Coming Soon

Big Fat Liar, Collateral Damage, The Fluffer, Little Otik, Monster's Ball, Rollerball, Shiri, Storytelling, Taliesin Jones


New This Week

Birthday Girl
Nicole Kidman plays every man's fantasy Russian mail- order bride: doesn't speak English, is literally perfectly beautiful, and when she finds your porn, she doesn't rip it up, she acts it out. Ben Chaplin plays a schlubby banker who orders her, falls in love, then gets played for a sucker when her Russkie boyfriends come to town. Despite a wobbly tone at the outset, the film perks up into a brisk, unjudgmentally sexual romantic comedy. (SEAN NELSON) Metro

* Chasing Sleep
Reviewed this issue. An excellent psychological suspenser starring Jeff Daniels as an academic whose wife is missing for reasons he may not be letting himself remember. (SEAN NELSON) Little Theatre

* Dancing Outlaw
See Stranger Suggests. Rednecks of the world unite and behold the twinkling toes of Jesco! 911 Media Arts Center

* EXPERIMENTAL FILM PROGRAM
James Benning has a knack, some might say an obsession, with American landscapes and the open road. Here he takes two murderers--a teenage girl who stabbed a more popular classmate in 1984, and the first cannibal murderer from Wisconsin, Ed Gein--and contrasts them with the isolation of their suburban California and rural Wisconsin locations. Landscape Suicide will be preceded by Martin Arnold's acclaimed short Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, which deconstructs a seemingly harmless scene from an Andy Hardy movie by slowing the footage down and looping it. Experimental film of this caliber doesn't come through Seattle too often, and it's doubtful these films will ever be on tape/DVD, so I would recommend not missing this program. (ANDY SPLETZER) 911 Media Arts Center

* Italian for Beginners
Reviewed this issue. The characters of Italian for Beginners begin in a state of despair. This being a romantic comedy, their lives begin to intersect through a series of coincidences--coincidences that could feel contrived, but due to the rough integrity of the script, performances, and direction (shaped in part by the monastic rigors of the Dogme 95 ethic), they feel like the organic waywardness of life. (BRET FETZER) Harvard Exit

* JAZZ ON FILM
This week: Vinyl. The record collector backlash continues in this self-examining documentary by vinyl junkie Alan Zweig, who is all-too-ready to admit that obsessive collecting (what Michael Goldberg called "music hoarding" in a recent neumu.com piece) can destroy you. JBL Theater at EMP

JEWISH FILM NIGHTS
This week: The Producers, a movie that is simultaneously brilliant and inept. Thanks to the comic performances of Zero Mostel and the--let's be frank--greatest living comic actor, Gene Wilder, the film that spawned the world's most famous musical has endured. But Mel Brooks had not yet learned how to make a film (as he later would, masterfully, with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein), so his debut is glacially paced and almost unbearable. Except for when it's perfect. Weird. (SEAN NELSON) JCC, Mercer Island Facility

* The Man Who Would Be King
Michael Caine and Sean Connery star in John Huston's marvelous adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's yarn about power and absolute power corrupting and absolutely corrupting. A none-too-subtle disdain for empire is evident throughout, as is the plain and irrefutable fact that Michael Caine is twice the man and movie star Connery ever was. (SEAN NELSON) Egyptian

A Matter of Taste
A waiter named Nicolas impresses a rich customer named Frederic, who offers him a job as a food taster. In what might have been a fine life full of food's succulent luxury, Frederic becomes obsessed with changing Nicolas into the spitting image of himself--a vain, domineering man with excellent taste in food. Mauvais apetit! Varsity

SCREWBALL COMEDY SERIES
NW Film Forum's screwball retrospective kicks off with the incandescent teaming of My Man Godfrey, with Carole Lombard (the queen of screwball) and William Powell and His Girl Friday, with Cary Grant (the king of all film genres) and Rosalind Russell. (SEAN NELSON) Grand Illusion

Slackers
If only this were a sequel in the tradition of Alien and Aliens! Alas, no. (There already was a sequel to Slacker: Waking Life.) One distinguishing characteristic is that the movie is set not in a high school, but in a college. A nerdy narc busts the three title characters cheating on final exams, then agrees to let them off the hook if they get him laid with a supermodel. Dude! Varsity

* Starters
See Stranger Suggests. The hoop dreams of twin giants Rodrick and Lodrick Stewart (and their Rainier Beach High School basketball teammates) are on view in this documentary. Local 46

VIOLENCE IN CINEMA
The Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study sponsors this film series, which will take place every first Friday for the next five months. This week: The Sopranos. (BRIAN GOEDDE) Seattle Asian Art Museum

VINTAGE EROTICA
Before there was porn proper, there was "erotica," a distinction approximately as useful as the one between "radical" and "liberal." NWFF presents this late-night look back at the days of black socks and hickock belts. Gentlemen, start your boners. (SEAN NELSON) Grand Illusion


Continuing Runs

A Beautiful Mind
Stories about the insane are an inherent paradox. Because for a story to be compelling, it has to have rules, and an inner logic, whereas mental illness doesn't have rules, and treats logic as just another way of seeing. In the case of John Nash (Russell Crowe), the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who suffered from schizophrenia, there is the added irony that a man of quantitative genius could lose all control of quantitative reality. With a deft directorial touch, the paradox of Nash's world could really come to life. But that would take more of a talent than Ron Howard, whose interest is to make 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
As a filmmaker, Ridley Scott is an ad man forever in search of a product to sell. In Black Hawk Down, there are several competing products, including Military Hypocrisy, Uncommon Valor, and African Savagery, but in the end the bill of goods boils down to the hoariest chestnut of all: War is Hell. To test this chancy proposition, Scott enlists the true story of a botched U.S. military incursion in Mogadishu, Somalia, 1993, during which a battalion of elite forces was stranded in the "entirely hostile district" of Bakara, and forced to hold its impossible position for 15 hours without supplies or support. Like any good shill, this director can't be bothered to let messy details like politics, reason, or history overcomplicate his pitch. (SEAN NELSON) Factoria, Lewis & Clark, Majestic Bay, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center, Woodinville 12

* Charlotte Gray
Just when you thought Cate Blanchett couldn't get any sexier, she goes and joins the French Resistance! Blanchett plays Charlotte as a willing naif, whose participation in the war effort arises out of her simple desire to do good, and the less noble desire to be reunited with her soldier lover lost behind enemy lines. Of course, Charlotte soon becomes the traditional ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances--and frankly, a bit of a saint--but director Gillian Armstrong (Last Days of Chez Nous) is too much of a sensualist to let the proceedings become conventional. (SEAN NELSON) Broadway Market

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. (MEG VAN HUYGEN) Broadway Market

* FANTASTIKA
NWFF presents a program of films by Russian visionary Aleksandr Ptushko, concluding this Thursday with the final screening of The New Gulliver, a 1933 full-length animated (stop-motion and live action) adaptation/modernization of the Swift classic. Ptushko's Lilliput is full of then-new technology, and is a fertile enough ground for the hero, Petya, to lead a worker's revolution! Grand Illusion

* Gosford Park
Set in 1932, Gosford Park is an exhausted murder mystery. It takes a toxic narrative, the sort that was exploited to death by Agatha Christie, and emphasizes things Christie wouldn't emphasize (like class antagonisms, power structures within sexual relationships), and de-emphasizes things she would emphasize (like the murder, the mystery, and its solution). In a word, Gosford Park is a meta-mystery, meaning the setting, figures, and tropes of a murder mystery form the frame for the real concern (or concerns): class and gender rivalries; the rise of mass entertainment; and the dark history of the industrial revolution and British imperialism. (CHARLES MUDEDE) Aurora Cinema Grill, Grand Alderwood, Pacific Place 11, Seven Gables

I Am Sam
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. (SEAN NELSON) Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Guild 45th, Meridian 16, Woodinville 12

* 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. A college boy (Nick Stahl; never liked him before, but he's great here) having a fling with a townie single mother (Marisa Tomei, back from the dead and in excellent form), the boy's parents (Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson, who carry the picture with a realistic melancholy gravitas), and the mistress' ex-husband (William Mapother, who is related to Tom Cruise, but a fine actor nonetheless; he recalls Eric Roberts in Star 80, the creepiest creep in movie history) form the locus of Todd Field's insidiously gripping adaptation of Andre Dubus' deeply moral short story. (SEAN NELSON) Metro, Oak Tree, Uptown

* Kandahar
The journey at the heart of this brutal, fascinating film is an odyssey into the hell of contemporary Afghanistan, which is to say prehistoric Afghanistan; the only true difference between ancient past and gruesome present appears to be the modernity of the weaponry. Makhmalbaf's film tells the story of Nafas, a female Afghan expatriate, now living in Canada and working as a journalist (so is the non-actress who plays her, Nelofer Pazira). Her sister is still trapped in the title city, maimed by a land mine and unable to tolerate the subhuman conditions for women that are enforced under Taliban rule (as opposed to merely systemic under their predecessors). When the sister writes of her intention to commit suicide, Nafas decides to return to Kandahar and intervene. What follows is actually not even a journey--it's a human smuggling operation. Because women are forbidden by Taliban law from travelling unaccompanied in Afghanistan, Nafas must rely on the mercenary "kindness" of fellow travelers. Broadway Market

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
If you're in the market for a stupid spoof that's actually amusing, do yourself a favor: rent Woody Allen's 1966 What's Up, Tiger Lily and steer clear of this stinking pile of karate-kicking cow offal. (TAMARA PARIS) Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Redmond Town Center, Varsity, Woodinville 12

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

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. 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) Broadway Market

The Mothman Prophecies
John Klein (Richard Gere) is a reporter whose wife (Debra Messing) dies after a sinister, bat-like creature--seen only by her--steps in front of her car. Confused and despairing, John throws himself into his work until it throws him into the backwoodsy town of Point Pleasant, where numerous residents have received similar visitations. Following his nose for news, John struggles to reconcile these incidents with his wife's death, in the process fleshing out what might be a schlocky, skeletal story in less capable hands than Mark Pellington's (Arlington Road). (SARAH STERNAU) Grand Alderwood, Meridian 16, Metro, Northgate, Woodinville 12

* No Man's Land
War is--guess what?--hell in this story of the Bosnia-Serbia conflict, circa 1993. Surrounded by UN "peacekeepers," clumsy media vultures, and their warring rival factions, two soldiers cross into the zone between the bullets and clash about the war's origins and costs. (SEAN NELSON) Meridian 16

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. 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. (RACHEL KESSLER) Meridian 16

Orange County
Directed by the son of the famous Lawrence Kasdan and starring the (utterly charmless) son of the famous Tom Hanks, OC is not the abortion that its pedigree and previews foretold. 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. All that said, it's rip-roaringly conventional, predictable, and ultimately dumb. (SEAN NELSON) Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Oak Tree, Woodinville 12

A Walk to Remember
A long-standing complaint of the religious right has been the lack of wholesome, family-oriented (i.e., good Christian) entertainment available to the average, wholesome (good Christian) American. But what Michael Medved and his ilk seem to misunderstand (or ignore) is the simple fact that wholesome, good Christian entertainment is consistently, irredeemably lame. Case in point: A Walk to Remember, an unforgivably sappy teen romance starring Mandy Moore as a Christian girl who, through her kindness and faith, saves a troubled local hottie (Shane West) from the path of sin and ruin. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER) Grand Alderwood, Meridian 16, Metro, Woodinville 12