Local & Repertory
Centro Historico This four-part anthology film features episodes directed by Aki Kaurismaki, Pedro Costa, Victor Erice, and Manoel de Oliveira. All were shot in Portugal. (NR)
Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 829-7863, nwfilmforum.org, $6-$10, Aug. 26-29, 7 & 9 p.m.
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Computer Chess SEE THE WIRE, PAGE 21.
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Fremont Outdoor Movies 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. Outdoor movie screens at dusk. (R) BRIAN MILLER 3501 Phinney Ave. N., 781-4230, fremontoutdoormovies.com, $5, Sat., Aug. 24, 7:30 p.m.
The Fugitive Local film appreciation society The 20/20 Awards screens this suspenseful 1993 take on the old TV show, directed by Andrew Davis and starring Harrison Ford as the doctor trying to clear his name from charges of murder. (PG-13)
Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org, $5-$8, Thu., Aug. 22, 6:30 p.m.
The Gits Today being the birthday of slain local musician Mia Zapata (1965-1993), this 2007 doc by Kerri O’Kane celebrates both her legacy and that of the pioneering local grunge-era band. (NR)
Northwest Film Forum, $6-$10, Sun., Aug. 25, 7 p.m.
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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. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., 323-0587, landmarktheatres.com, $8.25, Sat., Aug. 24, 11:59 p.m.
MOHAI Movies in the Park Matthew Broderick tries to save the world from nuclear annihilation in the 1983 computer hacker drama War Games, effectively directed by John Badham. Thirty years later, it’s a time capsule from the Cold War era. Outdoor screening begins at dusk. (PG) BRIAN MILLER Lake Union Park, 860 Terry Ave. N., mohai.org, Free, Saturdays. Sat., Aug. 24.
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Moonlight Cinema There’s nothing more cinematic than a ticking bomb and the life-or-death deadline to defuse it. Which wire do you cut—red or blue? In 2009’s Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, Jeremy Renner plays the reckless but methodical leader of an elite Army bomb squad patrolling Baghdad, where every trash heap (or corpse) could contain an IED. There are no antiwar lectures, just intricate process and male ego gone amok. (Anthony Mackie plays Renner’s disapproving, more by-the-book comrade.) When a blast occurs, director Kathryn Bigelow shows us the shudder of rust being shaken from old auto bodies, the slo-mo surge of the shock wave beneath the sand. What it does to human bodies, and minds, is even worse. Bigelow has generally been known for stylized action flicks, often with gonzo male leads (see that timeless testosterone opera, Point Break). But The Hurt Locker is a career best for her: tense, compressed, and often wordless for page after page of action. A sudden, extended sniper attack, midway through the movie, is the best combat sequence put to film this decade. 21 and over Outdoor screening begins at dusk. (R) BRIAN MILLER Redhook Ale Brewery, 14300 N.E. 145th St. (Woodinville), 425-483-3232, redhook.com, $5, Thursdays, 6 p.m. Through Aug. 29.
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Movies at Magnuson Park From 1987, Rob Reiner’s charming adaptation of the classic William Goldman children’s tale The Princess Bride is sweet, funny, and well played down the line for both parents and kids. Cary Elwes and Robin Wright Penn are the handsome, occasionally quarrelsome lovers; Wallace Shawn, Mandy Patinkin, and the late Andre the Giant aid them through amusing adventures. Outdoor movie screens at dusk. (PG) BRIAN MILLER Magnuson Park, 7400 Sand Point Way N.E., moviesatmagnuson.com, $5, Thursdays, 7 p.m. Through Aug. 29.
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Movies at Marymoor The late writer Michael Crichton, who famously tutored President Bush on the fallacy of global warming, 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. 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. Outdoor movie screens at dusk. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Marymoor Park, 6046 W. Lake Sammamish Parkway N.E. (Redmond), moviesatmarymoor.com, $5, Wednesdays, 7 p.m. Through Aug. 28.
Pasolini’s Last Words SEE THE WIRE, PAGE 21.
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Rear Window Hitchcock’s 1954 masterwork posits Jimmy Stewart’s character as a voyeur, cooped up in his New York City apartment with a broken leg, staring through his neighbors’ windows, just as we do at the movie screen. But Rear Window is also a love story. Stewart rebuffs his girlfriend (Grace Kelly) with casual disdain, saying she’s “too perfect” for him. Fortunately our heroine is more than a match for her recalcitrant beau. She does the legwork for his amateur sleuthing, while he just watches. Kelly remakes herself into a woman of action, thereby increasing her allure—and subverting Stewart’s view of her. In Rear Window, all the neighbors’ courtyard stories-within-a-story are greatly enhanced, and all comment both on the love story and the expertly made thriller. (PG) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, $6-$8, Aug. 23-28, 7 p.m.
Rent In this 2005 adaptation of 1996 Broadway smash, Rent becomes less a cri de coeur and more of an upbeat, Fame-like raveup. Most of the original cast is back, including Anthony Rapp’s quasi-narrator, a four-eyed documentary filmmaker among the singing East Village bohemians. The tunes are certainly timeless, from the thrilling, opening-scene faux-gospel “Seasons of Love,” performed on a bare stage a la A Chorus Line, to the barbaric yawp of “La Vie Boheme.” Rent works best as a centaur creation: half-movie, half-play, plunging into theater-world in all its mindless, cheesy, sentimental splendor. (PG-13) TIM APPELO Central Cinema, $6-$8, Aug. 24-28, 9:45 p.m.
Sharknado If you missed it on Syfy, here’s a second chance to see airborne sharks battling Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, and John Heard. We’re rooting for the sharks. (NR)
SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996, siff.net, $6-$11, Sat., Aug. 24, 10 p.m.
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Slapstick Savants This retrospective of early screen comedy includes silent classics like Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last!, talkies from The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, and The Marx Brothers’ anarchic features Duck Soup and Animal Crackers. See siff.net for full schedule. (NR)
SIFF Cinema Uptown, $6-$11, Aug. 23-29.
VHS Month The 1984 direct-to-video action flick Furious is screened Friday and Saturday. More to recommend is the Sunday matinee of The Hunt for Red October (1990), an effective Tom Clancy submarine yarn starring Sean Connery, whose birthday is also Sunday. Remember that beer and wine are now served, but screening is open to all ages. (PG-13)
Scarecrow Video, 5030 Roosevelt Way N.E., 524-8554, scarecrow.com, Free, Fri., Aug. 23, 8 p.m.; Sat., Aug. 24, 8 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 25, 1 p.m.
Ongoing
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Blackfish This relentless documentary circles around the 2010 death of Dawn Brancheau, a SeaWorld trainer killed by Tilikum, a 12,000-pound whale. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite also looks into prior incidents involving Tilikum, which brought about the sale of the unfortunate whale to SeaWorld. If Blackfish outrages people, so much the better. The case is closed, and whales and dolphins are too high on the evolutionary scale to keep captive. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Seven Gables
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. Blue Jasmine is an awkward mismatch of pathos and ridicule, less fusion than simple borrowing. 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. As with Baz Luhrmann’s recent The Great Gatsby, you sense that Allen wants to say something about our present culture of inequality and fraud, but he only dabbles, never probes. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, Ark Lodge, Sundance Cinemas, Kirkland Parkplace, Lynwood (Bainbridge)
Elysium Elysium hangs in orbit, a giant spinning space station of deluxe McMansions and WASPy country clubs; it’s a brief supersonic ride from the filthy, overpopulated Earth of 2154. Down below, Max (Matt Damon) is a worker-drone who must find a way to get to Elysium and fix his decaying body after radiation accident at the factory. Already you can see the outlines of Neill Blomkamp’s allegory, a world divided between the haves and the have-nots. Most of the time we’re on Earth, in a Los Angeles that resembles Mexico City. Damon knows exactly how to lock Max into focus; Jodie Foster (leading with clenched jaw) is on point as the Elysium security chief; and William Fichtner is scrupulous as a corporate jerk. Less successful are Wagner Moura and Sharlto Copley in supporting roles. Elysium qualifies as satisfying old-school science fiction. (R) ROBERT HORTON Alderwood 16, Cinebarre, Cinerama, Kirkland Parkplace, Majestic Bay, Bainbridge, Meridian, Thornton Place, others
Europa Report This thrifty little sci-fi picture is both topical and deeply underwhelming. A private European space consortium has launched a probe to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, where there’s ice, heat, and the possibility of life. En route, communication is lost, and the astronauts are feared dead. Europa Report gets the look and tedium right for more than 20 months of claustrophobic space travel; then you realize Europa Report is one of those fake found-footage exercises like The Blair Witch Project. Something bad has happened on the journey, and the movie delays those revelations for as long as possible. Europa Report starts with a pleasing modesty, but it’s ruined by its gimmicky, withholding editing scheme. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Varsity
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Fruitvale Station By an accident of timing, if not craft, Ryan Coogler has made one of the most important movies of the year. His docudrama chronicles the last 24 hours in the life of Oscar Grant (played by Michael B. Jordan), a 22-year-old black man shot to death by overzealous transit cops on an Oakland BART platform in 2009. Fruitvale Station leads up to that incident with a day-in-the-life format. Grant goes out of his way to do favors for everyone he encounters. He’s respectful of his mother (The Help’s Oscar-winning Octavia Spencer), kind to dogs, loving to his girlfriend (Melonie Diaz) and 5-year-old daughter. Coogler spends a relaxed hour humanizing Grant; then comes the grim rush of docudrama that loops us back to the fateful railway platform. (R) BRIAN MILLER Oak Tree, Ark Lodge, Meridian, others
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The Hunt Mads Mikkelsen plays a serial killer on TV’s Hannibal, but in Thomas Vinterberg’s study of rumors and self-righteous hysteria in a Danish village, he’s a compassionate preschool teacher who falls under wrongful suspicion of child sexual abuse. Adorable little Klara (Annika Wedderkopp) pours out a confused but alarming string of inappropriate phrases she overheard, and alarm bells go off. The police investigation is leaked to the public before it’s even begun. Everyone assumes Lucas is guilty. Vinterberg works in the same key of personal transgression and raw, inchoate emotion that made his 1998 The Celebration so effective. Onetime friends suddenly treat Lucas like a war criminal somehow free on a technicality; it’s open season for vigilantism without consequences. (R) SEAN AXMAKER Guild 45th
Prince Avalanche It’s 1988, and two guys are on a summer job sprucing up a lonely road in West Texas. A recent fire has burned the surrounding countryside, which gives the setting a pleasant, haven’t-quite-seen-this-before-in-a-movie quality. The guys are Alvin (Paul Rudd) and Lance (Emile Hirsch), and they really don’t get on. Alvin wears a mustache of self-satisfaction, as befits a man with a secure collection of platitudes and a condescending air to match. Lance is the brother of Alvin’s girlfriend, and Alvin tries manfully to impose his standards of behavior on his younger cohort. They putter along the blasted landscape, painting new yellow lines on the road and arguing about what constitutes mature behavior. It’s to director David Gordon Green’s credit that the eventual revelation that Alvin’s life is not as together as he’d like to think is treated not as gotcha irony but as a natural piece of confused masculine existence. Rudd has always been able to suggest the human presence behind his nonpareil comic talents, and Hirsch, who’s beefed up since wasting away in Into the Wild, contributes a portrait of arrested adolescence without distancing himself from the role. (R) ROBERT HORTON Varsity
The Spectacular Now In this agreeable adaptation of a 2008 young-adult novel by Tim Tharp, teen protagonist Sutter (Miles Teller) leads a wildly unsupervised life of partying and blown-off homework. He wakes up on a lawn, unsure where he left the car, which introduces him to smart-girl Aimee (Shailene Woodley, one of Clooney’s kids in The Descendants). They’re total opposites, and The Spectacular Now is the story of their unlikely yet plausible romance. (Oh, and Sutter is plainly an alcoholic, though that term is curiously omitted here.) Director James Ponsoldt’s young duo behaves with a likable, naturalistic ease. Sutter’s credo is “Live in the now,” while ever-striving Aimee’s goals are to own a horse farm and work for NASA. They’re both living in a bubble, but such is first love. Reality intrudes in a clunky third act, as a road trip to find Sutter’s father (Kyle Chandler) yields predictable results. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, Sundance
20 Feet From Stardom Who dreams of being a backup singer? This mostly delightful music doc is tinged with an air of disappointment. Meeting the full-throated likes of Merry Clayton, Claudia Lennear, and Lisa Fischer, we understand these are masters of their craft. But the question nags: If they are masters, why aren’t they stars? The film includes some who made the leap, including Darlene Love and Sheryl Crow, but the focus is mostly on the folks who’ve made a career out of being in the background. (Also interviewed are figures like Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, and Sting.) Like the 2002 doc Standing in the Shadows of Motown, it’s got a built-in hook: all that great music, served with annotations from musicians. Director Morgan Neville doesn’t organize his material in a way that feels entirely intuitive. Despite the choppiness, the prime footage from George Harrison’s 1971 Concert for Bangladesh or Jonathan Demme’s 1984 Talking Heads concert doc Stop Making Sense is exciting. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge
The Way, Way Back Fourteen-year-old Duncan (Liam James) and his divorced mother Pam (Toni Colette) are dragged to a Massachusetts beach rental by her overbearing new bf Trent (Steve Carell). Trent. There is no way we are going to like a guy named that (and a car salesman, of course), and Duncan emphatically dislikes the bullying Trent. In this awfully broad and familiar tale, unhappy Duncan finds a sympathetic mentor in Owen (Sam Rockwell), the flippant king of the local water park where Duncan lands a summer job. Owen is the anti-Trent: goofy and fun-loving, spitting out nicknames and bald lies, treating his staff with affectionate sarcasm, and harboring a not-so-secret thing for his boss (Maya Rudolph). While the drunken adults enjoy “spring break for adults” (per Duncan’s glum crush object, played by AnnaSophia Robb), Duncan finds new pals and self-confidence. We’ve seen this story a thousand times. But what are its incidental pleasures? Rockwell, Rockwell, and Rockwell. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Alderwood 16, Kirkland Parkplace, Guild 45th, Bainbridge, Vashon, Meridian, Thornton Place, others
Theaters:
Admiral, 2343 California Ave. SW, 938-3456; Ark Lodge Cinemas, 4816 Rainier Ave. S, 721-3156; Big Picture, 2505 First Ave., 256-0566; Big
Picture
Redmond, 7411 166th Ave. NE, 425-556-0566; Central
Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684; Cinebarre, 6009 SW 244th St. (Mountlake Terrace)., 425-672-7501; Cinerama, 2100 Fourth Ave., 448-6680; Crest, 16505 Fifth Ave. NE, 781-5755; Grand Illusion, 1403 NE 50th St., 523-3935; Guild 45, 2115 N. 45th St., 781-5755; Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., 781-5755; iPic Theaters, 16451 N.E. 74th St. (Redmond), 425-636-5601; Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, 425-827-9000; Lincoln Square, 700 Bellevue Way N, 425-454-7400; Majestic Bay, 2044 NW Market St., 781-2229; Meridian, 1501 Seventh Ave., 223-9600; Metro, 4500 Ninth Ave. NE, 781-5755; Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380; Oak Tree, 10006 Aurora Ave. N, 527-1748; Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., 888-262-4386; Seven Gables, 911 NE 50th St., 781-5755; SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996; SIFF Film Center, 305 Harrison St. (Seattle Center), 324-9996; Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave NE, 633-0059; Thornton Place, 301 NE 103rd St., 517-9953; Varsity, 4329 University Way NE, 781-5755.
