Local & Repertory
•
Auntie Mame SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 44.
•
Edward Scissorhands Johnny Depp made the most of the opportunity given him by Tim Burton in the dark suburban fairy tale Edward Scissorhands. In their first collaboration, Depp plays a gentle, misunderstood monster literally stitched together by mad scientist Vincent Price, whom Burton revered and here gives a lovely career coda. Diane Wiest is the woman who rescues Edward, and Winona Ryder the girl who loves him. The 1990 film represents Burton’s first fully realized personal and grown-up feature. Preceding the film at 7 p.m. is Joe Dante’s enjoyable 1983 critter flick Gremlins. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com, $6-$8, Dec. 13-18, 9:30 p.m.
•
It’s a Wonderful Life Times are tough in Frank Capra’s 1946 It’s a Wonderful Life. Banks are failing. People are losing their homes. Veterans are returning from a bloody war abroad. Families are falling apart. And all these stresses converge during the holidays, when there may not even be enough money in the household to buy any presents. Sound familiar? In the GI’s 43rd-annual screening of this seasonal classic, the distressed town of Bedford Falls could today be Anytown, USA. And beleaguered banker James Stewart could be any small businessman struggling to remain solvent amid our current financial crisis. If It’s a Wonderful Life is arguably the best Christmas movie ever made, that’s because it’s certainly one of the most depressing Christmas movies ever made. Before the inevitable tear-swelling plot reversal, the movie is 100 percent grim. Yet amazingly, 67 years later, it preserves the power to inspire hope for better days ahead. (No shows Dec. 16 & 31; see grandillusioncinema.org regarding Christmas Eve and Christmas Day screenings.) BRIAN MILLER Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, $5-$8, Dec. 14-Jan. 2.
The Last Ocean Here’s a pristine ecosystem. Here’s something destroying it. Here’s how you’re destroying it! And here’s how to stop it. Formula firmly in hand, Peter Young’s eco-doc brings us to the Antarctic Ross Sea, which is being despoiled by commercial fishermen going after something called a tooth fish (rechristened Chilean sea bass for high-end American consumers). Cookie-cutter as The Last Ocean is, it benefits from outstanding photography; these stunning shots of wilderness and seas help enliven what’s ultimately a well-told but weighty story of international politics and fishery mismanagement. And while there are a million valid reasons to protect every parcel of unspoiled nature, Young makes a convincing case that the Ross Sea is “the most pristine marine ecosystem on Earth.” There’s even a Pike Place Market shot here, literally bringing the issue home to us local seafood consumers. (NR) DANIEL PERSON Keystone Congregational Church, 5019 Keystone Place N., 632-6021, keystoneseattle.org, Free, Fri., Dec. 13, 7 p.m.
Ms. 45 From 1981, Abel Ferrara’s gynocentric revenge flick lacks much taste or subtlety, but it’s a weird, violent snapshot of New York City during the grungy Taxi Driver era. (R)
Grand Illusion, $5-$8, Fri., Dec. 13, 10 p.m.; Sat., Dec. 14.
•
The Princess Bride Quote-Along Bring the kids, or not, to test your knowledge of the William Goldman children’s tale, memorably filmed by Rob Reiner in 1987. Among the cast, as if you didn’t know, are Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin, Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn, Peter Falk, Carol Kane, and Andre the Giant. (PG)
SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff.net, $6-$11, Fri., Dec. 13, 7:30 p.m.; Dec. 14-24.
Rawstock: Klausterfokken SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 43.
•
Schindler’s List: Local film appreciation group The 20/20 Society presents Steven Spielberg’s 1993 multiple Oscar winner. You know the holiday season has begun when the Holocaust movies start playing again. (R)
Grand Illusion, $5-$8, Sat., Dec. 14, 1 p.m.
Screen Style The fashion world is celebrated with a weekend program of repertory titles including Joseph von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman, Hal Ashby’s Shampoo, and the recent English coming-of-age drama An Education, with Carey Mulligan. See website for full schedule and details. (NR)
Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 829-7863, nwfilmforum.org, $6-$10 ($35-$40 pass), Dec. 13-15.
Space Battleship Yamato This is apparently a live-action adaptation of the old Japanese anime TV series Star Blazers, again set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, again featuring the same plucky band trying to save Earth with their flying battleship. (NR)
Grand Illusion, $5-$8, Sun., Dec. 15, 3 p.m.; Mon., Dec. 16, 7:30 p.m.
VHSXMAS III Scarecrow Video presents a holiday-themed program of oddities from the VHS era. (NR)
Grand Illusion, $5-$8, Sat., Dec. 14, 8 p.m.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory The 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel stars Gene Wilder as the flamboyant candy-preneur. Something of an artifact of its time, the movie packs in a lot of trippy period humor and visuals. And it still beats the dreadful Tim Burton remake with Johnny Depp. Everyone hiss Veruca Salt! SIFF claims to be presenting the film in Smell-O-Vision, so be warned. (G)
SIFF Film Center, $6-$11, Fri., Dec. 13, 5 p.m.; Dec. 14-24.
Ongoing
•
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 full of shoes, 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 Redford without any Hollywood trappings. 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 Sundance, Oak Tree
The Armstrong Lie Just as Lance Armstrong once pumped too much EPO into his veins, too much Lance Armstrong has been pumped into media annals to make Alex Gibney’s long-delayed documentary very newsworthy. He started out as a fan when following the 2009 comeback bid at the Tour de France, where Armstrong triumphed seven times from 1999 to 2005. That return was Armstrong’s downfall, though he couldn’t have known it when he granted Gibney backstage access to make some sort of cancer-awareness/human-interest hagiography film. Bicyclists and disappointed fans already know the story, and Armstrong is contrite only to a point. He’s too disciplined, like most elite athletes, to spill his guts on camera. He’s most interesting when Gibney (and other journalists) here provoke his anger and peevishness, his self-justification. (R) B.R.M. Sundance
•
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. (NC-17) ROBERT HORTON Sundance, Harvard Exit
Blue Jasmine There’s nothing comic about the downfall of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, the inspiration for Woody Allen’s miscalculated seriocom. Grafted onto the story of delusional trophy wife Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is a Madoff-like fable of the recent financial crisis. In flashback, we see her husband (Alec Baldwin) buying her consent with luxury while he swindles the Montauk set. In the present timeframe, Jasmine is broke and living with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) in a shabby San Francisco apartment. Jasmine is a snob who needs to be brought low, a task relished by Ginger, her boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale), and her ex (a surprisingly sympathetic Andrew Dice Clay). You sense that Allen wants to say something about our present culture of inequality and fraud, but he only dabbles, never probes. (PG-13) B.R.M. Crest, Sundance
The Book Thief Based on Australian writer Markus Zusak’s 2005 novel, this WWII movie is also meant for children, and parents can safely drop them off for a matinee, candy money in hand, since there are no gas chambers or mass graves to give them nightmares. Our orphaned German heroine is Liesel (Sophie Nelisse), aged 11 when sent to live with a childless couple—kindly Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and sour Rosa (Emily Watson). It’s 1938, and you know what follows: the Nuremberg Rally, Jesse Owens at the Olympics, Kristallnacht, the roundup of the Jews, the Anschluss, and the Allied bombing raids that kill German civilians and combatants alike. Liesel is illiterate, but Hans helps teach her to read, as does a handsome Jewish lad hiding in their basement (Ben Schnetzer). Liesel’s adventures are tame; the entire movie is so tame, in fact, that I’d strip the 13 off the PG. (PG-13) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sundance, Kirkland Parkplace, Lincoln Square, Meridian, Thornton Place, Lynwood (Bainbridge), Oak Tree, others
•
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, 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) B.R.M. Alderwood 16, Sundance, Harvard Exit, Lincoln Square, Thornton Place
•
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. (PG-13) B.R.M. Lincoln Square, iPic, Thornton Place, Sundance, Cinebarre, Meridian, others
•
The Great Beauty Paolo Sorrentino’s fantastic account of an aging playboy journalist in Rome casts its eye back to La Dolce Vita (also about a playboy journalist in Rome). Yet this movie looks even further back, from the capsized Costa Concordia to the ruins and reproachful marble statues of antiquity. “I feel old,” says Jep (the sublime Toni Servillo) soon after the debauch of his 65th birthday party. Yet disgust—and then perhaps self-disgust—begins to color his perception of a Botox party, the food obsessions of a prominent cardinal, and the whole “debauched country.” In one of the year’s best movies, Servillo makes Jep both suave and somber. His wry glances are both mocking and wincing, appropriate for a movie that’s simultaneously bursting with life and regret. (NR) B.R.M. Varsity
•
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. With its mix of delusion, decency, and dunces, Nebraska is a little slow for my taste but enormously rewarding in the end, one of the year’s best films. (R) B.R.M. Guild 45th, Oak Tree
Out of the Furnace You’ll soon see the fat, bald, Jewish con-man Christian Bale in the forthcoming American Hustle; for now we have the hardened, saddened, Pennsylvania steelworker Christian Bale in this rather leaden, predictable revenge flick. Director Scott Cooper did better with Crazy Heart, but he also had Jeff Bridges to provide some warmth. However technically accomplished, which is to say very, Bale has an unfortunate default mode as an actor—perhaps reinforced by those Batman movies—of cold, self-directed intensity, like an imploded sun. He shows the same kind of quiet seething and pain after Russell causes a fatal car wreck, loses his girlfriend (Zoe Saldana) and father, then watches his errant younger brother (Casey Affleck) get involved with bare-knuckle fighting and dangerous meth dealers (cue Woody Harrelson, all mumbles and menace). Without the A-list cast, this would just be another vengeance vehicle for Jason Statham. Or Charles Bronson, back in the day. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, Oak Tree, Kirkland Parkplace, Lincoln Square, Cinebarre, Pacific Place, Bainbridge, others
•
12 Years a Slave Steve McQueen’s 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. 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. (R) R.H. Alderwood 16, SIFF Cinema Uptown, Ark Lodge, Guild 45th Theatre, Lincoln Square, Meridian, Thornton Place, Bainbridge, others
