WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1
SIFF
The princess (Nagisa Shirai) slumbers in Snow White.
SIFF
Rabe paddles her way into paradise in Letters From the Big Man.
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Johan Primero 7 p.m., Everett
Ritual is at the heart of Johan Primero, a routine but enjoyable rom-com written and directed by a German named Johan (last name: Kramer) about a Spanish soccer fan also named Johan (José Luis Adserías, a dead-ringer for an older, chubbier Jonah Hill) who's obsessed with routine. Movie Johan believes that the 50 laps he drives around the stadium of legendary FC Barcelona, his favorite squad (duh), are responsible for its success. Why he believes this is complicated and divorced from logic, but has to do with the death of his father, who now sits shotgun in an urn. Johan's daily habit brings him into contact with his espresso-serving best friend, a park-bench-sitting, Zen-koan-spouting sage; and, as required by the bylaws of all Judd Apatow man-child movies, eventually a sympathetic pixie (this one has an eyepatch!), whose introduction augurs the movie's central question: Now that he's found a woman willing to put up with him, will Johan still put futbol (and ritual) first? CALEB HANNAN (Also: Admiral, 9 p.m. Mon., June 6.)
The Last Mountain 7 p.m., Pacific Place
A grueling barrage of geologic plunder, union busting, sociopathic official indifference (hey, why not put a toxic-sludge lake next to an elementary school?), and worse, this environmental exposé confirms every awful suspicion ever raised about the coal industry. Trouble is, the news is so bad and so plentiful that The Last Mountain may have you looking for the nearest exit (or a razor blade) instead of a way to register your outrage. Director Bill Haney approaches the subject from the perspective of a small West Virginia community, where a handful of citizens takes a stand against Massey Energy—currently in the news for a damning federal report on last year's mining explosion victims—to save a local peak from the monstrously thorough process called "mountain removal mining." It all begins to play like a campaign film once activist Robert Kennedy Jr. joins the fight, but scenes of him sparring with double-talking Big Coal flunkies provide relief from visits to cancer-decimated towns and the frequent, stats-heavy, PSA-style intertitles. The staggering disregard for life on display here is eye-opening and infuriating, and Haney juxtaposes it effectively with scenes of Appalachia's lush countryside and homegrown protests. But before an encouraging wind-power segment arrives in its last reel, Mountain threatens to become a desensitizing loop of the corporate ethos—grab everything you can until somebody makes you stop—writ large. MARK HOLCOMB (Also: 4 p.m. Thurs., June 2.)
Blinding9 p.m., SIFF Cinema
Is it possible to make a movie about blindness? It's a monumental, paradoxical challenge to visually depict sightlessness, but Canadian filmmaker Steve Sanguedolce takes a stab with this documentary about "the beauty and curse of vision." The movie explores the lives and psyches of three real people—a writer who slowly lost his vision starting at the age of 18; a lesbian police officer from Toronto; and a pilot from the Canadian Air Force who served in Rwanda and Bosnia—using Errol Morris-style reenactments and stock footage. Sanguedolce painstakingly hand-colored each frame of the 16mm film, giving it a damaged, distorted aesthetic. The three subjects, meanwhile, remain faceless behind the camera, recounting in mostly monotone voices the most traumatic events of their lives, such as the time the cop discovered an abandoned newborn frozen to the pavement in a puddle of afterbirth in the Canadian winter (a sight no one would wish to recall). Unfortunately, after sitting through the mercifully brief 72-minute film, viewers may well wish they were both blind and deaf. KEEGAN HAMILTON (Also: 4:30 p.m. Fri., June 3.)
THURSDAY , JUNE 2
[PICK] Snow White 4 p.m., Neptune
We don't think of Gustav Mahler, with his immense, all-embracing symphonies, as a dance composer. But Angelin Preljocaj set his 2008 ballet Blanche Neige to beautifully chosen excerpts from the composer's opulent, hyperdramatic scores, then filmed it. The result is ravishing beyond description. Don't think Disney; in this dark and haunting version, Snow is exiled, but followed by her Prince Charming, whom she meets early on, and falls in with a sybaritic, lotus-eating troupe of pond-dwelling quasi-naiads before she meets the seven miners (who dance not on the floor but against a rear wall, suspended by cables) and eats the apple. Her story ends happily, but the evil queen gets the first and last word: embittered in the chilling opening, in which her child is taken from her, and punished gruesomely in the denouement. Preljocaj's choreography looks, to these dance-untutored eyes, marvelously fresh and inventive on a step-by-step basis, and it's matched stunningly to the score (recordings by several top conductors and orchestras). If you have the slightest interest in dance, please don't miss it. GAVIN BORCHERT (Also: 6:30 p.m. Sun., June 5.)
Killing Bono 6:30 p.m., Neptune
Yes, that Bono, the Irish schoolboy who, with his mates in the late '70s, formed a band that eventually became U2. Also in school with him was aspiring rocker Neil McCormick, whose musical path eventually fizzled to much less acclaim. Now his 2004 memoir of their divergent careers, set mostly in the '80s, has been very loosely adapted into a seriocomic tale of brotherly rivalry within a band and celebrity stalking outside it. The first part, an amiable style survey of all that was wonderful/ridiculous about the English music scene in the Thatcher era, works much better than the second, which flirts with Mark David Chapman-John Lennon territory. Since McCormick later got Bono to pen the introduction to his memoir, and collaborated with him on a separate U2 book, the singer is treated pretty generously—though in few scenes (played by Martin McCann). The selfish and generally bungling side of musical ambition we see in Neil (Chronicles of Narnia pretty boy Ben Barnes, conveying both charisma and arrogance), who seems determined to destroy his brother Ivan's life as well. These two Irish lads borrow money from a gangster to fund their quest for a record deal in London, where they encounter all manner of colorfully comic and devious characters. Killing Bono is lightweight, nostalgic fun. And, obviously, no one gets killed. BRIAN MILLER (Also: 1:30 p.m. Sun., June 5; and Admiral, 9:15 p.m. Weds., June 8.)
