Movies & TV

MOVIES & EVENTS 28 DAYS Sandra Bullock is an alcoholic whose behavior lands her in Serenity Glen, a touchy-feely rehab center filled with the requisite, cuddly goofs and embittered oddballs. Bullock carries an ultimately phony movie with something resembling humanity. Division Street ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER “You are more authentic the more you are closer […]

LIKE SCORSESE’S TAXI DRIVER and Bresson’s Pickpocket before it, Mike Hodges’ unreleased 1998 masterpiece Croupier makes a convincing case that a sleazy, specialized profession–in this case, the guy who rolls the ball and collects the chips at a roulette table–is a perfect metaphor for existential malaise. In the role of God’s Lonely Man stands Jack […]

THE WORLD OF JAPANESE ANIME is like an oversized carousel operated by the Marquis de Sade. The lights are too bright, it spins too fast, everyone around is screaming out of control, and in the end, all you want to do is throw up. The problem lies in the lack of appreciation for simple stillness. […]

Girl, Interrupted, the mediocre screen adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s similarly mediocre novel, is released on video June 6. Winona Ryder can put an audience to sleep more efficiently than a Sealy mattress. Our chicks-in-the-loony-bin picks are like a bucket of NoDoz. • FRANCES (1982)–If lobotomies were handed out after every nervous breakdown (like ’30s film […]

Thursday, May 18 8:00 5 FRIENDS Season finale! Chandler is about to pop the question to Monica when Tom Selleck walks back in! Damn his gorgeous booshy moostache! 10:00 5 E.R. Season finale! Carter pitches a hissy-fit in front of everybody, just because he was stabbed with a knife. Boo, hoo, hoo! Friday, May 19 […]

FILM IS A POWERFUL AGENT of confusion, especially when taken in massive quantity. The multiplicity of film’s attack on our minds–aural, visual, rhythmic, musical–makes us extraordinarily susceptible to its demands. When the Lumières projected a train arriving at the Gare St. Lazare, and the terrified audience fled the cinema, they did so in a state […]

FOR YEARS NOW, local film programmers have been trying to negotiate the annual juggernaut that is the Seattle International Film Festival. Regardless of one’s opinion of the festival itself, it’s a simple fact that trying to counterprogram an event that consolidates 200 films, 25,000 people, and the focused attention of every media outlet in the […]

THE HUGHES BROTHERS’ documentary American Pimp opens with a montage of middle-class white Americans expressing total contempt for the practice of pimping. What’s striking about this opening is not so much the angry and often ridiculous comments (it’s easy to get random people on the street to say stupid things), but that the outraged whites […]

AT THIS POINT in his long and brilliant career, Woody Allen should be allowed the dignity of coasting on his reputation. And that’s just what he’s done, at the rate of a movie a year in the decade or so since his last all-out great film, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)–with contested exceptions made for Husbands […]