Local & Repertory
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Cry-Baby What was Johnny Depp like back in 1990 before he became an Oscar-nominated pirate genius? Possibly still a genius? John Waters uses the young thespian, then transitioning out of 21 Jump Street, to fine effect in this send-up of ’50s juvenile delinquency pictures. Ricki Lake, Iggy Pop, Troy Donahue, Polly Bergen, and ex-porno starlet Traci Lords lend to the fun and music. The tone is affectionate camp, not strident screeching. Depp pokes fun at his Tiger Beat teen-idol image, but nobody’s dumping on the films—then and now—that made such melodramatic eye-candy of the troubled-hormone set. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $7-$9. 7 p.m. Fri.-Sat. (also 3 p.m. Sat. matinee) & 7 p.m. Mon.-Tues.
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Growing Up Baumbach Opening April 10, Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young features Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as 40-something filmmakers who become besotted with an energetic married couple (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried). The ending doesn’t quite achieve its desired effect, but it’s a brisk, smart comedy of marital dissatisfaction you’ll definitely want to see. And as in Greenberg, Stiller is excellent at channeling Baumbach’s brand of self-sabotaging male characters. (R)
SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff.net. $5. 7 p.m. Weds.
Noir de France Is there anyone in Touchez Pas au Grisbi Jean Gabin does not slap? In one of my favorite scenes during this influential but frankly rather dull 1954 French gangster flick, he open-hands his girlfriend, her double-dealing fellow chorine (who happens to be Jeanne Moreau, so we really feel the sting), and a hotel concierge cowering behind some folded linen. I’ve done no research into the matter, but I’m pretty sure that when the take was over, Gabin walked behind the camera to slap the director and several grips as well. It’s that kind of movie. You’re so intent on finding the pleasure and worth to its creaky Gallic gangster archetypes that you imagine better things occurring offscreen and in scenes unseen. The plot is just as simple as a slap. Max (Gabin) and his partner, Riton, are sitting on 200 pounds of stolen gold; his partner’s coke-sniffing moll (Moreau) tips that info to a gang of thugs, who then kidnap Riton to force one of those hostage-for-suitcase swaps that today take place in empty California parking garages. Fortunately, Grisbi is set in Paris, and we do glimpse the real Moulin Rouge and other black-and-white sights among arrondissments laced with narrow cobblestone streets. (NR) B.R.M. Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $63–$68 series, $8 individual. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through May 21.
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SLeeper Woody Allen’s 1973 sci-fi comedy is still pretty damn hilarious, however ragged the assembly of jokes. Somehow the giant banana-peel gag never gets old. (PG-13)
Central Cinema, $7-$9. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Weds.
Zombeavers College kids are attacked by zombie beavers. What more do you need to know? (NR)
SIFF Cinema Egyptian, 801 E. Pine St., 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. 11:55 p.m. Fri. & Sat.
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Event Yadda. (NR)
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Event Yadda. (NR)
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Event Yadda. (NR)
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Ongoing
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Birdman A movie star in a career skid since he stopped playing a masked superhero named Birdman back in the ’90s, Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) is preparing his big comeback in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver stories, funded and directed by himself. Obstacles abound: Riggan’s co-star (Andrea Riseborough) announces she’s pregnant with his child; his grown daughter (Emma Stone) is his assistant, and not his biggest fan; a critic plans to destroy the play. And, in the movie’s funniest headache, Riggan must endure a popular but insufferable stage actor (Edward Norton, doing a wonderful self-parody) who’s involved with the play’s other actress (Naomi Watts). This is all going on while Riggan maintains a tenuous hold on his own sanity—he hears Birdman’s voice in his head, for one thing. To create Riggan’s world, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Gravity cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki present the film as a continuous unbroken shot (disguised with artful digital seams). Birdman serves so many heady moments it qualifies as a bona fide happening. It has a few stumbles, but the result is truly fun to watch. (R) R.H. Varsity TK
Chappie Though hugely anticipated, the new sci-fi movie from Neill Blomkamp (of District 9 and Elysium) turns out to be hugely unwieldy, if not quite a flop. Again filming in a gritty, near-futuristic Johannesburg, Blomkamp and his co-writer (and wife) Terri Tatchell have concocted an R-rated fairy tale of sorts. There’s too much crime, bad language, and shooting for kids who otherwise might appreciate how the artificially intelligent robot Chappie (created by Dev Patel’s programmer) swiftly undergoes an innocence-to-experience process of maturation not unlike their own. The movie works best and most sweetly in its crypto-parenting scenes, with the overprotective Patel pitted against the larcenous Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser (from the hip-hop duo Die Antwoord). Chappie’s hard-wired to do no harm, per Asimov’s Three Rules of Robotics, but he’s also tempted—teenage rebellion soon arrives—by the thug life. The rest of the plot is a mess, a stripped-bolt fusion of Frankenstein, RoboCop, and A.I. Blomkamp and Tatchell crib from many sources, but they can’t have it both ways. The corporate intrigue about commercialized crime fighting—cue Sigourney Weaver and Hugh Jackman—demands a grown-up treatment, satire advanced beyond the Brothers Grimm. Chappie himself eventually becomes a genius savant incapable of original thought, a fitting mascot for the movie. (R) B.R.M. Cinerama, TK Pacific Place, Thornton Place, Kirkland, Lincoln Square, Pacific Science Center, others
Cinderella When the mood strikes me, I also can be swept up in watching two beautiful people fall in love. And beautiful they are: Game of Thrones’ Richard Madden as Prince Charming (in some very flattering tight pants) and Downton Abbey’s Lily James as the demure and free-spirited Ella, who wears butterflies in her hair because that’s just her brand of Manic Pixie Dream Girl. (Let’s also here bestow the praising-hands emoji upon James’ eyebrows, the boldness of which is unprecedented by any other Disney princess.) The familiar plot has been gently tweaked. Prior to the fateful ball, Ella now meets Prince Charming in the forest, where he claims to be a humble apprentice working at the palace. Ella’s also been given more agency. Unlike most adaptations of the Perrault folk tale, this Ella is hardly embarrassed by her low station. She soon adopts a strong take-me-as-I-am attitude, surely designed to appeal to girls raised on Frozen. After being christened “Cinderella” by her evil stepmother (Cate Blanchett) and stepsisters, she chooses to reclaim the demeaning nickname and make it her own. Is that the best message for how to respond to bullying? Perhaps not the worst. (PG) DIANA M. LE Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Varsity, others
Focus Will Smith is all arrogant confidence as Nicky, the veteran con artist who runs his jobs like a coach fielding a champion team. Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street) is working-class grifter Jess, the minor-league talent who proves to be a natural as the distraction, if not star player, of Nicky’s squad. Filmmaking team Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who wrote Bad Santa and directed Crazy Stupid Love, seed the script with clues and suggestions and comic relief to keep us looking in the wrong direction, manufacturing one kind of drama while surreptitiously playing out another. It’s kind of fun as those things go, at least until the con is dropped. Without their carefully cultivated pose in place, Smith and Robbie have nothing to fall back on, and are left to bicker like idiots. It would be clever if that were the point, but it’s merely a failure of imagination. (R) SEAN AXMAKER Sundance, Ark Lodge, Admiral, Bainbridge, Lincoln Square, Kirkland, others
Get Hard This raunchy ebony-and-ivory buddy comedy is essentially a long riff on the terror of becoming another man’s prison bitch. Or, even more horrifying, a white man becoming a black man’s. Except for when it’s also a riff on black stereotypes. Financier James (Will Ferrell) is framed for fraud and embezzlement, and has 30 days before slammer-time. He’s so terrified of becoming someone’s bitch that he hires the only black guy he knows, his building’s car-wash guy, Darnell (Kevin Hart), to teach him to survive behind bars. Setting aside any consideration of taste—or the concept of taste—Get Hard is marginally funny with a handful of solid laughs, and it goes limp in the final act. Along with such hilarity as Darnell telling James that if he can’t fight, he’s going to have to practice sucking dick, there are a few clever satirical moments that’ll be lost on, say, northern Idaho audiences. (R) MARK RAHNER Sundance, TK…
The Gunman Sean Penn and Taken maestro Pierre Morel have updated a 1981 French novel to our present age of African strife: mercenaries and aid workers mixing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, conflict minerals, covert assassinations, and—after an eight-year surfing safari from that dirty game—a U.S. congressional subpoena that pulls shirtless Jim Terrier (Penn) back in. You know the rest: Jim’s mad killing skills are wrenched back into service; the baddies nab the only woman he ever loved (no, not Madonna); and we hear weary professions of disgust at the whole sordid business (mercenary-dom, not movies). Though The Gunman does offer one genre twist: Jim’s a TBI concussion case, brain-addled almost to the point of Still Alice, who must write everything down in notebooks. Through London, Barcelona, and Gibraltar, Penn serviceably kills dozens of flak-jacketed rejects from the Bourne movies’ Operation Treadstone. Everything here is routine, though there’s a bit of pleasure in watching supporting players Javier Bardem, Ray Winstone, and Mark Rylance tick off scenes before their characters’ inevitable demise. Since Liam Neeson has announced his looming retirement from AARP action movies, Penn and his bulging, hairless pecs are well positioned to take his place. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, Meridian, Thornton Place, Lincoln Square, Bainbridge, others
Insurgent
Insurgent picks up three days after the end Divergent, with teenage Tris (Shailene Woodley), Four (Theo James), and Caleb (Ansel Elgort) on the run from Jeanine (Kate Winslet) and her goons. So far, so good: We came to see some action. However, Insurgent soon falls into the typical second-movie slump so common to trilogies. (Though four movies are actually being made from Veronica Roth’s three novels.) The fun to 2014’s Divergent came from the introduction of a whole new futuristic world, and in seeing misfit Tris blossom and get to know her new faction. Now, after the death of her parents and a friend, Tris is understandably troubled—but her nightmares weigh heavily on us, too. Insurgent feels exhausted by its latter half; even the ever-energetic Woodley seems a little depleted. Early in Insurgent, Tris cuts her hair short, without any thought to whether or not her boyfriend will like it. Because she doesn’t draw her strength or beauty from his approval, I dug Shailene’s no-makeup, androgynous look—believable for fugitive life. Tris also loses her virginity in a no-nonsense manner, another small touch of realism in this dystopia. (PG-13) D.M.L. Sundance, Big Picture, Meridian, Cinerama, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, others
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It Follows David Robert Mitchell’s suburban thriller creates constant anxiety. The premise itself is simple, if faintly absurd. A teenager, Jay (Maika Monroe, excellent in The Guest), sleeps with her handsome new crush; he then informs her that she is now the target of a relentless, shape-shifting ghoul, which will pursue her to death. Her only escape is to have sex with someone else, who will then become the target. Mitchell canny about using the camera to evoke mystery. Every time someone drifts into the background of a shot, we have to wonder: Is that just a random passerby, or is that, you know, “It”? There’s also a wild musical score by Disasterpeace that provides an aggressive—at times maybe too aggressive—accompaniment to the film’s eerie mood. If the use of teen sex as a horror convention seems tired, rest assured that Mitchell seems less interested in a morality play than in sketching the in-between world of suburban adolescence. (R) R.H. SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Lincoln Square
Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter The setup here might promise routine road comedy: A sad and lonely Japanese woman, who somehow believes the 1996 Coen brothers movie Fargo is a documentary, ventures from Japan to the frozen Midwest to find the cash Steve Buscemi buried in the featureless snow. Yet filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner have no interest in obvious gags. Half their movie is scene-setting in Tokyo, where dejected office drone Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, from Babel) is a Eleanor Rigby-like loner. More than shyness or defeat, an ever-widening distance separates her from the world beyond her imagination. Kindly strangers, including a widowed Minnesota farm wife and a sympathetic cop (David Zellner), barely register. Unseen in Seattle, the Zellners’ prior two features, Kid-Thing and Goliath, also dealt with alienated loners. The well-crafted Kumiko can likewise be seen as a character study; though, like her supposed treasure, it’s not certain if that character actually exists. A stubborn obstinacy lies at Kumiko’s core, but also delusion—and possibly mental illness. (NR) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown
Merchants of Doubt Based on the 2010 book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, this doc lays out a convincing, follow-the-money trail from the tobacco industry’s postwar efforts to prevent (or forestall) government regulation to a profitable lobbying specialty today. Fake scientific experts and “teach the controversy” subterfuge have now infiltrated all public-policy debates where billions are at stake. Harvard historian Oreskes, prominent in the film, helps advance the thesis that PR consultants perfected a strategy of obfuscation and delay (“There is no consensus”) during our government’s decades-long war against Big Tobacco. After those battles, a professional class of liars found eager new clients in the oil, chemical, and food industries. Merchants of Doubt is about D.C.’s permanent lobbying establishment and those false-front organizations always espousing individual liberty and responsibility. Constrained by fact, it’s not so entertaining as Thank You for Smoking, and most of its points are well familiar. And the consultants are winning. They’ve successfully tapped into a tribal belief system that trumps empirical evidence. “It’s all about distraction,” says Oreskes. (PG-13) B.R.M. TK Meridian, Sundance
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel The plot devices in this sequel are so stale that the movie itself loses interest in them halfway through its dawdling 122 minutes—and this is a good thing. By that time the contrivances of Ol Parker’s script have done their duty, and we can get to the element that turned the film’s 2011 predecessor into a surprise hit: hanging around with a group of witty old pros in a pleasant location. There are many worse reasons for enjoying movies. Director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) mostly allows Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Celia Imrie, and Penelope Wilton to float around on many years’ worth of accrued goodwill. (New to the expat ensemble is Richard Gere.) Especially fine is the spindly Bill Nighy, whose shy Douglas is a hesitant suitor to Dench’s Evelyn, a still-active buyer of fabrics. Even when the story has him fulfilling sitcom ideas, Nighy maintains his tottering dignity and sense of fun. Second Best will be a hit with its original audience, and maybe then some. The languid mood is laced with an appreciation for getting to the End of Things, especially as Smith’s formerly snappish Muriel mellows into a melancholy leave-taking. (PG) R.H. Sundance, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Kirkland, others
Selma A lot of Selma is good, and a lot of it is dutiful lesson-telling. But even when it feels like civics class, Selma benefits from its timing: Coming at the tail-end of 2014, a truly rotten year for race in America, the film’s depictions of protest marches and boiled-over tensions can’t help but create ripples of excitement in a movie theater. Director Ava DuVernay keeps her focus on the events surrounding the march to Selma, when the horrifying violence of Alabama law enforcement against black protesters—televised in a newly immediate way—helped turn public opinion toward the idea of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This very American story has a curiously Brit-dominated cast, including David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Carmen Ejogo as his wife Coretta. The casting is not a huge issue, although anybody with direct memories of the larger-than-life presences of LBJ and Alabama governor George Wallace can be forgiven for finding Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth (respectively) insufficiently vulgar in the roles. Cameos by the likes of Oprah Winfrey (as a victim of the ludicrously unfair methods of keeping African-Americans away from the voting booth) and Cuba Gooding, Jr., carry an unfortunate TV-movie guest-star air about them, although one understands the value of getting marquee players in a relatively low-budget project. (PG-13) R.H. Crest
Song of the Sea Dazzling in its visual presentation, though not so thrilling in its conventional storytelling, the Irish-animated Song features a plot is drawn from Celtic folklore, specifically the tradition of the selkie, those mythological shapeshifters who can live on land or sea, as humans or seals. Our hero is Ben (voiced by David Rawle), a young lad whose mother vanishes under dramatic circumstances the night his mute younger sister Saoirse is born. They live on a wee shard of an island with their mournful father (Brendan Gleeson), a red-bearded lighthouse-keeper, but a series of marvelous events lead Ben into a secret world of magical creatures and spell-spinning songs. Director Tomm Moore lets the movie’s forward momentum run aground at various moments, but he and the Cartoon Saloon crew seem more interested in creating the gorgeous vistas that occupy virtually every frame. The character designs follow circular, looping patterns, and the visual influences seem inspired by anime and the line drawings of 1950s-era UPA cartoons (Mr. Magoo is not forgotten, people). (PG) R.H. Crest
The Theory of Everything The Stephen Hawking biopic opens with our hero (Les Miz star Eddie Redmayne) as a young nerd at university, where his geeky manner doesn’t entirely derail his ability to woo future wife Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones). Hawking is diagnosed with motor neuron disease at age 21 and given a two-year prognosis for survival—one of the film’s sharpest ideas is to allow time to pass, and pass, without pointing out that Hawking is demolishing the expectations for someone with his condition. James Marsh’s movie is officially adapted from (now ex-wife) Jane Hawking’s memoir, so the love story has its share of ups and downs. This is where Theory manages to distinguish itself from the usual Oscar bait. Whether dealing with Jane’s closeness to a widowed choirmaster (who becomes part of the Hawking family), or Stephen’s chemistry with his speech therapist, the film catches a frank, worldly view of the way things happen sometimes. No special villains here—you might say it’s just the way the universe unfolds. Redmayne’s performance is a fine piece of physical acting, and does suggest some of the playfulness in Hawking’s personality. From now until Oscar night, you will not be able to get away from it. (PG-13) R.H. Crest
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What We Do in the Shadows The premise is ’90s-stale: basically MTV’s The Real World cast with vampires, presented as direct-address documentary. This droll comedy comes from the brain trust behind 2007’s Eagle Vs. Shark: Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) and Taika Waititi, who play neck-biters Vladislav and Viago, respectively. Our three main vamps are a hapless lot. They can’t get invited into any of the good clubs or discos—ending up forlorn in an all-night Chinese diner instead. After all the aestheticized languor of Only Lovers Left Alive (and the earnest teen soap opera of Twilight), the silly deadpan tone is quite welcome. Clement and Waititi know this is a sketch writ large (forget about plot), so they never pause long between sneaky gags. The amsuing and essential conflict here is between age-old vampire traditions and today’s hook-up customs. These neck-biters have been at it so long that they’re only imitating old vampire stereotypes. Things have gotten to the point, Vladislav admits, where they’re even cribbing from The Lost Boys. (NR) B.R.M. Sundance, SIFF Cinema Egyptian
Wild Though I have reservations about the fulsome emotional blasts of director Jean-Marc Vallee (like his Dallas Buyers Club), and though the adaptation by Nick Hornby (About a Boy, An Education) leans rather too hard on the death of bestselling memoirist Cheryl Strayed’s mother (played by Laura Dern), this is a movie that—like its solitary hiker heroine—cannot be stopped. Reese Witherspoon’s ironclad casting makes matters even more inevitable. Here is a woman who bottoms out—with men, drugs, and grief—then straightens out while hiking 1,100 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail from California to Oregon, even without disavowing all her past actions. Wild is essentially a memory trip, presented non-sequentially, as Cheryl plods north. Various men figure in her past (including a brother), but none memorably. In the movie’s second half, more maudlin than its smart start, Wild is all about mommy. Yet don’t mistake Wild for an easy, conventional healing narrative (though healing does of course come at the end). Rather, it’s more a coming-to-terms account. Or as our heroine puts it, “Problems don’t stay problems. They turn into something else”—in this case a book and surefire hit movie. (R) B.R.M. Crest
Wild Tales The opening sequence to Damian Szifron’s Argentine anthology movie sets up a Twilight Zone-style series of revelations, compressed into just a few minutes. Passengers riding on a suspiciously underfilled plane begin to realize that there might be a reason for their presence there, beyond the obvious business of getting to a destination. Szifron wants to get his movie started with a bang, and he does—though the rest of Wild Tales doesn’t live up to the wicked curtain-raiser. But there are enough moments of irony and ingenuity to make it worthwhile. In one episode, a lone driver has a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, which allows the slowpoke he antagonized earlier to stop by and exact revenge. In another, an explosives expert becomes enraged by a parking ticket—rage that leads him to lose everything. But there’s a twist. A lot of these segments rely on a twist, a technique that doesn’t quite disguise how in-your-face the lessons are. The twists also can’t disguise the way some of the tales rely on illogical behavior to allow their plots to develop. Wild Tales is a showy exercise (you can see why Pedro Almodovar signed on as a producer), and Szifron has undoubtedly punched his ticket for bigger and better things. (R) R.H. Guild 45th
