Seattle Film Guide: March 19-25

Opening this Week

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo  Bill White Reviews it for Seattle PostGlobe

The Bounty Hunter  Bounty hunter is hired to bring in his  ex-wife.

The Runaways  His  Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for "Revolutionary Road" is a curse on Michael Shannon, who promised to be one of the top new leading men with his roles in "Bug" and "Shotgun Stories," and is now given to playing eccentrics, such as the scurrilous weirdo Kim Fowley in "The Runaways," which is a pretty good picture about the girl power new wavers led by Joan Jett,  an under-rated force of rock and roll who deserves to be estimated in the same class as Lou Reed.  

Repo Men It's not a remake of "Repo Man."  These guys are coming for those replacement organs you haven't kept up your payments on.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid  From the best-selling illustrated novel Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney comes this comedy of youth's tribulations....

October Country  (NWFF, March 19-25)

The first great horror movie of the decade is a documentary about an American family. “October Country” is eerier, creepier, spookier, and just plain more scary than any common fright film.  The Mosher  family is caught in a cycle of  damnation to rival the lineage of  the fabled Ushers  This is the family portrait  Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist” fell so short of being, the one that  should  shake   us out of our torpor and wake us up to ourselves.

Don, a war veteran whose humanity was shell-shocked out of him in Vietnam, and who spent the rest of his life as an emotionally-challenged police officer, heads the Mosher family.   Hs sister is a lonely and pathetic witch who hangs around the cemetery asking the ghosts if they want to play with her. His wife, awaiting the day when an intelligent person will emerge and escape from this cursed family, is a philosopher of the lost, watching...

Although I spent a good part of my theater-hopping youth taking in three or more movies a day, my first experience with sitting down in one theater to watch five movies in a row was in 1973, when the former Movie House, now the Grand Illusion Cinema, had an unofficial policy of showing every movie in the projection booth on Sundays.  When they were in the middle of  a Warner Brothers festival, there was usually a wealth of film cans  laying about. A typical Sunday might include Bette Davis in Jezebel,” Edward G. Robinson in “Brother Orchid,” Errol Flynn in “Gentleman Jim,” James Cagney in “Taxi,” and Humphrey Bogart in “The Return of Dr. X.” I remember one Sunday when, five movies not being enough, I zipped over to the Crest for a double feature of “The Godfather” and “Anne of a Thousand Days” after the Warner Brothers pictures ran out.   

There had been other marathon events, such  as the dusk ...

Jacques Audiard’s   "A Prophet" might not have won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, but in its native country it took nine Cesar awards, including Best Picture, Best Director,  Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor.  Although Audiards last picture,   “The Beat My Heart Skipped,” was a disappointing and over-rated remake  of James Toback’s “Fingers,”   this new one is the best  ethnocentric prison movie since “Blood In Blood Out,” Taylor Hackford’s 1993 masterpiece about   Chicano gangs in San Quentin.

“A Prophet” chronicles  the rise to power of Malik el Djebena (Tahar Rahim).  Sentenced to six years in a French prison for assaulting a police officer, the 19-year old Arab boy becomes the right hand man of Corsican gangster Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup). By the time of his release, Malik has built  up a nice piece of business for himself on the outside.

This is a...

Gold: Before Woodstock. Beyond Reality (Grand Illusion, March 12-18)

Forget about “Easy Rider,” “Psych-Out,” and “ Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”   For an authentic dose of psychedelic sunshine, accept nothing less than the marvelously incoherent “Gold: Before Woodstock. Beyond Reality.” Connoisseurs of the weird, epicureans of the flesh, and archeologists of hippie lore will find infinite delights in this lost treasure from 1968. Others may see nothing but a trainload of naked freaks set loose in a forest where a handful of part-time television actors, dressed as politicians, discuss issues of public morality.

The sex scenes, which run the gamut from    innocent skinny-dipping to  Calabanish group gropes in the mud, must have been the primary marketing lure of the film when it was finally released in London in 1972, but its more tingling  pleasures are the anthropological   images of hippies in their natural habitat &...

Seattle Film Guide March 12-18

Opening this Week

A Prophet Bill White reviews it for the Seattle PostGlobe

Green Zone  When is Jason Bourne not Jason Bourne?  When he is Roy Miller.

Our Family Wedding  When you marry someone, you also marry their family.  Apparently, thre are people who do not yet know this. 

Remember Me  "wondering if the movie will ever end"  Nick Pinkerton, The Weekly

She's Out of My League     "30% romance and 70% comedy"  Megan Selling, The Stranger

Good Guy One of those movies that shows up uninvited and leaves before anybody knows it was there.

Limited Runs

The Most Dangerous Man in America (Varsity, March 12-18)  Bill White reviews it for the Seattle PostGlobe

Gold (Grand Illusion, March 12-18)   Bill White reviews it for the Seattle PostGlobe

Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 (NWFF, March 12-13)   Bill White reviews it for the Seattle PostGlobe

45365 (NWFF, March...

 Poets have written about the disordering of the senses through means that might include  drugs, eroticism, or prayer, in order to break down the barriers of consciousness and establish soul-to-soul communications with a great, mysterious Other.   Usually the poetry resulting from such self de-fragging is  obscure, if not meaningless, to those outside the experience. Once in a while, though, the poet breaks through to the people and poetry becomes prophecy. The world stops spinning for a sacred moment in which everyone joins the dance. Such an occasion was the 31^st of August, 1970, at four in the morning, when, after five days of  wallowing in their own sludge, 600,000 people awoke to a similarly  ragged and haunted  Leonard Cohen.  For one angelic hour, both performer and audience occupied the  column of smoke that rose  from the singer’s breath and was carried away by passing clouds.    

It is scandalous that Murray Lerner’s film of&...

It’s a story well known in Washington state, and now the subject of a short documentary that’s up for an Academy Award Sunday evening.  It’s called “The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner,” a reference to the popular former governor’s debilitating battle with Parkinson’s and his crusade to legalize physician-assisted suicide.

This “last campaign” is also recounted in a Legacy Project biography now nearing completion. It’s called “Booth Who?” and is written by chief historian John Hughes. It will be available free online and in a book format not financed at public expense. It's up for an Oscar. [UPDATE: It didn't win.]

(more)

The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner clip from Just Media on Vimeo.

Unable to imagine a title better suited to current 3D technology than “Alice in Wonderland,” I am happy to report that Tim Burton’s new version of the Lewis Carroll stories fulfills James Cameron’s empty boast of initiating a new era in cinema technology. “Alice in Wonderland” puts “Avatar” back in the dollhouse with the rest of the toy stories and shows the world how live-action and animation can truthfully be blended into a new art form.

One of the biggest problems with 3D cinematography is the tendency for objects, not only  to become smaller as they move away from the camera, but to lose  their dimensional stability.  Most of the current 3D movies choose to ignore this altogether, the result being a nightmare in visual perspective. Burton doesn’t solve the problem, but he adapts it to his subject matter. With altered perspectives being integral to Wonderland, the drastic variability of movable forms just adds to the delight...

The Girl on the Train (Varsity, March 5-11)

Bob Dylan wrote “Lay Lady Lay” for “Midnight Cowboy” and director  John Schlesinger had the good sense not to use it, knowing that Nilsson singing Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin” would better capture the feel of the young Texan leaving his home for New York City.  The over-stated eroticism of Dylan’s song     might have caused the audience to titter when Joe Buck started thinking back to the girl he left behind.  Anyway, the song has finally made it into a movie, and doesn’t add much of anything to the scene in which a girl on skates is followed by a guy on skates.   We don’t  need Bob Dylan singing “Lay Lady Lay” to let is know that he  is in romantic pursuit of her.  We could, however, have used a bit of warning to let us know that the picture’s  first half, which is about the subsequent love affair between these two...

The question I most often hear regarding this year’s Oscars is, “What do you think of having ten nominees for Best Picture?”

My answer is that it is a ploy to give legs to movies that would otherwise be played out, movies that the Academy has no intention of honoring with a statuette.  Since it is the custom to award the Best Director to the director of the Best Picture, we can safely eliminate those five movies that have not received   nominations for their directors.  So scratch  “An Education,” “District 9.” “Up,” The Blind Side,” and “A Serious Man” from the competition.

Now that we are down to the customary five, let’s   take a look at the careers and personalities of the nominated directors and decide who the Academy thinks will make the best headliner for the Awards broadcast.  Quentin Tarantino would surely be amusing, but he is too much of an oddball to be inducted into the elite circle...

They were the children of terror, these children who  were dragged into the street and forced to sing nationalist hymns one day and  the next day dragged into those same streets  and forced to sing  songs of revolution.  These children watched as their mothers were raped and murdered in the streets and  they fed on the milk of fear, of sorrow, and  were told they had no souls.  These orphans  of revolution, their villages bombed and burned by terrorists, fled their villages to live in the desert hills around Lima. They arrived with their customs and superstitions,  many without  birth certificates so if they were murdered it could never be proven that they had lived.  They arrived with their poetry and their dances  and found work as gardeners and maids for the rich of Lima, who  secretly hated them and stole their songs and paid them off in lies.  

“The Milk of Sorrow” begins in darkness, a song coming to life on the...

Fish Tank (Varsity, Feb 26-March 4)

Andrea Arnold’s second feature may have communists supporting the class system.  No utopia could function with this Essex family on their dole. It doesn’t help that none of them can act, the only one with any experience being television actress Kierston Waring, who struggles to bring a soap-opera credibility to   Mia’s mother,  a sodden floozie looking at the onset of middle age from  the wrong side of an alcohol-stained  bed that’s about ready for the woodpile.   

Mia, or maybe it is just Katie Jarvis,  is a  mean-faced brat with what little personality she might have had being channeled into her social-defense mechanisms.   Reportedly discovered by the director while having a fight with her boyfriend at a train station, Jarvis is  typical of  the untrained no-talents who so frequently garner praise for the amateurish realism of their non-performances.

In the council estate where...

Seattle Film Guide for February 26 - March 4

OPENING THIS WEEK

The Crazies  David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) is sheriff of Ogden Marsh, a picture-perfect American town with happy, law-abiding citizens. But one night, one of them comes to a school baseball game with a loaded shotgun, ready to kill. Another man burns down his own house... after locking his wife and young son in a closet inside. Within days, the town has transformed into a sickening asylum; people who days ago lived quiet, unremarkable lives have now become depraved, bloodthirsty killers. Sheriff Dutton tries to make sense of what's happening as the horrific, nonsensical violence escalates. Now complete anarchy reigns as one by one the townsfolk succumb to an unknown toxin and turn sadistically violent. In an effort to keep the madness contained, the government uses deadly force to close off all access and won't let anyone in or out — even those uninfected. The few still sane find themselves trapped: Sheriff Dutton; his pregnant wife,...

It might have been made for British television, but the Red Riding Trilogy, adapted by David Peaces’s quartet of novels that circum-investigate two outbreaks of serial killings in Yorkshire,  should not be mistaken for television fare.

The first film, “In the Year of Our Lord 1974,” directed by Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots, Becoming Jane), follows a journalist’s investigation of three missing girls, ages eight through ten, who disappeared between 1969 and 1974. Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) is inexperienced and insensitive in his interviewing of the parents of the missing children, a negative character trait that gives the police an excuse to persuade him to leave the people to their grief and not bother them with invasive questions. Instead, he becomes sexually involved with Paula, whose husband committed suicide after the disappearance of their child, and who has been in a submissive relationship with the powerful businessman John Dawson (Sean Bean) for several years. When...

Perhaps Martin Scorsese is retaliating for not having been invited to participate in “Grindhouse” by making a B-movie that is as long as both Tarantino’s “Death Proof”  and Rodriguez’ “Planet Terror” put together. Whatever his motives for filming  Dennis Lehane's novel about the continuation of  medical experiments  on the inmates of an institution for the criminally insane on an island off the Boston coast, he hasn’t cheated on the promise of  a toy in his box of crackerjacks.

Unlike Tarantino and Rodriguez and just about everybody else who looks for inspiration in the lower depths of Hollywood picture-making, Scorsese never looks down on his  material through the hip and snooty nose of irony.  Sometimes he errs on the side of sincerity, the result being scenes that seem they were written by Sam Fuller but directed by William Wyler.  He has definitely come down with a case of multiple director personality disorder.&...

A Charles Darwin who entertains hallucinations of his deceased daughter, sometimes confusing her death with that of an orangutan, surely deserves a more imaginative director than Jon Amiel. David Cronenberg, for example, might have given the biological material some pizzazz, and Ken Russell, in his prime, could have enlivened the bizarre fantasy sequences. Amiel gives the same literary literalness to each scene, making “Creation” this year’s most plodding invitation to the snooze.

John Collee’s awkward screenplay introduces Darwin as a man who enjoys telling racist-tinged tales of Tierra de Fuego’s primitive tribes to his worshipful daughters in between his attempts to reconcile the horrors of the food chain with his wife’s belief in a loving, just, and merciful god. At one point he stomps out of church because the preacher does not take the millions of parasitical bacteria that plague all living flesh into consideration while claiming that God is empathetic...

Nudist colonies, junkyards, carnivals, blackjack tables, motels, convenience stores, public showers, insurance companies…are these the circles of Hell?

“Saint John of Las Vegas” is some kind of Inferno, but not Dante’s, despite his name in the credits.   But maybe that’s part of the joke.  “Of course we didn't adapt the Inferno!" one can almost hear Steve Buscemi chortle.  “Are you stupid, or what?”  Well, we believed the Coen Brothers when they said they were updating The Odyssey,” and   plenty of scenes in “O Brother Where Art Thou”  were direct allusions to Homer’s epic.  But only the most reprobate flunk-out would claim there are any antecedents in classical literature for the shenanigans that  are dispersed throughout this wayward script.

Buscemi, bless his heart, with his buggy eyes and big teeth, lord love him, has been representing the more unfortunate among  us for two...

Seattle Film Guide for February 19th

OPENING THIS WEEK

Saint John of Las Vegas  Bill White Reviews it for Seattle Post Globe      

Creation        Bill White reviews it for Seattle PostGlobe

Shutter Island      Bill White reviews it for Seattle PostGlobe

IN LIMITED RELEASE

Oscar Nominated Shorts 2010 (Varsity, Feb 19-25)   Bill White reviews it for Seattle PostGlobe  

Home (NWFF, Feb 19-25) Bill White reviews it for Seattle PostGlobe

Unmistaken Child (Grand Illusion Feb 19-25) Bill White reviews it for Seattle PostGlobe

Elect of the Dead Symphony (NWFF, Sat. Feb 20 at 11pm only)    If Yanni were a singer-songwriter, he might be something like Serj Tankian.  If that sounds good to you, then this concert film will be a paradise for the eyes and ears.  All others, stay away.  Stay far away.

The Usual Suspects  (Central Cinema, Feb 19-25)

Return Engagements...

Home (NWFF, Feb 19-25)

From a whimsical opening worthy of Jacques Tati, to the Bunuelian nightmare that nearly finishes off the whole family unit, “Home” reads best as a Feminist manifesto on the perils of domesticity. A family lives  free and easily in a house beside a freeway extension that has lain dormant across the countryside for over a decade. They run around in minimal clothing, watch television in the yard, and play games on the concrete snake. When the road suddenly opens to vehicles, their paradise becomes fraught with danger, noise, and pollutants. Eventually, they give up the battle and wall themselves in, their former utopia now becoming a prison.

We have been living with freeways cutting across our neighborhoods for over half a century now, but Ursula Meier’s sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying film offers a fresh look at the ways our lives are diminished by them. Meier also uses the situation as a means of breaking down the cycle of married life into three stages:...

The Varsity Theatre  continues  its two  programs of this year’s Oscar-nominated shorts, so you have a chance to see the winners, "Logorama" and "The New Tenants," as well as the equally worthy nominees.

The Live Action Program

KAVI USA|INDIA  19 MINS

Gregg Helvey’s portrait of an Indian boy forced to work as a slave in the brick kilns begs for expansion into a feature film. In 19 minutes, Helvey touches upon a caste system that divides people into those who work and those who go to school, a reward/punishment system that makes a boy proud to be dubbed “my fastest worker” by the slave driver, and the hidden cruelties that drive such methods of cheap production. Helvey proves himself an exceptional director of actors with a solid film making sense.

THE DOOR IRELAND  17 MINS

The suddenness of the disaster, the quick evacuation, and the lingering poisons that took the life of a young girl, taken to her snowy grave on the same door that carried...

In “For the Love of Movies,” Gerald Peary crunches a century of film criticism into 81 minutes, capturing the essence of the curve that began as a scheme to induce studios to advertise their movies in the newspapers  and ended in the cacophony of uninformed opinion. 

 By way of disclosure, I must admit I was predisposed to like this movie, as Peary, by enlisting me to write capsule reviews for  the Boston Phoenix, was one of three writers who helped me get started as a film critic.  The others  were Mark Sommer, who gave me some assignments at the Northshore Weeklies, and Video Eyeball publisher Dave Yount.  There is a moment in “For the Love of Movies” when Peary lists several critics who got their start in Boston.  Although born and raised in Seattle, and will always feel much warmth and gratitude toward William Arnold, who stood up for me at the PI, I feel more a part of Boston’s history than that of my hometown.

So it was with keen anticipation...

Louis Mellis and David Scinto, who displayed a knack for sharp, vulgar dialog and little else in their script for 2000’s “Sexy Beast,” return with a hilariously tragic tale of a cuckold and the brute friends who see him through the shambles of his shattered marriage. Who would have suspected that, with novice director Malcom Venville at the helm, “44 Inch Chest” would succeed so fabulously. If it is a miracle, it is a miracle of casting, with Ray Winstone (Colin), Ian McShane (Meredith), John Hurt (Peanut), Tom Wilkinson (Archie), Dave Legeno), Melvil Poupaud (Loverboy) and Joanne Whalley (Liz) turning in word perfect performances.

The picture opens on a sprawled Colin, unconscious on the floor in a room destroyed by the last marital battle between he and wife Liz in the wake of her announcement that she had met another man. It is a scene everybody knows, whether or not they have themselves lived it, the wreckage from that last burst of violence before the finality of a...