A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
I don’t remember much from my single-digit years, but I do remember having a fondness for Paddington Bear somewhere around first or second grade. I found him easily loveable and lacking any sense of maliciousness. When “they” started putting out live action Paddington movies a decade ago, I realized I still do.
On paper, the movie hits all of my receptors. The location is gorgeous, the acting is phenomenal, and I’m not sure anyone has ever worn anything cooler in a movie than that yellow suit Tilda Swinton wears.
Musicals live and die by music and that is where Better Man succeeds. Most musicals are lucky if they have one or two show-stopping scenes. Better Man has at least five.
As the year winds to a close, we’re sharing lists of our favorite films we’ve seen (so far).
Tuesday night, me and a bunch of cooler, hipper people, packed into the Northwest Film Forum for the launch party of a fundraising campaign for Reckless Spirits, a very funny short film from 2022 that the filmmakers hope to turn into a feature film in the future. Directed by former NWFF executive director Vee Hua 華婷婷, the film is billed as “A gender-fluid Latine performance artist and a neurotic Asian American therapist are led by a series of uncanny circumstances into a world of chakras, spirits, and a fanatic cult leader.”
It’s taken a long time, maybe twenty years, to get an adaptation of the popular novel by Gregory Maguire and more popular musical Wicked into theaters, and after seeing the film over the past weekend, it appears to be well worth the wait.
It’s like Psycho with Mormons. That should be the tagline.
The old adage that the original is always better than the sequel certainly applies here. It wouldn’t be hyperbole to say that Joker: Folie à Deux is the most unpleasant experience I’ve had in a movie theater since SIFF decided to screen the (almost literally) nauseating The Greasy Strangler for press and passholders.
Tomorrow begins one of my favorite mini-festivals in Seattle: SIFF’s annual DocFest. It’s a week-long festival celebrating some of the best new-ish documentaries out there (and in true Seattle fashion, this week goes from Thursday to Thursday, so it is actually eight days long).
Sweetheart Deal is 98 minutes of tragedy and heartbreak but it also felt so vital and important to tell the stories of these women who suffer from so much abuse and marginalization. “Sex work is work” and “my body, my choice” are good, rhetorical, platitudes (that I believe) but they are also too vague to meaningfully represent anyone whose choice and autonomy are often taken out of the equation, often by situations far beyond their control.
