OPENING
I WANT YOU--Varsity
INSTINCT--Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11
LIMBO--Guild 45th
REPERTORY & REVIVAL
BRAKHAGE--Grand Illusion
CANDOR--Union Garage
FILMS OF MARCO FERRERI--Grand Illusion
FRENCH FILM NOIR--Seattle Art Museum
GREASE--Friday Night Cinema
MIDDLE OF THE MOMENT--Little Theater
ROBERT BRESSON FILM SERIES--Grand Illusion
ROBERT MITCHUM DOUBLE FEATURE--Fremont Outdoor Cinema
SILENT MOVIE MONDAYS--Paramount Theatre
WIFE TO BE SACRIFICED--Grand Illusion
COMING SOON
June 11--Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Get Real, Besieged, Twice Upon a Yesterday, Return With Honor, Juliette of the Herbs
June 18--Eternity and a Day, Tarzan, The General's Daughter, The Red Violin, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Buena Vista Social Club
MOVIES & EVENTS
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ALASKA: SPIRIT OF THE WILD--More of a nature documentary than a ghost story. Omnidome
AMAZON--Follow an ethnobotanist through the lush rainforests of the Andes and along the rough-and-tumble Amazon River! Learn about exotic animals, medicinal plants, and Indian shamanism! Amazon's IMAX quality and the Omnidome screen vs. a back issue of National Geographic...you decide. Omnidome
BLACK MASK--Jet Li stars in this wacky, action romp. Pacific Place 11
*BRAKHAGE--Jim Shedden's documentary about Stan Brakhage examines his unique style and avant-garde aesthetic. Thurs June 3 at 5, 7, 9. Grand Illusion
CANDOR--Candor, Brad Cook's new indie film, features local talent and locale while telling the story of a small town bursting with secrets and ugly realities. Sun June 6 at 5, 7, 9; $7.50. Union Garage
THE CASTLE--Australian comedies can be charming (Strictly Ballroom), but most of the time they are patronizing verging on offensive. Such is the case with The Castle, an unreliably optimistic film about low-rent neighbors trying to save their houses from the ever-expanding airport. Isn't it cute that these folks love living on poisoned ground, under buzzing high-tension wires, amid airport noise pollution? Let's cheer for these simpletons as they go to court to fight for their land! On the other hand, let's wait for the remake starring Jeff Foxworthy. (Andy Spletzer) Broadway Market
COOKIE'S FORTUNE--Robert Altman has taken a slight but enjoyable story and applied his familiar techniques of oblique angles, ragged narration, and busy ensemble casts. A suicide is covered up, and a man is imprisoned because of it. Other stories play out about the small town of Holly Springs. Plot, however, is not the main concern of the film. If you want them, there are plenty of rueful themes flamesoating around the movie: idealized, hypocritical notions of the past and of honor, and the way family secrets hurt the person keeping them even more than the person who ferrets them out. (Bruce Reid) Metro, Uptown
*ELECTION--A brilliant dark comedy about an unctuous overachiever's campaign for student council president, and the high school teacher determined to foil her. Election's style serves to plunge us completely into its characters' tiny, highly-charged world, rendering pathetic human pettiness on a nearly operatic scale. Director/co-writer Alexander Payne has infused his miniature world with enormous creativity and meticulous attention to detail: every character is unnervingly humane, the supporting cast is uniformly perfect, and you've never seen a contemporary high school so uncannily rendered. As the charmingly atrocious Tracy Flick, Reese Witherspoon gives an indelible performance; finally she has a role to compete with her star-making turn in the little-seen Freeway. And Matthew Broderick lays the ghost of Ferris Bueller to rest once and for all with his lovely portrayal of Tracy's beleaguered, would-be nemesis. (David Schmader) Grand Alderwood, Meridian 16, Metro, Oak Tree, Redmond Town Center
ENDURANCE--In this docudrama, form has total precedence over content. Set in Ethiopia, the movie's about the life of the great long-distance runner Haile Gebrselasie, who broke a world record for 10,000 meters in the 1996 Olympics. Despite its stilted, European structure, the photography of the film manages to capture an authentic image of the African landscape; an African landscape with people, with huts, with crops, and not with hoards of animals doing that "cycle of life" thing. (Charles Mudede) Metro
ENTRAPMENT--Sean Connery is an ass man. His "character" spends the whole movie looking at the ass of Catherine Zeta-Jones (The Mask of Zorro). Not that there's anything better to do. Entrapment is a high-tech crime thriller chock full of double-crosses but short on thrills. Everybody's a master thief or a federal agent... or both! The information for every crime is flawless, the gadgets never fail, nothing ever goes wrong. Boring! Connery coasts through his role, as does Ving Rhames, but Zeta-Jones turns out to be a real disappointment. How can she be a master thief if she's so prone to temper tantrums and breakdowns? She does have a nice ass, though. (Andy Spletzer) Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Redmond Town Center
THE ERUPTION OF MOUNT ST. HELENS--The mountain blew up in 1980, and has been blowing up on film ever since. Omnidome
EVEREST--The first IMAX footage ever shot on top of the world. Pacific Science Center
*EXISTENZ--Cronenberg's is a world where virtual reality games have become so commonplace that most people think nothing of drilling a "bioport" directly into their spine in order to plug in. Once a game starts, the player becomes a cast member in an artificial world where everything looks and feels "real," where some actions are preprogrammed and others are not. The biggest celebrities of the day are game designers, and none is bigger or more brilliant than the reclusive Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), whose latest, greatest achievement, eXistenZ, has inspired somebody to put a death sentence on her head. David Cronenberg is working from his first original script since Videodrome, and what he's come up with is, in some ways, a revisitation to that movie's themes, and this is one of the wittiest, most perceptive movies about movies and how we think they affect us since Videodrome. (Bruce Reid) Pacific Place 11
FILMS OF MARCO FERRERI--The Grand Illusion's focus on Italian director Marco Ferreri includes an early Roberto Benigni flick (Seeking Asylum, 1979) in which Benigni portrays an energetic kindergarten teacher, and Tales of Ordinary Madness, based on the seedy, drunken life of grumpy poet Charles Bukowski. Reviewed this issue. Grand Illusion
FRENCH FILM NOIR--The Seattle Art Museum's French film noir series comes to an end with Maurice Pialat's Police (Thurs June 3 at 7:30), in which macho cop Gérard Depardieu (in a Venice Film Festival award-winning performance) falls in love with seductive criminal-babe Sophie Marceau, and Thieves (Thurs June 10 at 7:30), Andre Téchiné's examination of a complex web of personalities and emotions that link a seemingly random group of people together. Starring Catherine Deneuve. Call 625-8900 for more info. Seattle Art Museum
GO--Three successive tales: a teen grocery clerk takes a stab at dealing ecstasy; a fellow clerk and his rowdy buddies head out on a road trip; and two actors agree to take part in a drug bust to clear their record. There's some funny scenes, though none of them manage to avoid either cliché, or a hip, ironic take on a cliché. Zero points for originality, then, but don't write the movie off entirely. There's a clutch of good performances (especially Sarah Polley as the would-be dealer, and William Fichtner as a cop), and a few moments do an excellent job capturing the madcap rush of adrenaline when you're young and stupid enough to think you can get away with anything. (Bruce Reid) City Center
GREASE--Fremont's second al fresco cinema series takes place in the Adobe parking lot, underneath the Aurora Bridge. All films will be presented with digital projection and sound, and this week's movie is Grease, being shown with a Wallace & Grommet animated short. Fri June 4 at dusk; $5. Friday Night Cinema
I WANT YOU--Honda, a 14 year old mute boy, is the "narrator" of this enigmatic story about a prisoner who returns to the coastal village where he grew up, in search of the only woman he ever loved. From Michael Winterbottom, the director of Jude and Butterfly Kiss. Varsity
INSTINCT--Sir Anthony Hopkins starts living with apes, then kills to protect them. He goes to jail, and it's up to Cuba Gooding, Jr. to make him human again. Reviewed this issue. Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11
INTO THE DEEP--An IMAX film in 3-D, putting you right into the aquarium. Pacific Science Center
THE KING OF THE MASKS--Zhu Xu stars as the title character, a street performer whose act involves rapidly removing a series of brightly colored masks. Old and childless, he's desperate to pass on the secrets of his art, and thinks he's made quite a wonderful match when he adopts a young boy. But the boy turns out to be a girl. The third act--which trots out some irrelevant child kidnappers and the police--goes on way too long; but story flaws aside, the acting of the two leads is perfect, and the side streets and mighty rivers of China are as lovely as always. (Bruce Reid) Metro
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL--Like any good comedian, Roberto Benigni (and his co-writer Vincenzo Cerami) knows how to plant the seed for a gag early on, let it sit, then return to it much later for the payoff. The opening, which seems so frivolous, is all groundwork for what Benigni knows will be the toughest sell of his life: comedy in the Nazi camps. Employing the understatement and flamesair for timing that comedy requires, Benigni captures detail after detail in a far more devastating way than more earnest films on the subject could manage. (Bruce Reid) Harvard Exit
LIMBO--John Sayles has always been concerned primarily with the depiction of place in his film. In the best instances, his films seem to grow directly from the soil in which they take place, novelistic and natural, like a very old tree. Limbo, by comparison, seems transplanted and sickly, like an idea cast upon a barren field that has failed to take root. Sayles' place here is the last physical and emotional outpost of the American spirit: Alaska. Luminous cinematography by Haskell Wexler renders the land as a gilded promise, with golden light glancing in at acute angles, but the characterizations and heavy-handed plot fail to live up to this promise. This is the blunt and obvious Alaska of losers, dreamers, and schemers, peppered with a few de-facto modern appliances, like ex-Seattle lesbians and California tourism tycoons. The plot, which concerns ill-fated lovers on a ham-fisted backwoods adventure poorly extrapolated from Jack London's wastebasket, feels overworked and plodding. Moreover, this film is just too goddamn written: every word seems delivered in the death-throes of acting, like salmon at the end of their run. (Jamie Hook) Guild 45th
THE LIVING SEA--It's alive! See fish and waves and whales and jellyfish, all in that big-screen IMAX format. Omnidome
*LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS--Set in the East End of London, it's a fast, frantic, and frequently flippant ride through the social strata of gangland as four wide boys send one of their number, cardsharp Eddie (heartthrob Nick Moran), to take on local crime boss Hatchet Harry (P. H. Moriarty) at poker. They soon find themselves in debt, and Harry puts his debt collector Big Chris (soccer hardman Vinnie Jones) on their tails. It's a tidy movie--all the dead bodies are shot and accounted for--and it's also got a wicked, very English sense of humor. (Everett True) Varsity
THE LOVE LETTER--An anonymous love letter to an anonymous recipient electrifies a sleepy New England town. Kate Capshaw becomes determined to find the letter's author. With Tom Selleck, Ellen DeGeneres, and Gwynneth Paltrow's mom. Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center
THE MATRIX--Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) has been searching for the One, a cyber-Christ who will destroy the Matrix and wake people out of their preprogrammed idea of life. He thinks he has found Him in Neo (Keanu Reeves). With the knowledge that the Matrix is a computer-created dream, Morpheus and his rebels (with equally stupid names: Trinity, Cypher, Switch, Apoc, etc.) can run and jump and fight with superhuman power, but are hunted down by super-agents who want to cleanse the system. Sure, the character names are stupid, the barroom metaphysics ("Hey, what if life is just a dream?") are simplistic, and the cyber-Christ story is predictable, but the action scenes--even the ones that use that 180 degree near-freeze frame--make this otherwise boring movie worth seeing. From the directors of Bound. (Andy Spletzer) Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Redmond Town Center, Varsity
MIDDLE OF THE MOMENT--This self-described "cinepoem" consists of footage shot over two years, as directors Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel traveled with nomadic groups--specifically, South Saharan tribes, a French circus (one of those "intellectual" kinds, with silly costumes and no laughs, despite the laughing dubbed in from an unseen audience), and an American poet named Robert Lax who seems to take trains a lot. By the very nature of the project, some images are quite stunning, but there is no narrative or thematic organization that I can see, just plenty of shots of campfires, sand, camels, practicing jugglers, and musicians. Even the few shots with a point drag on long after everyone has "gotten it." The result is ultimately as dull and uninvolving as your aunt and uncle's vacation slides, only more pretentious and in black-and-white. Thurs-Sun June 3-6 at 5:30, 7:30, 9:30. (Bruce Reid) The Little Theater
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM--Apart from its small successes and larger failures, the question looming above the latest screen version of A Midsummer Night's Dream has to be: what is Stanley Tucci doing playing Puck? I like Tucci, but he's not a mischievous sprite. Actually, most of the fairies and follies of this Midsummer are strangely earthbound. Director and adapter Michael Hoffman has an intensely melancholy take on the material; his idea of whimsy is to have Tucci take a piss against a cave like some mythical barfly. The rest of the great cast deliver uneven results. Following Hoffman's lead, Kevin Kline is too somber as Bottom. Michelle Pfeiffer's Titania is fine, if a bit too grand. Calista Flockhart as Helena is, surprisingly, the only actor who consistently manages to hit the right tone (despite some McBeal-type pouts); she's as airy and just as sweetly heartstricken as the rest of this well-intended but plodding film should be. (Steve Wiecking) Grand Alderwood, Guild 45th, Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center
THE MUMMY--Neither a horror film or an action epic, The Mummy is actually a flat-out comedy. This latest retread of a horror icon throws itself into its period (the '30s) with gusto, derring-do, screwball comedy, and wisecracking sexual flirtation among the leads, and even cheerful sexism and racism. Except for the special effects, this movie may as well have come out in 1935. The very things that make The Mummy initially entertaining, however, begin to grate as the movie goes on. When Imhotep the mummy finally appears, he starts as a dull computer-generated corpse and becomes the even duller Arnold Vosloo. Despite the lack of a good villain, or even a good heroine, The Mummy remains a perfect matinee. Directed by Stephen Sommers, creator of the vastly underrated Deep Rising. (Bruce Reid) Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Metro, Oak Tree
NEVER BEEN KISSED--The basic premise is this: Drew is 25, she's never been kissed (yeah, right), and she works at the Chicago Sun-Times. She needs a break, so she's sent as an undercover reporter to her old high school where... no, you must have peeked! She gets kissed! (Everett True) Grand Alderwood
NOTTING HILL--Julia Roberts is a spoiled American star, Hugh Grant is a doddering nobody, in this cross between Pretty Woman and Four Weddings and a Funeral. Factoria, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center, Southcenter
PUSHING TIN--This is a therapy film for guys in the same way that Good Will Hunting was. John Cusack plays a married air traffic controller with the emphasis on "control." He's the best there is, at least until Billy Bob Thornton shows up. The movie has a perfect opportunity to branch into comedy, but it decides to do drama. Cusack's wandering eye and overblown expectations of self-control ultimately lead to trouble with his wife and a breakdown. You see, men need to give up control in order to find themselves. Or they just need therapy. (Andy Spletzer) City Center
*ROBERT BRESSON FILM SERIES--Based on the life of Andre Devigny (and drawn from his own Nazi prisoner experience), Bresson's A Man Escaped tells the tale of a French resistance leader who is about to be executed. Sun June 6 at 1, 3. Grand Illusion
ROBERT MITCHUM DOUBLE FEATURE--This week at Fremont Outdoor Cinema, Robert Mitchum takes center stage. Cape Fear (the original version) and Night of the Hunter (where Mitchum is a psychotic religious fanatic) will be shown, along with a performance by The Creepers, Seattle's own country-rockabilly band. Sat June 5; doors at 7, films at dusk, $5 donation. Call 632-0287 for more info. Fremont Outdoor Cinema
SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE--Certainly the idea is appealing: one of history's immortals, shown in his still-struggling youth, with eye-catching period details and a cast uniformly professional enough to carry it off with whimsy. But the film strains too much to flatter and please the audience, setting up predictable conflicts and getting out of them through the easiest ways possible. It's clever in a very simple way, content to show its hero as a great-man-in-waiting and its heroine as so improbably perfect she could only be a muse. (Bruce Reid) Metro, Redmond Town Center, Uptown
*SILENT MOVIE MONDAYS--The Seattle Landmark Association's "Silent Movie Mondays" returns this summer with a collection of comedies, mysteries, and adventures. Enjoy classic silent films, live organ accompaniment, and the gilded elegance of the Paramount. Show People, a comedy based on Gloria Swanson's career, kicks off the series. Mon June 7 at 7, $10. Paramount Theatre
STAR WARS: EPISODE I--What does it matter what we say? You'll see it anyway. The threadbare plot involves a trade dispute between the emperor-controlled "alliance" and the peaceful, enlightened Naboo people. The Jedi appear to negotiate a settlement, but alas, it won't be. And so the "drama" begins: the race to flee the planet; the crash-landing on Tattooine; the mystery-boy who joins the mission; the simmering Oedipal set-up as the Boy leaves his Mother and discovers, in her stead, Natalie Portman; and the inevitable 11th-hour solution to all problems. Lucas' obsessions with technology, with money, with salability and easy-access too often overwhelm his abilities as a director. It is as if Lucas himself has been seduced by the Dark Side of CGI effects. Indeed, the young Darth Vader is merely a surrogate for Lucas the Director: a natural with great promise somehow given to the evil, inorganic pleasures of power and money for their sake alone. (Jamie Hook) Cinerama, Factoria, Lewis & Clark, Neptune, Northgate
THE SWINDLE--By this, his 50th film, Claude Chabrol has long since passed the stage of merely having brilliant set pieces; every scene in the film flows together marvelously, with never a camera move out of place. What's being filmed, though, is another matter. Isabelle Huppert and Michel Serrault star as a pair of small-time swindlers who specialize in doping up businessmen and stealing about half their cash--this discretion posing less risk since the men upon awaking don't even realize they've been taken. Their latest prey are at a dentist's convention in Switzerland, but when Serrault arrives he finds Huppert already arm-in-arm with a money courier for the mob, hard at work plotting their first big score. The movie is frothy and fun enough, but far too slight. Without any real sense of danger or passion from the leads, it's hard to care, no matter how cleverly the director stages everything. (Bruce Reid) Metro
TEA WITH MUSSOLINI--Franco Zeffirelli's autobiographical film, set in Florence on the brink of WWII, is about a little Italian boy who was born out of wedlock. A bastard. His father doesn't want him, so he ends up adopted by his father's English secretary, who shares babysitting duties with her female friends, also English. The ladies don't want to leave Florence, even after the war breaks out, thinking Mussolini won't want to hurt them. Turns out (surprise, surprise) that Mussolini doesn't care about them. Zeffirelli has never been a subtle filmmaker, but here he is so enthusiastic about stereotypes and manipulating emotions that the film is interesting until it becomes tiresome. Tea With Mussolini sentimentalizes the war years in much the same way as Life Is Beautiful did, never really acknowledging the atrocities of that--or any--war. As the wealthy American debutante, Cher sings one song. (Andy Spletzer) Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11, Seven Gables
THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR--A $2 billion dollar corporation running tests on a virtual video game that allows a person to travel to different periods in history and play out their fantasies. Hannon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl), designed the program, owns the company, and enjoys traveling back to 1937 to sleep with a beautiful young woman in a glamorous hotel, all of which he created. One night he is stabbed to death in an alley, and the primary suspect is Fuller's protégé (Craig Bierko). Soon, a femme fatale (Gretchen Mol) enters the plot, claiming to be the daughter of the dead boss. The biggest error in this flawed film was to release this film so soon after The Matrix. Thematically, the films are too close. Then again, what do you expect when producer Roland Emmerich, director Josef Rusnak, and a crew full of Germans try to make a purely "American" entertainment. (Charles Mudede) Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Metro, Oak Tree
THIS IS MY FATHER--This Is My Father is actually two films: The first is about a jaded Chicago school teacher (James Caan) who returns to Ireland with his rebellious nephew (Jacob Tierney) to rediscover his soul, his history, his identity, and so on. This is the weak part of the film. The second story is a flashback set in 1939, in rural Ireland, and concerns a strange love affair that forms between two people who have as much in common as night and day. One (Moya Farrelly) is beautiful, the other (Aidan Quinn) is ugly; one is rich, the other is poor. They fall in love, and it's the monstrous nature of this love affair that gives the second story its greatness. You see, the young and beautiful woman is unstable, unpredictable, and the lonely giant she falls in love with is nothing more than a projection of her deformed soul. The man not only looks like a monster, he acts like a monster. He knows that the girl is insane, he knows her love for him is a product of that insanity, yet he accepts (and hungrily devours) her demented affection. (Charles Mudede) Broadway Market
THREE SEASONS--This movie interweaves four thin short stories: a flower picker who meets her leperous master; a cyclo driver and deluded prostitute; an American ex-soldier (Harvey Keitel) looking for his long-lost daughter; and the last, the meanderings of a little boy who peddles cigarettes and lighters at local night clubs for his father. Why has this film been popular at festivals? Because it is virtually content-free. There's no action, no hunks, one prostitute with a heart of gold, no sex, and above all no plot. Tony Bui's film is not about the "new" Vietnam (as is supposed), but instead glorifies Vietnam's poverty from the point of view of an American tourist. (Charles Mudede) Broadway Market
*TREKKIES--Everybody has an obsession. What separates the fan from the fanatic is how far you take your obsession. Trekkies looks at Star Trek followers on both sides of the fan/fanatic fence. It's all too easy to make fun of the truly hardcore fanatic, and Trekkies wisely avoids this approach. Denise Crosby (Lt. Tasha Yar on The Next Generation) interviews the film's subjects, which encourages both fans and fellow cast members to open up, knowing she won't be condescending. But let's face it, it's the wacky fans that are the most interesting. The man who had his ears surgically altered into pointy Vulcan ones. Dr. Denis Bourguignon, who transformed his dentist's office into "Starbase Dental." Barbara Adams, who made the national news for wearing her Starfleet uniform while on jury duty in the Whitewater trial. Trekkies is a fascinating look at an often bizarre phenomenon. (Gillian G. Gaar) Meridian 16
A WALK ON THE MOON--A Walk on the Moon tries desperately to draw parallels between its everyday characters and the seemingly momentous changes going on in the nation. It doesn't work, mostly because neither the characters we're watching nor the times they live in ever feel anything more than a superficial rehash of everything you've heard and seen before. (Bruce Reid) Uptown
WHALES--An up close and personal look at the largest mammals on earth. Omnidome
WIFE TO BE SACRIFICED--Masaru Konuma's sadistic vision of a battered wife and her husband's twisted attempts at retribution. Chock full o' bondage and torture. Fri-Sat June 4-5 at 11. Grand Illusion
THE WINSLOW BOY--David Mamet adapts a play for the screen that was written long before cursing tirades were acceptable, and does an "okay" job with it. A young boy gets kicked out of military school when he's accused of stealing. We never really know if the boy, this "Winslow" boy, did it or not, but the boy maintains his innocence. The father decides to trust the boy and sue the school, causing a big public uproar in a case that nearly sinks them financially. Mamet tones down the actors' deliveries to such a point that it seems everybody is speaking in a monotone; that wouldn't be so bad if the underlying emotions were strong enough to make up for it. Ah well, it's a diverting and often dull time in the theater--kind of like seeing a play! (Andy Spletzer) Broadway Market
