Results tagged “starwars”

In Douglas Coupland's novel it. That little piece of lung makes their own fragments less scary."

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, 1963, as the Martin Cinerama. (The Paramount twice installed and removed CineMiracle, a rival technology that never took off.)

We gotta admit to being kind of a sci-fi nerd. We own all the Star Wars movies in most of their various formats and edits, have read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels numerous times (including the atrocious Mostly Harmless), and actively seek out any books and films that depict any kind of a dystopic view of our future. So when we heard that yet another cut of Blade Runner was playing at the Cinerama, AKA: God's Gift to Seattle, you can bet we made plans to get down there.

Maybe (okay, most likely) Seattlest is waaay behind on this, but we just watched The Comedians of Comedy and we gotta say, good stuff. You see, our better half is out of town this weekend so we're passing the time doing what any good husband would do in his wife's absence -- putting a nice dent in the checking account by renting movies and drinking too many gin & tonics.

With the sun out, the temperatures high, one can only think of one thing-- what's going on in the World of the -ist's?

We don't really have to look any farther afield than the Stranger to get more than our fill of Seattle Weekly bashing in any given week, but right now there's an article in a Phoenix daily about the New Times Media vs. Village Voice Media culture war that jettisoned Weekly longtimers out the Weekly's door (and into something yet to be seen). The gist of the article is that across the country the left-leaning, axe-grinding, political alt-weekly veterans have been replaced with ass-kicking, name-taking whipper-snapper upstarts who don't much care for politics or other traditional alt-weekly stomping grounds.

According to this guy's cost analysis, not only is Vista going to screw you, the person who purchased the software, it's also going to doom Microsoft itself and quite possibly the computing universe as we have come to know it. Particularly, he's got issues with the Visa Content Protection specification of which he says in the Executive Executive summary of his paper "The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history." Nerds will be able to parse the fact that a content protection specification has to do with DRM. Normal people might need to be told that DRM has to do with copy-protection and that kind of thing. Bill Gates himself isn't so high on DRM these days, despite the fact that he's about to stake Microsoft on an operating system that holds digital rights as one of its core truths. In December he told a blogger that the best way to ensure that your music is legal and playable is to rip CDs yourself. We'll see if that holds true under Vista.

We hate to use such a cliché for a post title, but in this case it's actually true. Seattlest had an opportunity to check out the children's improv show Hogwash this weekend, and despite worries that it would provide nothing but boredom for us (we're happily childless), we were suprised at how entertaining the production actually was, and would heartily recommend it for you Seattlest readers out there with little ones in tow.

Here's another entry in the categories of "Until There is a Portlandist" and "Seattlest Has a One-Track Mind." An AP article making the bloggity blog blog rounds has dug up a swath of indie bands telling Hummer to go stick it in their 10MPG gas pipe and smoke it. Hummer ad execs, while drinking designer vodkas and wondering how they could be as hip as that Cohen kid on the O.C., must have picked up on the recent trend of using less well-known "indie" songs to sell shit these days. Unfortunately for them, they are much, much dumber than indie musicians, and Seattlest is thankful for that.

The set and special effects are more richly rendered than anything Dreamworks has ever produced. The well-designed ensemble cast overshadows your old favorites from the original Star Wars. The story is both more believable and more fantastic than The Matrix. Of course, in RL it’s just one man on a bare stage in the dark cellar of the Capitol Hill Arts Center, but Virtual Solitaire is so fully imagined and so strongly performed that Dawson Nichols is able to pull an entire electronic world seemingly out of thin air.

Local hater Pete Bagge drew a little comic strip last year for the anarcho-fascist propoganda outlet Reason Magazine that heaped scorn and ridcule on the innocent men, women and children of the art world. Now, one year later, Bagge's karma comes back to bite him in the ass with an art world style exhibition of that very same comic. Will the hypocrisy blow Bagge's mind? Will it be as bad as that one scene in the Star Wars movie where Luke Skywalker cuts off Darth Vader's head only to see behind the mask... his own face!?

The summer’s dearth of classical music is finally over. In fact, there’s so much happening around town we may have trouble fitting it all in without overwhelming you.

If you weren't mortally wounded from the bitter Oasis/Blur feud that tore our country apart in the mid-nineties, then check out Oasis tonight at the Everett Events Center. As of the last time that we checked craigslist, tickets can be had pretty cheap. Personally we like both Oasis and Blur, but we always did consider ourselves to be the Switzerland of rock fans.

over! Sure, it broke records, but cash isn't the only measure of success. Lucas & Co. have long passed their sell-by dates, hardly able to achieve story rudiments like cause and effect in their visually top-heavy cartoons. And let's not talk about the acting. The crushing weight of special-effects has usurped all common sense at Skywalker Ranch, which bodes ill for the future, as the Man is currently up to something. Fingers crossed that Earth collides with a comet before it sees the light of day, whatever it is.

Since you have undoubtedly already seen 'Star Wars Episode 3 Revenge of the Sith,' we recommend putting your wookie costume in dry storage and checking out comedy legend (okay, not really a legend, but a funny guy) David Cross performing with Todd Barry and the Thermals at the Showbox. It is really hard for us to quantify our love of David Cross, but we would like to say that if any cast member of 'Arrested Development' were to ask for our spare kidney, we would grab the nearest butter knife and start cutting. The Thermals play punk in the proper old-fashioned three chord way and are described by Amazon.com reviewer 'wicked emo' as kicking "...my ass every day with brutal sonic punishment, and I love it."

It has come to Seattlest's attention that there's some big movie coming out tomorrow. Sigh.

Entertainment giant Sony announced yesterday that they are planting roots in Seattle's fertile developer soil by opening a development studio in the city. The move, no doubt, can also be attributed to the prominent members of the SOE team who were booted from Microsoft--namely, Matt Wilson, who had his last large project in Redmond closed down last year. After the Mythica debacle at Microsoft Wilson opened FireAnt, Inc., all of whose members will be joining Sony.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, the impending finale of Star Wars would have excited Seattlest to no end. Then, twenty minutes into The Phantom Menace, Seattlest learned a very harsh life lesson and wrote the whole thing off. People are different, though, and different people are going to come away from a film with different things.