Sam Rockwell dancing, Anna Kendrick snarking and twinkling—what’s not to like? Mr. Right leans hard on the considerable charm of its leads and the skill of its supporting cast (most notably the excellent Tim Roth and the very funny newcomer Katie Nehra), and while it too often feels formulaic and forced, it’s still good fun. Continue reading “Mr. Right (Paco Cabezas, 2015)”
Playing for the next two weeks at the SIFF Uptown is Russian director Alexander Sokurov’s look at The Louvre, a companion piece to what remains his most well-known film in this country, 2002’s Russian Ark. That film, shot in an elaborate and still impressive single-take, weaved through The Hermitage, the museum in St. Petersburg, crossing seamlessly through Russia’s past and present, a guided tour of the fluidity of culture and the ways art, and our collections of art, keep the past alive into the future. Francofonia is no less thematically ambitious, though the single-take approach is abandoned in favor of more conventional shifts between documentary-style glides through the galleries, dramatic recreations, and meta making-of looks at those recreations. The film is framed with a film director (Sokurov himself) in the editing stage of the movie we’re watching, attempting to talk to a ship’s captain caught in a storm at sea (Captain Dirk, seriously). The ship is apparently transporting precious works of art, an extension of the final image of Russian Ark, with the museum as a ship floating in seas of time. Captain Dirk has a bad Skype connection, so the director ruminates about the museum itself, covering, in somewhat random order, its founding as an anti-Viking fortress, its various expansions and decorations, its transformation into a museum filled with the spoils of imperialism and finally its modern state. Taking up the bulk of the film is the story of how the museum’s director (Jacques Jaujard) and the Nazi in charge of cultural artifacts (Franz Wolff-Metternich) kept the collection safe and out of Hitler’s hands during the Second World War.
In what is essentially a sequel to his greatest film, 1993’s Dazed and Confused, director Richard Linklater again sketches an ethnography of baseball-playing Texans in the Carter years. With in-coming freshman Jake (Blake Jenner), tall, broad of shoulder and square of jaw, the most all-American Jake there ever was, as our guide to the world surrounding the off-campus housing of the Southeast Texas University baseball team, the film begins hitting every known beat of the college film, taking cues especially from the juvenile romps of the late 70s and early 80s. The first of five days in the film introduces the team and establishes their various personalities and approaches to life, the end goals of which are universally baseball, woman and beer, and not necessarily in that order. Jake affably meets smooth-talking Finnegan (Glen Powell), somewhat dim Plummer (Temple Baker), henpecked farm boy Beuter (Will Brittain) and apparently insane Niles (Juston Street) among a host of other tall, healthy, reasonably handsome, hyper-competetive men. They spend their first night together drinking and dancing at a local disco and hooking up with a steady supply of casually available women. It’s exactly the kind of obnoxious fantasy of college life you’d imagine 18 year old athletes dream about. But rather than spend a whole film indulging this fantasy, Linklater expands and deepens his film, creating a film that is as much a dumb frat comedy as Dazed and Confused is a stoner comedy, which is to say not at all.
Continue reading “Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater, 2016)”
Major League Baseball returns this week. There is nothing like the arrival of a new season, timed to coincide with the inviting sunshine of spring, to fill one’s heart with hope and excitement. The helmets are shiny, not a disgusting buildup of pine tar on a single one. Heroes are about to be made. Arriving on cinema screens at the same time is director Richard Linklater’s new comedy Everybody Wants Some, a raunchy reminiscence of life among college baseball players in pre-AIDS 1980. It’s here to remind us that baseball players are rarely heroes. They’re usually just unfunny jerks, entitled and annoying. Thanks a lot, Dick. Continue reading “Everybody Wants Some (Richard Linklater, 2016)”
The latest Chinese import to grace Seattle Screens, now playing at the Regal Meridian, is an absurdist thriller about trio of friends who own a failing underground restaurant and who accidentally tunnel into a nearby bank vault. After a tense prologue that recalls any number of Hong Kong gangster thrillers, men in black wearing Journey to the West masks arrive at a bank during a torrential downpour. The getaway driver has a tense run-in with a traffic cop, leading to panic in the bank as the robbers are soon surrounded and desperate for a way out. The camera tracks into the vault and discovers a hole in the ground, leading us down through a cave and into the restaurant, and back in time to the events leading up to the standoff. We’re told that the city of Chongqing (alternately “Chungking”), in southwestern China, is famous for its hot pot restaurants, and that lately people have been adapting the city’s network of caves and bomb shelters into trendy eating locales. Three old school friends have done just that, but the business is failing and they’re rapidly trying to unload it. To jack up their asking price, they try to extend the tunnel themselves, and that’s how they get into the bank. The bulk of the film revolves around their schemes to fix the hole without anyone finding out what they’ve done, while avoiding the temptation to steal the money.
With the First Folio in town at the Seattle Public Library, we take a look at a couple of unusual Shakespeare adaptations. First is Peter Greenaway’s 1991 adaptation of The Tempest, Prospero’s Books, with John Gielgud and Mark Rylance. Then we discuss Matías Piñeiro’s 2014 riff on Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Princess of France. We also pick our Essential Shakespeare films, look around at what’s coming soon to Seattle Screens, and discuss the 1946 film Dirty Gertie from Harlem USA, directed by Spencer Williams and playing as part of the Pioneers of African-American Cinema here in town and touring around the country.
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Hard to think of a better way to celebrate the 12th anniversary of the current iteration of the U-District’s venerable Grand Illusion Cinema than with a 35mm print of Jean Cocteau’s classic 1946 fairy tale. Decades ahead of its time in the integration of the surreal and avant-garde into popular filmmaking, Cocteau’s adaptation of the story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont remains, 70 years after its release, a landmark in special effects. Among the greatest works of magic in film history, only scattered moments in movies by the likes of Georges Méliès, Ray Harryhausen and Tsui Hark can even dare to be considered in the same breath.
In Wide Release:
Seattle Screen Scene 
