film» October 12–18 | 206.324.9996 | siff.net
Ongoing
TBY BRIAN MILLER
Local Film
• ARBITRAGE Slick and grown-up as Richard Gere
• CURSE OF ALL MONSTERS ATTACK! See the GI’s
• Opens Friday October 12 Uptown
WALK THE RED CARPET IN OUR MOCK PREMIERE!
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Krzysztof Kieslowski’s
THREE COLORS
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Uptown Blue | Oct. 15 White | Oct. 16 Red | Oct. 17
FILMS4FAMILIES: ANIMAL KINGDOMS See
SCAN
Trilogy Marathon
on the Giant Screen | Oct. 18
T H I S CO D E
TO DOWNLOAD THE FREE
HELD OVER!
SEATTLE WEEKLY
Film Center
IPHONE/ANDROID APP FOR MORE FILM OR VISIT
KEEP THE LIGHTS ON
seattleweekly.com
ARBITRAGE Monday October 15 | 6:30 | Film Center
Seattle weekly • OCTOBER 10− 16, 2012
Does Hell Exist?
Hellbound? Director in attendance!!
Saturday 13 & Sunday 14 Film Center BALLET
La Sylphide
Monday 17 | Uptown
SIFF Cinema Uptown 511 Queen Anne Avenue North
SIFF Film Center
Seattle Center | Northwest Rooms
FREE VALIDATED PARKING
made an unlikely icon out of the dream-invading Freddie Krueger (again played by Robert Englund in several sequels). Look sharp and you’ll spot Johnny Depp in an early film role. Call for showtimes. (R) Central Cinema, $6-$8, Oct. 12-17. SEATTLE LATINO FILM FESTIVAL Playing at several venues around town, this year’s fest has a Brazilian theme. See slff.org for full schedule, ticket prices, and other details. (NR) Various locations, Through Oct. 14. SEATTLE POLISH FILM FESTIVAL This 20th-annual fest will offer features, docs, shorts, and related programs. Opening night is Letters to Santa, a romantic comedy set on Christmas Eve, directed by Mitja Okorn, who’ll attend the screening along with actress Roma Gasiorowska. See polishfilms.org for full schedule, including different venues following the first weekend. (NR) SIFF Cinema Uptown, $5-$10 (individual), $60 (pass), Oct. 12-21. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN Mel Brooks’ inspired 1974 spoof is probably his best movie, affectionately rooted in the James Whale originals (particularly Bride of Frankenstein) yet knowingly updated with innuendo and vaudeville. Gene Wilder stars as the reluctant mad scientist who’s determined not to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. The great Madeline Kahn plays his fiancée, destined to end up with quite another man (er, monster, played by Peter Boyle). Marty Feldman is the goggle-eyed hunchback. Wilder and Brooks are both credited with the script, which includes countless classic gags—from “What knockers!” to “It could be worse; it could be raining”—and much horse whinnying at the mention of Frau Blücher (Cloris Leachman). Brooks was able to reuse portions of the original Frankenstein laboratory sets that Universal had saved; and that period integrity is one reason the comedy holds up so well. In a way, the Borscht Belt is as timeless as Transylvania. Call for showtimes. (PG) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, $6-$8, Oct. 12-16.
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Monday October 15 | Film Center Command Performance in HD!
FILMS4FAMILIES $4
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KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI’S THREE COLORS TRILOGY SEE
THE WIRE, PAGE 15.
HELD OVER! Uptown
Fantastic Mr Fox
siff.net for full list of titles in this squee-tastic weekend series, which includes Fantastic Mr. Fox and other barnyard faves. (G) SIFF Cinema Uptown, $4, Sat., Sun., 1 p.m. Through Oct. 28.
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET This 1984 ghoul movie
a film by Ira Sachs
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website for a full schedule of scary titles programmed through Halloween. Among the second week highlights are 1963’s The Raven, with Peter Lorre battling Vincent Prince, and The Comedy of Terrors, a horror-comedyquickie with the same duo also produced that year. Also look for Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone in the latter. (R) Grand Illusion, $5-$8, Through Oct. 31. DOUBLE INDEMNITY Barbara Stanwyck’s doublecrossing Phyllis is perhaps the iconic femme fatale of film noir—a sultry schemer who, in Billy Wilder’s superior 1944 adaptation of the James M. Cain crime novel, seduces a sap (Fred MacMurray) and tricks him into murdering her husband. Walter’s pal and fellow insurance investigator (Edward G. Robinson) is the only figure of decency in the movie. And he warns Walter about what will inevitably follow the fatal train “accident” that Phyllis orchestrated: “Murder’s never perfect. Always comes apart sooner or later. And when two people are involved, it’s usually sooner.” (NR) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, $6-$8, Wed., Oct. 10, 9:30 p.m. THE EVIL DEAD Sam Raimi’s wildly influential and ultra-violent 1981 underground hit helped make him a future Hollywood star and also brought Bruce Campbell’s chin to a grateful world. Nobody will ever go to a cabin the remote woods again without thinking of the film, nor will filmmakers ever be able to make a movie about kids going to a cabin in the remote woods without thinking of what Raimi would do there. (R) BRIAN MILLER Grand Illusion, $5-$8, Fri., Oct. 12, 11 p.m.; Sat., Oct. 13, 11 p.m.
from 6pm weekdays / 10am weekends | Parking passes available at box office
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himself, this intricate fiscal thriller takes a dead bead on extreme privilege, with Gere’s Madoff-like billionaire fund-runner scrambling to keep his personal empire from crumbling like crackers. He has everything until he doesn’t—with the sale of his company for nine figures already jeopardized by cooked books, a car wreck, and warm corpse get him scrambling one step ahead of the cops. Director Nicholas Jarecki slices his cake and has it, too: We bizarrely empathize with the amoral hero’s stressed-out tightrope walk, wanting him to get away with being an untouchable plutocratic scumbag, while the film simultaneously limns the rank injustices money can buy in bulk. (R) Michael Atkinson SIFF Cinema Uptown, Kirkland Parkplace BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth, and ecological parable, this Louisiana-set debut feature by 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin rests, often cloyingly, on the tiny shoulders of Quvenzhané Wallis. Beasts strains to remind us of Hushpuppy’s wisdom and courage beyond her years. She is a motherless child: “She swam away,”explains her drunken father of Mom’s absence. He and Hushpuppy live in a grassy, overgrown expanse in a fictional bayou area called the Bathtub. Stomping around her ramshackle, squalid domain in white plastic rain boots, dirty T-shirt, and orange Underoos, this peewee heroine confidently wields a blowtorch. But in trying through incessant narration to make a six-year-old a prolix sage, Zeitlin can’t avoid falling into sticky sentimentality. (PG-13) Melissa Anderson Varsity BUTTER Broad-stereotype comedy is slathered in shameless bathos in Jim Field Smith’s tale of a heated Iowa butter-carving competition between former renowned champion Bob’s (Ty Burrell) ball-busting wife, Laura (Jennifer Garner), and young African-American orphan Destiny (Yara Shahidi), who now lives with kindly foster parents (Rob Corddry and Alicia Silverstone). This showdown is marked by cartoon characters popping up at every turn, from a hooker (Olivia Wilde) to whom Bob owes money to Bob’s daughter (Ashley Greene), who’s in love with Wilde’s working girl, to a car dealer (Hugh Jackman) still pining for Laura. Garner embodies her villainess, all steely ambition and unconcealed racism, with a robot smile that turns her into a grating Sarah Palin–style cretin. Jason A. Micallef’s script is humorless, but worse is its attempt to tug at heartstrings via Destiny triumphantly discovering her talent and finding a home—a maudlin subplot pockmarked by the girl musing “White people are weirdos” and “Are these crackers for real?” At least initially, a rowdy Wilde kick-starts some comedic commotion. Finally, though, she’s just another casualty of this inert dramedy, which plays like one long, slow descent into cloying moralizing and uplift that’s well past its expiration date. (R) Nick Schager Sundance Cinemas END OF WATCH In David Ayer’s End of Watch, one gets the sense of a skilled craftsman who has learned everything he knows about the ‘hood not from firsthand experience but from going to the movies. And so it is that the daily routine of two street cops (Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña) includes encounters with drug-addled parents, a nightgown-clad black mother screaming “My babies! My babies!” in front of her burning house, and Latina gang girls who cackle as they kill. As social insight, End of Watch is useless, but as engrossing entertainment, it’s irresistible. (R) Chuck Wilson Big Picture, Sundance Cinemas, Lincoln Square, Pacific Place FRANKENWEENIE Ever since Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton has mostly been in the adaptation business, rendering dark and becurlicued Sleepy Hollows and the like. With Frankenweenie, he adapts his own work—the first animated short he ever produced for a major film studio, and the one which semi-famously got him fired from Disney back in ’84. Working for “the man” generally entails a minimum of originality, yet—for all of his faults—Burton’s vision is still unlike any other filmmaker’s. In his films, introverts have access to bat caves, wonderlands, and the surprisingly comfortable interiors of giant peaches, all of which become the inner worlds of lonely people. It’s remarkable that this entire sensibility sprang so fully formed in that original short. It’s here, too. When his weenie dog Sparky is killed by a car, young Victor Frankenstein is inspired by his new science teacher to generate some impressive innovations in the untapped field of reanimation. Victor, voiced by Charlie Tahan, intends to submit his reassembled and electrically resurrected dog at his school’s science fair, but he’s actually motivated by a broken heart. The dog is great. Sparky isn’t a cartoon character as much as a behaviorally accurate little canine, which is 10 times cuter than if the script had
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gone in a Dreamworks Animation direction, with, like, Ben Stiller voicing the dog, and then a song by Smash Mouth; the script by Lenny Ripps from Burton’s original story, is tight and brief, hitting all the marks you’d expect from an animated kid’s film, and it’s all enlivened by Burton’s visual style. The man should make more small movies like this one. (PG) Chris Packham Varsity, Kirkland Parkplace, Cinebarre, Bainbridge Cinemas, Majestic Bay, Lincoln Square, and others KEEP THE LIGHTS ON Exhibiting great specificity about gay sexual mores while also rooting its story in tumultuous universal emotions, Keep the Lights On details a long-term romance fraught with turmoil. Like his prior Forty Shades of Blue and Married Life, director Ira Sachs’ latest boasts a riveting attention to troubled characters, in this case, documentary filmmaker Erik (Thure Lindhardt) and Paul (Zachary Booth), who meet for anonymous sex in 1998 and spend the next decade struggling to stay together amid Paul’s increasingly destructive drug addiction and Erik’s consuming need to save Paul from himself. Shooting with acute attention to shifting relationship dynamics and cutting in and out of scenes with a graceful fleetness that’s attuned to the rhythms of Erik and Paul’s up-and-down affair, Sachs creates an intensely intimate stew of fear, anger, longing, and regret. He’s aided in this by a sterling Lindhardt, whose unaffected expression of confused, desperate need is both charming and pitiful, and does much to further illuminate the story’s portrait of maturation and the unpleasant —and yet unavoidable—reality that, no matter how ardent, love ultimately can’t survive without trust. (NR) Nick Schager SIFF Film Center LOOPER Early in Rian Johnson’s thriller, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sits at a diner and chats with his self from 30 years in the future (Bruce Willis), who tells him not to worry about the particulars of time travel. Looper is more intent on the moral implications of a charged situation grounded in character, and it turns both Joes loose to make their own life-altering choices. Thrilling in its deft juggling of complex narrative elements, utterly clear in its presentation and unfolding with what feels like serious moral purpose, Looper favors the human scale over abstract philosophizing or meta-cinematic frippery. For Johnson, the inveterate pasticheur, it qualifies as a significant step forward. (R) Andrew Schenker Sundance Cinemas, Kirkland Parkplace, Lincoln Square, Meridian, Cinebarre, Thornton Place, and others THE MASTER In admitting that Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the figurehead of a growing faith movement in 1950s America, was inspired by L. Ron Hubbard, Paul Thomas Anderson set up expectations of an exposé of the origins of Scientology. Instead, he has delivered a free-form work of expressionism, more room-size painting than biopic. Anderson has never made a film so coded, so opaque. Dodd teaches a drunk named Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix) not to apologize for who he is—”a scoundrel”—and gets him to submit to the Master’s conversion therapy (this includes accessing memories from past lives). In Freddie he has a man who chewed through every leash ever clipped to his collar. Dodd repeatedly asks him, “Do your past failures bother you?” Can he change? Does he want to? Is this all vague enough for you? The film’s ambiguity could hardly be unintentional, but more interesting is Anderson’s use of sumptuous technique to tell a story defined by withholding. It’s a film of breathtaking cinematic romanticism and near-complete denial of conventional catharsis. (R) Karina Longworth Guild 45th, Cinerama, and others MOONRISE KINGDOM It’s 1965, the rainy end of summer on the rocky coast of a fictional New England isle. Twelve-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman) disappears from the Scout camp run by Randy Ward (Edward Norton). Also 12, bad seed Suzy (Kara Hayward) flees her distracted lawyer parents (Frances McDormand and Bill Murray). Aided by what remains of Ward’s troop (“It’s a chance to do some first-class scouting!”), the grownups, including Bruce Willis’ Captain Sharp, mobilize to find the fugitive young lovers. Moonrise takes the form of old-fashioned preteen literature, but, as everything made by Wes Anderson, does so knowingly. The escape Sam engineers for the pair is dangerous and crazy, but it’s also a way for him to exercise control, and to show off to a receptive audience. Suzy doesn’t have it so bad at home, but Sam’s flattering gaze gives her something she isn’t getting, and now won’t easily be able to live without. This utopian romance is thrown into relief by the quiet despair of the adults in Moonrise. (PG-13) Karina Longworth Crest, Admiral THE ORANGES Yeah, all right already, we get it about suburbia—it’s a topography of middle-age despair hidden under a sunny façade. Also: Suburbia’s dark underbelly—it’s so dark! Probably a lot of secrets buried there. The Oranges, an extremely dry comedy directed by Julian Farino, is kind of like a takedown of
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