There’s almost a homemade quality to some of the hotel theaters that are housed in converted conference rooms with uncomfortable chairs. Same goes for the makeshift “Concession’s” counter.
This one is for the proofreaders.
-Andy Spletzer reporting from the Sundance Film Festival
A USC cheerleader cheers for the opposing team.
What a condescending statement from Nickels on Nick Licata.
The Team Nickels press release says:
“Congratulations to Councilmember Licata on his election as the new city council president,” Nickels said. “Nick and I have worked together for four years on many important issues, including public safety and civil rights. The people of Seattle will find in him a strong advocate of the arts and open space. I know that he will serve the city council well as president.”
Worked together? Mainly, Nickels has accused Licata of being “anti-jobs” for consistently truth-squading Nickels’s South Lake Union agenda.
Uh, “arts and open space” …sure.
But here’s hoping Licata challenges Nickels right off the bat on the fire levy funding fiasco. Licata should call on Nickels to rein in the project. It’s currently 40%, or $67million over-budget. And we all know how outraged Mayor Gridlock gets when things go over budget. Uggh, what a hypocrite the mayor is.
Licata voted the wrong way last week when the council approved the first bit of levy spending, but let’s hope, now that he’s a cocky council president, he’ll take it to Team Hypocrisy.
Bush was in deep shit a couple of weeks ago… domestic spying… the war… and suddenly a new Osama tape surfaces… in which Osama threatens the USA with more attacks… and Osama recommends a book on the anti-war left’s reading list… and Osama uses language that sounds like Dem talking points… and yet White House doesn’t raise the terror alert level despite the new threat…
Could it be that it wasn’t really Osama on that tape? And does the White House know it wasn’t Osama?
It’s clear the White House was manipulating terror alert levels before the 2004 election. An Osama tape turning up right now is awfully convenient—just like all those terror alerts were in 2003 and 2004. Does the White House know the tape is fake and verified it anyway?
Hell, I wouldn’t put making a fake Osama tape past George W. Bush and his cronies
The fierce flamers over at Queerty.com have diagnosed the man replacing Anna Marie Cox at Wonkette with an long-standing case of homophobia.
According to the New York Times, David B. Lat, AKA the new Wonkette, has a troubling anti-gay history at Harvard, where Lat repeatedly castigated his alma mater’s Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Student Association.
Full NYT story here. Queerty.com report here.
Still, how homophobic can someone as bitchy and campy as Lat be?
This question is mulled in the NYT piece by Elaine Golin, a lawyer and former colleague of Lat’s: “David was on this one side a hard-core Federalist Society type, who clerked for an extremely hard-right judge, and was way to the right of most of his associates. And he had this whole other side of flamboyant, theater-watching, Oscar-watching, shoe-loving, litigatrix. How do these two sides get reconciled?”
Who knows? Maybe Lat should ask former Spokane mayor Jim West….
Guess what? Our president is an ass. Via Drudge:
President Bush has so far skipped BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN — the Hollywood hit about two homosexual cowboys. During a Q&A session at Kansas State University today, a student asked Bush: “I was just wanting to get your opinion on BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN if you’d seen it yet.”The crowd laughed softly before the student said loudly: “You would love it! You should check it out.”
“I haven’t seen it,” Bush said flatly. “I’d be glad to talk about ranching, but I haven’t seen the movie,” he said to laughter. “I’ve heard about it.”
The president waited a second or two, then said, according to a transcript: “I hope you go—(laughter)—you know—(laughter) — I hope you go back to the ranch and the farm, is what I was about to say. I haven’t seen it. (Laughter, applause.)”
I didn’t expect the Bigot and Cheif to rush right out and see Brokeback—hell, I haven’t even seen it yet. What really struck me about this transcript was all the laughter. Whenever Bush speaks before one of those worshipful crowds his aides assemble for him—at taxpayer expense—Bush gets lots of laughs. Not the right kind of laughs—not the derisive laughter his idiotic ramblings deserve, but “You’re hilarious, Mr. President!” guffaws. God bless the kid who asked Bush if he was going to see the movie, but who the fuck are these people who laugh at every dumbass thing that falls out of Bush’s mouth? “I hope you go” gets a laugh? “You know” gets a laugh?
Oh, Dear Leader! You are SO funny!
Three more years, folks, three more fucking years.
I’m thrilled that Nick Licata is going to be council president. (I wish Amy Jenniges were still around for this. I can hear her now: “Yes!”.)
From repealing the TDO, to fighting Sidran’s impound ordinance, to working to keep city hall accessible, Licata has been the Stranger’s favorite council member since he was first elected in ‘97.
Certainly, we disagree with Licata on some specifics (his pseudo populist Viaduct jag and his knee-jerk impulse to side with reactionary utopianists on “neighborhood” issues are slightly annoying.) But our most substantive gripe has always been that he never seemed able to rustle up the votes to make good on his leftist agenda.
But, damn, Licata emerged today with the votes to become president. The fact that the votes represented a compromise, speak to Nick’s emerging role as a broker on the council. This bodes well for Licata.
It doesn’t, however, bode well for Team Nickels. Licata is one of the sharpest critics of Nickels’s go-go agenda.
In honor of Mr. Licata, here’s the endorsement we published when he ran for reelection in November (And check out the last graph, in particular):
City Council Position 6 Vote for Nick LicataOkay. We swear we’re not just drunk dialing. The Stranger Election Control Board loves Nick Licata. A stalwart opponent of corporate giveaways (he’s currently lining up votes to oppose Team Nickels’s plans to subsidize the Sonics), Licata is Seattle’s iconoclastic lefty—the council’s most reliable go-to-guy for do-gooder activists, government accountability cranks, and the marginalized.
Case in point, Licata recently amended Team Nickels’s patronizing and sexist strip-club “four- foot” rule, scaling back Nickels’s attempt to force strippers into the court system rather than the more collaborative hearing-examiner process. (And after sneaking in that fix, Licata righteously rounded up three other protest votes and voted against Nickels’s nanny-state legislation as a whole. Ha!)
Speaking of challenging Nickels, Licata has often been the lone dissenting vote against the mayor’s big plans: No on Nickels’s useless vanity fix to Mercer, no on Nickels’s UW lease lid lift, no on Nickels’s unfunded viaduct tunnel plan (Hey, Greg, maybe we should give you a month to come up with a finance plan!), and—voting with lefty ally Peter Steinbrueck—no on authorizing $3.9 million in city money for Paul Allen’s streetcar.
Licata has been a determined critic of developer giveaways, taking up the fight (again with Steinbrueck) to amend Nickels’s plans in South Lake Union and downtown. And he’s currently pushing for expanded library hours in Nickels’s new budget, arguing that keeping the current Republican library hours (never fucking open) in place is a disservice to working-class people.
A longtime monorail advocate who argues that monorail technology is better suited to Seattle than Sound Transit’s light rail technology, Licata wants to keep monorail technology alive by getting Sound Transit to adopt the idea. He also says he will not let the monorail’s MVET be transferred to anything but mass transit projects.
Our one gripe with Nick is that as a veteran council member, with two terms under his belt, he still struggles to get the votes to bolster his crusades. For example, his amendment to require a citywide transportation-needs study before committing new bus hour money to South Lake Union went nowhere. And his idea for a city levy to fund both cops and social services disappeared.
The powers-that-be still view Licata as a threat. Team Vulcan tried, unsuccessfully, to field a candidate to challenge Licata. They failed because Licata’s most remarkable talent (thanks to his straight-shooting manner) is his ability to earn the respect of his adversaries. For example, the cop union endorsed Licata this year even though Licata—who chairs the council’s cop committee—is pledging to fight for stricter police-accountability rules like demanding unredacted complaint files.
The SECB has dreams of a Mayor Licata. At the very least, we’re hoping for a Council President Licata, who would shake up city hall’s second floor and pull the council in a more activist direction. Vote Licata!
Electro-pop sensations The Postal Service are accusing Apple Computers of plagiarism. According to Pitchfork, the duo discovered that the directors of the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” video—Josh Melnick and Xander Charity—have made a commercial spot that parodies their original work, but they failed to contact the group about it, and PS members Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello aren’t amused. You can view the original and the ad version here and here.
No legal action has been taken yet, and with the “Such Great Heights” video topping iTunes download chart in the wake of the parody, maybe it’s best to let it go.
There’s a good chance you might have seen him if you live in Washington’s 16th, 17th, 26th, 28th, or 47th Legislative Districts, where a GOP-funded scare tactic is spreading false information just in time for the Republicans’ big election year push on the sex offender issue. The mailer reads, “This violent predator lives in your community,” but it has turned up in mailboxes near Walla Walla, Tacoma, Kelso, and Vancouver (WA). Which makes this supposed sex offender either a major Washington landowner with an extremely diverse portfolio, or a fiction. The bet of the bloggers who have been unraveling this story is on the latter.
“I’ve seen a lot of offensive things as a participant and observer of politics, but this is one of the most vile things I have ever seen,” writes a blogger in Vancouver, Washington.
Over at the conservative SoundPolitics, the person in the photo is alleged by Stefan Sharkansky to be a Level 3 sex offender from Pierce County. But rather than explain why the GOP is erroneously warning residents of far off Walla Walla County—to pick just one example—that this man lives among them, Sharkansky is taking a page from Karl Rove’s playbook and trying to paint the Democrats as unconcerned about things that scare Americans. In Washington State, it seems sex offenders are the new terrorists in terms of political utility. Sharkansky even outlines a loopy theory in which he sees Democrats as being soft on sex offenders (they’re not, by the way) because Democrats don’t want to upset their sex offender friends in the teacher’s union.
To which David Goldstein responds:
You know what Stefan… fuck you. If you actually believe that Dems would protect teachers unions over sexually abused children then you are just plain sick. And if you don’t believe it, then your are as dishonest and conscienceless as the GOP operatives who designed and executed this disgusting fear campaign.
Don’t expect this to be the last you hear about sex offenders before the elections in November…
One of the movies I was most looking forward to was Bobcat “Bob” Goldthwait’s new movie Stay, from the director of my favorite clown movie, Shakes the Clown. Its premise is that sometimes it pays to NOT be completely honest with your significant other, especially when you have something in your past that is horrifically embarrassing. I didn’t expect it to be such a poorly written script full of stock characters and an unlikable, if cute, lead actress.
The movie looked like shit at the press screening, and not just because of the bad lighting within the film. Either the projector at the venue wasn’t calibrated properly, or the video master was off, but there was blotchy orange video noise in the highlights on people’s faces. That would have been forgivable if it wasn’t for the stock meth-smoking brother still living at home, the prudish mom who has a wild sexual history with famous rock stars of the ’50s, which she’s kept a secret from the straight shooting dad.
My biggest regret is not walking out of the movie early enough to catch the press screening of TV Junkie, which I read about in Matt Dentler’s Blog. For that I am still kicking myself.
-Andy Spletzer
reporting from Sundance
Park City, Utah
By the way, if you want to know what the transgression that she’s embarrassed to tell her fiancĂ© is, follow this link.
After weeks of intrigue and deadlock, the council was set today to elect a new president: Nick Licata.
Licata, a dark-horse candidate whom many initially laughed off as a presidential contender because he’s the most left-leaning member of the city council, became a frontrunner after council members deadlocked 4-4 between the original two contenders, Jean Godden and Richard Conlin, when Jim Compton resigned in December. Conlin and Godden both hung on until this morning, when Conlin announced he was withdrawing his name, opening up the field to Licata and Richard McIver, another “compromise” candidate who had the support of David Della and Godden.
The catch, of course, was that McIver didn’t really want the job. He likes his current position as head of the council’s budget committee, and offered to step up as president only if no other viable candidate volunteered. When it became clear Licata had the support of the majority of the council (including swing vote Jan Drago), McIver withdrew.
As a council staffer whispered to me a few minutes before the vote, “I laughed when you predicted it would be Nick,” back in December. Sometimes, the good guys win.
Every year for the past four years, Seattle has thrown a party in Park City to raise awareness of the city as a place for filmmaking. We’re not the only ones who do this, either. I popped into the San Francisco party for some drinks and to hear about what kind of initiatives they’re pushing. They’ve got this new thing called SF360, where they’re teaming up with indieWIRE to create daily reports on the San Francisco film scene. I also had some free wine and played this racing videogame (it wasn’t even the X-box 360!) before heading over to the Seattle Party.
Perhaps we should have called it the Sub Pop Party, with the musical acts Band of Horses, Fruit Bats and Iron & Wine featured at the party. For some reason the Master of Ceremonies was Kate Walsh from the “set in Seattle but filmed elsewhere” show “Grey’s Anatomy.” That was fairly ridiculous. The bands were good, but as a spoiled member of the press and regular Sundance hobo, I was disappointed at the lack of free drinks at this event.
Apparently, several Seattle venders are also hosting two VIP dinners, but I haven’t heard who was on the guest list for those. I do know that they’re being hosted by Seattle film promoter/publicist Warren Etheredge, who had nice things to say about the Park City emergency room after breaking (or spraining) his arm slipping on the ice walking from the shuttle to his condo.
-Andy Spletzer
reporting from Sundance
Park City, Utah
When your Seagull-induced elation and optimism for the future begins to wane, take a look at this man and find comfort in the fact that (as a soothsayin’ Obi-Wan once said) he is is our only hope.
OCALA, Fla. — A 50-year-old classic novel about forbidden love is shaking things up in Marion County.The controversy centers on the book “Lolita” and whether it’s obscene under today’s standards, WESH 2 News reported.
“Lolita” is a famous novel full of pages and pages of sexually explicit material about pedophilia.
“I believe that you, at least hypothetically, could read this book and consider it obscene,” said Terry Blaes, of Dunnellon.
She challenged the Marion County Commission to determine whether they should pull “Lolita” from public library shelves, as they have the right to do so.
“I want you to think about the effect of literature on the people who read it, children and adults,” she said.
Moral scolds: Protecting America’s children—and adults!—from great literature.
This post was written by my brother, Bill Savage, a football fan and a Chicago Bears season ticket holder. He has some advice for Seattle residents who don’t know what’s expected of them now that our pro-football team is headed to the Superbowl.—Dan Savage
OK, Seattle—take a deep breath. Hold it, hold it—now, exhale through the nose. Repeat as necessary. You all know this zen yoga shit.
Your Seahawks are going to the Super Bowl, and word is that the whole town is losing its mind, even people who recently didn’t know the species of the local NFL fowl. I’d like to offer a few words of advice for how to enjoy the coming two weeks of media hype and giddy anticipation, how to act like you know what’s going on when discussing football, and then the actual game itself.
As for the game, rent a car, load it up with food and drink and drive all night, south through Mississippi (watch out for the cops in Yolabusha County, no mercy on the speeding tickets there, I can tell you) to New Orleans, where they know how to throw a party.
Wait, that was Super Bowl XX.
Sorry, flashing back a bit to when the Bears were in the game—Post Ecstatic Stress Disorder, the happy cousin of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder . If the Seahawks win, you’ll all experience the symptoms of PEST, including inexplicable grinning and high-fiving total strangers.
But back to the present: in keeping with Seattle’s Never Won Much Luck, Seahawks fans get that once-in-every-20-years Super Bowl in a cold weather site. Instead of the Big Easy or Miami or even Los Angeles, you get Detroit—an urban wasteland which bears something of a resemblance to post-Katrina N’Awlins, without the sublime juxtapositions any natural disaster creates.
If you’re going to the game, the word on Detroit: I wouldn’t stay there. Stay in Windsor, on the Ontario side of the river, for better bars, legal gambling, and strip clubs that serve booze.
More on that later—back now to the media hype, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since since the last Super Bowl.
Journalists—local and national—will delve into every crevice of the town and the team looking for stories to fill endless pages of newsprint, since they now have 13 days to fill without the benefit of an actual game to write about. They’ll find every possible background story, every angle, every meaningless bit of nonsense. What are you to do when presented with this onslaught?
Read every word.
You must, it’s your civic duty—and trust me, you might not get the chance again for a while.
This daily ingestion of blather then enables the non-fan to join the conversation. You Stranger-reading hipster bandwagon-jumpers should abide by two rules:
1) Keep your mouth shut. If you don’t know what you’re talking about—see my brother’s liveslogging of the NFC championship game for a primo example—you don’t want anyone to know. When some knowledgeable fan says “Seattle beat Caroline while the Bears couldn’t because the Bears Tampa Bay-style Cover 2 scheme left a seam for Steve Smith”—just nod, since you wouldn’t know Cover 2 from Cover Girl. Football is a hypermasculine game, and strong and silent works just fine.
2) If you must speak, though, the best thing to do is just to agree and extend a bit. If you’re at the Comet and some crusty old-timer with an ancient, soiled Seahawks cap says “Shaun Alexander can’t win The Game for us, he’s too much of a finesse runner, can’t take a hit,” simply reply, “Finesse never wins in the running game.” This will allow Old Crusty to think you know a thing or two, buy you a Fat Tire, and continue the conversation with observations about Matt Hasselbeck’s passing options.
When in doubt, refer to rule 1.
More to come in the days ahead. Tomorrow: Speaking Football 101.
Last week I wrote in Live Wire that three Northwest acts (Mudhoney, Sleater-Kinney, and the Shins) have been picked to curate lineups at All Tomorrow’s Parties this year….I’d also printed some old info that Ween was one of the non-NW bands acting as curators….well I guess Ween’s out now and Dinosaur Jr have curated a lineup that includes Dead Meadow, Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Lilys, and more. (Thanks to Daniel Garber for the heads up on that one).
This weekend, while taking a gander at some art around town, I came upon Miguel Edwards’ hot pink and purple, LED-powered, holograph-like photograph-paintings of female porn bodies posed suggestively in a smoky mist while wearing such accoutrements as angel wings and cowboy hats. (See below? I’m not making this up).
They’re on view in CoCA’s darkened project room, where evidently, you can feel free to masturbate at will.
So after hearing forever that Wedding Crashers is such a funny fucking move, I finally rented it last night. There were maybe five funny moments in the movie—or I should say, the parts of the movie I could sit through—because the thing quickly disintegrated into a sappy, predictable, lame love story instead of the fucked up, bad boy comedy I kept hearing about. What gives with this movie? Is the standard for cinematic comedy so dumbed down that this piece of shit passes as hilarious? Granted, I love Bad Santa and Old School and 40 Year Old Virgin had a lot of funny moments, but why is there always some stupid lesson or love story that has to ruin things in the end? Mean comedy is pretty damn funny…
Everyone loves what Rem Koolhaas did with Seattle’s downtown library, but everyone loves to hate on his Soho Prada store. Including a friend in New York who writes, with evident glee:
Rem Koolhaas’ landmark Prada store in SoHo was basically destroyed yesterday by smoke and water damage caused by a fire next door. Maybe Rem had an intern set the blaze to end criticism of the $40M store’s notoriously rapid deterioration.
And the bitchy architecture blog The Gutter piles on, relishing the image of those “Brazilian zebra wood floors soaking up the firefighters’ spume.”
As president of the Seattle chapter of the Richard Conlin Haters Club, it is my solemn obligation to post this link to this December press release:
RICHARD CONLIN WILL SERVE AS COUNCIL PRESIDENTSEATTLE — Councilmember Richard Conlin, who chaired the Council’s Transportation Committee for the past four years, will lead the Seattle City Council as president for the two year term, 2006-2007…
“I am very excited about this opportunity,” said President Richard Conlin, “to work with my colleagues to serve the people of Seattle. This is a seasoned and skilled Council. I am confident that we will continue to creatively and responsibly meet the challenges of Seattle’s future.”
Hee-haw.
My vote for council president, if I had one, would be for Nick Licata—even though he’s wrong, wrong, wrong about the Viaduct. Go Nick!
Richard Conlin, who just withdrew his name from the running for the council presidency.
At today’s 2:00 meeting, Peter Steinbrueck will move to nominate Nick Licata, who has the support of Steinbrueck, Tom Rasmussen, Conlin, and, of course, himself. He’ll need to win Jan Drago’s vote to break the protracted 4-4 deadlock that has held the council presidency in limbo ever since Jim Compton resigned in December. (The other new candidate, Richard McIver, has the support of David Della, Jean Godden, and himself).
Six women, five of them minorities:
Sharon Maeda (with seven of eight possible votes);
Stella Chao (with seven votes)
Sally Clark (with six votes)
Ven Knox (with five votes)
Venus Velasquez
Dolores Sibonga
The last two were chosen in a series of tiebreaking votes. In the final vote, Sibonga beat Rainier Valley Chamber of Commerce president Darryl Smith five to three.
I live for junk like this:
Hello,I recently found this website, and read through your article about health and diet, and was quite disappointed with some of your recommendations. I completely agree with your concerns for greasy fast foods causing health problems, but please don’t lump wonderful nutrient dense foods like eggs and red meat into this category. These foods have sustained traditional cultures for millennia. If you do your research on traditional African diets you will find that the healthiest and most long-lived people always had a source of animal or insect protein to provide the fat-soluble vitamins A and D. (Vitamin D deficiency in Blacks is rampant and widespread as you may or may not know). Specifically, there is a tribe in Africa, the Masai, which live on diet largely consisting of red meat and raw dairy. This tribe is known for its longevity and absence of the diseases of civilization as well as their beautiful straight teeth. I must add that there is a huge difference between the feed lot animals raised in confinement compared to those raised sustainably on green pasture in open air. The introduction of vegetable (industrial) oils, white flour and sugar, pasteurized milk, highly processed foods like soy, and food additives into our diets are largely responsible for the maladies you describe. My organization is a huge adovocate of Buying Local, and Buying Organic. You don’t necessarily have to eat meat to be healthy, but you need a source of the fat-soluble vitamins which are only found in animal fats. These fats allow use to stay healthy generation after generation. If you serious about our brothers and sisters health, I urge you to learn more about what I am talking about please refer to these resources below:
Websites:
The Weston A. Price Foundation, www.westonaprice.org
Congratulations to the Seagulls, who won passage to Super Bowl XXXXXIV.5 yesterday at Qwest Field.
However the mighty ‘Gulls weren’t the only newsworthy birds of the weekend. On Sunday morning, I received this report from Hot Tipper Greg:
Leaving my apartment to run some Saturday afternoon errands, I noticed a couple of bicycle cops on the sidewalk. As I approached 12th, I saw a crowd of people gathered, all of them looking up at the sky. Then I saw what they were looking at: a white snowy owl perched atop a street light. I rode my bike back up to my apartment and got my camera, then returned to the corner, where I took a few pictures and stared at the owl for about twenty minutes with the rest of the mesmerized crowd. There were about twenty or thirty people there when I arrived; some people meandered off after watching for a little while; others called friends on their cell phones to describe what they were looking at; some people pulled over in their cars, curious to know what everyone was looking at, and the three bicycle cops sat across the street to take in the sight as well. Several crows tried to get the owl to fly away by dive bombing it, but the owl seemed indifferent to them and like it knew the crows were beneath it in both station and style. Three hours later, after I’d run my Saturday errands, the owl and small crowd were still gathered, though it was now perched on the peak of the building that houses the Artist Trust offices. Everyone seemed mesmerized and excited by the owl sighting. I took it as a good omen.
Not all of the weekend’s subsidiary bird sightings engendered such feel-goodism. On Saturday, my roommate went out to get the mail and came back with a big dead bird she found on the sidewalk in front of our place. At first she thought it was a Peregrin falcon, but when the summoned “raptor expert” arrived (referred by the Audobon Society), he confirmed the bird was a Cooper’s hawk. Either way, it was dead, of what looked like natural causes to the raptor expert, and even its corpse was kinda pretty.
Go Seagulls!
… as seen on a truck on my commute this morning.
“We service your business.”
Eastside Rev. Ken Hutcherson has announced he is launching a national boycott of several companies (including Microsoft, Boeing, Corbis, and RealNetworks) that support Washington’s gay civil rights bill. Sounds like big news, right? Well, last week, after the Associated Press took Rev. Hutcherson’s word for it and told its millions of readers that this boycott was coming, I started looking for evidence that this “national boycott” actually exists.
I found none. And my blog posts about my fruitless search have been collected into a story, here.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media is starting to sound more skeptical about Rev. Hutcherson’s threats (and Goldy over at horsesass.org says it’s about time). On Saturday, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted that the boycott it told readers was coming had not, in fact, arrived.
Hutcherson did not announce a boycott of Microsoft and other businesses that supported gay rights legislation. In a later interview with the Seattle P-I, he said he is planning a boycott but is not ready to reveal details.“We’re going to make it rough (on Microsoft) by having these policies,” he said.
And The New York Times, also on Saturday, cast Rev. Hutcherson’s threat as merely a hypothetical:
This week, the Rev. Ken Hutcherson, pastor of the evangelical Antioch Bible Church in Redmond, Wash., raised the possibility of boycotts of companies like Microsoft, Nike and Boeing for their support of legislation in Washington State prohibiting discrimination in housing, employment and insurance on the basis of sexual orientation.
Rev. Hutcherson still claims he has an unspecified plan, and the required clout, to “make it rough” on Microsoft and other companies that support gay civil rights. But so far it seems all he has is a lot of reporters’ phone numbers and a belief that bluster and exaggeration can substitute for actual clout. It’s a game that works only as long as the media is willing to help him maintain the illusion.
The best thing about Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man is that it incorporates about a half hour of interviews with the classic poet/singer-songwriter, maybe more, and spreads it throughout a tribute concert. He is hilarious and self-deprecating, and I wish people like Bono and the Edge saw that footage before they went off on their hero worship. The concert itself is a distraction from the core of the movie, Cohen’s life and words, though Rufus Wainwright does do a couple great covers of his work.
The other doc I saw was the Beastie Boys concert film Awesome: I Fucking Shot That!. Here’s the good news. The movie captures a show at the Madison Square Garden, and it’s a kick-ass show. The way they covered it was by giving 50 fans cheap video cameras to cover the show from the audience. Then director Nathanial Hornblower (aka Adam Yauch) mixed the movie like it was on Mixmaster Mike’s turntables, and the result is shakey and overwhelming on the big screen, but should play great as a DVD on your TV.
-Andy Spletzer slogging from Sundance in Park City, Utah
Every year there’s this kind of all-star crime film that is nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. I’m thinking of films like the Ed Burns/Rachel Weitz starrer Confidence or even the William H. Macy/Maria Bello film The Cooler. These films do pick up their fans, particularly among college-aged viewers looking for twists for twists sake, but they are deeply flawed at their core.
Add to that list Lucky Number Slevin. Josh Hartnet stars as a guy mistaken for a guy who owes money to a bookie, who gets pulled into a crime war between mob boss Morgan Freeman and Jewish mob boss Sir Ben Kingsley that is being orchestrated famed international assassin Bruce Willis. Throw in Lucy Liu as a perky and annoying coroner, with witty banter replacing actual dialog, and you’ve got one flashy indie films that is empty at its core. Horrible. And with bad art design, too.
-Andy Spletzer slogging from Sundance in Park City, Utah
First things first: Go Seahawks! Hard to believe, but I guess I have a couple weeks to get used to the Seahhawks in the Super Bowl. Damn. And I’m even optimistic about them winning it right now.
Anyway, back to the movies.
This Slamdance charmer looks like a throwback to the days before Sex, Lies and Videotape ushered in an era were feature films would become Hollywood calling cards. Guatemalan Handshake is a good-looking, semi-rural movie, shot on 35mm film, about a power surge in a nuclear power plant, a balding guy (Will Oldham) in a triangular electric car, the pregnant daughter of a demolition driver, a skate rink lothario who gets sick every time he drinks milkshakes, and an older lady looking for her dead dog, among other things.
I wasn’t sure if it all came together for me, but talking to director Todd Rohal over drinks last night, he assures me that it does (which was verified by a friend after the fact). Rohal compares the experience of some people with my reaction to letting your mind wander while reading a book, where you read the same page over and over again before the text sticks. It may be this year’s Primer, but without the scientists. In this case, I look forward to reading these passages again because, even without everything coming together in my mind, I enjoyed the ride.
-Andy Spletzer slogging from Sundance in Park City, Utah
