There are some great movie choices around town this weekend, everything from semi-schlocky sci-fi from back in the day to classic political satire to the story of a man’s transformation into a hamburger

Films playing in Seattle this weekend include:

• The Grand Illusion [site] brings you Friday night and Saturday/Sunday evening showings of Our Man in Havana starring Alec Guinness and Noel Coward in the story of a vacuum cleaner salesman turned spy. (Friday at 7 & 9 pm, Saturday & Sunday at 3 & 5 pm; Later in the night they’re screening Hamburger Dad, a locally produced film about a man who one day wakes up to find himself turned into a hamburger. See how he copes (and ask the attending filmmakers just what they were on when they came up with this concept) Friday and Saturday at 11 pm.
• Over at SIFF [site] Friday brings Fires on the Plains at 7:30 pm, Kon Ichikawa’s 1959 film about the last days of World War II on the Phillipine island of Leyte. 10 pm the same night you can catch Kurosawa’s High and Low about a businessman, a kidnapping and a search through the underworld. If you miss Friday night’s presentation, you can see High and Low on Saturday at 2:45 pm then go out for some sushi and get back by 7:30 to watch Kurosawa’s legendary Seven Samurai, a movie that influenced everyone from Sam Peckinpah to Francis Ford Coppola, and then some. Sunday at 2:30 is another showing of Fires on the Plain at 2:30 and then Seven Samurai again at 7:00.
• Northwest Film Forum [site] presents Cats of Mirikitani, a look at Jimmy Mirikitani, an artist who stuck with his motto of “Make Art, Not War” even when he found himself homeless on the streets of New York. Filmmaker Linda Hattendorf took him in on 9/11/01 and eventually created this film which shows Mirkikitani’s history, art and life in detail. The film runs until the 6th, but if you go Friday night at 7, Linda Ando of the Tule Lake Pilgrimage [site] and CAssie Chinn of Wing Luke Museum [site] will be on hand for some Q&Q. On Saturday at 7 Linda Ando returns with Stan Shikuma, also from the Tule Lake organization.
• This weekend Midnight at the Egyptian [site] is Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan, a movie for which a good number of people have a great deal of fondness. Me, I remember thinking when I saw this movie just after its release: “Huh, I guess I’m not a diehard Trek fan, after all.” Their prime time film this week is After the Wedding [site] a well-reviewed film about a young man who runs an Indian orphanage and the drama that ensues when he returns to Denmark to request heolp from a wealthy benefactor.