siffweek3»Picks & Pans payback, and an emotionally paralyzed collection agent (Jeong Jae-yeong, so impassive he’s practically absent) who will die in 10 days without a liver transplant. Which would be cool if there was anything more to the film than clever gamesmanship, a succession of chase scenes, and the occasional gang brawl. First-time writer/director Huh Jung-ho has that sleek, slick, steely visual style down, but he mistakes narrative hooks and plot twists for story. Countdown gets distracted by the busy work of its plotting. Teasing flashbacks to our frosty hero’s tragic past are so drawn-out that they lose all emotional impact. The rousing of dormant maternal instincts in the cheerfully amoral con woman (Jeon Do-yeon, clearly enjoying herself ) feels purely obligatory. There’s a potentially interesting story lost in the tangle here, and by the third or fourth ending (the film just keeps piling them on), you get a glimpse of what it might have been. SEAN AXMAKER (Also 3 p.m. Mon., June 4.)
SUNDAY, JUNE 3 Italy Love It or Leave It
deep analysis, he charts a fault line of age that runs parallel to income inequality—a system Berlusconi rigged to favor old, entrenched interests. By the end, you’d love to see Luca and Gustav repeat their project by driving across the U.S.—in the new Fiat 500, of course, with air conditioning and cup holders. BRIAN MILLER (Also 6 p.m. Tues., June 5.)
Mel Brooks’ Tony AwArd-winning MusicAl coMedy sMAsh
MONDAY, JUNE 4
P Prime Time Soap 6:30 P.M., HARVARD EXIT
Issaquah: (425) 392-2202 • www.VillageTheatre.org • Everett: (425) 257-8600
ITALYLOVEITORLEAVE.IT
It’s 1978, and Brazil is doubly in thrall: to a brutal anti-Communist dictatorship and to telenovelas. In the kitchen, put-upon maid Dora watches TV news footage of bloodily quashed political protests. Her employer, lollipoppy call girl Amanda, meanwhile lounges in her bedroom drooling over Dancin’ Days, a cheeseball drama set at a disco (a real show, which starred Sonia Braga at the height of her sizzle). This premise may make Prime Time Soap sound campier than it is; sprinkles of black comedy are there, but what director Odilon Rocha primarily borrows from the titular genre is tangled, twisty plotting. We also meet a secret cell of those protesters, a gay teen being raised by his grandparents, and a soft-spoken diplomat. How they all interact—after a policeman/client winds up dead in Amanda’s bedroom, sending her and Dora on the run—is the film’s chief pleasure. Rocha doesn’t back off from grimness, but nor does he seem to blame his countrymen for having preferred kitschy escapism to facing the regime’s hideous realities. Sympathetic to how necessary such telenovelas must have been, he affectionately uses a disco as the setting for his plot resolutions—gruelingly suspenseful, happy, and bittersweet. GAVIN BORCHERT (Also 4 p.m. Tues., June 5.)
issAquAh: MAy 9- July 1 evereTT: July 6-29
P Italy Love It
or Leave It
NOON, SIFF CINEMA UPTOWN
TUESDAY, JUNE 5
P Moonrise Kingdom 7 P.M., EGYPTIAN
Don’t even bother hoping for standby tickets tonight, since Wes Anderson’s highly anticipated new feature is sold out. Besides, it opens this Friday at Pacific Place and Guild 45th, so you can stand in line then. But I will say this: Though I’ve had issues with Anderson’s hyper-whimsical/melancholy style in the past, this is the best and most satisfying work of his career. Two 12-year-olds elope through the woods, pursued by Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton, and an overzealous scout troop. Along the way, there are electrical storms, first kisses, scissor stabbings, and dancing on the beach to vintage French pop. The youngsters are dead set on serious, grown-up romance (though imperfectly understood), while their concerned elders are reminded of lost youth. It’s a meticulous, tender storybook tale set on a notquite-enchanted island. BRIAN MILLER E film@seattleweekly.com
Seattle weekly • M AY 30–Ju n e 5, 2012
Our tour guides/social critics in this documentary road movie are Luca Ragazzi (the one with glasses, who narrates in crisp English) and his boyfriend, Gustav Hoffer, who declares himself disgusted with Berlusconi’s Italy and suggests they leave. (This is precisely what many young, educated Italians are doing to find work abroad.) So the two pack themselves into a vintage Fiat 500—several of them, actually—and set off to catalog what’s wrong and possibly right about their homeland. Whimsical maps and animation help us track their journey from the top of the boot to the toe. Along they way they meet Fiat workers, philosophers, feminists, fascists, Mafia experts, a self-professed gay Communist mayor, and a swarm of Berlusconi supporters in Milan just as the Rubygate/ bunga-bunga scandal is beginning to crack the prime minister’s regime. One crone praises Berlusconi’s “youth” and vitality (enhanced by plastic surgery and Viagra, as we know), to which Luca politely replies that there are no young people at the rally. Italy’s youthunemployment rates and stagnant economy are a dire warning to the rest of Europe, and possibly the next big crisis after Greece. Though Luca favors colorful anecdote over
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