Local & Repertory
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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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Czech That Film Festival Six recent titles are screned in this weekend mini-fest. See siff.net for schedule and details. (NR)
SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff.net. $6-$11. Fri.-Sun.
For Laughing Out Loud This six-film series of American screen comedies begins with 1935’s Hand Across the Table. Here, Carole Lombard must choose between Ralph Bellamy (who’s rich) and Fred MacMurray (who’s poor). We’re betting on MacMurray. (NR)
Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $8 individual, $42-$45 series. 7:30 p.m. Thurs. Ends. Aug. 14.
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The Magnificent Andersons On Weds., July 9, we have the unexpectedly fine Tom Cruise in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 Magnolia. Next week are Wes Anderson’s enjoyably twee 2004 maritime adventure The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (Tues.) and PTA’s 2002 Punch-Drunk Love (Weds.), the last time Adam Sandler has been remotel bearable onscreen. (R)
SIFF Film Center, $6-$11. 7 p.m. Tues. & Weds.
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Movies at Magnuson Park This popular series begins with Grease. Gates open at 7 p.m. Movie at dusk. 1978’s most popular film cemented John Travolta’s movie superstardom, and gave Olivia Newton-John her only taste of it. And, make no mistake, Grease—despite the fact that everyone in the cast is obviously old enough to be running the P.T.A.—still looks like the stuff of which legends are made. When the T-Bird gang first calls out “Hey, Zuko!” and the camera zooms in to capture Travolta’s magnificent mug, you know you’re in the presence of a god. Zac Efron? As if. (PG-13)
Magnuson Park, 7400 Sand Point Way N.E., moviesatmagnuson.com. $5. 7 p.m.
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Pulp Fiction Yes, Pulp Fiction is 20 years old. How many motherfucking candles does it deserve on its motherfucking cake? As many motherfucking candles as Jules Winnfield wants, that’s how many. Such is the movie’s influence that, also owing to the prior Reservoir Dogs, a whole generation of moviegoers has been raised in what we now call the Post-Tarantino Era. As the director and Oscar-winning co-writer of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino influenced countless young filmmakers in ways both good and bad. Everyone wanted to make crime movies full of long, loopy, colorful speeches, using as much profanity as possible, attaching odd pop-culture digressions to the scaffolding of traditional movie plots. I won’t bore you with the long list of Tarantino wannabes; the truth is that he’s outlasted most of them, validated himself in Hollywood with more unlikely hits (e.g., Inglourious Basterds), attracted big stars with his writing, and finally earned a whole Oscar—not just a half—for scripting Django Unchained (which also did a whole lot more business than anyone expected). But this is the movie that brought Tarantino to the mainstream, with its wonderfully elliptical plotting and abrupt reversals and tangents, plus that all-star cast. (If you need reminding: John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Tim Roth, Bruce Willis, Christopher Walken, Amanda Plummer, and Harvey Keitel deliver line after quotable line. Let’s not speak of Maria de Medeiros.) (R) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $6-$8. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Weds.
Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky From 1991, this super-violent prison drama from Hong Kong, here dubbed into English, has achieved midnight-movie status for its gore. (NR)
Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $5-$7. 9 p.m Fri. & Sat.
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Roman Holiday Audrey Hepburn stars in this 1953 romance, for which she earned an Oscar playing a princess who dumps her station to cavort with a reporter (Gregory Peck). The two of them tooling around on his scooter through Italian streets has become an icon of love, and of Rome, although William Wyler’s movie doesn’t stand among her best work or his. It’s more a charmer than a classic, and the source story by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo seems to look back to a prewar time of innocence. Peck hardly makes for a bohemian journalist, though Eddie Albert scores some laughs as a proto-beatnik. Mainly it’s a chance to enjoy Hepburn’s radiance—in effect, she’s a princess playing a princess. (NR) B.R.M. Central Cinema, $6-$8. 7 p.m. Fri.-Tues. plus 3 p.m. Sat. & Sun.
Under the Skin Yes, this is the movie where Scarlett Johansson gets naked and—playing an alien huntress cloaked in human skin—lures men to their deaths. Aided by some motorcycle-riding minions, Johansson’s unnamed character is more worker bee than killer, a drone programmed to do one particular thing. This consists of driving around Scotland in a white van, calling out to single men with a posh English accent, then leading them back to her glass-floored abattoir. In the eerie, affectless Under the Skin, director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth) dispenses with suspense or context. Instead we have process, sometimes dull. Johansson’s alien cares only for the body, not the mind, and she’s learned only enough of our language and social protocols to flirt and deceive. Eventually Johansson’s visitor goes rogue, apparently having been inspired to empathy—or maybe just bloodless curiosity—after picking up a disfigured hitchhiker. Under the Skin then becomes a dilatory chase movie, without much action, as her brood tries to return her to the nest. The movie risks tedium to ask an unsettling question about this apex predator: If this she can question her role, consider her apartness from the hive, might she then have a soul? (R) B.R.M. SIFF Film Center, $6-$11. 8:30 p.m. Mon.
The Unknown Known Having won an Oscar for his 2003 The Fog of War, a study of Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara, documentary giant Errol Morris now turns to another controversial U.S. Secretary of Defense for a bookend project. The subject here is Donald Rumsfeld, who held the job during the commencement of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Rumsfeld is utterly tranquil in his aphorisms and his conviction. The fog of war? There isn’t even a faint mist in Rumsfeld’s mind. Where McNamara was troubled by the decisions he’d made during Vietnam, Rumsfeld does not appear to have practiced introspection, or even heard of it. Nothing happens to break the surface, and Rumsfeld’s bright-eyed, unfailingly cheerful bureaucrat is unflappable in the face of Morris’ camera. Rumsfeld is utterly tranquil in his aphorisms and his conviction. The fog of war? There isn’t even a faint mist in Rumsfeld’s mind. Where McNamara was troubled by the decisions he’d made during Vietnam, Rumsfeld does not appear to have practiced introspection, or even heard of it. Nothing happens to break the surface, and Rumsfeld’s bright-eyed, unfailingly cheerful bureaucrat is unflappable in the face of Morris’ camera. Yet in the absence of a breakdown or the slightest bit of hand-wringing from Rumsfeld, Morris allows us to decide how to view this singularly unreflective person. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Film Center, $6-$11. 6 p.m. Mon.
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20,000 Days on Earth This new film by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard makes Nick Cave, who performed at the Paramount last week, its subject. The film’s not a documentary portrait, but more kind of a dreamy, life-inspired series of vignettes, with Cave very much an equal partner on the project. He and Warren Ellis provide the score. (NR)
Grand Illusion, $5-$7. 7 p.m. Weds., 9 p.m. Thurs.
Ongoing
TK…. Beyod the Edge? Half Sun? Third Person?
Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists—and original score—this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work—not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, Big Picture, others
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Belle The English Belle, based on a true story, inspired by an 18th-century painting of two cousins—one black, one white—never lets you doubt its heroine’s felicitous fate. Dido (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is born with two strikes against her: She’s the mulatto daughter of a kindly English naval captain who swiftly returns to sea, never to be seen again; and she’s female, raised by aristocratic cousins in the famous Kenwood House (today a museum), meaning she can’t work for a living and must marry into society—but what white gentleman would have her? Writer Misan Sagay and director Amma Assante have thus fused two genres—the Austen-style marriage drama and the outsider’s quest for equality—and neatly placed them under one roof. The guardians for Dido and cousin Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon) are Lady and Lord Mansfield (Emily Watson and Tom Wilkinson); the latter is England’s highest jurist who in 1783 would decide the Zong case, in which seafaring slavers dumped their human cargo to claim the insurance money. Belle never surprises you, but it satisfyingly combines corsets and social conscience, love match and legal progress. (PG) BRIAN MILLER Kirkland Parkplace
Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism—apart from the constant Twitter plugs—is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene—but no, he’s only there to help. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. Just expect no salt. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, Bainbridge, Ark Lodge, Lynwood (Bainbridge), others
The Dance of Reality Bring on the legless dwarfs, cue the full-frontal nudity, and pass the peyote: Alejandro Jodorowsky has made a new movie. Born in 1929, Jodorowsky was already a veteran of wigged-out experimental theater when he devised El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973), films that crammed together intense violence, spiritual searching, and preposterous grotesquerie—guaranteeing their success as counterculture happenings. (Jodorowsky essentially invented the midnight-movie phenomenon.) His latest is an autobiographical look at the filmmaker’s youth in small-town Chile. There’s something almost heartwarming about the fact that this movie is—for all its zaniness—almost a normal film. Jodorowsky himself appears as the narrator, a dapper man given to trailing aphorisms in his wake. His youthful self (played by Jeremias Herskovitz) is a sensitive lad, coddled by a Rubensesque mother (Pamela Flores, whose dialogue is entirely sung) and bullied by a hard-backed Communist father (Brontis Jodorowsky, the director’s son—he was the kid in El Topo). We witness the father’s macho child-rearing habits and his mission against Chile’s right-wing president, a cause that leads to a long and curious third-act detour including dog shows and political torture. Around this curved spine of plot, Jodorowsky brings in a carnival sideshow, sharp childhood observations, and frequent bouts of on-camera urination. Dance of Reality has its share of mystifying moments. But the overall impression is energetic and imaginative, suggesting that all his past insanity had done wonders for this octogenarian’s creative process. (NR) R.H. Grand Illusion
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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead—but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah—he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman—he did the first Bourne picture—understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance, Majestic Bay, others
The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ’04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) R.H. Seven Gables
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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew—an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (NR) B.R.M. Sundance
Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) R.H. Sundance, Bainbridge, Kirkland Parkplace, others
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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade—he died in April 2013—Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James—whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed—had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit
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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does—winningly, amusingly, credibly—is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy—caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office—as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) B.R.M. Guild 45th, others
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Snowpiercer Let me state that I have no factual basis for believing that a train would be able to stay in continuous motion across a globe-girdling circuit of track for almost two decades, nor that the people on board could sustain themselves and their brutal caste system under such circumstances. But for 124 minutes of loco-motion, I had no problem buying it all. That’s because director Bong Joon-ho, making his first English-language film, has gone whole hog in imagining this self-contained universe. The poor folk finally rebel—Captain America’s Chris Evans and Jamie Bell play their leaders—and stalk their way toward the godlike inventor of the supertrain, ensconced all the way up in the front. This heroic progress reveals food sources, a dance party, and some hilarious propaganda videos screened in a classroom. Each train car is a wacky surprise, fully designed and wittily detailed. (Various other characters are played by Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, and Song Kang-ho, star of Bong’s spirited monster movie The Host.) The progression is a little like passing through the color-coded rooms of The Masque of the Red Death, but peopled by refugees from Orwell. The political allegory would be ham-handed indeed if it were being served up in a more serious context, but the film’s zany pulp approach means Bong can get away with the baldness of the metaphor. Who needs plausibility anyway? (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, Ark Lodge, Kirkland Parkplace
Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance, Bainbridge, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Kirkland Parkplace, others
