Thursday, Dec. 4
Seven Samurai
One of the great pleasures in revisiting Akira Kurosawa’s action-filled 1954 masterpiece is how the seven different samurai will consider the odds and adversity against them, then simply throw back their heads and laugh. They don’t look so grim and anguished as certain latter-day action heroes, although they’re both a product of and influence upon Hollywood. Toshiro Mifune stars as Kikuchiyo, an unwashed 16th-century peasant masquerading as a samurai, only grudgingly tolerated by the six real ronin defending a village against 40 bloodthirsty bandits just “for the fun of it.” Kikuchiyo entertains the village children with his mimicry, connects with its adults with his earthy humor, and wins the audience with his insecurities and bluster. And of course he fights like “a wild dog” when the time comes. Note: The film will be introduced via Skype by New York cinema scholar Richard D. Pepperman, who just wrote a book about it, appropriately titled Everything I Know About Filmmaking I Learned Watching Seven Samurai. Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum.org. $6–$11. 7 p.m.
BRIAN MILLER
William Mortensen
Port Townsend publisher Feral House is known for pushing the boundaries of good taste and the First Amendment. (It even printed the ravings of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.) But what its founder, Adam Parfrey, really loves are the vulgar-sexy-shocking artifacts of olden times: everything that was cheap and weird and popular before the sanitized standards of the postwar era were imposed. Hence two new volumes celebrating the L.A. photographer Mortensen (1897–1965): the biography American Grotesque and Mortensen’s reissued, newly annotated The Command to Look. A small selection of photos, heavily processed in the darkroom by Mortensen, goes on view tonight (along with recent paintings by locals Stacy Rozich and John Brophy). Mortensen was a master of interwar sensationalism: bare-breasted white women threatened by negroid gorillas, religious persecution and torture, suggestions of horror and the occult. Nonetheless—or maybe precisely because of those tendencies—he was an in-demand portrait photographer who brought Rudolph Valentino, Lon Chaney, Fay Wray, Jean Harlow, Clara Bow, and Peter Lorre before his lurid lens. His aesthetic was the opposite of realism, and his photos essentially passed themselves off as paintings. But look at any dime novel, comic book, or movie poster of his day and you’ll see his influence. (Ends Jan. 3.) Roq La Rue Gallery, 532 First Ave. S., 374-8977, roqlarue.com. First Thursday opening reception 6–9 p.m.
BRIAN MILLER
Richard Ford
“I’ve always suffered fools well, which is why I sleep so soundly at night.” Ford didn’t write that—well, not directly—since the words belong to failed writer-turned-realtor Frank Bascombe, now making his fourth appearance since 1986’s The Sportswriter. Let Me Be Frank With You (Ecco, $27.99) is likely the last go-round for Frank, now 68 and retired, moved back to central Jersey, and counting his luck for having avoided Hurricane Sandy at his old beachfront home. In more than one sense, Frank is appraising the wreckage around him in these four linked stories. Guiltily, yet trying to maintain what he calls his “Default Self,” he goes to meet the unlucky guy who bought his last home—now knocked sideways on the sand, a total loss. He’s visited by a stranger with a sad tale about his present digs. He in turn visits his ex, afflicted with Parkinson’s, and an old dying buddy with secrets to share. Frank wants none of their candor; he still has the writer’s habit of keeping life experience—mostly sad, at this point in the game—at arm’s length, just as he does his adult kids. Frank doesn’t lack empathy or powers of observation (here we’re really talking about Ford). Rather, he insists on limits to his tears or engagement with the world, with Ford serving as his editor to the soft end. What’s his Default Self? “The self I’d like others to understand me to be, and at heart believe myself to be”—honest, optimistic, unembellished, and nice. What Frank mutters to himself is quite different, of course, and therein lies the appeal of Ford’s book. Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., 386-4636, spl.org. Free. 7 p.m.
BRIAN MILLER
Friday, Dec. 5
Order & Chaos
If you’re a Burning Man skeptic, the photographs of one-named Frenchwoman MARTI, though beautiful, may not change your mind; here are the grand and fanciful art projects, the elaborate costuming, the nonchalant undress you’ll see in any visual record of the event. But what I love about her photos, gathered in the exhibit Order & Chaos: A Decade of Burning Man, is that she nearly always shoots the flamboyance in question against a great deal of nothing: the off-white Nevada desert floor, blue sky, maybe a dust cloud, with a palpable sense of vast distance between her subject and anything else that might incidentally be in the frame. The inclusion of all that emptiness emphasizes the improbability, and thus the surrealism, of the images; this isn’t just another Halloween night in Fremont. For me, looking at them feels like what being there feels like—the nothing is just as weird as the something. (Through Jan. 17.) Kirkland Arts Center, 620 Market St., 822-7161, kirklandartscenter.org. Free. Opening reception 6–10 p.m.
GAVIN BORCHERT
Monday, Dec. 8
NEXT Dance Cinema
It started out as serendipity that Velocity Dance Center is just down the road from Northwest Film Forum, but the two organizations are making a virtue of proximity with their ongoing collaborations for NEXT Dance Cinema. This time they’ve got four separate programs, opening with a cinematic sampler featuring several local choreographers, including Dinosaurs and Sea Hawks, a poignant addition to Ezra Dickinson’s 2013 examination of mental illness and homelessness, Mother for you I made this. Later programs include work by local artists KT Niehoff and Dayna Hanson, along with a sweet lip-sync directed by Sara Jinks to “Lonesome Polecat” (from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers). Other programs include a rigorous solo by Dutch performer Roxane Huilmand and an evening of film examining contemporary African dance. (Through Sat.) Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum.org. $6–$11. 7 p.m.
Hello, Burner in the sand.
