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Friday, March 2, 2007

This Weekend at the Movies

posted by on March 2 at 13:45 PM

First, the movie news:

Worst idea ever: The Oscar-winning The Lives of Others, about the secret police in 1980s East Germany, is going to be remade as an English-language film by the Weinstein bros.

Someone finally punched NP Thompson where it hurts: Interviews by the former Seattle freelancer and professional basketcase have been pulled from the Greencine website.

David Denby still hates Babel: For all the same reasons, but with shiny new literary references.

SIFF Cinema at Nesholm Family Lecture Hall in the Cell Therapeutics something Auditorium at Marion Oliver McCaw Hall (WHEW!) had its soft opening last night with a reception and a screening of Max Ophul’s fantastic The Earrings of Madame de…. In attendance, among throngs of donors and SIFF staffers: Michael Seiwerath and Susie Purves of Northwest Film Forum (future competitor, which nonetheless provides a venue during part of the festival), Ruth Hayler of Landmark Theatres (future competitor, which nonetheless provides multiple venues during the entire festival), Seattle City Council President Nick Licata, and Seattle Times gossip columnist Pamela Sitt.

Opening today and this weekend:

zodiac.jpg

Zodiac (like being locked in the file cabinet of a conspiracy junkie), along with Black Snake Moan (a ridiculous piece of Southern-fried exploitation), Tears of the Black Tiger (Day-Glo bugfuck!), Wild Hogs (so many kinds of mediocre, and it’ll be number one this weekend), and Days of Glory (a postcolonial war movie) are all in On Screen this week. Scroll to the bottom, and you’ll find reviews of The Aura (a one-week only run of an excellent thriller by the director of Nine Queens), Celine and Julie Go Boating (a one DAY only screening of a fantastically bizarre classic, part of Northwest Film Forum’s practically compulsory Jacques Rivette series), and the traveling Rural Route Film Festival at Grand Illusion (check out the shorts program).

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Film Shorts and Movie Times are available in our carefully compiled, lovingly updated movie search, Get Out. Don’t miss the Janus series, continuing at SIFF Cinema through the weekend and beyond: brand spanking new, incredibly glorious prints of The 400 Blows, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, Malle’s The Lovers, and a whole new batch on Wednesday.

RSS icon Comments

1

Disagree. I saw The Lives of Others at a preview mostly attended by many German people, and it highly deserved the buzz - a very good film. The fact that my brother was a student in Hamburg during the time of the movie made it all the more interesting - he was there when the wall fell.

Posted by Will in Seattle | March 2, 2007 2:20 PM
2

"Zodiac (like being locked in the file cabinet of a conspiracy junkie)."

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I'm going to see Zodiac tonight and I hope it's not as bad as your description. i used to wonder if The Stranger waited for everyone else to review a movie and if, as a whole, the reviews were positive, The Stranger took a contrary opinion. Unless a film is an obvious piece of crap like Wild Hogs, I tend to believe a movie is as bad as The Stranger suggests.

Posted by elswinger | March 2, 2007 2:37 PM
3

Dear people, do you ever bother to read the reviews I link to?

Will, you should know I loved The Lives of Others. But taking cutting it out of its political and historical context and needlessly remaking it? HORRIBLE. IDEA.

Elswinger, I'm quoting from the review, which you can click on right there. Andrew Wright praises the film. Please read the review before you wantonly misinterpret the teaser.

Posted by annie | March 2, 2007 2:45 PM
4

Annie, I read the review earlier today, but for some reason forgot you didn't write it, that Andrew did. By your comment it doesn't sound like you liked it as much as Andrew did (I could be wrong) and so it was my knee jerk reaction to assume the Stranger panned it. It would be a great feature to the web page to be able to go back and read Stranger reviews of movies of the past.

Posted by elswinger | March 2, 2007 2:54 PM
5

I haven't seen Zodiac yet; I was quoting directly from Andrew's review, and I think that line is neither positive nor negative--whether that sounds good depends on your perspective.

You can already search for film titles, which will bring up reviews, but we would like to have some kind of index in the future. Thanks for the suggestion.

Posted by annie | March 2, 2007 3:00 PM
6

The more the critics condemn Black Snake Moan as sleazy and trashy, the more I'm tempted to see it.

I mean, c'mon, am I the only person who enjoyed Poor White Trash 2?

Posted by Original Andrew | March 2, 2007 3:11 PM
7

Your inclusion of the NPT/GreenCine drama makes me happy in all the unmentionable places. Here's to hoping his writing career eventually devolves into doing the one-word keyword summaries on Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Posted by karmic cleanser | March 2, 2007 8:16 PM

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