Opening this week:

The dismal The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

Andrew Wright: "The only one who appears to be having any fun at all, really, remains Brendan Fraser, who struggles mightily to interject a few moments of jut-jawed humanity. His yeoman efforts aside, this is really a joyless, borderline culturally insulting [in the press notes, Cohen talks about his deep love and respect of Chinese history, an ardor which translates into pan flutes on the soundtrack and absolutely everyone knowing kung fu], terminally dopey cluster-eff that almost reaches Ed Woodian depths."

The weirdly affecting Swing Vote. Me: "It's impossible to resist such a massive onslaught of resources, music, and transparent narrative shortcuts meant to persuade you to exercise your right to vote. I won't say it's Capra-esque, but it's awfully nice."

At the Varsity for one week only, the lovely SIFF 08 alum Chris & Don, about the love of Christopher Isherwood's life. Frizzelle: "Among this film's many pleasures is all the home-video footage Isherwood and Don Bachardy took of each other during their relationship, which lasted 30 years—Isherwood standing by a pool in Los Angeles, Bachardy waving on a ship in New York's harbor, both of them covered in birds in a European square."

The glossy high-school doc American Teen, also a SIFF alum. Me again: "American Teen is slick and snappy, and it's easy to get engrossed in the narrative. But it's also just as easy to forget it ever happened. When updates on the teens' lives rolled just before the closing credits, I found myself hoping something bizarre had happened to one of them, just to see the edifice buckle a bit. No such luck—they're all doing precisely what you'd expect."

The old folks' love story Elsa & Fred. Megan Seling: "Elsa & Fred is simply a charming romantic comedy that proves you're never too old to fall in love and dance in a fountain. The moral of the story is that even when one love ends, there's always the possibility for another (even at the age of 82). But what I took away from the movie, more than everything else, is that old people can get away with anything!"

______________________________________
In Concessions this week, Lindy West writes about the short film event Rawstock, at ACT Theatre last Friday. ______________________________________
And hidden away in Limited Runs are the following reviews and listings: The Silence Before Bach (Brendan Kiley: "A paean to Bach by experimental Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella, The Silence Before Bach alternates between overlong narrative vignettes and short, sweet surrealist flourishes") and Orson Welles's The Trial (me: "You must see this film, if only for the sight of the painter Tintorelli's herd of girl groupies peering through the slats of his ramshackle apartment. In the book, they're all hunchbacks, but here, being stalked by an able-bodied little girl is frightening enough") at Northwest Film Forum, Kenny (me: "This mild-mannered mockumentary gets less interesting the longer it goes on about its protagonist's moral superiority over the rest of humanity, but it stays fairly funny throughout") at Grand Illusion, and A Man Named Pearl at SIFF Cinema. About the only place the supposedly decent Clive Barker horror movie Midnight Meat Train is opening tonight is Federal Way's Starplex Cinemas.

The box office for the second Hulk, $132,742,865, finally passed the box office for the first and better one, $132,177,234. How I hate Ed Norton.

The good news is that you can now buy a hoverboard for $30,000.

The bad news is that it's just the hoverboard from Back to the Future II, and it doesn't work.

For a second there, during an inattentive scan of a blog post, I completely spazzed out, thinking that hover technology has finally arrived. Now that I know it's a movie prop, I am morose. Thanks a lot, SF Signal.

Just a reminder--Hal Ashby's Shampoo is at Northwest Film Forum tonight and tomorrow. (Sean Nelson wrote a great piece for us about Hal Ashby's oeuvre a few weeks back.)

But check out the competition! I still want to see Water Lilies at the Varsity, The Last Mistress at the Metro, The Omega Man at Grand Illusion, and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired at SIFF Cinema—all of which end this Thursday. And that's leaving out all the smart, supremely enjoyable wide releases that are out right now, including WALL•E (so amazing, people!), The Dark Knight (tickets are finally freeing up in IMAX), Encounters at the End of the World (which started as a Varsity calendar release and has been playing for weeks--good job, Herzog fans), and—I still can't quite believe this is any good, but Lindy West swears—Mamma Mia!.

I went to the movies twice this weekend and twice there were long lines and audible excitement. I am feeling oddly optimistic about the future of cinema right now, in blissful defiance of all the news and portents.

I just saw The X-Files: I Want to Believe again last night, because I felt guilty for seeing The Dark Knight earlier in the day (about which more below) and thereby contributing to The X-Files's thumping at the box office. And I have to say, the worst thing about the movie is not the gay-married villains or the fact that David Duchovny is not aging particularly well. It's the scene where Father Joe miraculously intuits that the house across the way is not the crime scene. Um, duh, the car drove by the real crime scene (clearly marked with yellow police tape) on the way to the fake crime scene. Ugh. The show was rarely that sloppy. (Of course, Chris Carter wrote very few of the best episodes.) I'm probably still seeing it one more time anyway, because I really, really want Fox to make another movie.

OK, but anyway, this post is supposed to be about Christopher spilling my secrets. Yes, I'm going to the University of Chicago Law School in September, but I'm staying long enough to help Slog the Democratic National Convention at the end of August. My decision had little to do with The Stranger, which I love, and a lot to do with the frightening decline of print film criticism, which I had hoped to do for the rest of my career. Also, something to do with Andersen v. King County, which, as you may recall, got me irrationally excited about rational basis tests and other things only lawyers should care about.

And about The Dark Knight: The reason you should see it in IMAX is not for the extra detail in the action scenes, but because the IMAX aspect ratio (close to the boxy old Academy ratio of 1:37) is way better than widescreen for displaying the glory of Chicago/Gotham's skyscrapers. I've rarely seen a film that seemed so vertical, so urban, so exciting. It almost convinced me I really do want to move to Chicago, despite the ridiculous cold.

Surfwise, a documentary by the director who made Hype!, didn't get much play in Seattle—just a week in the theaters, nobody went nuts for it—but it comes out on DVD this week and you should watch it, preferably after you've been swimming. It's all about a man, his brood, surfing, patriarchal tyranny, health nuttiness, and so on:

Sometime in the mid-1950s, Dorian Paskowitz, MD, had a revelation. He was at the peak of his career (Stanford graduate, president of the American Medical Association in Hawaii, asked to run for governor) but felt horrible about himself and his life. He just wanted to go surfing.

So he quit the rich life, took a pilgrimage to Israel, had sex with women all over the world (he believed sexual inadequacy was central to his misery), married a California girl, sired eight sons and one daughter, and hauled them all over the world in a 24-foot trailer. They surfed every day, didn't go to school, and occasionally almost died: Moses, son number five, nearly perished from a torn colon when a surfboard fin jammed itself up his ass off a remote beach in Mexico, several hours from the nearest hospital.

Did the Paskowitz children grow up emancipated or abused? It's hard to say and Surfwise, by documentary filmmaker Doug Pray (Scratch, Hype!), toys with the question. Doc Paskowitz was clearly an eccentric and a tyrant. He was strict with his kids' diet and exercise, pitted them against each other, and had noisy sex in the trailer each night while the children shoved their fingers in their ears and tried to think about other things.

But, as adults, the Paskowitz children aren't much different than their peers. One is a suburban mom. One is a graphic designer. One wants to be in the movie business. One is a cook. One runs a surf camp. One likes to paddle into the ocean, drop a hook, and let sharks and other gigantic fish pull him around. (Let's take that as evidence of emancipation.) A few have been in shitty metal bands. (Let's take that as evidence of abuse.) Some were estranged but, with the help of the filmmakers, have been reunited. You know, typical family stuff.

Surfwise doesn't require that you care about surfing. Pray's documentary—cobbled together from interviews, old TV footage, and home movies—is a case study of an eccentric American adventurer who treated recreation as necessity and the beach as his frontier.

The trailer:

And it isn't Mulder's beard or the bad dialogue or the getting-it-on. It's just the wrong time for an X-Files movie. Annie Wagner, who can fit more ideas into a movie review than anyone, hits on the problem exactly:

The X-Files was, after all, unusually grounded in the psychological climate of its time. It's fascinating to go back through the seasons now, in the wake of 9/11 and especially Hurricane Katrina, to see how the series--which went on the air in 1993, near the beginning of the Clinton administration--envisioned an American government so monolithic, so complacent in its power that one had to suspect things were more complicated than they seemed. In the 1990s, we were sufficiently bored with prosperity and globalization... that it was entertaining to imagine that an international cabal might be pulling the strings behind the scenes. The chasm between that way of thinking and the current political atmosphere became obvious to me only after I rewatched the last movie. Released in 1998, it went so far as to suggest that FEMA was a second shadow government, just waiting to take the reins after alien colonization. Thanks to Mike ("heckuva job") Brown and the Bush administration, FEMA is an embarrassment now, not a fearsome symbol of government's reach into the most obscure corners of our lives.

It's easy to believe that post-9/11 patriotism killed The X-Files, that people couldn't find pleasure in imagining a malevolent U.S. government when we'd been so rudely reintroduced to foreign malice. But I think it goes farther than that. Conservative governments love to hate themselves; so when the show's suspicion that the federal government had too much power was co-opted by the Bush administration (albeit hypocritically), conspiracy theories lost some purchase. Then the bungled occupation of Iraq and the pathetic response to Hurricane Katrina made it clear that an effective federal government that isn't afraid to exert soft power might not be such a bad thing after all. We might have to wait until a second Obama administration for people to ascribe such nefarious over-competence to government again.

(Why do you have to go off to law school, Annie? Can't you just stay?)

X-Files movie times are here.

I'm actually pretty excited about this. But then, Nixon is one of my favorite movies.

Via HuffPo, and everywhere else.

UPDATE! Apparently, there's already some sort of scandal. Via Hollywood Elsewhere:

This newly re-posted W. trailer is very slightly different than the one that was taken down last night. Yesterday's version had a stern admonishment spoken by James Cromwell's George Bush, Sr., to Josh Brolin's Dubya: "What are you cut out for? Fighting, chasing tail, driving drunk? What do you think you are? A Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." In today's version the words "what are you cut out for? Fighting, chasing tail, driving drunk?" have been cut.

I was not prepared for a fighting-chasing-tail-driving-drunk-gate to happen so early in the process.

Opening this week:

I write about The X-Files: I Want to Believe at a length that probably is not justified. I loved the shit out of that show, so don't get in the comments and start doubting my geek. Among other qualifications: I wrote a fan letter to Gillian Anderson in approximately 1995 (I was 14 or 15) and received a personalized signed photograph in return, attended not one but two X-Files conventions, and scored an invitation to the set in Vancouver from Sheila Larkin, who played Scully's mother on the show but was actually the mother of a kid young enough to be in a Centrum theater camp with me. Unfortunately, her son saw through my greedy opportunism and quashed my fondest dreams. Oh, and I wrote some fan fiction once and posted it on ye olde Usenet newsgroup alt.tv.x-files.creative. I think I was 16 at the time. It's probably still floating around the internet somewhere. How embarrassing.

On a more serious note (no, actually, my discussion of The X-Files is quite serious), Sean Nelson grapples with another fan relationship in an essay about Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired ("For this antisentimentalist, in film as in life, 'acceptable behavior' is something for other people to worry about. Which is, of course, the whole dilemma of being an ardent fan of Polanski's movies. Because of what we know and think we know, it's never easy to find the line between the artist and his work. Because there is no such line. Because the Polanski who made so many titanic works of cinema is the same Polanski who escaped from the Nazis is the same Polanski who not only lost his wife and unborn child to the Mansons but was initially accused of the murders in the press is the same Polanski who gave a 13-year-old girl champagne and a quaalude fragment then had sex with her on the floor of Jack Nicholson's living room. If the 20th century happened to anyone, it happened to Roman Polanski").

I review the first feature film adaptation of Brideshead Revisted ("This film, like the book, is told from the perspective of Charles Ryder [slightly-too-old Matthew Goode], an upper-middle-class striver completely out of his depth—but the filmmakers don't do enough to remind us that Charles is our narrator. The voice-overs are scarce, the cinematography [by Jess Hall] is square and pompous when it should be dazzling, and the score [by Adrian Johnston] thunders when it should be stricken with awe. Still, the acting is more nuanced than the screenplay for director Julian Jarrold's Becoming Jane ever allowed").

Former synchro swimmer Jen Graves writes about Water Lilies ("Water Lilies, the ambitious first film from 27-year-old French director Céline Sciamma, is about synchronized swimming. It is also the first film ever to use synchronized swimming intelligently, as the powerful metaphor that it is, representing the fascism and subterranean maneuvering of female adolescence. Above water, or walking down the hallways of high schools, we have only one goal as girls newly confronted with the real possibility of sex: look good, and make it look easy. Underwater we're working like hell").

Lindy West has to deal with Step Brothers ("The story of two curly-headed men-children, John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell, forced to live together when their aging parents get married, Step Brothers is dull, ineptly paced, and lazy").

I write about an adaptation of a book I'd never heard of but which all of Canada is apparently devoted to: The Stone Angel ("Tragedy arrives in fits and starts, and it's strangely difficult to get invested in Hagar's emotional life. [Come to think of it, the name "Hagar" might have something to do with it.] Still, there's always something (or someone) attractive to look at: Watching The Stone Angel is not a chore").

And Andrew Wright assesses the concert film/documentary hybrid CSNY: Déjà Vu ("Longtime Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young fans may still find things to savor [the sequence where the quartet performs "Let's Impeach the President" in front of a stadium full of booing red-staters is one for the time capsule], but as a whole, this falls somewhere between warts-and-all documentary and glad-handing publicity piece").

There's a lot of good stuff in Limited Runs this week. Charles Mudede went nuts over the Nikkatsu Action Cinema series at Northwest Film Forum: Titles include A Colt Is My Passport, The Warped Ones, and Velvet Hustler. A mysterious David Lynch-related movie with a mysterious David Lynch-related guest is playing tonight at Seattle Art Museum as part of the Twin Peaks Festival in North Bend. Grand Illusion has The Omega Man for those of you who weren't impressed by the Will Smith version of I Am Legend. Northwest Film Forum is playing an irritating documentary called Operation Filmmaker, about do-gooder Hollywood liberals who decide to give the gift of coffee-fetching to a film student in Baghdad; the Hal Ashby series at NWFF is continuing Tuesday with Shampoo. David Schmader already pointed you to Raising Arizona (on DVD) at Central Cinema, which is also hosting a screening of a new marriage equality doc called For My Wife, about the partner of Kate Fleming, the audio book actor who died in her Madison Valley basement during a flood. I must mention tonight's South Lake Union outdoor movie, because it's Bring It On; Fremont Outdoor Movies is doing An Inconvenient Truth tomorrow. And Landmark is reviving the delightful Metro Classics with a series about World War II--sort of. The next three weeks are themed "Axis," so this Wednesday's program is a double bill of the German Expressionist classics The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Last Laugh. Finally, The Last Mistress is holding over at the Metro, if you're still curious about Catherine Breillat's period piece.

After the steaming shitpile of dunderheaded ambition that was The Fountain, I am most pleased to see that Darren Aronofsky is aiming a little lower for his next movie: a remake of RoboCop.

Unfortunately, in the Great Wheel of Karma that is Hollywood, this means we'll have to endure a third Harold and Kumar movie. The law of diminishing returns means that, after the pleasant and funny first movie and the awful and bad second movie, this third film will pulverize its viewers' eyeballs to liquid. As long as I get to see RoboCop before that happens, that'll be just fine.

Clearly this fact makes me some kind of butthole, but until last night at the Central Cinema, I'd never seen Raising Arizona all the way through.

How this was allowed to happen? I'm a humongous Coen Brothers fan, having seen Fargo—AKA the greatest American movie not about the mob ever made—at least 150 times. But at the time of Raising Arizona's release—1987—I required Great Movies to be awash in seriousness. (For me, this was the time of Hannah and Her Sisters (featuring full frames of e.e. cummings quotes), Room with a View (my first Merchant-Ivory swoonfest), and Blue Velvet (severed ears, sexy rape, and symbolism for beginners!).) During this phase, Raising Arizona was too goofy, with too many close-ups of ugly men hollering and chewing with their mouths open, for my taste.

But encountering it now—dear God that's a good, weird movie. Holly Hunter's subject line-engendering sob attack remains one of the funniest things I've ever seen, and all of the ugliness that sent me running back in the day turned out to be part of a strange and glorious whole, once I took the time to watch it through to the end.

Coen brothers, please accept my apology. Everyone else, Raising Arizona continues through tomorrow night at Central Cinema, where they bring food and booze right to your seat.

Sci-fi publisher Tor Books has a new blog that's really quite good. It's not just a promotional house organ; it seems like its a blog put together by people who really like science fiction (for some reason, I've been unable to get into io9's know-it-all tone, so this is an especially welcome blog for me.)

In any case, Tor's blog announced that a Doc Savage movie could be nearing production. Granted, there's always a Doc Savage movie nearing production, but I'm feeling hopeful now, especially since Arnold Schwarzenegger probably isn't going to play Doc anytime soon. (For those who don't know, Doc Savage is an old pulp crime-fighting character who was an inspiration for characters like Superman. More info here.) Also, if there's a new Doc Savage movie, maybe there'll be a reissue of those old out of print Doc Savage novels. I've got probably 50 or 60 of the suckers, and I really want all 96.

That imaginary book that Sarah Jessica Parker was reading in the Sex and the City movie? The one that confounded thousands of booksellers and Amazon.com's search engine because it didn't actually exist and yet thousands of SatC fans insisted that it did because they saw it in the SatC movie?

It's getting published.

One New York minute after word spread that fans of the Sex and the City movie were logging onto Amazon.com in hopes of purchasing Love Letters of Great Men — the fake book highlighted in the film — publisher Pan MacMillan announced that on Aug. 15, they're planning to release a book with the same title in the U.K., to include "all of the letters referenced in the film."

I find it especially annoying that the one thing in the entire goddamned movie that wasn't a product placement is now officially a product.

Netflix is closing Red Envelope Entertainment, its film purchasing and distribution arm, because "...the Red Envelope Entertainment unit competed with its main suppliers, Hollywood studios."

This is a big bummer, actually. Two of the movies that Red Envelope produced, Sherrybaby (a movie about an irresponsible mom on parole starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Danny Trejo) and Confessions of a Superhero (a documentary about the people who dress up like superheroes and stand around Hollywood Boulevard taking pictures with tourists for tips) were among my favorites of the last few years. They had a distinctly un-big-studio pacing and sensibility that I'll genuinely miss.

Red Envelope also distributed that Helvetica movie that everyone went nuts about a few months ago, as well as a ton of other documentaries and little indie dramas. I hope that the employees responsible for these movies find work at other studios that let them produce more movies like this.

Seattle filmmaker Ann Coppel made an amusing six-minute mock-doc about an ersatz self-help movement called "I Am Ann." I can't find a version to embed on Slog, but New York Magazine has it up here.

It's about a bunch of middle-aged, polar-fleece hippies being all self-empowered and stupid. Ha ha!

This week's Entertainment Weekly provided the first look at the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie poster:

SF Signal doesn't like it because it has Uhura on it and not McCoy. Of course, SF Signal is run by a bunch of nerds. As for myself, I'm hoping that the come-here-and-I'll-either-kick-your-ass-or-fuck-you look on Chris Pine's Kirk, in the lower right hand corner, is an early sign that there'll be a whole lot of sex with aliens and fistfights in the new movie, because Kirk is always the best, and frequently the only, reason to watch Star Trek.

I wanted to watch a movie this weekend. I wanted the movie to be easy on the imagination. I wanted a crime, a criminal, a detective, a city. I wanted clues, a fatal woman, a doomed lover, and a plot that thickens. But all I found in the movie market are films with people wearing tights, capes, and smeared makeup. What has happened to adults in Hollywood cinema? Where did they go? Wanted is for teenagers; Meet Dave is for horses and other animals that like to "hee, hee, hee." Only the French offered a thriller with a real man,Tell No One, which I had already seen and did not like. For this Hollywood season, only women were offered something barely interesting--Sex in the City. As for grown men--zip. I now regret not praising Micheal Clayton when it was released last year; I had no idea it was part of a dying species.

Sue Jones-Davies, who starred as Judith Iscariot in Monty Python's Life of Brian—and famous for this NSFW nude comedy scene—was recently elected mayor of Aberystwyth, Wales (population: 12,000).

One of her first acts of office? Trying to repeal the town's 30-year-ban on Life of Brian.

Via the Guardian.

Now that everyone has seen The Dark Knight--now that it has broken the record for top-grossing box-office weekend in U.S. history--can we talk about how excellent Heath Ledger is and how limp and drawn out most of the rest of it is?

Paul Constant, who I think agrees with me, writes in next week's Stranger Suggests:

The Dark Knight is not "the best movie ever," as many internet nerds have proclaimed. Nor is it even the best movie of the year. But it is truly a great movie, packed with excellent performances (Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart) and thrilling, non-CGI special effects. Plus, Batman! And 30 minutes of the thing were filmed with an IMAX-exclusive camera, which means that if you watch it on an IMAX screen (highly recommended--movie times here) you're in for some vertiginous eyegasms.

If you haven't noticed (you probably didn't), I have failed to post This Weekend at the Movies for the past two weeks. I'm sorry--vacation, then a day off to recover from riding to Portland on my bicycle, got in the way.

Here, briefly, are links to reviews of notable recent movies: WALL•E, The Wackness, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Monsieur Verdoux (damn, you missed it), Tell No One, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson, and Brick Lane (only at the Crest this week).

News:

indieWIRE has been sold to SnagFilms, an online documentary hub. More at GreenCine Daily.

After reading reviews of WALL•E (I thought no one did that anymore?), Barack Obama offers his own assessment.

Is the Weinstein Co. in trouble?

And Mara Manus is the new executive director of the rapidly expanding Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Opening this week (we like everything!):

Charles Mudede adores Alexandra ("Because the acting plays a very small role in Alexandra, the cinema is free to flourish").

Paul Constant reviews The Dark Knight ("Heath Ledger seems as though he's alternating roles in a dark love scene between Daffy Duck, Marlon Brando, and Hannibal Lecter. It's a riveting performance, and terrifying").

Jon Frosch writes about The Last Mistress ("If The Last Mistress hits harder than Catherine Breillat's previous, more sexually explicit work, it's in large part thanks to Asia Argento. The actress stalks, gnarls, gnashes, and vamps her way through the movie, yet it never seems like she's hamming it up; hers is one of the most vivid portrayals of lust that I've seen").

Lindy West actually likes Mamma Mia! ("Sparkling and earnest, hammy beyond all acceptable boundaries of ham, full of slow-motion leaping and young love—it's the movie equivalent of, well, ABBA. The cast rules: Meryl Streep is adorable; Pierce Brosnan sings (TERRIBLY) and stands on a cliff looking windswept in front of an Aegean sunset. Mamma Mia! entertained the shit out of me").

And Charles Mudede defends Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts ("You do not think of Philip Glass and see a human being, but, instead, you hear a type of sound, a tone, a tune, a movement that is beautiful, repetitive, and architectural. And so the first thing any film about Glass's music must do is reduce it to a human being").

For other limited run films and one-time events, including Last Year at Marienbad, Seattle Bike-In, and Planet of the Apes, see our movie times search. There's also a review of Space Chimps, if you must.

I know that I totally maligned Hulu when it launched. I called it "the Internet’s version of a hideous, six-story primary-colored condo with retail space on the ground floor." Well, the egg's on my face because you can watch The Rundown on Hulu for free anytime you want now.

I'd call The Rundown a guilty pleasure, but there's nothing guilty about it. It's one of my favorite movies of the last ten years. The Rock is hired muscle sent into the jungle to pick up that douchebag Sean William Scott, who, in the casting move of the century, plays a douchebag. Christopher Walken gets all up in their respective faces.

Don't get me wrong; I was skeptical, too. And the movie shouldn't be as good as it is, but it all works, somehow. These disparate elements all came together into one of the most enjoyable action movies I think I've ever seen.

I was camping with friends a few weeks ago, and we were all drinking up a storm and somebody started talking about what movie we'd pick if we could only choose one movie to watch for the rest of our lives. I picked To Have and Have Not, but one of my friends paused, and said "I know this sounds stupid, but I think that I'd pick The Rundown, because I could watch it forever." And she was right. It is stupid, but it's also the perfect choice. I've seen this movie like seven times now, because it's perfect for everyone. It's funny and dumb and clever, too.

And its working title was Welcome to the Jungle, which is clearly a better title for the movie. The fact that The Rundown is titled The Rundown is the only flaw that can be found in this movie. Seriously. Go watch it.

...courtesy of The Incredible Shrinking Woman, the beloved Lily Tomlin comedy of 1981, which will be screened for free tonight in Cal Anderson Park, as part of Three Dollar Bill Cinema's Features from the Black Lagoon.

See you there. (I'll be the one sniffing Galaxy Glue.)

I think that a Watchmen movie is a terrible idea. It's a wonderful comic book that was planned to be just that: a wonderful comic book. For it to become a movie, it would take a director who could somehow make it as dependent on the medium of film as the original was on the medium of comic books. And I just don't have that kind of trust in Zack Snyder.

That said, Dr. Manhattan looks fucking awesome, and I will be there on opening weekend. Even if it was as bad as it could possibly be, it wouldn't ruin the comic book for me.

(Thanks to Slog Tipper Levi.)

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful:

You guys realize that Mulder and Scully are totally going to make out in the new X-Files movie, right? OK, just checking.

... are the following locally produced films.

The much maligned, much defended, much debated, much misspelled Cthulhu is opening in theaters August 22! No word on the actual Seattle venue yet, but we should be in the August 22 rollout.

And Lynn Shelton's My Effortless Brilliance has been acquired by IFC and will be available on its Festival Direct video-on-demand service in August. A DVD is also forthcoming.

And Charles has already informed you as to the progress of his and Robinson Devor's Seattle greenbelt fantasy, North American.

....and makes me not only willing but hungry to see the goddamned ABBA-movie-musical-starring-Meryl-fucking-Streep Mamma Mia!.

My expectations for the ABBA musical Mamma Mia! were low. Very low. My expectations were so low that they dug a hole all the way to China and were walking around upside down asking for a fork (my expectations never learned how to use chopsticks). But oh, how young and wrong I was then! Mamma Mia! is pure entertainment. Sparkling and earnest, hammy beyond all acceptable boundaries of ham, full of slow-motion leaping and young love—it's the movie equivalent of, well, ABBA. The cast rules: Meryl Streep is adorable; Pierce Brosnan sings (TERRIBLY) and stands on a cliff looking windswept in front of an Aegean sunset. Mamma Mia! entertained the shit out of me.

Read the whole thing here. (And see you at Mamma Mia! this weekend! I'll be the one cowering in shame!)

Thinking of Canada, this news story:

OTTAWA - Air Canada has launched an informal investigation in the emergency diversion of a London-bound flight after the co-pilot fell ill somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, with one passenger saying the pilot was having a breakdown and calling for God.

Sean Finucane said the co-pilot was bound by restraints and carried into the cabin.

"He was very, very distraught. He was yelling loudly," he told CBC.

"His voice was clear, he didn't sound like he was drunk or anything, but he was swearing and asking for God," he said in an interview from England. "He specifically said he wants to talk to God."

Is the inspiration of a new film, North American:
(For Tim Appelo: the image is by Matt Daniels)

[I]t’s the story of an airline pilot having a mental breakdown mid-flight. Put up in a Seattle hotel, the pilot sneaks across the street to “an incredibly dense and seemingly endless terrain” fused “of the major Olmsted parks into one diverse geography located in the middle of downtown Seattle.”

The reason why Devor and I decided to make this film, which is almost completed and photographed by Sean Kirby? Seattle has a stunning park system. It's one of the four reasons I settled here--the near end of North America.

Canada in the age of Bush:

A U.S. soldier who fled to Canada because he refused to serve in Iraq has been deported, and now faces a possible court martial.

Robin Long crossed the border into Canada in 2005. Last October, he was arrested in Nelson, B.C., on a Canada-wide warrant.

He called military operations in Iraq "an illegal war of aggression."

This is sad, so sad.

New York magazine's David Edelstein has a review of The Dark Knight up. The review is negative—awestruck, but ultimately negative—but the review is not why I'm linking to the page.

I'm linking to the review because the comments are fascinating. Most of the commenters haven't seen the movie yet, but they're violently attacking Edelstein for his negative review...without having seen the movie themselves.

It's quite obvious that the reviewer clearly wants attention by writing such an article on one of the most anticipated movies of this summer. I've been hearing of universal acclaim from almost every critic, yet the one review with such attitude and bravado is the one with no meaning at all, least to forget reasoning.

Hes pretty confused throughout the review. maybe this movie is actually that great to have someone this twisted after they see it. he thinks hes the joker now trying to "crash the party" thats going to start on july 18th. what a scrub.

Much more, including an old-school put-down of fanboys, after the jump.

Continue reading "Someone's Got a Bat in Their Belfry" »

Point One:
In WALL•E, human evolution from normal weight to overweight is concomitant with their evolution from animal...

...to animation.

The transformation, which is pictured on the commander's wall, has this as its meaning: the infantilization of humanity is the final result of the capitalist mode of economic production and parliamentary politics. It is not without meaning that the last organic things are infantile humans (Neitzche's last man, the absolute couch potato) and cockroaches. The superman--that rare and wonderful thing--has been reduced to a weed in a boot.

Point Two:
The appearance of robots in the movie is more real than the appearance of people. Reality, then, is not about being on Earth but doing hard work. The return to Earth is a return to work (the real reality), which is the metabolic interaction between labor and nature.

Point Three:
Wall-e is the subject of universal history, a slave. A slave is in history because of his/her work marks the temporality of his labor. The temporality is the trace between the body and world. The trace is the subject. Wall-e builds pyramids out of blocks of garbage. He is continuous with the slaves pulling blocks of stone in the cradle of civilisation.

Point Four:
Wall-e's form of consumption--productive consumption--is the opposite of the consumption taking place on the space/cruise ship--unproductive consumption. Unproductive consumption ends with a mere (fat) individual; productive consumption ends with an object, and from the object we see history in the making, and from this making of history arises self-consciousness, and this form of recognition is the foundation of class consciousness. On the space/cruise ship, Wall-e is the hero of a slave/class revolt.

Point Five:
The revolt in the movie corresponds with Hardt and Negri ideas and not with Marx's. The rebel robots are disorderly, heterogeneous, monstrous--they are the multitude. Marx's revolt was to be organized and orchestrated by a single class--the proletariat. If Wall-e's revolt was a Marxist one, then the other Wall-e robots compacting the garbage at the very bottom of the space/cruise ship would have recognized him as a revolutionary subject. Instead, they only weakly wave at him as he departs to the struggle. That struggle is a love movement.

Point Six:
It is not surprising that the thing that Wall-e most loves is itself in a state of perfection, an absolute robot, a most excellent machine, Eva.

Point Seven:
Work on its own can not revolutionize the subject (this is why the other Wall-e robots are doomed to the bottom of the space/cruise ship). The revolutionary moment must be activated by love. This love, however, is the love of work. This worship of work is the Marxist core of WALL•E. This core is the troubling one of capitalism and Marxism. This oneness presents, in the 20th century, a dead end for the Marxist project and open road for parliamentary capitalism. It is here that things stand in our moment of history.

After four weekends, the Louis Leterrier-directed “The Incredible Hulk” has earned $125 million, the same as what “Hulk” had pulled in at the same time in its run. “Hulk” finished with $132 million, and its successor is unlikely to do much better.

Maybe people just don't like CGI Hulk.

Via Kung Fu Rodeo.

I'm pretty excited about The Dark Knight. Maybe not excited enough to take part in all the 'viral' shenanigans, but still pretty excited.

I rented and watched Batman: Gotham Knight a couple days ago. Like The Animatrix that came out between the Matrix movies, B:GK is comprised of animated short films made by anime studios.

Though they can be watched separately, the six short films are linked, both by story elements and by the fact that they are all incredibly boring. There was a very good Batman cartoon in the 1990s, and I dearly missed it while I was watching this terrible mess. If, like me, you're so excited for the Batman movie that you'd consider renting this thing as a kind of placeholder, please don't.

Avoid.

I saw Pixar's WALL•E last week and everyone's right: it's wonderful. It's also the rare "family film" that drips with contempt for its audience. In Wall•E's world (small spoiler alert) the earth is an uninhabitable wasteland, leaving mankind—every single member of which is morbidly obese and strapped to a full-body iPod—to float around outer space in a huge, stupor-inducing spaceship.

It's a ballsy choice—for comparison, see Blade Runner, which presented a dystopia that quietly stroked audience's egos. (The future may be ruled by some vague Asian conglomerate, but at least we'll get to fuck Daryl Hannah-shaped robots!) But in Wall•E, the earth is a big dead trash dump, and humanity is so fat it can barely move of its own volition.

For what it's worth, the fatties in Wall•E are adorable (like babies) and hilarious (like platypuses). But people of size aren't laughing.

Here's New York mag's link-heavy overview of the brouhaha.

And here's a heartfelt letter written to Pixar from disappointed fan:

Do you know what it feels like seeing a shipfull of fat people who exist to show how dissolute and horrible and wasteful people can be? I’ve had fat jokes directed at me. I’ve had people laugh at my pictures. Since childhood, I’ve even had family members poke fun at my body, where I’m supposed to “take a joke”.

Pixar, this is one joke I don’t want to take. It is horrible when you see the only bodies shaped like you as things to laugh at, as living examples of as a culture, how shoddily we treat the earth. There’s no complexity, no understanding, just an easy punchline. Why is it instantly funny to see people fall and struggle and be hurt?

Worst yet, I sat there watching trying to be hopeful because at least the fat couple touched hands and smiled at each other. Unlike Wall-e and Eve, they never got to dance.

Read the whole eloquent letter here. (And go see Wall•E! At the Cinerama, if you can...)

These images are connected to a conversation I had yesterday with someone in this city. Nothing more is to be said than that.

The Smoking Gun offers a thrilling behind-the-scenes glimpse at how Sacha Baron Cohen goes about getting such amazing shit on film.

Lured by $1 beer and the prospect of "hot chicks" and "hardcore fights," thousands of Arkansans were duped last month into appearing as extras in comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's latest staged mayhem. Cohen and his confederates organized cage fighting programs on consecutive days in Texarkana and Fort Smith. Both cards ended with two male grapplers (one was identified as "Straight Dave" and wore camouflage) tearing each other's clothes off and, while in underwear, kissing down their opponent's chest. This man-on-man action triggered Fort Smith fans to throw chairs and beer at the ring, according to one cop present at the city's Convention Center.

The promotion of the faux matches was a work of art unto itself:

The June 5 Texarkana promotion was adverstised as "Red, White, and Blood." The June 6 matches in Fort Smith were dubbed "Blue Collar Brawlin'" as seen in this poster. Ads on Craigslist—like this one—noted that attendees had to be over 21 and suggested that fans arrive early "for $1 BEERS!" Cohen & Co. underwrote the cost of beer, which usually sells for $4 at the Fort Smith facility. "Blue Collar Brawlin'" drew about 1500 fans, who were greeted by signs stating that the event was being filmed. Attendees were also not allowed in with cameras or cell phones and some were asked to sign releases.

Thank you, Smoking Gun. (And thank you, Sacha Baron Cohen.)

For those who know the famous sequence in I am Cuba:

The liberation of Legoland from capitalist exploitation!

Another version of that sequence is in Boogie Nights;

The pool (or being under water) is an excellent metaphor for capitalism: total pleasure, immersion, suffocation.

I watched Hancock this weekend and found Paul Constant's assessment to be on the side that is right...

..[T]he trailers, with Will Smith as a drunken misanthrope flying into buildings and tossing whales around with impunity, suggested the kind of brainless summer fun that Smith used to supply with films like Men in Black. Unfortunately, as with I Am Legend and I, Robot, Smith has developed the unfortunate tendency to make all his popcorn flicks as heavy as a brain-dead Hamlet.

And David Denby’s to be on the side of that is wrong...

But Theron isn’t running away from her good looks anymore. Wearing a simple sleeveless red shift, her blond hair hanging around her shoulders, she’s a knockout in “Hancock,” and she gives the sexiest performance of her career. The currents flowing between her and Smith are reminiscent of the heat generated by Gable and Harlow, say, or Bogart and Bacall.

Between Theron and Smith nothing like chemistry exists. Those two are cold to each other. Sagan tell us near the opening of his book Cosmos that some stars in space are so close they exchange star stuff. The same can not be said about Theron and Smith. They are two stars separated by cold and indifferent space. Not even a single racial spark is generated by the positive and negative codes (the cultural and historical binary) of their flesh. The interracial situation in the kids' movie Holes had more sex in it than what is found (and soon to be forgotten) in Hancock.

In this week's paper, I reviewed Hancock. It was pretty...blah.

...the trailers, with Will Smith as a drunken misanthrope flying into buildings and tossing whales around with impunity, suggested the kind of brainless summer fun that Smith used to supply with films like Men in Black. Unfortunately, as with I Am Legend and I, Robot, Smith has developed the unfortunate tendency to make all his popcorn flicks as heavy as a brain-dead Hamlet. Everything now has to have gravity and weight, and a simple redemptive superhero comedy simply wouldn't do for the erstwhile Mr. July.

But then I read David Denby's review of Hancock, and I had to wonder if we saw the same movie. He declares it the most enjoyable movie of the summer and drools over just about every aspect of the film. That's fine. Critics disagree. But here's the part where my jaw nearly hit my desk:

But Theron isn’t running away from her good looks anymore. Wearing a simple sleeveless red shift, her blond hair hanging around her shoulders, she’s a knockout in “Hancock,” and she gives the sexiest performance of her career. The currents flowing between her and Smith are reminiscent of the heat generated by Gable and Harlow, say, or Bogart and Bacall.

I had to rub my eyes and reread that part:

reminiscent of the heat generated by Gable and Harlow, say, or Bogart and Bacall

David Denby, are you on crack? I ask this not as someone who counts To Have and Have Not among my all-time favorite movies. I ask this as someone who's seen Hancock and doesn't understand how you could find that much gold in all this mediocre pudding. Are we going to have to fight, David Denby? I will totally fight you, and because justice is on my side, I will win.

If you want to figure out which side you're on in this fight, film times are here.

David Fincher's long list of upcoming kick-ass film projects continues to grow.

Fincher—director of Fight Club, Zodiac and George Michael videos—is now attached to a CG animated adaptation of Dark Horse Comics' The Goon series.

Nerds, rejoice.

For those of you who don't know what the hell I'm talking about, go here. (Warning: annoying flash Myspace link.)