It appears that The Stranger's infantile preoccupation with honoring criminals and thieves has taken root in Hollywood. This full-length talkie is intended to honor the terrorists and misanthropes behind 1999's protests against the World Trade Organization. The end result is a motion picture so anti-American and proanarchic that it may as well have been filmed in an Afghanistani cave by Al Qaeda. Surely The Stranger had some hand in the creation of this film—who else would cast world-renowned drug addict Woody Harrelson as a police officer? The impressive thing about Battle in Seattle is that, after its world premiere at SIFF this past May, the film proved to be so incompetently made that even the weak-minded infants of The Stranger turned on it: Staffers were heard to comment between bong hits that the Gary Locke character's Asian accent was "insulting and racist" and that the characters were "flat and stupid" and that the film was altogether "inept." Shockingly, I agree. One day, the true story of the brave officers who fended off the masses of drooling, illiterate, antiestablishment troglodytes will be told—hopefully in a film starring good, conservative Americans like Tom Selleck, Wilford Brimley, and Bruce Willis. But until that day, Seattleites who truly love their city are advised to avoid this film as though their liberty depended on it. recommended