This Week In Seattle Cinema: Take in a Classic
I know you kids are busy with your iBricks and your floating picture cubes, so you might not have heard that the world's leading producers of film cameras have shifted all of their efforts towards digital hardware, prompting the chilling quote that "someone in the world, right now, is holding the last film camera ever manufactured." While this is great news for filmmakers aspiring to make 3D adaptations of TV shows you've totally forgotten about at a more preposterous rate, one has to admit it's kind of a bummer that an instrument so vital in the emotional and intellectual development of so many people around the world was given the boot so unceremoniously. You should amend that. This week, keep holy the death of celluloid with any of these three fascinating relics of the silver screen.
Twentieth Century
Uptown Cinema (10/23, 10/26)
While there's plenty of ballyhoo surrounding the grand reopening of the famed Uptown Cinema for City Arts Fest's singalong showings of Grease, Purple Rain and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, what you might not know is that SIFF is also planning a small, inaugural festival of "Uptown Classics" starting tomorrow. Featuring a wide swath of critically acclaimed films that have all showed at the theater at some point during its storied 85 years, Twentieth Century is the earliest film of the collection and the one you're probably least likely to see on a big screen anywhere else for a little while. If you see just one movie in this crowdpleasing bundle, save Monty Python & The Holy Grail and The Godfather for another time and engage a film classic that is considered one of the foremost prototypes of the wildly successful screwball comedies that dominated American theaters during the Depression era.
Frankenhooker (w/ Live Burlesque)
Central Cinema (10/27, 8PM)
Central Cinema has brought plenty of exciting additions to the Seattle filmgoing experience, bringing us local beer, decent pizza, trivia nights and even our favorite television shows into one of the most exciting yearly programming schedules you could possibly ask of an independent movie theater. Here, Central Cinema aims to continue that proud, groundbreaking tradition by bringing theatregoers scantily clad women to dance for our amusement. Accompanying local burlesque nabob Donatella Melies and her band of players is the jaw-dropping, rather fairly maligned Troma Films cult classic, Frankenhooker. While Frankenhooker can hardly be considered a milestone of film history, there's nothing more time-tested than the potency of half-naked people gyrating at you.
D.W. Griffith's Intolerance
Northwest Film Forum (10/25, 7PM)
Seattle's own mechanical cinema advocacy group The Sprocket Society is co-sponsoring a rare screening of Intolerance, the unquestionably influential D.W. Griffith film that doesn't proudly feature the Ku Klux Klan as heroes. That said, a lot of Intolerance's influence came from its unchecked $2 million budget (a sum unheard of in 1916), which subsequently made it one of the select few films so recklessly ambitious that they more or less singlehandedly bankrupted a studio. Still, one has to admit Griffith's ambition was on point for this captivating three-hour epic that spans millenia in its quest to find some logic or moral to mankind's persistent obsession with violent bigotry.
