Last weekend, Seattlest revisited the other Shorewood High School for our 20-year reunion. And it's been 20 years since Lloyd Dobler and Diane Court left Lakeside High, so on our flight to Milwaukee, we got reacquainted with Cameron Crowe's Say Anything.... Singles gets the Seattle-centric attention, but Say Anything... is the movie where Seattle first caught our eye, several years before we actually moved to the land of the Gas 'n' Sip. more ›

Looking like the everyman John Cusack would play in the movie, John Darnielle still has a teenager's reedy tenor, in contrast to his grown-man's, slow-footed cadence when apologizing for having a lyric cheat sheet for a new song. more ›

We've always gotten a strong High Fidelity vibe from Pitchfork. Duh, right? The music geek relationship is hardly subtle. But now that Blue Moon booker Jason Josephes is spreading these recordings he made in Minneapolis with Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber back in '97 we can't even think of the music moguls at P'fork and not imagine a dank basement with matresses crammed against the walls, a mic hanging from an exposed two by four and John Cusack tapping away at a Casio singing about a naked transexual with nothing but margerine for eyes. You can hear the fat in her thighs... more ›

In some ways, we wish we could experience Sundance every week, but on the other hand, we're pretty f-ing exhausted. So it's a good thing that this is our last day here. We've had a great time with both the movies and the festival-goers. We've had film discussions with strangers everywhere we went, we've argued with film critics, and we've interacted with some really remarkable people, including two Lauras from Portland, a Bermudan film festival programmer, and a wonderfully chatty fag from NYC. Normally, we hate people. We tend to avoid meeting new people (most of them suck), and we definitely aren't prone to striking up discussions with strangers. But at Sundance it's different. Film really can bring us all together. more ›

We're only going to say this once: Say Anything... is the best Hollywood romance since Casa-frickin'-blanca. (Or Notorious!, which has a harder title to frick up.) It does for Seattle in the '80s what Bogie's film did for Vichy-held Morocco: makes it look like the coolest place on earth to be hopelessly in love. more ›

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. more ›

Seattlest likes Nick Hornby, we really do. We like his witty, casual style of writing, we like that he's big enough of a music geek to write essays on specific songs, and we certainly like his McSweeney's connection. Most of all, though, we enjoy the movies made from his books. High Fidelity ranks among our favorites, due to its eminently quotable dialogue, great soundtrack, smart use of lists, and John Cusack's lovesick moping coupled with Jack Black's voracious scene-stealing. In fact, this is one of the rare cases where the film is better than the book, with a seamless setting shift from London to Chicago (especially endearing to Seattlest). About a Boy is another good one, in which the Weitzes first displayed a light touch and emotional maturity, and frankly, it's the only Hugh Grant performance we can stomach. As to Fever Pitch...well, we purposely avoided the recent Farrelly Brothers/Jimmy Fallon/Drew Barrymore crime against humanity---which ended up being a box office disappointment anyways---but we hear that the original version of the film, about football and starring Colin Firth, was more than decent. more ›