Local & Repertory •  Casablanca SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 40. • 

Local & Repertory

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Casablanca SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 40.

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Days of Heaven SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 40.

differently, Molussia Director Nicolas Rey will attend the screening and explain how he came to make a nine-part adaptation of Gunther Anders’ The Molussian Catacomb. The novelist and philosopher wrote the book partly during exile, after being chased out Vienna by Hitler. And more, the political-philosophical allegory has its parts screened in random order. (NR)

Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 829-7863, nwfilmforum.org, $6-$10, Wed., Nov. 27, 7 p.m.

Filmage: The Story of Descendents/All Dave Grohl, Mike Watt, and others are among the sources in this new doc about the punk band The Descendents. (NR)

Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, $5-$10, Sat., Nov. 30, 3 p.m.

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In No Great Hurry Certain big names emerged among postwar American street photographers. Saul Leiter wasn’t one of them. He moved to New York in the mid-’40s, began shooting urban scenes in black-and-white, and transitioned in the ’50s to color—then considered the lowly province of Look and LIFE and fashion mags. No serious photographer would be caught dead shooting the stuff. Yet Leiter persisted, and Steidl’s 2008 publication of his Early Color suddenly put him in the pantheon with William Eggleston, Robert Frank, and Gary Winogrand. English filmmaker Tomas Leach became a fan (as did I), and he’s created an intimate documentary portrait of the now-90-year-old artist. The doc includes a generous selection of Leiter’s work, in which awnings, umbrellas, and women’s dresses become smears of color, often shot through damp windows and cropped in-frame by the city’s architecture and street furniture. But, in 13 chapters, what Leiter mainly does is discourse on his patient method. The son of a rabbi, Leiter invests his images with numinous mystery. What’s he trying to capture? The avuncular artist is vague to the point of Zen. “My photographs are meant to tickle your left ear,” he says, and leaves it at that. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Northwest Film Forum, $6–$10. Wed., Nov. 27, 7 & 9 p.m.

Savage Streets Linnea Quigley and Linda Blair are among the fading stars in this 1984 teenage revenge flick. (R)

Grand Illusion, $5-$8, Fri., Nov. 29, 11 p.m.; Sat., Nov. 30, 11 p.m.

Trashed What but a sense of shame about the trash each of us produces could account for the relief of disposing of it and the speed at which its memory evaporates? But our garbage never really goes away, as Jeremy Irons and director Candida Brady expend vigorous energy and much jet fuel to illustrate in the quietly livid Trashed. Irons’ high indignation provides a fine, Stradivarian accompaniment to his visits to a seething Lebanon landfill, several Scandinavia incineration plants, a rubbish-choked Indonesia river, and, most grotesquely, a hall of Agent Orange–warped fetuses aligned in giant pickling jars in Vietnam. The form is straightforward, if a little meandering, as is the message: We have to fix this. Discussion follows. (NR) MICHELLE ORANGE Keystone Congregational Church, 5019 Keystone Place N., 632-6021, keystoneseattle.org, Free, Fri., Nov. 29, 7 p.m.

Ongoing

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All Is Lost Playing an unnamed solo yachtsman shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean, the 77-year-old Robert Redford is truly like The Old Man and the Sea—a taciturn, uncomplaining hero in the Hemingway mold. Writer/director J.C. Chandor (Margin Call) withholds any personal information about our near-wordless hero, whose sloop is damaged by an errant floating shipping container, somehow lost during its journey from China to the U.S. His radio and electronics are flooded, so he calmly and methodically goes about patching his boat while storm clouds gather in the distance. Like Gravity and Captain Phillips, this is fundamentally a process drama: Character is revealed through action, not words. Here is a small man adrift, stripped of technology, surviving by his wits. Here, too, is Redford without any Hollywood trappings—no chance to smile or charm. And it’s a great performance, possibly his best. All Is Lost pushes backward to the primitive: from GPS technology to sextant to drifting raft. It’s a simple story, but so in a way was that of Odysseus: epic, stoic, and specific. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Bainbridge, Oak Tree, Meridian

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Blue Is the Warmest Color In Abdellatif Kechiche’s three-hour Cannes prize-winner, our main character is Adele, played by the splendid Adele Exarchopoulos. She begins as a high-school student and grows up during a half-dozen years, mostly involving her relationship with Emma (Lea Seydoux). Emma is a dashing figure, artsy and experienced, with upper-class parents and intellectual friends. It’s a lot to handle for Adele, who comes from humbler origins and really just wants to teach grade-school kids. As the bedroom scenes suggest, there is a strong physical connection here, but the movie is about much more than that—why any given love affair might thrive and/or founder. Blue’s length allows the sex scenes to take their proper role in Adele’s world: Their duration shows us how much they matter, but they don’t actually take up that much time when folded into the larger dish. Based on a recent graphic novel by Julie Maroh and on Pierre de Marivaux’s 18th-century novel La vie de Marianne), the film repeatedly raises the question of how difficult it is to understand another person. At first, Adele doesn’t know who she is yet. But her exit from the film’s strong final sequence suggests she is ready to slip the frames others have put around her—including the movie itself. (NC-17) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, Sundance

The Broken Circle Breakdown There’s something both melodramatic and archetypical about this affecting, unwieldy tearjerker, which originated as a musical stage show co-written by and also starring Johan Heldenbergh as Didier. The movie begins with a pure, frontal Carter Family blast of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” This isn’t realism, but something heightened by the music, like a church service. Here I’ll note that Heldenbergh does his own singing, most of the band is real, and the astonishing Veerle Baetens lends her real voice to Elise’s singing, too. An impetuous tattoo artist, Elise falls instantly for Didier, moves to his farm (he’s a Flemish “kuu-boy”), and soon joins his band. Baetens has sung in Belgian stage roles, and obviously studied hard to get that Partonesque twang in her voice. This is a band you would pay to see on tour. Director Felix van Groeningen has given a strenuously elliptical edit to the originally straightforward stage tale, also freighting it with camera effects. Since Didier and Elise’s story covers about a half-dozen years, packed with romance, music, and tragedy, the effect is a bit like Once—if that musical couple had stayed together for the long, difficult business of maintaining a marriage. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity

Captain Phillips Tom Hanks is hijacked and held hostage by Somali pirates, as actually happened to Richard Phillips in 2009, upon whose book this film is based. If you read that account or the newspapers, there’s nothing surprising here, though expert director Paul Greengrass—of the Bourne movies and United 93—adds as much tension as he can, chiefly through jittery cameras, screaming pirates, and the late-film addition of lethal Navy SEALs. But if I may jump to the end of the movie first: Greengrass and screenwriter Billy Ray do make the interesting decision not to treat that ending triumphantly. What we could not guess is that after more than two days of cool thinking, protecting his crew, calm negotiating, and even coaching his captors, Captain Phillips would finally lose his shit. Before that point, however, he flatters the chief pirate, Muse (Barkhad Abdi), by treating him as an equal. If not quite cogs, they’re bit players in the global nexus of commerce and power. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Varsity, Meridian, Thornton Place, others

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Dallas Buyers Club Making a straight white Texas homophobe the hero of a film about the ’80s AIDS crisis doesn’t seem right. It’s inappropriate, exceptional, possibly even crass. All those qualities are reflected in Matthew McConaughey’s ornery, emaciated portrayal of Ron Woodroof, a rodeo rider and rough liver who contracted HIV in 1985. Fond of strippers, regularly swigging from his pocket flask, doing lines of coke when he can afford them, betting on the bulls he rides, Ron has tons of Texas-sized character. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee, the unruly Dallas Buyers Club goes easy on the sinner-to-saint conversion story. McConaughey and the filmmakers know that once Ron gets religion, so to speak, their tale risks tedium. As Ron desperately bribes and steals a path to off-label meds, then drives to Mexico to smuggle them from a sympathetic hippie doctor (good to see you, Griffin Dunne), his allies and adversaries do read like fictional composites. There’s nice Dr. Saks (Jennifer Garner) and her profit-minded, drug-trial-chasing boss (Denis O’Hare), plus a friendly cop (Steve Zahn) and the transvestite who becomes Ron’s right-hand woman (Jared Leto). Rayon is also an addict, sicker than Ron, but they’re fellow gamblers who delight in beating the house. Dallas Buyers Club is ultimately more a caper movie than an AIDS story. There are better, more accurate films about the latter subject, but those are called documentaries. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, Sundance, Lincoln Square, Thornton Place

Enough Said Nothing much happens in a Nicole Holofcener film, and that’s OK. Ten years divorced, her daughter soon to leave for college, Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) wearily lugs her massage table from client to client, hearing their petty complaints without comment, seemingly resigned to a single woman’s slide toward menopause. The large, hairy obstacle in that path is Albert (James Gandolfini), also divorced with a college-bound daughter. Eva has a secret pipeline to confirm her doubts about him: Albert’s ex-wife Marianne (Catherine Keener) is one of her clients. Yet she continues to knead and befriend the cynical poet while allowing Marianne’s complaints to poison her relationship with Albert. In his last screen role, Gandolfini conveys a lumpy shyness and decency; his Albert is genuinely hurt by the fat-shaming of Eva’s yoga-toned cohort. For the women of Enough Said, too much candor has its risks, but remaining silent can bring disaster. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Pacific Place

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Gravity George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are stranded in orbit, menaced by regular bombardments of space debris. The oxygen is running out and there’s no prospect of rescue from Earth. Their dilemma is established in an astonishing 12-minute opening sequence, seamlessly rendered via CGI by director Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien). The camera occupies no fixed position. There is no up or down in the frame as it pushes and swoops among the wreckage and flailing astronauts. (Here let’s note that the 3-D version is essential; don’t even consider seeing the conventional rendering.) Dr. Stone (Bullock) at first can’t get her bearings; and the rest of the film consists of her navigating from one problem to the next. Stone scores her biggest laugh with an exasperated aside: “I hate space.” Thanks to Cuaron’s peerless directing work, we know just the feeling. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Lincoln Square, Thornton Place, Meridian, Sundance, others

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Nebraska Whether delusional, demented, or duped by a sweepstakes letter promising him $1 million, it really doesn’t matter about the motivations of Woody (the excellent and subdued Bruce Dern). What counts is the willpower of this cotton-haired, ex-alcoholic Montana geezer. His son David (Will Forte, surprisingly tender) becomes the enabler/Sancho Panza figure on their trek to Nebraska, where Woody expects to get his prize. There is a lifetime of regret and bad parenting to reveal in Alexander Payne’s black-white-movie, which makes it sound more bleak than it is. There’s both comedy and pathos as Woody makes his triumphant return to Hawthorne, en route to the sweepstakes office in Lincoln, Nebraska. Supposedly a prospective millionaire in his old hometown, he’s a big shot at last, grander than his bullying old business partner Ed (Stacy Keach). If the locals mistakenly gush over Woody’s good fortune, and if his own ridiculous family, the Grants, come begging for riches, he enjoys the acclaim. Also visiting Lincoln is Woody’s wife, the movie’s salty truth-teller. Kate (June Squibb, a hoot) cheerfully defames the dead, ridicules Woody’s lottery dreams, and gives zero fucks about offending anyone. Nebraska is a little slow for my taste but enormously rewarding in the end, one of the year’s best films. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th

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12 Years a Slave Made by English director Steve McQueen, this harrowing historical drama is based on a memoir by Solomon Northup (here played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free man from Saratoga, New York, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841. Solomon passes through the possession of a series of Southern plantation owners. One sensitive owner (Benedict Cumberbatch) gives Solomon—a musician by trade—a fiddle. Then he’s sold to the cruel cotton farmer Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), who also owns the furiously hard-working Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). Patsey, like Solomon, is caught inside the terror of not knowing how to play this hand. Do they keep their heads down and try to survive, or do they resist? This is no Amistad or Schindler’s List, tackling the big story, but a personal tale. Instead of taking on the history of the “peculiar institution,” the film narrows itself to a single story, Solomon’s daily routine, his few possessions. The film’s and-then-this-happened quality is appropriate for a memoir written in the stunned aftermath of a nightmare. Along the way, McQueen includes idyllic nature shots of Louisiana, as though to contrast that unspoiled world with what men have done in it. The contrast is lacerating. (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, Guild 45th, Kirkland Parkplace, Bainbridge, Lincoln Square, Ark Lodge, Meridian, Thornton Place, others