Tag: featured

Seattle Screen Valentine Scene

~ Sean Gilman

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Valentine’s Day hits Seattle screens weird this weekend, with off-kilter romances old and new taking over theatres all across the city. Here they are in alphabetical order:

The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, 2014) at SIFF Film Center: I haven’t seen this yet, but it was our friend Matt’s favorite movie of 2014. It’s an homage to the European softcore art-porn films of the 1970s. So I assume it’s pretty romantic with great music and some nifty dissolves.

Giant (George Stevens, 1956) at Cinemark theatres in Federal Way and Bellevue: James Dean makes a fortune in oil to impress Elizabeth Taylor, spends his super-wealthy life in misery when she still prefers Rock Hudson, apparently because she can’t understand a word Dean says because he’s always mumbling.

Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) at the Cinerama: Vivien Leigh’s feisty Southern Belle falls for the one man she can’t dominate (Clark Gable), submits to him (sort of), then sabotages their romance with all the incandescent fire of an orange only achievable in Technicolor.

Guys and Dolls (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1955) at the Cinerama: Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando gamble on whether or not Brando can sleep with Jean Simmons (or “take her to Cuba” as they say). He gets her drunk, they go to Cuba. Also there’s gambling. And music. And everyone talks funny.

Harold & Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971) at the SIFF Uptown: Suicidal teenager falls for batty old lady. A favorite of every girl I went to high school with.

It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) at Scarecrow Video: Paparrazzo Clark Gable stalks runaway heiress Claudette Colbert, destroys the undershirt industry with his daring chest.

Lady Snowblood (Toshiba Fujita, 1973) at Scarecrow Video: Meiko Kaji revenges herself on the people who raped her mother and killed her family. It is snowy and there is blood. Like all Valentine’s Days.

Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001) at the Central Cinema: Ewan McGregor invents the mashup and falls tragically in love with Nicole Kidman’s tubercular prostitute and then Kurt Cobain rolls over in his grave.

R100 (Hitoshi Matsumoto, 2013) at the Grand Illusion: Mike saw this movie and wrote about it. I assume the “R100” rating means it’s fun for all ages.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010) at the SIFF Uptown: A video game universe teaches bassist Michael Cera the key lesson about relationships: the other person is irrelevant, the important thing is to know that you are awesome.

Some Like it Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959) at the Cinerama: Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis dress in drag to escape mobsters. Curtis pretends to be Cary Grant to sleep with Marilyn Monroe. Lemmon hooks up with Joe E. Brown. Marilyn Monroe is pretty.

True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993) at the Central Cinema: Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette are so cool falling in love over a Sonny Chiba triple feature, coffee and pie. Then they travel across the country to make a fortune selling stolen cocaine. As we all do.

Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2014)

~ Sean Gilman

B6hV5dsCEAEGwAY Continuing this week at the SIFF Uptown is the latest from neo-realist Belgian masters Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Two Days, One Night, their first foray into movie-stardom thanks to an Oscar-nominated performance from Marion Cotillard (The Dardennes themselves have never been nominated for an Academy Award, though they have accomplished the rare feat of twice winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival). Cotillard plays a factory worker (solar panels) who has just recently and barely recovered from the suicidal depression that caused a prolonged work absence, thus proving to her bosses that the factory will run just fine without her. She’s been laid off because her co-workers were made to vote on whether they’d rather she continue to work or they get their annual bonus. It’s an absurdly blunt premise that the Dardennes, whatever its worth, remain firmly committed to with their meticulous direct-cinema style. After talking her way into a revote as the film begins, the bulk of the movie follows Cotillard visiting each of her coworkers in turn over the weekend to beg them to allow her to keep her job. The fact that the Dardennes manage to make such a didactic and schematic premise watchable at all is a credit to their skill, and a testament to the fine performances of their cast. Cotillard first and foremost is a stunner, her portrait of a woman desperately trying to keep it together on the brink of disaster is easily on par with her exceptional work in 2013’s The Immigrant, which she probably should have been Oscar-nominated for as well. The only other recognizable face in the film is the man who plays her husband, Fabrizio Rongione, who also played the architect in 2014’s La Sapienza (look for Eugène Green’s very fine film to get a US release in the coming months, hopefully it’ll make it to Seattle), but all the performances are wonderful, each new co-worker bringing a wonderfully individualized set of hang-ups, guilts and possibilities of hope.

Two Days, One Night plays Friday through Thursday at the Kirkland Parkplace Cinema.

Goodbye to Language 3D at the SIFF Cinema Uptown

~ Sean Gilman ~ 1 Comment

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The latest film from Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, 84-year old icon of the French New Wave (you know the hits: Breathless, Pierrot le fou, Contempt), after a smash-hit two-night run at the Cinerama earlier this month, gets a full run of shows this week at the Uptown. In keeping with the director’s late style, it’s a series of disjointed and overlapping ruminations and jokes, half-oblique narrative and half-essay film, shot in an experimental digital 3D that is guaranteed to slice out your eyeballs. Like a handful of other auteur projects (Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Wim Wenders’s Pina), Adieu au langage (I prefer the French title, if only because it’s riffed and punned on throughout the movie) makes the case for the potential of digital 3D to add something truly new and wondrous to the art form, rather than simply as a tool for ever more “spectacular” effects designed to lure teenagers to the multiplex. There’s a kind of a plot, about two couples, or one couple twice, but like most late Godard, it isn’t, for the most part, immediately comprehensible (Professor David Bordwell has helpfully elucidated on his website his reading of the plot and its structure, along with a lot of other insights gleaned over much research and several viewings). Yet despite the gnomic impenetrability, few 2014 films are more immediately pleasurable, more of an experience. Under the sheen of narrative games and puns and references both literary and cinematic, at the center of it all, is a dog, Roxy Miéville, wandering the countryside, beside a lake, through a woods, a natural world utterly transformed by the phantasmagoric possibilities of digital cinema.

(Goodbye to Language 3D plays digitally at SIFF Cinema Uptown 1/23-1/29)

James Stewart Movies at the Grand Illusion Cinema

~ Sean Gilman ~ 1 Comment

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After failing to win the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (he lost to Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, which is a very good performance in a fine film, but come on), James Stewart was rewarded by the Academy the very next year for The Philadelphia Story, in which he plays third lead to Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in George Cukor’s monumental screwball. He might better have won for Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, released earlier that same year, in which he co-starred with Margaret Sullavan as a pair of feuding store clerks who don’t know they’re pen pals in love. Both films are playing this week at the Grand Illusion, on 35mm (the GI continues to be the last great bastion of repertory-on-film in the Seattle area).

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