WHAT THE...?: Apparently you shouldn't go to Seattle School's Strikethough #7 Jennifer Zwick's performance of Teddy Roosevelt: The Musical. It's at the Rendezvous Jewelbox Theatre. 8 p.m. // 2322 Second Ave. // no cover; no admittance MUSIC?: It's like everyone's hungover from the Capitol Hill Block Party; there's just nothing going on. Down at the Paramount, you can catch one-hit-wonder Matisyahu reprising his hip-hop/reggae religious rock. You can wander around the audience taking in the......

HAPPY HOUR!: The Seattlest crew is clambering out of our darkened basements, adjusting our sun-starved eyes to the light of day, and exposing ourselves to our readers by showing up to the first ever Seattlest happy hour at Moe Bar, tonight from five to eight. Come, meet (and get hit on) by your favorite Seattlest contributor, share your feelings with us about how much you hate our reviews, or just plain use it as an......

Seven facts in honor of Little Miss Seattlest's first-ever movie, WALL-E, which we saw at the Cinerama—one of three three-panel Cinerama theaters left in the world. FACT: The Seattle Cinerama is not Seattle's original Cinerama. That'd be the Paramount, which sacrificed 1600 seats to fit the screen and three projection booths required. They screened Cinerama films from September 1, 1956, to January 26, 1958. The Cinerama we know and love today opened January 24,......

Many thoughts crossed our mind last night as we left the showing of Edward Curtis's In the Land of the Head Hunters at the Moore, not the least of which was our continued amazement that film ever took off. No more or less so than contemporaneous films like Birth of a Nation, Curtis's work bears witness to the fact that early film sucked. The narrative is disjointed, the story thin and hard to follow. It......

Last night the Northwest Film Forum had a line out the door with moviegoers eager for some classic European cinema. As previously mentioned, the Italian sex comedy Divorce--Italian Style (and its follow-up, Seduced and Abandoned) are showing in the small theater through tomorrow, leaving the big one to hold the main event, the NWFF's latest film series, Duel of the Cool. In this corner, France's Jean-Paul Belmondo, former boxer (hence the big, oft-broken nose),......

Girls Rock! is a documentary about a week-long summer camp in Portland where girls between the ages of 8 and 18 go to learn how to make music, form bands, and perform in front of a live audience at a showcase. Tonight it opens at SIFF Cinema. We got to watch the movie earlier this month and loved it. The stories of the girls the filmmakers followed were funny, touching, entertaining and illuminating. The movie,......

FRIDAY MUSIC: We're supporting local talent this evening, with a Cornish Senior Recital. Composer Andrew Boscardin (aka Bosco) has two new pieces ready to meet the world. He tells us:The first set will feature a sextet with myself, Mack Grout, Brad Gibson, Rachael Contorer and Clark Gibson. The second set will feature a 13-piece big band. All of the music was written by me and represents easily the largest and most daunting undertaking of......

Friday Theatre: The Solo Performance Festival, SPF2: Sweatproof!, returns to the Theatre Off Jackson with a terrific lineup of uni-personned shows. In fact, tonight has a terrific lineup all on its own, thanks to the Unicycle Collective. Their MonoLodge 4 is an evening of solo shorts from Seattle veterans and up-and-coming talents: Keith Hitchcock, Jennifer Jasper, Troy Mink, K. Brian Neel, Becky Poole, Mary Purdy, Seth Rosenbloom, Mark Siano, and Jenna Bean Veatch. (Saturday......

Tonight's show deserves special attention because Reign of Terror is, to our knowledge, the only noir film set during the French revolution. NoirFan62 says: The great Anthony Mann takes a film that would probably play mostly as a colorful, sweeping, epic piece dealing with the French revolution and turns it, with the help of cinematographer John Alton, into a dark, shadowy and claustrophobic film noir/adventure/spy/suspense tale period piece featuring excellent performances from a cast that......

The Irish writer whom we hadn't heard of until writing this, Anne Enright, is in town flogging her fourth book, The Gathering, a Booker Prize winner. (Which reminds us that Eavan Boland is visiting this March 3.) Her book, says the NY Times:...inhabits the restless, angry consciousness of Veronica Hegarty, one of a dozen children of a “vague” mother — a “piece of benign human meat, sitting in a room” — and a mannerly,......

SIFF Cinema's Noir City Festival has a double-feature not many of you have seen before: Moonrise / Night Has a Thousand Eyes. The festival benefits the Film Noir Foundation, whose mission is to find and preserve noir titles in danger of being lost or irreparably damaged. Says Noir of the Week: Moonrise was once to be a William Wellman A-list picture with Jimmy Stewart or John Garfield but ended up in the lap of Charles......

Tonight the documentary Inlaws & Outlaws opens at Central Cinema. It's about marriage, who's got it, who doesn't, who wants it. As it's showing at Central Cinema, it all comes with pizza and beer if you want to make a dinner documentary of it. As the film begins, you meet each person without cues as to who’s gay or straight or coupled up or single. As the stories unfold, stereotypes crumple. Expect "candor, good......

Today SIFF hosts the Seattle opening of the documentary The Rape of Europa, about the efforts to save art stolen and/or desecrated by the Nazis in the runup to and during WWII. The Stranger loves it. The Seattle Times loves it. By all accounts, Seattlest shouldn't be as excited by this movie as we are, but we find something poetic about the preservation of culture in the face of war. For now we'll leave you......

SIFF Cinema's Rialto film series continues through February 7, with a double-feature each night.Pepe le Moki / Quai des Orfevres Monday, Feb 4, 7pm Umberto D. / The Fallen Idol Tuesday, Feb 5, 7pm The Milky Way / Murderous Maids Wednesday, Feb 6, 7pm Mouchette / Au Hasard Balthazar Thursday, Feb 7, 7:30pmTonight is gritty French gangsters, tomorrow, a feast for any Italo-Anglophiles out there: Scorsese says Umberto D. is as good as it gets,......

We can guarantee that when you think of French New Wave cinema, a sultry feeling of cool washes over you. Suddenly, even if you can't name one French New Wave film, you're driven to wander forlornly down moodily lit city streets wondering where your lover has gone while an ultra-cool soundtrack plays in the background and your lover is trapped, desperately trying to reach you. All of that is thanks to Louis Malle's Elevator to......

Central Cinema, over at 21st and Union, is showing the Super Bowl on its big screen. This Sunday, 3pm. The biggest football you've ever seen. We've checked the Big Picture's website, and it looks like Central Cinema has this idea all to itself. They've done this the last few years, and we haven't gone yet, even though it's free -- the pizza and beer (menu pdf) aren't, but then, the pizza and beer never are.......

When we looked at tonight's SIFF Cinema schedule, what first caught our eye was the first part of the double feature: 10 Years of Rialto Trailers. Thinking it would be a great way to figure out which noir films we should see during the rest of the festival, and get a crash course in the genre, we decided to check it out. Plus, we love trailers. But in preparing to write this preview --......

We haven't yet seen The Battle of Algiers -- we weren't alive in the '60s, we weren't working at the Pentagon in '03, and last time we checked the Criterion release out of the library we never got a chance to watch it. So we're happy to see it turn up on local screens again this Sunday, at the SIFF Cinema. We could point you to a bunch of reviews that mostly tell you......

George Franju's Eyes Without a Face includes one of the most horrifying sequences we've ever seen in a movie theater. It was #1 until Irreversible came along, and this is a different kind of horror, so don't let any lingering Gaspar Noe trauma dissuade you from heading to SIFF Cinema this afternoon. It's horrifying the way Psycho would've been horrifying if we hadn't been spoiled on that film's secrets long before we actually watched it.......

Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Jules Dassin, Federico Fellini -- thanks to distributor Rialto Pictures, their restored films are popping up in theaters around the country, and, happily, here in Seattle. SIFF's classic film series, starting today and running through February 7, commemorates Rialto's 10th year in the movie business. Funny that a classic film company would be just ten years old, but life has a seemingly limitless supply of surprises, doesn't it? Tonight......

Starting tomorrow night, SIFF Cinema is showing Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, a documentary that examines Hollywood's relationship and depiction of one of the 20th Century's defining events. Growing up Jewish in New York City, we were introduced to The Diary of Anne Frank at age 9. We quickly became fascinated by her story (our copy of the book is in tatters we read it so often) and by the subject of the......

Depending on how excruciating your teenage years were, the documentary Billy the Kid [blog] will have a different effect on you. Certainly if you have or know someone who has Asperger's syndrome, it'll make you squirm a bit. But it's also about being an outsider in a small town. About wanting to share interests. About negotiating the changes life throws at you. About falling in love for the first time and emotional insecurity. Except for......

This weekend's highlight for Geoff will be a Brewer's Dinner at The Collins Pub held by Hair of the Dog Brewery from Portland. 6 courses paired with 6 beers, plus a few special releases to boot. As a Bears and now semi-Seahawks fan, he'll be hoping that Brett Favre breaks a hip during Saturday's Seahawks game at Lambeau Field. Aside from the glamorous task of replacing the gutters on his house, Jack's weekend pretty much......

This morning we were glancing through the Going Out section of the Seattle P-I when we ran across these two questionable entries:"War and Peace": 1 p.m. Sergei Bondarchuk's adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel (part one screens today) is widely considered to be one of Russia's greatest achievements. Right up there with Ivan Drago and those wooden dolls that open up to reveal a bunch of smaller wooden dolls. SIFF Cinema, Nesholm Family Lecture Hall, McCaw......

What it is ain't exactly clear, however. Back on December 2, PopMatters published "So Long, Something Weird," which made it sound like locally based exploitation/sexploitation distributor Something Weird Video was going out of business. It’s time to call out the carnal color guard and get the bugler to blow a rather trashy and tawdry Taps. After nearly seven years celebrating the best of exploitation, Something Weird Video has parted ways with chief home theater......

The 1968 film version War and Peace, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, with the participation of over 100,000 Red Army soldiers, is in a class by itself, not least because it runs 411 minutes and is being presented in Russian with subtitles. We're not sure how to recommend a 7-hour movie, except to agree with Roger Ebert that it does "take the enormous bulk of Leo Tolstoy's novel and somehow transform it into this great......

Tonight and tomorrow, it's your last chance to see one of the year's best-reviewed documentaries at the Grand Illusion. King Corn follows two friends who move from the East Coast to the Iowa heartland to raise an acre of the highly-subsidized titular crop and follow it through the "corn industrial complex." It ain't pretty, but the film helpfully points out the extent to which corn is a part of the average American (and the......

A couple of Seattlest haters and their friends went to the SIFF Cinema last night to check out the new Coen Bros. movie, which is still every bit as good as we already said it was when we saw it months ago. Lucky for us No Country for Old Men is more along the lines of vintage Coen masterpieces like Blood Simple and has absolutely nothing in common with the turd-arific misfires of their more......

We start things off this weekend with a simple two words from Donte: Muthafucking Justice! As Halloween approaches, it seems that the tradition of Seattlests stalking each other continues. Seth will attend the opening night of the Seattle Opera's first ever co-production with New York's Metropolitan Opera, Iphigenia in Tauris, which is conveniently scheduled at the exact fucking same time as the Husky/ASU game. He'll try to catch the fourth quarter at the Spectator on......

Yes, it's the return of Stalk of the Town where Seattlest lets you in on our weekend plans. Got something going on we should know about? Drop a note in the comments. Seth's watching Saturday's Husky night game with the usual suspects, but at a new place: Teddy's on Roosevelt. After some Friday night theater, MvB is off to see what's the deal with the new Stumptown Coffee on 12th Ave. Dan's going to The......