Fourth Row Center

Earlier I have confessed my penchant for "apocalyptic" style movies. These movies deal with the not too distant future, or even present day, that has somehow been changed (war, flood, famine, zombie) and the survivors must work out how they will adapt. Another favorite vehicle would have to be time travel. "Deja Vu" stars Denzel Washington and was directed by Tony Scott. Washington plays Doug Carlin, an ATF official investigating the bombing of a New Orleans ferry that kills over five hundred passengers. He is recruited by the FBI to participate in an experimental use of technology that allows investigators to peer back in time four days. Carlin uses the technology to investigate the death of Claire Kuchever, who Carlin believes was murdered by the bomber of the ferry. One of the time travel themes explored is that the past can not really be changed. It is as if "God has decided" and no matter how the characters try to affect the past, the will end up chan...

The past few weeks has been a good one at the Seattle International Film Festival, with some fantastic indie flicks like Cashback , a mediocre Japanese ghost story called Retribution , a chilling and cautionary tale about a nuclear power plant accident called The Cloud , a Spanish language film from director Antonio Banderas, a world premiere documentary from the producers of March of the Penguins called Arctic Tale , and a few classics enjoyed on the big screen. From Germany, The Cloud is an arresting film about a town impacted by a meltdown at a nearby nuclear power plant. Unlike The China Syndrome , which dealt with a near-meltdown from inside the plant, The Cloud focuses on a teenage girl separated from her family who is irradiated in the disaster. Finding she has lost everything, she is rescued from her dismal existence in a hospital ward by a distant aunt and a fellow student with whom she has fallen in love. The film is brutally honest in its treatment of the tragedy, and com...

One of the most compelling performances I have seen thus far at the Seattle Film Festival is given by the multi-talented Christopher Plummer in The Man in the Chair . The movie concerns a high school student who befriends bitter, retired filmmaker Flash Madden (Christopher Plummer) and enlists his aid in making a student film for a scholarship competition. Flash and a long-retired screenwriter, played by M. Emmet Walsh, must exorcise their own demons before becoming fully involved with the student project, a movie about neglect in nursing homes. A story about youth, age, purpose and usefulness, Chair boldly compares neglected residents of nursing home with dogs waiting to be euthanized at the animal control shelter. The message here is a bit heavy-handed at times, but within the dramatic framework of the story it manages to work. Plummer carries the film with his complex, moving performance, one director Michael Schroeder already predicts will generate Oscar buzz when Chair goes into...

One of the most anticipated films we viewed at the Seattle Film Festival has been Paris Je t'aime , a delightful stack of greeting cards from the city of lights. Eighteen directors contributed to the film, including the Coen brothers, screenwriter turned director Richard LaGravenese , Tom Tykwer ( Run, Lola, Run ) , Alexander Payne ( About Schmidt, Election ), Gurinder Chadha ( Bend it Like Beckham ), Alfonso Cuarón ( Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkanban ), Walter Salles ( Dark Water ) and horror master Wes Craven. The vignette concept works here better than in similar efforts that I've seen, mainly due to the common theme that threads its way through the shorts. There is a unity and cohesiveness present among these stories about love which makes watching this film a true joy. The cast, which includes Nick Nolte , Natalie Portman , Gerard Depardieu , Barbet Schroeder, Juliette Binoche , Miranda Richardson, Maggie Gyllenhaal , Bob Hoskins , Elijah Wood, Ben Gazzara...

I was trying to pull together five sumer films that, if originally released today, would help make one great summer. 1. Star Wars: Exploding onto America in a year when gasoline was high, disillusionment with the government was even higher and an our part in an unpopular war had just concluded. This was the film that redefined cinematic science fiction and gave America her very own mythology. 2. Aliens: James Cameron took the premise of one Alien wiping out a crew of unarmed miners and turned it into a hive of aliens wiping out two squads of heavily armed marines. Underneath this was a subtext of a mother daughter relationship with a final show down with the biggest mother of all. 3. Jaws: Memorable characters (Quint, Brody and Hooper) and memorable lines ("Smile you son of a BOOM") combined with a sinking boat and a twenty five foot great white shark equaled a movie that kept me out of the ocean for years. 4. Terminator 2: This might be the role that Arnold will be remembere...

I think what Charles meant to write down in his notes under "5" but forgot to do because he was not taking notes and was too preoccupied dreaming of a Star Wars re-release in order to do so, was Raiders of the Lost Ark . 5. Leave it to George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to reinvent the adventure genre. Raiders had it all -- an unlikely hero, a gutsy girlfriend , exotic locales, a grand quest, high adventure, sinister villains , close escapes, mystery and intrigue, Nazis , great fight sequences, fabulous set pieces and a sense of humor. Oh -- and did I mention it had Harrison Ford at the top of his game? And most importantly, it was something many of us had never seen before, or something a good many more had not seen in very long time. Raiders rounds out the top five perfect summer movies.

In the movie year, nothing spells more promise of hope than the Summer season. It also delivers the most disappointments when the hype extends a viewers expectations far beyond what the movie is capable of delivering. So far, the summer of 2007 has not been spectacular. Not bad, just not memorable. The signature scene in Spiderman 2 was the subway train fight. Collapsing unconscious in the subway car, and mask completely gone, the citizens of New York see Spiderman for who he really is. Not the menace the papers were making him out to be, but just a guy trying to help. Spiderman 3 never built on this. Visually, it looked great, but it was missing some of the heart that made the first two films the best in Comic Book Cinema. Pirates of the Caribbean was an unexpected surprise a few summers ago. Really, a movie based on a ride? It actually gave some street credit for the Haunted Mansion movie (for the record, I still have not seen that film). The second movie never appealed to me. O...

Death at a Funeral , a British comedy from director Frank Oz, puts the 'fun' back into funeral. In this classically structured farce, a family gathering at a country house for the funeral of its patriarch experiences a series of mix-ups and misunderstandings which culminate into a disastrous send-off for the old man. Oz, who was born in England, is no stranger to comedy, having directed Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Little Shop of Horrors, What About Bob? and Housesitter , among others. In Funeral , he expertly executes the pacing and timing of this farce in the tradition of the great Ealing comedies, and the results are hilarious. Oz presented his film to an audience at the Seattle Film Festival this week. He said was pleased that our audience managed to "lose control" of ourselves during the film's climax, even though we managed to laugh through several lines of dialogue. "You missed several key lines because you were laughing," Oz said, "but you were ...