Willem de Kooning, Police Gazette, 1955.

Questioned on her “attitude towards modern art,” Gertrude Stein once remarked, “I like to look at it. That is, I like to look at the picture part of it; the other parts interest me much less.” What I like to look at in De Kooning’s paintings is the yellow. I like to look at the yellow parts of even those paintings I don’t think much of. Next to the yellow, I like to look at the pink. Finally the grey. For me the name De Kooning means the chance to stare at these painted colors, not works of art or experiences of form, and certainly not the various figurative pretexts, although the remnants of the faces of women are certainly unavoidable.

That's the first paragraph of the twelfth essay in Frederic Jameson's new book, The Modernist Papers, and it's cracking me up.

Taiwanese director Edward Yang passed away yesterday from colon cancer, leaving behind a handful of films ranging from the merely great (1991’s A Brighter Summer Day) to the oh-my-god-this-is-incredibly-awesome (2000’s Yi Yi). Greencine has more info (including details on his upcoming planned collaboration with Jackie Chan) and a steadily increasing number of tributes.

In an attempt to cheer myself up, here’s the trailer for (the extremely unYanglike) Hardcase and Fist. (NSFW)

Ratatouille

(ANIMATION) Ratatouille is the first great Hollywood film of the year, and may end up being the only great Hollywood film of the year. The premise: a Parisian rat that has a taste for fine foods, that worships a famous chef, that becomes a cook in that famous chef's restaurant, and is so talented that he melts the iciest of food critics into a warm puddle. It's just too much. You will be overwhelmed by a laughter as ridiculous as the movie's premise. (See movie times.) CHARLES MUDEDE

Summer movies just hit you in the face. Here's what's up this weekend.

Already open for several days: Live Free or Die Hard. Andrew Wright says it's pretty great.

Opening today: Sicko, from the inimitable (and I don't mean that as a compliment, exactly) Michael Moore.

Sicko is perfectly entertaining, but it's perhaps the least informative movies about single-payer healthcare I could imagine. I could've gotten more cogent arguments from a soft-money issue ad. Here's my full review.

And don't overlook Ratatouille, which despite appearances...

.... may end up being one of the best movies of the summer. Seriously. Here's an extended version of the review Charles Mudede wrote for the print edition. And you needn't take Charles's word for it (though we wish you would)--check out the stacks upon stacks of 100s on Metacritic right now.

Reviewed in On Screen this week: the star-studded (groan) Evening, in which an imaginary angel makes an appearance, and the dishy ShowBusiness, in which four major musicals workshop and rehearse and shovel fodder toward the tabloids on the way to their Broadway debuts.

The specialty theaters are all bunching up in Suggests this week. Don't miss the locally produced Walking to Werner at Northwest Film Forum (late show tonight followed by a party featuring Today!, a band made up of Dayna Hanson, Maggie Brown of We Go Way Back, and some serious musicians). We didn't have much room in the film section this week for a long review, but you should read my profile of filmmaker Linas Phillips, written while Walking to Werner was being edited. The film is absorbing and unnervingly spiritual. The best thing about it is the half-serious, half-cheeky way Phillips deploys found narration, repurposed from commentary tracks on Werner Herzog's films. It's a technique without precedent, as far as I know, and it probably won't be repeated.

Finally, at the Grand Illusion, an awesome program of monster-movie double features starts tonight with The Thing From Another World and The Thing. The J-horror late night, Ghost Train, doesn't sound half-bad either.

See Get Out for all your Movie Times needs. Like The Buffy the Vampire Slayer Musical Big Screen Extravaganza at the Egyptian. And old-school pirate movies at Northwest Film Forum. And Duck Soup.

Rats and HMOs and Things, oh my!

The last few weeks have been tough for the Capitol Hill Arts Center.

First Annex Theater grumbled about leaving.

Then the People's Republic of Comedy announced that they're leaving.

And now Blacklight, a series of club nights CHAC adopted after the Vogue closed, is outie.

Blacklight became CHAC's club-in-residence back in January and, as CHAC director Matthew Kwatinetz said, was a necessary diversification for the arts center, the kind of diversification other arts centers might have to pursue, what with local theater not being known for its piles of filthy lucre.

Seems that noise killed the club nights. From the just-arrived press release:

Noise in the building became a concern. In Seattle there are two noise laws—one based on measurable levels of noise, and one based solely on citizen complaint. Though CHAC and Blacklight were commended by the police for keeping the measurable (DB) levels low and within legal limits, citizen complaints persisted.

The last night is tomorrow, June 30.

One of Pascal's thoughts:

If we dreamt the same thing every night, it would affect us as much as the objects we see every day. And if an artisan were sure to dream every night for twelve hours’ duration that he was a king, I believe he would be almost as happy as a king, who should dream every night for twelve hours on end that he was an artisan.

If Pascal had ended the thought on "almost as happy as a king," that would have been the real insight. A man who dreams every night that he is a king is really a king. And only a poor man can dream of being a king. Kings have no dreams.

From a song by the Thompson Twins:

If I was king for just one day
I would give it all away
I would give it all away to be with you If I was king for just one day
I had just one thing to say
You know that love is
All we need to get us through

What concerns me here is the substance of this claim. Meaning, does it have any substance, value, weight? What's so great about giving up one day's worth of being a king to be with the one you love until the end of all time? Exactly who would give up nights of hot sex for just one day of being a king? A poor fool.

From a speech delivered by a theologian on August 28, 1963:

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

The density of sensual imagery in King's speech (its hills, mountains, flesh) is to language what a density of droplets is to a cloud. He hopes that the condensation of sensual imagery in the language will bring about "the real rain," the fall from the cloudland of ideas a tangible, graspable experience of freedom. This King wants to stop dreaming.

Walking to Werner

(FILM) If you saw the mediocre Outsourced at SIFF and were saddened by the apparent want of imagination on the part of Seattle filmmakers, be prepared to be knocked out by this film. Documenting a harebrained pilgrimage from Seattle to Werner Herzog's house in L.A., Walking to Werner becomes a meditation on the varieties of spiritual experience on America's left coast. Best of all is the found narration, hilariously repurposed from the commentary tracks on Herzog's DVDs. (Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave, 267-5380. 7 and 9:15 pm, $8.50.) ANNIE WAGNER

It's always good entertainment when critics get passionate about something they haven't seen. Rudy Giuliani, meet Regina Hackett. She's your kind of girl.

The truth is, on a deep level, critics love criticism. And Regina keeps it coming to me.

This time, she's so irritated with me for panning SuttonBeresCuller's recent performance--which happened while she was out of town--that she takes the opportunity to slam me (once again) on her blog. (My review of the performance first appeared in longer form on Slog.)

First, she says, I don't know criticism from insults. This from the critic who wrote, in direct retort to Sheila Farr (who'd gotten an exclusive preview and written an incisive review of Paul Allen's art collection that made Regina's review look late and weak in comparison): "Those who think the container cancels out the pleasures of the art contained need a checkup from the neck up." That sentence still cracks me up.

(My other favorite Hackettism was her blog post about my being wrong in my criticism of SBC's boat in the biennial at Tacoma Art Museum. She cited the responses of local critics to the work--questioning the credibility of one of those critics along the way--and decided that the vote was in: 2 out of 3 critics say the boat is good, so it must be! Take that, Graves!)

In this latest case, it's not just that I don't know from criticism. It's also that I don't know from genius. Because I question the quality of recent work by SBC, I would also have hated John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Morris Graves back when they were enlivening Seattle. Because--to quote once again from the review Regina wrote in 2005--John Sutton, Ben Beres, and Zac Culler are the reincarnation of Cage, Cunningham, and Graves.

Welcome back, Regina. I could spend all day trading barbs with you, it's so much fun. But I have to get back to the business of criticizing art rather than another critic--until next time, that is. See you on the flip side of another battle, lady.

From departing SIFF communications director Gary Tucker:

This year’s festival did not quite reach the goals we’d been aiming for, so with a potential capital campaign looming in our future, a few sacrifices have to be made in order to end the year in the black. The full-time position of director of communications was new for SIFF this year, hence in the spirit of “last to arrive, first to leave...”.

This belies the sunny 6% box office increase we'd heard projected. Or does it? SIFF Cinema is at least 100 seats bigger than Broadway Performance Hall, the venue which it replaced (though BPH had 102 shows last year, compared to SIFF Cinemas' 90 this year, if my quick math is right); so--assuming provisionally the other venues had the same number of shows--SIFF had something on the order of 7,000 more tickets available this year compared to last. You'd better hope revenue would increase.

SIFF Cinema's new yearlong venue opens next week with the very tasty (and undoubtedly expensive) Noir City program.

A Mighty Heart is bombing at the box office, and it can't do any better this coming week, with competition from Sicko in limited markets and Ratatouille and Live Free or Die Hard everywhere. But I'd submit that the distressing subject matter is but one reason filmgoers are staying away. The uncomfortable vision of Angelina Jolie moping around in adopted skin is another.

This article from the Washington Post last weekend is the best thing I've read on the legacy of mixed-race "brown"-face in cinema. A must if you can't understand what all the fuss is about.

Incidentally, there's a new book out about Oscar Micheaux, who's mentioned in the article: The Great and Only Oscar Micheaux: The Life of America's First Black Filmmaker. I just got it from the library.

And that great '70s film by Charles Burnett, Killer of Sheep, is extending through next Thursday at Northwest Film Forum.

It's not secret that I am sometimes put out with the choices funders and residencies make when doling out awards. So it's only fair that I praise the Mayor's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs for announcing their awards to what sound like some promising projects:

Awards include $5,000 to Jennifer Zeyl [of Washington Ensemble Theatre] to direct Hedda: Blah, Blah, Bang, a reconstruction of Hedda Gabler, a classic Henrik Ibsen play;

$8,500 to William Smith to compose, record and present Jazzopera, a lecture-performance combining elements of classical music and jazz;

$2,600 to Elspeth Savani Macdonald to present a concert of original boleros, sambas and folkloric music;

$1,500 to Raymond Houle to present Against the Grain/Men in Dance, a series of performances highlighting the evolution of male dance in contemporary society;

$10,000 to Lucia Neare to present Lullaby Carriage, an outdoor, interdisciplinary “dream-theater” piece;

$9,500 to Haruko Nishimura [of Degenerate Art Ensemble] to create a series of solo dance performances in partnership with dance, theater and music artists.

(I'm a little suspicious of that outdoor "'dream-theater' piece," but I'll hold my horses until I've seen it.)

This universe spares no one. Even philosophers die. All we can hope is that one day a man/woman will produce a thought strong enough to win even one battle against the given time.

Artist Trust announced yesterday that the painter Elizabeth Sandvig, who recently had a show at her gallery, Francine Seders, has won the $10,000 Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.

Here's Elizabeth Bryant's great review of the show.

Sandvig will be honored at a reception September 7 at the Frye Art Museum.

^{Elizabeth Sandvig, Fox and Partridges, oil on canvas, 2006}

You know that haunted little room off the foyer at McLeod Residence where the 19th-century paintings used to hang? Through this week, Mandy Greer's show Parlor (above) is in there, with individual works for sale like this one, titled Little White Lion,

and this one,

titled White Milk Balls.

There's a closing party Thursday night (tomorrow), but the gallery doesn't turn over until after Saturday.

Then, opening July 6 is what promises to be an ambitious group show of interactive works (its title, Interactivity, seems criminally plain given the names of some of the works in the show: Biomimetic Butterflies, Running Plaid, Contexture).

My favorite part:

Contrary to popular opinion, things don’t go stale particularly fast in the art world. As they say, everything changes but the avant-garde. Chelsea was a ghost town last week, but had you been with the crush in Europe you’d have observed, at each stop, the same cast of museum directors and trustees, art advisers and clients, curators and more curators, artists, dealers, journalists, PR people, and who knows who else--all talking one another up, all on the lookout for the next paradigm shift. It’s a bubble environment. Everyone goes to the same exhibitions and the same parties, stays in the same handful of hotels, eats at the same no-star restaurants, and has almost the same opinions. I adore the art world, but this is copycat behavior in a sphere that prides itself on independent thinking.

Ed Winkleman has a brave post up on his blog today, about why galleries split the profits of sales with artists 50/50.

He dives all the way in, including a list detailing a typical dealer's expenses, beginning here:

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Gallery/Artist relationship is, not surprisingly, the most controversial aspect of any relationship in any business: money. Specifically, the 50/50 split of sales between the artist and dealer. Many folks outside the gallery system will look at that split and be amazed, I'm sure. The artist is the creative genius, the artist spent years in art school, the artist is the one putting it all on the line for the public to take pot shots at their vision. In other professions, like acting, managers only get 15% and agents only get 10%. Why on earth does the gallery take 50% of the money? The short answer is because it costs that much to promote the artist's work. The longer answer is, well...a bit like the adage about watching sausages being made. The following is a very unromantic discussion, leaving out issues such as how much the gallery believes in the work or how important the artist is to the world. Those things do matter, but I'm taking a wholly bottom-line view here to provide the most objective analysis and hopefully most useful information toward understanding this.

Winkleman spends the post justifying why galleries should take half. But he also gives a nod to artists who feel this is highway robbery:

In general, I find the artists most upset about the 50/50 split fall into one of two categories: 1) they don't understand the business that well (and many of them have never had full-time representation) or 2) they have a bad relationship with their gallery (i.e., their gallery is not doing enough in their opinion to earn the 50% they're taking). This second category of artists can also be broken down in two groups: those who are correct in their assessment that the gallery is not doing enough for their 50% and those who may not understand that the gallery is still behind in the deal in terms of recouping their investment and is actually doing more than their fair share for the 50%.

Normally, comments about art on this blog are limited to ad hominem attacks and mouth-breathing disses that date back to the impressionists ("I coulda made that").

But maybe I could hear from some artists actually represented in Seattle.

Does your dealer take half? Do you think it's fair? Have dealers in Seattle stepped up their promotion enough to leverage the new publicity Aqua Art Miami gives to Northwest artists? Who's the hardest-working dealer in town?

I have no reason to believe that Seattle dealers are lax in their duties, and I'm making no accusations with this line of questioning. But while Ed's being brave...

Kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen

Last week many other capitals of culture got to see, on their local public TV stations, Simon Schama's gazillion-hour series on the history of great works by great artists from Caravaggio to Rothko, The Power of Art.

I tuned in to KCTS assuming it would air, but it wasn't there. That night I came down with a flu that swallowed my week and made me forgot to follow up or ask why.

Monday I was talking casually with folks at the Henry and discovered that Schama's series isn't coming to Seattle. It had been scheduled to air, but funding just didn't come through, was the word in the Henry offices.

That's a shame. Here's the NYT on what you missed, including the story of this painting by Caravaggio, made after he had himself killed a man.

Killer of Sheep

(BLACK CINEMA) Finished in 1977, Killer of Sheep is a film by the most important black director in the history of American moving pictures, Charles Burnett. To obtain an adequate understanding of the film—which is set in a black L.A. neighborhood, and is about a sad man who kills sheep for a living—you must watch it much more than once. (Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave, 329-2629. 7 pm and 9:15 pm, $8/$5 for members, through Sept 15.) CHARLES MUDEDE

The lady who pretended to be JT LeRoy has been found guilty of fraud by a jury and forced to pay $116,500 to Antidote International Films, the company that optioned her first book, Sarah. (I mean, JT LeRoy's first book.) Does this seem weird to anyone else?

OK, yes, Laura Albert "lied" to everyone, including Antidote International Films but also Courtney Love and Winona Ryder and Mary Gaitskill and Dennis Cooper and lots of other musicians and writers. (I once heard a voicemail JT LeRoy left on the answering machine of a well known writer, a writer who shared an agent with JT LeRoy, and always thought this was proof that JT LeRoy existed.) But writers "lying" to readers--writing under a name that isn't their real name!--isn't exactly unheard of. Writers "lying" about their gender isn't exactly unheard of. Sure, Albert furthered the confusion/deception/act by sending people out to public appearances to act as JT LeRoy, but wouldn't George Eliot have done the same if she'd been pressured to, like, go on a book tour? Plus, hasn't this is-he-real-or-isn't-he? performance art that Laura Albert has been perpetuating for years been kind of wonderful to behold? It's not like she hasn't been working really hard at it.

What seems weird is that Antidote International Films optioned a novel called Sarah, not a human being who wrote a novel called Sarah. To get all huffy (more than huffy: to sue a writer for all this money, not just this first $116,500 but also all the legal fees) because the author of a novel--which, by definition, is a book that we are to assume is made-up--has a different name and gender and personality than the person we all thought wrote it just illustrates that Antidote's interest in the book wasn't actually, you know, an interest in the book. From the New York Times:

Among the various battles waged at the trial--art versus commerce, truth versus fiction, reality versus the imagination--it was perhaps the battle over JT LeRoy’s purpose in the world that was most in dispute. Before his identity (or, rather, nonidentity) was revealed last year in a series of newspaper articles, the production team at Antidote considered him that rare commodity in today’s biography-obsessed entertainment world: a gifted writer with a titillating past that only enhanced the value of the work.

Bullshit. JT LeRoy's biography was their interest in the work. Their perception of the person who wrote it was what they liked. It was an interest in career, celebrity, the "sellability" of the author, rather than ideas.

Things have gotten increasingly hilarious around my house, thanks to the wealth of advance advertising for Disney/Pixar's Ratatouille, every bit of which drives my fella Jake eloquently insane.

The quote in the subject line was his first pronouncement on the forthcoming CGI blockbuster, which tells a family-friendly story of a rat that dreams of becoming a great chef. "Teaching children that rats are adorable, misunderstood creatures can bring nothing but good," says Jake, whose vermin feelings were irreparably colored by two years in New York City, where rats rule, and regularly bite the faces of babies. "Also, connecting rats to delicious food is genius. It's important that kids know that rats love human food, and have great taste. Whatever kids see a rat eating, they should eat it, too."

I doubt this is the moral Disney/Pixar's going for, but the fact that Ratatouille might serve as genius propoganda in the ongoing war between man and vermin is now impossible for me to ignore...

Nancy Drew

(FILM) Now this is a conservative backlash to get behind: brainiac sleuthing instead of CGI stunts. Nancy Drew isn't entirely old school. She does use Google to help her solve the murder mystery at hand—proving, really, that Google isn't just a lazy crutch that's dumbing us all down. Knowing what questions to type in is an old-school skill. Nancy Drew knows. (See movie times.) JOSH FEIT

Literary snacks:

• Tina Brown calls critic/novelist Rebecca West a Grand Old Trout. This is in Brown's review of Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910-1939. West and H.G. Wells weren't married--he was married to someone else, actually--but nevertheless they had a kid together, a kid West thought of as "a maddening impediment to literary output." (Not mentioned: West and Wells met and fell in love--he was 46, she was 20--when "he sought her out after she attacked his novel Marriage, denouncing him as 'the Old Maid among novelists.'")

• F. Scott Fitzgerald used to throw Venetian wine goblets out the window. And eat hundred-dollar bills.

• According to a solar system-themed graphic of Jewish writers, Myla Goldberg is the planet Mercury, Nicole Krauss is Venus, Jonathan Safran Foer is Earth, and Nathan Englander is Mars.

• Jeffrey Eugenides on getting the call from Oprah.

Oh, and:

• A bunch of crazy shit is happening in Iran.

Good morning!

Given the strength of the ceramics program at UW and Autio's importance in establishing contemporary ceramics, I thought some of you might want to know.

Woody takes on opera. (I always thought Love and Death would make a great opera.)

(Thank you, ArtsJournal.)

Killer of Sheep, the movie with the highest Metacritic score so far in 2007, arrives in Seattle tonight. Since our competitor chose to review the Angelina Jolie vehicle A Mighty Heart twice instead of reprinting J. Hoberman's review in full, I'll take the liberty of pointing you to the Village Voice review. And for good measure, here's Manohla Dargis in the New York Times and Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader.

Charles Mudede reviews Killer of Sheep in an extra-long On Screen this week, alongside reviews of Evan Almighty ("Sorry," says Lindy West, "but a movie is not going to trick me into believing in God--especially a movie in which God crushes an entire neighborhood because he prefers pretty trees to human progress"), Angel-A ("très boring," concludes Jon Frosch, The Stranger's Paris correspondent), A Mighty Heart (me: "Angelina Jolie's character owes more to her own carefully cultivated image as a globalized matriarch than anything you'd recognize as a journalist's persistent hunger or a wife's panicky devotion"), La Vie en Rose ("stretches of the film, which traces Edith Piaf's rise from Parisian poverty to international stardom, feel uncommonly--even thrillingly--intimate," says Frosch), Day Watch ("At a time where most would-be magnum opuses can barely manage to rub two neurons together, director Timur Bekmambetov's film is chockablock with neat ideas—so many, in fact, that they ultimately end up crowding each other out," says Andrew Wright), Eagle vs. Shark (it is indeed "Napoleon Dynamite transposed to New Zealand, with misfit Kiwis in place of klutzy Mormons and real animals in place of ligers," but it's still funny, say I), and Golden Door (me again: "a generic immigrant's tale that too often mistakes blankness for mystery").

Whew!

But that's not all! Grand Illusion continues its mini-series on British director Lindsay Anderson with the sort-of-sequel to If...: the rock musical satire O Lucky Man!. Again Malcom McDowell stars as Mick Travis, a middle-class English Everyman with a, shall we wish, overactive fantasy life. I haven't seen it yet, but you really can't beat that title.

Meanwhile, at the Varsity, the SIFF holdover Red Road, a moody pseudo-thriller that joins The Lives of Others in the list of 2006 films about government surveillance.

Pride celebrants should check out the original Hairspray at Volunteer Park tomorrow at dusk, or, if you insist, the well intentioned but condescendingly constructed Inlaws & Outlaws, continuing at the Uptown for a second week. (For a passionate defense of the film--in full recognition of the suspicious aesthetics--check out Adam Sekuler's post over at Northwest Film Forum's blog.)

In Web Extras this week: Andrew Wright reviews 1408 ("Rather surprisingly, the inevitable movie adaptation doesn’t suck") and I interview Taika Waititi, the director of Eagle vs. Shark ("Part of me still cringes, like, what? I just made a romantic comedy?").

For all your Movie Times needs, see Get Out. Happy Pride.

Go here to see production stills of Lynn Shelton's next feature film, Seven Ways to Sunday. Indeed, Sean Nelson is the subject and star of her flick.

How DId I Get Here? (ART) Cris Bruch is the kind of artist that other artists talk about, talk to, admire, and learn from. And yet he hasn't had much of a presence at museums locally, or even steady gallery representation. All that changes now. Lawrimore Project is doing a museum's job by presenting a 20-year retrospective of the artist's sculptures and installations. Oh, and while he's being "introduced": Pronounce his last name "brew." (Lawrimore Project, 831 Airport Way S, 501-1231. 6—10 pm, free.) JEN GRAVES

and...

Glass Candy (MUSIC) Portland's Glass Candy have recently transformed themselves from an attractive glam-punk trio into a white-hot Italo disco machine. Johnny Jewel lays down spare drum beats, strutting bass, fried guitar, glittering synths, and Moroder arpeggios while drop-dead vocalist Ida No whispers and wails through druggy echoes and reverbs. Their live shows have always been satisfying mixes of spectacle and substance (or substances). Once, at Yo-Yo a Go-Go, No's pants were falling down for the entirety of their performance. (The Comet, 922 E Pike St, 323-9853, 9 pm, $7, 21+.) ERIC GRANDY

Thanks, Eric F! (Check out more on Josh Azzarella's blog.)

Emily White
(CONFLICT OF INTEREST: LITERARY) The former editor of this newspaper reads from her interesting, imperfect, celebrity-heavy exposé You Will Make Money in Your Sleep: The Story of Dana Giacchetto, Financial Adviser to the Stars. Subject of the exposé: a charming, shady financial advisor whose clients, in the mid-'90s, included Leonardo DiCaprio (Giacchetto handled his investments) and Sub Pop (Giacchetto brokered the $20 million deal with Warner Music). It ends with the scammer in the slammer. (Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600. 7:30 pm, free.) CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

that, so far, my test group is pro the new Nancy Drew movie.

In a glowing review of the movie in last week's paper, I nervously wondered:

it's hard for me to tell whether this entertaining movie is ultimately too square for its tween audience. I hope not. In this age of loud CGI spectacles like Spider-Man and Harry Potter, this comparatively low-fi fare has the makings of a backlash hit.

Well, a friend of mine took their 13-year-old kid sister to see it last night at the Metro in the U. District and the word is kid sister loved it ... and was scared too, during the creeping around in the underground hallway scene!

Better yet, my friend loved the movie too—reporting they grabbed their sister's arm in fright when !SPOILER ALERT! Nancy discovers her cell phone wasn't a gift from her dad after all, but rather, the bad guys sent it to her on the sly so they could track her whereabouts...which they do!

As of a couple of hours ago, the The People's Republic of Komedy (the four-man comedy kibbutz that produces Laff Hole!) is leaving the Capitol Hill Arts Center.

PROK member Kevin Hyder says negotiations to renew their contract have been difficult. (This week's Theater News has a story about Annex Theatre, another CHAC tenant, which is looking for a new home for the same reason.)

PROK will take Laff Hole, which is becoming more popular despite its creepy name, to Chop Suey.

PROK was happy about its arrangement with CHAC: growing audiences, good press, their financial arrangement (basically a small weekly guarantee). Hyder said CHAC wanted to raise the ticket price from $5 to $7. PROK said no. Then the negotiations began: ticket prices, advances, cuts of ticket sales, and new fees (for, among other things, use of the air conditioner and the house projector).

PROK said fuck it, started talking with Chop Suey, and made a deal to move Laff Hole in July. (PROK will finish out its June commitments at CHAC.)

It's a shame that the list of performers who've left CHAC (usually frustrated) keeps growing—Annex, PROK, Printer's Devil, Pure Cirkus, etc. CHAC's main stage, an old auto showroom, is beautiful. Their Lower Level bar is a little performance bar that feels like a clubhouse.

Other theaters keep closing (NWAS, Empty Space) or being taken off regular rental rotation (the Chamber after Velocity acquired it, the Hugo House after it announced its new resident companies).

CHAC should have Capitol Hill all sewn up, should be the place to put on a show.

But people keep walking away from the place.

'Crazy Love'
(DOCUMENTARY) The brilliantly skin-crawly SIFF smash leaps to regular screens for a feature run. Crazy Love concerns Burt Pugach and Linda Riss, a pair of star-crossed lovers whose 45-years-and-counting relationship begins with an illicit affair in the late 1950s. When Linda tries to move on, Burt goes nuts, commissioning a brutal attack that leaves Linda permanently disfigured and lands Burt behind bars. What happens next will blow your mind. A fucked-up love story for the ages. (See Movie Times.) DAVID SCHMADER

One of my first paid writing gigs was for Amazon.com’s then-fledgling video section, where I handled the lucrative Cynthia Rothrock (five time undefeated World Karate Champion in Forms & Weapons) beat, often watching up to 10 of her films per week.

My point is, I’ve seen good Rothrock, and bad Rothrock. This, my friends, is prime Rothrock.

Warning: Possibly NSFW, due to the thing with the eye.

Planning a hike? Be sure and check in with the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization beforehand.

Ok, I mainly posted that as an excuse to show the climactic scene from the most awesome Bigfoot movie ever made, 1980's Night of the Demon. Gentle Giant of the Forest, my ass.

Warning: Extremely NSFW, due to intestine-whippin' radness.

I can't decide who was more of a letdown: SuttonBeresCuller, or the audience that laughed at and cheered their shallow, dull, adolescent, clichéd, dim-witted, feeble new work at the Northwest New Works Festival last night.

The piece started with John Sutton, wearing old-man makeup and sitting at a desk, pushing paper like your typical sad sack. In a video projected behind him, he strokes a Playboy centerfold hidden in his papers. The audience laughed at this, but they had been laughing since the moment his face appeared on the screen. The audience knew the guys, or knew of them, and were there to cheer. With friends like these, artists don't need enemies.

Soon enough, the old man hobbles home. (On the way, two young guys wielding basketballs mock him.) He climbs into bed, and begins to dream his life as a young man, from his gleeful heel-clicking days with a chipper wide-eyed wife to the moment when everything falls apart, the moment when the word "ejaculation" is written on a chalkboard by a teacher in a twee nostalgia video from the 1950s. (Twee nostalgia videos—those black-and-white 1950s ads and PSAs sure are fun!—run throughout, interspliced with video of the man's life.)

The gleeful young man (played by Damien Luvara) is not so gleeful after the cells do their compulsory joining up on the video screen to make a baby. So he goes to a bar and gets drunk. He dances with a vixen and gets in a fight. Finally, he goes home to his wife, who isn't lovey dovey anymore. Now, she's a wildly gesticulating shrew. (Everything Is Keeping The Man Down!) She and everybody else who's ever been onstage (bartender, vixen, coworker, the doctor who delivered their old-faced oversized baby, the whole band "Awesome") chase him back to his work desk, where the doctor, now demented, begins sawing him in half as the mob chants and a red light falls on the scene.

A bell rings and the mob freezes. This is because the old man, who is dreaming the mob, gets up to pee. It is a comedically halting pee because, you know, he's old. Then he gets back in bed and the mob resumes. Then another bell rings. Time for the old man to get up. The actors shake off their personas and hug and high five and walk off. Another day starts for the old man.

The real nightmare is that every cutesy scene coasts by without being funny, unsettling, or sympathetic. One of the three would do.

It seems obvious that the mania of this piece is a release valve for the anxiety of three thirtyish guys getting older. And since they're only going to keep getting older, if this is their way of getting older as artists, then they're in trouble. It's like Neil Simon on a bad day, with a little sex and some mouth-foaming thrown in. Are their fears really this generic? Or is it supposed to be transgressive the way they're puncturing high art with bad jokes?

If it were a hoax, if there were any hint that this was intended as audience torture, then maybe you could at least appreciate their admitted haplessness in the face of an empty stage and a mountain of expectations. After all, the three artists have the hottest dealer in town. They have a storm of fans, including Regina Hackett, the art critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who, as quoted in the program notes, compares them to Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Morris Graves. Even typing the comparison makes me embarrassed. The point here is not that SBC are awful artists, it is that even when they make an awful work of art, nobody notices. When that happens, art in Seattle is in serious trouble.

Maybe the artists intended to pay tribute to strains in visual art, from the gory videos of Paul McCarthy to the costume dramas of Matthew Barney or the silly anarchy of dada theater. But the power of McCarthy's work comes from his implicit aggression toward the audience; SBC's piece was like a puppy alternating between licking the audience's face and licking its own balls. There was one almost-success: the long-armed, boxing-gloved, foaming-at-the-mouth costume that Matt Richter wore as the main character's tormentor. But the tormentor's appearance at the moment of impregnation was so offensive that it was hard to care about his alluringly strange costume.

For those catching up: getting a girl pregnant is traumatic for boys.

But let's put aside the retrograde politics, since they're nauseating. Let's just make a list of the clichés: Dream sequence device. Man in Gray Flannel Suit. Egg and sperm join on film. Married man flirts with vixen in a bar. Woman is at home waiting for her husband. Old men love Playboy. Old men's bladders are funny. Jocks are bullies. Desk jobs are boring. Those are the first nine that come to mind.

Or maybe the references were in theater, film, and TV: David Lynch? Nihilist playwright Sarah Kane? Or even "There's Something About Mary"? "Porky's"? "Married With Children"? I'm trying here.

The truth is, despite all the cheering, nothing happened on that stage.

Northwest Actors Studio: born in 1978, died 2007.

Phone's disconnected, lease is up, the stuff's almost all moved out.

The theater (probably best-known for Carlotta's Late Night Wing-Ding) had been struggling for years and was seriously behind on its rent—more than just a few months, according to property manager Anne Michaelson, who has a long-term lease for the building (and owns significant properties in the Pike/Pine corridor, like the Wildrose and Sweat Box Yoga buildings).

Even Backstage Thrift, the second-hand store started to help save NWAS, has gone under.

Michaleson and the building owner are trying to find NWAS founder and director Ann Graham a little place to set up shop and keep up her acting school. But NWAS at 1100 East Pike Street is finished.

"In the spirit of our neighborhood culture, I'd like to get another theater in the second floor," Michaelson said. She's already talking to a few applicants including some (ahem) who might or might not be moving out of CHAC and who applied for, but didn't get, one of the two two-year theater residencies Hugo House just handed out. (Those went to SiS, which does the Sex in Seattle serial soaps and NextStage, a new company.)

Hurrah to Michaelson and the building's owner for having the (what's the right word? guts? loyalty? temerity?) to try and get another theater in there.

When was the last time you attended a high school production of Godspell? Well now, through the magic of YouTube, you can attend one anytime you like. Enjoy...

Thanks to Slog tipper Hank.

The Pigs on Parade are back this summer. But I write about art, so those are the first and last eight words I will be writing about pigs on our streets.

Everything worth saying on the matter has been said by Emily Hall, former Stranger art critic.

What must happen, what absolutely must happen, is for this city to get over its ambivalence and distaste for ambition. You don't become a great art city by filling the street with painted pigs. You become a great art city by supporting artists doing what artists do.

SIFF this weekend is a pigpile of world premieres and awards and a peculiarly Polartec version of glamour. If that doesn't appeal to you, here's what's on tap in the normal theaters.

In On Screen this week: Fresh from SIFF, a tale of brutal facial disfiguration gone disgustingly right—David Schmader reviews Crazy Love. Josh Feit geeks out on refreshingly square girl detective Nancy Drew.

I coldheartedly question the necessity of the local production Inlaws & Outlaws, a feel-good gay marriage doc that plays like a PSA. Andrew Wright gets pumped about Johnny To's newest, Triad Election (not quite as good as SIFF's Exiled, but close enough). And Lindy West digs the infanticide fantasy, hates the Utilikilt, in the Aussie update of Macbeth.

There are some fabulous limited runs this week too.

At Northwest Film Forum, the coolest rock-n-roll documentary ever made: D.A. Pennbaker's Don't Look Back.

Look out for sure.

And more sick attitude over at Grand Illusion, with the fantastic 1969 film If..., by Lindsay Anderson, about armed rebellion at a middling British public school. Especially if you were able to catch Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite at SIFF Cinema this spring, you should not miss this sizzling, angry, homoerotic update on the theme of schoolboy mutiny. The following still is in black and white, but most of the movie is in color. At first you think the black and white is for stodgy scenes and people (the first time it crops up is when the camera follows a new teacher up to his cold bare garret), but then you realize it's willfully random.

And next Wednesday, there's a great lineup of experimental docs at the Henry's Artists' Cinema series, including shorts by Jem Cohen, Matt McCormick, and featured filmmaker Brian Doyle.

See Get Out for all your Movie Times needs. See you after SIFF!