The Dark Knight Rises is about to. Meanwhile, here's a review of Tim Burton's franchise-starting take on the Batguy legend. It was my first assignment for the Manhattan magazine 7 Days. I wrote it in Seattle, having just attended an advance screening at a North End theater (the Oak Tree, I'm pretty sure). The release of Batman was a big-enough event to inspire at least one Seattle TV station to send a crew. Never will forget the preppie type who, asked whether it was the greatest movie of all time, smirked at the reporter as if she were a silly thing, and said no. OK, she pressed: in the top five? He gave this due consideration, then generously allowed as how it probably was.
Magnolia Thriftway owner Jim Penhollow was feeling the time had come to begin looking towards retirement after 34 years of running his grocery store. According to Brad Halverson, Metropolitan Market’s Vice President of Marketing, Penhollow picked up the phone and called Met Market, with whom he had had a long-standing relationship, dating back to when Met Market was a Thriftway store.
Kathleen Murphy writes: Give a listen to "Don't Fall in Love with a Superhero," a witty little dirge warbled by Khavn dela Cruz in A(ngst)-minor, before reading my ruminations about the weird, wonderful and often fatal hookups between misguided girls—from ordinary Mary Janes to exotics like Catwoman—and sexy superhunks. Khavn warns that such love may be "as uncanny as the X-men, as amazing as Spider-Man, as daring as Daredevil, but it will only break your heart ... your little human heart. Don't forget [he's] a superhero ... and you're nothing but a human being." And there's the rub.
Benh Zeitlan’s directorial debut “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is the most unique and profound movie I’ve seen so far this year.
Looking for a plant loaded with colorful blooms that could climb a wall or clamber through a shrub? Clematis is the answer.
Roswell C. Heins wrote of his experience of life at West Point in a letter to the Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle (Metro). Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation, Discovery Park Photographic Archive. Courtesy of Roswell C. Heins. 1974.
Reprising the franchise’s surefire money-minting strategy, Step Up Revolution detonates five or six hyperkinetic dance extravaganzas in dazzling 3-D, timed to obliterate a traditionally saggy storyline. In the Step Up mythology, dreamers, losers and misfits always pull themselves up by their bootstraps, hoofing their way out of mean streets to fame—e.g., prizes, dance scholarships, Nike contracts. It’s a showbiz fairy tale as old as the movies; what’s surprising is how successfully this stale slice of the American Dream sells, in a marketplace supposedly dominated by the hip-kid demographic.
After its abrupt mid-season closure in 2011 due to financial woes, Intiman Theatre is back with new staff and a new concept, due largely to the creative and youthful energy of then Associate Director, now Artistic Director Andrew Russell.
(Editor’s note: This review was written and submitted before last week’s tragic events in Colorado.) Batman has sure come a long way.
My friend and fellow Framing Pictures talker Robert Horton just put up his review of Francis Ford Coppola's 1984 The Cotton Club on his What A Feeling! website, a sort of film-critic's-diary of the Eighties. Coincidentally I had just scanned my own Film Comment article about the film and where Coppola's reputation as a filmmaker stood at that moment. Sufficient excuse to share it here.
Kathleen Murphy asks: Did the gutsy co-stars of Hope Springs simply hijack this safe little comedy of marital errors?
Framing Pictures is due for its August outing this coming Friday, Aug. 17, 5 p.m. at Northwest Film Forum. Click "Read More" to do just that.