A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
There comes a time in every Spider-Boy’s life when he must hang up his Spidey suit and go off to war, become addicted to opioids, rob a bunch of banks, and fly off to have adventures in space to establish himself as a credible grown adult actor who can do so much more, as if being the far and away best friendly neighborhood web-slinger in Marvel’s history wasn’t enough. Alas, this spring has been that time for young Tom Holland, who did all of those things in two not that good spring releases.
After being one of the first festivals of 2020 to go into hibernation when confronted with the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Seattle International Film Festival is returning in (mostly) virtual format for 2021. Running from April 8-18 (early and abbreviated for SIFF, but still a long festival by most standards), most films will be available to at-home festival goers through their screen of choice. We chatted about our first reactions to the virtual festival, suggested strategies for approaching the program, and make some quick picks.
Megan Park’s coming-of-age film starts like a typical high school day that takes a dark turn that’s also increasingly tragically common. The result ing story of the aftermath of a school shooting is a nuanced and emotionally riveting piece of storytelling that won audience and jury awards at this year’s SXSW film festival.
Whenever I’m feeling indecisive at a film festival, I tend to default to documentaries. The highs may not be as high as with a surprisingly revelatory narrative feature, but the lows are rarely as low as a complete indie disaster. Reviews from four pretty-good documentary premieres from this year’s SXSW fit the bill with stories of would be public servants and scam artists.
Two comedies that embrace the aesthetics of the pandemic era premiered — and succeeded — at this year’s SXSW.
When a group of Dorset bus drivers made the very unconventional decision to abandon their holiday season pantomime in favor of a homegrown theatrical adaptation of Alien, Ridley Scott’s revered science fiction horror film, the response from local audiences was predictably muted. Luckily, the show found a life beyond their town and has been committed to film in this delightful documentary.
When he received a surprise ALS diagnosis in in his early thirties, advocacy lawyer Ady Barkan pledged to spend the limited time he had left to live with his young family in Santa Barbara. A weekend in DC lobbying to save the Affordable Care Act, a chance meeting with a young activist in the airport, and a viral conversation with Arizona senator Jeff Flake aboard a cross-country flight changed all of that.
Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil (2021 | USA | 98 minutes | Michael D. Ratner) In 2018 Demi Lovato, who had …
When R. J. Cutler’s experiential new documentary opens, his subject, Billie Eilish is sixteen years old, crafting songs from illustrated diary entries and engineered beats in her brother Finneas’s bedroom in their family’s modest Los Angeles bungalow. It closes, a little over two years later, when having just celebrated her nineteenth birthday, she cleaned up at the Grammy Awards as the youngest person to win the Big Four (Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Album of the Year), leaving the ceremony with multiple armloads of shiny gramophones (those, plus Pop Solo Performance, Pop Vocal Album and Producer of the Year for Finneas) and — more importantly — a congratulatory FaceTime call from her tweenage crush, Justin Bieber.
I Care A Lot (2021 | USA | 118 minutes | J Blakeson)
Netflix has its share of great (or aspiring to be great) cinema — e.g., Roma, The Irishman, maybe even Mank — but as nice as it is that they indulge the occasional auteur with commercially questionable projects, their great gift to the world may be the Good Enough Netflix Movie. Light yet engaging, well-paced, an amount of star power, maybe a bit of an edge, and a grab bag of genres that shift every half hour to comfortably disappear two hours of quality time on your couch. J. Blakeson’s I Care A Lot falls into the latter category: it opens as a dark comedy about swindling old people, morphs a few times into a mystery, a heist, and a violent revenge thriller, before coming full circle. But throughout the ever-shifting tone, it remains a constant showcase for Rosamund Pike.
