Ocean's 11, Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy

* Bad Bugs Bunny
Back before he was a lovable scoundrel, our boy Bugs was a racist, xenophobic, fearmongering Jew-hater. And the kids LOVED IT! This infamous archival presentation returns, along with its archivist, the enigmatic Dennis Nyback. (SEAN NELSON) Grand Illusion

Behind Enemy Lines
Two of the greatest American movie actors of this young century, Gene Hackman and Owen Wilson, share the screen in this utterly irredeemable piece of complete and total shit. In case the end of that last sentence didn't spell it out, suck on this: With the POSSIBLE exception of about three minutes of semi-exciting plane-flying footage, THERE IS NOTHING GOOD ABOUT THIS FILM. NOTHING. AT ALL. EVER. AT ALL ALL ALL!!! Ugly as sin, badly lit, poorly acted, logically untenable, and possibly not even written, Behind Enemy Lines is a total fucking travesty in which even the actors' makeup is incompetently applied. I know everyone's desperate for The Royal Tennenbaums, but this Wilson-Hackman pairing is no kind of substitute. Do not see it, please, for the love of all things holy. (Sean Nelson) Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11

Cartoon Cavalcade
A night of vintage cartoons on Victrola's "wide screen" for free. The flyer has Betty Boop on it, and that's good enough for me. Victrola

Lost World
The Seattle Art Museum weekly After Hours program usually features a musical group (yes, most of the time they are "bands," but I don't want to turn any noses at the SAM), and tonight it is expanding to include film. In this original version of Lost World, Londoners go to South America to find prehistoric creatures. The adventurers are silent in this 1925 film-though very, very wide-eyed-and tonight they will be given a live score by the Paul Rucker Ensemble. (BRIAN GOEDDE) Seattle Art Museum

NIGHT WEBS FILM NOIR
This week: Cause for Alarm, which stars Loretta Young, Barry Sullivan, and Bruce Cowling in a tale of good old noir paranoia, switcheroo, and backfire. Crazy Sullivan mistakenly suspects Young (his wife) and Cowling (his doctor) of having an affair, and writes a phony letter detailing their (imaginary) plot to kill him. He sends the letter to his lawyer, has a moment of clarity, tells his wife, and promptly dies, thus screwing Loretta over but good. Seattle Art Museum

OUTRIDER PICTURES MINI-FEST
Outrider, an independent film distribution company in the vein of the late Shooting Gallery, will be showcasing six of their wares this weekend. Regrettably, the two I saw were mostly bad. Postmark Paradise is about a gang of rednecks who order a Russian bride for their grizzled, drunken friend, only to discover that she is a real person with feelings, and mulicultural hijinks ensue; and East of A is really just a poorly written feature-length Friends except with more AIDS, drugs, and fat guys having sex. However, while those two are to be judiciously avoided, a couple others look promising. I'll go back to see Along for the Ride (two guys drive to Mexico to bury their father, whose corpse is recovered from a cantina's walk-in freezer) and Amargosa (a documentary about the bizarre living habits of dancer/painter Marta Becket) out of faith and curiosity. (MEG VAN HUYGEN) Little Theatre

* Rosemary's Baby
Polanski's second greatest American film stars Mia Farrow as vulnerability incarnate and John Cassavetes as the personification of vanity. Ruth Gordon tags along as the embodiment of all that is frustrating and treacherous about the elderly. Rosemary's Baby is a film that both shows its age (33 years old) and holds up brilliantly well. Viva Polanski! (SEAN NELSON) Egyptian

SILENCE BROKEN

Korean "comfort women" were forced to serve the Japanese Imperial Army as sex slaves during WWII. Writer, director, and producer Sil Kim-Gibson made the film based on interviews she conducted with former comfort women, and she will be in attendence at this screening to talk about the project. And: it's all free! Hub Ballroom

Texas Rangers
At last! A Western starring contemporary teenage sitcom actors. Need a rugged band of salty Dixie boys to clean up the wilds of post-Civil War Texas? Call what's-his-butt from Dawson's Creek and who's-his-ass from That '70s Show! Also starring Rachel Leigh Cook, Tom Skerritt, Dylan McDermott, and Usher (ouch). Redmond Town Center

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust
Look, I hate anime as much as you do, and I feel a very deep-seated shame for admitting this, but... like... some of the artwork in this thing is pretty cool. The plot and the dialogue (vampires, zombies, hot chicks with impossibly huge guns) are nothing less than mortifying, of course--don't get me wrong. The detail in the backgrounds, though? All the cliffs and foliage and architecture? You can't help but be impressed. I dunno. Maybe you can pay off the projectionist to kill the sound or something. (MEG VAN HUYGEN) Varsity

* Amélie
A beautifully kinetic testament to human sweetness that has audiences lining up around the block and contrarians carping about its artificiality. I'm not saying you have to be an asshole not to like Amélie, but it would probably help.... When director Jean-Pierre Jeunet was in Seattle recently, I asked him if the criticism of the film's fairy-tale aesthetic bothered him. "In France," he laughed, "sometimes if you have too much style, they crucify you. They prefer films about men and women fighting in ugly kitchens. They think if you have style, if the film is lit well, or is poetic, then you are not making something true. The reverse is true. The style is important. I love to play with everything. I can't avoid it. You need the style to get to the emotion. It's actually more realistic, dans un certain sense. When you do a film, it's for you. Very egoist. But you can please people if you are sincere." (SEAN NELSON) Egyptian, Redmond Town Center

* American Job
From the directors of the great American Movie comes this stylistic prequel, in which yet another middle-American schlub wrestles with bad luck (some situational, some self-made) and diminishing returns on his quest to find a job that doesn't rob him of his humanity. Grand Illusion

The Black Knight
Martin Lawrence plays Jamal Walker, a brother who toils all day at a decrepit ghetto theme park known as Medieval World. While cleaning Medieval World's polluted moats he happens upon a medallion that transports him back in time to medieval England. The locals don't really know what to make of Lawrence's clothes, language, or mannerisms. And well, anyway, in an exercise of isolating exactly just what the world wasn't waiting for, Black Knight picks us up just where other "fish out of water" classics such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Turtles in Time left us: tunneling out of the theater with a spoon. (KUDZAI MUDEDE) Factoria, Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Northgate, Redmond Town Center, Varsity

Domestic Disturbance
John Travolta is the dad, and Vince Vaughn is the stepdad. One of them is a nasty murderer and one of them is an underdog hero. It's up to the kid to decide. A propos of nothing: my late grandmother was fond of calling Travolta "John Revolting" when she was alive. (SEAN NELSON) Meridian 16, Redmond Town Center

The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition
A documentary of Seattle's new favorite tragic failure of a sea voyage, Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914 quest for Antarctica, which wound up, as we all know, with an icebound vessel full of starving crewmen reduced to smoking penguin feathers. Lucky for this documentary that they had a camera crew with 'em.... Seven Gables

Fat Girl
Seems every film that Catherine Breillat has ever made is about naughty sex, which might explain why she seems to have run dry on interesting approaches with her latest one. Titled à ma soeur! in France (which does not translate to "Fat Girl"), it's about Anaïs, a phlegmatic 12-year-old fat girl with a foxy older sister, Elena. This film exists only to underscore those facts, so you keep thinking maybe it's building up to some point or revelation... but you keep being wrong. Save for a tense, tortured, Nabokovian sex scene with Elena's law-student boyfriend (while Anaïs watches in plain view), the story never offers any real reward. Also, if you were a fat girl in junior high, you probably shouldn't see this movie because it will fuck you up. (MEG VAN HUYGEN) Harvard Exit

From Hell
This movie is really awful. Meridian 16

* Grateful Dawg
Ever wonder what Jerry Garcia did when the Grateful Dead weren't on the road (besides a lot of heroin)? Me neither. But this documentary is nonetheless a warm, entertaining, and sometimes beautiful examination of the musical partnership between Garcia and David Grisman--two true reverent aficionados of old-timey bluegrass picking--which spanned some 30 years. The music is absolutely stellar. (SEAN NELSON) Broadway Market

Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone
See Stranger Suggests. Fans of the novels won't be disappointed by Chris Columbus' adaptation, which is so faithful that it often feels like they just pointed a camera at the book and said "Action!" Those who haven't read it--myself included--may fail to be captivated by what feels like an exercise in defining the difference between page and screen. I had been led to believe there was some underlying artistic merit in the stories of Harry Potter, and maybe there is, but not in the film. The actors, sets, and effects are all great, but this really is a movie just for kids. (SEAN NELSON) Cinerama, Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Majestic Bay, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11

Heist
In Heist, writer-director David Mamet adores his plot-twisting, line-stinging script so much the acting comes off plastic, and you repeatedly run into the thought that no one would ever, ever say "she could talk her way out of a sunburn," and "my man is so cool, when he goes to sleep sheep count him" when lives are in danger. This isn't really a problem in itself, though, it's the whole point: the script is the thing to "watch," and Gene Hackman, Delroy Lindo, and Danny DeVito are its vehicles. What becomes a problem, however, is that at the end of the movie you'll remember that Mamet is capable of writing characters of incredible--profound, even--emotional depth, and there is absolutely none of that here. Even Mamet's slick, script-dependent film Spanish Prisoner makes me think about interpersonal ethics. In Heist, when characters betray, love, fight, save, etc., each other, it doesn't really matter. You wish it would, but it doesn't. This is a perfect summer movie! (BRIAN GOEDDE) Aurora Cinema Grill, Grand Alderwood, Meridian 16, Metro

Life as a House
Kevin Kline has cancer, but he hasn't told his ex-wife (Kristin Scott Thomas), who's too busy letting herself be an emotional doormat, or his son (Hayden Christensen), who's too busy huffing Scotchguard to care. Rather than come clean, he decides to fix everything by making his dysfunctional son help him build his dream house. In the process--surprise of surprises!--he does fix everything: the son wipes away the mascara and stops giving head to rich men for cash (hooking up with a nubile hottie in the process), the wife realizes she's still in love with her ex, and Kline gets to die the heroic death of a saintly drop-out. Histrionic folderol aside, this film is a guilty kind of good. (SEAN NELSON) Grand Alderwood, Guild 45th, Meridian 16

* The Man Who Wasn't There
The new film by the Coen Brothers, shot in glorious black and white, recalls the low-budget, slow burning, postwar noir of directors like Edgar G. Ulmer, and features Billy Bob Thornton's uncannily Bogartlike performance (In a Lonely Place-era) as the eponymous Man. Thornton's Ed Crane is a drastically affectless man, a barber who chain-smokes his way through a sexless marriage to a bourgeois wannabe in a postwar California town. When he discovers his wife (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with her boss (James Gandolfini), Ed hatches a scheme and soon becomes embroiled in a complex imbroglio involving blackmail, murder, and dry cleaning. The Coens' genre fetish works astoundingly well in this film, which mines noir's deeply American absurdities for rich laughs, shrewd plotting, top-flight performances from all the actors (Thornton and Gandolfini in particular), and visuals that make your eyes swell. (SEAN NELSON) Neptune, Uptown

Monsters, Inc.
Sully (John Goodman) is one of Monsters, Inc.'s top Scarers, meaning that he excels at getting kids to scream in fright--and bottled screams are the fuel upon which Monstropolis, his hometown, depends. Kids, however, are supposed to be highly contagious, so when Sully accidentally brings a little girl back to Monstropolis, he's got a lot of nervous running and hiding to do. The first two-thirds of this film are pleasant to watch, though the narcotizing currents of confused cultural allegory that run through modern Disney films course just as strongly through this one. But the final third of the movie is excellent and beautiful, arriving suddenly at one of those gorgeous imaginary landscapes that legitimately become a part of a child's dream fabric. (EVAN SULT) Factoria, Majestic Bay, Meridian 16, Metro, Oak Tree

* Mulholland Drive
This new work from David Lynch is confounding and bizarre (for a change). Originally conceived as a network TV pilot, Drive takes a long time establishing its characters--an aspiring actress, a glamorous amnesiac, a luckless Hollywood producer, and a mysterious gang of Mafiosi who are dead set on making sure a certain woman gets a certain part. Like all of Lynch's post-Wild at Heart work, Drive is more concerned with atmosphere and suggestion than linear meaning. But like all Lynch, period, it's beautifully constructed, bizarre, and funny. It's just impossible to say definitively whether this is good or not. (SEAN NELSON) Aurora Cinema Grill, Broadway Market, Guild 45th

Novocaine
Steve Martin stars as a dentist who becomes embroiled in a murder fiasco straight out of pulp fiction in this charming, if self-satisfied noir update. Martin and his girlfriend (the hyperbolically fastidious Laura Dern) live a sanitary existence until saucy little junkie Helena Bonham Carter and her incestuous brother (Scott Caan) enter their lives by force, demanding such things as medical cocaine and sex in the dentist's chair. Soon, someone is dead, and someone is blamed, and someone has to fight to clear his name. This would be a fully smug and frustrating exercise in genre resuscitation if it weren't peopled by a game cast of excellent actors. The presence of pros like Martin and Carter (and Elias Koteas in a glorified cameo) elevates matters considerably. (SEAN NELSON) Metro, Uptown

The One
It's a fact that the philosophical theories that explained The Matrix were derived from the most exhausted metaphysical concepts about the split between phenomena and consciousness. When one compares The Matrix's reality to the one proposed in Jet Li's The One, however, The Matrix sounds like Kant. The One, which is about a bad Jet Li vs. a good Jet Li who lives in a parallel universe, also lacks poetry and beauty, like the bamboo sequence in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But despite its lack of substance, The One is still fun to watch, because, you know, it's about kung fu in space. (CHARLES MUDEDE) Aurora Cinema Grill, Meridian 16, Redmond Town Center

Out Cold
If you've seen the previews for this lowbrow snowboarding romp, you might think it's Porky's on Ice. And you'd almost be right. It's astoundingly stupid, all right. But shockingly, it's also sort of fun. It has just enough anarchic, substance abusing, anti-authoritarian, apparently improvised hijinks in it to make it vaguely redolent of that all-time classic of unapologetic stupidity, Animal House. It even has a rotund, hairy lunatic named Zach Galifianakis who might have been cloned from a scraping of John Belushi's tongue. The plot, about a group of slacker snowboarders foiling leathery-looking Lee Majors' gentrification of their rundown Alaskan ski resort, is laughably implausible, but it's kinda nice to watch these good-looking kids lay an evil land-developer low simply by getting their dicks stuck in his hot tub. Yow! (Tamara Paris) Factoria, Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center, Varsity

Serendipity
John Cusack stars as John Cusack with a bad haircut, opposite the unremarkably beautiful Kate Beckinsale, in the very worst movie I've ever seen. Premise: They meet over Christmas shopping in Bloomingdales, sort of fall in love but not really, part ways, get betrothed to other people, and spend the rest of the movie trying to find each other again. Fine. The injury comes from the script relentlessly stabbing you in the gut with its transparent plot twists, maddening dialogue, and desperate "fateful coincidences." The fact that this film was ever made defies reason. If you like John Cusack, it will hurt your feelings. If you don't, it will make you want to die. (MEG VAN HUYGEN) Pacific Place 11

Shallow Hal
A warning for dense women out there who believe a skunk can change his stripe: It's not going to happen. The Farrelly Brothers have handed out a new load of horseshit in the form of Hal (Jack Black), a chubby jackass who dates only physically flawless women. After a chance encounter with a motivational guru, Hal begins seeing inner beauty as outer beauty and falls in love with a 300-pound Peace Corps volunteer he thinks looks like Gwyneth Paltrow with falsies. Hal soon loses his new goggles, but does he go back to the way he was? Of course not, so all the heartbreaking fat gags and shameless burn victim makeup is acceptable, right? Because we all got enlightened? Horseshit. (KATHLEEN WILSON) Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11

Sidewalks of New York
This film is way better than Ed Burns' other efforts, and it certainly towers over the last five Woody Allen misery marathons, and Stanley Tucci is great, and everyone else hits their mark and seems believable enough. However, it's nowhere near as good as Aerosmith, not even Draw the Line. (MICHAEL SHILLING) Metro, Uptown

The Spy Game
Robert Redford and Brad Pitt pretend that anyone could take them seriously as CIA men in this action thrilla. Factoria, Lewis & Clark, Majestic Bay, Meridian 16, Metro, Oak Tree, Redmond Town Center

* Tape
Richard Linklater bats two for two with this nervy character study that indicts all three of its subjects (played by Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, and Uma Thurman) by way of exploring questions of memory, friendship, and truth. Highly recommended. (SEAN NELSON) Harvard Exit

* Together
Q: What do you get when you combine a '70s commune full of Swedish hippies, a soundtrack that features hits by ABBA and Nazareth, and a VW bus painted with flowers? A: This strangely sitcommish but thoroughly engaging little movie. Throw in a middle-class domestic-abuse refugee and her kids, a pre-op transsexual, some hilariously passive-aggressive dialogue about the importance of nonaggressiveness, a nymphomaniac, and a central character who suffers like a sweet-natured Job trying to keep the whole thing together (as it were); stir; cock your head in wonder; and enjoy. (SEAN NELSON) Broadway Market

* Waking Life
Richard Linklater's monologue-heavy, beautifully animated opus about the quest for lucid dreaming and active living is one of the coolest, most interesting movies you'll ever see. Or you might hate it and think it's talky and pretentious. If you liked Slacker, however--wait, not if you liked it... if you GOT Slacker--and have been waiting for Linklater to return to philosophical quandary mode, don't wait another second. Go see Waking Life. (SEAN NELSON) Broadway Market

The Wash
DJ Pooh's follow-up to the hiphop Friday movies, The Wash, stars Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg and features the likes of Eminem, Xzibit, and Ludacris in smaller roles. In it, Snoop and Dre are roommates. Dre is unemployed and can't pay rent, so Snoop gets him a job at the car wash where he works. Eventually Dre becomes Snoop's boss, and power-struggle hijinks result. Then the car wash owner (George Wallace, a "real actor") gets kidnapped.... I don't really need to summarize the rest. It's a silly comedy; see it stoned. What is remarkable is how Dr. Dre carries the movie. He goes from being broke and kickin' it (hittin' the blunt while brushing his teeth--you know how he do) to being a ball-busting, responsible boss who is sincere and sensitive to his love interest (Shari Watson), a well-mannered, soft-spoken student. It is difficult to truly see Dre's performance through the film's gags, but he performs with remarkable depth.(BRIAN GOEDDE) Meridian 16