Slog

Hey lords & ladies.
There’s a whole bunchload of stuff playing this week, some good, some bad. Plus, the weather is totally shitty! Go see a movie! Go see three! (Not these three.)

Opening today:

Regarding Ghost Town, a movie about a grumpy dentist (Ricky Gervais) forced to help ghosts transition from somethingness into nothingness, Charles Mudede wonders: “Why do the dead want to really die? What’s wrong with being a ghost? You have died, you are still around—you can haunt this street, that home, those shops. This order seems sensible enough: To be alive is the best, to be a ghost is not the worst, and to be nothing is unimaginable. Why, then, do ghosts want the unimaginable? Why?”

On Lakeview Terrace, Andrew Wright chronicles the de-fanging of Neil LaBute: “Only once, during a housewarming-party chat gone wrong, do LaBute’s old habits come to the fore and threaten to pin the audience’s ears back. Otherwise, chalk it up as a potentially decent B-picture stymied by the director’s newfound tendency to stay within the lines. We need him mean, or not at all.”

The esteemed A. Birch Steen has some constructive criticism for Battle in Seattle:”One day, the true story of the brave officers who fended off the masses of drooling, illiterate, antiestablishment troglodytes will be told—hopefully in a film starring good, conservative Americans like Tom Selleck, Wilford Brimley, and Bruce Willis.”

Sean Nelson “suggests the living fuck” out of Mister Foe: “He does these things because he misses his dead mother, who drowned in the lake behind the stately home he lives in with his stately father and Verity (!!!), his much younger superfox of a stepmother. He obsessively believes that Verity murdered his mom and made it look like suicide. This does not stop him from desiring her sexually, which makes for a complicated home life.”

PLUS: David Schmader on Stealing America: Vote by Vote (“Why am I recommending you spend 90 minutes of your life watching a boringly thorough movie that makes you murderously furious? For the primary reason anyone watches any documentary: To see amazing real-life shit that you can’t fucking believe you’re watching”); Mudede on A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (“How wonderful it is to see Wayne Wang in his element: the Chinese-American experience”); I find Alan Ball’s Towelhead to be just okay (“Towelhead wants you to know that IT IS NOT AFRAID TO MAKE YOU UNCOMFORTABLE”); and Megan Seling is delighted by Igor (“It’s funny to try to kill yourself over and over again so long as you’re an immortal bunny”).

And in Limited Runs:

Creepy Dr. Seuss “Technicolor freakout” The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T plays at SIFF Cinema. Also at SIFF Cinema, Devil Music Ensemble Presents Red Heroine and The Human Condition Part Three: A Soldier’s Prayer. Don’t miss the final few days of Momma’s Man at Northwest Film Forum. Do go ahead and miss Outsourced at Central Cinema (Annie Wagner: “It’s exactly like every other movie in the world, and I don’t know why anyone would bother watching it”). Film critic Robert Horton talks about Napoleon this Sunday at the Frye. Over at the Grand Illusion, see Ten Nights of Dreams (featuring “lots of blood, barf, and a beautiful pig-woman in a kimono who assaults her enemies with a special ‘fart attack’”). Both late nights are good this weekend: The Grand Illusion has Viva, which Paul Constant luuuvs. And at the Egyptian it’s the Gump-tastic Return to Oz. Tonight you can join fellow concerned citizens at Keystone Church for USA Vs. Al-Arian; OR stay at home and completely avoid the weak documentary The Universe of Keith Haring at NWFF.

Ta-daaah! That’s about it.

As always, visit our complete movie times and listings HERE.

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