Local & Repertory
Buffalo Field Campaign Roadshow Film clips and discussion are part of the effort to save the lumbering denizens of Yellowstone National Park. (NR)
Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St. See buffalofieldcampaign.org for price and ticket info. 4:30 p.m. Sat.
Flagler Films Long-Distance Hiking Cinema Tour Friday, hikers tackle the Appalachian Trail. On Saturday, it’s the Continental Divide Trail. (NR)
Grand Illusion. See flaglerfilms.com for tickets. 6:30 p.m. Fri. & 2:30 p.m. Sat.
Handmade Puppet Dreams: Vol. 1 Short films document the local puppetry scene, curated by Heather Henson. (NR)
Grand Illusion, price TBD. 7 p.m. Mon.
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House Cult movies should be mistakes, not intentional. In his 1977 feature debut, there’s no indication that Nobuhiko Obayahshi meant for House to appear—three decades later, to non-Japanese viewers—completely insane. But it is: batshit, Technicolor, fairy-tale-meets-softcore-porn insane. Seven teenage schoolgirls visit the creepy old mansion inhabited by the spinster aunt of heroine Gorgeous (all the girls are similarly type-named); there they begin to disappear Ten Little Indians-style. But who’s killing whom, and why, are the least interesting questions about this effects-saturated dreamscape. Gorgeous is in love with her dashing father and despises his evil fiancee (whose hair and dress are permanently aflutter with a wind machine). Her schoolmates have a crush on their teacher, and her aunt is still pining for a soldier who died in WWII. All that thwarted love leads to flying heads, flashbacks, severed limbs, a ravenous piano, demonic cat, and tidal wave of blood. Obayashi crams every scene of House with giddy, gaudy visual excess; it’s like Douglas Sirk on acid. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $6-$8. 9:30 p.m. Sat.-Tues.
Nymphomaniac: Extended Director’s Cut Brace yourself: This is a five and one-half hour fusion of Lars von Trier’s two movies from last year, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg as the woman sharing her sexual history with Stellan Skarsgård. Or something like that. (NR)
SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. 6:30 p.m. Mon.
Seattle Latino Film Festival Chile is the focus of this year’s programming, though countries including Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, and Cuba are naturally represented with over a dozen documentaries and features. (NR)
Seattle Art Museum, Pacific Place, and other locations. Full schedule, information, and tickets: slff.org. Fri., Oct. 3-Sun., Oct. 12.
Seattle Polish Film Festival Titles in this two-week series, which includes a group of repertory classics selected by Martin Scorsese, include The Saragossa Manuscript, Man of Iron, and A Short Film About Killing. All films are screened with subtitles. (NR)
Northwest Film Forum and other venues. See polishfilms.org for full schedule and ticket information. Sun., Oct. 5-Sun., Oct. 19.
Event Yadda. (NR)
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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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Event Yadda. (NR)
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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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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) ROBERT HORTON Sundance
The Equalizer Yes, this is a movie nominally inspired by the old ’80s TV show. And yes, it’s essentially a Liam Neeson vehicle instead starring Denzel Washington as a grumpy old samaritan/vigilante/knight errant who defends the weak and defeats the bad guys. It is, down to the R rating and inevitable shot of Washington striding in slo-mo away from an exploding orange fireball (but never looking back, because that is the law with exploding orange fireballs), exactly what you expect. Punctilious old Boston widower McCall (Washington) befriends a teenage Russian hooker (Chloe Grace Moretz), then sets out to destroy both her pimp and a whole platoon of Russian mobsters (Marton Csokas plays their tattooed chief enforcer). The mysterious McCall eventually reveals himself to be a kind of Jason Bourne with an AARP card. And, because he works in a hardware store, you know where the final showdown will take place. Excuse me, Mr. McCall, but in which aisle could I find a nail gun? (R) BRIAN MILLER Kirkland, others
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Gone Girl What’s exceptional about Gillian Flynn’s adaptation of her 2012 novel, directed with acid fidelity by David Fincher, is that Gone Girl doesn’t like most of its characters. Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) soon falls under suspicion of murdering his missing wife Amy (Rosamund Pike). The small-town Missouri police investigation (led by Kim Dickens) goes entirely against Nick for the first hour. He behaves like an oaf and does most everything to make himself the prime suspect, despite wise counsel from his sister (Carrie Coon) and lawyer (a surprisingly effective, enjoyable Tyler Perry). Second hour, still no body, but flashbacks turn us against the absent Amy. As we slowly investigate the Dunnes’ very flawed marriage, funny little kernels of bile begin to explode underfoot. How the hell did these two end up together? Flynn’s foundational joke answers that question with a satire of marriage. The movie poster and tabloid-TV plot suggest a standard I-didn’t-kill-my-wife tale, but matrimony is what’s being murdered here. Amid the media circus, Nick becomes the scorned sap because of his untruths; but what really damns him in the movie’s intricate plot is his credulity—he believed in Amy too much. Gone Girl is all about manipulation—Fincher’s stock in trade, really, which helps make the film such cynical, mean-spirited fun. (R) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sundance, others
Hector and the Search for Happiness The title of this whimsical though ultimately conventional quest-com spells it out for you. Hector (Simon Pegg) is an upright British shrink with a committed girlfriend named Clara (Rosamund Pike), amusingly eccentric patients, and a very neat apartment. What he needs is an adventure, very much like Tintin, so he embarks on a world tour to find out what makes people happy. (The final answer will be Clara, but you knew that already.) Hector’s travels take him to Shanghai, the Himalayas, Africa, and Los Angeles. En route he meets a gruff business tycoon (Stellan Skarsgård), a gorgeous Chinese woman (Ming Zhou), a Tibetan monk, a drug lord (Jean Reno), an old flame (Toni Collette), and a sage neuroscientist (Christopher Plummer). There’s a lot of talent and international color here, and director Peter Chelsom knows how to use both quite agreeably. Hector is nothing if not agreeable—to a fault, really—though it’s impossible to hate. Hector himself is nice to a fault. Back home, we can understand why impatient Clara keeps shutting off their Skype chats: So much virtue can be a bore. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables
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Last Days in Vietnam How, short of total victory, do you end a war? The question has been haunting our military and political leaders since Korea. And though Rory Kennedy’s sobering new doc focuses on the last few desperate days of the Vietnam War, 40 years ago, its lessons are surely applicable today in Iraq, Afghanistan, and whatever the hell it is we call ISIS. The bulk of the testimony here comes from guys who were actually on the ground in Saigon—soldiers (American and Vietnamese), a CIA agent, embassy staffers, and the stray journalist or two. These fresh interviews are coupled with vivid archival news footage filmed on both sides of the U.S. embassy walls as a terrified tidal wave of humanity sought evacuation before the North Vietnamese Army overran Saigon in late April 1975. With a deluded ambassador in charge, his men began a covert evacuation plan that would also include thousands of Vietnamese (despite orders and U.S. immigration laws): girlfriends, wives and families, friends, and brothers-in-arms. (“We gotta save the tailor!” says one attache whose suits he made.) There’s intrigue in these brave tales that occasionally recalls Argo, only with an unhappy outcome for all those natives left behind. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity
My Old Lady Set mostly in a fabulous Paris apartment, tis film is based on a play by Israel Horovitz, and no wonder Horovitz (making his feature-film directing debut—at age 75) chose not to open up the stage work; that’s one great pad. A failed-at-everything 57-year-old blowhard named Mathias Gold (Kevin Kline) has arrived in Paris to claim the place, but there’s just one problem. It was purchased by his father, some 40 years earlier, in the French contract called viager, which means the seller gets to live in it until she dies, as the buyer pays a monthly stipend in the interim. And she—in this case 92-year-old Madame Girard (Maggie Smith)—is still very alertly alive. So is her daughter Chloe (Kristin Scott Thomas), and so are various ghosts from the past, many of which come staggering to life as Mathias moves into an empty room and schemes a way to undercut these entrenched ladies. The pace is rocky here, and everybody speaks as though they’re in a play. This is partially mitigated by the fact that if you’re going to have people running off at the mouth, you could do worse than this hyper-eloquent trio. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance
The Skeleton Twins Maggie and Milo are fraternal twins who are estranged (for 10 years), living on opposite coasts, and seriously depressed for reasons that seem dissimilar but boil down to past family trauma. That Maggie and Milo are played by Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader will get this mediocre dramedy more attention than it deserves. That their performances are good oughtn’t be surprising (the two SNL pros have plenty of experience with the comedy of awkwardness). That their script is so tonally sad-happy yet familiar, one has to attribute to the inexperienced writers (Mark Heyman and Craig Johnson; the latter is a Bellingham native and UW grad who directed the film). Maggie and Milo are catty, sardonic misanthropes, angry at the world because they haven’t lived up to their youthful potential. A failed actor, Milo returns home to New Jersey, where Maggie’s a dental hygienist married to a doofus (Luke Wilson) whom she treats with gentle contempt. There’s also a sex scandal lurking in the past, but the snark bogs down in melodrama, and no amount of ’80s pop montages can really change the film’s predictable trajectory. When even the bitter Maggie can declare “We’re supposed to be there for each other,” you know the cause is lost. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, Sundance
This Is Where I Leave You The fractious Altman clan gathers for an awkward and altogether irreverent weeklong mourning period (sitting shiva) for its deceased patriarch, at the command of an imperious new widow (Jane Fonda) who wears her conspicuous boob job with blithe pride. All of which greatly discomfits her four grown children. Among them, Corey Stoll is the son who stayed to run the family business; Adam Driver is the ne’er-do-well youngest son who fled to the West Coast; Tina Fey is the unhappily married wife and mother, also visiting; and Jason Bateman is the New York radio producer whose marriage just imploded (not that he’s telling anyone, not just now, not on this trip, no way). There’s a lot of ground to cover in this cluttered adaptation of Jonathan Tropper’s 2009 novel (he did the adaptation), directed with no great subtlety by Shawn Levy, who helmed all those wildly popular, family-friendly Night at the Museum movies. There are moments that work well here. Fey shows tender lost love for her old boyfriend (Timothy Olyphant), a guy who never left town owing to an accident; how culpable she was, the script is reluctant to spell out. Driver, of Girls, brings a welcome jolt of energy to a feckless, underwritten character. On the whole, however, Levy is fatally wed to a formula of tears, outbursts, wise counsel, and reconciliation—repeated often. (R) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, Guild 45th, others
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Tracks The place is the Australian desert, where in 1975 a young woman named Robyn Davidson determined she would walk the 1,700 miles from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean. In writing a National Geographic article and subsequent best-selling book about the trek, Davidson offered little explanation for her impulse, and the movie is blunt about acknowledging that no coherent justification can be made on that score. She just needed to do it. Mia Wasikowska’s skeptical gaze and stony delivery are ideal for this tough character, and the actress never makes a bid for likability. Once on the path, she endures/exploits the expectations of National Geographic photographer Rick (Adam Driver, from Girls—a necessary warm presence in this severe portrait), as he periodically meets her along the long miles of desert scrub. Director John Curran (The Painted Veil) imagines this journey in an admirably terse way. We do hear Davidson’s words on the soundtrack, but for the most part the movie simply forges ahead; the romance-of-the-desert familiar from Lawrence of Arabia is kept at bay. This isn’t about conquering the land, but it’s not a reassuring journey of self-discovery, either. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance, others
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The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (NR) B.R.M. Crest
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20,000 Days on Earth Nick Cave awakes on a mundane note in his Brighton bedroom. “I wake, I write, I eat, I write,” he says in his disquieting drawl. Yet as an equal partner in this quasi-documentary project with filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, he divulges only so much about himself: Neither his life story nor his philosophy are easily understood. Rather, this is both a biographical sketch and a fanciful promotional art film, which documents the recording and live performance of 2013’s acclaimed Push the Sky Away. Throughout, Cave maintains his deadpan, oblique sensibility. 20,000 Days even puts Cave on the therapist’s couch to tease out his story. During this extended scene—shot, like the entire film, in a flattering and dramatic light that gives Cave’s universe a fittingly crisp and sinister air—we learn some secrets (unless they’re more of Cave’s fictions). Asked what he most fears, he replies, “Losing my memory”—and that’s likely the film’s most important notion: The past informs all his writing. (NR) MARK BAUMGARTEN Grand Illusion
