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.
Author: Chris Burlingame
Chris’s Favorite Films of 2024
As the year winds to a close, we’re sharing lists of our favorite films we’ve seen (so far).
Seattle filmmaker Vee Hua is hoping to turn their short film Reckless Spirits into a feature, and needs your help
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.”
Wicked is determined to be the crowd-pleasingest musical in the Emerald City, and beyond
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.
Hugh Grant serves up heebies and jeebies, along with a blueberry pie, in Heretic
It’s like Psycho with Mormons. That should be the tagline.
Joker: Folie à Deux sends in the (sad, sociopathic, murderous) clowns
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.
Are We Not Film? SIFF DocFest returns this week
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 a moving story of heartbreak and tragedy on Aurora Avenue
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.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: Michael Keaton is the hardest-working spirit in the afterlife
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.
Deadpool and Wolverine team up: butts will be kicked, jokes will be cracked
Deadpool & Wolverine is something else. It’s a big mess of a movie, much of it entertaining, much of it tiresome. It throws so much at the wall, some of it sticks. It probably will delight a lot of Marvel fans. And even by my standards, it contains a lot of dick jokes.