Smart Words About Cinema
The Seattle International Film Festival is upon us again, that equally cherished and dreaded pre-summer ritual that entails queuing and going indoors just as the city is collectively preparing to spread its wings after another monochrome season of scarce daylight and, quite probably, enough drama already. Complain, however, that the fest is too long, and [...]
How to do a rock and roll film is intertwined with why to do a rock and roll film. Two biopics of rock icons (one more iconic than the other) play at SIFF this weekend, but genre aside, there isn’t much in common with the two. Nowhere Boy (dir: Sam Taylor Wood, UK) is the [...]
(revised and updated Saturday, May 22) I spent Friday, May 21—the first day of regular screenings—at the Neptune in the University District, a fine old theater with personality and history. It’s recently added a digital projector for 3D screenings, but those studio pictures run off of what is essentially a massive hard drive of digital [...]
SIFF held its opening night in Benaroya Hall (for the first time) with a typically SIFF opening night film: The Extra Man, with Paul Dano as twentysomething literature teacher Louis Ives, a shy young man mired in sexual confusion, a fantasy life born of F. Scott Fitzgerald novels and the eccentrics in his Manhattan apartment [...]
Update: The complete schedule now online at SIFF website here. The 36th Seattle International Film Festival, still the largest (and, at 25 days, the longest) film festival in the United States, opens on Thursday, May 20 with Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s The Extra Man, the Sundance premiere starring Paul Dano and Kevin Kline, [...]