Culture Fiend

Queen Anne’s Uptown Theater to Reopen in October

SIFF takes over the lease.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Aug 08, 2011 at 11:30AM 1 Comments

Let there be (pink neon) light! The Uptown Theater reopens this fall.

Never say never for the city’s oldest cinemas: Seattle International Film Festival announced on Saturday that it had taken over the lease for the Uptown Theater in Queen Anne, which was shut in November after 84 years of first-run features and artsy indie flicks. Former renter AMC had concluded the three-screen movie house no longer competed effectively in the marketplace, but SIFF sees it as essential to its redevelopment plans this fall.

Starting October 21, SIFF Cinema—the year-round programming arm of the festival—will leave its current location at McCaw Hall and start showing films at the Uptown; the same day, SIFF will officially open its new Film Center at Seattle Center, which will house administrative offices and a single-screen theater seating about 100. That’s three new screens and a dedicated home for SIFF, which had previously been the bleary-eyed basement dweller of McCaw while glitzy opera and ballet patrons dominated the upstairs. It’s a promising move, and yet another historic cinema with a new lease on life. (The Neptune Theatre in the U-District also has its grand reopening this fall.)

For tickets to upcoming screenings, visit siff.net.

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Tags: Venues, film, SIFF

Cedric the Entertainer meets Richard the Politician and Grant the Polar Bear

‘Grassroots’ stars share the love with the Seattleites they play on screen

Posted by: Eric Scigliano on Jul 23, 2010 at 02:00PM 0 Comments

It passed unnoted even on the production blog for Grassroots, the first Hollywood feature about Seattle to actually be shot in Seattle in eons. But last week’s shooting at the Phinney Neighborhood Center featured an off-camera encounter loaded with nostalgia for fans and local political junkies: the Two Grants and Two Richards Summit. Together again for the first time were Grant Cogswell, the mercurial local writer/activist/monorail booster whose upstart campaign for Seattle City Council the film recreates; Avatar’s Joel David Moore, who plays Cogswell; then-councilmember Richard McIver, whom Cogswell nearly defeated; and Cedric the Entertainer, playing McIver.

Moore, who looks like Pete Townshend in Who days, towers over Cogswell, whom a Stranger writer indelibly described as a “manly” version of M*A*S*H’s Radio Reilly. But Cedric and McIver are the same height and, save for a few decades, pounds, and skin shades, could be döppelgangers. (We’ll post a photo as soon as Cedric approves one for release. Meanwhile, here he is rapping last Saturday at the county courthouse, backed by Moore in Cogswell’s famous polar bear suit.)
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“I wrapped today, so I’m dressed in my casual Richard McIvers,” Cedric explained, beating the heat in white jams and a red Crooks & Castles T-shirt blazoned with “Peace Through Superior Firepower” and a tiny AK-47. But he was still in part enough to ponder Seattle’s politics: “It’s interesting trying to capture the city. It’s a city that cares about its politics.”

“Trust me, everybody has an opinion!” McIver interjected, evidently glad not to have to listen to everybody anymore. Cedric described how he saw his character’s reaction to Cogswell’s challenge: “I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute, this guy’s taking my white hat back. Who is this dude? Everybody loves me!” McIver laughed and explained how he and Cogswell got to be friends in the course of the grueling campaign: “I saw he wasn’t the devil I thought he was, and he saw I wasn’t the devil.”

“I love Richard McGiver!” says Cogswell, who hadn’t seen his old adversary in years. They hugged when they met again.

Two more nostalgic notes: This isn’t the first time show biz has occupied the Phinney center; the Firesign Theatre rehearsed there for their big reunion tour nearly 20 years ago. And I had my own döppelganger doubletake on the Grassroots set yesterday, when crewmembers kept calling me “Mike”—the name of the guy I got mistaken for all freshman year. (I finally met Mike on the last day of classes.) Turns out the Grassrooters thought I was ex-California congressman (and ex-husband of Arianna) Michael Huffington, who was due to perform a cameo today. I considered telling them what Arianna’s really like, but bit my tongue.

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Tags: film, Grassroots

Happy Hour Outing: Blue Moon

Enjoy a double feature and cheap drinks at the U-District’s saltiest bar.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Jan 19, 2010 at 03:00PM 0 Comments

You never know what kind of crowd you’ll find at Blue Moon Tavern. Since the U-District pub opened in 1934, it’s been a second home for “radicals, artists, writers, journalists, beatniks, hippies, and wannabees” (according to its website ) —and, of course, college students pounding $2 beers.

But starting tonight, Blue Moon also makes itself a haunt for film fans with its FREE Tuesday night double features and late happy hour. They’ll screen Shaun of the Dead at 8 and Star Trek (2009) at 10, with all well drinks dropping to $3.50 when the second movie starts. Tuesdays are also free peanut nights (woo!) and bartenders will have the usual assortment of munchies and microwaveable mini-pizzas for sale.

If you can’t make it, here’s the lineup for the next few double features:

Jan 26: Airplane, Anchorman
Feb 2: Big Trouble in Little China, The Goonies
Feb 9: Idiocracy, Wet Hot American Summer
Feb 16 (Swayze edition): Point Break, Roadhouse

And a preview of tonight’s movies:

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Tags: film, Blue Moon, Happy Hour Outing, University District, Drink and a Movie

Review: Nine

Star-studded cast fails to impress in Rob Marshall’s movie musical

Posted by: Matthew Halverson on Dec 25, 2009 at 08:00AM 3 Comments

Cruz, Day-Lewis, and Cotillard cozy up in Nine.

Let’s get this out of the way: Daniel Day-Lewis can’t sing. When he unleashes his brand of back-of-the-throat vibrato in Nine, he sounds a bit like he’s gargling a milkshake. (Gargling it up!) Thankfully, he only has two numbers in Rob Marshall’s big-screen adaptation of the Tony-winning musical—though it’s hard to shake the feeling that Marshall expects you to give his leading man a pass because, well, it’s Daniel Day-Lewis. In fact, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Marshall hopes you’ll give the entire cast a pass, based on the promise of their collective resume. Too bad so few of the starlets actually deliver.

Saggy singing aside, Day-Lewis is appropriately slick as Guido Contini, an Italian director based on Federico Fellini who’s as skilled at romancing his leading ladies as he is at coaxing powerful performances out of them. Ten days before the cameras roll on his latest picture, he has no script, no budget, and a chorus line of past and present female influences dancing through his head. Day-Lewis sells Contini’s existential angst—and irrepressible id—but in light of real-world sleaze stories like Tiger Woods’s, asking us to root for the fictional director to overcome his pre-production dalliances is a hard sell.

What makes Nine such a letdown, though, is the clunky integration of musical numbers that should have buoyed the whole movie. Each feels like a forced attempt to give the cast of supporting actresses—Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, and the Black Eyed Peas’ Fergie, among others—a chance to vamp, and with one exception, they’re flashy, hollow set pieces. It’s not until Marion Cotillard, who plays Guido’s wife, Luisa, mourns the impending death of her marriage in “My Husband Makes Movies,” that Nine stops to show a little heart.

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Tags: reviews, film

Review: Avatar

More shine than substance in James Cameron’s new $400m sci-fi epic.

Posted by: Matthew Halverson on Dec 17, 2009 at 09:00AM 7 Comments

Dances With Smurfs. That’s what the cynics labeled Avatar when its promotional assault launched last fall. Based on a two-minute trailer and a barrage of 30-second TV spots, fanboys concluded that James Cameron’s new two-and-a-half-hour sci-fi epic populated by 10-foot-tall blue aliens with tails was nothing but a 3D CGI remake of Kevin Costner’s 1990 flick.

But this is James Cameron, the guy behind Aliens and Terminator, the self-professed king of the world who captained Titanic to Oscar glory. Surely his first picture in 12 years, a $400 million magnum opus, would be anchored by a more compelling narrative than “guy realizes he was fighting for the wrong team all along,” right?

Yeah, not so much. Cameron’s predictable morality tale is only saved by eye-popping visuals, and really, that’s what everyone came to see anyway.

The story starts in the year 2154, when paraplegic Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) enters the Avatar program on the distant moon Pandora. By downloading his brain to a cloned version of the native Na’vi species, he can walk among the primitive hunter-gatherers and explain that his people need to strip-mine the pristine planet. But after falling in love with warrior princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana)—you guessed it—he has a change of heart.

He might not have defected so easily if Cameron, who also wrote the script, hadn’t drawn such a clear line between the good, the bad, and the ugly; with the exception of tough-talking, big-hearted scientist Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) Sully’s human counterparts are greedy, violent eco-terrorists. The Na’vi, on the other hand, are a hard-to-hate, blue-hued update on the squirm-inducing “noble savage” archetype.

For the hardcore action-adventure crowd, the stunningly photorealistic landscape of Pandora will be reason enough to sit through lines like, “The wealth of this world isn’t in the ground; it’s all around us.” But for everyone else, ask yourself this: Can you suspend disbelief long enough to accept that the Na’vi commune with the animals of their world through their ponytails?

Avatar opens worldwide Friday, December 18.

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Tags: reviews, film