Seattle to Remain Famous for Coffee and Rain
Thanksgiving Pairing Suggestion: Dessert Isn't Just a Meal
Eight Things A Seattle Sports Fan Can Be Thankful For
Seattlest Pix 09Nov25
Can't Miss It: Thanksgiving Eve
Yes, it's the new year, but we find it hard to look forward without a few final looks back. Instead of doing a straight-forward Favorite/Greatest/Best Films of 2005, we thought we'd reflect on some of our more interesting times at the movies during the past year.
Audrey:
The most fun I had seeing a film this year was at The Seven Gables for a packed screening of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. The crowd included a large contingency of Puget Sound Energy employees, who were totally riled up, given their connection to the topic at hand. We booed and hissed at the big bad businessmen, and we laughed at the gall of Kenny-Boy's assertion that the scandal had hurt no one as much as it had him. Audience participation at its finest. A good time was had by all.
Michael:
John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, and Oliver Platt in a movie by the guy who wrote Groundhog Day and Bedazzled? We hit a lunchtime matinee of The Ice Harvest at Pacific Place. Our attention quickly wandered from the screen to some choked snoring near the front of the theater, and then we watched in bemused amazement as a sleepy tubby homeless man roused himself to cart three garbage sacks full of his belongings and what sounded like the rasp of newspaper to the back of the theater. Was it quieter back there? The garbage sacks went one by one, not lifted, but dragged on the ground. Later, Seattlest had to take a bathroom break, and we were joined in a few minutes by our two work-skipping compatriots -- it's unusual for men to head to the bathroom "ensemble" but we shot the breeze for a bit before heading back to the smoking wreck of Harold Ramis's career. Randy Quaid appeared briefly. The snoring resumed. No one bothered to complain.
Matt:
My favorite local film experience of 2005 was Derailroaded: Inside the Mind of Larry "Wild Man" Fischer, which screened at the NWFF last summer. The deeply personal biopic of the paranoid schizophrenic protégé of Frank Zappa won much-deserved props from The Seattle Times ("Haunting and suggestively epic...") and The Stranger ("...a devastating portrait of delusion and fathomless despair"), but got dissed hard by the Onion's AV Club for being too "amateurish," to which the only valid response is "Aw, COME ON!" The filmmakers, director Josh Rubin and producer Jeremy Lubin, were on hand at the NWFF screening, along with Seattle area cartooning talents Pat Moriarity and Dennis Eichorn (the latter of which worked on the Top Shelf comic The Legend of Wild Man Fischer with J.R. Williams), to talk about their roles in the film---and for once, the Q&A wasn't totally ruined by insolent audience members. Five stars, two thumbs up, etc. Go buy the DVD.
James:
There were other highlights throughout the year, but three films from SIFF still stand out in my memory. Grizzly Man grabbed my attention from the opening frames, a prickly examination of the ecstasies and agonies of obsession. The most chilling scene in any film this year was watching Werner Herzog listen to the death of Timothy Treadwell. Another, smoother chronicle of obsession, Tony Takitani, indulges in mass quantities of voiceover and pulls it off beautifully. Watching it was a gorgeous experience. Finally, I may be the only person who actually loved Games of Love and Chance, but watching young French toughs deal with unexpectedly delicate feelings was a real treat. It reminded me of the glory days of 1980s Jonathan Demme films, and that's a very good thing. Seeing all of these within 10 days of each other is the glory of SIFF. (Sitting through some god-awful boring stuff is the anti-glory, but I don't dwell.)
Margaret:
My most memorable film-going experience of 2005, when I started trying to nail down my initial thoughts, turned out to be not as memorable as I thought it was. Or, rather, the specifics were foggy, but the visceral memory of the day was clear.
We were at SIFF. It was Monday, Memorial Day, and we saw Murderball. When we walked out of the Egyptian, it was raining, and we were hungry. We tried to go to Linda's, but walked out after a few minutes because they weren't serving food. So we made the wet trek to Bimbo's, practically ate ourselves sick, and then parted ways.
Those are the specifics, which took some time to remember correctly. What has stayed with me -- what I do know without a need to double check -- is the dreamy feeling of walking out of the Egyptian into a gray, rainy Seattle late-spring afternoon, spending time with friends, and feeling (although this will sound corny) as if any of us could go in any direction, as if the world was just waiting for us with open arms.
Steve:
My favorite "events" were Big City Dick: Richard Peterson's First Movie at the Rendezvous in January, and We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen at the Northwest Film Forum in June. My favorite movie of the year was King Kong, followed by The Squid and the Whale, Good Night, and Good Luck, Star Wars III, Broken Flowers and Batman Begins. I'm one of the few people on earth who actually enjoyed The Dukes of Hazzard. I also liked Me and You and Everyone We Know, but it's waaay overrated.
Speaking of which, here's a weird experience related to that film: Miranda July occasionally visited the Kinko's I worked at in Portland. She'd always make self-serve copies and bolt out the door without paying, but we weren't too concerned. One time though (I'm guessing around 1997), she came up to the front counter and showed me how the heel was breaking off of her shoe, and asked me if I had any glue to fix it. Later, while watching MAYAEWK, when her character asked the shoe salesman for glue to fix her mirror, I flashed back to that Kinko's incident. I thought her request was odd, but I couldn't find anything better than glue-stick to fix her shoe, so she left. Upon seeing that scene in the movie I suddenly felt flattered, but I also wondered how many other service-industry people she's asked for glue.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Why anyone goes to the movies now that Quincy is out on DVD continues to baffle me.
The same reason anyone would buy Rockford DVDs when they've got perfectly good Quincy DVDs at home. Variety.