Black Narcissus
SAM's Michael Powell series continues with this 1947 film about a group of nuns who try to establish a new religious community in the Himalayan Mountains. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Feb 17 at 7:30 pm.
Brazil
A midnight revisit of Terry Gilliam's cult masterpiece, with its wild visuals and an Orwellian slant. Introduced by The Stranger's own Charles Mudede. EMP's JBL Theater, Fri Feb 18 at 7 pm.
The Brother from Another Planet
John Sayles' 1984 movie about an alien who looks black but acts whack. Rendezvous, Wed Feb 23 at 7:30 pm.
Bush's Brain
An unforgivably lazy documentary without any hint of doubt about its diabolical thesis, Bush's Brain is a panicky, literal-minded adaptation of the book of the same name. Using little more than secondhand information and an offensively opportunistic visit with a grieving war widow, the movie isn't content with characterizing Karl Rove as an amoral sonofabitch who runs campaigns so dirty they'd probably shock Joseph Goebbels. He is, as one talking head tells us, "co-president of the United States," with the entire government at his fingertips. (ADAM HART) Keystone Church, Fri Feb 18 at 7 pm.
David
A film about the Nazi occupation of Finland. Nordic Heritage Museum, Thurs Feb 17 at 7 pm.
Days of Being Wild
See review this issue. Varsity, see Movie Times for details.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Howard Hawks' 1953 film about two transatlantic lounge singers played by Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Grand Illusion, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm.
Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg
A 1990 narrative feature about Raoul Wallenberg, a Swede who travels to German-occupied Hungary to transport the Jews living there to Sweden and safety. Nordic Heritage Museum, Thurs Feb 24 at 7 pm.
The Kids Are Alright
Though The Who (who are the subjects of this movie) may not have objected to the title given to their film, I must point out that "alright" is not a word, but a gross almalgamation of two words. All right? The Kids Are (shudder) Alright is mostly a concert film, with some interviews, and this is a brand-new print. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sat 11 pm.
Male and Female
Silent Movie Mondays continue with this 1919 movie about shipwrecked Brits. Paramount, Mon Feb 21 at 7 pm.
Milan
A love story about Filipino workers in Italy. Allen Auditorium, UW campus, Thurs Feb 24 at 6:30 pm.
Mooladé
The new Ousmane Sembene film about female genital mutilation. Varsity, see Movie Times for details.
Orphans of Delirium
A video documenting a paratheater experiment by Antero Alli. 911 Media Arts, Thurs Feb 24 at 7 pm.
Out of the Past
Jacques Tourneur's film noir starring Jane Greer as the femme fatale. Movie Legends, Sun Feb 20 at 1 pm.
The Red Shoes
Michael Powell's 1948 film about a ballet company under impressario Boris Lermontov. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Feb 24 at 7:30 pm.
Sacred Cinema: Yasujiro Ozu Retrospective
Ozu rarely moved his camera (especially later in his career), choosing instead to keep it static and close to the floor; his characters often look directly into the lens, causing each conversation to feel extremely intimate, as if the audience is itself involved. It is a clean, trouble-free vision, void of flair but so perfectly realized that its apparent simplicity can obscure just how beautiful the images really are. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER) All films screen at Northwest FIlm Forum. That Night's Wife, Thurs Feb 17 at 7 and 9 pm. Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, Thurs-Sat 7, 9:15 pm. Floating Weeds, Fri-Sun 6, 8:30 pm, Mon-Wed 6:30, 9 pm. Ohayo/Good Morning, Sat Feb 19 at 11 am. The Lady and the Bird, accompanied by Aono Jikken Ensemble, Sun Feb 20 at 4:30 pm. The Inn at Tokyo, accompanied by Aono Jikken Ensemble, Thurs Feb 24 at 7 pm. Series continues through March 10, see www.nwfilmforum.org/ozu for details.
Seafarers
A documentary by Jason Massot about the lives of four merchant seamen. 911 Media Arts, Thurs-Fri Feb 17-18 at 7 pm.
Stag Party: The Norman McMahon Tribute Show 2
More antique smut at Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm.
NOW PLAYING
Are We There Yet?
Ice Cube stars as a player/babysitter. Aw.
Assault on Precinct 13
It seems like the scenario--bad guys try to infiltrate an understaffed precinct house during a New Year's Eve snowstorm--is going to yield some good confined-action results, despite the slightly lazy treatment of the villains, who never seem terribly threatening, which makes the heroes never seem terribly heroic, which, in turn, makes the stakes never seem terribly high. Still and all, as genre exercises go, Assault on Precinct 13 redux has a lot going for it. (SEAN NELSON)
The Aviator
It may be impossible to fully know Howard Hughes, but DiCaprio and Scorsese can only offer the broadest of paint strokes here. Scorsese attempts to cover up the lack of depth in The Aviator by focusing heavily on both Hughes' love life as well as his daring in the skies, but no matter how many romantic entanglements and spectacular crashes we see, the film itself remains superficial. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Bad Education
Bad Education announces itself with a rich melodramatic subject--Catholic clergy sex abuse--only to reject all predictable conflict for an emotional and thematic territory all its own. It's a brilliant maneuver, sending audiences traipsing down an initially recognizable path that soon splinters in directions they never could've dreamed. (DAVID SCHMADER)
Because of Winn-Dixie
A kid named Opal finds a dog in a grocery store.
Being Julia
Annette Bening throws herself into each dizzying emotion with abandon, but the histrionics are so grossly out of proportion with the charm or threat posed by her schoolboy lover that the emotional center of the film is hollowed out. The end is smashingly entertaining, but I'm not so sure it makes the tedious, feature-length setup worthwhile. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Boogeyman
A man returns home to face a childhood trauma.
Born Into Brothels
Rare is the documentary that feels too short, but this wrenching, multiple award-winning look at kids growing up within the squalid red-light sector of India begs out for a more detailed exploration. Filmed in an arresting mix of handheld video and Kodachrome stills, the film follows the efforts of co-director/photographer Zana Briski to save the children of Calcutta's sex workers, initially by encouraging their photographic skills (attracting worldwide attention, and with ongoing results viewable at www.kids-with-cameras.org), and then navigating through unbelievable levels of bureaucratic quicksand in an attempt to get them out of the slums and into boarding schools. Briski's struggle is worthy of sainthood, but her resulting document, after an absolutely engrossing first reel, follows a slightly frustrating route. Unintentionally or not, as she concentrates increasingly on getting passports and HIV tests processed, the focus shifts to a more conventional individual vs. the system story, and away from the fairly miraculous day-to-day existence of the kids, where it feels like it belongs. As it stands, the glimpses we see of them and their all-too-knowing interactions with their hellish surroundings are somehow both too much, and not nearly enough. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Bride & Prejudice
I'm happy to report that adapter Paul Mayeda Berges and co-adapter/director Gurinder Chadha lose no sleep over fitting the plot of Pride and Prejudice into a Bollywood mold. The end result doesn't bear the faintest resemblance to Jane Austen, and truth be told, it doesn't cleave too closely to Bollywood conventions either. Bride & Prejudice--even the title makes me simultaneously cringe and cackle--is shorter than you'd expect, some of the colors in that big party scene look a bit washed out, and a certain character bears an unmistakable resemblance to Ali G. But who cares in the slightest? (ANNIE WAGNER)
Closer
Viewed scene by scene, the unfettered, constant venom on display in this film is bracing, thrilling, and almost as much fun to watch as it must have been to perform. Taken as a whole, however, it proves to be a bit too much of a bad thing. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Coach Carter
The heavily hyped Coach Carter tackles a worthy, deservedly inspirational story, about a tough-love basketball coach who turned his dead-ender squad into academic winners, but treats its subject in such a neutered, worshipful fashion that it ultimately does the actual accomplishment a disservice. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Constantine
See review this issue.
Finding Neverland
Marc Forster's third film, Monster's Ball, was complete and utter nonsense. His fourth film, Finding Neverland, is ordinary and dry nonsense. Clearly, Forster is a director of the middling order. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
Hide and Seek
So this little girl gets a bit crazy after seeing her mom laying dead in a pool of blood in the bathtub. She's eight, so of course she's gonna be traumatized. But what does Daddy do? He moves her out to the middle of fucking nowhere! She's exceedingly depressed, she barely talks, she has no friends except her dumb, ratty doll, and so her dad provides her with even more solitude by dragging her out into some creepy fucking woods in upstate New York where the closest neighbors are also pretty messed up?! That's his solution?! Anyways, soon after moving, things get weird due to Little Miss Fanning's new imaginary friend Charlie. Then there are twists and turns and Elizabeth Shue's boobs, and a good movie goes bad-but because it gets all "SURPRISE TWIST ENDING" on our asses, I can't divulge those aggravating aspects because if I did, it'd give everything away and people would write in saying shit like, "You ruined the movie! %#*$!" Well no, dumbass, I didn't ruin the movie; cheesy thriller movie clichés actually ruined the movie. (MEGAN SELING)
Hitch
For the most part, the movie is dull because Smith plays a playa (a man who has all the right moves). It's only late in the film where things turn lively, as Smith finally wakes up and begins to do more of what he always did when he was as a teen rapper and a '90s TV star: comedy. Indeed, this man who bores us with his knowledge of what women want is the very same man who once made us laugh when he rapped "girls of the world ain't nothing but trouble." Unfortunately, that funny man arrives too late to save Hitch. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
Hotel Rwanda
Unlike Spielberg's Schindler's List, Hotel Rwanda doesn't have a huge budget, which is the primary reason why it's not a great film in terms of both photography and casting (many of the extras do not look like Hutus or Tutsis). It's a film held up entirely by Don Cheadle, whose portrayal of an African is, for a black American, second only to Canada Lee's in the 1951 adaptation of Cry, the Beloved Country. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
In Good Company
In Good Company is a happily inoffensive, warmly predictable, wholly inconsequential comedy/drama from American Pie and About a Boy director Paul Weitz. The movie's surface-level themes--corporate takeovers, white-collar backstabbing, familial versus professional relationships, fucking people you're not supposed to--could make for interesting conflicts in the hands of a sharp satirist or incisive sociologist. But the increasingly bland Weitz is neither. (ERIK HENRIKSEN)
Inside Deep Throat
It's the background of Deep Throat not as a porn landmark, but as a portrait of the cultural climate of repression and anti-obscenity laws that met it, which is the most fascinating aspect of the film. From Nixon appointing a commission on pornography and then suppressing its findings when they don't deliver the wanted political outcome, all the way up to the Meese Commission under Ronald Reagan's regime, the filmmakers give us a chilling portrait of the industry of censorship. (NATE LIPPENS)
Kinsey
The first half of Kinsey is exciting on a micro scale the way Kinsey's work was exciting on a grand one: It demonstrates that reason can prevail over mythology. Unfortunately, because it's a movie, the second half allows mythology--the mythology of narrative--to re-intrude, and the picture grows musty. (SEAN NELSON)
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
The movie is faithful to the books, mining the first three for settings, characters, and unfortunate events. Jim Carrey is perfectly cast as the evil Count Olaf, and the pair of roundups cast as the elder orphans, Jennifer Coolidge and Liam Aiken, more than hold their own against Carrey. (DAN SAVAGE)
The Life Aquatic
Long stretches of The Life Aquatic feel malnourished, as if Wes Anderson spent so much energy creating the film's distinct reality that he forgot to provide reasons for that reality to exist. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Meet the Fockers
Watching Meet the Fockers started out grating and ended up grinding my flesh off the bone. (JENNIFER MAERZ)
The Merchant of Venice
You can sleep through the rest of the watery Venetian canal scenes, but Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons are fascinating. These aren't definitive performances by any means--Pacino's Shylock is so infinitely burdened he almost buckles, and that's before his daughter leaves him--but they are acute, stubbornly personal, and a joy to watch. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Million Dollar Baby
As sappy and Lifetime-y as the plot sounds, Clint Eastwood's skill with the performers keeps Million Dollar Baby afloat. Both Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman deliver graceful turns that mesh perfectly with Eastwood's grave brooding, and by the time the film takes a brutally tragic turn you can't help but find yourself yanked along emotionally. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
The Motorcycle Diaries
This is a film that should be taken for what it is: a beautifully constructed road movie with a dash of conscience on the side. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
National Treasure
At the end of the movie the main mystery remains unsolved: Why was so much money, energy, and talent spent realizing what is evidently a dull and dumb script? (CHARLES MUDEDE)
Ocean's Twelve
The story is a mess, the scam is a fraud, and the performances are lazy and smug, but Ocean's 12 has one major plus: the return of Steven Soderbergh's creative pulse. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior
Compared to, say, Jackie Chan's comedic underdogging, the star can't help but come off as a bit of a cold fish. Thankfully, whatever Tony Jaa may lack in charisma, he more than makes up for in utter and total bodily self-disregard; whether skittering through a coil of barbed wire at top speed or doing the splits under a moving van, he delivers a constant stream of suicidally crazy-legged stunts that would make the Jackass crew reach for their Blue Cross cards. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
The Phantom of the Opera
Even putting aside the unspeakably horrendous set design, this movie does everything wrong. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Pooh's Heffalump Movie
Christopher Robin once again plays with his Pooh.
Racing Stripes
Shit yes! I've got it! I've come up with THE BEST MOVIE CONCEPT EVER! Listen up: It'll be a story about a zebra. A baby zebra who was abandoned by the circus in the middle of the night during a rainstorm, but then picked up by some retired and heartbroken racing horse coach guy who hasn't gotten over the fact his wife died during a horseracing accident. He'll bring the zebra home, his wannabe horseracing daughter with the bad hair will fall in love with it and raise it like a horse and everything. What's funny, though, is the zebra won't know he's a zebra! Hahaha! I know, right? Since he grew up on a farm around a bunch of racing horses, the zebra will think he too is a racing horse! Oh man! Hilarity abounds! (MEGAN SELING)
Ray
Despite a tendency to bathe in the molasses of sentimentality, Ray is a rich exponent of the biopic genre. (SEAN NELSON)
The Sea Inside
The movie is admirable and unsparing, and it's a departure for Alejandro Amenábar, a director who's only ever made thrillers and ghost stories. Still, it suffers under the weight of unrelenting ruin. (CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE)
Sideways
Blessed with pitch-perfect performances, especially by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church, Sideways is a slight film, to be sure, but it's also one of Alexander Payne's least snide efforts. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Son of the Mask
See review this issue.
Vera Drake
A bruising, classical tragedy about a woman whose passionate altruism brings pain and suffering upon herself and the people whom she loves. (ANNIE WAGNER)
A Very Long Engagement
I'm not saying it isn't corny. What I'm saying is that it's a fantastic movie, and unless you're the stated enemy of life and all that makes it worth living, you'll probably fall for it. (SEAN NELSON)
What the #$*! Do We Know?!
This ungainly, inane film purports to be about quantum physics but is really about the power of positive thinking. (EMILY HALL)
