There are tons of interesting movies at SIFF this weekend—it’s a final, last-minute pileup before we all go into movie withdrawal, just in time to ignore the summer blockbusters. Tonight, check out Sundance favorite Quinceañera, the big, gay, Canadian C.R.A.Z.Y., the weirdly satisfying Slovene black comedy Gravehopping (love the scene with the language instruction tapes), the ever-intriguing François Ozon’s Time to Leave, and French pop lust galore in Backstage. And a special event: Portatastic, fronted by Mac McCaughan of Superchunk, plays a live original score to the very cool Lon Cheney film The Unknown (by Tod Browning of Freaks explo-sideshow fame). Tickets are a little steep at $20, but I’d venture to suggest it’s worth it.

It’s hard to find an image for The Unknown, but if you do a Google image search for the phrase, the following strange thing appears. It has nothing to do with the movie, but I thought you’d enjoy it:

Saturday, check out the lovely local film We Go Back if you missed it Tuesday. It’s rush tickets only for Strangers with Candy (yum!), but waiting in line for dubious reward may not be so boring when Jerri Blank lookalikes are constantly streaming past, angling for free tickets to the SWC afterparty. The other special event is Melodic Meshes, a cool-sounding collection of avant garde shorts (usual-suspect Meshes of the Afternoon, by Maya Deren, is actually the only one I’ve seen), including Tung (Bruce Baillie), Hands (Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke), The Furies (Slavko Vorkapich), and one by by Joseph Cornell. Finally, I’d put money on the Sneak Midnight Film Saturday night being Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly—the print’s in town for a press screening next week, and SIFF’s coy clue (“a twisted new animated film from a director who first made his mark at SIFF with a film in 1991”) seems to fit.

And then… the moment we’ve all been waiting for…. Sunday, June 18, The Last Day of SIFF 2006. Repeat screenings include C.R.A.Z.Y. and Quinceañera, Monster House, Backstage, and Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. Oh, and Broken Sky, which Dan Savage really, really liked, for some reason.

We have a new in-house review for The Science of Sleep, the closing night movie for this year. Happy Gondrying!