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This Weekend at the Movies

Plenty to see! Plenty to do! Plenty to not see! Plenty of air conditioned theaters available!

Opening this week:

burn%20after%20reading.jpg

The new Coen brothers’ comedy Burn After Reading, a movie I like more and more the longer I think about it: “Burn After Reading is sillier and less thematically cohesive than Fargo or Raising Arizona, but it takes a turn exactly one hour in that reminds you just how fucked-up and brilliant the Coens can be. Brad Pitt is involved.”

Paul Constant very much enjoyed Momma’s Man at Northwest Film Forum: “It sounds like an underbaked Will Ferrell bomb, but Momma’s Man actually more closely resembles 2006’s Old Joy—it certainly shares that film’s patient pacing and oblique sentimentality—or the funny, pathetic sadness of a Chris Ware cartoon.”

Paul Constant very much didn’t enjoy Cthulhu: “Waggish critics will probably comment that Tori Spelling puts in the best performance of the movie, but that’s a lazy zinger: Her acting is exactly as bad as everyone else’s.”

Or Trumbo: “Aspiring documentarians should watch Trumbo as an example of what not to do: The film tells us how charming the man is, but they don’t show us much of anything. Instead, it’s just a bunch of famous people talking at you for an hour and a half about the First Amendment. This isn’t a testament to an underappreciated talent, it’s a boring-ass middle-school civics class.”

And finally, as has been mentioned before, special guest reviewer Diane Keaton is none too pleased about having been left out of The Women: “Hey, Hollywood. Write this down. Next time you make a two-hour vaginal suppository that hasn’t met a feminine cliché it didn’t dip in chocolate and shove down America’s gullet (smoking, shopping, cheating, faked orgasms, diets, supermodels, bubble baths, hunger, water breaking, Botox), maybe you should do your job and fucking call Diane Keaton. Bitches.”

In Concessions this week, I attend the Sprocket Society’s Secret Sunday Matinee, where I am irreversibly traumatized by Betty Boop: “When Boop throws a party, it is not humans who come to dine.”

And in Limited Runs:

Paul Constant fucking luuuved Viva: “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen an homage film as note-perfect and entertaining as Viva. It’s a callback to early ’70s sexploitation films, where busty blondes refer to whiskey and a copy of Playboy as ‘coffee and the morning paper,’ where orgies are the Greatest Thing Ever, and women are expected to cook and clean in transparent lingerie.”

Charles Mudede wrote this really, really funny sentence about Audition aka Competition: “The pleasures of this documentary (or at least I think it’s a documentary) can only accessed by that extraordinary type of human being whose life is utterly meaningless when it’s not directed toward the painfully slow activity of accumulating more and more knowledge about very rare Czech films.”

And these extremely satisfying ones about Alain Robbe-Grillet: “Why did Alain Robbe-Grillet make movies? Because he was the one who put a bullet into the old head of the novel.”

Also:
Donnie Darko at the Egyptian!
This Is Spinal Tap at the Grand Illusion!
And a whole bunch of other stuff!!!

AND FINALLY, I just noticed that I totally fucked up and left some ancient information for Soul Nite! in the print edition. Soul Nite! at the NWFF is not, in fact, “Thurs July 31 at 8 pm.” It was actually last night, September 11, at 8 pm. My apologies to anyone patiently waiting for next July to roll around.

Comments (4)

1

Air conditioned theaters? It's 75 degrees outside. Folks need to be outside now; the remaining 10 months of the year when it's 45 and drizzly they can park their big butts in a theater seat and watch a movie.

Posted by Sargon Bighorn | September 12, 2008 8:38 PM
2

I'll be seeing Cthulhu at the Metro on Sunday evening.

After helping repaint the Fremont Mural this Sunday at 11 am - many hands make light work!

Come on down to Bridgeway North just up the street from the Fremont Troll and pitch in!

Posted by Will in Seattle | September 13, 2008 12:29 AM
3

but do many hands make great art?

Posted by PC | September 13, 2008 8:20 AM
4

Arms Made Of Legs make great art.

NOT!!!!!

Posted by Cookie W. Monster | September 13, 2008 1:53 PM

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