This Week in Seattle Cinema: Get on the Bus Edition

In what has to come as great news for practically everyone in Seattle who doesn't have a malicious commitment to driving their personal vehicle as much as humanly possible before they die, it turns out our cities' busses aren't going to collapse into an inefficient, economy-killing mess (at least not any further). Celebrate another bullet dodged by public transit by packing yourself into your favorite articulating metal tube and enjoying the local color on your way to one of these excellent films.

True Grit (2010)
Marymoor Park (8/17)
Outdoor movies, more than just a novelty for a summer date, are a great way to throw a healthy monkey wrench into your long-established history of watching movies in a dark, stale room with sticky floors and corporate omnipresence. Even if purists draw their noses up at any screening that challenges the musty ideal, you'd be surprised at exactly how much changing the venue of the film you're watching can change your entire outlook on a favorite film and draw out elements of the production that you might have never noticed before. While the opportunity for an outdoor movie is anything but rare in Seattle nowadays, cinephiles are often stuck watching the same Disney movies or other heavies of the family-friendly canon over and over and over again. Redmond's Movies@Marymoor program seeks to help put an end to that by offering up The Coen Brothers' Oscar-nominated remake of the John Wayne classic, a dense but entertaining piece of film perfect for watching with your butt in the grass and your head in the clouds.

Blank City
Northwest Film Forum (8/13-8/18)
This fascinating documentary illuminates the No Wave Movement, an obscure yet nonetheless important film renaissance centralized in 1980s New York -- well before the now largely affluent metropolis went through its Carrie Bradshaw phase. Blank City looks at the movement's titular lack of identity amidst one of the most dramatic transitions in the city's history. Come for the depressingly relevant questions of how artists relate to their home cities as they recover from devastating financial crisis, stay for the candid Super 8 footage of Steve Buscemi, Deborah Harry, and Jim Jarmusch in their vibrant, prophetically unstoppable youth.

The Guard
Egyptian Theater (8/13-8/18)
Fans of the all-too-underrated 2008 In Bruges will be delighted to hear that the ever-exasperated character actor Brendan Gleeson has returned, this time under the directorial debut of Bruges director Martin McDonagh's brother, John Michael McDonagh. Gleeson and the McDonagh family offer another pitch black comedy to ruin your day while you're laughing your ass off, this time set in their native Ireland. Gleeson plays a down-and-out cop who's more burnout than loose cannon, before he's forced to cooperate with the FBI, the IRA, and Don Cheadle to take down a ring of particularly unscrupulous drug smugglers. Reviews have been pretty strong for John Michael's first outing, which takes the breakneck pace of Bruges' witty dialogue and imbues it with a more aggressive pace that happily confronts critics of his playwright brother's tendency to forsake good film for good theater.