Author: Chris Burlingame

Interviews News

Seattle filmmaker Vee Hua is hoping to turn their short film Reckless Spirits into a feature, and needs your help

by Chris Burlingame

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.”

Festivals SIFF

Are We Not Film? SIFF DocFest returns this week

by Chris Burlingame

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).

Festivals Reviews SIFF

Sweetheart Deal is a moving story of heartbreak and tragedy on Aurora Avenue

by Chris Burlingame

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. 

Reviews

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: Michael Keaton is the hardest-working spirit in the afterlife

by Chris Burlingame

I loved the expansive world-building Burton and his team put together. There were some cool visual effects and some running gags that were quite funny. I laughed hard whenever the late Charles Deetz was on screen. I also really liked the storyline between Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega. Still, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice throws a lot of proverbial spaghetti at the proverbial wall and quite a bit of it sticks because a lot of it was thrown.

Reviews

Copa 71, or how to memory hole an entire World Cup for 50 years

by Chris Burlingame

There’s something remarkable about the opening scene of Copa 71. Brandi Chastain, hero of the winning American team of the 1991 Women’s World Cup, is given a tablet and shown footage of the 1971 Copa tournament, a massive women’s soccer competition in Mexico City two decades earlier than the first official FIFA Women’s World Cup. She had no idea it even existed. I suspect many other diehard women’s sports fans didn’t either (I certainly didn’t).