A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
Saturday brought another tribute, this time to the legendary Cate Blanchett to coincide with the US premiere of Todd Field’s TÁR. We spend two hours and forty masterfully controlled minutes with the prodigious, highly-lauded, multiply-degreed conductor Lydia Tár.
Since seeing Halloween Ends, purportedly the final chapter in director David Gordon Green’s reboot of the iconic slasher franchise, I’ve oscillated between dismissing it as entertainingly lousy, and viewing it as a work of operatically-pitched satiric genius. Truth be told, it kinda feels like both at once, and therein lies much of its cockeyed charm. Whether you succumb to that charm, however, is another story.
The follies of the wealthy are on full display in two comedy premieres in Toronto. Rian Johnson returns to the Knives Out saga with Glass Onion’s debut and Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness made landfall on North American shores during TIFF 2022.
October is proving to show an embarrassment of riches in terms of film festivals. SIFF’s DocFest is wrapping up tonight just as we usher in the Seattle Queer Film Festival. Always bringing the finest LGBTQ+ films to the Pacific Northwest, this year’s festival looks different than in years past. This year, it’s enormous with some 150 films playing, as well as live podcast tapings, parties, meetups, and even an art show. It runs from tonight, October 13 to October 23.
Joe and Nick are also pranksters and their pranks are often hilarious. They created characters who have been successful in duping local TV news programs. Programmers desperate for time to fill on the air, but no time for a quick Google search, have been a ripe target for them. Hilarity ensues when TV anchors try to maintain professionalism when talking to a yoyo master who doesn’t know any yoyo tricks or chefs that don’t actually know how to cook. But it was the characters of “Chop and Steele” that landed them in some trouble
When PyeongChang, South Korea was named hosts for the 2018 Winter Olympics, the nation was automatically given a spot to compete for the gold medal in ice hockey. Between the time of the announcement and the actual Olympics, South Korea had four years to field a respectable team. Not exactly a hockey juggernaut, the host nation had to basically start from scratch to field a team.
Oh boy. David O’ Russell’s zany star-packed Amsterdam is a movie with so much going for it that nevertheless makes itself incredibly challenging to recommend. I sympathize with those who will find it simultaneously too much and not enough, or recoil from the ambitious sentimentality that animates its many excesses. I also groaned as it’s machinery sputtered and strained to draw meaning from madness. Yet! From its chaotic energy — a hallmark of a director who’s a monster on set yet consistently attracts the industry’s highest levels of talent — spring no shortage of genuinely laugh-out-loud bits and gonzo performances. Like most of his work, it’s a big-hearted mess that many will hate, but some might be able to forgive in spite of itself.
After a successful debut last year, the people at SIFF are doing another DocFest and it has a pretty impressive lineup. It …
