Fourth Row Center

It’s Memorial Day Weekend, which means the Seattle International Film Festival has come around again. I am settling in for four weeks of new, foreign, documentary and independent film. This first weekend saw the SIFF tribute to Sir Ben Kingsley, the Shakespearean stage actor turned film star whose work includes Schindler’s List , Searching for Bobby Fisher , Bugsy , House of Sand and Fog , Dave , and the Oscar-winning Gandhi . The actor spoke of his craft and many of his roles, providing insight into his work and artistic experiences. Thus far this weekend we have had the opportunity to screen two of the seven (!) new films Kingsley has coming out this year: Elegy and Transsiberian . Today’s program included the North American premiere of Elegy , with Penelope Cruz, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard . Based on a novel by Philip Roth, Elegy is the story of David Kepesh , a writer coming to terms with his inability experience intimacy. Long estranged from his ex-wi...

My friends and I are children of the eighties: we were born much earlier but our formative teenage years occurred during that decade. We had MTV, Thriller and many really cool films, most coming out prior to 1985. The Empire Strikes Back, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark , Return of the Jedi and Temple of Doom. I could name other films, such as Romancing the Stone, Goonies, or Ghostbusters , but they did not hold up in the same way. During the next decade, my friends and I would embark on our next stage of life, and become separated not only by distances but by shared experiences. Perhaps it was fitting that, in 1989, when Last Crusade finished, our childhood hero was riding off into the sunset. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not a perfect movie. It has scenes that will make you wince, but, as I said over on Creative Loafing , the other three films have a bit of whimsy, and ultimately, you have to allow the films to exist in a world where over the top action ex...

The Seattle Film Festival opened tonight with a premiere of the film Battle in Seattle , starring Charleze Theron, Ray Liotta and Woody Harrleson . The film, about the WTO riots here, opens in September, and represents the first big American movie premiere in at the Seattle Festival since " Braveheart ." They did the whole red carpet thing with Theron, director Stuart Townsend and other cast members, but I decided to skip it. Though a pass holder for the entire festival (I have many, many movies to see over the next four weeks), I elected to take in Indiana Jones with some present and former office cronies at Seattle's Cinerama. What can I say? Harrison Ford is back, and the action never stops. And seeing Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen, the best of the Indy dames) back with Ford again was sheer pleasure. It's a pot luck of elements that have worked well in the first three Indiana Jones flicks, so it often seems familiar. But the lack of freshness and the deja vou...

I post this in honor of the time I tried to introduce Jay to the world of George A. Romero, and it fell flat. In this world, the dead do not stay dead. They rise. They attack. They eat. Romero's first film, Night of the Living Dead , never identified the dead as zombies. Romero even thought of them more as ghouls, but that doesn't matter. The first film crossed social boundaries and began a theme that permeates all of his movies: the dead are just a reflection of the living. In all of his movies, there are a group of heroes trying to survive, only to have the efforts ultimately ruined by the living. Sure, the dead always pose the threat, but it is the living that is the bigger threat. The dead physically prey on the living in the same way that the living preys on each other. Well, perhaps not quite the same – in the case of the dead, when I say prey, I mean eat. The only way to re-kill the dead is to destroy the brain (that's Romero's rule…many have copied it). Dawn of ...

The summer 2008 movie season officially started today with the release of Ironman. I had been planning to see it on opening day, and I took an extended lunch along with one of my employees to see if the coolness of the trailers lived up to the film. It did. In fact, Robert Downey's Tony Stark is possibly one of the best "alter egos" of any of the super hero flicks out since Toby McGuire spun out as Peter Parker a few years back. But I wasn't sure if Robert would sell Tony. Sure, he was perfect as the self-absorbed Tony, but I knew at some point he has to become a hero, and I honestly did not think I was going to buy it. Not quite as big of a gamble as Michael Keaton's Batman, but that was in the back of my mind. I remember reading Ironman, but I do not believe that I had ever caught his origin story. I liked this story. And, with the state of the world, it was very timely. I was never really sure about the circle on his chest and what it was for (beyond giving him...