Author: Sean Gilman

Friday November 10 – Thursday November 16

~ Sean Gilman

Featured Film:

120 Beats per Minute at the AMC Seattle and Faces Places at the SIFF Film Center

Two of the very best movies of 2017 open this week on single screens in Seattle. Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats per Minute (BPM) is the story of the Paris branch of ACT UP during the early 90s, an expert melding of suspenseful political filmmaking with personal romance and tragedy. Faces Places, by venerable New Wave icon Agnès Varda and ambiguous photographer JR is the year’s best best buddy comedy and probably the nicest movie of the year too, as the two travel around France making large pictures of the people they meet. It’s also the 2017 movie most likely to make you want to punch Jean-Luc Godard in the nose. Taken together, these two French films make a compelling argument that European Cinema is not, in fact, dead. On the other hand, Palme d’Or winner The Square opens too this week at the Uptown and the Lincoln Square.

Playing This Week:

AMC Alderwood:

Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes) Fri-Thurs Our Review

Ark Lodge Cinemas:

This is Spinal Tap (Marty DiBergi, 1984) Sat Only Our Review

Central Cinema:

Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) Fri, Sat & Mon

SIFF Egyptian:

Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig) Fri-Thurs Our Review

Century Federal Way:

Sardar Mohammad (Harry Bhatti) Fri-Thurs
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) Sun & Weds Only Our Review

Grand Cinema:

The Florida Project (Sean Baker) Fri-Thurs Our Review Our Other Review
Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman) Fri-Thurs
Jane (Brett Morgen) Fri-Thurs
78/52 (Alexandre O. Philippe) Sat Only
Boston (Jon Dunham) Tues Only
The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) Weds Only
Demain (Cyril Dion & Melanie Laurent) Thurs Only

Grand Illusion Cinema:

Blade of the Immortal (Takashi Miike) Fri-Mon, Weds-Thurs
Mansfield 66/67 (Todd Hughes & P. David Ebersole) Fri-Thurs
Alternative Views (John Behrens, 2014) Tues Only

Cinemark Lincoln Square:

Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig) Fri-Thurs Our Review
Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes) Fri-Thurs Our Review
Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman) Fri-Thurs
The Square (Ruben Östlund) Fri-Thurs
Golmaal Again!!! (Rohit Shetty) Fri-Thurs
Secret Superstar (Advait Chandan) Fri-Thurs
PSV Garuda Vega 126.18M (Praveen Sattaru) Fri-Thurs
Qarib Qarib Single (Tanuja Chandra) Fri-Thurs
C/O Surya (Suseenthiran) Fri-Thurs
Ittefaq (Abhay Chopra) Fri-Thurs
Dayavittu Gamanisi (Rohit Padaki) Sun Only
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) Sun & Weds Only Our Review

Regal Meridian:

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos) Fri-Thurs Our Review
Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes) Fri-Thurs Our Review
Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman) Fri-Thurs
My Friend Dahmer (Marc Meyers) Fri-Thurs

Northwest Film Forum:

Don’t Break Down: A Film about Jawbreaker (Keith Schieron & Tim Irwin) Fri Only Bassist in Attendance
Signature Move (Jennifer Reeder) Fri & Sat Only
Brimstone & Glory (Viktor Jakovleski) Sat & Thurs Only
Kékszakállú (Gastón Solnicki) Sun Only
Almost Sunrise (Michael Collins) Sun Only
Moving History – Sound & Color Sun Only
Time to Die (Arturo Ripstein, 1966) Weds & Thurs Only
Short Night of Glass Dolls (Aldo Lado, 1971) Weds Only

Regal Parkway Plaza:

Qarib Qarib Single (Tanuja Chandra) Fri-Thurs
Seven Sundays (Cathy Garcia-Molina) Fri-Thurs

AMC Seattle:

BPM (120 Beats per Minute) (Robin Campillo) Fri-Thurs Our Review Our Other Review
The Florida Project (Sean Baker) Fri-Thurs Our Review Our Other Review
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos) Fri-Thurs Our Review

Seattle Art Museum:

The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925) Weds Only Our Podcast
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962) Thurs Only

SIFF Film Center:

Faces Places (Agnès Varda & JR) Fri-Thurs Our Review

Regal Thornton Place:

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) Sun & Weds Only Our Review

SIFF Uptown:

Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman) Fri-Thurs
The Florida Project (Sean Baker) Fri-Thurs Our Review Our Other Review
The Square (Ruben Östlund) Fri-Thurs
Cinema Italian Style 2017 Fri-Thurs Full Program

Varsity Theatre:

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) Weds Only Our Review
The Truth About Lies (Phil Allocco, 2015) Weds Only

In Wide Release:

Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve) Our Review

Daguerrotype (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2016)

~ Sean Gilman ~ 1 Comment

le-secret-de-la-chambre-noire

Halloween may have passed but it’s always a good time to watch a creepy movie by a great director, and that exactly what Daguerrotype, by Kiyoshi Kurosawa is. The artiest of the filmmakers to emerge in the J-Horror boom of the late 90s, or at least the one most likely to win awards at Cannes, Kurosawa’s formal precision and methodical rhythms have earned him comparisons to the usual suspects (Kubrick, Tarkovsky), and films like Cure and Pulse are indeed a far cry from the free-wheeling genre hysterics of Takashi Miike and Sion Sono. This isn’t his latest film (that would be Before We Vanish, which premiered this year, at Cannes), but rather the one that premiered last year, at Cannes, around the same time his other 2016 film, Creepy, was playing here at SIFF. It’s not getting a local release here in Seattle, but will be available on-demand starting on November 7.

Daguerrotype finds the director working in France, in French and with an all European cast (the French title, Le secret de la chambre noir gives a much better sense of the film’s eerie vibe). Tahar Rahim plays a young man who gets a job assisting a photographer (Dardennes regular Olivier Gourmet) at his suburban mansion (or “old house with some land”). The photographer uses 19th century equipment and techniques to create life-sized and disturbingly like-like photographs of his daughter (Constance Rousseau), which require dressing her in old dresses and locking her into place using a terrifying brace so that she can remain totally immobilized for the inordinately long exposure times the daguerrotype process requires (they start at an hour and get longer as the film goes along). He previously used the process on his wife, now deceased and possibly haunting the house. The young man falls in love with the daughter, who wants to be a gardener, and so a real estate scam begins. The movie is essentially a film noir, except instead of Lana Turner seducing a working class guy into murdering her husband, it’s a ghost (or two) doing the seducing. Call it “The Ghost-man Always Rings Twice”.

But, like any film noir or horror film, to reduce it to its plot is to highlight its essential absurdity. Daguerrotype is far more mysterious an object than that, a black hole of a movie that sucks you in with the gravity of its deliberate movements, then revels in the terror that is the absence of explanation. Possible interpretations of the facts of the film abound (perhaps too many), but mostly it seems to come down to an act of revenge against the impulse to freeze things in time place, to stop the gradual process of change, both men ultimately driven by an obsolete patriarchal desire to lock women down, as wives, daughters, lovers, subjects. The entropic destruction of the father is inverted in the panicked scheming of the worker, both leading to their inevitable and not especially surprising doom. But perhaps most upsetting is that there’s no satisfaction to be found in this revenge, no cathartic joy at the destruction of an immoral system. The ghosts seem to be just as scared as we are.

Friday November 3 – Thursday November 9

~ Sean Gilman

Featured Film:

Wonderstruck in Limited Release

On its surface, Todd Haynes’s latest appears to have little in common with prior works by the director of Carol, I’m Not There, Safe and Far From Heaven. But his adaptation of an illustrated novel by Hugo author Brian Selznick, about a deaf boy and a deaf girl, separated by 50 years who run away to New York’s Natural History museum epitomizes a lot of what makes me uneasy about his work, while also being a very satisfying family adventure film. Ryan and I talked about it across several emails over the past week, which you can read here.

Playing This Week:

AMC Alderwood:

Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes) Fri-Thurs Our Review

Central Cinema:

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) Fri-Mon
Clue (Jonathan Lynn, 1985) Fri-Mon

SIFF Egyptian:

The Florida Project (Sean Baker) Fri-Weds Our Review Our Other Review

Century Federal Way:

Sardar Mohammad (Harry Bhatti) Fri-Thurs

Grand Cinema:

The Florida Project (Sean Baker) Fri-Thurs Our Review Our Other Review
Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman) Fri-Thurs
Goodbye Christopher Robin (Simon Curtis) Fri-Thurs
Okja (Bong Joonho) Sat Only
Sidemen: Long Road to Glory (Scott D. Rosenbaum) Tues Only

Grand Illusion Cinema:

Blade of the Immortal (Takashi Miike) Fri-Thurs

Cinemark Lincoln Square:

The Florida Project (Sean Baker) Fri-Thurs Our Review Our Other Review
Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes) Fri-Thurs Our Review
Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman) Fri-Thurs
Golmaal Again!!! (Rohit Shetty) Fri-Thurs
Secret Superstar (Advait Chandan) Fri-Thurs
PSV Garuda Vega 126.18M (Praveen Sattaru) Fri-Thurs
Next Nuvve (Prabhakar) Fri-Thurs
Ittefaq (Abhay Chopra) Fri-Thurs
Faster Fene (Aditya Sarpotdar) Sat & Sun Only

Regal Meridian:

Golmaal Again!!! (Rohit Shetty) Fri-Thurs
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos) Fri-Thurs Our Review
Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes) Fri-Thurs Our Review
Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman) Fri-Thurs
Tragedy Girls (Tyler MacIntyre) Fri-Thurs
A Silent Voice (Naoko Yamada) Tues & Weds Only

Northwest Film Forum:

Spettacolo (Jeff Malmberg & Chris Shellen) Fri & Weds Only
The Divine Order (Petra Biondina Volpe) Sat-Mon Only
The Resistance Saga Parts 1-3 (Pamela Yates, 1983, 2011, 2017) Sat Only Director & Producer in Attendance
Chavela (Catherine Gund & Daresha Kyi) Weds & Thurs Only
All the Rage (Michael Galinsky, Suki Hawley & David Beilinson) Weds & Thurs Only
Death Laid an Egg (Giulio Questi, 1968) Weds Only
Don’t Break Down: A Film about Jawbreaker (Keith Schieron & Tim Irwin) Thurs & Fri Only Bassist in Attendance
Gilbert (Neil Berkeley) Thurs Only

Paramount Theatre:

The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927) Mon Only Live Score

Regal Parkway Plaza:

Golmaal Again!!! (Rohit Shetty) Fri-Thurs
Seven Sundays (Cathy Garcia-Molina) Fri-Thurs

AMC Seattle:

The Florida Project (Sean Baker) Fri-Thurs Our Review Our Other Review
Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes) Fri-Thurs Our Review
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos) Fri-Thurs Our Review

Seattle Art Museum:

Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953) Thurs Only

SIFF Film Center:

2017 Seattle Turkish Film Festival Fri-Sun Full Program 
Mozart’s Sister (René Féret, 2010) Weds Only
Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future (Peter Rosen) Thurs Only

Regal Thornton Place:

A Silent Voice (Naoko Yamada) Tues & Weds Only

SIFF Uptown:

Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman) Fri-Thurs
God’s Own Country (Francis Lee) Fri-Thurs
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos) Fri-Thurs Our Review

In Wide Release:

Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve) Our Review

Dead or Alive (Takashi Miike, 1999)

~ Sean Gilman ~ 1 Comment

doa-opening

No filmmaker in the world has more fun that Takashi Miike. That’s evident from a late career masterpiece like 2012’s Ace Attorney, or from the last of the prolific director’s films to play here in Seattle, Yakuza Apocalypse. But even going back to 1999’s Dead or Alive, playing one night only Thursday at the Grand Illusion, you find that streak of absurd humor and perversity electrifying even the grimmest of bloody gangster sagas. The movie opens with a music video of destruction, rapidly cutting between locations as nameless gangsters live their good lives (prostitutes and strippers, cocaine and ramen) only to be cut down by a coordinated assault by ruthless assassins. The killers turn out to be a gang of immigrants from Taiwan led by Ryūichi, a pompadoured man in black, who are trying to instigate a gang fight between the local yakuza and Japanese Triads and take control of the heroin importation racket. On their trail is a reasonably honest cop named Jojima, who comes complete with a wife who’s endlessly worried about their ability to pay for a life-saving operation for their sullen teenage daughter. The plot careens wildly from one generic scene to another, enlivened at every turn by Miike’s eye for over-the-top grotesquerie, manic framing, and apocalyptic greens and yellows (not to mention random dudes in giant bird costumes). Sidelong glances at political relevance (a barely attended lecture on the future of communism in the post-Soviet era, the social pressures that allow an underground economy (and thus the gang warfare that goes with it) to flourish) are smash cut with the most appalling violence and cruelty, daring theory to account for our demented world. In the end, even genre itself cannot contain the depravity and contradictions at the heart of the cop/gangster drama, from The Big Heat to Battles without Honor and Humanity, the lunatic cycles of violence escalate beyond all reason, and cop and gangster burning the world and all to red dust.

Vampir-Cuadecuc (Pere Portabella, 1971)

~ Sean Gilman ~ 1 Comment

cuadecuc2

In 1970, Jesús Franco made Count Dracula, a vampire movie starring Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski and Herbert Lom. It was a mostly faithful telling of Bram Stoker’s story: a naive and handsome man travels to Transylvania to conduct a real estate deal with an aged Count, becomes trapped and escapes back to England just as the Count arrives and begins sucking the blood of a young woman, who happens to be the best friend of the young man’s fiancée. Led by a scientist named Van Helsing, the young man and three other men figure out what the Count is, kill the woman who has herself been turned into a vampire and then go back to Transylvania to kill the Count. Franco was a director of notorious reputation, one who frequented the low-budget, pornier corners of European cinema for most of the 160+ films he directed. Count Dracula is the only one of his movies I’ve seen, and it isn’t terrible, but neither is it particularly good: Lee is terrific, as always, and there are some nice atmospheric moments. But the movie progressively becomes dumber as it goes along, either straying from Stoker’s original or cutting out the connective tissue that in the novel help the characters’ actions make some kind of sense. By far the best thing about the movie, though, is that Catalan experimental filmmaker Pere Portabella was there to chronicle its making.

Far from a conventional behind-the-scenes documentary, however, Vampir-Cuadecuc is more like a stealth remake of the same movie, using not only the same actors, but the same takes. It’s shot entirely in black-and-white, with a creepy soundtrack composed almost entirely of drones and ambient noises (passing trains or airplanes, workers hammering away): the world as it might sound from inside a coffin. The black-and-white is grainy and high contrast, with brilliant whites and deep blacks, bringing an eerie edge to scenes that in the conventionally flat-lit, color photography of the original are bland and somnolent.

The film follows the chronology of the original almost exactly, cutting out some of the more useless parts (including the entirety of Kinski’s one-note performance as the lunatic Renfield), filming the scenes as they are being filmed, but from unintended angles, such that we see the lights or cameras or behind the stage walls. Similarly we see the actors before and after their performances, getting into and out of character or simply walking around the set looking beautiful (Soledad Miranda lights up the screen in a way she just can’t as the zombified Lucy in the Franco film), often accompanied by jaunty elevator music. At the most basic level, the difference in quality between Franco and Portabella’s films can be seen in the fact that (in the version I saw, there are different cuts) Franco’s runs a seemingly endless 96 minutes, where Vampir-Cuadecuc is a very nice 69 minutes long.

By removing all of the dialogue and stripping out the extraneous plotting, Portabella captures the fundamental anxiety of horror cinema, spooky sounds and images that harken all the way back to Murnau’s Nosferatu and Dreyer’s Vampyr. The only spoken words come at the end, with Lee reading from Stoker’s book itself, a far better conclusion than Franco’s limp and silly climax. It’s the stripped down, elemental adaptation of Stoker’s text counterpart to Francis Ford Coppola’s blown-up, operatic version. Taken together, there’s no reason for anyone to ever make another Dracula movie.

Friday October 27 – Thursday November 2

~ Sean Gilman

Featured Film:

Halloween Week at the Grand Illusion

No theatre in town has more fun come Halloween season than the Grand Illusion. Their second week of oddball grindhouse rarities and bona fide classics continues this week with an eclectic mix of cult favorites and obscurities, playing on everything from actual 35mm film (The Hidden and a mystery triple-feature program called “Nature Gone Amok” and Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste) to VHS (Terror on the Menu) to digital (Ganja & Hess, Effects, Otto; Or, Up With Dead People). The highlight is probably the new digital restoration of Mario Bava’s Kill Baby Kill, playing Saturday and Sunday, which if nothing else should whet your appetite for the Northwest Film Forum’s Giallo series, which also kicks off this week with Bava’s Blood and Black Lace on Wednesday). The week wraps up with another must-see, Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive, leading-in to their opening of Miike’s latest film, Blade of the Immortal, next Friday.

Playing This Week:

AMC Alderwood:

The Fortress (Hwang Dong-hyuk) Fri-Thurs
Goodbye Christopher Robin (Simon Curtis) Fri-Thurs

Central Cinema:

Army of Darkness (Sam Raimi, 1992) Fri-Tues
Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993) Fri-Tues

SIFF Egyptian:

The Florida Project (Sean Baker) Fri-Weds Our Review Our Other Review

Century Federal Way:

Bhalwan Singh (Param Shiv) Fri-Thurs
The Fortress (Hwang Dong-hyuk) Fri-Thurs
Secret Superstar (Advait Chandan) Fri-Thurs
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) Sun, Mon & Weds Only Subtitled Mon Only

Grand Cinema:

Lucky (John Carroll Lynch) Fri-Thurs
Goodbye Christopher Robin (Simon Curtis) Fri-Thurs
Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) Sat Only
Garbage Warrior (Oliver Hodge, 2008) Thurs Only

Grand Illusion Cinema:

Effects (Dusty Nelson, 1980) Fri Only
The Hidden (Jack Sholder, 1987) Fri Only 35mm
Kill Baby Kill (Mario Bava, 1966) Sat & Sun Only
Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973) Sat & Mon Only
Terror on the Menu (Bud Townsend, 1972) Sat Only VHS
Nature Gone Amok 35mm Triple Feature Pizza Party Sun Only 35mm
Otto; Or, Up With Dead People (Bruce LaBruce, 2008) Mon Only
Bad Taste (Peter Jackson, 1987) Tues Only 35mm
Dead or Alive (Takashi Miike, 1999) Thurs Only

Cinemark Lincoln Square:

The Florida Project (Sean Baker) Fri-Thurs Our Review Our Other Review
Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman) Fri-Thurs
Golmaal Again!!! (Rohit Shetty) Fri-Thurs
Secret Superstar (Advait Chandan) Fri-Thurs
Goodbye Christopher Robin (Simon Curtis) Fri-Thurs
Mersal (Atlee Kumar) Fri-Thurs
Vunnadi Okate Zindagi (Kishore Tirumala) Fri-Thurs
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) Sun, Mon & Weds Only Subtitled Mon Only
Little Shop of Horrors (Frank Oz, 1986) Sun & Tues Only

Regal Meridian:

Golmaal Again!!! (Rohit Shetty) Fri-Thurs
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos) Fri-Thurs Our Review
The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993) Fri-Thurs
Goodbye Christopher Robin (Simon Curtis) Fri-Thurs
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) Sun, Mon & Weds Only

Northwest Film Forum:

Rat Film (Theo Anthony) Fri-Sun
Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) Fri Only Live Soundtrack
Out of State (Ciara Lacy) Sat Only
Therapy for a Vampire (David Rühm, 2014) Sat Only
Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band (Carol Bash, 2015) Sun Only
Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava, 1964) Weds Only
Vampir-Cuadecuc (Pere Portabella, 1971) Thurs Only
Mama Africa (Mika Kaurismäki, 2011) Thurs Only

Regal Parkway Plaza:

Golmaal Again!!! (Rohit Shetty) Fri-Thurs
Wind River (Taylor Sheridan) Fri-Thurs Our Review
Seven Sundays (Cathy Garcia-Molina) Fri-Thurs

AMC Seattle:

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos) Fri-Thurs Our Review
Human Flow (Ai Weiwei) Fri-Thurs
The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (Various) Fri-Thurs
Goodbye Christopher Robin (Simon Curtis) Fri-Thurs

Seattle Art Museum:

The Naked Alibi (Jerry Hopper, 1954) Thurs Only

SIFF Film Center:

25th Seattle Polish Film Festival Sat-Sun Full Program

Regal Thornton Place:

The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993) Fri-Thurs
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) Sun, Mon & Weds Only

SIFF Uptown:

Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman) Fri-Thurs
Lucky (John Carroll Lynch) Fri-Thurs No Shows Tuesday
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos) Fri-Thurs Our Review
The King’s Choice (Erik Poppe) Fri-Thurs
Kedi (Ceyda Torun) Sun Only National Cat Day

Varsity Theatre:

Leatherface (Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury) Fri-Thurs
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) Mon Only Subtitled

In Wide Release:

Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve) Our Review

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017)

~ Sean Gilman ~ 1 Comment

the-killing-of-a-sacred-deer-1200x520

This is the first movie I’ve seen from celebrated Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, and it’ll likely be the last. A bearded Colin Farrell plays a surgeon whose patient dies during an operation. The patient’s son (Barry Keoghan, super creepy) first tries to get Farrell to hook up with his mother (Alicia Silverstone, sad and sadly underutilized) to take the dead father’s place, but when that doesn’t work out, begins supernaturally torturing his family in an attempt to force Farrell to choose which one of his two kids should die as compensation for the boy’s dead father. It’s an adaptation of the story of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon who is commanded to be sacrificed after her father kills a deer beloved of the goddess Artemis. But in adapting the story into the bleak world of Euro-art house cruelty, Lanthimos drains the story of its humanity and its tragedy, leaving instead a deeply cynical, and exceedingly dumb, black comedy. Farrell and Nicole Kidman, playing his wife, speak and relate with an affectless precision, which is funny and weird when playing up their bizarre oversharing at parties or depressing bedroom antics, but serves no other apparent purpose. A satire of bourgeois zombiism dressed up with a classical education. Lacking belief in either the cause or the tragedy of Iphigenia’s sacrifice, all that’s left is a cheap mockery of humanity. An adaptation of myth from the point of view not of the people who strive and suffer, but through the eyes of an imperious god, tormenting foolish, hubristic mortal souls. A film almost wholly lacking empathy.

Friday October 20 – Thursday October 26

~ Sean Gilman

Featured Film:

The Florida Project at the SIFF Egyptian and the Lincoln Square

Normally I’d use this space to highlight the Northwest Film Forums presentation of an unearthed, uncut 35mm print of Dario Argento’s classic horror film Suspiria, with star Jessica Harper in attendance. But they’re playing it one night only and both shows have been sold out for weeks. So if, like me, you’re shut out of the movie event of the fall, you should go see what is quite probably the best American film of 2017 so far, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. We like it so much, we reviewed it twice in a single day. Here’s Ryan’s take on it and here’s mine.

Playing This Week:

AMC Alderwood:

The Fortress (Hwang Dong-hyuk) Fri-Thurs
The Bachelors (Kurt Voelker) Fri-Thurs

Ark Lodge Cinemas:

Death Bed: The Bed that Eats (George Barry, 1977) Thurs Only

Central Cinema:

Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946) Fri-Mon   Our Review
The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012) Fri-Mon
The Nightmare Emporium (Various) Tues Only

SIFF Egyptian:

The Florida Project (Sean Baker) Fri-Weds Our Review Our Other Review

Century Federal Way:

The Fortress (Hwang Dong-hyuk) Fri-Thurs
Secret Superstar (Advait Chandan) Fri-Thurs
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) Sun & Weds Only

Grand Cinema:

Lucky (John Carroll Lynch) Fri-Thurs
The Last Dalai Lama? (Mickey Lemle) Fri-Thurs
Dolores (Peter Bratt) Fri-Thurs
Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974) Sat Only
The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) Sat Only
California Typewriter (Doug Nichol) Tues Only
Turn It Around: The Story Of East Bay Punk (Corbett Reford) Thurs Only
The Road to Nickelsville (Derek Armstrong McNeill) Thurs Only

Grand Illusion Cinema:

The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932) Fri, Sat, Mon & Weds
The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015) Fri-Thurs Our Review
Rawhead Rex (George Pavlou, 1986) Sat & Thurs Only
2nd Annual Scarecrow Video Weirdo Horror Triple Feature Sun Only VHS
Damsels of Doom: Horror B-Movie Double Feature Tues Only 16mm

Cinemark Lincoln Square:

The Florida Project (Sean Baker) Fri-Thurs Our Review Our Other Review
Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman) Fri-Thurs
Golmaal Again!!! (Rohit Shetty) Fri-Thurs
Secret Superstar (Advait Chandan) Fri-Thurs
Goodbye Christopher Robin (Simon Curtis) Fri-Thurs
Mersal (Atlee Kumar) Fri-Thurs
Raja the Great (Anil Ravipudi) Fri-Thurs
Tokyo Ghoul (Kentarô Hagiwara) Sat Only
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) Sun & Weds Only

Regal Meridian:

Golmaal Again!!! (Rohit Shetty) Fri-Thurs
Wind River (Taylor Sheridan) Fri-Thurs Our Review
Mother! (Darren Aronofsky) Fri-Thurs Our Review

Northwest Film Forum:

4 Days in France (Jérôme Reybaud) Fri-Thurs
King of Jazz (John Murray Anderson, 1930) Sun Only
Rat Film (Theo Anthony) Starts Weds
Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) Thurs Only Jessica Harper in Attendance Sold Out

AMC Pacific Place:

Never Say Die (Yang Song & Chiyu Zhang) Fri-Thurs

Regal Parkway Plaza:

Golmaal Again!!! (Rohit Shetty) Fri-Thurs
Wind River (Taylor Sheridan) Fri-Thurs Our Review

AMC Seattle:

Dina (Antonio Santini & Dan Sickles) Fri-Thurs
The Departure (Lana Wilson) Fri-Thurs

Seattle Art Museum:

Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947) Thurs Only

SIFF Film Center:

Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968) Fri-Sun

SIFF Uptown:

Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman) Fri-Thurs
Lucky (John Carroll Lynch) Fri-Thurs
Seattle Polish Film Festival Fri-Sun Full Program
Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) Fri, Mon & Tues Only
Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968) Mon & Tues Only
The Fall (Tarsem Singh, 2006) Weds Only

Varsity Theatre:

Jungle (Greg McLean) Fri-Thurs
Walking Out (Andrew J. Smith & Alex Smith) Fri-Thurs
Leatherface (Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury) Fri-Thurs

In Wide Release:

Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve) Our Review

The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017)

~ Sean Gilman ~ 1 Comment

Florida-Project-NYTimes

Tangerine director Sean Baker returns to Seattle Screens this week with another tale of life on the margins of 21st century capitalism. Set entirely around the vicinity of the cheerfully purple Magic Castle motel, a semiurban wasteland of hotels, abandoned houses and oversized promotional mascots bordering the unapproachable dream of Disney World, Baker takes for his heroes a small group of children, led by Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), an amoral, loudmouth innocent trying to entertain herself over summer break. The first half of the film mostly follows her adventures with the neighbor kids in the motel (begging for change to buy ice cream, playing hide and seek in the motel office, exploring empty houses and what passes for countryside amid Orlando’s sprawl). The second half focuses more on Moonee’s mother, just as loud, but more amoral, as she resorts to increasingly inappropriate ways of earning the weekly rent cash. Uniting it all is the weary presence of Willem Dafoe, motel manager, a good man trying to do his job with compassion and honor.

Like Tangerine, Baker films with a sun-dappled luminosity that’s all but anathema in the European art house tradition of films about poverty. Being poor isn’t supposed to look nice, or fun, and the easiest way to convey that is with a drab grunginess. The Florida Project rejects that approach, but also the kind of somber mysticism that makes things like Beasts of the Southern Wild* or George Washington palatable for a mass audience. His models instead go back further, to the Depression: Hal Roach and the Little Rascals are thanked in the credits, and the influence of those stories of kids being poor but nonetheless being kids is clear. I was reminded as well of Frank Borzage’s classic No Greater Glory, about unsupervised children recreating the martial ideologies and conflicts of their parents’ generation, with tragic consequences. The kids in The Florida Project aren’t playing war games, but are instead learning their parents’ approaches to failing in capitalism: acting out against things, not people – they vandalize objects of wealth, a car, a house. One of their first acts of terror is literally turning off power. Poverty in The Florida Project never looks fun, it looks brutal and crushingly sad (the unseen face of the boy forced to give away all his toys because they don’t fit in his father’s car when they’re moving away). But it’s still sunny in Florida, and there is ice cream and cows and maple syrup to be found.

*Spoiler Ahead*

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The Frances Farmer Show #15: VIFF 2017 Recap

~ Sean Gilman

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We talk about many of the movies we saw at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Films discussed include: Maison du bonheur, Milla, Caniba, 24 Frames, Claire’s Camera, The Square, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the Future//Present program (Fail to Appear, Mass for Shut-Ins, Still Night Still Light, Prototype, Black Cop, Scaffold, Forest Movie), Faces Places, Top of the Lake: China Girl, 120 Beats per Minute, Bad Genius, Wonderstruck, The Florida Project, and SPL: Paradox.

You can listen to the show by downloading it directly, or by subscribing on iTunes or the podcast player of your choice.