Assumptions that the Interbay area could become home to a new city jail were confirmed May 6 at a briefing held by the city an hour after this newspaper went to press.
Turner Classic Movies has three terrific suspense films in a row Wednesday night, July 6: Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase (1946), the original film version of Gaslight (1940), and the John Huston picture John Huston didn't get to make, Three Strangers (1946).
In a couple of weeks a new version of Fright Night will be released, with Colin Farrell in the vampire-next-door role and David (Doctor Who) Tennant as the has-been horror movie star reduced to hosting the local spook show. Those are two good reasons to give it a look, yet really, was it necessary to do a remake of the 1985 picture? Not quite a classic, but a film of considerable wit, creepiness, and—yes—charm. Here's a review I wrote in The Weekly back in the day.
Making great-tasting ice cream is the easy part of any ice-cream-making outfit. It's the marketing and negotiating that's hard, the do-everything-you-can effort to get your brand in the supermarket freezer section alongside industry heavyweights Breyers and Dreyer's.
Lindsay Brown, 50, died peacefully at home on Sunday, Aug. 31, after a courageous fight against cancer in her liver and lungs. Her life, though too short, was remarkably full, with many unusual and fulfilling chapters.
One July 1976 afternoon Kathleen Murphy and I sat down with Howard Hawks in his Palm Springs home to talk about his filmmaking career. Kathleen was working on her doctoral dissertation, of which he was the subject. An edited version of the conversation was published in the Seattle Film Society journal Movietone News (No. 54). Now it's been posted at Parallax View: http://parallax-view.org/2011/08/09/youre-goddam-right-i-remember-howard-hawks-interviewed/ Parallax View has also posted the chapter on Bringing Up Baby from Kathleen's dissertation: http://parallax-view.org/2011/08/08/of-babies-bones-and-butterflies-bringing-up-baby/
Kathleen Murphy had a premonition that anyone attending the press screening of Final Destination 5 was going to see a fatally bad movie. And this was true. Yet she survived ... or did she?... Judge for yourself at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/final-destination-5/#Review_0
The Magnolia Chorale, under the direction of its new conductor, Jean-Marie Kent, begins rehearsals for its 20th holiday concert next Sunday, Sept. 14.
The signs are gone, the front has been covered in plywood that was quickly defaced by graffiti vandals, and there's a huge hole where the parking lot used to be at the Magnolia 7-Eleven store on West Dravus Street.
Autumn has always been my favorite season, and Greg Olson's annual film noir series does nothing to undercut that preference. This year's edition looks especially tasty.
Kathleen Murphy writes: "50/50 is some kind of comedy about cancer, the Big C as unlikely catalyst for growing up. The laughs and dramatic lows don't always blend as organically as one might wish, and a couple of scenes feel like calculated setups for sentimentality. Still, the prognosis is mostly positive, thanks to the genuine sweetness and pure joy generated by this surprisingly feel-good flick. Jonathan Levine (The Wackness) directs with the kind of laid-back affection that pot-laced macaroons might inspire, and screenwriter Will Reiser, whose bio 50/50 mostly is, delivers some hard-core truths as well as therapeutic humor while treating more than one kind of death." Read on at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/50-50.3/#Review_0
The Cinerama in Belltown, one of a handful of surviving showplaces for the vast, curved-screen, "puts you in the picture" format, is about to host a couple weeks of variously spectacular films produced in either three-panel Cinerama or a 70mm format.
Against all odds, Kathleen Murphy finds value in an unlikely venue: "Even as Tucker & Dale vs. Evil has fun sending up horror movie conventions and clichés, this low-budget spoof exposes how a mind-set—movie-made, political or religious—can so color the way we see the world, it's dead easy to demonize people who aren't us. But fear not: T&D's timely message never gets in the way of the funny, and a veritable tsunami of slapstick gore."There's more at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/tucker-and-dale-vs-evil.1/#Review_0
Jenny Healy was happily dog-sitting her mother's dog, Kira, an American Eskimo just 12 weeks old.
The Lloyd Nordstrom Guild raised more than $3,000 to install a bench at Karen's Place playground in memory of the late King County Prosecutor and Magnolian Norm Maleng.