Woo, SIFF is over… and just in time, because it’s sunny outside. Meanwhile, in theaters, a whole lot of middling-to-awful summer movies are landing with a thump.

If you missed it, here is my final take on The Happening: not intelligent design propaganda. Just a very silly movie about the menacing rustling of leaves.

Opening this week:

Speaking of awful summer movies: I try to describe the unique brand of yuck that is The Love Guru (“When Mike Meyers isn’t making inane pseudo-puns, he’s exploiting stereotypes of relatively defenseless sub-minorities, such as French-Canadians and black women. Classy”).

Paul Constant appraises the SIFF alum Mongol (“When your protagonist is responsible for fathering half of a percent of the modern world’s male population through rape and conquest, any aspirations toward romance ring hollow. Casting Genghis Khan as a one-woman man is an unspeakably batshit-crazy maneuver”).

I write up the so-so Get Smart (“Get Smart moves quickly, and the insanely hyperbolic action sequences are enough to distract you from most of the movie’s flaws. Except for the lazy jokes about the character flaws of George W. Bush”).

Bradley Steinbacher sits through the Julianne Moore freakshow (and SIFF holdover) Savage Grace (“As it turns out, no amount of lover swapping and incestuous three-ways can make vacant, uninteresting people interesting”).

Charles Mudede reviews a worthwhile SIFF alum, Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (“Though he is not a user of steroids, [director Chris] Bell is very critical of how his culture codes them. The culture wants you to be bigger and better and faster, and at the same time it marks the use of drugs that make you bigger and better and faster as wrong. The contradiction results in all manner of absurdities, a number of which Bell exposes”).

And Steinbacher destroys the fourth SIFF alum of the week, The Children of Huang Shi (“The film’s biggest weakness is [Jonathan Rhys] Meyers. With a feeble delivery and a pretty-but-blank mug, he’s far too bland to hang an overly earnest film on. Only at the end, as the real-life survivors recount their memories over the closing credits, does The Children of Huang Shi achieve the impact it’s been straining for”).

Finally, Lindy West discusses her glamorous roots.

In Limited Runs this week: Tonight only are two Sichuan earthquake benefit screenings of Made in China, by Genius shortlister John Helde, at Northwest Film Forum. Also at NWFF: Passing Poston, an interesting but badly constructed film about a Japanese-American internment camp in WWII, and Rabbit in the Moon, an excellent film about the internment, and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the first in a summer Miyazaki series. Grand Illusion is doing a whole week of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, plus the late-night Joysticks, about a video arcade. Central Cinema has a family-friendly “Balloonamentary”; SAM has a gay-pride screening of Victor/Victoria; Silent Movie Mondays has The Gaucho, with an uncharacteristic bad-dude performance by Douglas Fairbanks (that’s Sr., not Jr., as I mistakenly wrote in the print edition). And the beloved IMAX classic Beavers is back at the Science Center starting tomorrow. (SIFF Cinema reopens next week, by the way, with the new Guy Maddin fantasia, My Winnipeg.)

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