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Friday, March 9, 2007

This Weekend at the Movies

posted by on March 9 at 17:30 PM

I didn’t hear about it until after we went to press, but for all you procrastinators out there: Iraq in Fragments is getting a limited re-release at the cozy Grand Illusion starting this weekend. The times are 1 pm this Saturday and Sunday, continuing next weekend. Background reading here, here, and here.

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Movie news, etc.: Wild Hogs was tops at the box office last weekend. WILD HOGS! Does anybody know anyone who bought a ticket to this stupid movie? Premiere magazine is going online only, starting in April. Starting today, you can read Cahiers du Cinéma in an English translation for 35 euros a year. (No, I haven’t ponied up yet, but I’m tempted.) And Northwest Film Forum is starting a blog… any day now…

In the paper this week, you can read my piece on SIFF Cinema and its prospective impact on the independent exhibition scene. My instinct, not elaborated there, is that SIFF will in fact be in direct competition with Northwest Film Forum for bookings, which in turn will further restrict the programming options for Grand Illusion. For viewers, there are tradeoffs in either direction. Getting to Seattle Center can be a bitch, but the theater itself is fantastic. If SIFF Cinema sucks up to middlebrow tastes in order to fill their 400-seat house, the programming could end up dispiriting. But it will be fun to watch everything play out. One nice factoid that didn’t make it into the piece: SIFF artistic director Carl Spence told me that their digital projector is capable of the live Metropolitan Opera simulcasts that have so far been relegated to suburban theaters in our market. (Pacific Place plays “encore” presentations, but it’s just not the same.)

Opening today:

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Andrew Wright reviews the giant, toothy tadpole movie The Host: “Fleet-footed, slimy, and prone to regurgitation at the most inconvenient of times, the monster serves as a reminder of the simple, goofy pleasures that a well-made creature feature can induce.”

I review the British quiz-show movie Starter for Ten. Note to heterosexual male film critics: PLEASE stop calling James McAvoy “likeable,” “attractive,” “handsome,” etc. He is none of the above. I think I have it right: McAvoy is a hateful empathy suck.

Speaking of heterosexual male film critics: Andrew Wright tackles the homoerotic bronzed-muscle epic 300. His conclusion? “Stand down, Showgirls; a new shining star of queer cinema has been erected.”

And in On Screen this week: Lindy West on Gray Matters (“I thought [Heather Graham] was a harmless, wobbly, mildly amusing bug-face. But that was before I realized that THE WOMAN MAKES ME WANT TO DIE.”), Andrew Wright on Mafioso (“fresh as a daisy!”), and Jen Graves on the consumer debt agitdoc Maxed Out (“the scariest movie of the year!”).

Our fully searchable movie times and film shorts are available via Get Out. The practically compulsory Jacques Rivette series continues this weekend at the Northwest Film Forum, Jean Renoir’s definitely compulsory The Rules of the Game opens today at the Varsity, and the almost compulsory Janus series at SIFF Cinema continues with The Organizer, Ballad of a Soldier, The Cranes Are Flying, and the experimental Yugoslav quasi-documentary WR: Mysteries of the Organism. Crazy go!

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