LIMITED RUN
Hettie MacDonald's 1996 film about two working class boys in sweetly ambivalent love. Central Cinema, Fri-Sat 7 pm.
A rather cursory doc about the chorus girls who performed at the Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club in the '30s. Reunited under the banner The Silver Belles in the '80s, the old ladies (snappy dressers, all) shim-sham their way through nostalgic revues and tutor the next generation in the forgotton steps of the jazz chorus line. Been Rich All My Life is great when it digs into their history (of tours through South America and the segregated South, of the first strike of black entertainers), but it drags unforgiveably in the present. Cute and sassy as they are, the dance-lovin' grandmas can't hold up the second half of the film, as their ranks are slowly depleted by broken hips and cancer. (ANNIE WAGNER) Grand Illusion, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm.
Bickford Shmeckler's Cool IdeaA sunny, strange, and altogether disarming college comedy about a deep-thinking genius who believes he's discovered the meaning of life... only to have it stolen by a mega-sexy pothead, thereby sparking a mad scavenger hunt for "Bickford Schmeckler's Cool Ideas." Boasting a fantastic ensemble, a winning sense of humor, a few sly little surprises, and a lot more brains than you'd normally expect from a campus comedy, the flick doesn't fall into any easy categories, but it's a creative and understated little winner all the way. (SCOTT WEINBERG) South Lake Union Discovery Center, Fri Aug 25 after dusk.
Bike-InRide your bike to this Northwest Film Forum-curated screening of short bike films, including One Got Fat, a bicycle safety movie from the '50s. Plus: BMX bicycle dancing from excellent local dance/music ensemble locust. Magnuson Park, Sat Aug 26 at 7 pm.
CapoteDespite its limited scopeâit addresses only the years that Truman Capote was writing his groundbreaking In Cold Blood, about a Kansas robbery turned quadruple murderâyou want to call the film, after the fashion of ambitious biographies, "A Life." Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Truman Capote, and his is an enveloping performance, in which every flighty affectation seems an invention of the man rather than the impersonator. His pursed lips and bons mots and the ravishing twirls of his overcoat become more and more infrequent until all that's left is alcohol and a horrible will to power. (ANNIE WAGNER) Central Cinema, Fri-Sat 9:30 pm. (All shows 21+.)
David Arquette stars in this 1997 oddity about leftovers from the counterculture. Central Cinema, Wed-Thurs 7, 9:30 pm. (Late shows 21+).
See review this issue. Varsity, Fri-Sun 2, 4:30, 7, 9:20 pm, Mon-Thurs 7, 9:20 pm.
A 2005 documentary by Doug Pray (Hype!) about six of America's most prolific street artists (Cold K is not numbered among them). With cocktails to start and a Q&A with the director to follow. Harvard Exit, Tues Aug 29 at 6:30 pm. (21+ only.)
The Iron MaskSee Stranger Suggests, page 23. Paramount, Mon Aug 28 at 7 pm.
Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic"I was raped by a doctor," announces Sarah Silverman. "Which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl." If she's smart, Silverman will eventually sharpen her celebrated claws on something meatier than taboo. For now, she's just fucking with us. But audiences have never been fucked with by anyone like Sarah Silverman before. (DAVID SCHMADER) Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight.
A local skateboard movie produced by Marshall "Stack" Reid. Showbox, Thurs Aug 31 at 9 pm. (All ages.)
Stooges-a-Poppin!! Week 6Even more Stooges shorts, including such titles as A-Plumbing We Will Go and I'll Never Heil Again. Grand Illusion, Fri 11 pm, Sat 12:30, 11 pm, Sun 12:30 pm.
A damn ugly lookin' spider terrorizes Earth in this 1958 film, given all-new dialogue by the members of Jet City Improv. Historic University Theater, Thurs-Sat 8 pm.
Another vintage horror movie gets the Jet City improv voiceover treatment. Fremont Outdoor Movies, Sat Aug 26 at dusk.
NWFF's Werner Herzog series continues with this 2003 film about Tibetan Buddhist ritual. Northwest Film Forum, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 5, 7, 9 pm.
now playing
Accepted is about a bunch of horrible, entitled, middle-class teens who don't get into college for perfectly legitimate reasons. Well, boo fucking hoo. You're such a smarty-pants that you only applied to Yale? Your bad! Busted rotator cuff busted your sports scholarship? How about some studying, champ? Oh, you just didn't try that hard? Wow! Fuck you! I wish it were possible to punch a movie in the face (can we get to work on that, science?). (LINDY WEST)
Army of ShadowsOn top of the perfect title Army of Shadows, about cruelty at the core of French Resistance heroism, is a damn near unimpeachable movie: serious, complex, and relentlessly intense. It's an object lesson in how to make an art film. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Humanized cows do NOT make good cartoon characters. You can't stand a cow up on its hind legs and make it talk and dance around with its bright pink phallic udder swinging everywhere! That's not cute and goofy! These cartoon cows don't even have buttholes drawn onto them, yet we get to watch their perverse udders just flap around in the wind the whole fucking movie? Uh, ew! (MEGAN SELING)
The DescentThe story of six female spelunkers trapped several miles below the surface of the earth, the movie is, from the get-go, hugely claustrophobic and skin-crawlingly intense. And then the flesh-eating monsters come out. Hyperbole be danged: This is the best, purest horror film in years. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Is Meryl Streep afraid of Anna Wintour? There's something weirdly soft in her portrayal of "dragon lady" Miranda Priestly, the editor at Runway magazine (read: Wintour's Vogue), that completely contradicts the spirit of the movie. But to be fair, it's not her fault: Streep can't help but play a human being, and the characters in The Devil Wears Prada are not human beings. A Hollywood movie, I would argue, can do satire, but it can't usually do personal or dishy. Hundreds of people create a movie; one aggrieved ex-employee, sitting in a garret somewhere, types a novel. The entire mechanism of cinema works to make its content presentable: Scenes are performed, not cattily divulged. If Streep's performance softens under this pressure, Anne Hathaway, as the perky Lauren Weisberger stand-in, simply dissolves. Her character is nice and, we're repeatedly told, smartâand conspicuously, no longer Jewishâbut she's incredibly dull. (ANNIE WAGNER)
See www.thestranger.com for review.
An Inconvenient TruthAn Inconvenient Truth is workmanlike and clumsy at timesâbut it's also hugely invigorating. Tracking Al Gore's global-warming lecture as he schleps his Apple laptop across the country and to China, it's a collection of scientific facts and correlations made urgent through human drama and low-tech slide-show magic. It should be required viewing for every American citizen. And if it kicks up a storm of speculation regarding Al Gore's political prospects in 2008? So much the better. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Holy shit. Everything is wrong with this picture. Everything! The photography is exceptionally dull. The story has nothing new to reveal. Lastly, the lady from the water is a pure-white, Pre-Raphaelite woman (played by Bryce Dallas Howard); whereas the evil being is simply a black mass. This binary construction leads us, by way of King Kong, back to The Birth of a Nation. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
A monster hit at Sundance, where it was picked up for a record-breaking $10.5 million, Little Miss Sunshine is brazen enough to truck in well-worn indie film trappings. Which is to say it's a dysfunctional family road trip comedy built upon a mountain of character quirks. Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Alan Arkin, and Steve Carell star as motivational speaker father, beleaguered mother, loony grandfather, and gay Proust-scholar uncle, respectively. The plot sends them tripping from New Mexico to California, where youngest daughter Olive is due to compete in a pre-teen beauty pageant. At its best, the film achieves a sort of hipster whimsy; at its worst, it's forced to create gross caricatures in order to lend its characters a semblance of humanity in comparison. Call it Indie Filmmaking 101. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Hilary Duff stars in this incisive portrait of wealthâand its dark shade, povertyâin these United States of America.
Miami Viceâa decidedly non-winking update of the '80s television seriesâis in many ways the ultimate Michael Mann film. All the touchstones are there. Oceans are on hand for lingering gazes; women are on hand for conflicted grazingâswap out the title card and this could easily be a description of Heat. But while that film has become a certifiable classic worthy of repeat viewings, Miami Vice is an outright mess, underfed and seemingly filmed on the flyâa surprise from a director vaunted for his painful perfectionism. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
Monster HouseOld Man Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi), like all neighborhood coots, really, really wants you to stay off his lawn. He screams and howls, threatens bodily harm ("You want to be a dead person?"), and he will not give you your ball back. But it's for your own good, really, considering the giant carnivorous child-gobbling monster (Kathleen Turnerâno, seriously) masquerading as Nebbercracker's house. Across the street, neighbor kid DJ peers through his telescope, suspecting foul play, determined to get to the bottom of things. Leafless trees flank the house like sad, dead fingers. Grasping tendrils of lawn drag unsuspecting trespassers to their doom. Long story short, I now have nightmares from a movie meant for babies. (LINDY WEST)
Nacho LibreGosh! Rip off my frickin' movie why don't you, Jared Hess! This is pretty much the worst movie ever made. I mean, I guess it's an okay movie. It's pretty funny. Now that I think about it, it's pretty much my favorite movie ever. (NAPOLEON DYNAMITE)
The Night Listener is a wholly unthrilling thrillerâa mystery that solves itself in the first 20 minutes, then spends the next 71 just double-checking. (LINDY WEST)
Paul Rudd plays a man who has never given his wife, Parker Posey, an orgasm. So they seek help from a sort of pink sorceress played by Liza Minnelli. She intones: "Tonight we're going to learn about the healing power! Of mastur! Bation!" It's funny to see Minnelli play an even crazier person than Liza Minnelli. But she's only in the one scene. The rest of the movie isn't funny. (CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE)
The first Pirates of the Caribbean film rose from the ashes of low expectations, dragged up from its dubious theme-park origins by a subversive and hilariously twisted performance by Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. What should have been un film stupide turned into one of the few surprises of 2003. Now comes the midsection of the trilogy, which picks up shortly after the first film ended. Capt. Jack remains a truly weird invention, but now everyone around him is trying desperately to keep up, and what's left is a film so amped up it flirts with being cartoonish. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is the expected romp: swords are clashed, cannons are fired, and many a quip is unsheathed. But what's missing this go-around is the genuine surprise of the first film. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)
In his ballyhooed return to the environs, if not the concerns, of Middle America, Robert Altman takes on a script by Garrison Keillor about the end of his famed radio show. G. K., as the dour host is known backstage, looks rather like some heretofore-unknown breed of fleshy-lipped bulldog. To be frank, I wish I had never learned that: imaginary Powder Milk Biscuits will never taste quite the same. Such are the perils of adapting a radio program to film. But none particularly impugn Altman's contribution: his patented ensemble whirligig, which sweeps through and around scenes with an almost mechanical precision. Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin are adorable as a pair of indifferently harmonizing sisters. Lindsay Lohan, as Streep's poetry-scribbling daughter, is, like the children of Lake Wobegone, merely above average. But all this delicate chemistry is nearly ruined by the script. It's sad to see Keillor making miscalculations about the nature and appeal of his own creations. (ANNIE WAGNER)
QuinceañeraMagdalena (nicely played by the rookie Emily Rios) wants a stretch Hummer limo to deliver her to her 15th birthday celebration, a semiformal quinceañera in the Mexican tradition. She's competing with her gorgeous cousin, whose dramatic quinceañera opens the film. But Magdalena's preacher father puts his foot down: A quinceañera is supposed to be spiritual, not materialist. Magdalena turns out to be pregnant by her dopey yet ambitious boyfriend Herman, and she refuses to admit any wrongdoing. By a margin so flimsy it's almost Clintonian, she is indeed a virgin. Her father is outraged by her evasions, and so Magdalena flees to her great-uncle's apartment. When Magdalena moves into the back unit of a duplex with her TĂo Tomasâthe most adorable old man in the history of adorable old menâshe finds another cousin, the rough Carlos, hiding out after being caught perusing gay porn on his parents' computer. Soon they form a fierce friendship, sketched with a supremely light hand. Their situation is the stuff of after-school specials, but the casual way they recognize themselves in each other's plight is anything but shrill. (ANNIE WAGNER)
What is the core truth of this film based on a Philip K. Dick short story of the same name? That capitalism is not progressive; it does not move from a lower condition to a higher and better one, but is circular. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
Match Point was slick, a film that politely looked the other way as you began to sympathize with the lead character's alternating lust for and horror of women (an ambivalence that ends in homicidal panic). Scoop is a screwball murder mysteryâfrequently funny, but somehow less fun. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Samuel L. Jackson is in the FBI. He wants a dude to testify against a hot Asian mobster named Eddie Kim. They have to fly to L.A. for the trial. On a plane. With snaaaaaakes!!! Eddie Kim wants to make sure those snakes fuck shit up on that plane (it's the only way), so after he's done practicing martial arts, he pumps the plane full of stinky snake pheromones, and the snakes go totally bonkers. Bonkers for genitals! Snakes on a boob. Snakes on a penis. Snakes on a fat lady's crotch. Snakes on a black man's ass. Snakes on a Plane is not good, per se. It could be a double feature with Mansquito on the Sci-Fi channel. It's boring at times. And it's disingenuousâa big-budget Hollywood movie masquerading as made-for-cable crap. So are you happy, America? Your movie is here. Now shut the fuck up already. (LINDY WEST)
This movie debuted at number 2! Julia Stiles must be fuming.
Who Killed the Electric Car?If this lively agitdoc is any indication, early adopters of environmentally friendly technology are a bunch of stubborn children. When General Motors rolled out its ice-blue, all-electric car in California in 1996, celebrities and subcelebrities and dot-com arrivistes (including director Chris Paine) snatched them up like candy. But the EV1, as the model was called, was only available for lease, not for sale, and when GM decided (with the help of the state of California) that electric vehicles were not in fact the wave of the future, it took them all back. Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, washed-up Baywatch actress Alexandra Paulâall talking heads in this movieâwere crushed. Systematically working through such potential "suspects" as SUV-minded consumers, battery capacity, oil companies, car companies, federal and state governments, and rival technologies (particularly the hydrogen fuel cell), the documentary crafts a compelling case that the decline of the electric car was misguided, collusive, and premature. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Compared to the several Scrabble documentaries that came out a few years ago, Wordplay is conspicuously lacking in crazy characters. But the interviews with Shortz are dorky-adorable. (ANNIE WAGNER)
Oliver Stone's movie (written by Andrea Berloff) is exactly what everyone was terrified United 93 was going to be. It's crass, lazyâand worseâit represents a distinctly evangelical form of pro-American fervor. My single biggest complaint about World Trade Center is the way it uses the Dave Karnes character (a retired marine called by God to rescue people at the World Trade Center) to link 9/11 with the war in Iraq. After all the drama is over, Karnes swells with righteous anger. "Gonna need some good men out there. To avenge this," he announces gruffly, his pronouns damning in their lack of specificity. Then, immediately before the credits roll, Karnes gets his own title card: "DAVE KARNES RE-ENLISTED IN THE MARINES AND SERVED TWO TOURS OF DUTY IN IRAQ." The truth is sloppy, I'm sure, but this kind of causal carelessness is absolutely unforgivable, especially when so many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein had some hand in 9/11. (ANNIE WAGNER)
