Local & Repertory
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The Big Lebowski The Coen brothers’ 1998 stoner-noir The Big Lebowski is Raymond Chandler filtered through dirty bong water, where almost every line of dialogue is a hazy, hilarious non sequitur. My favorite is when accidental P.I. Jeff Bridges (forever the Dude) is ambushed in his tub by nihilists bearing a ferret. “Hey, nice marmot,” he greets them, with his usual unflustered amiability. Nothing rattles Bridges’ Dude, not a lost rug, not a leering Tara Reid, not a lisping John Turturro, not a raving John Goodman, not a simpering Steve Buscemi, and not even shrieking performance artist Julianne Moore, who joins Bridges in a Busby Berkeley-style bowling fantasy that sums up the movie’s sweet, silly spirit. (R) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $6-$8. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Wed.
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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 34.
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Fremont Outdoor Cinema Author of Jurassic Park, the late writer Michael Crichton famously tutored President George W. Bush on the fallacy of global warming. He was no scientist, but the doctor-turned-novelist, from The Andromeda Strain forward, knew how to mix popular science into exceptionally good potboiler fiction. He was a master of the in-flight novel, and Jurassic Park is one of his very best works. Steven Spielberg’s 1993 adaptation benefits from equally from the then-new magic of CGI and our old love of dinosaurs running amok. (Long before Godzilla, silent movies were doing the same.) While Crichton warns us about the dangers of genetic engineering—in rather static debates among scientists Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum—Spielberg keeps things moving at a wonderful pace. As in Jaws, whose DNA is strongly felt here, the hunters become the hunted. The thud of the oncoming Tyrannosaurus rex rippling in a water cup, the heat of his breath on a car window, the swarming Velociraptors—these ancient terrors trump our high-tech inventions. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER 3501 Phinney Ave. N., 781-4230, fremontoutdoormovies.com. $30 series, $5 individual (21 and over). Movies start at dusk. Sat.
Moonlight Cinema Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, and the late Paul Walker star in last year’s Fast & Furious 6, likely to be the penultimate entry in the long-running hot-rod franchise. (R)
Redhook Ale Brewery, 14300 N.E. 145th St., Woodinville, 425-420-1113, redhook.com. $5. Outdoor movie screens at dusk. Thurs. Aug. 28.
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Movies at Magnuson Park Who you gonna call? I think we all know the answer: the top-grossing film of 1984, Ghostbusters! Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Sigourney Weaver star in the paranormal smash comedy, which inspired only one so-so sequel and a surprising number of video games. It was, of course, a simpler time back then, when special effects weren’t quite so seamless, and the greatest threat facing New York City was the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. The movie was a total star turn for Murray, playing the loosest and least professional academic on campus. Using Aykroyd as his uptight foil, with well-timed sideline zingers from the wonky Ramis (who co-wrote the script with Aykroyd), Murray is freed to embrace his inner, off-kilter leading man—he’s like Cary Grant on mescaline, utterly assured in everything he says, even when nothing he says makes the slightest bit of sense. (PG) B.R.M. Magnuson Park, 7400 Sand Point Way N.E., moviesatmagnuson.com. $5. Thursdays. 7 p.m.
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1 Reel Film Festival SEE PAGE 27.
Road to Ninja: Naruto the Movie Dubbed into English, this recent Japanese anime concerns magical masked shinobi and the young hero Naruto, blessed/cursed with special powers but lacking parents to call his own. (NR)
Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $12. 6:30 p.m. Fri.-Thurs.
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Alive Inside Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett tags along with Dan Cohen, a music-therapy proselytizer (and founder of the nonprofit Music & Memory), as Cohen travels to facilities for people living with dementia. Cohen’s method is frequently repeated here, but never wears out its welcome. He approaches people whose memory loss has put them in a dulled or lethargic state and invites them to listen to music from an iPod shuffle. When a song begins, the change is almost immediate: Eyes light up, limbs begin twisting, and stories pour out. If it isn’t a definitive argument in favor of using music as a therapeutic tool, it’s certainly dramatic. The film then goes on to lobby in favor of getting such therapies into hospitals and retirement communities, painting a dire portrait of a pharmaceutical-industrial complex that delights in ringing up thousands of dollars of drugs for patients every month but balks at a $40 iPod. Serious establishment voices are not much heard here, but then this isn’t really a documentary—it’s a work of activism, and a beautiful one. If Alive Inside helps change the culture of treatment for the cognitively impaired, that would be a very good thing. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown
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 Sundance
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Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period—Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned—the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) R.H. Sundance, Harvard Exit, Lincoln Square, Ark Lodge, Kirkland Parkplace, Lynwood (Bainbridge)
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Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions—is that simply to say it’s Irish?—and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people—more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, Harvard Exit
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
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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) R.H. Crest
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Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will—in their own zany way—end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right—and keeping the story’s goals simple—can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) R.H. Majestic Bay, Sundance, Bainbridge, Thornton Place, Kirkland Parkplace, Lincoln Square, Vashon, Ark Lodge, Big Picture, others
The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place—in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future—the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite—Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) R.H. Sundance, Majestic Bay, Bainbridge, Kirkland Parkplace, others
If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) R.H. Varsity, Bainbridge, TK more
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Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure—through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches—and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby–style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see—thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance—how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) B.R.M. Guild 45th, Lincoln Square
Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals—all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is—as in Besson’s best action efforts—a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, others
Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ’20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) B.R.M. Guild 45th, Bainbridge, Kirkland Parkplace, others
A Most Wanted Man Directed by the very deliberate Dutch photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn (Control, The American), this adaptation of a lesser 2008 John le Carre novel will, I think, be remembered as the best among Philip Seymour Hoffman’s posthumous releases. In a post-9/11 world, he plays a rumpled Hamburg cop, Bachmann, with failures in his past, who’s charged with the dirty work of counter-terrorism. Crawling out of the Elbe, like a rat, is a Russian-Chechen Muslim we’ll come to know as Karpov. Bachmann and his squad (including Continental all-stars Daniel Bruhl and Nina Hoss) follow Karpov intently without arresting him, hoping he’ll lead to bigger fish. His bosses are dubious; a separate, rival German intelligence agency interferes; and he’s even got to negotiate with the CIA—represented by Robin Wright—to allow Karpov room to roam. Rachel McAdams shows up as a naive, sympathetic human-rights lawyer (riding a bike, of course). Will Karpov plant a bomb in the rush-hour subway or lead Bachmann to an important al-Qaida funding link? Related within a few days’ time and surveillance, that’s the essential plot. The recent Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was a much better movie as it evoked the old, analog Cold War; unreliable technology meant that human relationships, and betrayals, were paramount. Hoffman would’ve been a better fit in that bygone world of smoky negotiation and curdled compromise. (R) B.R.M. Ark Lodge
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The One I Love It’s almost impossible to describe the fanciful sci-fi plot here without resorting to significant clues, so let’s be vague about things. Sophie (Elisabeth Moss) and Ethan (Mark Duplass) are a bickering L.A. couple making no progress in marriage counseling. (Ethan’s affair will be revealed later.) Childless and confortable, they’re studies in yuppie self-absorption, neither one willing to concede ground to the other. Their smooth therapist (Ted Danson) sends them to a weekend retreat that’s worked well for other clients, he says. There, Sophie and Ethan wonder what became of their fun, Lollapalooza-going, X-dropping days. What happened to their kinder, cooler selves? In a very big story twist, writer Justin Lader and director Charlie McDowell cleverly filter that feeling of past/present discontent through a refracting lens. (Duplass actually gave them the movie’s premise to develop.) Just how well do you know your spouse? You want to be a better partner, but it takes so much damn effort. And The One I Love forces Ethan and Sophie to make that effort; their very freedom depends upon it. Thus their weekend lesson may be this: A successful relationship requires you to be a very good actor. (R) B.R.M. Sundance
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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) R.H. Majestic Bay
To Be Takei George Takei has become America’s favorite gay uncle. Closeted during his Star Trek days, now enthusiastically, emphatically out, he’s a terrific subject for Jennifer Kroot’s admiring new documentary. The only problem for them both? Takei has told his story so much since 2005, maybe too often, on Howard Stern and sundry TV talk shows. There isn’t much new to learn here, since Takei has been so effective in selling his brand and commenting on the culture via Twitter. Such irony: After decades of coy silence about his personal affairs, Takei’s late-life outspokenness has left him with little new to say. With his dyed hair and determined affability, he’s the kind of professional ham whose spiel is expertly timed to last through the dinner course on the lecture circuit. And yet still we applaud, maybe a little teary, just when dessert arrives. How sweet it is to see a life thus validated. (NR) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown
