Eight, 10-foot-tall aluminum sculptures were installed at the north end of the Ballard bridge in the middle of September, and they may look familiar to motorists.
We have truth in lending and truth in packaging. It might be time for Truth in Taxes as we face more than $20 billion in new taxes on the ballot this November. They will be on top of another 12 special tax levies that we are already paying.
Kathleen Murphy says: "Packed with provocative Orwellian ideas, In Time falls flat when it comes to execution. Sold as a sci-fi thriller, the film's full of footraces and car chases but succumbs to narrative inertia, helpless to whip up momentum or tripwire suspense. The acting runs from predictable to wooden to just plain silly. Dead air hangs between stars Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried, who, cast as System-shaking rebels, don't come anywhere near the hot, driven charisma of Beatty and Dunaway's Bonnie and Clyde." Continue the chase at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/in-time/#Review_0
Sleeping Sickness ... drifts in an eerie suspension, at once beautifully attentive to mood, place, and what we might call the climate of people's souls, yet holding the press of story and theme at arm's-length. The setting is Africa, where director Ulrich Köhler spent much of his childhood.
It's nice to be the boss and have everyone looking out for your love life.
The hot-pink tents and residents of Nickelsville were moved late Wednesday night, Oct. 8, to new digs to the east of the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Discovery Park.
Kathleen Murphy: The best films I saw during my week at the Vancouver Film Festival were Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Béla Tarr's incomparable The Turin Horse. Both ran two hours plus. The storytelling in the former unreels slowly, cumulatively, so mysteriously that if you don't watch with intense concentration, you'll miss moments when everything racks focus. The narrative in Tarr's masterpiece is terrifyingly repetitive and monotonous, in the Beckettian sense, like a great engine grinding itself ever deeper into a hole, in circular slow motion that you fear might go on forever.
For years I've listened to people rave about the Vancouver International Film Festival.......
The Queen Anne Silver Platters record and CD store is less than 2 years old, and the business has yet to turn a profit, according to majority owner Bob Scheulen.
John and Eva Mitchell say they'd always felt safe after moving from Tacoma to Magnolia eight years ago. They're not sure if they feel that way anymore following a terrifying encounter in the middle of the afternoon on Oct. 3 at their home on 28th Avenue West (the two didn't want their exact address used in this story).
A lot of people wonder if ghosts really do exist, but for Mercedes Yaeger there's no question about it because she's seen them.
Vivian Miller went home to be with the Lord on July 3. She died peacefully after a brief illness at Swedish Hospital in Seattle. She was 83 years old.
Two happy memories for Northwest film folk. Two success stories. The first was that of Rob Thompson, an Eastside resident laid up for a few weeks in the early Seventies (accident? illness? don't recall). He whiled away his convalescence watching old cowboy movies on television (obviously, that was a more enlightened era in local TV programming!) and eventually started thinking about building a screenplay around the grinding-out of such product. He wrote it and, miraculously, sold it. Made a nice little picture, though the picture—Hearts of the West—didn't make a dime. Thompson, however, went on to make a good living as a script doctor. Hearts of the West came out in 1975. Five years later, in autumn 1980, it was selected as one of the films to look at in an epic screenwriting symposium initially proposed by Jeff "The Dude" Dowd, subsequent inspiration for the Jeff Bridges character in The Big Lebowski. The University of Washington in its infinite wisdom had just cut Cinema Studies out of the biennial budget, but the course went through as a class for nonmatriculated students. One hundred eighty-four of them signed up, and came for three three-hour sessions a week that included screenings, workshops, and visits from such Dowd-invited luminaries as John Sayles, Irvin Kershner, Joan Micklin Silver, Jonathan Demme, the Airplane! triumvirate, and producer Tony Bill, who'd bought Rob Thompson's screenplay. As the NPR ladies say in the "Schweddy Balls" sketch, good times. Hearts of the West will be shown on Turner Classic Movies this coming Friday, Nov. 4, at 9 a.m. West Coast time, 12 noon Eastern. Here's the program note from the "Marvelous Modern Scripts" screening. —RTJ
If your faith in humankind has been taking some hits recently (inevitable if you keep up with the news), run, don't walk, to SIFF's Uptown Theater. Opening Friday, Nov. 11, Aki Kaurismäki's marvelous Le Havre offers many pleasures, chief among them a dream of a world full of moving reunions, communal connections and celebrations, fraternité and égalité.
Kathleen Murphy writes: Full disclosure: I belong to that oft-referenced "cult" that rates Tarsem Singh's The Fall (2006) as a singularly beautiful celebration of storytelling and its near-mythic power to create worlds so fantastic they could exist only in the imagination. Even Tarsem's first film, The Cell (2000), unreeling in the fecund mind of a serial killer, contains moments of mad splendor. Sad to say, Immortals, a sprawling epic cobbled out of faux-Greek mythology, exposes the limitations of this ambitious director's ultra-stylized approach to film design. Almost every shot gobsmacks the eye, but its impact stands alone, never carrying over to the next image, accumulating narrative momentum and meaning. This monumental tale of warring gods and men is a beautiful, dead thing, bereft of organic or kinetic life. Get gobsmacked some more at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/immortals/#Review_0