In summer 2008, Ron Sevart moved to Seattle as the CEO of the Space Needle, the city’s biggest tourist attraction (2 million visitors a year) and home to its highest-grossing restaurant ($14 million in 2010), the 250-seat Sky City.
Writer-director Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) and co-scripter C. Robert Cargill (the Ain't It Cool News staffer who pitched the story) clearly hoped to make Sinister an old-school horror movie, mining terror from classic haunted house scenarios designed to drive a desperate writer to Shining-style madness. Juice that formula with ancient deviltry laced with contemporary tech-paranoia and Sinister ought to look and play like lethal nightmare, in the tradition of John Carpenter's Halloween. It doesn't.
The October conversation takes place this coming Friday the 19th, 5 p.m. at Northwest Film Forum. Herald/KUOW film critic Robert Horton, Parallax View linksman Bruce Reid, and I shall settle onto (and try to keep from sliding off) our chairs for an hour-and-a-half of movie talk. Still at left is from the Australian Wake in Fright, with Donald Pleasence, always a party animal.
Paranormal Activity 4 probably won't drive you deep into slack-jawed boredom. This latest foray into found-footage, home-movie horror is far less annoying than the jumping-jack "edginess" of Sinister. Still, this particular style of storytelling has run out of juice.
Back in September, Kathleen and I and Framing Pictures interlocutor Bruce Reid were entranced by two moments when the movies changed: the shift from silents to talkies in 1928-29, as refracted through the adventurous work of little-known director Paul Fejos; and 1958, when Otto Preminger's Bonjour, Tristesse redefined CinemaScope as a format for subtlety and ambiguity and helped inspire the French New Wave.
Seattle’s Department of Parks and Recreation has approved a controversial rock sculpture be added to the Counterbalance Park located at the foot of Queen Anne Hill. The proposed sculpture includes five slabs of rock, three shorter pieces and two taller ones. According to Seattle Parks spokeswoman Dewey Potter, the shorter pieces will be embedded in the ground in the center of the park, located at the corner of Roy Street and Queen Anne Avenue North. The larger slabs will be located in a corner of the park.
She remembers gas lamps, iceboxes and when a horse and buggy were still used as a transportation mode. Hilda Berry, a 10-year veteran of the Queen Anne Community Center’s dance aerobics class, celebrated her 100th birthday with a party at the center on April 11.
Don't be looking for any link to John Mellencamp's anthem about angsty Heartland lovers here. This movie's Jack and Diane are urban teens of the same sex, blitzed by true love the instant their eyes meet. That muffled implosion sets off nearly two hours of soulful staring and sporadic, barely audible small talk.
Kathleen Murphy sizes up "a handsome period piece about hot times in the 18th-century court of Denmark" and finds: "Such a revolutionary era, plus a scandal that rocked all of Europe, should have fueled A Royal Affair with high-octane dramatic juice: oversize personalities, royal adultery, intellectual ferment, dynastic intrigue. But Affair is disappointingly conventional, much too decorous and, at two hours-plus, sometimes just plain dull."
The Seattle World’s Fair created all kinds of legacies that still resonate, starting with the Seattle Center campus. For Bob and Ruth Kildall of Magnolia, memories of the fair take on a more personal meaning: It’s where they met.
The Next 50, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, April 21 – October 21, begins Saturday morning at 10 a.m. with a series of fun events for the whole family.
Until 1982, he lay in an unmarked, pauper’s grave in Mount Pleasant Cemetery on upper Queen Anne. It took money-raising friends and admirers to mark the spot with a headstone more than two decades after his death.
It looks as though spring has officially sprung around here, and with that comes the Magnolia Springfest & Art Walk.