Film This Weekend at the Movies
posted by on October 18 at 10:11 AM
I awoke this morning to a pair of squirrels making love in a tree right outside my window. Good morning, squirrels! Hey, I have a question about squirrels. I’m familiar with roadkill squirrels, but what happens when squirrels just die of natural causes? There are so many squirrels around. But where are all the squirrel corpses? Funny business, is alls I’m saying.
There are a lot of things opening this week, none of which are about squirrels:
Oliver Stone’s W. takes on our sitting president—ballsy move, boring movie. Eli Sanders: “It’s hard to say for sure how liberals, who are certainly Stone’s intended audience, will react to this movie. A lot of them probably can’t get enough of seeing Bush mocked and deconstructed, and will therefore love this. But a good number of them, one suspects, will be bored—they’ll go in wanting a new, revelatory way of seeing the president and come out having had a few good chuckles amid one long, familiar flashback that they’re very ready not to have happen again.”
Disney pretends to make a documentary, calls it Morning Light. I do not recommend it: “Morning Light, a dumb vanity project from aging sailboat enthusiast Roy Disney, is a bland bundle of innocuously fabricated truth: Roy Disney buys fancy sailboat. Roy Disney recruits attractive Young People™ to pilot said boat. Young People™ recite scripted monologues about sailing over pretty sailing montages. Sailboat enters famous sailboat race. After much Togetherness™ and Lesson-Learning-At-Sea™, Young People™ almost win. Young People™’s lives will never be the same.”
David Schmader on Sex Drive, the illegitimate grandson of Porky’s: “In an inspired move, Sex Drive’s teenybopper cocksman is played by a schlub—Clark Duke, a doughy, cute young actor whose dorky exterior only makes his sexual cockiness that much funnier. As the film makes its way through its preordained paces—cussing babies take a virginity-vanquishing road trip, trouble ensues—Duke’s studly schlub manages to keep the proceedings mildly fresh. If a mildly fresh teen-sex comedy is what you’re after, here it is.”
And Paul Constant has very little love for Barry Levinson’s latest Hollywood satire, What Just Happened?: “The worst sin of the movie is that, purgatory-like, it just doesn’t end; there is no closure, and nothing gets any better or worse. If you have no taste for Hollywood movies about Hollywood movies, you should stay as far away from this movie as you possibly can. If you like good Hollywood insider movies like The Player and Levinson’s own Wag the Dog, you should stay as far away from this movie as you possibly can.”
Schmader breaks down the best and less-than-best of the lightly horror-themed Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival: “Hidden within the hit-and-miss horror is an impressive collection of gay documentaries, by which I mean documentaries about gay people—musicians, artists, writers, porn stars, drag queens, and activists—which add up to a fascinating minifest of queer life stories you won’t see anywhere else.” Complete schedule here.
PLUS! I deliver my most inane column yet, on the “history” of talking dogs.
In Limited Runs: Lucky for you, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story is still playing at Central Cinema. Go see it! There’s lots of classic horror/sci-fi/thrills at the Grand Illusion, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers (pods!), They Live (Rowdy!), and Galaxy of Terror (worm rape!). SIFF Cinema has the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival doc Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Dave Segal: “Besides the excellent performances by Thelonious Monk Trio, Jimmy Giuffre 3, Gerry Mulligan Quartet, Chico Hamilton Quintet, and others, it’s interesting to see so many smart-looking black and white jazz fans harmoniously digging the scene”). At the Frye, film critic Robert Horton gives a talk on Alexandria…Why? and the Egyptian late-night is Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.
As always, you can find our complete Movie Times here. Happy weekend!
I can't even stand to watch the real W, let alone 2 hours of a remake.
I might be able to watch this in 20 years but not now.
While running on the Burke this morning, we came across TWO dead squirrels less that 1/4 mile apart. Neither looked like they had been hit... they looked like they may have been up in a tree, had squirrel heart attacks and fell out.
Scavengers. Scavengers eat them before they accumulate into huge piles of squirrel carcasses. Thank you, scavengers!
Ms. West,
Do you if and where the movie "Let the Right One In" will be playing? It was a SIFF movie this past year and I saw a preview for it at the Quarantine opening last Friday. I've heard it's great and timely for Halloween.
Thank you.
> Hey, I have a question about squirrels.
> I’m familiar with roadkill squirrels,
> but what happens when squirrels just die
> of natural causes? There are so many
> squirrels around. But where are all the
> squirrel corpses? Funny business, is alls
> I’m saying.
Hi Lindy,
Well, I happened to come across a squirrel carcass in a nearby alley just a few days ago, and on the SAME day there was a dead mouse in my yard, AND i think maybe some other little dead animal.
So, based on the evidence at hand, I'd say that every so often there are dying days when we lose some of the little animals of the area who's time has come.
Yeah, it's too soon for 'W'. It's really, really not funny yet.
Last year a squirrel fell out of a tree (I can only assume) on a main walking path at UW and had blood coming from its mouth. It was really a slight to see. Later that day as I was walking home there was a UW worker basically wearing a hazmat suit power washing the dead squirrel bits away. Everybody wondered what had killed that squirrel...
Last year a squirrel fell out of a tree (I can only assume) on a main walking path at UW and had blood coming from its mouth. It was really a slight to see. Later that day as I was walking home there was a UW worker basically wearing a hazmat suit power washing the dead squirrel bits away. Everybody wondered what had killed that squirrel...
squirrels: i watched the fleas streaming off of a dead squirrel as it became cold and stiff, like rats from a sinking ship. where did they ultimately go?
Some Seattle neighborhoods have raccoons. Maybe they dispose of the squirrel corpses--I hear they'll eat anything.
As for W, I'm with Katy and Violet--it's too soon. Sort of like watching a Stephen King movie right after a funeral. Maybe after the soldiers are home from Iraq and the economy starts to look better I'll be in the right mood.
My neighborhood has coyotes, raccoons, and possums, and yet amongst all these scavengers, there's been a squirrel carcass in the middle of the sidewalk on my walk to my bus stop for the past two weeks. At the same time, as the squirrel has sat untouched, there has been a rash of "lost cat" signs. Apparently housecats are tastier than dead squirrels.
squirrel heart attacks? scavengers? raccoons? all lies! the truth is that squirrels are zombie cannibals and are already dead!
If you haven't seen it, it's worth seeing the Lemony Snicket movie on the big screen.
No squirrels die, but I can't say the same for snakes and eels.
Cats happen to squirrels.
And there is no way in hell I'd sit through anything whose main focus is Duh Shrub lasting 2 hours or even 2 minutes. I've suffered him for the past (nearly) 8 years. Not a moment longer.
p.s. The squirrels (and other critters) that mysteriously fell out of the trees dead, they sound like the victims of rat poison.
I saw the preview for "W." and I call bullshit on it. Josh Brolin doesn't look like me at all! Bullshit! Bullshit!
nobody reviewed the katrina doc 'trouble the water' playing at the varsity for one week only. what's up with that ?
@16: I did, Riz! It's in Suggests this week.
Never mind w, I saw boogieman. It was great, a gripping documentary about the man who mentored carl rove.
I almost go hit in the head by a dead squirrel once.
It was right after I first moved to Seattle many moons ago. I was walking up hill past Cyber Dog ($5 for a hotdog? Come on, its a tube of meat)and this very large gray squirrel fell from the tree inches in front of my face. It just thudded onto the metal grate at the base of the tree, twitched a few times, and shed its mortal coil. I thinks about that squirrel every time I walk past the Cyber Dog.
I think it was just old. Squirrels need hospice.
You probably put a plastic colander on your head to filter out the news, but Bush has been wowing people in Europe.
Like Jerry Lewis, Bush may have to be fully recognized there first.
@16 a few friends and I went and saw "trouble the water" last night and it was very good and very disturbing. the editing could have maybe been a bit better, but Kim's story, her husband's story, the stories of their friends, family and neighbors, the story of the gov't "assistance"... it was just all incredible. Very sad, but also wonderful to see how the brutality of nature and the crimes of gov't brought out the very best in the people in the story.
watch the trailer and see if you don't feel compelled to go see it:
www.troublethewaterfilm.com
@20: I'm getting a picture of Bush running franticly around the Oval Office knocking over lamps, scattering papers, etc while sticking out his top row of teeth and yelling "HEY LAY-DEEEEE!"
Sex drive….oooo…I could not stop laughing. Such a grate sex comedy it was. Never thought it will be that much funny. Love to see it again and again. It based on simple story but develops many funny dialogs. Don’t wait man. I saw it on http://www.80millionmoviesfree.com
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