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HOLIDAY FROM CAROL TO THE HATEFUL EIGHT TO THE BIG SHORT, WE REVIEW ALL THE BIG MOVIES. FILM GUIDE PLUS HORTON’S 10 BEST FILMS OF 2015 AND MILLER’S 10 FAVORITE MOMENTS. PAGE 27

Party Like It’s 2016

Ring in the New Year with our complete list of Seattle-area events. By Jeanny Rhee Page 37 DECEMBER 23, 2015 -JANUARY 5, 2016 | VOLUME 40 | NUMBER 51

Kedai Makan Grows Up Cap Hill’s kick-ass Malaysian counter expands its footprint—and its menu. By Nicole Sprinkle Page 24

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 23, 2015–JANUARY 5, 2016

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VOLUME 40 | NUMBER 51 SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM

Dec. 23, 2015 - Jan. 5, 2016

news&comment 7

2015 IN REVIEW

BY SW STAFF | Did your year suck?

We feel you. So we’re starting off with 10 reasons to look forward to 2016, from shiny new light-rail lines to the Honest Elections bill to—dare to dream!—the Seahawks’ third consecutive Super Bowl? We also recap the year in gun violence, an unsolved murder in the ID, and the interruption that front-burnered race as a presidential campaign issue, and we update you on 10 cover stories that made a splash and two gaffes that riled up social media. Plus: a comic fantasy of a brave new Amazon-free world.

food&drink

23 NOW TRENDING

BY NICOLE SPRINKLE | What’s

perfectly fresh, and what’s already overripe, in Seattle’s food scene. 23 | BEER HUNTING 24 | RESTAURANT REVIEW

arts&culture

BY ROBERT HORTON & BRIAN MILLER | 2015’s best films and best

moments from our two critics; plus what to see this weekend.

34 ALBUMS OF THE YEAR BY KELTON SEARS | G.L.O.S.S. eviscerates, Mackned comes out, Mount Eerie makes you wanna sauna, and seven more local highlights of the year in music.

36 CALENDAR 36 36 37 39

| PERFORMANCE/EAR SUPPLY | BOOKS | NEW YEAR’S EVE | FILM

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30 Editor-in-Chief Mark Baumgarten EDITORIAL News Editor Daniel Person Food Editor Nicole Sprinkle Arts Editor Brian Miller Music Editor Kelton Sears Editorial Operations Manager Gavin Borchert Staff Writers Sara Bernard, Ellis E. Conklin, Casey Jaywork Editorial Interns Cassandra Calderon, Scott Johnson, Mara Silvers Contributing Writers Rick Anderson, James Ballinger, Michael Berry, Alyssa Dyksterhouse, Jay Friedman, Margaret Friedman, Zach Geballe, Chason Gordon, Dusty Henry, Rhiannon Fionn, Marcus Harrison Green, Robert Horton, Patrick Hutchison, Seth Kolloen, Sandra Kurtz, Dave Lake, Terra Clarke Olsen, Jason Price, Keegan Prosser, Tiffany Ran, Michael A. Stusser, Jacob Uitti

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27 HOLIDAY FILMS

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HEY, NEW MEXICO, YOU WANT OUR NUCLEAR WASTE?

Last week, John Stang dissected the Hanford cleanup saga, which has seen ever-extending deadlines for converting nuclear waste into glass logs, which would solidify the waste and prevent it from leaching into the Columbia River. As Stang notes, many close to the project see a culture of shoddy work and poor oversight, resulting in projects that now stand decades behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget (though the site was recently designated a national park). The piece’s online title was “Will Hanford’s Big Clean-Up Ever Begin?” which readers took as a prompt.

“ The whole thing is a farce, with every stakeholder lying to some degree to keep the work going and the money flowing.” strategy might cost roughly one-quarter of the $100 billions or so that vitrification will cost over the next 50 to 75 years. The whole question revolves around money, and how we choose to spend our money. How much risk reduction will we actually be getting for the vast sums of money we will be spending on a vitrification disposal pathway; and what will its risk-reduction benefits be worth as compared to those of a much less expensive RH-TRU disposal pathway? Beta Blocker, via seattleweekly.com CAN’T A GIRL MAKE A DOLLAR?

And in Higher Ground, columnist Michael Stusser “Will Hanford’s Big Clean-Up Ever Begin?” No. noted that there’s still work to be done in cannabis No, it won’t, but that won’t stop them from makculture, even if it is legal. “I’m concerned that the ing public parks out of “formerly” contaminated marijuana movement and cannabis culture may areas. Maybe one day you can even take your kids not stay true to the ideals that launched the journey, without signing a health waiver release—what a including civil rights and personal liberties. It was privilege. No worries; it used to never about a Green Rush.” be contaminated but it’s not anySend your thoughts on more. Prove otherwise. Just like As for corporate America takthis week’s issue to “No radionuclides will ever make ing over—you are talking about it to the Columbia” . . . Oh, wait, letters@seattleweekly.com friends I’ve known most of my they did and do, but no worries, dilution is the solution. Which (if this were reality) would beg the question” Where does a radionuclide with a thousand-year half-life dilute away to? The whole thing is a farce, with every stakeholder lying to some degree and playing their part to keep the work going and the money flowing. thebriang, via seattleweekly.com

The big question is this: Will the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) ever produce a single log of vitrified nuclear waste? The answer to that question is “Most likely not, all things considered.” The most fundamental problem with the current waste-disposal strategy for Hanford’s tank wastes is that the great bulk of it, possibly 98 percent of it, simply is not dangerous enough to warrant spending the massive sums of money needed to dispose of it in the form of vitrified glass logs. It must be pointed out that nuclear wastes which are hotter than all but the very hottest of Hanford’s tank wastes are now being successfully disposed of at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico in the form of Remote Handled Transuranic (RH-TRU) wastes. A rough estimate of the total life-cycle cost of dealing with most of Hanford’s tank waste as RH-TRU packaged for disposal at WIPP, as opposed to the current strategy of loading it into vitrified glass logs, is that an RH-TRU disposal

life (including me) crossing over from mainstream jobs because either they or family members have been helped. Because legalization means medicine-makers are able to step out of the smoky closet of prohibition and feel safe to share. That’s how my breast cancer was put into remission. . . . Am I wrong to be paid for my writing to share this good news? So, worry not, my dear friend. We will burn a fatty together this weekend, and say to each other, “in our lifetime, lucky us.” P.S. Would rather have decriminalization rather than laws to litigate, yes, of course. Sharon Letts, via seattleweekly.com Michael Stusser responded: Thanks for your thoughtful feedback, Sharon. While I’m glad you and some of your friends have cashed in on the new Green Rush (as have I), without proper regulation and advocacy, Big Pharma and Big Tobacco will jump in, tossing aside the farming pioneers who have led us in overturning prohibition. It’s possible we share common ground (I’m at least partially informed), and I look forward to discussing these vital issues in greater detail over our community joint this weekend. Thanks again for working with me to Elevate the Dialogue on the legalization movement. —Michael Comments have been edited for length and clarity. Chatterbox has no current plans to visit Hanford National Park, or whatever it’s called. E

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECE MBER 23, 2015– JAN UARY 5, 2016

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 23, 2015–JANUARY 5, 2016

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

A LOOK AHEAD

2016 Is Going to Be the Best Year Ever for Seattle!

A hopeless optimist’s guide to how 2015 set 2016 up for success. BY SARA BERNARD

t’s easy to get mired in despair. We’re in the news business, so believe us, we know. But a lot of what happened in Seattle this year bodes well for the next—really! Here we raise a glass to this year’s wins and next year’s prospects.

First off, getting around town will be easier.

And no, not just because we’ll collectively admit that walking is the city’s fastest mode of transport. Seattle will have a light-rail line in early 2016 that will get you from Downtown to the U

SARA BERNARD

That’s a far cry from the current system, which is “about the time it takes to listen to every podcast you’ve ever heard of and then call your mom and then give up and go home.” The First Hill Streetcar is also finally running its test trains up and down the lines; chances are high it’ll launch within months. Voters approved Move Seattle in November, the huge transportation levy, which means nearly $1 billion for transportation infrastructure projects, including new protected bike lanes and bus lanes in 2016. And there’s some (marginally) good news for gridlock: The city’s traffic engineer, Dongho Chang, promises that we’re going to see

JEREMY DWYER-LINDGREN

District at rush hour in “about the time it takes to order and get coffee,” says Sound Transit.

The Seahawks see nothing but open field ahead of them.

A streetcar we desire.

tangibly address the dispro-

major improvements in traffic-light timing in the downtown corridor

portionate suspension rates of students of color. Seattle’s

rising minimum wage will inch toward its eventual $15 in 2016, too, by the way—up to $13 an hour if you work for a large employer who doesn’t pay your health-care premiums.

Environmentalists and policymakers have done a hell of

a job fighting for action on climate change this year, and show no signs of stopping in the next. Shell launched and then abandoned its effort to drill the Arctic for oil; Seattle’s kayaktivists can take credit for galvanizing global opposition to the effort. Washington could be the first

good year for all kinds of city policy, which means we might actually see some substantive changes next year on the city’s thorniest issues. Mayor Ed Murray’s declaration of emergency on homelessness won’t completely solve the problem, but acknowledging its severity and finding millions more dollars to address it is nothing to sneeze at; there will be more shelter beds next year. The

Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) came out, to much

JEREMY DWYER-LINDGREN

Speaking of which, 2015 was also a

critical acclaim (with a generous slice of plain old criticism on the side), and in 2016 we should see some of those recommendations become law, including a commercial linkage fee that will require developers to directly fund the construction of affordable housing. The city also approved $600,000 to develop alternatives to youth detention next year—an effort to help kids, not jail them. Voters passed Honest Elections this November, too, making it

tougher for corporate money to dominate city politics in the years to come. Granted, there won’t

Environmentalists had many victories this year, not least Shell’s decision to abandon its Arctic drilling program.

be any city elections to use them on next year, but it will be the law! And, after much ado and several nail-bitingly close races, we’ve got a freshfaced City Council that is younger, more racially diverse, more female, and more urbanist—in other words, more likely to pass legislation in 2016 that’ll help improve public transit and increase housing options and cap these skyrocketing rents. Labor unions are on the rise—a good thing for workers, but also for the city as a whole. The City Council last week passed legislation that allows

Uber and Lyft drivers to unionize, making us the first U.S. city to do so. The Council also doubled funding for the Tenant’s Union in the 2016 bud-

get, which means nearly $100,000 in support for renters. And after the Seattle teachers’ union went on strike for the first time in three decades this September, it secured all kinds of wins for the school district that will benefit students and classrooms, not just teacher salaries. Among them: a guaranteed 30 minutes of recess for all elementary-school kids and the creation of equity teams in dozens of schools that might finally,

U.S. state to pass a carbon tax at the ballot in 2016,

since Carbon Washington got the 350,000 signatures it was shooting for and then some. The proposal will be in the hands of the legislature in January—and then on the ballot if the legislature does nothing, which, let’s face it, is likely. The Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy is still developing its own carbon-tax proposal, too, which will start the signature-gathering process early in the year. What happened in Paris was way more promising than any climate conference that preceded it, and we had our own Gov. Jay Inslee on deck, teaming with other regional leaders to confab on better climate policies in

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECE MBER 23, 2015– JAN UARY 5, 2016

by early next year and along Mercer Avenue soon after, minimizing those interminable minutes you and everyone around you will sit at a red light, thinking Why? Why? And the lowincome Rainier Beach High School students advocating for free ORCA passes? They got their passes. The city this fall found $1 million to help them get to school.

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 10 9

A LOOK AHEAD » FROM PAGE 9

the Pacific Northwest. And even if the state legislature stagnates again, Inslee has already commanded the Department of Ecology to cap carbon emissions, with a new rule to roll out by the end of 2016. Meanwhile, King County just adopted one of the boldest climate action plans in the country. (Even Earth Day founder Denis Hayes said it was the best one he’d seen.) What’s more, contrary to popular fears, Seattle’s winter has started off both wet and cold, with several feet of snow already blanketing the Cascades. So chin up, snow bums: The snowpack is back!

SEE THE ZOO

Same goes for sports fans: The Seahawks end 2015 on a hot streak, and the prospect of a third straight Super Bowl appearance beckons once

again. Sure, Beast Mode is down, recovering from a hernia operation, and Thomas Rawls is out with a season-ending broken ankle, but who needs a running game when Russell Wilson is throwing three touchdowns a game? Plus, the Mariners have a new General Manager, Jerry Dipoto, who came in swinging, feeding hopes that the city’s beleaguered baseball team will break out of the playoff drought that’s been plaguing it for 14 agonizing years. None of the new GM’s transactions so far seem terribly sig-

THAN EVER

nificant, but the team has added depth, and—no offense, Trumbo—athleticism. Oh, and for a final toast: Beer is bigger than ever. Yes, Seattle has gotten even friendlier with our favorite frothy beverage. There’s now a craft brewery on every street corner! (OK, just kidding. We mean every street corner in Ballard.) There are at least 315 breweries in the state, a good fifth of them within Seattle city limits, and of those, a bunch saw major expansions this year. Fremont Brewing’s new tasting room and office space broke ground in September; Epic Ales’ new restaurant and brewery, Mollusk, is bringing inventive suds like squid-ink pilsner to 5,000 square feet of South Lake Union; 2-yearold Standard Brewing’s headquarters in the Central District went from a tiny row of stools to an expansive patio with heat lamps and a movie screen; and Reuben’s Brews in Ballard just snagged a veteran employee from Pike Brewing and opened a huge new taproom. And if booze isn’t your thing, well, Washington just upped the state limit on recreational cannabis shops from 334 to 556 stores. Many of those will open in, you guessed, it 2016. It’s going to be a blazing year. E

sbernard@seattleweekly.com

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 23, 2015–JANUARY 5, 2016

DON’T MISS OUT!

The teachers’ strike was a bummer, but yielded great results.

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

CRIME

Bullets Over Seattle

It was a banner year for gunfire in our city.

NOV. DEC.

Shots-fired report

Victim injured

Victim killed

Sources: Shots-fired, victims-injured, and victims-killed data through Nov. 23 from SeaStat and Seattle Police Department Crime Dashboard. November shots-fired data does not show shots fired after Nov. 23. Shots-fired markers for late November and December are for illustration purposes only and do not reflect SPD data. December victims-killed data from Seattle Police Blotter archives.

dperson@seattleweekly.com

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECE MBER 23, 2015– JAN UARY 5, 2016

OCT.

SEPT.

AUG.

JULY

JUNE

MAY

APR.

MAR.

FEB.

JAN.

BY DANIEL PERSON

hen discussing the American phenomenon that is civilian-oncivilian gun violence, grim context is necessary. Seattle’s 15 gun homicides this year pale in comparison to the 300-plus suffered in Baltimore, though the cities are of similar population. In a country that suffers, on average, one mass shooting every day, Seattle saw no deaths this year in that bleak category. But in another context, 2015 was a year of gunfire in the Emerald City. Through Nov. 23, the most recent statistics available, police had confirmed 348 shots-fired reports across the city. That amounted to 65 more shots-fired reports this year than last; precisely how many more bullets that amounts to is unknown, since a single shots-fired report could include a large volley of gunfire from a legal semi-automatic weapon. However many bullets there were, they found 15 more human targets this year (though by the strange logic of the barrel, gun-homicide rates remained steady.) The gunshots were not distributed equally. In late July and early August, when gun violence spiked in the city, there were 33 confirmed shots-fired reports. Twenty of those were reported in South Seattle and the Central District and on Capitol Hill. Even more specifically, many of the shootings occurred in places like Brighton and Dunlap, South Seattle neighborhoods that are too rarely mentioned anywhere else but the police blotter. The graphic at left tells the story of the numbers. We hope it conveys the sheer daunting volume of 348 terrifying eruptions of gunfire—averaging more than one every day. However, marks to indicate deaths and injuries from the gunfire notwithstanding, a graphic like this cannot fully convey the human toll of all the violence. One of those black marks stands for Robert Robinson Jr., a 17-year-old Cleveland High School student who was killed in a drive-by shooting on Beacon Hill in March. Robinson had a “heart for social justice,” one of his teachers told The Seattle Times. Another one stands for Donnie Chin, the International District activist whose murder left the community stunned and angry (for more on that, see “The Lost Cause of Donnie Chin,” page 12). The graphic also doesn’t include bullets fired by police officers. Discussion of those can be found on page 16 (“What We Said Before”). If there’s anything positive to be said about Seattle’s violent year, it is that it was not met with complacency. Mid-summer, Seattle Police began to devote extra resources to combat gun violence. As of Nov. 23, the department had seized 830 guns, nearly 200 more than it had the year before. Meanwhile, the Seattle City Council passed a new tax on guns and ammunition that is intended to help cover the millions of dollars spent at Harborview treating gunshot wounds. Even people affiliated with gangs—thought to be the source of most of the violence—have had enough. As we reported earlier this year (“Come Together,” July 30), a group called the United Hoods Movement is seeking to bring gang members from the Central District and South Seattle together to stem the violence. “We have to get past the point that if someone spits on your street sign or says something denigrating the South End, that you’re down to kill them for it,” United Hoods Movement co-founded Dwayne Maxted told us. “It’s been long overdue for us to come together as all of Seattle.” E

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

CRIME

The Lost Cause

Donnie Chin’s death was the highest-profile crime of 2015. What came of it? BY CASEY JAYWORK

CASEY JAYWORK

Donnie Chin’s uniform hangs in memoriam at the Wing Luke Museum.

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 23, 2015–JANUARY 5, 2016

haron Maeda is on TV. The date is August 3, 2015. The Seattle activist and former White House staffer is standing in the press conference room on the seventh floor of City Hall, surrounded by the mutual-appreciation society that is Seattle’s political elite: Mayor Ed Murray, more than half of the City Council, the city attorney, and the chief of police, plus a row of leaders of immigrant communities so long it crosses the room. Before her, the floor is jammed with reporters and observers, pens and pads and recorders and cameras poised, waiting to hear what the stout, earnest mayor beside her has to say. Hours before, Maeda had heard that Murray was going to release a statement on the recent murder of local hero Donnie Chin. She dropped everything and hightailed to City Hall, where she took a seat and waited to hear the big news. Then one of the mayor’s staffers asked Maeda to join the human backdrop for Murray’s announcement. She’s expecting some kind of announcement about Chin, whose killers have not been arrested: something like “We found the shooter” or “We know which gangs were involved” or even “We’re close to announcing new information on Donnie’s death.” The cameras are already rolling by the time she glances down at the prepared notes on the podium in front of Murray. CLOSE HOOKAH LOUNGES, it reads in big letters at the top. Maeda looks again just to be sure she’s not hallucinating, but the letters are still there, taunting her from the page. “Oh, ‘blank,’ ” she thinks. “I gotta get out of here.” But standing in front of a live video feed, there’s 12 no way to tactfully retreat—no way to leave with-

out storming out. So Maeda stares hard at the floor, her hands clasped in front of her waist as though at a funeral or a disciplinary hearing. Murray begins to speak into the podium microphone. “Good morning,” he says, “and thank you for being here today. In the last few years, Seattle has seen an alarming rise in violence and illegal activities associated with hookah lounges.” Maeda understands the connection. The shooting took place in the early morning about a block away from King’s Hookah Lounge on Lane Street, where late-night revelers were known to congregate. But she doesn’t like it. As she’ll later say, Murray’s plan to shut down hookah lounges isn’t much different from the political rhetoric that arises later in the year. “ “[This] is like Donald Trump saying, ‘We’re not going to let any Muslims in,’ ” she later says. But she’s trapped. She grits her teeth, keeps her eye on the carpeted floor. Maeda’s misgivings were well founded. Following Murray’s great roar against violence at hookah lounges came equally loud roars of racism. Over the next month, the Murray administration squirmed in the face of public controversy, trying desperately to please competing constituencies. Almost half a year after Chin’s death and the hookah non-crackdown, few are satisfied with the results. No arrests have been made in Chin’s case, and the hookah lounge that first incensed the International District remains open. The aborted attack on hookah lounges left many East Africans feeling scapegoated by a city administration that needs to look tough, while the residents of the ID who’d called for sanctions in the first place have nothing to show for their efforts.

All the while, memorials for Donnie Chin remain piled outside his small shop in Canton Alley—sad and drenched reminders of the most shocking crime of 2015, and the bizarre City Hall spectacle that followed it. In the wee hours of the morning of July 23,

Donnie Chin was gunned down in his car, caught in the crossfire while responding to gunshots in the International District. He died as he lived: serving the ID as a one-man emergency response unit, on call 24/7. The weight of his death hit everyone who knew him like a gunshot to the chest. A cloud of grief descended on Chinatown, which even today hasn’t fully dissipated. With grief came the demand for justice. While the killers seemed to disappear into the night like fading smoke, many believed the conditions for Chin’s death were laid by King’s, where anyone 18 or older could while away the night time hours inhaling fancy tobacco fumes through an octopus of twisted inhalation tubes. Open later than bars, residents near King’s were accustomed to hearing late-night carousing, fights, and occasional gunshots. To some, the problem and the solution seemed equally simple: Hookah lounges cause violence, so shut down hookah lounges. That logic was what led Bob Santos, the legendary activist, to lead dozens in protest against King’s during the nights that followed Chin’s death. “What do we want?” he chanted to protesters. “Close it down!” they replied in unison. Some East African leaders joined the call, penning a letter of support saying they endorsed closing the lounges because they attracted violence and because smoking is unhealthy. “Despite the long history of violence surrounding hookah

lounges,” they wrote, “we have not seen any of these business owners take serious steps to address our community concerns.” Long history, indeed. Deputy Mayor Hyok Kim says that while angst over Chin’s death was the most obvious spark for August’s firestorm of anti-hookah sentiment, the smoky lounges had been on Murray’s mind since last year. That’s when he found himself comforting the mother of another shooting victim, Mohamed Osman, who was killed in early June 2014 near Casablanca Hookah Lounge, also in the ID. According to Kim, Osman’s mother personally asked the mayor to do something about violence near hookah lounges—a request that “has been weighing heavily on the mayor ever since his first year in office,” she says. Chin himself repeatedly raised alarms in the ID over what he considered blatant criminal activity emanating from hookah lounges. However, Murray felt his hands were tied, mayoral staffer David Mendoza says. “The ability for the city to actually close businesses is incredibly limited,” he says. Following Chin’s death, though, inaction was no longer an option. At a community meeting the day of his death, Kim says, “There were some very strong voices who expressed their deep concerns about what was going on in Chinatown/ID with a couple of problem hookah bar lounges.” But neither the ID nor the ethnic groups within it are a monolith. No sooner had Murray uttered the words “alarming rise in violence and illegal activities associated with hookah lounges” than local resistance, and suggestions of racism, took root in the body politic. An August 10 City Council meeting was filled with commenters decrying the crackdown. “The closure of hookah lounges,” said lounge owner Nabil Mohamed, “is orchestrated to make the mayor appear decisive about ending violence without addressing the actual issues” undermining public safety in the in the ID. One week later, both pro- and anti-hookah factions again lobbied the Council to support and oppose Murray’s plan. Despite what the mayor’s office says was a resolve against hookah lounges that had reached back to the beginning of his administration, Murray struggled to maintain it in the face of protest. After reciting statistics on hookah-proximate fights and shootings, Murray was asked for comparable statistics on violence near bars. Murray had no answer. Neither did anyone else. (A more recent geographic analysis of the location of police 911 responses, available now at seattleweekly.com, shows that the lounges are not particularly associated with violence and crime.) Missing that key statistic, the Murray administration pivoted concern toward the health impacts of indoor smoking (which is banned in Washington state, though hookah-lounge owners say that they run private clubs, which are exempt). This argument had the advantage of holding weight in the East African community, and in science. Ubah Warsame worries about peer pres-

sure on young people to smoke hookah. “I am a mother of three children,” says the local health educator and interpreter, “and I think of all the youth who think this is the thing to do. “They can be there three to five hours, just sitting there,” she says. “It destroys their health, lungs . . . It’s not good for them” and costs precious time and money. However, to the public, talk of the health impact of hookah-smoking was all the more baffling. Was the crackdown on hookah lounges still about Donnie Chin? Or lung cancer? As Josh Kelety of PubliCola put it in early August, seizing the irresistible metaphor: “Murray’s motivations are hazy.”

Murray also says he’s already started to hear good things from ID leaders about their hookahlounge neighbors. “I am hearing from some of the leaders in Chinatown and Little Saigon that they’re having a very different relationship with [King’s],” he says. “Hopefully what we’re seeing is a willingness to find a model that would get them into compliance . . . [and] engaging with the neighborhood to become better neighbors.” This all sounds good, but none of it’s very concrete: a pending analysis, a pending court case, a fledgling advisory group. All in all, the city’s current relationship with hookah lounges can be summarized in a word: “conversations.”

Whatever the effects of hookah lounges on health and violence, the Murray administration switched tone again on August 28, one day after meeting with hookah-bar owners for the first time. “Yesterday’s meeting was the first opportunity for everybody to sit at the same table and understand fully what the regulatory

One big question—the central question in this

cjaywork@seattleweekly.com

to your

highlight reel

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECE MBER 23, 2015– JAN UARY 5, 2016

landscape looks like and recognize pathways to get into compliance,” mayoral staffer Brian Surratt told The Seattle Times. But weren’t hookah bars a pressing threat to public safety—a danger so clear and present that shutting them down was an integral part of “stopping violence in our streets,” as Murray put it on August 3? “My conversations with the [hookah] businesses right now are strictly confined to helping them get into compliance,” Surratt told the Times. Examined through the lens of that August 3 press conference, the Murray administration’s shift was striking: What had been a top-level public-safety priority had, within a month, become a matter of bureaucratic box-checking. Today, asked what steps the city was taking to address hookah lounges short of closing them, mayoral staff point to a couple of things. One is a pending Racial Equity Analysis from the Office of Civil Rights based largely on discussions with affected community members, trying to suss out the implicit effects of shuttering hookah lounges on East African Seattleites and other marginalized communities. Another is a pending King County Superior Court decision on a case between Seattle/King County Public Health and a Medina hookah-lounge over whether the latter is operating in violation of state smoking laws. A spokesperson for Public Health says they’ve contacted a dozen hookah lounges overall, but none has yet changed its operations to comply with state law. Still, in an interview with Seattle Weekly, Murray says progress is being made. Last week, the mayor convened a new ID task force to “build on Donnie’s legacy” and advise on local economic and safety issues, according to a press release.

SEATTLE CHANNEL

Murray’s press conference.

saga since the beginning—remains. When Murray called that August 3 press conference, was he motivated by a true belief that the presence of hookah bars represented a serious public safety threat, or by a desire to look responsive to the killing of Donnie Chin? After all, Chin had been complaining to the city for months about violence outside King’s, so it’s plausible that Murray feared that public opinion would blame him for Chin’s death. Alternatively, did Chin’s death gave the Murray administration an excuse to go after hookah lounges? In short, did Murray play politics with the death of a beloved citizen? In response to the suggestion that he hijacked the publicity around Chin’s death, Murray and his staff stress that the short-lived crusade against the lounges was brought to them by affected residents, not the other way around. One staffer provided a copy of a petition against hookah lounges received by the city. There are hundreds of handwritten signatures. A letter signed by 18 East African community leaders, dated August 12, urges the mayor to “support enforcement of the law and the closure of unlawful indoor smoking establishments.” “Probably the mistake I made,” says Murray, “was acting. Because if I hadn’t acted, the [news] stories would be about Chinatown and Little Saigon up in arms, and the Chinese and Vietnamese communities up in arms because I wasn’t acting. “So if I made a mistake, it’s probably I acted too soon. The political thing for me to do would have been for those communities to turn on me and then have acted.” Maeda agrees that Murray acted too fast on the Chin issue, but cautions against blaming the community. For her, the Murray administration just needs to impress people, all the time. “If you haven’t noticed, he does that a lot,” says Maeda, referring to Murray’s tendency to be visibly on top of the issue du jour. “I was actually very impressed [with Murray] the first few months he was in office. I said, ‘Oh my God, he’s gonna be OK.’ ” There seems, she says, to be “a need to come out first,” to “get ahead of everything . . . ‘We’re going to be first, we’re gonna be on top of this, we’re going to be on top of everything.’ Well, it’s impossible to be on top of everything. I think that his office is driven by that focus to want to be first,” she says. To some extent, that drive to be first can be a good thing, pushing the mayor to respond to public feedback. But taken to an extreme, it becomes a liability, she says. “I don’t expect my mayor to be everywhere there’s a news story.” E

add it

THE YEAR IN REVIEW RISE UP

After the Interruption

How the woman who upstaged Bernie Sanders is keeping the momentum. BY MARCUS HARRISON GREEN AND JAMES TRIMARCO

ALEX GARLAND

Marissa Janae Johnson, at the mic, says Democrats still have a long way to go.

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 23, 2015–JANUARY 5, 2016

he only time Marissa Janae Johnson ever doubted the interruption heard ’round the world came not long after she left a crowd of irate and disappointed Bernie Sanders supporters in a fury at downtown’s Westlake Park. She was walking from the stage when she received a text from Deray McKesson, a leading figure in the Black Lives Matter movement. It read: “This was a bad look. I can fix it . . . ” And for just a split second, she questioned her role in what had just taken place. Was it right for her and Mara Jacqueline Willaford to invade a local union rally that featured a keynote address from the great (white) liberal messiah? Had it been wise to relegate Sanders to a mere

bystander by taking the mic from the U.S. Senator’s hands right before he was about to deliver his gospel of class politics? Were they correct in electing to withstand an onslaught of jeering fused with forceful chants of “Let Bernie speak!” in order to lead four and a half minutes of silence in honor of black men and women killed by police? A moment later, she arrived at her answer: You’re damn right. It wasn’t the booing, hissing, and n-word carpet-bombing by some of the supporters in attendance that assured her she and Willaford were right, though it provided some affirmation. Rather, moral certainty returned to her, forged from a firm belief that the platform she had

taken from Sanders, albeit briefly, was one she was obliged to capture. For Johnson, Sanders and every other candidate seeking this land’s highest office should have heeded the warning signs that business as usual was over. Retribution was long overdue for the persistent neglect of black people’s grievances by politicians. She looked at the previous interruption of presidential candidates by Black Lives Matter protesters a month before at the progressive-minded Netroots Nation conference, where Sanders and his fellow presidential candidate Martin O’Malley failed to commit to supporting the fledgling movement while stumbling to ad-lib any lines offscript from their preplanned talking points. Consequences were needed for doing nothing to address the issues raised after that first disruption, when no candidate came out with any concrete policies, nor statements of purpose that their campaigns were aligned in common cause with black liberation. The equation was simple: Candidate X having a platform and failing to do what they said they were going to do equals that candidate forfeiting that platform. Bernie never stood a chance. To hell with “respectability.”

Oh, that word . . . its six syllables summoning ghosts of Carlton Banks and Theo Huxtable, and epitomized in the present day by figures such as Don Lemon and Tyler Perry. Its position as a cardinal tenet of how black people should properly go about obtaining legitimacy in America’s political system is the main argument Johnson receives, almost daily, to this day, as to why what the duo did on the afternoon of August 8 was so wrong.

As we sit in the Central District’s Wonder Coffee and Sports Bar, she reveals to me an unsolicited Facebook message sent her by a progressive “ally” that reads like a carbon copy of what she’s grown accustomed to hearing these past five months. With a word count that gives the Dead Sea Scrolls a run for their money, the woman’s tome begins with a lengthy disclaimer of how much she respects Johnson, that she agrees with the mission of the Black Lives Matter movement, and means her no offense. Then the crux of the missive floods the screen of Johnson’s smartphone. “Democrats are not the enemy . . . Racist, demon-hearted Republicans are to blame for our collective ills . . . interruption of Bernie Sanders absolutely the wrong tactic . . . ” The remainder reads akin to “yada, yada, yada . . . world peace.” Such intrusions into their personal lives have become a new normal, for both Johnson and Willaford (who is still taking time for herself following all the publicity, and who didn’t respond to my interview request). The two no longer work closely together, though they remain friends. “We’re different people, with different strengths,” says Johnson after her order of kitfo arrives. Her strength was fully tested in the months after the rally. Besides the initial media backlash, Johnson shares that she received very little support from friends and family. Many times she was forced to serve as an anchor for them, as they got caught up in the mounting scrutiny her actions invited. The devout Christian was even kicked off her church’s worship ministry team. “There were friends who left me, people who turned their back on me that I thought wouldn’t,” she says.

She talks about being broken during that time, even as she and Willaford broke the Internet in the wake of their actions. (The pair became the top trend on both Facebook and Twitter—for one bright shining moment. anyone related to the Kardashian clan had to settle for the silver medal in social-media mentions.) The breaking was important, however. It allowed her to locate a place of security within her, and to grow as a person. It also helped her to deal with sustained backlash. Reddit pages still exist dedicated to disparaging her, one even going into grotesque detail about how to perform an act of rape against her. The philosophy major seems indifferent to it, however, as well as to the outpouring of positive sentiment she’s received. She rejects the notion that she’s “special” or unique, as many of her admirers often label her, revealing a luminous smile as she chuckles when I mention that a fourth grader I tutor compared her to Katniss Everdeen. She is, however, leveraging her increased visibility. She is writing a book that will be part memoir, part manual on how to be an effective agitator in our current political system. “It’s easy to infiltrate,” she matter-of-factly tells me. She’s also a sought-after speaker, recently distilling wisdom to a packed house of students in the auditorium of Seattle University and even playing the Bernie incident for laughs at The Seattle Process, local comedian Brett Hamil’s Daily Show–style event at the Northwest Film Forum. The media continues to knock on her door incessantly. Both The Atlantic and a Frenchlanguage newspaper have reached out to her for a feature article in the past week. Interestingly enough, she thought the Westlake interruption would be limited to the local news cycle. “I really was just hoping to make the Seattle Weekly,” she shares.

As the year turns, Johnson sees herself pressing on with her mission of continuously raising the stakes in making demands of those in power until they deliver on them. It’s why she dismisses the recent adoption of Black Lives Matters verbiage by Democratic candidates as nothing but a meaningless political stunt. “Oh, great, they said something about Black Lives Matter, that’s not impressive. That’s like being able to get into Harvard because you’re able to write your name,” she says. Ironically enough, both Sanders and Clinton are just a couple of hours away, on this Saturday evening, from taking the stage at the latest Democratic debate, where indeed they will again speak endearingly of the importance of black lives. With speaking engagements across the country and no shortage of media still pining to hear what Johnson has to say, the momentum she received from her exploits in 2015 appears to be doing nothing but picking up steam heading into the new year. Has she ruled out another direct action like the one in August? Put it this way: In 2016, those presidential candidates, calling themselves “believers,” who refuse to make racial issues a policy priority should pray for a merciful Marissa. Everyone else, good luck. You’ll need it. E

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECE MBER 23, 2015– JAN UARY 5, 2016

The aftershocks from the earthquake Johnson and Willaford set off from liberals, libertarians, and activists alike still rumble. Though interruptions at events did not start with these two, their actions arguably gave the most potent fuel to the movement’s fire. YouTube footage of the incident drips with tension, as white progressives boo Johnson as she lists the names of young black people killed by police. And the impact wasn’t just emotional—it had immediate and long-term effects on the candidates’ campaigns and speeches. Just two days after the Seattle events, Sanders’ campaign adopted a platform that broke racism down into five different kinds of violence, starting with the physical sort most visibly wielded by cops. Around the same time, Sanders hired a young racial-justice activist as his national press secretary. By the Democratic debates of October 13, Sanders was ready to make racial justice the main course and economics an aperitif. When asked whether “black lives matter, or all lives matter,” Bernie name-dropped Sandra Bland and said, “We need to combat institutional racism from top to bottom.” His answer was so good that Patrisse Cullors, one of the three women who originally founded the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, tweeted Sanders saying “good job.” Clinton’s campaign changed too—but not as much. She met with movement activists in August for an awkward conversation in which

she said she suggested that Black Lives Matter needed clearer policy goals. Then, when activists interrupted her on October 30, she said: “I have some issues to discuss and proposals to make if our friends will allow me to do it. They may actually find them to their liking.” If that sounds a bit tepid, or even patronizing, it may have something to do with the fact that Clinton has the black vote tied up. In South Carolina, the third state to hold a primary after Iowa and New Hampshire, a recent poll showed that 86 percent of black primary voters support Clinton. Only 11 percent said they would vote for Sanders. Those numbers haven’t changed much throughout the campaign, and they aren’t expected to now. Yet this campaign season is unique in that Democratic candidates are being held accountable for the quality of their work in addressing systemic racism. Which is why Johnson shares that the interruption of Bernie Sanders was more strategic than most people give her credit for. Speaking about an activist who was punched and kicked by Donald Trump supporters when he tried to bring the Black Lives Matter message there, Johnson says, “I’m not really sure of what the efficacy of that was, to be honest. I appreciate all black people taking a stand—but going to a Trump rally is like going to a KKK meeting.” In her view, disrupting Trump (whom she considered challenging to a boxing match after he made demeaning comments about her and Willaford after the Sanders event) would have produced nothing more than red meat to sate a ravenous base of closeted racists, whereas going after Sanders brought to light things that otherwise would have remained under the cloak of political politeness and, oh yes, respectability. “We made one of the most liberal rallies sound just like a Ku Klux Klan meeting. It forced Bernie and Hillary to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. It was the most effective 30 minutes of my life,” she says.

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

UPDATE

What We Said Before

A roundup of what happened to stuff after we wrote about it. BY SW STAFF

e put a lot of time and effort into our cover stories—not to mention the covers themselves. But more often than not, after writing 5,000 well-chosen words on everything from sentencing reform to heroin addiction, events conspire to ensure those won’t be the final words. Below you will find updates on a few of our 50 cover topics of 2015, along with the fantastic cover art that accompanied them.

While Chop Suey’s preservation marked a happy occasion for most, it also reopened debate over the venue’s controversial name, highlighted in a letter by local musician Andy Panda of allpeople-of-color dance band My Parade. While the venue decided to keep its name, its interior was stripped of most of its Asian exotica decoration after renovations (including the Chinese dragon that graced the cover of our pre-emptive farewell comics package.) KELTON SEARS

other criminal-justice reformers are pleased, yet criticize the bill’s reluctance to entirely eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses.) Meanwhile on the state level, Utah, Connecticut, and Maine just joined California in reclassifying a simple drug-possession charge from a felony to a misdemeanor, and Holcomb wrote online recently that she foresees similar changes in more states next year. SARA BERNARD

America Is (Slowly) Kicking Its Imprisonment Addiction

Alison Holcomb, of pot-legalizing I-502 fame, has been the national director of the ACLU Campaign for Smart Justice for over a year now. Since reporter Nina Shapiro’s feature profiling Holcomb’s new role (“A Voice for Victims,” Jan. 28), the lawyer turned criminaljustice advocate has been hacking away at national issues from her Seattle office—and it shows. President Obama and a bipartisan group of national legislators have come together to prioritize reducing incarceration of nonviolent offenders. (The overcrowding of American prisons is an issue so bipartisan, in fact, that the ACLU even shares a page with the Koch Brothers on the matter.) Hey Hey, My My. Chop Suey Will Never Die

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 23, 2015–JANUARY 5, 2016

Capitol Hill punks and weirdos were getting ready to elicit an enormous simul-sigh at the beginning of 2015. The reason: Beloved neighborhood music venue Chop Suey had announced its “Another One Bites the Dust” show on Jan. 18, billed as the venue’s last before officially closing the doors on Jan. 20. To mark Chop Suey’s passing, we published five comics relating the craziest stories from the storied club (“Tales of Chop Suey,” Jan. 14). The music community, which had spent much of 2014 (and this year, for that matter) railing against gentrification in Seattle, had known the club was up for sale since August, so the announcement didn’t come as a surprise. What was surprising: Two buyers, L.A. club owners Brianna Rettig and Erin Carnes, swooped in at the 11th hour and bought Chop Suey, announcing that, beyond some interior renovations and a sound system upgrade, it would remain largely the same. It was later revealed that the community’s worst nightmare almost did happen when a developer aggressively tried to buy Rettig and Carnes out of the lease, but the two relented and managed against all odds to maintain the club’s spirit throughout its first year of new life in 2015—thanks largely to veteran booker Jodi Ecklund, who continued her winning streak at Chop Suey by bringing in amazing talent and putting together the most stacked iteration yet of what has become the venue’s signature event, the annual Mo’Wave Queer Arts & Music Festival 16 in November.

This fall, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, also known as the Sentencing Reform Act, passed judiciary committees in both the Senate and the House. While the federal bill has yet to be finalized, these versions include, for example, a provision that would reduce the mandatory minimum sentence of life without parole for a third drug offense to 25 years. If enacted, the Act would represent the first time in decades that the federal government has rolled back any of the tough-on-crime sentencing policies of the 1980s and ’90s—including the 1994 “threestrikes law,” which automatically sentences thirdtime offenders to life in federal prison. The Act would also be retroactive, meaning that current inmates would see a change in their sentences immediately. (Holcomb and

Bertha Drills Today! (Over/Under on Whether She Makes It Another 1,000 feet!)

Weed Is Getting Legal-er, But Medical Weed Is on the Outs

In February, Seattle Weekly’s intrepid marijuana correspondent, Michael Stusser, took the plunge into the, er, weeds of legalization (“Fear and Loathing in Legal Territory,” Feb. 4). Since he chronicled the hopes and concerns of marijuana legalization in Washington, the landscape has changed considerably: We’ve got 188 recreational retailers in Washington (up from 100); Washington, D.C., Oregon, and Alaska joined Washington and Colorado in legalizing pot; marijuana sales stuffed state coffers with nearly $65 million in excise taxes during the 2015 fiscal year; and the state’s Liquor Control Board officially changed its name to Liquor and Cannabis Board, among other things. But the biggest shift since then was the passage of Senate Bill 5052, which will require all medical-marijuana dispensaries in Washington to get the same license as recreational shops by July 2016. That helped spur Seattle’s latesummer crackdown on dispensaries that may not have been playing by the rules, medical or otherwise. Fifty-nine dispensaries in the city have closed voluntarily since, and some longtime medical shops are up in arms; in September, one dispensary filed a lawsuit against the city for its enforcement efforts. To help medical dispensaries ease into the recreational market, the state—just this past Thursday—increased the total number of pot stores allowed in Washington by 222, to 556. In Seattle, Mayor Ed Murray has proposed an ordinance that would drop the required buffer zone between pot retailers and child-care centers, libraries, and other designated areas from 1,000 to 500 feet, thus boosting the city’s legal areas for legal weed by 1,650 acres—which would help the city accommodate new shops. The ordinance is part of the city’s effort to consolidate the recreational and medical markets, and will likely be up for a full-Council vote in January. SARA BERNARD

Last time we checked in on Bertha, that grand Japanese-made contraption, designed to bore a 9,720-foot tunnel from SoDo to South Lake Union, had been stationary for well over a year— a veritable whale upon the sand, awesome yet helpless (“The Dirt Behind Bertha,” Feb. 18). Her subterranean journey began with great fanfare on July 30, 2013. But just six months later, having drilled just over 1,000 feet, she overheated and was shut down. It turned out her seals and central bearing were broken. In December 2014, eight months after Seattle Tunnel Partners decided to forge a rescue pit to drill down to Bertha’s busted cutterhead, Seattle’s mega-project was the runaway winner of Streetsblog USA ’s “Highway Boondoggle of the Year” award. But now the great city joke that is Bertha is supposedly fixed and ready to dig again. Today, December 23, is the day the $80 million machine will (they say) be fired up again, in the hope that at long last she will be able to complete her Herculean chore. We’re not holding our breath, and we’re pretty sure you aren’t either. As it happens, that four-lane, $2 billion tunnel was supposed to have opened this very month. The most recent projected date of completion: April 2018. ELLIS E. CONKLIN

That Landlord Wanted the Tenants Gone All Along

Freelance journalist Janice Harper related the heartbreaking story of her neighbor, William McHalffey, who killed himself after learning that his and Harper’s Alki apartment

building had been sold (“Dear Landlord,” March 25). McHalffey, who was living off disability checks and food stamps, had been paying significantly discounted rent to the previous landlords, who knew he couldn’t afford the market rate. The sale meant losing the discount, and losing the apartment, McHalffey knew, likely meant a life on the streets or, at best, in homeless shelters. “You aren’t just in the real-estate business,” Harper wrote to the company buying the building. “You’re in the business of creating unaffordable housing.” The sale of the building closed April 15, and Harper says that most residents left shortly after the article was published. She, as well as a few others remained, and saw her rent tripled, from $1,945 to $6,100. The new owners then offered to cover her moving costs if she left; she did, in July, to Tacoma. (For context: Rent has been rising in older apartment buildings in Seattle, but not on that scale. The Seattle Times reported in September that rent in older buildings had increased by 8.4 percent in 2014 and 3.9 percent this year.) There’s reason to believe that the new landlords had wanted the tenants out all along, though. In September, West Seattle Blog reported that the building in question was to be turned into a sober-living house run by a company called Seattle Sober Living. According to its website, Seattle Sober Living “emphasizes accountability through random drug testing, mandatory AA or NA meetings, daily chores, wake-up times and curfews, job requirements, furthering education, and volunteering.” One thing WSB doesn’t say about the place is the rent. DANIEL PERSON

the person dies because of it, that’s unfortunate.” On his Instagram account, among examples of his elaborate ink art, Leiataua described his goals as “Dream big do big.” That death followed the killing of Raymond Azevedo the previous Sunday, December 6, the third to die at the hands of police in Seattle this year. The 35-year-old ex-con and suspected carjacker led police on a high-speed chase and exchanged gunfire before crashing in Wedgwood. A viral video shows Azevedo being shot dead as his stolen vehicle attempts to drive away again. Another carjacker, Robert Burgess Jr., 35, was killed by Kirkland police October 15 during a struggle, investigators said, after he grabbed an officer’s gun and pointed it at police. He also had a child in his arms, but had handed the toddler to an officer before running away. Those killings bring to 18 the toll of those killed by police across the state in 2015, according to an ongoing Seattle Weekly count, which began with a cover story on the subject (“Blue Death,” July 15); 11 others died in jails. Most seemed justified, others arguably were not. However, only one Washington officer has been charged in a death the past 10 years, and he was acquitted. The 2015 count doesn’t include Christopher Sean Harris, 30, who was permanently disabled six years ago after being mistaken for a suspect and pushed violently into a wall outside Seattle’s Cinerama theater by a King County sheriff ’s deputy. Harris, who was awarded a $10 million settlement, died December 10, likely as the belated result of those injuries. Still, there’s some good news. This year’s toll is five less than the 34 who died statewide in 2014 and, in Seattle, two less than the five killed by police last year. Also, to obtain a better accounting of such killings, the FBI has finally agreed to keep a running nationwide count and release more detailed reports of the deaths. RICK ANDER-

SON

Over the summer, we wrote about a merry band of engineers in Redmond who one day hope to dispatch interplanetary robots to distant asteroids and extract from those far-flung space rocks precious metals and waters that will

Nine More People Have Been Killed by Police in Washington This Year

Thirty-year-old tattoo artist Nephi Leiataua became the 29th and—as of this writing—last person to be killed by Washington law-enforcement officers or die in their custody in 2015. Leiataua, who stabbed and wounded his cousin, was holding a knife to the throat of his 3-yearold daughter during a three-hour standoff at his Lacey-area home on December 13. It ended with a bullet fired by a Thurston County Sheriff ’s SWAT marksman. County Lt. Cliff Ziesemer told The Olympian that the marksman’s mission was to “shoot to stop the threat [of the child being injured] . . . If

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 18

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECE MBER 23, 2015– JAN UARY 5, 2016

Private Companies Can Now Legally Mine Asteroids (And You Said Congress Doesn’t Do Anything)

UPDATE » FROM PAGE 17

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enable manned rockets to refuel and travel to planets millions of miles away (“Space Crusaders,” July 22). Sure, it may sound a bit far-fetched, but Planetary Resources—whose A-list investors include Google leaders Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and Microsoft megamillionaire Charles Simonyi—believes it won’t be long, perhaps within the next 10 to 15 years, that space-mining companies will begin to relieve space rocks of their intergalactic goodies. Such exploration by the private aeronautical industry could set off an extraterrestrial gold rush, making it essential for some rules to be established as to how to govern the final frontier. And now here we have some. Under the SPACE Act of 2015, which President Obama signed into law just a few weeks ago, asteroidmining businesses like Planetary Resources will be allowed to keep the riches they unearth on these floating mountains. Thanks, Obama! ELLIS

ex-wife has begun to speak publicly about what she says was an abusive relationship with Price, who denies it.) Of course, to every backlash is a backlash, and plenty of people have argued that the suggestion that Price is doing this for good PR doesn’t add up; hiring a top-notch publicist would be way cheaper. But then again, that probably wouldn’t have landed Price a coveted Seattle Weekly cover.

DANIEL PERSON

E. CONKLIN

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 23, 2015–JANUARY 5, 2016

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Is Dan Price Really the Nice Guy We Think He Is?

For this year’s Best of Seattle issue, we credited Dan Price, the CEO who decided to start paying everyone in his company a $70,000 salary, with the “best business idea” of the year (“What if the CEO and the Secretary Had the Same Salary?” Aug. 5). As Patrick Hutchinson wrote, Price’s big breakthrough may not have been his intention to pay his secretary that amount, but himself. CEOs tend to enjoy a salary bubble that relies on the belief that companies, to succeed, need to heavily compensate business leaders. “If the message gets out there that a CEO can pay themselves $70,000 a year and survive, it starts to unravel the whole sweater,” Jacob Vigdor, a public-affairs professor at the University of Washington, told us. New revelations, though, suggest another reason why this was a great business ploy. In a Bloomberg Businessweek article published earlier this month, writer Karen Weise revealed that contrary to what everyone—including the Weekly—had reported, a lawsuit brought against Price by his brother this spring was actually filed before Price made his announcement. Given that part of the lawsuit dealt with Price’s previously high salary, Businessweek suggested that the announcement was a way to turn the PR tide his way. (The critical piece also revealed that Price’s

Seattle had a historic City Council election this year, with four of nine seats going to new members. As we noted in our election guide (“The Election Guide That Trumps All,” Oct. 14), many eyes were on whether Kshama Sawant would gain enough Council allies to form a far-left voting bloc to take on Mayor Ed Murray. While that “Sawant majority” never materialized, 2016’s Council will be mostly women (five of nine members) and much younger and urbanist than its predecessor (but with no homos, bro). Relative conservatives Jean Godden, Tom Rasmussen, and John Okamoto have been or will be replaced by transit wonk Rob Johnson and attorneys M. Lorena Gonzàlez and Debora Juarez. That means that president Tim Burgess will likely be as much of a right-wing outlier as Kshama Sawant is on the left, while Sally Bagshaw and Bruce Harrell may lose their influence as the Council’s swing-votes. The real wild card, though, is Juarez, of North Seattle’s District 5, hard to place along the Council’s progressive/moderate spectrum. “I don’t see myself as left or right or even central sometimes,” she says. Trying to cram her into the save-the-neigborhood/urbanist dichotomy is equally difficult. Juarez says she’ll champion the parochial interests of her district against “downtown politics,” but two of her top three local priorities are urbanist dream projects: a light-rail station and a pedestrian/bike bridge for North Seattle. Seattle’s electoral shakeups aren’t finished. In November, voters approved a package of campaign reforms that, among other things, bring public financing to Seattle elections via “democracy vouchers” distributed to voters. The idea is to give grassroots candidates a chance to get their own message out without pandering to the donor class. CASEY JAYWORK E

news@seattleweekly.com

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

MUSIC

What’s in a Name? Follow-ups with the subjects of two of the biggest social-media controversies in PNW music this year.

BY KELTON SEARS

Would you say Black Pussy is trying to expand culture and society?

n Jon Ronson’s new book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, the author catches up, after the dust has settled, with a number of people who found themselves at the center of social-media storms. Intrigued, I decided to follow up with the subjects of two of the biggest social-media controversies in the Northwest music community this year, both of which happened to center around band names. My goal was simply to see what impact, if any, the public outrage had. These are the interviews that followed.

I’m pretty educated, and I don’t really want to get into too-deep conversations. But politically and economically, I’m very educated at a very crazy level. And that’s always kind of within my art. My music is ambiguous; you can make it mean whatever you want. Hence the name Black Pussy. What do you make of the people who think it’s racist and misogynist, then?

BRENNAN MORING

C.J. Frederick, 33, is a Seattle-based independent booker who put on over 100 local shows this year under the name DASWASUP GIG. In October, a show Frederick booked for all-male Australian punk band Cuntz became the subject of global headlines in Vice, Stereogum, and NME when, under a flood of local criticism from the music community, he decided to cancel the show, eliciting an even larger wave of international outrage in reaction. Frederick and I spoke in his West Seattle home. SW: Before you booked the Cuntz show, did you have reservations?

Did you talk personally with any of the early objectors on the Facebook event page?

At some point my friend Rachel reached out and said “Hey, we need to talk about this.” Rachel, she’s a community leader in a sense—a big part of the feminist and queer community. I was like, “I’d love to know what you think about this.” We went out for bloody marys, and over the course of two hours, I was like, “You know what, Rachel, I think you helped me realize that I don’t really want to do this show.” I consider myself a feminist ally, and if I have a woman here, a feminist and a good friend, telling me over bloody marys that this is a bad idea and I’m agreeing with her, then it’s time to fucking cancel the show. When did the whole thing really unravel?

I e-mailed Strange Victory, being like, “I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to cancel this show.” Lucky Liquor ended up taking it. The male half of the agency was like “That’s a real bummer, but thanks anyway.” But Nicole goes on Facebook and writes this giant rant. It was like “Seattle canceled the Cuntz show, fuck them and their PTSD!” It got weird and personal. Her post ended up on Stereogum, which I could not believe.

Then it became international news. People around the world started coming out of the woodwork on the Facebook page telling people on these giant threads they are “fucking crybabies,” personally messaging me saying “Fuck you, you’re an asshole.” I got probably 30 or 40 messages like that. I was physically ill for a couple of days. I thought I was getting an ulcer. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. So I said, “This Facebook page is going to self-destruct in 48 hours.” People were text-messaging me updates from the threads like it was a wrestling match, and I was like, “I don’t care.” I turned off my Facebook notifications. I haven’t turned it back on since. The whole thing has really taught me how involved I want to be with social media. Did you learn something from all this? Or do you just want to be on Facebook less now?

There’s an obvious line I’ll never cross now. The really obvious stuff. But you know, when you were on your way here, I got an e-mail, “Oh, I want to do a show for this band Genocide Skin.” I looked them up, listened, and was like “Hmmmm . . . genocide . . . I don’t think that’s bad?” I don’t know! I don’t think shutting it down is the answer. Because, fuck, we technically did shut it down, and Cuntz are more popular than they’ve ever been. I don’t think anyone is really learning or gaining anything from this; I think we’re just bashing our feelings into each other’s faces. But having that face-to-face conversation with Rachel, that’s what made it. That’s how you get shit done.

You later posted an offer to buy anyone a beer who wanted to talk to you about this at Victory Lounge, where you bartend. Did anyone take you up on it?

One person took me up on it, and he always comes to the Victory Lounge for a beer anyway. It was disheartening, but I wasn’t expecting anything different. Eespecially in Seattle where it’s

so passive-aggressive. It was like “Meet the guy you’re talking shit about! Meet the guy you hate, at his bar, and he will buy you a beer!” I think people should understand that’s a great way to get shit done rather than wasting your time and looking at your fucking phone. In that venue, there’s not a whole lot of room for gray area. Dustin Hill, 41, is the front man of 8-year-old

all-white-male Portland “stoner-pop” band Black Pussy, named after the original title of the Rolling Stones’ song “Brown Sugar.” In March while on tour, a change.org petition to get the band to either change its name or boycott venues that had booked them went viral, eliciting articles from national outlets like Huffington Post, Daily Dot, Vice, and a storm of Internet commenters decrying the name. Hill refused to change the name, and was forced to cancel shows in Winnipeg, Man., and Raleigh, N.C., due to controversy and threats. Hill and I spoke over the phone. SW: When all this broke, how did you react?

Hill: I was scared. Especially when you put that many years into an art project and every dime you’ve ever had. I’d just pressed a thousand vinyls and CDs, just released our album Magic Mustache, and I’m totally broke starting this tour. It’s to the point where we’re all homeless. I have a lovely lady that lets me sleep with her, but a lot of us live in our rehearsal room, to give you an idea. It was scary, because we thought we were about to lose our business. It’s not like we can change the name, put out a record, and have nobody know who we are. Viet Cong [a Canadian band who also came under fire this year], look at them! They decided to change their name and nobody knows what it is now [note: Viet Cong has not yet chosen a new name]. How can you call yourself an artist unless you’re willing to die for your art? Real artists are trying to expand society and culture, and you can’t do that by folding.

But weren’t the ’60s and ’70s radical times of social upheaval and social justice?

In the ’60s . . . it wasn’t a book-burning thing. It was like, “Hey, we don’t have rights. Let’s fight for equality.” Attacking my band name is not fighting for equality. It’s just attacking my band name. If you think my band should be eliminated because you think it has a tinge of racism or sexism, you should also burn the Bible and the Quran. In the ’70s it was “I’m a woman, I don’t wanna wear a bra, that’s my choice.” If women couldn’t go braless now, I’d go “That’s dumb.” There are issues we’re fighting right now that do make sense. Like what?

The issue of these big banks, “too big to fail,” calling that out. If we call out those things, we’re all going to have more freedom. The Black Lives Matter movement, it’s a great movement. It started out of those police shootings, and that’s getting exposed. That shit’s always existed, but now it’s on camera. So now we get outraged, and we fight that. But Black Lives Matter, if you research it, [business magnate] George Soros is funding it [note: The Daily Beast has debunked this rumor]. So there’s this agenda, I think it’s an agenda to make more racism. But the common man, it shouldn’t create race issues between us. I just watched this video of a cop fucking shoot this guy crawling out of his car, and they’re calling it “accidental.” That’s insane. People taking on my band name are doing that because they’re not strong enough to take on something of importance. There are lots of important things to confront in this world—my band is really not that important. E

ksears@seattleweekly.com

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECE MBER 23, 2015– JAN UARY 5, 2016

Frederick: I wasn’t really sure I was doing the right thing. I had a good relationship with their bookers, Strange Victory Touring, so I was like, I’m going to at least try this. People at [DIY space] the Black Lodge were like, “Nope, we aren’t doing a show called Cuntz,” and I was like, “Sure! I’ll just do it at the Victory Lounge.” I put the bill together, and there was a woman in every band besides Cuntz. I did that on purpose. I figured by asking those bands, I’d get a bit of a clue about who this would and wouldn’t offend. I asked Strange Victory, “Are these folks cool? . . . What’s with their name?” And they said, “Yeah, they are super-nice!” And one half of Strange Victory is a woman, Nicole, so there was a female presence there also. I still had really mixed feelings on it.

I think you can just look to South Park, this new season. PC culture is out of control. I think South Park is calling a lot of good points out right now. When these people say Black Pussy is racist and sexist, I’m like, “You’re spiritually sick.” I think a lot of people are spiritually sick. I dare these people to do DMT. I dare these people to do a heroic dose of psilocybin, go in, and then see if Black Pussy is sexist or racist. These people explore bottom-feeder dimensions. Do DMT, this won’t even matter. I meditated on this for a long time after it happened; I was like “Whoa, did I make some huge mistake here?” I meditated as an artist, as a spirit being, and I was like, “Was I infiltrated by some dark force?” And I was like, “No!” Because I’m positive every day. I’m blown away at my shows, because I see all different kinds of people hanging out there, it’s like the ’60s and ’70s, man. I don’t think I made the bad choice, I just think the hip thing now is this ultra-PC social-justicewarrior thing.

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 23, 2015–JANUARY 5, 2016

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

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food&drink

2016: The Dish on Dining Thumbs-up and thumbs-down trends in Seattle. BY NICOLE SPRINKLE

BEER HUNTING ultimately ends up tasting like, well, a pickle. The trend shows no sign of slowing, but I for one will always opt for something more inventive. SPECIALTY DESSERT/COCKTAIL BARS With Renee Erickson’s brand-new General Porpoise donut shop, a second location for Autumn Martin’s Hot Cakes Chocolate Molten Cakery on Capitol Hill, and a proliferation of pie shops with booze, it’s safe to say that Seattle can’t seem to get enough sweets, particularly when coupled with cocktails. The lines that form even in winter for Martin’s spiked hot cocoa and drinking caramel, boozy milkshakes, chocolate cakes boosted with beer, and pie doused with liquor are legendary. As restaurants continue to cut back on in-house pastry chefs, diners may look to other places to get their sweet fix—with a drink to boot—in 2016. STREET FOOD As we come off years of “farm-to-

COCKTAILS AS ELIXIRS It started with shrub, a non-alcoholic drink of fruit fermented in vinegar with purported health benefits, being added to cocktail lists all over the city. Now, in the past couple of months, I’ve seen bar menus popping up with drinks—or even shots—that combine alcohol with a potent potion of infused herbs and spices with supposed healing properties, like ginseng and turmeric. Do these additions really boost longevity and ward off ailments? My guess is that blasting your liver with alcohol might counter any possible perks. But, hey, what’s the harm in believing?—especially if it tastes good! If you like herbal notes in your liquor, these are for you.

BREADS AND SPREADS This trend has spread (no pun intended) from Middle Eastern menus, where it’s common to find flatbreads with a variety of dips like hummus and muhammara. Now it seems every hip restaurant is elbowing in on it. Expect to see more breads, crackers, and veggies paired with spreads, exotic oils, preserves, and cultured, flavored butters. Italian trattoria Ernest Loves Agnes on Capitol Hill has a menu section titled “Condimenti Ala Carte” that includes bread with add-ons such as saba, white truffle oil, housemade porcini salt blend, “Desert Miracle Olive Oil,” and house preserves. On Eve Fremont’s menu, “The Spread” includes baguettes, gluten-free crackers, and raw veggies, vehicles for goat butter, “Eve Goddess” dip, and golden-beet hummus. It’s an easy, cheap way to fill up guests and, I suppose, stretch your menu. Personally, I’d rather find a unique starter or two. COMFY SEATING The past two years have seen

some of the most uncomfortable, back-paininducing restaurant seating: stools, backless chairs, hard metal seats, and wooden banquettes. I get it, they’re cheap and restaurants have to cut costs where they can. But, hallelujah, the future is looking up for anyone who actually considers comfort an integral part of dining out. Over the past few months, I’ve rested my bum on many a velvet- or suede-covered booth, and let my body sink into the soft back of a chair. Speaking of booths, they too seem to be proliferating (not just in diners), eliminating the need to beg the hostess to seat you in the one or two of them many restaurants typically only have.

CHARCUTERIE PLATES AND PICKLES The two often go hand in hand, and in 2015 Seattle’s dining scene was defined by their presence (it’s the new cheese plate). Not just any charcuterie, mind you, but house-cured meats. Pickles too strayed far from the dependable ol’ cucumber, and included cauliflower, beets, fennel, and other veggies. I wasn’t a fan; sure, I love salumi as much as the next person, but its ubiquity felt derivative and uninspired. And frankly, no matter what exotic item a restaurant chooses to pickle, it

VEGGIES AS MAINS I was recently a panelist on Seattle TV’s The Civic Cocktail, where, among other topics, the rise of the vegetable was discussed with special guest Tom Douglas. At his new Carlile Room, he’s completely overturned the traditional menu by making “Plants” the mains and meats (like filet mignon) the side dishes. Until visiting there, I would never have imagined uttering to a waiter, “A side of filet mignon, please.” It’s not just Douglas who has figured out how sublimely good vegetables can taste (see Stoneburner, Eve Fremont), and how many there are to offer beyond kale. The beauty of this is that you can get delicious vegetable preparations without defaulting to a vegetarian restaurant. Finally, Americans (or Seattleites, anyway) are realizing that we’ve been eating, proportionally, all wrong. Expect more menus weighted toward the veg in 2016. HOTEL RESTAURANTS Tom Douglas has Lola

at the Hotel Ändra; Thierry Rautureau has Loulay at the Sheraton; and now Ethan Stowell has Goldfinch Tavern at the Four Seasons. Coincidence or the beginning of a trend? As Seattle continues to transition into a world-renowned city, it’s not so surprising that some of our “celebrity” chefs aspire for recognition beyond the faithful locals, catering as well to tourists and clients on business with big expense accounts. Good or bad? Depends, in my opinion, how well these restaurants represent the essence of Seattle and whether the chefs behind them continue to focus on the exceptional neighborhood restaurants that made them famous in the first place. Lola manages to appeal to all and doesn’t seem like it’s tied to a hotel (perhaps because it came before the city went bananas), while Loulay and Goldfinch inhabit that luxe space which doesn’t necessarily feel particularly Pacific Northwest. E

nsprinkle@seattleweekly.com

BY JACOB UITTI

hen I go to a bar, I find

myself checking the tap list for one style of beer first. It’s an unlikely sort, different from the much more popular IPAs, ciders, pale ales, or lighter fare like pilsners or lagers. What I look for are red ales. And I’m not alone—in a recent conversation with Georgetown Brewing co-founder Manny Chao, he admitted to loving the style too. “I’ve always loved Mad River’s Jamaica Red Ale,” says the brewer. “But it always came and went. I think they had problems with their capacity; you’d see it on the market and then it would disappear.” As a result, Chao and Georgetown created their own red ale: Chopper’s, named after former Georgetown employee Brett Chop. Chopper’s might be my favorite beer in the whole city—it’s a hoppier red than, say, the nationally known Killian’s Irish Red, and it’s lighter and cleaner (5.4 percent alcohol by volume) than traditional Scotch ales, which tend to be thicker, sweeter, and heavier. Another great red ale comes from Double Mountain in Hood River, Ore., which brews the phenomenal IRA, or India Red Ale, a sharp red with more hops than just about any in the style, though it’s not too heavy, at 6.5 percent ABV. Historically, many styles of beer have been dubbed red ale or Irish red ale or Scotch ale, because, depending on which malts and grains were used, they ended up looking red or amber in color—or simply originated from Ireland or Scotland. Some of those beers are now called English-style bitters or plain amber ales. These are not the beers I’m singing the praises of. Rather, the best-known (local) example of what I’m talking about might be Pike’s Kilt Lifter, which Pike Brewing describes as having “layers of sweet malt, reminiscent of marmalade . . . followed by peat-smoked flavors.” They go on: “At the turn of the 20th century, Edinburgh, Scotland, was famous for a dozen breweries producing strong and malty ale. To this day a ‘Scotch’ is a style of beer, not a whiskey.” But I often go a step or two away from the maltier side of red ales, choosing Chopper’s or Double Mountain’s IRA—beers that add a hoppy flavor to the brew’s profile. To me, it’s the best of both worlds. But if you’re looking for something that splits the difference—a red ale with a touch of malt, a touch of oak-barrel finish, and little to no hops—try Odin Brewing’s Ruby Red, which they’ve also called Odin’s Gift. It’s another satisfying ale that drinks light and tastes different than just about anything else on the market. E

beerhunting@seattleweekly.com

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECE MBER 23, 2015– JAN UARY 5, 2016

hile many Seattle foodies bemoaned this year’s snub by the James Beard Awards—only Renee Erickson’s The Whale Wins was a finalist in the Best Chef Northwest category—we still saved face nationally. Zagat’s just-published list of the top 17 food cities includes us at #13 (yes, Portland beat us at #8 . . . ) and Manolin squeezed into the #9 spot on Bon Appetit’s top-10 list. Likewise, Zoi Antonitsas (formerly of Westward and now at Omega Ouzeri) was lauded as one of 2015’s Best New Chefs by Food & Wine. And in addition to celebrating what’s come before, there were plenty of new spots to explore over the year, including several strong first efforts from former sous chefs (Salare, Vendemmia) and a growing collection of projects from renowned restaurateurs like Erickson (Bar Mesuline, Bateau), Jerry Traunfeld (Lionhead), Tom Douglas (The Carlile Room), Ethan Stowell (The Goldfinch Tavern, Bramling Cross), and Josh Henderson (Quality Athletics). Though the minimum wage jumped a dollar (and will go up another in January as it makes its way to $15), the restaurant scene hardly felt anemic. In such a vibrant food scene, there will surely be lots to watch in 2016. Here are my eight favorite and flawed trends to seek out (or avoid) in the new year.

table” dining and precious small plates, people are increasingly clamoring for the bold flavors and quick comfort of global street foods, from Indian rotis to spicy Thai papaya salads, octopus skewers to Jamaican meat patties. The world is truly the limit, and beyond food trucks or outdoor markets, the number of actual brick-and-mortar restaurants specializing in these cheap delicacies (Nue, Kraken Congee, Kedai Makan; see page 24) is on the rise. You can now enjoy your favorite foreign snack in a well-appointed space, not just on the street of a far-flung country.

All Hail the Red Ale!

REVIEW

Kedai Makan, Bigger and Better The popular Malaysian takeout window is now a real restaurant. BY NICOLE SPRINKLE

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ime leaf, “almost” burnt chilies, fish sauce, toasted coconut, palm sugar, sweet basil, turmeric, sambal belecan, anchovy broth, mint, coriander, shrimp paste: These are but a smattering of the wonderful words that make up the menu at Kedai Makan. If you love Asian street-stall food, particularly of the underrepresented Malaysian variety, you’ve spent time hanging out on Broadway on Capitol Hill, waiting for your order of stuffed rotis to be handed, steaming, through the tiny takeout window of its former incarnation. For those who haven’t experienced this, or haven’t been following culinary news, Kedai Makan has gone from takeout only to a full-fledged restaurant with plenty of seating and a separate bar area—and that’s truly cause for celebration. When owners Kevin Burzell and Alysson Wilson (who are not in fact Malaysian) opened the new space on Bellevue Avenue, they could have easily coasted on a menu with taste-tested hits. Instead they’ve scrapped most of the original offerings; only three, including nasi goreng (Malaysian fried rice), kerabu timum (a salad, described below), and house-pickled greens remain. According to our server, the owners just couldn’t help themselves from going wild in a full kitchen—and that’s great news for diners. The menu features noodle and rice dishes, a couple of rotis (with lamb curry or pork), salads, and entrées like the dynamite whole mackerel stuffed with rempah (chili paste, lemongrass, and galangal) and topped with a bean-sprout salad. The fish is crispy and explodes with flavor (a steal at $15) but may not be on the menu when you visit, as they change items frequently. If it’s not, please ask for it. I aim to create a groundswell of demand in the hope that I may relish it once more. The kerabu timun isn’t a bad consolation prize, though. This salad of pineapple, cucumber, red onions, and peanuts, blasted with fish sauce, kersik (toasted coconut), and sweet basil, manages to be utterly refreshing even while it’s tingling your taste buds. The noodles (mee) range from a flat

flour-rice variety to a hand-torn, pinched-wheat style and come with myriad toppings. I opted for the chili pan mee: wheat noodles tossed with ground pork, soy, green onions, poached egg, fried shallots, and fried anchovies. It’s reminiscent of Chinese mapo dofu, the pork and tofu creating a similarly stew-like effect, albeit with a briny bite. This is Malaysian comfort food, but full-bodied and flavorful, like everything else here. These noodles, in particular, come with a side of broth to sip; savory and slightly medicinal, it’s a lovely palate-cleanser. I’m told this dish will appear often. Speaking of medicinal, Kedai Makan has

curated a bar menu with cocktails featuring ingredients like chrysanthemum tea, bitter melon vodka, and Thai chili tequila tamarind paste, plus four corn-based liquor shots infused with Chinese herbs like red ginseng, eucommia bark, and wolfberry. Not sure what some of the ingredients are? Ask or order based on category: Libido, Strength and Stamina, Longevity, Health. These concoctions soak in huge glass containers above the bar, a small but inviting square braced by beautiful carved wooden pillars strung with small paper lanterns. Elsewhere throughout the L-shaped restaurant, painted an arresting teal, are black-and-white photos of rural and city life in southeast Asia. It’s noisy and full, but somehow also cozy. And while the menu can be challenging—even the descriptions could use descriptions—our server patiently, cheerily provided expert information on our every question about a Malaysian term or obscure ingredient. This is the best Asian food I’ve had all year, and is sure to become my go-to when I’m not out reviewing other restaurants. Plus, I need to come back for dessert (the large, shareable portions left me stuffed and hauling home leftovers). Otherwise how could I possibly have passed up a shake made with fresh coconut, Full Tilt coconut ice cream, and dark rum? E

nsprinkle@seattleweekly.com

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The 10 Best Films of 2015 BY ROBERT HORTON

The Hateful Eight and The Revenant (not yet released here, but a 2015 film) led the way, not forgetting the quirky Slow West. But did anybody see Bone Tomahawk? Has anybody even heard of Bone Tomahawk? Because this gory horrorWestern is a true original. Other winners included older actors, with meaty lead roles for pros like Charlotte Rampling (45 Years), Ian McKellen (Mr. Holmes), and Michael Caine (Youth). But one older actor must be counted among the year’s losers: the beloved Bill Murray. Rock the Kasbah and Aloha were belly flops, and what was the deal with his conceptual Netflix Christmas special? Another loser: teasing the audience. The returns for the final Hunger Games movie were, surprisingly, smaller than those of the previous installment—the decision to split the literary series’ last book into two films created resentment after Mockingjay—Part 1 turned out to be a cynical place-holder. But never mind. The future is all lightsabers anyway. Here are the 10 best movies of 2015, with a rendition of Bill Murray’s Star Wars theme sung to the following: 1) 45 Years Just before their 45th anniversary, a comfy English couple (Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay) get a revelation about the distant past—and about a secret that went unacknowledged over the decades. Andrew Haigh’s quiet film creates a little world, full of detailed behavior—and then in its final moments, it slays you. This is the year’s most haunting work. (Opens Jan. 29) 2) Son of Saul A film about the Holocaust, but not like any you’ve seen before. Set inside

Auschwitz, Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes’ movie keeps you within inches of its hollowedout protagonist, a prisoner who aids the Nazi extermination in exchange for a few more weeks of life. (Opens Jan. 29) 3) Bridge of Spies The year’s most satisfying Hollywood production, an impeccable Cold War story about the U.S. lawyer (Tom Hanks) who negotiated a fair trial for a Russian spy (the marvelous Mark Rylance) and a tense prisoner exchange in Berlin. They don’t make them like this anymore, but Steven Spielberg does. 4) Experimenter Michael Almereyda’s film about “obedience experiments” professor Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard, using his innate smarm) is itself experimental—this is anything but a straight biopic. The intriguing question proposed here is whether movies might be the ultimate obedience experiment. 5) It Follows You know there’s hope for movies when someone can take the most worn-out genre—not another teen slasher picture!—and make a mysterious, new kind of experience. So kudos to David Robert Mitchell, a Detroit filmmaker who makes you study every inch of the screen for hints of danger. 6) Clouds of Sils Maria Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart play a great actress and her very modern assistant in Olivier Assayas’ look at how a residue of mystery still seems to exist in this wired, YouTubed world. 7) Ex Machina A nifty sci-fi concept and execution from first-time director Alex Garland. A billionaire brainiac (Oscar Isaac in juicy form) introduces his girlish Artificial Intelligence ’bot

(Alicia Vikander) to a computer nerd (Domhnall Gleeson). In this minimalist cautionary tale, Garland plays by the rules—and the payoff is sinister but exactly right. 8) The Assassin Not your average martial-arts movie, this gorgeously photographed film seems to leave out plot details—actually, it also leaves out large parts of the kung fu fighting. But isn’t the fighting the point? Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien says no. 9) Spotlight As for hitting all the storytelling buttons—and serving up an astonishment of acting riches—it’s hard to argue against this blistering account of how The Boston Globe exposed the Catholic church’s cover-up of sexual abuse and the clergy. 10) The Duke of Burgundy A ’60s-style hothouse number about the bizarre relationship between two women in a lonely country house. An absolutely strange experience, director Peter Strickland’s drama is another one of those should-have-been-a-cult-hit movies. The second 10, just missing: The droll Swedish film A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence ; Mad Max: Fury Road, maybe not as good as the fanboys say, but definitely good; the straightforwardly lovely Brooklyn; Viggo Mortensen in the magical Jauja; Bone Tomahawk; Mississippi Grind; the devastating documentary The Look of Silence ; The Hateful Eight ; the pictorially astonishing The Revenant ; and—why not—Star Wars: The Force Awakens. E

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ake no mistake—when critics make lists or give awards for the year’s best films, it’s all very nice that they mention little gems like Carol or serious pictures like Spotlight. This year, there’s even been stubborn support for Mad Max: Fury Road, the rare multiplex action flick that garners critical praise. But the utter domination of Disney’s Star Wars wager—a brilliantly managed coup across all platforms, as they say— almost certainly has bigger implications than anybody imagined. On the one hand, it confirms our culture’s yearning for perpetual youth; so close is the movie to its original source, it’s practically a return to the womb. On a somewhat more encouraging note, the Force’s awakening reveals the need for the communal experience. Not so fast there, Netflixand-chill future. People still like to gather and celebrate in large groups—even in an era when going to theaters may carry a risk of terrorist attention. Happily, that dark side didn’t stand a chance against the Force. If big movies got more childlike, there was plenty to be challenged by in 2015. American indies saw their best crop in years, from gutsy debuts like The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Tangerine to misfit creations like Buzzard and The Mend. Lots of terrific foreign filmmakers worked various edges, too—yet still struggled to find a niche in the arthouse box office. At one time unusual pictures such as La Sapienza and Amour Fou might’ve caught on and become cult pictures, but it’s hard to find a spot in this saturated movie market. Westerns had a good year—Tarantino’s

Shu Qi in The Assassin.

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My 10 Favorite Film Moments of 2015 Scenes from the dinner table to the War Rig.

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 23, 2015–JANUARY 5, 2016

issed screenings (or those too late for deadline); this week’s double issue (instead of ruminating a week longer); the usual excuses. The yearend rush has made a proper 10-best list impossible for me, so I’m opting for purely personal impressions instead. 10) Up in the Garhwal region of the Himalayas, in the climbing documentary Meru, co-director Jimmy Chin nervously taps his piton hammer on a detached granite flake the size of a car. It gives a hollow, sickening ring—a sign that it could never hold a fall. It’s a sound I know from the Cascades, usually cause to turn around and find another route, yet Chin and his two rope-mates press on. 9) Costumes, props, and set dressing are so crucial to period movies, but none of us have lived through the era of, say, Far From the Madding Crowd. Recent period movies are different. The family memoir Infinitely Polar Bear is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the late ’70s—an era that both I and director Maya Forbes remember well from childhood. From the mismatched preppie attire to the rusting, dying Citroën station wagons favored by threadbare liberals of the day, every concrete detail was perfect. The one I appreciated most was entirely personal: Her family had the same exact napkin rings as mine. (Friends with

longer memories tell me that Brooklyn and Bridge of Spies were just as faithful to their eras.) 8) Tom Cruise is often ridiculed for his sheer strenuous determination to remain a big-budget action star, but he’s always had a hidden gift for comedy. I loved the bit where Ethan Hunt, barely recovered from a near-drowning and heart defibrillation in Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, attempts to join a car chase after the villain. He runs unsteadily toward his vehicle, attempts to vault over the hood like Starsky and Hutch, and instead slams into the side like a spastic drunk and falls to the ground. Big laugh—that’s why he’s still a movie star. 7) Here’s an argument for not having a TV or watching trailers: In a tiny critics’ screening of The Revenant (opening January 8), I was the only one to gasp when Leo rides his horse off a cliff. Why? Everyone had already seen it, ruining the surprise. Sometimes the least amount of preparation for a movie is best. 6) This is such a minor yet telling detail: Near the end of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the good guys stage a raid on the villains’ snowy base. Rey and Finn are running around like young people should, while Han Solo is, understandably, a few steps behind. He looks old, tired, and cold. Then Chewbacca pauses in a doorway to hand Han his winter

coat before they head outside again. They’re like a loving/bickering long-married couple—one reason their return to the franchise was so welcome. 5) Young and unknown: Teenage Amy Winehouse in the documentary Amy, speaking in a blurry old video shot in the back of a car, says of her future prospects and possible fame, “I don’t think I’d be able to handle it.” The rest of the movie bears this out, heartbreakingly so. 4) Mr. Turner, photographed by the great Dick Pope, was full of beautiful images—none more than a vision of an old warship being towed to the scrapyard, a steam tug pulling the forlorn sailing vessel up the Thames. Turner sees it and later paints it as The Fighting Temeraire. What we see is a mostly digital hybrid, but still gorgeous. 3) I don’t know what you call those long, bendy poles on which dangle some of the bald, painthuffing “War Boys” in Mad Max: Fury Road. But in that thrilling, near-continuous chase movie, I had to gasp when a guy swooped down on the flexible arm to grab one of the War Rig girls that Max and Furiosa are protecting. This between two speeding vehicles, amazing in 3-D. 2) Grandma belongs to the very forceful Lily Tomlin, whose angry yet grieving character steamrolls anyone in the way of funding an abortion for her granddaughter. Until, that is, Sam Elliott shows

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up. His Karl delivers a ferocious, wounded rebuke to Tomlin’s Elle. It’s an unexpected emotional meltdown from an actor we associate with calm, stoic masculinity. The whole movie pivots on that scene. 1) At the very end of the audacious one-take German heist movie Victoria, our blood-spattered heroine (Laia Costa) emerges from a hotel at dawn, plastic shopping bag full of cash in her hand. Having been followed by the camera—of heroic cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen—every step of the way, her overnight ordeal is over. Then finally the camera relents, and she walks away into the empty streets. We sense she’ll be safe, somehow, and we can finally stop holding our breath. E

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Sell! Sell! Sell!

The 2008 housing crisis is cheerfully explained, via movie stars, eye candy, and broad comedy. BY BRIAN MILLER

an economist). Bourdain asks rhetorically, What are tranches of mortgage-backed bonds? Basically old fish in a new stew. Wall Street will sell you anything. Along with Carol ’s period plea for gay rights and Concussion’s indictment of the NFL, The Big Short is one of the few big holiday movies with something important to say. Though it comes late to the subprime bonfire, though scattered in its storytelling, it settles on a proper note of disgust (sometimes a cause of laughter). McKay takes a looser, bro-ier approach than Lewis, but his lessons need to be sold differently at the multiplex. The mass audience isn’t made of financial analysts or hedge funders; it’s made of the folks whom Wall Street swindled, who lost their homes, their credit ratings, their 401(k) s, and their jobs. And McKay, in his very broad American way, knows and respects those people. That’s why he concludes his movie with angry speeches and dire warnings. Banks won’t admit fault; they’ll just “blame immigrants and poor people” for taking out all those loans. A postscript reminds us that just one banker in an entire industry went to jail. Wall Street ducks meaningful regulation, again. The homeless are living under freeway ramps. And the final toll is $5 trillion lost, eight million jobs, six million homes. Unusually and admirably for a professional funnyman, McKay ends his film not with a punchline, but with a punch to the gut. E

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1) In California, eccentric money manager some sense a detective story, only no one finally Michael Burry (Christian Bale) is essentially a goes to jail.) Mark’s team interviews strippers team of one: heavy-metal drummer, non-practicand investigates forlorn Florida cul-de-sacs with ing neurologist, and probably a high-functioning alligators snapping in the fetid pools. Arrogant Asperger’s case. His focus on the junk—subbankers—oh, how this movie hates bankers!— prime mortgages bundled into securities— laugh in Michael’s face when he purchases that Wall Street is peddling makes him credit default swaps from them—a bet an enormously unpopular contraron a housing downturn that they Opens Wed., Dec 23 ian. Bale’s tightly hidden smile, believe will never happen. Cranky at SIFF Cinema Uptown, however, indicates that Burry old Ben behaves like Howard Sundance, Meridian, would be happy in no other place. Hughes, both encouraging his two Thorton Place, He’s an obsessive who’s surrenColorado minions and heaping Bainbridge, and others. dered to his obsession, an OCD contempt upon the whole rotten Rated R. total-focus pariah. system. 130 minutes. In New York, we have 2) successAll three teams were correct in ful but neurotic hedge-fund manager retrospect, we know, but as Ben sternly Mark Baum (Steve Carell), who’s no stranger to explains, their triumph (and huge profit) means shorting (i.e., betting against prevailing market financial disaster for millions of ordinary Amerisentiment). He and his team are being wooed by cans: economic suffering, bankruptcy, even death. cheerfully smarmy banker Jared Vennett (Ryan When Burry warns of the mortgage market, “It’s Gosling, regularly breaking the proscenium to a time bomb,” we know that bomb will eventuhelp narrate the story of how “a few outsidally explode and cause great carnage. (When the ers and weirdos saw what no one else could”). teams visit a 2007 mortgage-banking conferNew to Wall Street are 3) an affable pair of ence in Vegas, sharp eyes will see a Washington tyro money managers (Finn Wittrock and John Mutual booth.) Magaro) who get financial backing from ornery And it’s that foreknowledge that can make retired banker/disaster-prepper Ben Rickert McKay’s comedy burn like bile in your throat, (Brad Pitt, beard gone gray, wearing his father’s however zany the tone. Full of side notes and aviator glasses from the ’70s). direct address, The Big Short will suddenly stop to say of some arcane financial instrument, “Here’s Margo Robbie in a bubble bath to explain.” Also There is much to entertain here as McKay, the lending their disparate expertise are Anthony merry ringmaster, zips us from one piece of the Bourdain and Selena Gomez (the latter aided by puzzle solving to the next. (The Big Short is in

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utrage can be expressed in different ways. There have been many sober books and an angry, analytical documentary—Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning 2010 Inside Job—about the subprime mortgage debacle and ensuing global financial crisis. J.C. Chandor’s 2011 drama Margin Call then took us inside the Wall Street collapse. This year, as the economy has improved for some (the haves, not the have-nots), we saw Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes, which illustrated Florida’s boom-and-bust. And now comes an entirely novel approach—the madcap comedy of Adam McKay, best known for the Anchorman movies and Funny or Die videos made with Will Ferrell. If this seems inappropriate, remember that the Marx brothers’ Duck Soup can be understood as a comedy about war and fascism. To be sure, The Big Short has its roots in Michael Lewis’ serious financial reporting for his 2010 book of that name, a typically smart chronicle of several investors who bet against the housing boom. Yet McKay still faces the challenge of relating a lot of esoteric financial detail. (The complexity, as many have noted, was partly a way of avoiding the scrutiny of regulators, journalists, and institutional investors who should’ve known better.) Those toxic CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) and bundled bond tranches McKay will later explain in zesty terms. First, however, he introduces three separate teams who begin to doubt the solidity of the housing market—which proves to be two teams too many.

The skeptic (Carell, left) and the salesman (Gosling).

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Blanchett (left) and Mara as lovers on the run.

only the occasional side glance to suggest uncertainty. Mara, the tranquil star of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, brings her tiny intensity to bear on a character who remains quiet (Phyllis Nagy’s screenplay is short on spelling out meanings). If Carol feels less adventurous than Haynes’ previous forays into upending Hollywood styles, it still maintains a pulse because Blanchett and Mara are superb at executing one of the cinema’s great gifts: the exchanged glance, held long enough to scorch even the well-mannered ’50s. (Guild 45th, SIFF Cinema Uptown, Lincoln Square. Rated R. 118 min.) ROBERT HORTON

Concussion Science Versus Showbiz in the NFL Concussion joins the small collection of investigative films arriving at the end of 2015, with Spotlight and Truth and the German picture Labyrinth of Lies. This one might actually move the needle on its subject. The true story chronicled here looks at Dr. Bennet Omalu,

Love outside the lab: Mbatha-Raw and Smith.

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The Price of Salt is a 1952 novel by Patricia Highsmith (using the pseudonym Claire Morgan) about a lesbian romance. It sold a lot of copies in an underground way, and must’ve had great subversive punch as both a tale about “a love that dare not speak its name” and one in which the gay protagonists were not subjected to either a straightening “cure” or guilt-ridden suicide. In 2015, that layer of illicit discovery is impossible for Todd Haynes’ movie adaptation to resurrect. The Portland-based director instead presents a period piece that presents its passions in impeccably designed scenes that contain remarkably few surprises. The romance simmers between Therese (Rooney Mara), a department-store salesgirl with vague notions of becoming a photographer, and Carol (Cate Blanchett), an elegant lady currently divorcing her respectable husband (Kyle Chandler). The unformed Therese has a boyfriend ( Jake Lacy) but is stirred by Carol’s fur-swaddled allure; they meet in Manhattan during Christmas season 1952, and a slow-burning attraction develops. Carol’s custody battle with her husband—a man more bewildered than evil—is affected by her sexual orientation, but Haynes is less interested in the social-issue aspects of the story than in the hesitant intimacy between the two women. This plays out against luscious production design, which frankly overwhelms the people—were the ’50s really this relentlessly arranged ?—like a visual reminder of the constraints on this romance. Haynes recalibrated the mid-century melodrama in Far From Heaven, but Carol is less artificial than that exercise. His best borrowing here explicitly lifts a storytelling device from the classic Brief Encounter : beginning the film with the romance’s end (trampled on by a boorish bystander), and then flashing back so that when we return to the scene 90 minutes later we understand what was really happening. The twist on Brief Encounter is that these characters do not have to be martyred on the altar of propriety. Blanchett rises from the screen like a careful layout from a glossy magazine, all Joan Crawford–style mask—with

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Daddy’s Home ¿Quien Es Mas Macho: Wahlberg or Ferrell?

Will Ferrell hasn’t exhausted the comedy of emasculation just yet—his argyle-sweater-vestclad persona still has some comic juice. Still, it was probably wise to reteam him with his The Other Guys co-star Mark Wahlberg, as the latter’s alpha-male swagger seems to bring out the best in Ferrell’s passive-aggressive boob. In Daddy’s Home the comedy is strictly PG-13, and even that seems overly protective. Brad (Ferrell) works at a smoothjazz radio station—the movie gets points just for that glorious touch—and is determined to be the world’s best stepdad to the two dismissive kids of new wife Sara (Linda Cardellini). The little tykes can’t stand his chipper enthusiasm for family bonding. Enter Dusty (Wahlberg), Sara’s tattooed, chopper-ridin’ ex, who blows in from parts unknown and might want to re-enter the family portrait. It’s a formula situation, right down to the way Brad’s insensitive boss (expertly turned by Thomas Haden Church) constantly reminds his employee of how fantastically cool his rival really is. And at this point, relegating someone as good as Cardellini to wifely support is inexcusable; except for a couple of craftily wistful glances in her was-band’s direction, she doesn’t have much to do. Director Sean Anders (That’s My Boy) sticks to sitcom setups, and the jokes tend toward the obvious. But compared to, say, the shapeless Sisters, Daddy’s Home at least has structure, and even some sincerity behind its ultimately sweetnatured story. (Don’t get me wrong: There are still jokes about genitals, albeit tamer here.) The movie’s good-hearted ending and ironic coda are authentically funny; comedies should build as they move forward, and this one peaks at just the right time. Nobody does abject humiliation quite like Ferrell, and he and Wahlberg are well-matched in one-upmanship—even if nothing here is quite as soaringly daft as the “lions versus tunas” exchange in The Other Guys. And give Anders credit for allowing in the surreal: an apparently throwaway bit about a home repairman (comedian Hannibal Buress) turns into an unexpected but welcome running

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the Nigerian-born forensic pathologist who established a connection between football and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE. That research has already led to changes in NFL rules and increased scrutiny of former players. All those shots to the head, all those concussions— acknowledged or, frequently, not—have created a class of ex-players struggling with depression, erratic behavior, and memory loss. The film casts Will Smith as Omalu, a gentle but determined soul working in a pathology lab in Pittsburgh. That’s how he gets a look at the brain of former Steeler Mike Webster (played, hauntingly, by David Morse), who died at age 50 in 2002. From there, Omalu faces an obstacle course erected by the National Football League, which comes to resemble Big Tobacco in its dogged attempts to deny something that is increasingly obvious: A career in football is a deadly gamble. Writer/director Peter Landesman takes a nicely low-key approach to some of this, but the subplots feel like Hollywood string-pulling: The shy Omalu takes in a fellow immigrant (the splendid Gugu Mbatha-Raw, from Beyond the Lights) and slowly falls for her, while the NFL’s flunkies apparently wage a campaign of bullying and intimidation against him. The film is respectable to the point of stuffiness. Even Will Smith’s effortless movie-star charisma can’t enliven his saintly character (nor do Albert Brooks or Alec Baldwin, as sympathetic doctors, generate much liveliness). Concussion has one interesting running theme—that America has stopped being the place of fulfilling dreams, for immigrants or others. When that disenchanted mantra keeps getting repeated in a wide-release picture starring Will Smith, something may really be up. But I wish the film had pursued its story’s other implication, the way we’d all rather embrace fantasy than face reality—this is, after all, a movie about science denial, that maddeningly timely subject. This extends not just to the NFL’s attempts to sidestep CTE data but to fandom as well. I’m a lifelong football fan, but the CTE stuff has at times made me queasy while watching the Seahawks flying around the field. On that score, it’ll be interesting to see whether people actually turn out to see this bearer of bad holiday tidings. (Pacific Place, Sundance, others. Rated PG-13. 123 min.) ROBERT HORTON

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gag when the guy just never seems to leave the house. (Brad doesn’t want to be taken as racist by asking him to leave.) There’s just enough of that kind of oddness to keep Daddy’s Home recognizably, and acceptably, Ferrellesque. (Sundance, Thornton Place, Pacific Place, Southcenter, others. Rated PG-13. 96 min.) ROBERT HORTON

BEST ACTOR* EDDIE REDMAYNE • BEST ACTRESS* ALICIA VIKANDER

time somebody clobbers her, and I had the nagging feeling that the usual Tarantino soliloquies were not quite as soaring as usual, not quite as precisely sculpted to find mad poetry in the profane. (Granted, Marquise has one monologue that vies with Christopher Walken’s Pulp Fiction pocket-watch speech for sheer cuckoo-bird craziness.) The other members of the unsavory octet are a lustily racist Confederate general (Bruce Cabin fever? From left, Russell, Leigh, and Dern.

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P The Hateful Eight

Talk First, Shoot the Questioners Later

What’s he done this time? As a filmmaker who creates experiences that aren’t remotely like anything else out there, Quentin Tarantino has earned the curiosity. Like ’em or loathe ’em, Tarantino’s movies exist in their own distinctive, vacuum-packed world, strange missives from an unfettered imagination. He’s unfettered because his movies keep making money, but I wonder what the faithful will think of The Hateful Eight, a typically outrageous but even-chattierthan-usual extravaganza. Most of the film’s 187 minutes (with an intermission) take place inside a snowed-in frontier trading post, although the scenes outside Minnie’s Haberdashery are just as talkative and—despite the Western vistas in the background—claustrophobic. Bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell, as attached to fur coats as Cate Blanchett is in Carol ) is transporting a valuable prisoner, Daisy Domergue ( Jennifer Jason Leigh), so she can be properly hanged. Ruth’s stagecoach reluctantly picks up a colleague, Marquise Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), and a small-town sheriff, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins, the film’s secret weapon), before the blizzard sets in and Minnie’s provides shelter. But not much comfort: A bedraggled group of strangers waits there, and something seems wrong from the start—where’s Minnie? Is somebody in cahoots with Daisy, waiting to get the drop on Ruth? And why is the coffee so bad? (This being a Tarantino movie, the coffee thing has multiple ramifications we can’t possibly predict at first.) Tarantino bounces these disreputable varmints off one another like the puppetmaster at a blood-soaked Punch and Judy show. The abuse heaped on Daisy gets less funny every

Dern), a Mexican ranch hand (Demián Bichir), an English hangman (Tim Roth), and a brooding cowboy (Michael Madsen). Strewn throughout the movie are pointed references to race and Manifest Destiny, but Tarantino is too confident to need to lecture us about it. This is a slyly anti-romantic Western by a filmmaker who loves Westerns; it makes you remember how the world’s most famous movie geek has actually been a debunker this whole time. What redeems the sourness of The Hateful Eight is its pleasure in yarn-spinning (and -tangling); the director himself is heard halfway through as an offscreen narrator, as though unable to resist horning in to relish the ways the plot details are beginning to pay off. Incorrigible. (Pacific Place, Lincoln Square. Rated R. 187 min. The 167-min. version expands next week at Sundance and other theaters.) ROBERT HORTON

Joy Cinderella Without the Prince

Intentionally or not, David O. Russell’s pleasing new empowerment-com is perfectly represented by its emblem, the Miracle Mop. The movie begins as an enjoyable mess, with a broken/imperfectly mended Long Island clan incessantly squabbling, four generations under one leaky roof. “I don’t want to end up like my family,” despairs Joy ( Jennifer Lawrence), the tireless Ms. Fix-It and conciliator of the Manganos, her blouse stained and hair mussed, her prospects sadly diminished from childhood promise. Then that mess is miraculously mopped up by our heroine. Order is established, a fortune is made, and Joy finally triumphs as a successful ’90s businesswoman. Yet I prefer the mess of Joy’s first half, and that’s where Russell and his fine cast—including Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Diane

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Seattle Weekly

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECE MBER 23, 2015– JAN UARY 5, 2016

TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

COHEN MEDIA GROUP

Ladd, Édgar Ramírez, Isabella Rossellini, and Virginia Madsen—do their best work. The director is famous for shouting off-camera suggestions and lines at his performers. If the dialogue track is later stripped of this coaching, you can imagine his instructions. “Jennifer, From left, the cloistered sisters portrayed by hit the floor harder with Tugba Sunguroglu, Doga Zeynep Doguslu, that claw hammer!” “Bobby, Elit Iscan, Ilayda Akdogan, and Günes Sensoy. play it bigger and broader!” “Ms. Rossellini, could you make the Italian P Mustang accent more hammy?” So noisy and fractious Inside the Wife Factory (both Joy and her mother are divorced), these Arriving amid the December awards season and scenes achieve an unlikely comic harmony. Rusyear-end lists, this fine Turkish drama strikes a resosell has a gift for screwball (recall Flirting With nant chord with some other standouts from 2015. Disaster), and he really embraces the theme of In outline, it’s like a grim old pre-Grimm fairy tale: creativity coming from chaos—precisely how he five orphan sisters, locked in their home by a cruel runs his sets. uncle and grandmother, to be parceled out as unwillJoy is understandably frustrated with this ing brides. They’re taken out of school and denied pandemonium, which the movie contrasts cell phones and computers, and free will is crushed with the soap-opera fantasies—starring Susan beneath the patriarchy’s boot heel. The sisters are Lucci!—watched obsessively by her houseaged about 11 to 17, and for all these reasons I bound mother (Madsen). These soaps haunt recalled the documentary He Named Me Malala, Joy’s dreams until her Miracle Mop gains about the teen Pakistani activist and Nobel laureate her access to the dream factory of QVC, the Malala Yousafzai who so bravely crusades for the very Pennsylvania studio run by retail maestro same rights being denied in Mustang. Neil (Cooper). It’s like Oz for Joy, and there In her powerful debut feature, Deniz Gamze she even meets fellow vendor Joan Rivers Ergüven makes clear how this sex-based repression, (played by daughter Melissa Rivers). Neil is in Turkey’s rural north, isn’t just the work of men. the wizard—though not a love interest—who First the sisters are denounced by a conservative village woman for roughhousing with some boys—all fully clothed—at the beach. Their grandmother is scandalized: Suddenly shame is cast upon the family, so she beats them and begins their home confinement. (When she meets the pious informant in the street, she nervously places a scarf atop her usually uncovered hair.) Social codes may be dictated by men, but they’re enforced and promulgated by women. Soon the grandmother begins training the girls to dress demurely and cook; she alternates slaps and hugs to keep them in line. And, horrible to say, she made me think of the kapos in the Hungarian concentration-camp movie Son of Saul—Jews being used to brutalize and control other Jews. (Saul arrives here All business: Lawrence and Cooper. in January; both films are on the foreignlanguage Oscar shortlist.) Youngest daughter Lale (Günes Sensoy) is our patiently explains how Hollywood is his fierce little narrator, who decries this “wife facmodel: Together they will sell cleanly domestory.” When one sister says there’s no way to reach tic fantasy via phone bank. (Al Gore hasn’t Istanbul (600 miles south) because she can’t drive, invented the Internet yet.) Lale decides to teach herself. The older sisters meet Indefatigable Joy’s determination never their fate—marriages with strangers, arranged by really falters. Even as the movie bogs down in their families, complete with dowry—with varying product development, supply chains, manufacdegrees of resistance. Since humiliating “virginity turing molds, and patent law, the outcome is tests” are required before these nuptials (and bloodnever in doubt. Joy steamrolls every obstacle; ied sheets after), the girls’ feelings about boys and and as she tidies up, Joy becomes less anarchic sex are conflicted. Ergüven doesn’t let her camera and interesting. Russell obviously means his shy away from their healthy pubescent bodies, but movie to be a salute to strong, can-do women she’s frank about the cost of such constant self- and who succeed without men. Joy is relentlessly social monitoring. (Lale overhears the eldest sister positive and uplifting, well-timed to the holiexplaining that she’s still technically a virgin, since days, yet it’s honest enough to admit that no she and her boyfriend do it “in back.”) holiday gathering—not for the quarrelsome The modern world seems very distant here, but Manganos, not for the Ward-Eklund clan of Mustang is also an escape movie, no parable. In many The Fighter—is ever going to be perfect. What regions of the globe, Ergüven reminds us, this is how you like best here are the family imperfecyoung women are still being treated as chattel. (Seven tions that Russell transforms into strengths. Gables. Rated PG-13. 94 min.) BRIAN MILLER E (Sundance, Oak Tree, Big Picture, Kirkland, others. Rated PG-13. 124 min.) BRIAN MILLER film@seattleweekly.com

reviews The Top 10 Local Records of 2015 We listened to everything so you didn’t have to.

BY KELTON SEARS

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 23, 2015–JANUARY 5, 2016

1) G.L.O.S.S., Demo

Sadie Switchblade will eviscerate your hateful, cis-het ass. “You want the pepper spray first? Or the pocket knife!?” she howls like a volcano on “Targets of Men,” a point she underscores live by performing with a very large blade strapped to her leather utility belt. If punk at its best is about carving out safe space, G.L.O.S.S. took a serrated knife and sliced open something vital in 2015. Short for “Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit,” the Olympia hardcore band blew a crater in the national punk underground in January with the release of its searing five-track demo, which burned with scorching trans/ queer manifestos, dive-bomb riffs, and crushing d-beat blasts. In the wake of antiLGBTQ violence and rapes in Seattle, a recent local G.L.O.S.S. show opened with a street self-defense lesson that taught the crowd how to combat predators and how allies can help to diffuse potentially dangerous situations. When the music got ready to start, the band made sure as shit that the straight white dudes in the crowd (including myself ) got the hell out of the way and let everyone else come to the front. Standing at the back of the room and watching the awe-inspiring, joyous chaos G.L.O.S.S. whipped up reminded me why music is so beautiful and important in the first place—music can save your life, and even if it’s not your life, being present for that transcendent communal humanity (and, importantly, making room for and celebrating it) is such an amazing thing to witness. 2) DoNormaal, Jump or Die

No new artist blew me away more this year than DoNormaal, a Ballard rapper whose remarkable debut LP is all about struggling with whether or not she should even do music in the first place (thank God her answer was yes). Christianne KarefaJohnson’s 13-track sonic journey weaves through her surreal inner worlds, full of spooky apocalyptic visions, fun Technicolor weirdness, and metaphysical musings on life and death. The way Karefa-Johnson relates this world to the listener is what makes her such a standout—she can rhyme like no other, wielding a truly unique sense of rhythm and meter that contains multitudes and conjures brilliant hooks. It’s a skill she’s been honing ever since she started writing poetry as a young girl, a pursuit she followed into college before deciding her melodic sensibilities were pushing against the limits of the medium’s spoken-word confines (hence her uneasy jump to music). Here’s to Karefa-Johnson’s next record, which can’t come soon enough.

Female was something of a national coming-out party for Mackned and the rapidly growing Seattle/L.A. crew he leads, Thraxxhouse. There’s all the bravado you would expect from a statement record like this—boasting about his influence, “stacking money,” and descriptions of smoke-shrouded parties and hangouts—but what makes this record shine are the moments Mackned really lets his guard down and talks about what’s not all that hot. Backed by the gorgeous new-age-gone-trap production of BroBak, Mackned laments his distinctly millennial loneliness (“White Mountains”), his regretted past choices and resulting family issues (“Role Model”), and the existential weight of purpose (“Beach Drive”). Female’s candidness cuts deep, making for some raw, emotional, very real moments few others were able to tap into this year. Thraxxhouse’s mission—to “find yourself completely,” as crew co-founder Key Nyata told Seattle Weekly last August—is a charge its members seem to take seriously, and if Mackned keeps up the soul searching, we’re in for many more brilliant records to come.

Mount Eerie’s gorgeous masterpiece actually got me into hitting up saunas (I went just yesterday). The eponymous 10-minute opening track is one of the most beautiful, contemplative songs that came out in 2015. In a way only Anacortes master of lo-fi ambience Phil Elverum could, the song begins with the sound of a breath stoking some coals, which revs up into a warm organ drone that underscores our clacking, wooden trip through Elverum’s Zen-like meditations on existence as he sweats in a metaphorical sauna. “I don’t think the world still exists/Only this room in the snow/And the light from the coals/And only this breath,” he chants. There’s a bold stillness in Elverum’s lyrics that detractors have criticized him for, but his staunch attachment to Anacortes, and finding transcendence in the daily minutiae of being a human, is heroic, and perhaps the most articulated it’s ever been on Sauna. As he wrote of the album’s metaphorical sauna, “Inside this deliberate space a transformation occurs.” Lord knows after staring at Facebook and Twitter all year, humanity could spend some time outlining deliberate space to sit down and think for a while.

4) Josef Gaard, Obsidian Falls

6) THEESatisfaction, EarthEE

3) Mackned, Female

The Northwest spent 2015 asserting its own distinct dance scenes, whose unique flavors struck a chord globally: Vancouver, B.C.s breezy, weirdo house scene, defined by the curatorial eye of DIY dance-label powerhouses 1080p and Mood Hut, and Seattle’s hypnotic, biological techno, coalescing around the Denny Triangle’s vital year-and-a-half-old basement lair, Kremwerk. Obsidian Falls is one of the most immersive records to sprout from the soil of this dark, loamy scene, a fivetrack EP from departing secondnature collective member Josef Gaard. The record is a subterranean journey through waves of meditative, pulsating thrums, which re-emerge from beneath the surface for skittering, heady trips into fog-laden landscapes echoing with Alpine ambience. Producer Nathan Levenson’s structural ingenuity is the star of the album, building tracks in subtle, unexpected patterns that can submerge you in a trance and crisply snap you back out of it on a dime. Levenson is kicking off 2016 by saying farewell to Seattle and taking his talents to the global center of forwardthinking dance, Berlin. He will be missed. 5) Mount Eerie, Sauna

Of the records that had the most direct impact on me this year, listening to

As its cover suggests, EarthEE sounds like it was written from the perspective of two goddesses looking at our planet from above, riffing on the cultural and environmental devastation humanity has wrought and imagining a utopian future in its stead. If Octavia Butler were a musician, this is the album she’d have written. As Catherine Harris-White muses on “Universal Perspective,” “when we face our biggest fears, the truth appears,” and telling the truth is something this record bravely and eloquently does through the duo’s effortlessly funky cosmic R&B—a tone that turns shamanic on the record’s standout track, the hypnotic, circular “Recognition.” 7) Midday Veil, This Wilderness

As if this record weren’t psychedelic and funky enough, Seattle five-piece Midday Veil enlisted Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic to join them in the studio. They really weren’t messing around when they recorded this thing, and it shows—This Wilderness is the most majestic and towering the band has sounded, and that’s saying something for a group that has been writing 10-minute-plus epics about eternity, esoterica, and the mechanisms of perception for six years now. The band’s past meditations

have taken it to dark, broody territory, but some of the most stunning tracks from This Wilderness, like “Babel,” “Empire Is No More” and “I Am the War,” clear out some of that smokemachine fog, replacing it with a lightup dance floor. 8) Beat Connection, Product 3

The four UW guys who form Beat Connection have been churning out glossy, radio-ready hits for five years now—so what do they do when they finally sign to a big label? Write a record about how weird it is to write glossy, radio-ready hits. Product 3 succeeds as both an earworm pop record and a subliminal critique of the commercial pop world it seeks to enter, a trick the group pulls off by writing lyrics that on the surface seem like they’re just about love. “I don’t know what I was hoping for but you gave me something to think about/There was a time when it all made sense but you’re making it all hard to think about,” front man Tom Eddy croons on the cheekily titled tune “Ad Space.” Very sneaky, guys. 9) Mommy Long Legs, Assholes EP

Of all the songs written about the changes Seattle has undergone in the past couple of years, “Assholes” is easily the most fun. Over a scritchy-scratchy rev-up riff, the ladies of Mommy Long Legs declare that “You can take your money, and put it in your asshole!/ You can take your condo and put it in your bungalow!” Many a DIY basement party turned legendary this year thanks to the group’s impeccable gang-vox scream-alongs about scrapping by in a world rapidly spiraling out of chill. Somehow, the Assholes EP made it all seem like it was going to be OK—a glitter-strewn party on top of all the garbage. 10) WMD, Protection From Enemies

Not to be confused with the other local WMD making electronic music, Seattle’s Madison Liam Levine put out one of the year’s most underrated local records. The techno album works even if you don’t read Resident Advisor every day thanks to its stunningly crafted ambience, which unfolds in beautiful, sunlit waves throughout the six-track record. “Warmth” and “Incandescence” work just as well on the dance floor as they do while you’re waking up for a cup of coffee in your living room. E

ksears@seattleweekly.com

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LOCAL POPICANA

CHRISTY MCWILSON & WS2, NORTH SEATTLE UKESTRA

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HOME SWEET HOME, ECHO RAVINE

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JD MCPHERSON with HONEYHONEY

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HAIR OF THE DOG

THE PAPERBOYS MEXICANA IRISH FOLK 9PM - $20

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with MIKE DOUGHTY

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1/25 7:30PM

TRIBAL SEEDS with THE SKINTS + THE STEPPAS

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8:30PM

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HOODIE ALLEN UNDEROATH with SUPER DUPER KYLE + BLACKBEAR

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3/31

8:00PM

DARK STAR IRATION + PEPPER ORCHESTRA KEXP’S POSITIVE VIBRATIONS AND SHOWBOX PRESENT HAWAIIAN PUNCH WINTER TOUR

with NEW KINGSTON

2/19

9:00PM

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2/20

3/24

BORGEOUS + MORGAN PAGE with DELORA

MASTERS OF ILLUSION

MOORE THEATRE

9:00PM

4/4

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8:00PM

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WAMU THEATER

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECE MBER 23, 2015– JAN UARY 5, 2016

3/30

calendar THEATER Openings & Events THE BOOK OF MORMON

Satirically pointed, outrageously profane, and probably the most popular musical of the past decade—should we draw a lesson from that? The Paramount, 911 Pine, stgpresents.org. $58.75–$166.75. Opens Dec. 29. 7:30 p.m. Tues.– Thurs., 8 p.m. Fri., 2 & 8 p.m. Sat., 1 & 6:30 p.m. Sun. Ends Jan. 10. THE EDGE Bainbridge Island’s own improv troupe. Bainbridge Performing Arts, 200 Madison Ave. N., Bainbridge Island, 842-8569, theedgeimprov.com. $12–$16. 7:30 p.m. Sat., Jan 2. SANDBOX RADIO LIVE! Music, storytelling, and new work by Scot Augustson, Juliet Waller Pruzan, and Wayne Rawley. ACT, 700 Union St., acttheatre.org. $10–$25. 8 p.m. Mon., Dec. 28.

Current Runs

A(N IMPROVISED) CHRISTMAS CAROL Unexpected Productions

wants your help with the rewrite. Market Theater, 1428 Post Alley, unexpectedproductions.org. $5–$15. 8:30 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. plus Dec. 21 & 22; 7 p.m. Sun. Ends Dec. 26. THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER Those Herdman

kids are ruining our holiday play! Seattle Public Theater, 7312 W. Green Lake Dr. N., seattlepublic theater.org. $17–$34. Runs 2 & 4 p.m. Sat.–Sun. and Dec. 22–24. Ends Dec. 24.

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS A stage adaptation of

the animated TV special, 50 years old this season. Taproot Theatre Company’s Isaac Studio Theatre, 212 N. 85th St. $25. Runs Fri.–Sat. plus Dec. 22 & 23; see taproot theatre.org for exact schedule. Ends Dec. 26. CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG

on film (with Alicia Silverstone in Clueless and Gwyneth Paltrow in Emma), but Emma’s well-intentioned foolishness never gets old. Like she says, “The most beautiful thing in the world is a match well made.” BRIAN MILLER Book-It Repertory Theatre, Center House Theater (Seattle Center), 216-0833. $25–$50. Runs Wed.–Sun., see book-it.org for exact schedule. Ends Jan. 3.

detective story. Seattle Public Theater, 7312 W. Green Lake Dr. N. $17–$34. Runs Thurs.–Sun. plus Dec. 22 & 23; see seattlepublic theater.org for exact schedule. Ends Dec. 24.

annual British panto: a fairy tale with lots of music, audience participation, and a dash of camp. Hale’s Palladium, 4301 Leary Way N.W., brownpapertickets.com. $7–$13. 4 & 7:30 p.m. Sat., 1 & 4 p.m. Sun. Ends Jan. 10.

CHRISTMASTOWN: A HOLIDAY NOIR Wayne Rawley’s hard-boiled

DINA MARTINA CHRISTMAS SHOW 2015 An all-new show

of warmth and wonder from the incomparable, indefatigable, indescribable entertaineress. Re-bar, 1114 Howell St. $22–$25. Runs nearly every day starting Dec. 10; see brownpapertickets.com for exact schedule. Ends Dec. 31. ■ EMMA No one gets married during the holiday season, because there are so many other competing parties and family gatherings. So here’s a happy chance to attend the wedding—and prior courtship, and countless preliminary romantic misunderstandings—in this staging of the Jane Austen classic, probably the sweetest work in her canon. Appropriately, Book-It is reviving its 2009 adaptation (by Rachel Atkins, directed by Carol Roscoe) for the bicentennial of Emma’s publication. Back from that production is Sylvie Davison as our heroine, now pitted with the challenge of resisting the handsome, charming Mr. Knightly (Sylvester Kamara). Along the way, of course, Emma is a famous meddler and know-it-all who proves herself wrong in one failed match after another. Yet she blithely steamrolls her way through Highbury and the surrounding countryside, crushing good sense at every turn. The comic disconnect between her intentions and outcomes has been profitably mined

HANSEL & GRETEL AND THREE BEARS The Fremont Players’

HOMO FOR THE HOLIDAYS

Don your gayest apparel for this queer burlesque revue, starring BenDeLaCreme, Kitten LaRue, Lou Henry Hoover. Waxie Moon, and many others. West Hall, OddFellows Building, 915 E. Pine St. $25–$37. 8 p.m. Wed.–Thurs., 7 & 10 p.m. Fri.–Sat., 5 & 8 p.m. Sun., plus 8 p.m. Dec. 21 & 22. Ends Dec. 27.

LAND OF SWEETS: THE BURLESQUE NUTCRACKER

Most productions of The Nutcracker are definitely family fare, but Lily Verlaine and Jasper McCann have been presenting a decidedly adult version of the show for the past 10 years. Their burlesque Nutcracker is full of salacious fun in the best tradition, with showgirl snowflakes, a King of the Rats with tearaway pants, and Verlaine herself as the Countess of Coffee, stripping in a steamy cup. If you’re a bit bored with the traditional fare over at PNB, this is a zesty alternative to the G-rated version. SANDRA KURTZ The Triple Door, 216 Union St., VerlaineandMcCann.com. $35–$65. Runs daily, generally at 7 & 10 p.m.; see thetripledoor.net for exact schedule. Ends Dec. 27. ■ MY FAIR LADY The enduringly popular and hit-filled 1956 Lerner and Loewe musical is directed by our homegrown Tony- and Pulitzer-

EAR SUPPLY

Monkey headlines their family show. Teatro ZinZanni, 222 Mercer St., 8020015. $20–$25. Runs 11 a.m. some Sat. & Sun.; see zinzanni.com/seattle for exact schedule. Ends Dec. 27.

A Suite of One’s Own? BY GAVIN BORCHERT

It’s rare for composers to make headlines, and unprecedented for their spouses to do so; but one scholar’s theory that Anna Magdalena Bach (1701–60), second wife of Johann Sebastian, really composed the six cello suites attributed to him made an international splash in the fall of 2014. Intriguing idea, but extremely flimsy evidence, hinging on two points: the argument that Anna’s copy of the suites—she regularly made clean copies of Bach’s music from his original manuscripts—supposedly looks more like a speedy first draft than a neat final one, and a misreading of the French verb ecrite. It is true, though, that J.S. dedicated two collections of keyboard pieces (in 1722 and 1725) to his helpful and industrious wife; if Anna ever did try her hand at composition, the results are probably here, since several of the pieces in these collections are unattributed. This weekend, Byron Schenkman will present a sampling from these notebooks: suites, arias (with soprano Linda Tsatsanis), and other charming miniatures. Nathan Whittaker, too, will play one of those contentious cello suites. On

winning Brian Yorkey, who must love the thing. Village Theatre, 303 Front St. N., Issaquah. $38–$70. Runs Tues.–Sun.; see villagetheatre. org for exact schedule. Ends Jan. 3. (Runs in Everett Jan. 8–Feb. 7.) ■ THE SOUND OF MUSIC It’s partially a credit to the original Richard Rodgers score itself, as well as to this locally cast production, that the 60-year-old musical manages to keep the audience rapt through 38 songs. By including all the songs, the musical must, necessarily, lose some plot nuances from the Oscar Hammerstein book—otherwise the show would last all night. When Maria comes to the von Trapp home and meets the children, there’s only a perfunctory struggle to win them over; in just one number, she’s got them under her thumb. Standouts in this familiar 1959 musical include scenes at the abbey, where Anne Allgood’s Mother Abbess practically steals the show. Not only do her interactions with Kirsten deLohr Helland’s Maria feel charged and authentic, but her voice is a marvel, leading a legion of nuns in several numbers. Her chill-inducing crescendos had me seriously contemplating going to church. The children are all adorable and exactly what you’d expect, with an exceptional performance from Liesl, the eldest (Shaye Hodgins), whose voice stood out as one of the loveliest. Likewise Jessica Skerritt plays a far feistier, more complicated Baroness Elsa than we’re used to. In Act 2, the staging, directed by David Bennett, manages to impart the ominousness of Germany’s occupation of Austria. A huge red Nazi flag hangs boldly— the one with the “black spider,” says one of the von Trapp children, before their escape. And the finale isn’t sunny; instead we hear the haunting voices of the Mother Abbess and her forlorn nuns—a reminder of the horrors that follow the happy ending. NICOLE SPRINKLE 5th Avenue Theatre, 1308 Fifth Ave. $29 and up. Runs practically every day; see 5thavenue.org for exact schedule. Ends Jan. 3. TEATRO ZINZANNI: LIGHTER THAN AIR The band Recess

■ TEATRO ZINZANNI:

COURTESY CHUCK MOSES

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 23, 2015–JANUARY 5, 2016

Caractacus Potts and his flying car are back. Seattle Children’s Theatre, Seattle Center, sct.org. $25 and up. 7 p.m. Thurs.–Fri., 2 & 5:30

p.m. Sat., 11 a.m. & 2:30 p.m. Sun. Ends Dec. 27. A CHRISTMAS CAROL Keep your parodies and improv shows; ACT dishes the Dickens straight up. Kurt Beattie and Charles Leggett tag-team as Scrooge. ACT, 700 Union St. $27–$37 and up. Runs Tues.–Sun. plus Mon., Dec. 28; see acttheatre.org for exact schedule. Ends Dec. 30.

From left: Whittaker, Tsatsanis, and Schenkman.

which topic, Schenkman observes: “Although I have no doubt that as a professional singer and music copyist Anna Magdalena was capable of composing music, she is not known to have been active as a composer. Some fabulous Baroque composers were women, including Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, all of whom were commercially and artistically very successful. I think it’s important for us to study, perform, and celebrate those women who were known to be composers, and less useful to speculate on someone who most likely was not.” Benaroya Recital Hall, Third Ave. & Union St., byronschenkman.com. $10–$42. 7 p.m. Sun., Dec. 27.

HOLLYWOOD NIGHTS Plus-one called it the best ZinZanni show he’s seen, and I see no reason to disagree. The company channels silver-screen glamour as Ron Campbell plays movie director Cecil B. DeGrille, who invades the theater with his crew and inspires dreams of stardom among the performers. In a TZ show, everyone multitasks, and here not only are the cirque stunts as dazzlingly skillful as usual, but the character work overall is a cut above the norm. I wish all opera singers were as comedically ferocious as soprano Juliana Rambaldi, who then turns around and delivers a sumptuous “Con te partirò.”And I still can’t figure out how Wayne Doba makes tap-dancing so affecting; his “Rainbow Connection” number is the show’s emotional high point, and I’ve never even liked the song. GAVIN BORCHERT Teatro ZinZanni, 222 Mercer St., 802-0015. $99 and up. Runs Thurs.–Sun. plus some Wed.; see zinzanni.com/seattle for exact schedule. Ends Jan. 31. THIS CHRISTMAS The holiday threatens to careen out of control (but probably won’t) in Anne Kennedy

Brady’s play. Taproot Theatre, 204 N. 85th St. $20–$40. Runs generally Tues.–Sat.; see taproottheatre.org for exact schedule. Ends Dec. 26. WINTERFEST All kinds of music, dance, circus, and more through Dec. 31. Seattle Center, seattlecenter.com. ■ WONDERFUL LIFE Yes, Frank Capra’s holiday perennial has returned to the Grand Illusion, but here too is a new take on the famous 1946 movie. The shorter title is a clue to the recent abridgement by Helen Pafumi and Jason Lott: It’s a one-man show, here starring Andrew Lee Creech, in which the storyteller takes on all the roles in Bedford Falls. That means the same guy plays both noble, suicidal George Bailey and the evil banker Mr. Potter, which may seem a rather schizophrenic exercise. Add to that the angel Clarence, faithful wife Mary (the Donna Reed role), and miserable alternate-reality denizens of Pottersville (basically Hell), and Creech will be embodying an entire community. But that unitary spirit is appropriate to the source, Philip Van Doren Stern’s 1943 self-published short story, first called “The Greatest Gift.” About to leap off a bridge in financial despair, George is granted a vision of his town without him—as if he’d never been born. Yet this show (and the movie) emphasize how the individual and the community are so interdependent; the health of one affects all. And a society’s true prosperity is measured by how we treat those like George who are down on their luck (or “losers,” as Donald Trump would call them). Erin Murray directs. BRIAN MILLER ArtsWest, 4711 California Ave. S.W., artswest. org. $17–$37.50. 7:30 p.m. Wed.–Sat., 3 p.m. Sun. Ends Dec. 27.

DANCE

■ PACIFIC NORTHWEST BALLET: NUTCRACKER PNB

director Peter Boal has merged George Balanchine’s 1954 choreography with new set and costume designs by renowned children’s author/illustrator Ian Falconer (of Olivia the Pig fame). This Nutcracker reflects the classical heritage that defines ballet for many people, alongside a more conventional telling of the story. Longtime Seattle dancegoers will note the difference not in plot, but in positioning Clara squarely back in the safe place of childhood innocence. Clara is danced by a child throughout, rather than transforming into an adult performer; and the role of Drosselmeier is much more benign—an eccentric toymaker rather than a menacing male figure. Balanchine’s choreography for Nutcracker is laced with references to the 1892 original by Lev Ivanov, including the mime sequence for the young prince as he describes the battle with the Mouse King, and the gymnastic jumping for a group of candy canes. It’s a much more old-fashioned, even patriarchal production, set firmly in the classical tradition. Compared to the old Maurice Sendak designs, Falconer’s palette is brighter—especially the vivid use of colored light in the second act. His “Land of Sweets” is outlined by pink and green stick candy and paper-doily lace, with elaborate, old-fashioned gelatin molds and piles of butter mints. It’s all very Currier and Ives, more sweet than tart. SANDRA KURTZ McCaw Hall, Seattle Center. $25–$156. Runs a lot; see pnb.org for exact schedule. Ends Dec. 28.

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE Stars from the 12th season

of the reality-competition show on tour. The Paramount, 911 Pine, stgpresents.org. $39.50–$69.50. 8 p.m. Sat., Dec. 26.

ON STAGE WITH CLASSICAL KING FM Your favorite DJs host an

evening of social dance (with a lesson!) with music by the Valse Cafe Orchestra. Resonance at SOMA, 288 106th Ave. N.E., Suite 203, Bellevue, resonance.events. $25. 7 p.m. Sat., Jan. 2.

CLASSICAL, ETC.

■ MESSIAH SING- AND PLAYALONG Bring your instruments,

or just your voice—if you think you can Handel it. Karen P. Thomas conducts. University Unitarian Church, 6556 35th Ave. N.E., uuchurch.org. $13–$18. 7 p.m. Sat., Dec. 26. CROSSTALK Brahms and Smetana piano trios, played by the Sonare Trio from Cleveland, plus discussion. Resonance at SOMA, 288 106th Ave. N.E., Suite 203, Bellevue, resonance.events. $12.50–$25. 2 p.m. Sun., Dec. 27.

■ BYRON SCHENKMAN AND FRIENDS SEE EAR SUPPLY,

BELOW.

■ SEATTLE SYMPHONY The traditional year-end Beethoven Ninth. Benaroya Hall, Third Ave. & Union St., seattlesymphony.org. $28 and up. 7:30 p.m. Wed., Dec. 30; 9 p.m. Thurs., Dec. 31 ($50 and up; incl. afterparty); 8 p.m. Sat., Jan. 2; 2 p.m. Sun., Jan. 3. ST. JAMES CATHEDRAL Bach, Handel, Rheinberger, and more on their choral/orchestral New Year’s Eve concert. 804 Ninth Ave., stjamescathedral.org. $30. 11 p.m. Thurs., Dec. 31. CAPPELLA ROMANA Ring in the new year with Byzantine and Old Roman chant. Blessed Sacrament Church, 5050 Eighth Ave. N.E., cappellaromana.org. $22 and up. 7:30 p.m. Fri., Jan. 1. ■ DAVID BROOKS An interesting miscellany of piano works by C.P.E. Bach, Messiaen, Grieg, and Schoenberg. Brechemin Auditorium, School of Music, UW campus, music. washington.edu. Free. 7:30 p.m. Tues., Jan. 5.

AUTHOR EVENTS

SIAMAK VOSSOUGHI The IranianAmerican’s short-story collection is Better Than War. Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave., 624-6600, elliottbay book.com. 7 p.m. Mon., Jan. 4. DAVE BARA Starbound is the second volume in his “Lightship Chronicles” sci-fi series. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, bookstore.washington.edu. 7 p.m. Tues., Jan. 5. MARGARET MALONE talks with Hugo House’s Peter Mountford about her debut story collection, People Like You. Elliott Bay, 7 p.m. Tues., Jan. 5. JAMES J. TRACY Faith, Doubt, Mystery: A Catholic Journey is this Jesuit-turned-psychologist’s memoir. University Book Store, 7 p.m. Wed., Jan. 6. ROBBIE BACH & PAUL SHOEMAKER The authors of XBox

Revisited and Can’t Not Do, respectively, discuss positive social change. Elliott Bay. 7 p.m. Wed., Jan. 6. JAMIE MERISOTIS America Needs Talent sounds like a reality competition show, but it’s actually this Lumina Foundation CEO’s guide for bringing the American workforce into the next century. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., 652-4255, townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 p.m. Wed., Jan. 6.

2033 6th Avenue (206) 441-9729 jazzalley.com

New Year’s Eve

JAZZ ALLEY IS A SUPPER CLUB JEREMY PELT POWER QUINTET

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PETER WHITE

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THE SENATE WED, DEC 23 COURTESY OF USC EVENTS

RESOLUTION 2016

This spectacle is not for the faint of heart. The producers behind the Paradiso festival and Freaknight host a blaring two-stage EDM concert with prismatic laser lights and a host of DJs, including Dillon Francis, Eric Prydz, Seven Lions, and many more. Though it costs more than a night in with a bottle of champagne watching the Space Needle fireworks from a balcony, you can count this as your last splurge before ridding yourself of all temptations for the New Year and rage into the night. With more than a decade of experience hosting large festivals, USC Events has planned everything you may need to dance through the night, with full bars, various food vendors, USC paraphernalia, and, more important, a hydration station. This year’s theme is white and gold, representing a clean slate, success, and triumph, with matching confetti and giant balloons. Watch and dance underneath live theatrical performances with acrobats swaying across the ceilings and other world-class performances. WaMu Theater, 800 Occidental Ave. S. 6:30 p.m. $107–$169. 18 and over.

Concerts

NEW YEAR’S EVE: CONCERT, COUNTDOWN & CELEBRATION

SHELLY & THE CURVES NYE PARTY A ticket will buy you a

full-service prime rib and salmon dinner with live music, a view of the fireworks at the Space Needle, and complimentary champagne at midnight. The Best Western Executive Inn, curvesband.com. $110. ABNEY PARK Grab your goggles and gas mask and get ready to party like it’s the end of the world as postapocalyptic steampunk band Abney Park ushers in a New Year with a mix of industrial dance and world music. Columbia City Theater, columbiacity theater.com. 8 p.m. $30. 21 and over. PANCHO SANCHEZ NYE Spend the evening with a legend as the Latin jazz singer and bandleader once again draws on 40 years of lively performance to usher in New Year’s Day. Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley, jazzalley.com. 8:45 & 11 p.m. $46–$179.50. 4TH ANNUAL ARTIST HOME NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY The

folks that bring you the Timber! Outdoor Music Festival and the Timbrrr! Winter Music Festival will mark the start of another year with an an all-star band from some of the city’s most beloved acts, playing covers we all know and love. Conor Byrne, conorbyrnepub.com. 8 p.m. $25. 21 and over.

PONCHO SANCHEZ LATIN JAZZ BAND

MARTIN TAYLOR

TUES, JAN 12 - WED, JAN 13

“Martin Taylor is one of the most awesome solo guitar players in the history of the instrument.” — Pat Metheny

SAT, DEC 26 - SUN, DEC 27 & TUES, DEC 29 - NYE THURS, DEC 31ST Master conguero Poncho Sanchez and his 7-piece band has stirred up a fiery stew of straightahead jazz, gritty soul music, and infectious melodies from a variety of Latin American and South American sources.

Four NYE package options!

PEARL DJANGO AND SPECIAL GUEST GAIL PETTIS SAT, JAN 2 - SUN, JAN 3

SHEMEKIA COPELAND WITH SPECIAL GUEST OPENER NAOMI WACHIRA THURS, JAN 14 - SUN, JAN 17

“Shemekia’s a ball-of-fire vocalist with a voice that’s part Memphis, part Chicago and all woman...devastatingly powerful. She’s a great singer, period.” — Chicago Sun-Times Opening act Naomi Wachira - Seattle’s favorite folk singer/songwriter —Seattle Weekly

0 215 Pearl Django has long been regarded as one of Americaís finest gypsy jazz bands. Gail is a two-time recipient of the Earshot Jazz “Jazz Vocalist Of The Year” award.

all ages | free parking | full schedule at jazzalley.com

NEW YEAR’S EVE 2015 Bliss out to DJ and producer Benny Benassi, whose world-class reputation earns him gold stars at major electronicmusic festivals. Complimentary champagne toast at midnight. Foundation Nightclub, foundation-nightclub.com. 10 p.m. $55. 21 and over.

NYE MASHUP: MCTUFF AND CRACKER FACTORY It’s a night of

throwback sounds at the Hard Rock, anchored by the funk and jazz of the Hammond B-3-led group Mctuff and the riff-steady classic rock of Cracker Factory. Hard Rock Cafe, hardrock.com. 9 p.m. $20 adv./$25 DOS. 21 and over. ’80S INVASION If the future is just a little too daunting for you—and we understand completely if it is—this group will rock you back into the Reagan years with the pop and New Wave hits and crossover rock that made that decade dance. High Dive, highdiveseattle.com. $10 adv./$15 DOS. 8 p.m. 21 and over. SHABAZZ PALACES For the second year, the folks at Seattle Theater Group give Seattleites the chance to start the New Year on a different planet with Seattle’s top experimental hip-hop group. Here’s hoping this signals the beginning of a new NYE tradition. The Neptune, stgpresents. org. 9 p.m. $25. LA LUZ Spending the better half of 2015 touring the world, the rock band comes home to ring in the New Year with Gazebos and Sick Sad World. Neumos, neumos.com. $15. 9 p.m. 21 and over. “THE ROLLING STONES” No, you will not be clinking champagne flutes with Mick and Keith this New Year’s Eve, but “The Rolling Stones”—a cover band made up of former members of the Blood Brothers and others—are likely more fun. With Great Spiders, Steal Shit Do Drugs. Sunset

Tavern, sunsettavern.com. 9 p.m. $15. 21 and over.

THE DIP NEW YEAR’S EVE BASH Featuring members of Beat

CENTURY BALLROOM

Connection and the Tom Eddy Band, the Dip will groove into the new year with original soul and funk numbers, and some help from Tomten and DJ Nitty Gritty. Tractor Tavern, tractor tavern.com. 9 p.m. $20. 21 and over. NEW YEAR’S EVE WITH THE DUDLEY MANLOVE QUARTET

Closing out its 20th year of partystarting, the Dudley Manlove Quartet will bring a half-century of hits to the stage, from the swingin’ ’60s to the synthin’ ’80s. The Triple Door, the tripledoor.net. 7 p.m. (all ages) & 10:30 p.m. (21 and over). $70–$100.

Comedy

AMY SCHUMER Live Nation welcomes the film star of this year’s Trainwreck and Emmy-award winner for Inside Amy Schumer to KeyArena, livenation.com. $40–$150. 8 p.m. XTREME THEATRESPORTS NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY Sip on

champagne and vote for the winner at the improv comedy battle with over 20 improvisers. Unexpected Productions’ Market Theater, unexpectedproductions.org. $32. 9 p.m., 21 and over.

Parties

NYE MASQUERADE Aston Manor turns itself upside down for its third annual masquerade party with a full bar, DJs playing top 40, trap, and more. Aston Manor, astonmanorsea. com. $45/$60 VIP. 9 p.m. 21 and over. BALLARD ELKS NYE PARTY

Dance in formal attire to Seattle’s Left Turn on Blue, a 10-piece horn band playing blues, funk, swing, and classic soul. Ballard Elks Lodge, ballardelks.org. 8 p.m. $15–$30.

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 38

NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY Thu, Dec 31

Prix Fixe Dinner 2 Rooms of Dancing! Live Salsa with Buena Vibra DJd Kizomba

Tickets available at CENTURYBALLROOM.COM

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECE MBER 23, 2015– JAN UARY 5, 2016

As it does every year, the Seattle Symphony will bid the past 365 days adieu with a grand performance of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9, in the hope that the “Ode to Joy” will bring us all a little more joy in the new year. The performance will be followed by a glass of champagne, music by swing outfit Good Co, and the countdown. Benaroya Hall, seattle symphony.org. 9 p.m. $66–$153.

Seattle’s rock and roll string band with two acoustic guitars, an upright bass and three voices create a dynamic musical hybrid that continues to push the boundaries of acoustic instrumentation!

One of the most versatile and prolific acoustic guitarists on the contemporary jazz landscape.

New Year’s Eve INDULGENCE NEW YEAR’S EVE 2016

What could be more exciting than a New Year’s Eve bash that gets you unlimited access to five different parties in one location? Nothing. Hosted by Seattle’s big, shiny pop-culture temple, this event features more than 25 bars, which will help you celebrate your last night of the year with thousands of others dancing and staring at the gleaming LED screen—touted as the largest in the world—with state-of-the-art sounds and lighting. For the gleeful celebrants, there will be a live comedy theater with famous stand-up comedians and plenty of drinks to go around. Have another go at wearing your favorite Halloween costume and enter the costume contest for a chance to win $1,000. Those who made it through the year alone can bid farewell to singledom at a free singles pre-party. Together you can venture underneath the Space Needle to view the fireworks at midnight, counting down the seconds embracing the New Year, locking lips. EMP Museum, 325 Fifth Ave. N. 8 p.m. $79. 21 and over.

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BALTIC ROOM NYE 2016 Hosted by Absolut Vodka, the Capitol Hill club has DJs from Movin 92.5. Open bar, complimentary champagne toast. Baltic Room, balticroom.com. $7., 9 p.m. 21 and over. CANDI POP From the folks who brought you Dance Yourself Clean, Drake vs. Kanye, and Rapture 80s//90s comes this new dance night, launched on the last night of 2015 and featuring dance-party hits from the ’90s and ’00s, including *NSync, Madonna, Hanson, Taylor Swift, TLC, and a whole lot more. Barboza, thebarboza.com. 9 p.m. $20–$180. 21 and over. NEW YEAR’S EVE 2015 PARTY

Enjoy a multicourse dinner and live salsa dancing across two rooms in one of Seattle’s iconic spaces. Century Ballroom, centuryballroom. com. 6:30 p.m. $30–$130. 21 and over.

NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY

Celebrate beneath Seattle’s iconic fireworks display while dancing to the Michael Benson Band, and enjoy delicious appetizers and desserts from Collections Cafe. Chihuly Garden and Glass, chihuly gardenandglass.com. 8 p.m. $200. 21 and over. BEARRACUDA SEATTLE NEW YEAR’S EVE! The biggest bear

dance party in the nation has found a home at Chop Suey, where San Francisco DJ Matt Consola and Matt Stands will keep the dance floor moving and Pacific NW Laser will keep all the bears, otters, cubs, and beefcakes welllit. Chop Suey, chopsuey.com. 9 p.m., $10 adv. ABOVE THE FRAY The Cloud Room offers a laid-back alternative to all the oontz-oontz-oontz and

urges revelers to relax with a drink from Jay Kuehner and a musical collaboration on the space’s white baby grand from Adra Boo (Fly Moon Royalty) and Amos Miller. The Cloud Room, cloudroomseattle. com. $25. 9 p.m.

NYE SNAP ’90S DANCE PARTY

Time-travel back nearly two decades to celebrate the end of this year by revisiting top tunes from the ’90s played by Trashy Trash DJs including Ms. Coco B, Introcut, and others. The Crocodile, thecrocodile.com. $12. 8 p.m. 21 and over. NEW YEARS EVE 2016 BOAT PARTY Seattle Boat Parties hosts

a celebration on the water with a full bar, DJs, and a view of the Seattle fireworks along Lake Union and Lake Washington. The Islander in Seattle, champagnecruise.com. 9 p.m. $50.

IVAR’S SALMON HOUSE NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY What could

be more Seattle than ringing in the New Year from a Seattle institution, especially one that offers a lakeside view of the Space Needle, music from Diana Ruize, and a dinner buffet from chef James Somerville? Ivar’s Salmon House, ivars.com. $85. 6 p.m. THIS JOINT IS JUMPIN’! Come ready to dance in the ballroom of the Leif Erikson Lodge at this swing-centered celebration, featuring the music of Casey MacGill & His High Five and DJ Robin Nunnally and a small-plate gourmet buffet. Leif Erikson Lodge, nwdance.net. $55. 8:30 p.m. EMERALD CITY SOUL CLUB & DUG Two rooms, nine DJs, and

some deep soul, funk, and R&B cuts will fill the Lo-Fi as the city’s experts in ass-shaking team up and take over the venue. Lo-Fi, thelofi. net. 8 p.m. $20.

NEON NEW YEAR’S EVE The

Fremont lounge features DJ Baby Van Beezly and all the ’80s dance jams with New Wave, rock, and boy bands. Nectar Lounge, nectarlounge.com. $25 adv/$40 DOS. 8 p.m. 21 and over. NYE 2016: DR. FRESCH Tony Fresch’s remixes have earned him millions of YouTube views and more than 10,000,000 plays on Soundcloud, but this New Year’s Eve, he—along with Sean Majors, Dig-Dug, Justin Haringer, and Altesse—will be earning his keep by keeping you moving. Q Nightclub, qnightclub.com. 9 p.m. $30–$35. 21 and over. NEW YEAR’S EVE AT THE ROYAL ROOM Enjoy a prix fixe

dinner, then cap a big year with the big-band sounds of Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, and more from the Royal Room Orchestra. The Royal Room, theroyalroomseattle.com. 7:30 p.m. $40 dinner/no admission. All ages until 10 p.m.

NEW YEAR’S AT THE NEEDLE

Watch the 31st annual fireworks show at the SkyCity restaurant, expected to be eight minutes long and fired from 72 different locations. The Space Needle, spaceneedle. com. $250. 8 p.m.

BOLLYWOOD NEW YEAR’S EVE 2015 Celebrate the largest

Bollywood event of the year with DJ Aanshul and DJ Kapil playing the best Bollywood and Top-40 hits. The Showbox, showboxpresents. com. $24. 9 p.m. 21 and over.

8TH ANNUAL NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY St. Clouds turns its din-

ing room into a dance hall where celebrants can sway to the counds of Danny and Trevor Wheetman and their band. The ticket includes passed apps, a midnight buffet, and an open bar. St. Clouds, stclouds. com. $150. 9:30 p.m. 21 and over.

FILM Opening Friday

POINT BREAK Yes, it’s the 3-D

remake of the 1991 action/karma flick starring Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves. Now their roles are played by Édgar Ramírez and Luke Bracey, respectively. (PG-13) Opens wide

Local & Repertory

■ FIDDLER ON THE ROOF SING ALONG Would it surprise you to

MOULIN ROUGE! NEW YEAR’S EVE SING ALONG Before Baz

Luhrmann reminded us in 2013 of what a real party was like in The Great Gatsby, his 2001 musical Moulin Rouge! was already pumping up the music, the glamor, and the sex appeal. Here’s your chance to ring in your New Year while sipping champagne, singing along to “Elephant Love Medley” and “Lady Marmalade.” Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman star. JOHNSON (PG13) SIFF Cinema Uptown, $10-$15. 9 p.m. Thurs., Dec. 31.

It’s the annual “Smell-O-Vision” presentation of the 1971 Gene Wilder-starring adaptation of the Roald Dahl children’s tale. During the same period is a quote-along version of The Princesss Bride. (G) SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), $10-$15. See siff.net for schedule. Ends Jan. 3.

Ongoing

■ BROOKLYN Burnished by what

you might call sentimental realism, this lovely adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s 2009 source novel has young Irishwoman Eilis (Saoirse Ronan, swiftly maturing from Atonement to The Grand Budapest Hotel) sent to America by an older sister. Our heroine is determined to escape the narrow confines of Enniscorthy, where the stifling social codes seem almost medieval—though the year is 1951. Immediately established in a Brooklyn rooming house and a tony department store, it might seem that Eilis is an innocent, like Dorothy in Oz. Yet, partly because of Ronan’s assurance, Eilis already seems wise to the world. She appraises new people and situations with a cool gaze that belies her years. Sensitively adapted (by Nick Hornby, of Wild and An Education) and directed (by John Crowley), Brooklyn is respectful of all the minor players in Eilis’ adventures—which oughtn’t be surprising but somehow is. (Jim Broadbent trenchantly plays a priest; Julie Walters adds spice to the twinkle of Eilis’ landlady.) And while there are traces of melodrama, there’s a notable absence of blarney. BRIAN MILLER (PG-13) Pacific Place, Sundance, Lincoln Square, Thornton Place, Lynwood (Bainbridge), others CREED The Rocky franchise is almost four decades old! Despite critical pummelings and disrespect, it keeps getting up from the canvas, bloodied but unbowed, to reliable cheers. The crowd-pleasing Creed, assuming you liked the prior six Rocky movies, essentially recycles them. The illegitimate son Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) of Rocky’s old nemesis/pal Apollo Creed seeks selfvalidation in the ring. This amateur boxer wants respect, to prove he’s not a mistake, so he naturally seeks out training advice from grizzled old Rocky (Stallone, now 69, as was Burgess Meredith in Rocky). You can write the rest. Creed is a film unburdened by surprises—or any serious consideration of brain damage and CTE, which will have to wait for Concussion. Writer/director Ryan Cooglar (of Fruitvale Station) does his

best with this 50-pound heavy bag of clichés, yet fans won’t care about the sheer familiarity—they’ll reward it. Creed offers the reliable pleasures of formula and nostalgia. Never a great actor, Stallone’s stiffness now suits Balboa’s sad, widowed modesty. MILLER (PG-13) Pacific Place, Thornton Place, others THE DANISH GIRL Eddie Redmayne, who won an Oscar last year for The Theory of Everything, now plays Einar Wegener, a Danish painter who underwent sexreassignment surgery to become a woman, newly christened Lili Elbe. This true story happened in the early years of the 20th century, which makes it prime fodder for the perioddecoration approach of director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech). Einar is married to fellow artist Gerda (Alicia Vikander), and early reels catch some of the uncertainty and riskiness of people figuring out who they are— Gerda as much as Einar/Lili—before an experimental doctor (Sebastian Koch, from The Lives of Others) is consulted, and the film takes a turn toward the fatally noble. The eerily composed Vikander (The Man From U.N.C.L.E) gives a very modern, thoughtful performance. (Redmayne’s acting style actually looks antique next to hers.) Hooper’s approach brings to the fore the worst aspects of the prestige arthouse picture: tasteful design, serious subject, selfcongratulating mood. The Danish Girl is content to quietly admire its own importance, and assume you will, too. ROBERT HORTON (R) SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Lincoln Square, Sundance THE INTERN It’s gratifying to see how Robert De Niro has freed himself, in late career, from the Mantle of Greatness by doing more comedies. Nancy Meyers uses him to fine effect in her latest distaff comfort movie, in which Anne Hathaway plays the multitasking Park Slope mommy trying to manage her fashion startup. De Niro’s Ben is her unwanted 70-yearold intern, who inevitably proves himself a trusted aide and companion to the stressed-out Jules. There are no surprises here, the comic and story turns are rote, but The Intern— like courtly, punctual, and observant Ben—never fails to please. What Meyers also gets right is the kindred discrimination both Ben and Jules face in the New Economy, he for being too old. The movie also charms in positing a non-sexual romance between the two. They can even chastely bond over Singin’ in the Rain in their bathrobes together on a business trip. MILLER (PG-13) Crest

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 40

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learn that composer John Williams won his first Oscar not for Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or Jaws, but for this 1971 adaptation of the Broadway show? Preceded by Asian take-out from Leah’s Gourmet Kosher Foods, this three-hour musical includes an intermission and live music beforehand (by Orkestyr Farfeleh). How better to spend Christmas Day? Then stay for more movies! SCOTT JOHNSON (NR) SIFF Cinema Uptown, $25. 11 a.m. noshing, movie at noon. Fri., Dec. 25. ■ IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE It’s funny to think that the Christmas movie we all hold near and dear to our hearts not only met with mixed reviews, but also ended up losing RKO a half-million dollars in 1946 (about $6 million today). But like the bottomed-out George Bailey (memorably played by James Stewart), there was hope for this little movie that could. Almost 70 years later, Frank Capra’s Yuletide melodrama is still one of the most important staples of both Christmas movies and film as a whole. Upon its release, some critics tore it to shreds for its unrealistic, optimistic themes and emotions. The Scrooges of the time apparently saw no need for humor, happiness, and a hope for a better future. Yet today, when the world is so full of hate, anger, and ignorance, it would do us all good to experience some holiday cheer. This is the GI’s 45th annual screening of this true classic. JOHNSON (NR) Grand Illusion, $5–$9. See grandillusioncinema.org for showtimes. Ends Dec. 31.

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Golden Globe nominee: Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Original Score. Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander star in this remarkable love story inspired by the life of transgender pioneer Lili Elbe. Directed by Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech).

Golden Globe nominee: Best Picture, Best Director (Todd Haynes), Best Actress (Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara), Best Original Score. This sumptuously filmed love story follows two women in 1950s New York who form an immediate, electric connection.

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The Big Short

Four Golden Globe nominations, including Best Picture. Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt star as Wall Street outsiders who foresee the collapse of the housing market, and hatch a bold plan to bet against the U.S. economy.

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THE MARTIAN This is a problemsolving movie: Stranded on Mars, how will castaway astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) figure out the fundamental problems of food, shelter, and communication? Ridley Scott’s movie doesn’t waste much time worrying about issues of loneliness; after we’ve spent time with Watney, who has a complete lack of introspection and neurosis, it’s no wonder. Apart from his survival efforts, The Martian spends a lot of time back on our planet, where nervous NASA honchos played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, and Jeff Daniels are plotting out a rescue mission. There’s also the departed spaceship, slowly making its way back to Earth and peopled by the usual diverse crew: Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, Kate Mara, et al. Damon gives a skillful performance, and Scott’s ability to put you in the middle of a howling Martian gale is impressive. But man, is The Martian corny. Its jokes are telegraphed a mile away, and its many inspirational moments are underscored by heart-tugging reaction shots. HORTON (PG-13) Crest ■ ROOM Joy (the excellent Brie Larson, from Short Term 12), we shall learn, was abducted as a 17-year-old. We meet her as the young mother of Jack (Jacob Tremblay, an emotionally pure lodestar), both of them confined to a garden shed/prison that forms the 5-year-old boy’s entire known universe. A skylight above, a few books, and TV cartoons blur into a magical realm for Jack; notions of what’s real and imaginary are just beginning to settle into his head. Adapted by Emma Donoghue from her 2010 novel, Room is marked by Jack’s long, lyrical passages of description, taken directly from the book. Objects are like friends for Jack, who’s been kept in a paradoxical state of enchantment, since Joy needs to hold horrible reality at bay. To be vague about the plot, which takes a big turn after an hour, Jack’s task, like Alice’s in Wonderland, is to understand the rules—or their absence—in two different realms. Lenny Abrahamson, of Frank, provides direction that’s both sure-handed and dry-eyed. MILLER (R) Crest SISTERS In screenwriter Paula Pell’s sitcom premise, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler play play sisters coming together to spend one last weekend in the childhood home their parents have just sold—allows the duo to vamp their way through a series of increasingly chaotic and eminently R-rated situations. After they invite their old high-school class over for a last waltz, things escalate quicklyk. Drugs are ingested, and genital jokes abound; it’s as though Fey and Poehler bottled up their raunchiest impulses during years of network success on 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation and just decided here to go full potty-mouth. Pitch Perfect director Jason Moore allows Fey and Poehler to stretch the rhythm of the film’s best scenes, so that the two women improvise ideas or bend inflections to suit their style. (Lending able support are Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, John Leguizamo, Dianne Wiest, and James Brolin.) Sisters feels as though we’re watching the outtakes reel during the actual film, instead of during the end credits. This is a compliment—those blooper reels are usually funnier than the films they follow. HORTON (R) Sundance, Majestic Bay, Ark Lodge, Admiral, Pacific Place, others

■ SPOTLIGHT Arriving at a time

when our culture appears to have embraced the idea that it is better to believe what you want to believe and that “the media” is not to be trusted, Spotlight creates excitement out of the day-to-day business of recognizing uncomfortable facts. Tom McCarthy’s extremely well-cast ensemble drama follows The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-winning 2002 exposé of the Catholic church’s cover-up of widespread sexual abuse of minors by priests. He relates the story from the multiple viewpoints of editors (John Slattery, Michael Keaton, Liev Schreiber) and reporters (Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Brian d’Arcy James). The approach allows us to see how the scandal permeates every level of Boston society, from blue-collar Catholic neighborhoods where disgraced priests are hidden to tony golf courses where church attorneys share the links with Globe editors. Given such explosive material, McCarthy (The Visitor) mostly lays off the hard sell. This movie excels at digging into the nooks and crannies of deep-seated corruption and making those shadowed places come to credible life. (R) HORTON Sundance, Kirkland, others

■ STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS Director J.J. Abrams

brings the beloved sci-fi series back to its core values. Unlike the middle George Lucas sequence of Parts I–III, it feels as though Abrams is borrowing more—and to better effect— from the original three (1977–83, aka the good ones). The chief improvements are pacing and humor, the latter mainly supplied by the droids (old and new), Chewbacca, and Harrison Ford. Han Solo now seems happier, mellower, and more comfortable being the agent of continuity. If not quite Obi-Wan, he’s the cool dad who gives you the keys to the spaceship. Adding some puckish charm is John Boyega’s very human “Finn”—a turncoat stormtrooper who doesn’t know his birth name—who’s the most fun among the three main new cast members. Oscar Isaacs’ pilot Poe Dameron spends too much time in his X-wing fighter; his swagger is less appealing than Finn’s selfdoubt and improvisations. Orphaned scavenger Rey (Daisey Ridley) is very much the model of powerful female agency; she’s never passive or prim, but neither is Ridley terribly funny. Like Mark Hamill before, she seems to have been cast as the Serious One—heavy lies the crown, etc. It’s no secret that Abrams has returned Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Ford to the fold. In addition to pushing the franchise forward with new faces (and dispatching one elder), he respects the nostalgia that viewers will bring to this nearly four-decade-old series. The Force Awakens is a worthy successor to the first three wonderful Lucas movies. MILLER (PG-13) Cinerama, Sundance, Meridian, Pacific Science Center, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Admiral, Thornton Place, Kirkland, Bainbridge, Vashon, Cinebarre (Mountlake), others STEVE JOBS There is so much talent behind this oddly structured dud: Oscar winners Aaron Sorkin (script) and Danny Boyle (director), plus the title role’s Michael Fassbender, who’ll one day earn a statuette (though not for this). So why doesn’t the highly anticipated movie work? In part because the market is so glutted with other Jobs accounts. Steve Jobs gives Steve Jobs three chances to make amends and treat people decently. Sorkin has written a deliberately repetitive tripartite study in karma: the frantic backstage

drama before product launches in 1984 (Mac), ’88 (NeXT whatever yawn), and ’98 (candy-colored iMac). All the same figures recur, beseeching King Steve for favors. He lords his status over others, even in the amusing middle chapter when it emerges that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Inevitably, per Hollywood formula, our prickly egotist will grow and mature. (Kate Winslet, as Jobs’ long-suffering marketing chief, fares the best here.) Bizarrely, in profiling such an outspoken futurist, the film keeps ransacking Jobs’ past for Rosebuds; it’s the same sin he damns in Steve Wozniak (cuddly/wounded Seth Rogen), who can’t let go of his beloved Apple II. MILLER (R) Crest TRUMBO Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976) was one of the Hollywood Ten, who were blacklisted by the studios during the great red scare of the Cold War era. This is a distant chapter in American history, let alone Hollywood annals. To educate today’s popcorn-chewers, director Jay Roach has to cover a lot of PBS-y ground in this very admiring drama, interpolating new footage with old newsreels of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Our hero (Bryan Cranston) stubbornly hews to principle—declaimed in tedious speeches, not recognizable prose—and refuses to answer HUAC’s questions, resulting in jail time and disgrace. The rest of Trumbo is a more familiar comeback story, and it’s even less interesting than the first half. Cranston’s had better results playing flawed heroes (Walter White, LBJ, etc.), and the good parts here go to Helen Mirren—as anti-Commie gossip columnist Hedda Hopper—and Michael Stuhlbarg, as Trumbo’s weakly compliant pal Edward G. Robinson. At every turn, Roach and his generally dull movie are gripped by a nostalgia for Old Hollywood and principled artists. Ironically, this is exactly the kind of movie its hero was paid to punch up during the blacklist. MILLER (R) Guild 45th, others YOUTH One of the great pleasures of The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino’s last film, was the way the portrait of an aging, regretful Roman society journalist became a more sprawling and satirical portrait of Italy-in-decline. Set in a posh Swiss spa/hotel, Youth has a lot in common with its predecessor. Here we have two old artists, Fred (Michael Caine) and Mick (Harvey Keitel), best friends who use their annual visit to catch up and cast back in memory. Both are 80ish, with many ex-wives and old loves behind them. Filmmaker Mick trails a crew of screenwriters, all trying to devise his next project (a dreadful-sounding final cinematic “testament”); while composer/conductor Fred has only his daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz), who manages his affairs—despite his grumpy preference to stay retired. The early spa scenes are promising, a comic mix of Fellini and Tati. Rich sybarites of every nationality are poked and prodded by an attentive staff. Though the hotel is full of potentially interesting characters (one who performs magical footwork with a tennis ball), they never go anywhere. Despite a few hikes and walks in alpine scenery, Youth becomes claustrophobic—insular in its theme of Artist contemplating Art. Fred is constantly addressed as “maestro,” and Mick speaks reverentially of his muse (Jane Fonda, showing up late and to little effect). Youth, like its two heroes, never steps outside the spa’s nostalgic comforts. MILLER (PG-13) Guild 45th

odds&ends

Coming Out of the Cannabis Closet BY MICHAEL A. STUSSER

cannabis and 23 more have medical-marijuana laws, the War on Drugs is not over by a long shot. In addition to the 700,000 citizens arrested every year for marijuana-related offenses, employees are still being fired for having THC in their systems (even in legal states); parents of kids with severe epilepsy can’t get access to non-psychoactive cannabidoids (aka CBD) to help with life-threatening seizures; and soldiers and vets aren’t allowed to use pot for PTSD, anxiety, or trauma. Even here in Washington, it’s still illegal to grow at home and use it in public, and still a federal felony to pass a joint. Hell, both Instagram and Facebook continue to delete accounts related to cannabis brands and refuse to allow them to promote posts.

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Maybe the way to eliminate the second-class stigma attached to cannabis is to put a spiritual spin on the notion of getting high. Throughout history, cultures have used natural psychoactive substances to elicit transformative, mind-altering experiences: Ethiopians chew khat, which they consider a divine food; Amazonians (from South America, not South Lake Union) eat yaga (ayahuasca) which translates to “vine of the souls”; Bohemians suck down wormwood (absinthe) to get lifted; and Native Americans have used Hell’s Bells (jimsonweed) and peyote as a mystical sacrament. The Aztecs even used a type of morning glory to soar with their shamans. (Then again, they also used human heads as soccer balls in certain ceremonial situations.) It was the ancient Greeks who came up with wine as a way to celebrate life, pouring it down one another’s gullets during drunken dance festivals that encouraged community bonding. It’s high time to bring cannabis into the communal tent. Praise Sativas! There are lots of reasons to be loud and proud about cannabis; in fact, you don’t even have to like weed! Perhaps you’re a parent who wants to kill off the cartels and raise tax revenue for drug education and awareness. Perhaps Dr. Sanjay Gupta convinced you this healing herb should be available to the sick and the needy; perhaps you want to screw over the Saudis by using hemp for fuel and fiber; perhaps you want cops focused on more serious crimes; perhaps you’re a libertarian who wants the government off our backs and personal freedoms to reign. Or perhaps, like me, you want to be able to expand your consciousness and get high as a kite. Whatever your reason, please raise your voice in support of legalization. We’re at a tipping point—and the rest of the nation is watching. E For more Higher Ground, visit higher groundtv. com. BRIANNA CASHIN

was recently asked to participate on a panel that was part of a charity auction for a local nonprofit. The organizer was excited to have me involved, but wanted to make sure I didn’t mention my work in the cannabis community as “it wouldn’t go over well with our patrons.” While I agreed to avoid any wild diatribes about legalization, I did think the request was a bit ironic, given that there was an open bar and they were auctioning a wine trip to Walla Walla as a grand prize. I’ve been “out of the cannabis closet” for decades, and have always taken a great deal of pride in being the obvious stoner—the guy everyone knew would show up to the party with a joint or three on hand. In the “old days” of prohibition (circa 2011), we had to hide our ditch weed in the closet and smoke in side alleys and basements. Today I can proudly display my elegant glassetched water pipe and cedar stash box on the coffee table, just as the Mad Men generation showed off the Art Deco tumblers and wood-engrained bars of their era. With legality, then, should come public acceptance and innovation. Brainiac Jason Silva (host of National Geographic’s Brain Games) talks about cannabis in relation to Timothy Leary’s concept of “set and setting”: “You start eliminating the association with criminality and the paranoia and the fear of getting caught, and instead you create a canvas where people can smoke a joint before going to a boutique movie theater to have a very increased cinematic immersion. Or you can create spaces where people can maybe vaporize some cannabis before going and listening to a symphony orchestra. Or maybe they can go on these beautiful, sort of guided marijuana hikes, where the set and setting would be curated for a particular marijuana flavor.” While I’ve been advocating for stoned symphony nights, vaporizer bars and marijuana dinners for cannabis connoisseurs, each and every legal state is making it damn near impossible to use the stuff in a social setting. Public consumption—in bars, parks, public spaces, hotels, or restaurants—is currently not allowed in any of the states that have legalized it. (Oregon just passed a law banning the few cannabis cafes that were in existence, while the Alaskans, God bless ’em, are fighting to allow consumption at recreational stores.) Community events involving cannabis are also forbidden: Ya can’t smoke weed at music festivals, marijuana conferences (even at the High Times Cannabis Cup), cannabis “tastings,” or Bud and Breadfasts. If it’s legal, we should be able to use it in safe and social settings. While four states have now legalized

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BIG D TOWING Abandoned Vehicle Auction Wednesday 01/06/16 @ 11AM. 3 Vehicles Preview 10-11am. 1540 Leary Way NW, Seattle 98107

GUITAR LESSONS Exp’d, Patient Teacher. BFA/MM Brian Oates (206) 434-1942

Stan’s Mountain View Towing Inc Abandoned Vehicle Auction 9000 Delridge Way SW, Seattle WA Wednesday 12/30/15 Gates Open 9AM, Auction 12 PM 206-767-4848

Greenlake/WestSeattle $550 & up (1st/last/deposit) Utilities included! busline, some with private bathrooms • Please call Anna between 10am & 8pm • 206-790-5342

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Nunn Better Tax Resolution LLC, Redmond, WA

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(253) 882-0882

W E E K LY

Plant. Prune. Weed. Bark. Mow. Debris Removal. Call Geoff for fall cleanup

206-854-1794

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AMANA RANGE Deluxe 30” Glasstop Range self clean, auto clock & timer ExtraLarge oven & storage *UNDER WARRANTY* Over $800. new. Pay off balance of $193 or make payments of $14 per month. Credit Dept. 206-244-6966

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just $9 per line per week (or less if running long term) Contact 206-623-6231 classifieds@seattleweekly.com

REPO REFRIGERATOR Custom deluxe 22 cu. ft. sideby-side, ice & water disp., color panels available

UNDER WARRANTY!

was over $1200 new, now only payoff bal. of $473 or make pmts of only $15 per mo. Credit Dept. 206-244-6966

STACK LAUNDRY Deluxe front loading washer & dryer. Energy efficient, 8 cycles. Like new condition * Under Warranty * Over $1,200 new, now only $578 or make payments of $25 per month

%206-244-6966% Employment Services WANTS TO purchase minerals and other oil & gas interests. Send details to P.O. Box 13557, Denver, Co 80201

D I N I NG DINING NEWSLETTER The inside scoop on openings, hotspots and offers.

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Classified Ads in

NEW APPLIANCES UP TO 70% OFF All Manufacturer Small Ding’s, Dents, Scratches and Factory Imperfections *Under Warranty* For Inquiries, Call or Visit Appliance Distributors @ 14639 Tukwila Intl. Blvd. 206-244-6966

Appliances

You Could Save Thousands On Any Amount You Currently Owe The IRS

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KENMORE REPO Heavy duty washer & dryer, deluxe, large cap. w/normal, perm-press & gentle cycles. * Under Warranty! * Balance left owing $272 or make payments of $25. Call credit dept. 206-244-6966

Announcements

13811 HIGHWAY 99 LYNNWOOD WA 98087 425-743-6183

MASSEUSE NEEDED

interior light *UNDER WARRANTY* Make $15 monthly payments or pay off balance of $293. Credit Dept. 206-244-6966

WA Misc. Rentals Rooms for Rent

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CASTING CALL: Hot “real” northwest guys +18 y.o. wanted for adult video/photo work. www.XYRAW.com

KENMORE FREEZER

Repo Sears deluxe 20cu.ft. freezer 4 fast freeze shelves, defrost drain,

Home Services Lawn/Garden Service

Henning Gardening

Appliances

W E E K LY

Employment Computer/Technology

BUSINESS Razorfish LLC seeks candidates for the following position in Seattle, WA: Principal Business Analyst (Job ID 201520638) Bachelor’s or foreign equivalent degree in Business, e-Commerce, Graphic Design or rel field + 2 yrs exp. req’d. Alt. req. 3 yrs post-secondary education + 3 yrs exp. Roving employee – requires travel up to 100% with work to be performed at various undetermined worksites throughout the U.S. Telecommuting permitted. To apply, go to https:// jobs-razorfishtechnology platforms.icims.com/jobs; and refer to Job ID. EOE. Principals only.

FEIVL EMN T S

Medical Technologist Interpath Laboratory, Inc. seeks a Medical Technologist in Seattle, WA. Must have B.S. in Clinical Lab Sci/Lab Medicine +1 yr exp+ASCP Medical Technologist Cert. Reply by mail: Interpath Laboratory, Inc., 2460 SW Perkins Ave, Pendleton, OR 97801, Attn: HR

Employment General

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ECO ELEMENTS METAPHYSICAL BOOKS & GIFTS Part Time Position Immediate Associate Needed Must Be Experienced in Retail Sales and Metaphysics Drop off resume in person & book list to: 1530 1st Ave

Employment General

Multi-Media Advertising Consultant Puget Sound Region, WA Do you have a proven track record of success in sales and enjoy managing your own territory? Are you competitive and thrive in an energetic environment? Do you desire to work for a company that offers uncapped earning opportunities? Are you interested in a fast paced, creative atmosphere where you can use your sales expertise to provide consultative print and digital solutions? If you answered YES then you need to join the largest community news organization in Washington. The Daily Herald/La Raza is looking for a candidate who is selfmotivated, results-driven, and interested in a multi-media sales career. This position will be responsible for print and digital advertising sales to an exciting group of clients from Bellingham to Tacoma. The successful candidate will be engaging and goal oriented, with good organizational skills and will have the ability to grow and maintain strong business relationships through consultative sales and excellent customer service. Every day will be a new adventure! You can be an integral part of our top-notch sales team; helping local business partners succeed in their in print or online branding, marketing and advertising strategies. Professional sales experience necessary; media experience is a definite asset but not mandatory. If you have these skills, and enjoy playing a pro-active part in helping your clients achieve business success, please email your resume and cover letter to: hreast@soundpublishing.com ATTN: LARAZA in the subject line. We offer a competitive compensation (Base plus Commission) and benefits package including health insurance, paid time off (vacation, sick, and holidays), and 401K (currently with an employer match.) Sound Publishing is an Equal Opportunity Employee (EOE) and strongly supports diversity in the workplace. Visit our website to learn more about us! www.soundpublishing.com

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P R HO AMPOPTYI OHNOSU R

Tree Professionals Wanted Looking for Experienced Climber to performing Residential Tree Trimming, Pruning & Removal work. Full Time- Year Round, No Layoffs Day rate DOE, Incentives, Medical & Voluntary Dental Must have climbing gear, vehicle & DL Email work experience to recruiting@treeservicesnw.com 1-800-684-8733 ext. 3434

A R T S A N D E N T E R TA I N M E N T Order Generator Work for the Northwest’s Largest Tree Preservation Service. No Experience Necessary. Must enjoy working with people and being outdoors Set Your Own Schedule. Paid Orientation, Marketing Materials & Company Apparel Provided • $500-$750/ Week Average, Top Reps earn $1000+ • Daily Travel & Monthly Cell Phone Allowance Available • Group Medical & Voluntary Dental Plan Avail Email resume to recruiting@evergreentlc.com 1-800-684-8733 ext. 3434

Employment Career Services THE OCEAN Corp. 10840 Rockley Road, Houston, Texas 77099. Train for a new career. *Underwater Welder. Commercial Diver. *NDT/Weld Inspector. Job Placement Assistance. Financial Aid avail for those who qualify 1.800.321.0298

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Classified

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Temporary, Temporary-to-Hire & Direct Hire Do you have administrative experience? We place:

Had a traumatic event? Drinking more than you want?

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Debris Removal • 206-784-0313 • Credit Cards Accepted!

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 23, 2015–JANUARY 5, 2016

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