Word is the long-rumored Arrested Development movie is officially in the works.

Out in Hollywood, they're about to start work on a Martha Gellhorn biopic. Gillian Anderson (of the incredibly dumb-sounding X-Files: I Want To Believe movie coming out this summer) will produce and star.

If you don't know who Martha Gellhorn is, you should be ashamed of yourself. She's probably best known as one of Hemingway's ex-wives, but she was an amazing journalist and travel essayist. She lived a crazy life, traveling everywhere and meeting seemingly everyone.

There's one problem on the horizon for this movie already. They licensed the rights to Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life, a recent biography of Gellhorn by Caroline Moorehead. It's actually nowhere near as good a book as Gellhorn's memoir Travels With Myself and Another, which everyone should read. The structure and the tone of Travels is so much better than Gellhorn, and ultimately more filmable. But still, anything that's likely to get her books out to a bigger audience is good news.

I took my son to see Wall•E this weekend.

The latest from Pixar, a hit with critics and audiences, is set a eight or nine centuries in the future. Wall•E paints a picture of a planet destroyed by a thoughtless humanity in the thrall of a consumer culture that eventually overwhelms the earth with... junk. Garbage, refuse, crap—everywhere. Humans are forced to abandon the planet and blast off into space, where humanity survives on spaceships that look and function like cruise ships or, um, Disney resorts. There's not much to do out there in space but sit on lounge chairs (floating space lounge chairs), and eat, eat, eat. Meanwhile on earth huge garbage ziggurats tower over abandoned skyscrapers, container ships full of crap sit on dried up ocean beds, and dust-and-garbage storms blow scour the surface of the earth.

Depressing—all that garbage, all that thoughtless over-consumption, all that environmental devastation. But look what we got on the way into the theater...

That's a watch. A cheap plastic watch. According to the instruction card that comes with it, my son's Wall•E watch was made in China, it's not water resistant, and it's batteries are not replaceable. So basically it's a disposable watch brought to us by a movie about the dire consequences of thoughtless over-consumption, a watch that is just one of many—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands—that will be coming soon to landfills near you.

UPDATE: In Wall•E the world appears to be governed by a huge corporation called Buy 'N Large, which at first encourages over-consumption and then, when the environmental consequences become clear, tries to find ways for humanity to consume its way out of the environmental crisis that over-consumption caused in the first place. Eventually the planet has to be abandoned—via Buy 'N Large space ships. Slog tipper Pop Tart draws our attention to a Buy 'N Large website, where you can... buy movie merchandise...

The Onion A.V. Club has a list of 19 one-scene wonders. These scenes generally improve the movie that they're in, or, in a few cases, like Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, are actually the scene that powers the rest of the movie. There's already a lot of anger at the fact that Christopher Walken's watch monologue from Pulp Fiction wasn't included. The comments are a film nerd's paradise.

But the thing that this list really did for me was remind me of the genius cameo that David Letterman did in Cabin Boy. Cabin Boy simply wasn't that good of a movie, even though apologists have been making a case for it ever since it bombed in theaters back in 1994. But David Letterman's freakish, absurd cameo kicks off the plot and brings a level of humor to the whole thing that the movie never actually manages to attain for the remainder of its run time. He basically ruins Cabin Boy by being so much weirder and funnier than the rest of the film around it. I've watched this thing five or six times in a row and I can't figure out why or how it works, but it's sure made my day.

Woo, SIFF is over... and just in time, because it's sunny outside. Meanwhile, in theaters, a whole lot of middling-to-awful summer movies are landing with a thump.

If you missed it, here is my final take on The Happening: not intelligent design propaganda. Just a very silly movie about the menacing rustling of leaves.

Opening this week:

Speaking of awful summer movies: I try to describe the unique brand of yuck that is The Love Guru ("When Mike Meyers isn't making inane pseudo-puns, he's exploiting stereotypes of relatively defenseless sub-minorities, such as French-Canadians and black women. Classy").

Paul Constant appraises the SIFF alum Mongol ("When your protagonist is responsible for fathering half of a percent of the modern world's male population through rape and conquest, any aspirations toward romance ring hollow. Casting Genghis Khan as a one-woman man is an unspeakably batshit-crazy maneuver").

I write up the so-so Get Smart ("Get Smart moves quickly, and the insanely hyperbolic action sequences are enough to distract you from most of the movie's flaws. Except for the lazy jokes about the character flaws of George W. Bush").

Bradley Steinbacher sits through the Julianne Moore freakshow (and SIFF holdover) Savage Grace ("As it turns out, no amount of lover swapping and incestuous three-ways can make vacant, uninteresting people interesting").

Charles Mudede reviews a worthwhile SIFF alum, Bigger, Stronger, Faster* ("Though he is not a user of steroids, [director Chris] Bell is very critical of how his culture codes them. The culture wants you to be bigger and better and faster, and at the same time it marks the use of drugs that make you bigger and better and faster as wrong. The contradiction results in all manner of absurdities, a number of which Bell exposes").

And Steinbacher destroys the fourth SIFF alum of the week, The Children of Huang Shi ("The film's biggest weakness is [Jonathan Rhys] Meyers. With a feeble delivery and a pretty-but-blank mug, he's far too bland to hang an overly earnest film on. Only at the end, as the real-life survivors recount their memories over the closing credits, does The Children of Huang Shi achieve the impact it's been straining for").

Finally, Lindy West discusses her glamorous roots.

In Limited Runs this week: Tonight only are two Sichuan earthquake benefit screenings of Made in China, by Genius shortlister John Helde, at Northwest Film Forum. Also at NWFF: Passing Poston, an interesting but badly constructed film about a Japanese-American internment camp in WWII, and Rabbit in the Moon, an excellent film about the internment, and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the first in a summer Miyazaki series. Grand Illusion is doing a whole week of Hitchcock's Vertigo, plus the late-night Joysticks, about a video arcade. Central Cinema has a family-friendly "Balloonamentary"; SAM has a gay-pride screening of Victor/Victoria; Silent Movie Mondays has The Gaucho, with an uncharacteristic bad-dude performance by Douglas Fairbanks (that's Sr., not Jr., as I mistakenly wrote in the print edition). And the beloved IMAX classic Beavers is back at the Science Center starting tomorrow. (SIFF Cinema reopens next week, by the way, with the new Guy Maddin fantasia, My Winnipeg.)

For all your movie times needs, use us.

Hey, remember how everybody was hating on that The Happening movie last week? Me neither! That's because this week, everyone is hating on The Love Guru, Mike Myers' newest movie.

The New York Times' A. O. Scott hates the hell out of it:

To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious...No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

And this is, come to think of it, something of an achievement. What is the opposite of a belly laugh? An interesting question, in a way, and to hear lines like “I think I just made a happy wee-wee” or “I’m making diarrhea noises in my cup” or to watch apprentice gurus attack one another with urine-soaked mops is to grasp the answer.

But my favorite bad review of The Love Guru is Ain't It Cool's Harry Knowles, who generally writes atrociously written favorable reviews of movies. He once equated Blade II to excellent cunnilingus, among other things. But the best part of Knowles' reviews is that they're usually overwhelmingly positive, atrociously written reviews of terrible movies, movies like AI and Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Just about every bad movie, like Daredevil, reduces Knowles to tears of joy. But he hates The Love Guru. The title of his review is "If Shit Got THE LOVE GURU On It, Shit Would Wipe It Off!" and it contains one of the funniest, and poorly written, paragraphs I've ever read in a film review:

Reviews of this film are nearly universally grotesquely negative - and with good reason. With this film, Myers puts a shotgun in the mouth of comedy and kills it. This isn't merely a bad film, but a painful experience that you keep telling yourself to leave. However, I have a very strong belief in witnessing the terror. People had to survive the Holocaust to hold those responsible, responsible. This film isn't as bad as the Holocaust. Nothing could be. But in the realm of film going experiences - it's a third trimester abortion. It is a pregnant woman smoking a cigarette and drinking a Coors Light.

Hopefully, for Lindy West's next column, she'll take in a marathon multiple viewing of The Love Guru and report back to us on the kinda-not-really Holocaust of this film.

Yes, Zoo was released and promoted by ThinkFilm:

"May you be in heaven a full half hour before the devil knows you're dead." The Irish saying, which inspired the title of ThinkFilm's highest-grossing release "Before the Devil Knows Your Dead" is an apt one for the specialized distributor, which is currently facing the worst financial crisis of its seven-year history. If last year's release of the acclaimed Sidney Lumet drama marked the heavenly highpoint of the company's career, now Lucifer appears to be breathing down its neck.

And:

Producers associated with Robinson Devor's documentary "Zoo," Susan Kaplan's "Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family" and David Sington's "In the Shadow of the Moon" all refused to comment for this story on the advice of their lawyers.

I ain't saying nothing.

Has "nuke the fridge" already jumped the shark?

The oddly titled The Secret of the Grain (the "secret" turns out to be that someone has made off with the couscous) was my favorite movie at SIFF. Certain commenters seem to have felt that a movie about couscous didn't deserve to be two and a half hours long. I disagree--the triviality of the subject matter made the insane suspense all the more delicious--but you'll be happy to hear that the subject of Abdellatif Kechiche's new movie is much heftier.

Yeah, Abdellatif Kechiche is making a period film about the Hottentot Venus. After all the crazy stereotyping of black women I've been seeing lately (Michelle Obama, the hockey star's mom in The Love Guru), I wish it were coming out now, but we're going to have to wait. It's shooting in 2009, so Cannes should get it in 2010, and SIFF should get it in... 2011. (Maybe.) I can't wait.

Via GreenCine Daily.

Is there a casting couch for interns?

World’s Greatest Dad, a motion picture being filmed in Seattle over the summer, starring Robin Williams and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, is in search of full-time, unpaid interns in a variety of departments. This is an excellent opportunity to learn about filmmaking and to make valuable contacts in the Seattle film industry.

College credit is available to currently enrolled students, if applicable. Non-students are welcome to apply. Internships begin immediately and run through the end of August.

If interested, please email resume to WGDseattle@gmail.com

(Via.)

Yes! Sorry! This is not Emmanuelle Chriqui.
This is Megan Fox.

She is in a very bad movie.

She is the sole reason to watch this very bad movie.

So, I know you guys have already discussed it to death already, but I promised you I would investigate M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening (and any intelligent design tendencies therein) over the weekend. And so I did.

Whatever its other faults (and there are plenty), The Happening is not intelligent design propaganda. The lecture about disappearing honeybees that science teacher Mark Wahlberg delivers is totally incoherent, but it doesn't follow that its particular brand of nonsense is the cleverly disguised creationism we've all grown to know and love. Yes, the science teacher uses the phrase "just a theory." But he's using it in the colloquial sense--he's actually criticizing a student's hypothesis, not evolution or gravity or another thoroughly substantiated explanation of natural phenomena. And even as he asserts that sometimes it's proper to attribute scientific phenomena to "an act of nature," he drills his students on a decent approximation of the scientific method. There is some nonsense about "rapid evolution" that occurs across several separate populations simultaneously, but that's just a junk-science plot convenience. It won't make anyone more susceptible to believing in ID.

The funny thing is, in the movie's universe, "an act of nature" is no mystery. It's literal.

I'm hiding the rest of this after the break, but honestly, I don't see how something can be a spoiler when it's revealed in the first half hour. (There is no final act twist--Shyamalan has abandoned his gimmick.)

Continue reading "Re: I'd Rather Go Down on a Goat" »

...than pay money to see another M. Night Shyamalan film.

Nevertheless, The New Republic's point-by-point, spoiler-ridden dissection of the endless stupidity of The Happening makes me think I need to go see it right now.

(Thanks for the heads-up, MetaFilter.)

Being Marky Mark is hard, dog.

Actor Mark Wahlberg has blamed filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan for turning him into a nervous wreck while filming The Happening - insisting the director has made his life a living nightmare. The 37-year-old teamed up with Shyamalan for the new thriller about a killer airborne toxin. And The Sixth Sense director helped him to prepare for his role by teaching him to get in touch with his inner paranoia. And Wahlberg admits he is still suffering from the experience. He tells the New York Daily News, "He's literally made me afraid of everything. I can't enjoy my life the way I used to."

What to do? Star in a movie that requires a fearless, confident character.

Stan Winston, the man who gave us this:

this

and this

has died.

Apparently the new M. Night Shamalamayamamama movie The Happening is intelligent design propaganda. I totally skipped the Tuesday screening, because who cares about M. Night and it was going to have to be a web-only review, but I totally would not have been so derelict had I known anything whatsoever about the film's content.

According to le Gawker:

M. Night Shyamalan's critically-panned flick The Happening is Hollywood's first blockbuster to promote the anti-evolutionary theory of intelligent design. Maybe you thought Ben Stein's ill-fated documentary Expelled was the only movie to argue in favor of the neo-Christian idea that an "intelligent designer" created the universe. Think again. With its references to "unexplained acts of nature" and a science teacher main character who calls evolution "just a theory," The Happening is basically a giant propaganda machine for intelligent design. Maybe science journalists are jizzing all over its allegedly realistic plants-attack-humans plot, but we talked to Shyamalan and we know the truth.

Avowed Christian Shyamalan told us that The Happening is really about religious faith, and explained that he chose Mark Wahlberg to play science teacher Elliot Moore because of the actor's intense belief in Jesus. Maybe he also chose vacant-eyed Zooey Deschanel to play his wife Alma because she looks like a little girl who needs a big strong monotheist in her life? No comment on that one from Shyamalan.

We get tipped off to the fact that this allegedly science fictional movie is really an ID tent revival in the opening scenes where Elliot teaches his science students about evolution. He explains to them that honeybees are disappearing all over the country, and asks what some possible explanations might be. Students who say things like "climate change" and "evolution" are dismissed as being "partly right." But then when a generally quiet student finally says, "It's an act of nature that we can't understand," Elliot lights up and says that's the best answer. That phrase "act of nature," which sounds suspiciously like "act of God," crops up in the movie again and again[....]

It goes on (avec spoilers). The horror! I will see it this weekend and get back to y'all.

Hulk Fact!

The Ang Lee Hulk movie from five years back totally blew chunks. If you need a reminder, here you go:

I have no news to share, but goodness gracious, have you seen this LOL cat?

Opening this week!

Paul Constant reviews The Incredible Hulk ("As in many superhero movies, the third act has problems—how do you keep your villain from becoming a caricature when he's a giant evil monster whose sole motivation seems to be finding a really tough guy to fight?—but the movie is such great fuck-shit-up fun that it can successfully smash through any cliché in its way").

I discuss the stylistically crippled The Tracey Fragments, which is nonetheless a don't-miss for Ellen Page fans. I think it's a more interesting performance than her turn in Juno, in a way, since it shows her pushing back against clichéd writing—something you rarely see from so young a performer. I never saw Hard Candy, though.

David Schmader compares The Promotion to Election ("From the subject matter and narrative voiceovers to the full-on homage shots, Steve Conrad's film is colored and contextualized by Alexander Payne's classic, but eventually finds its legs and grows into something of its own").

Charles Mudede praises War, Inc. and also talks to John "I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen" Cusack.

Lindy West writes about Moby's special celebrity visit to the Seattle True Independent Film Festival.

Tucked away in Film Shorts this week are repeat screenings of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait at Northwest Film Forum and The Dhamma Brothers at the Grand Illusion, plus the remaining STIFF movies.

For complete movie times, use us.

John Cusack has made a movie that relentlessly attacks all that constitutes the insane age of Bush.

Because the insanity has no bottom:

MESEBERG, Germany -- President Bush on Wednesday raised the possibility of a military strike to thwart Tehran's presumed nuclear weapons ambitions, speaking aggressively even as he admitted having been unwise to have done so previously about Iraq.

This passage is from my interview with Cusack:

In America, we treat war like the weather and weather like the war. A tsunami can happen and everyone’s outraged. We say: What can we do? We need to do something. Let’s band together to fight the weather. A war happens and they go, Well, that’s just the way it is. Wars come and they go. No, they don’t.

This is what he has to say about McCain:

Click for movie times.

Hulk Fact!

There was a Hulk doll released in the U.K. that was anatomically correct.

ENGLAND-- Shocked six-year-old Leah Lowland checked out a mystery bulge on her Incredible Hulk doll — and uncovered a giant green WILLY.

Curious Leah noticed a lump after winning the monster, catchphrase “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” at a seaside fair.

And when she peeled off the green comic-book character’s ripped purple shorts, she found the two-inch manhood beneath them.

Horrified Leah immediately ran to mum Kim and reported the find. And last night Kim called for a ban on the saucy toy. She said: “A hulk with a bulk like this just shouldn’t be allowed.

“Considering the doll is only 12-inches tall it’s amazing how big his willy is.

“And it’s definitely not an extra piece of material left on by mistake.”

The full report is here.

Via I-mockery, which has a lovely gallery of hideous Hulk stuffed animals that must be seen to be believed.

Hulk Fact!

One of the best Hulk comics ever is by James Kochalka, and it's only four pages long!

Here's the first page:

You can find the rest of the story here.

Bonus Hulk Fact!

Kochalka once pitched an idea of a super-hero group called The Hulk Squad. The Hulk Squad was a bunch of multi-colored clones of the Hulk. They would fight crime together. Or they'd fight each other. Or something. But, who cares! Multi-colored clones of the Hulk! My favorite, after the original green flavor, is the blue one.

Hulk Fact!

Did you know that one of the Hulk's deadliest foes is named The Bi-Beast? It's true!

According to The Immortal Thor fansite, the Bi-Beast is a citizen of the "City of the Bird-People," and that the very sad Bi-Beast doesn't have any relatives, but

the Bi-Beasts two heads, each possessing a separate intellect, address each other as "skull brother"

It's unknown if the Bi-Beast will still have two heads when he gets out of college.

Hulk Fact!

Did you know that the Hulk's alter ego, Bruce Banner, was nearly raped in a YMCA shower in a 1980s comic book? It's true:

For more information, see Cracked.

The whack based-on-a-true-story horror/comedy freakshow Stuck has its last shows at the Varsity tonight. (It moves to the Admiral tomorrow.) See movie times for details.

I really liked it.

Specifically, hey you thousands of people who have seen the Sex and the City movie and then have bugged booksellers: The book that Carrie reads in the movie doesn't exist.

Rarely have I wanted to use the atrocious word "sheeple" so badly.

You could call this a conflict of interest, since comedian Hari Kondabolu is a friend of mine, but whatever. His comedic short film, Manoj, is playing at STIFF tonight (6:15 pm, Jewel Box Theater, $8). I recommend it, unconflictedly.

I can't vouch for any of the other shorts in tonight's program, but Manoj--a mockumentary about an Indian comedian and America's clumsy affection for stereotypes-- is funny and smart and painful. (Read Charles's profile of director Zia Mohajerjasbi here.)

In other Hari Kondabolu news, he'll be appearing on Comedy Central's "Live at Gotham" on Friday, July 18th at 10 pm. If you like Hari Kondabolu, which you should, save the date.

The Vulture brings news that there will be a Brokeback Mountain opera. Also, there will be an Inconvenient Truth opera.

But the upcoming entertainment news that I'm most excited about on The Vulture is the upcoming Bill Maher documentary Religulous. I'm not a huge Maher fan--libertarians tend to bug the ever-loving shit out of me--but I fully expect to love this movie.

I'll withhold judgment on the operas until (or if) they actually happen.

In regular movie openings this week...

OMG. Remember Windshield Wanda? Here's her first appearance in Last Days, under her nom-de-real-life Chante Mallard. Now there's a movie based on this mind-blowingly awful story, and it's a horror-comedy. Starring Mena Suvari. You must see Stuck as soon as possible. Here's my review.

We also have reviews of SIFF alum Kung Fu Panda (Andrew Wright: "The story's cookie-cutter predictability may keep things from ever quite reaching Pixar's rarified air, but there's the gratifying sense throughout that the makers have finally stumbled across an amiable formula that might actually be worth cultivating. Until, that is, a gawdawful hiphop remix of 'Kung Fu Fighting' blares out over the end credits) and the Adam Sandler vehicle You Don't Mess with the Zohan (Lindy West: "Negligible, mediocre, unrepentantly ordinary").

Lindy also previews the Seattle True Independent Film Festival in Concessions this week. Movie times for the first week of the festival can be found at our Movie Times page.

And Charles Mudede profiles local filmmaker Zia Mohajerjasbi, who has a short film in STIFF.

Limited runs to look out for include the entire Dennis Nyback series at the Grand Illusion, repeat tribute screenings to Yves Saint Laurent tonight at Northwest Film Forum (on his life and atelier), and Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, also at Northwest Film Forum.

Variety reports that Keira Knightley is in talks to star in the remake of My Fair Lady.

Also, Variety reports that Guy Ritchie, whose Revolver is one of the worst movies I've ever seen even though it stars both Jason Statham and Ray Liotta, is about to direct a Sherlock Holmes movie. "(T)he new Holmes [will] be more adventuresome and take advantage of his skills as a boxer and swordsman." Unless Holmes is played by either Statham or Liotta (in which case it will be entirely awesome in an entirely awful way), this looks like bad news.

So the first movie in the Douglas Fairbanks series at Silent Movie Mondays was pretty great—late 'teens bohemian fashion and a spacious Greenwich Village "studio" festooned with Vassar flags, a nightmare sequence in which the dreamer hops about on the ceiling while menacing foodstuffs (spring onions, mincemeat pie) cavort below, a gigantic flood in which a miniature church detaches from its moorings and floats away... Dennis James, accompanying on the Paramount's organ, was excellent, as usual, though his playful "sound effects" were tempered in favor of a tribute score by a midcentury silent film pianist and composer. Not so great, however, was the introduction by one Jennifer Bean, of the Comp Lit department at the UW. I spent her entire bubbly, contentless discussion feeling sorry for her students. Then I googled her. Wow, Rate My Professors.com has gotten vicious since I was in school:

Jennifer Bean does not know how to shut-up. She will talk and talk and will not get to the point for about 3-5 minutes. I feel bad for our guest speakers.It seemed fine in the beginning but two weeks later and I do not want to be there. You can tell that she enjoys what she does but she is annoying with how she talks, and plays with her hair.

She has no business lecturing. She rambled on and on nonstop in nearly every lecture I attended. I was not once able to fully commit myself to listening to her rants. I have never been in a class with more people sleeping. Sign up if you have insomnia and wanna watch some movies in between naps.

She is crazy. She rambles for the full two hours – and you learn nothing. She is constantly yanking her hair. And loves sitting on tables giving the class a prime crotch shot. Her lectures are useless and infuriating, though it is an easy A.

Damn. Now I feel sorry for Jennifer Bean. Sort of.

Luckily, the next Silent Movie Monday (it skips a week--next up is Robin Hood on June 16) will be introduced by Michelle Liu, also of the UW. Her students "are so in love with Michelle." She is also "great" and "awesome." Hooray for Robin Hood!

I never watched Sex and the City while it was on the air. When I did watch it on DVD it was because my best friend made me. It is, to me, little more than a bunch of rich white ladies running around, which has nothing to do with my life. But.

The clothes. I fucking love the clothes.

So I saw the movie for the fashion, and it didn't disappoint. However, I was persistently distracted by a few nagging questions:

1. Don't these bitches have parents? They go through all kinds of whatnot, up to and including planning a huge wedding, and as far as I can tell have no blood relations involved at any point. That, to me, is more absurd than the whole "how does a sex columnist afford all those shoes?" thing. (Predatory credit cards with absurdly high interest rates. Happens every day.)

2. Four people who all get along at the same time? Really? Really??? I'm not trying to dog on anyone's ya-ya sister pants, but I have never seen that arrangement work, male or female. Three buddies, I'll buy that. But four? Really?

*Spoiler Alert!* (but seriously, who gives a fuck?)

3. I find it more than a little pat to couple up the only two gay men in the entire SATC universe (excluding Andre Leon Talley, or as I prefer to call him, geriatric Jay-Z).

Chelsea Alvarez-Bell is June's guest Slogger. Her permanent home on the web is Who Did What To Who.

Northwest Film Forum just happened to be playing a pair of films about Yves Saint Laurent the weekend he died.

If you'd still like to pay tribute to the inventor of the pantsuit, you still have time.

NWFF is playing the biographical documentary Yves Saint Laurent: His Life and Times again this Friday at 7:15 and 9:15 pm, and Yves Saint Laurent: 5 Avenue Marceau 75116 Paris, a doc about the designer's old-school, labor-intensive atelier in the year before it closed, on Friday at 7 and 9 pm.

No news, SIFF is keeping me too busy!

But here's what we've got in the paper this week.

Sandi Cioffi writes about being detained in Nigeria during the filming of a documentary about oil production there. (Sweet Crude screened in a work-in-progress version at last year's SIFF.) From her feature:

At one point, after sleeping for two hours, I was woken for interrogation. I was questioned four times total—once for six hours. A constant feature of interrogation is the fear of what might come if I failed to give them what they wanted, though I never knew what that actually was. I tried to think of some of the questions as really bad moments from film-fest audience Q&As, just to keep my sanity—it helped.

Opening this week:

Charles Mudede reviews the SIFF '08 alum Before the Rains ("Fidel Castro, Kenneth Kaunda, Robert Mugabe, Julius Nyerere—all were heroes during the war for self-determination, and villains during the period of independence. The promises made before the war [free health care, increased freedoms, better education, fairer distribution of wealth] were all broken not long after the war ended. The breaking of the promises ultimately led to the betrayal: the moment when the revolutionary became a dictator, the moment when the leader of the oppressed became worse than the overthrown oppressor. In our post–Cold War period, this betrayal we instantly recognize and condemn. But there is another, earlier betrayal that is mostly forgotten, and is surprisingly the subject of a new film from India, Before the Rains: the betrayal of the progressive colonist").

Bradley Steinbacher writes further on The Fall, which also opened at this year's SIFF ("Every frame has been meticulously crafted; every scene bursts with imagination. The primary colors and absurdly exotic locations pop from the screen, and the story's many false starts, quick rewrites, and major plot holes perfectly match the nature of a wild bedtime story cooked up on the fly. It's when matters return to unimaginative reality, however, that [Tarsem] Singh's film begins to fray").

Brendan Kiley really likes the new Doug Pray doc, Surfwise (it's a "a case study of a uniquely American eccentric who treated recreation as necessity and the beach as a frontier").

I finally succeeded in posting my interview with Errol Morris, but thanks to torture-averse Seattle filmgoers, the movie is no longer in theaters. Damn it! It's good, I swear. The book based on Morris's research for the film is out now, though. It's been getting some impressive reviews.

And in Concessions this week, Lindy West discusses the now-somewhat-infamous SIFF opening night.

Limited Runs may be found by browsing our exhaustive Movie Times search. Reviews this week include Bradley Steinbacher on Woman on the Beach ("a smart, moody dramedy") at the Grand Illusion and me on Northwest Film Forum's Lagerfeld Confidential ("the only interesting thing about the film is how unflattering it is to the filmmaker"). If you're still into the fashion movie conceit--NWFF is doing 'em all week--I'd try Yves Saint Laurent: 5 Avenue Marceau 75116 Paris, which is about an old-school atelier just a year before it closed forever. Also, I can't review Dennis James's amazing organ performances before they occur, but the Paramount's Silent Movie Mondays series is opening a Douglas Fairbanks series this week, and When Clouds Roll By (1919) has got to be the most eccentric and interesting film in the series. Now why did SIFF have to program Night Tide for the exact same time slot? Megan Seling also reviews Sex and the City in this cramped little space, because the studio refused to screen it early enough for us to review in the print edition. But that's okay. You pretty much know what to expect anyway.

For new SIFF reviews, schedule revisions, reports, and gossip, keep current at thestranger.com/siff.

Sydney Pollack, a fine (The Way We Were, They Shoot Horses Don't They, The Electric Horseman) and sometimes great (Three Days of the Condor, Jeremiah Johnson, Tootsie) and ok, sometimes not that awesome (Havana, Random Hearts, The Interpreter) American film director who also moonlighted as a producer (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Sense and Sensibility, The Fabulous Baker Boys) and a surprisingly excellent actor (Husbands and Wives, Eyes Wide Shut, Michael Clayton) died yesterday (Monday) from cancer at the age of 73, following a 47-year career in movies and TV.

Pollack was great. He was one of the most reliable of the '70s powerhouses, but one who never needed to self-identify as a maverick. He let his movies be smart and daring and surprising for him. And even when he misfired or played it safe (he worked a LOT), you never lost the sense that he and his work were still trying, still dignified, always reaching for the same elegant blend of cynical awareness and human refusal to simply give into that cynicism. I think of Jeremiah Johnson struggling without words to survive in the snowy mountains, Sonny Steele stealing the horse rather than just running away, Michael Dorsey chasing Julie down the street until she simply can't not forgive him for having been Dorothy Michaels, even weird-ass existential race car driver Bobby Deerfield blowing off marriage and career to pursue his doomed affair with Lillian. All that indomitable optimism in the face of unvanquishable corruption and natural antagonism—it's never naive optimism, either; it's always a choice.

Then, late in his career (right around the time his own movies started to lose a step, but not counting his own roles in his own films, especially Tootsie, in which he entered a two-way-race for steal with Bill Murray) he became this amazing actor—a warm Jewish eminence who excelled at portraying real power and real wealth. He effortlessly embodied the kind of powerful men who believe there is a way to do things right, to maximize profit and convenience for the bastards who secretly run the world, and then there's the way that all the losers do things. His best characters were the exact kind of hypocritical antagonists that made his best movies thrum. And just by investing him with himself—his obviously abundant warmth and intelligence—he expanded them. Did you see Michael Clayton? Husbands and Wives? Eyes Wide Shut? Even The Player? Pollack stealthily owned those visionary films all out from under their stars and directors, by masterfully vivifying the actual humanity of these bad, bad people (with their nice families and publicly liberal leanings) whom he brought to life. That was Pollack the actor, and he was just, it seemed, getting started.

Anyway, I'm watching Three Days of the Condor right after I post this. And then maybe Husbands and Wives. Maybe you'll want to watch something, too. He certainly deserves to be remembered.

Then click away.

It makes me a teensy bit more excited and it can't be worse than that godawful Ang Lee turd.

If, by some bizarre coincidence, you hate SIFF but love movies, aren't going to Sasquatch, and are allergic to drum circles, you may find this post helpful. Perhaps.

News:

Cannes coverage all over the place. Check out the New York Times, which has been very on top of things, and the nearly exhaustive GreenCine Daily. (I cannot wait for The Headless Woman. And SIFF AD Carl Spence was telling me yesterday he was impressed by Hunger, which just got picked up by IFC.)

Variety previews the musical theater version of Saved!.

This Week:

Bradley Steinbacher reviews the disappointing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ("When we'd last seen Indiana Jones he was riding off into the sunset after having discovered the Holy Grail. It was the perfect ending to the series: simple, iconic, and lasting. I'd have preferred to remember him that way").

I review Meet Bill, which is downright awful.

Limited runs are thin this week, due to SIFF. But we do have Northwest Film Forum, with an extended run of Mister Lonely (here's our interview with Harmony Korine), and Grand Illusion, with Young Yakuza, a documentary about the Japanese mafia. (We didn't have a chance to review it, due to the SIFF behemoth, but here's the Variety review.)

For all your movie times needs, go here. Looking for a SIFF movie? The only guidance you need is at thestranger.com/siff.

Samantha Morton plays a Marilyn Monroe impersonator in Harmony Korine's wonderful Mister Lonely.

This is from an interview I had with the director and screenwriter Harmony Korine:

What is the source of Mister Lonely?

Early on I had started thinking of this idea of nuns jumping out of airplanes, nuns riding bicycles in the clouds and doing tricks in the sky. But that was pretty much it; that was the extent of it. I didn't have a story or any kind of narrative. And I was working on a script before then, right before my houses burned down. It was a script about a pig named Trotsky and this kid who invented a special kind of adhesive that he would put on to ride outside of these walls. He would ride around and walk through the swampland in Florida and firebomb houses. A lot of that script burned down with my house.

To read more, go here; to see the movie, go here.

Totally nerdy thing to post, I know, but this was over at Darth Mojo, and I think it's hilarious. And then it's not hilarious anymore. And then it's really hilarious again. Not safe for work, unless you're wearing headphones:

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Pon Farr Edition) from Darth Mojo on Vimeo

_{(Make sure you read the 'making of' information at Darth Mojo, too.)}

In 1964 Kaneto Shindo directs Onibaba:
We must never forget this film. It is one of the ten defining works of silver-age Japanese cinema. Two women live in a grass swamp and survive by luring and killing samurai going to or coming from an everlasting war. The women and her daughter-in-law kill and rob men. The bodies of the men are then dumped into a deep hole. The raw power of this film is generated by this dynamic: life devours death. The women are life; the men are death. And the more death life devours, the less death there is in the world; and the more life devours death, the more life there is in the world. The women are the point at which death comes to an end and life thrives; the men are nothing but a cycle of death that has no end. To live is to live on nothing.