...but I guess I can spare a little time to write this post. There's something of a tiny, furious lynch mob forming, of people who think I should be fired and put out to pasture with all the other ponies who know nothing about film criticism (stupid ponies).

So even though I'm REALLY BUSY (there are a lot of meaningful documentaries out there that need ignoring, you guys!), your persuasive skills have prevailed: I shall now address these concerns.

Alex Williams writes:

LINDY WEST IS KILLING ART HOUSE CINEMA IN SEATTLE

Dear Editor, why is Lindy West still in charge of your film section? Yeah, she's funny and would probably make a great partner for drunken karaoke, but her lazy lack of interest, knowledge and coverage of what's showing in Seattle's independent cinemas is astounding.

Good point. I am funny; however, though I am great at being drunk, I do not enjoy karaoke.

This week: MUNYURANGABO got only rave reviews in NYC and now it's playing in Seattle; any review or recommendation from The Stranger? Nope. Likewise for NOLLYWOOD BABYLON, a 2009 Sundance-featured documentary on the Nigerian film industry that's having its US theatrical premiere at the Grand Illusion. So what films did get The Stranger's feature reviews this week? The new Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle, the latest Cameron Diaz film... and a big front-page piece about the new TRANSFORMERS movie. With editing choices like these, Lindy might as well be film editor at the Yakima Herald Republic. Hey Lindy: YOU ARE THE FILM EDITOR OF THE STRANGER NEWSPAPER IN SEATTLE! Get with it or get out.

Eli Drake writes:

Do you realize that your film section is a joke? Under the helm of Andy Spletzer and Annie Wagner, this part of the paper was a nationwide example of alternative film criticism and the place in Seattle to get the pulse on local work. Lindy West is driving your film section into the ground, and taking the local cinemas with her. Her coverage displays her utter inability to notice trends and achievements in filmmaking both worldwide and in the region. It's not only an embarrassment, but a threat to Seattle filmgoers and filmmakers who used to rely on the Stranger for intelligent, thoughtful and knowledgeable commentary and coverage. Ms. West clearly prefers gossip and pop culture to true film criticism; why force her to cover serious dramas and meaningful documentaries she is unable to appreciate? Bring back someone who cares.

And an anonymous person who has gone so far as to create the e-mail address LindyWestSucksAtHerJob@hotmail.com wrote to complain about the lack of coverage of Treeless Mountain, Munyurangabo, Adoration, and others.

People, you are heard. We don't have unlimited resources here at the paper (this isn't the most fruitful time for newspapers in general), but we cover as much as we have time for. When we don't manage to review something in time for the print edition, I try my hardest to follow up on the web. Some things are always going to go without coverage, and I'm sure we'll disagree in the future about what I choose to include and what I don't (and, like I said, it's not always a choice).

Be warned: I'm not going to stop liking celebrity gossip and I'm not going to stop covering mainstream films. I deny the charge that I have some sort of vendetta against all things meaningful, however. And I'm planning some changes for the section that will make our "arthouse" coverage—which tends to get lost in Film Shorts—more visible. Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks.

Also:
Here is my review of Munyurangabo.
Here are two different reviews of Treeless Mountain, both of which ran in the print edition.
Here is my review of Atom Egoyan's Adoration.
Here is my review of Made in U.S.A.
Here is my review of In a Dream, which played at Northwest Film Forum a few weeks ago.
Here is my review of The English Surgeon, which also played at Northwest Film Forum last month.
Here is Brendan Kiley's review of The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle.
Here is a review of Evangelion 1.0, which plays at the Grand Illusion this week.
There's also, you know, our giant fucking 2009 SIFF Guide.
Etc., etc., etc.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. In closing, because I do, in fact, love pop culture (till I die, bitchez!), I would like to leave you with this picture of David & Victoria Beckham being absolutely batshit insane, as usual. I fucking love them.

Love,
Lindy

I review Woody Allen's new comedy:

Allen, obviously, maintains his old talent for acidic quips, and Larry David is unparalleled in delivering them. Boris calls Melody "a character out of Faulkner, not unlike Benjy." When she says, "Most colleges just turn out mindless zombie morons," parroting one of Boris's standard lines, he lobs back, "You could benefit from some classes." And he's passable with ye olde Allen neuroses: When someone accuses him of not having an ulcer, he responds, "I said they can't FIND an ulcer—not that I don't have one."

It's not great. But I DID have a dream the other night that I was in a hilarious Three's Company-type roommate situation with Woody Allen and Larry David. The dream was awesome.

Read the full review HERE.

Paul Constant approves:

In many ways, this is a one-man show: Johnny Depp leavens folk-celebrity bank robber Dillinger with more than a dash of young Elvis Presley. When he smirks, you half expect him to be assaulted by a horde of screaming teenage girls. His scenes with Marion Cotillard make the most of that seductiveness: They look like they're going to eat each other. It's really adorable. Depp usually tries so hard to fugly himself up or weigh his character down with weird tics that to see him like this—as an attractive, charismatic, famous man—feels like a revelation.

Read the whole thing HERE.

Lindy West liked Two Lovers, the film that's supposed to be Joaquin Phoenix's swan song as an actor:

You know that person who, at all times, is manufacturing their next 1,000 crises and needing constant attention and rescue and affirmation but offers nearly nothing in return? Maybe they're sort of exhilarating and magnetic and you can't help but want to be around them, until one day you realize that they've never asked you one single question about yourself and you are an exhausted, moldy shipwreck? This is a movie about that person completely fucking up someone's life.

She did not so much enjoy Princess Protection Program: Royal B.F.F. Extended Edition:

I'm not totally clear on who this "Selena Gomez" person is. I think she dates a Jonas Brother? Or two? Anyway, as far as I can tell, she has brown hair and a face. Her hair is big. Her face is small.

Other movies out on DVD today include The Education of Charlie Banks and Jonas Brothers: The Concert Experience (um, squee?). There's also 12 Rounds, the weirdly popular revenge/action movie starring a professional wrestler; Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, which stars hottie Kristin Kreuk, who was the sole reason I watched the first two seasons of Smallville; Pedro, a documentary about the cast member of the Real World who championed AIDS education; and Wolphin: Issue 8, which includes a short film starring James Franco. The Frank Sinatra-starring classic The Man With the Golden Arm gets a re-release, too.

TV series out on DVD today include Season 5 of Entourage and the first season of Danny McBride's HBO comedy East Bound and Down. Also (barely) notable is Kong: The Animated Series, in which a boy is genetically linked to King Kong by his scientist grandmother to become Mega-Kong. And Eureka season 3 is out on DVD also.

A full list of all 90 of today's releases is here.

Sangwa and Ngabo, a pair of teenage best friends who’ve been eking out a living on their own in the years following the Rwandan genocide, drop in on Sangwa’s hometown while on their way to fulfull a morally questionable mission. Their reception is complicated and chilly: “That boy you are with, don’t you know he’s a Tutsi? Don’t you know Tutsis are nasty?” says Sangwa’s father, a lanky and foreboding presence. “Hutus and Tutsis are enemies. Don’t you know?”

Much of the boys’ emotional journey takes place without words, as Sangwa sinks back into the comforting rhythms of a home he left behind—turning over soil, patching a wall, his mother’s doting, his father’s eventual respect—while Ngabo grows increasingly impatient to leave the hostile little village and get on with their original endgame. The boys’ friendship evolves and splinters, with the specter of genocide going pointedly unmentioned for much of the movie. The film is visually gorgeous—damp hills and red earth and quiet, restrained tableaus—and it climaxes with an astounding single-take, cathartic, spoken-word epic that dives unselfconsciously into pain, horror, and love for a fractured nation: “We saw rivers clogged with bodies, children killing…And the blood covered the earth.”

[Interesting side note: Writer/director Lee Isaac Chung is actually an American filmmaker (Korean-American from Arkansas, to be specific) who set his story of adolescent friendship in rural Rwanda, in what Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir describes as an “under-the-radar mini-trend you might call indie globalization.” I noticed the same odd, ambitious transplantation in last year’s The Pool (director Chris Smith adapted an American short story into a film set in Goa, India). In both cases, despite tangled implications, the gamble works surprisingly well.]

Munyurangabo plays at Northwest Film Forum through Thursday, July 2nd.

This weekend I happened upon a cable screening of Stanley Kubrick's film of Nabakov's Lolita, and while the movie remains a mixed bag, the opening credits are perfect.

Apparently the rumor circulating is false—David Schmader says Lindy West said so.

Photo by teo_0 from The Stranger's flickr pool.

Yesterday I wrote about two weird controversies banging heads at the Paramount on Monday night: Wurlitzer organist Dennis James, who played the organ at the Paramount's silent movies for 11 years, was let go by Seattle Theater Group without explanation. And the version of the film The Godless Girl that aired at the Paramount was a "goat gland" cut, which is a second cut of the film made with sound to capitalize on the "talkie" craze that was temporarily overtaking movies at the time. The film was shown without sound, though, so Godless Girl ended with actors talking silently for a few minutes, leaving the audience confused as to what actually happened.

Jason Ferguson, the Director of Programming at STG, said that he can't discuss why James was let go, because it's STG's policy to not discuss personnel issues. When I asked if there was room for reconciliation, Ferguson responded with a fairly curt "He is not coming back." By e-mail, James said that he doesn't know why he was fired. He explained: "I'm told by the musicians union local that employers are not required to give any reason whatsoever for cessation of services."

And what about the goat gland print of Godless Girl? Ferguson says that STG actually screens the original prints of the silent movies—the Godless Girl print that showed on Monday night was 80 years old—and "you don't know the exact print of the film" that you're getting until you've got it. When I asked if they expected to get the goat gland print, Ferguson responded: "It was not the ending we expected."

(Illustration of goat and rhino glands from the gorgeous blog BIbliOdyssey.)

The Academy doubles the number of best picture nominees, from five to ten:

Amid concerns over a Holocaust-movie shortage and the usual speculation that this year's overall field of awards contenders could be weak, the Academy has made the astonishing decision to increase this year's number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten, meaning pretty much anything half-acclaimed and released by a studio with the money for a campaign has a pretty decent shot.

Via NY Magazine (via Variety).

You guys, Confessions of a Shopaholic is out today! I don't know why you'd need to know about any other new DVD releases, but I'll go over them just the same.

Lindy West was unmoved by Inkheart:

I understand that Brendan Fraser used to have a beautiful boday, and so we put him in the movies. But at this point, isn't he just a semiawkward actor with a regular boday and perma-terrible bangs? Must his great big eyeballs be all up in my juvenile-fiction magical business?

Well, THEY ARE.

But she loved Waltz With Bashir:

Attempting to excavate his suppressed memories, Folman recorded interviews with fellow soldiers, journalists, friends, and his therapist; he then animated their accounts in a series of dark, disjointed, somnambular episodes. The finished product is stunning: weird, angular dreams of snarling dogs, bodies wrapped up in shining bundles, yellow skies, silent swimming, sudden death, gigantic women, boys walking out of the sea, and people being swallowed up by shadows. Somehow all of it feels more accurate than any film documentary—certainly one based on painful and foggy recollection—ever could.

There are several classics out today. Charles Mudede calls Last Year at Marienbad "one of the greatest movies ever made." And My Dinner With Andre is out on DVD, too.

Some other notables include Dragon Hunters, a French animated movie about con men (voiced in the American version by Forrest Whitaker and Rob Paulsen) who have to, er, hunt dragons; Simon Says, a horror movie starring Crispin Glover as evil twins; the Morgan Freeman/Antonio Banderas/Robert Forster heist drama The Code; and a documentary titled TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball.

TV series releases include Reba: Season 6, The Girls Next Door: Season 5, and the complete Chuck Jones Tom & Jerry cartoons.

A complete list of releases can be found here.

I've written about the weird whitewash casting of The Last Airbender, the upcoming M. Night Shyamalan adaptation of the manga/anime of the same name. Well, the first trailer is out:

And it at least looks impressive in a summer-movie kind of way, especially for an M. Night Shyamalan movie. Although the soundtrack, specifically that flute-ish instrument that always plays in kung fu movie trailers, suggests that The Last Airbender is going to have a weird cultural goulash kind of feel. I'm really interested to see what's going to happen with this movie; in a lot of ways, Hollywood has been okay with being subtly racist toward Asian-Americans for a long time now. I've figured that at some point it would reach a tipping point of not-okay-ness. Perhaps The Last Airbender is that point.

Last night's showing of The Godless Girl at the Paramount was a bad night at the silent movies. Before the show, several people were protesting Seattle Theater Group, the nonprofit group that produces shows at the Paramount and the Moore, for not contracting "the legendary" Dennis James to play the Paramount's Wurlitzer organ during this silent movie program. The protesters handed out pamphlets that read "without Dennis James, it's not Silent Movie Monday."

Instead, STG flew San Francisco organist Jim Riggs up to Seattle yesterday to play the organ during The Godless Girl. Last time I went to Silent Movie Mondays, I called James "probably the best silent movie organist I've ever heard," but I lamented the fact that he read the Wikipedia entry for the movie before the show as an introduction.

Riggs did James one better in annoying pre-show infotainment by reading comments on IMDB posts praising The Godless Girl. He also told us the entire plot of the movie we were ten minutes away from watching, sharing major plot points and interesting lines of dialogue rather than just allowing us to enjoy them. What's more, Riggs' soundtrack for the movie was bland and uninteresting. But after the movie, he gave a very good reason for his poor showing: Riggs informed us that due to his sudden replacement of James, he had never seen The Godless Girl before one o'clock yesterday afternoon.

Worse than all that, the Paramount seems to have shown the wrong cut of the movie. Cecil B. DeMille madeThe Godless Girl at the very end of the silent movie era, and the film did very poorly on its release. The panicky studio reassembled the cast and had an actor reshot the ending with sound equipment, pasting a talkie scene onto the end of the movie. In the business, this was known as a "goat gland scene". This website describes the derivation of goat gland:

Goat gland took its name from a surgical procedure developed around 1920 by quack doctor J.R. Brinkley, who implanted goat testes into humans as a way to cure maladies such as impotence, arteriosclerosis, and dementia.

Before the film began, Riggs informed the audience that there was a talkie cut of the film out there, but he assured us that we were witnessing the original cut of the film, "as DeMille intended." But the print of The Godless Girl that ran at the Paramount last night had title cards all through the film until the last five minutes. In the final scene, characters made long monologues, but this particular print of The Godless Girl apparently didn't have the talkie soundtrack attached, so Riggs just played over it and we watched the actors talk mutely with no explanation before the screen went abruptly black. Seemed like a goat gland to me.

I have a call out to Jason Ferguson, the Director of Programming at STG, to ask about the Wurlitzer situation at the Paramount and about the cut of The Godless Girl that they showed last night, and I'll let you know if he gets back to me.

(Photo still from Godless Girl from Teleport City.)

Your advertising materials for 500 Days of Summer managed to make me EVEN MORE ANNOYED by that stupid movie than I already was.

The front:

The innards:

In case you can't make out the words, here's what they say:

THE (10) BEST THINGS ABOUT SUMMER

1. HER CROOKED SMILE
2. HER HAIR
3. THE SOUND OF HER LAUGH
4. HER HEART SHAPED BIRTHMARK
5. HER KNEES
6. HOW ONE EYE IS HIGHER UP ON HER FACE THAN THE OTHER
7. THE WAY SHE LOOKS IN MY CLASH T-SHIRT
8. HOW SHE LOOKS WHEN SHE'S SLEEPING
9. THE WAY SHE MAKES ME FEEL
10. WE BOTH LOVE THE SMITHS

Oh my god. The quirks. THE QUIRKS! THE QUIRKS! The quirkiness kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiills.

My short review of the film (which played at SIFF and opens July 17) is after the jump.

It is not good:

Year One is one of those “take a dump” comedies that’s so popular in Hollywood these days—you know, where they just “take” some funny actors and “dump” them into a craaazy situation and have them play themselves. Get it? For instance, here Jack Black and Michael Cera are “dumped” into caveman times, and then Hollywood “takes” your money. Get it? Do you get it? Oh, and it’s also like Harold Ramis literally took a dump. And then made you look at it for two hours. That’s the other meaning. Double meaning!

Goddamnit. To cleanse the palate, here's a video of the exact moment when I fell in love with Jack Black, oh so many years ago: