on the WurliTzer Theater Pipe Organ, and two full-length talkies, Brats and The Music Box. Another fine mess courtesy of Hokum W. Jeebs. Hokum Hall

Metropolis
Metropolis is a beautiful and stylish hybrid--one of those future worlds imagined from the distant past, where above ground looks like an Ayn Rand dream, below ground is pure Blade Runner, and the characters are retro in the style of Hergé's Tintin. The malicious but helpless President Boon presides over Metropolis, and the true power lies with the Roarkian Duke Red, builder of the Ziggurat and the muscle behind Tima, a gorgeous android (looking uncannily like Haley Joel Osment) who will someday rule the world. What makes Metropolis--which has a production pedigree that includes much of anime's royalty--feel like something truly new is the animation (combining the most up-to-date CGI with old-fashioned cels and the occasional live-action background), the mood (speakeasy 1920s, complete with Dixieland Jazz and gumshoe detectives), and its refusal to divide the world into absolute good and evil. Mostly, yes, it's eye candy, but everyone's eyes should be so lucky. (EMILY HALL) Varsity

The Mole People
The cast of Jet City Improv will screen this 1956 sci-fi flick and spruce it up with live voices, sound effects, and music, based on audience suggestions. Paradox Theater

The Mothman Prophecies
Um, it's pronounced Moth-mun. Richard Gere and Laura Linney star in this psychological thriller about a yuppie p.o.s. who has it all, and then loses it because he fails to apprehend the sinister augurs of the title. Directed by music videomaker Mark Pellington (whose debut, Arlington Road, was both underappreciated and overrated, oddly enough) has a very compelling visual gift, so this one might not be as bad as it probably is. Metro

The Operator
Cocky, philandering Dallas lawyer Gary Weelan (Michael Laurence) is caught eyeballing and otherwising so much ass on screen, even the press audience squirmed and sighed. Writer and director Jon Dichter (Seattle's own) delivers a slick modern morality tale, psychological-thriller style, in which a worthless sack of yuppie tan and muscle mass is sent through the spanking machine that is a telephone operator's obsessive, pseudo-spiritual vengeance. Swifter than Yahweh's destruction of Job, the unseen Asian Operator destroys a bad man to make him good again. In an erotically charged game of cat and mouse, the operator whispers over the phone that her desire is "to destroy you, and set you free," justifying her total control over this poor sod's silly life with sexy Eastern mysticism. Laurence radiates an appropriate charm, by turns disgusting and appealing, playing his part for all its worth. The righteous, relentless, and at times morbidly funny downward spiral of this relentlessly upwardly mobile man you love to hate is well executed, if predictable. Like an episode of Law & Order except with sex and incense (a.k.a. spirituality), The Operator intelligently accomplishes what it sets out to do--inserting order into a messy world. (RACHEL KESSLER) Meridian 16

Secrets of Silicon Valley
An earnest documentary that attempts to expose the seedy underbelly of the now-dead Internet economy: an underpaid, non-union, non-white, non-male temp workforce. What did they think they were making, tennis shoes? Independent Media Center

A Walk to Remember
Would-be teen pop princess and cosmetics shill Mandy Moore dares to eat a peach in what promises to be a film to be forgotten, instantly. Metro

WOMEN IN CINEMA FESTIVAL
Politics aside, there's nothing to suggest that films are gonna be any good just because the director's a chick. But they're having this festival despite what I think, and luckily, some of the movies are fantastic. This year's crown jewel is Italian for Beginners, a wry anti-comedy about a group of miserable Danes who take an Italian class together. Creative and tidy with priceless dialogue, it's proof that great work can come from a small budget if you have talent and a decent script. Also outstanding is the stark and exquisite Rain, which concerns a Kiwi Lolita competing with her alcoholic mother for the attentions of a beach bum. Conversely, some of the films are so bad that it's fucking criminal. I nearly broke down and sobbed when I realized that I had to sit through all of Clara Law's The Goddess of 1967, and Miracle (a prepubescent wigger-in-training has magical powers to make people do whatever he wants by pretending his hand is a gun and shooting them) was just as devastating. So it's a mixed bag this year, like film festivals usually are. I only ask that you don't blame womankind for the terrible films, nor exalt it for the great ones. (MEG VAN HUYGEN) Cinerama, Harvard Exit


Continuing Runs

Ali
Michael Mann is a shitty filmmaker because he believes that if you tell a lie with enough style--the lie of cool, the lie of dignity, the lie of Will Smith--then people will believe it. He is wrong. (SEAN NELSON) Factoria, Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Woodinville 12

A Beautiful Mind
Ron Howard is only interested in making an uplifting Christmas movie, and to provide an easily digestible tale of overcoming adversity--as if insanity was something you just get through, like a bad hair day. (MICHAEL SHILLING) Factoria, Majestic Bay, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center, Woodinville 12

Black Hawk Down
Reviewed this issue. Ridley Scott's effort to tell the story of Somalia, 1993, without dealing with all the messy politics. Ain't that America? Factoria, Lewis & Clark, Majestic Bay, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center, Woodinville 12

Brotherhood of the Wolf
It's not just that the plot (about a superwolf laying waste to the French countryside in the 1700s and a scientist with amazing fighting prowess sent to track it down) grows less and less sensible; not just that the lead actor is a second-rate Christopher Lambert; not just that the sex scenes are lurid and yet untitillating; not just that everyone knows kung fu--Brotherhood of the Wolf is all of this and more, a special French fusion of the pretentious and the inane. Were it not so long, this would be camp fun. (BRET FETZER) Pacific Place 11

* Charlotte Gray
Just when you thought Cate Blanchett couldn't get any sexier, she goes and joins the French Resistance! (SEAN NELSON) Broadway Market

* Dead or Alive
Director Takashi Miike (Audition) proves to be better at mood and movement than plot, but what remains constant is his desire to sacrifice innocence and purity for perversion and violence. Even a giant bird mascot is felled by a hail of bullets. It's THAT kind of movie. (ANDY SPLETZER) Grand Illusion

* FANTASTIKA
NWFF presents a program of films by Russian visionary Aleksandr Ptushko. This week: Viy and Sadko. Grand Illusion

Gosford Park
Robert Altman's latest is an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery set in the posh environs of a late 19th-century English mansion, where the swells and scousers surmount class boundaries to answer the question "Whodunnit?" Grand Alderwood, Pacific Place 11, Seven Gables

How High
Both Redman and Method Man are charismatic and irreverent performers with massive vitality who consistently bring marijuana into the themes and lyrics of their music: it is natural that they'd make a movie together. (RAPHAEL GINSBERG) Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16

Impostor
Gary Fleder directs Gary Sinise and Madeleine Stowe in this sci-fi thriller (about aliens and mistaken identity and so forth). Aurora Cinema Grill, Grand Alderwood, Meridian 16

* In the Bedroom
This langorous, beautifully acted film about erotic and familial entanglements in a small Maine fishing town one summer builds up to three moments of utter emotional brutality so severe that the long moments in between them thrum like high tension wires. An insidiously gripping adaptation of Andre Dubus' deeply moral short story. (SEAN NELSON) Metro, Oak Tree, Uptown

* Kandahar
One woman's harrowing journey through modern-day Afghanistan to try to prevent her sister, maimed by landmines and oppressed beyond consolation, from killing herself. Broadway Market

Kate and Leopold
This was like Crocodile Dundee crossed with Sleepless in Seattle, if your mind can wrap itself around that horror. (TAMARA PARIS) Aurora Cinema Grill, Grand Alderwood, Meridian 16, Varsity, Woodinville 12

* Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring
Director Peter Jackson's adaptation of part one of Tolkien's tale of Hobbits, Wizards, Orcs, Elves, Black Riders, and Dwarves has finally made it to the screen with real live humans. (SEAN NELSON) Cinerama, Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center, Woodinville 12

The Majestic
Sitting through this movie was like watching a four-hour long Coke commercial or eating a pound of frosting roses or submitting to a high-fructose corn syrup enema. (TAMARA PARIS) Aurora Cinema Grill, Meridian 16, Woodinville 12

* Mulholland Drive
Like all Lynch, this film is beautifully constructed, bizarre, and funny. It's just impossible to say definitively whether this is good or not. (SEAN NELSON) Broadway Market

* Ocean's 11
Steven Soderbergh remakes the classic (though turgid) Rat Pack heist film. Factoria, Meridian 16, Metro, Oak Tree, Redmond Town Center, Woodinville 12

Orange County
Though it seemed physically impossible for this film not to be horrendous, it's actually fairly charming (a bit of what's now called "bodily humor" notwithstanding) and--thanks to Jack Black, Catherine O'Hara, John Lithgow, and Jane Adams--quite frequently funny. I'm not saying go see it, just that if you secretly want to, don't feel so bad. (SEAN NELSON) Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Oak Tree, Varsity, Woodinville 12

* The Royal Tenenbaums
The film is hilariously funny, dryly tender, and impeccably designed. (SEAN NELSON) Neptune, Redmond Town Center, Uptown, Woodinville 12

The Shipping News
The film is full of shit on every level--every word it says is a lie. It should be avoided like fruitcake. PS: Whoever it was that told Kevin Spacey to stop playing charismatic bastards and to start playing cosmic naifs should be dipped in tar. (SEAN NELSON) Guild 45th, Meridian 16, Redmond Town Center

Snow Dogs
This film, a new Disney comedy starring Gooding Jr. and James Coburn, is a piece of shit, but maybe your 4 to 8-year-old spawn will find some use for it. (KUDZAI MUDEDE) Factoria, Meridian 16, Metro, Woodinville 12

Vanilla Sky
Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz star in Cameron Crowe's inferior remake of Alejandro Amenåbar's nonetheless overrated Abre los Ojos. (SEAN NELSON) Meridian 16, Northgate, Varsity