By Zee Grega
April 4th, 2008 @ 12:33 AM
film
- If you live in Capitol Hill, I’m sure by now you’ve seen the posters for Zidane plastered to walls and attached to posts. Zinedane Zidane is a French soccer player; along with soccer superstar Ronaldo, Zidane is one of the only two players to be named the FIFA World Player of the Year three times and is a midfielder who was part of the French national team when they won the 1998 FIFA World Cup and the Euro 2000. He was the captain of the French team in 2006 when his brilliant career came to a dark close after he headbutted Marco Materazzi of Italy. Zidane is also the subject of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, playing at NWFF Friday through Sunday. Filmmakers Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno avoided the usual talking head segments broken up by occasional game footage style of film by instead focusing seventeen synchronized 35mm and HD cameras on Zidane for the entirety of a game from start to finish, putting the viewer into the game as it unfolds. To accompany Zidane, NWFF is also screening Football As Never Before, an experimental work in the same vein made back in 1970 and with legendary English footballer George Best as the focus.
- The Grand Illusion presents yet another Seattle premiere on their screen this weekend: Look, a brand new documentary by director Adam Rifkin that examines how people act when they don’t know they’re being watched. Shot entirely by security cameras, Look interweaves five stories of ordinary people whose private lives are exposed by the never-closing prying eyes of the covert camera. Also at the Grand Illusion: Bomb It!, John Reiss’s examination of grafitti from its origins in prehistoric cave paintings to today.
- Speaking of the stories of ordinary people, SIFF is screening Flying – Confessions of a Free Woman (see ”A Closer Look” here), the excellent documentary by New York filmmaker Jennifer Fox in which she and her friends from around the globe open up for the camera to share their own true stories as modern women trying to find their place in the world.
- Opening at the Harvard Exit, Caramel is set in a Beirut beauty salon where several generations of women come together to talk to and confide in each other about their lives, loves, hopes, dreams and fears.
- Some talented musicians are also talented actors (and vice versa) but usually when a popular artist makes a film in which he/she/they play himself/herself/theirselves or a thinly-disguised version thereof, the film is either an entertaining bit of fluff (the majority of Elvis movies) or a cringe-inducing waste of celluloid (Cool as Ice, anyone?), but there are some notable exceptions. One of those is A Hard Day’s Night, this weekend’s Midnight Movie at the Egyptian. The Beatles first and best movie was filmed by Richard Lester as a mock documentary in which the group arrives at a theater, rehearses for their show later that night, and, then, finally, performs for a television special. Cleverly blending the real Beatles acting as themselves with fictional characters like Paul’s trouble-causing grandfather, the film gives the Beatles a chance to comment on their own fame and pokes fun at hype-making and the mechanics of the fame machine. The biting satire is still sharp several decades later, even movie-goers whose only idea of Beatlemania as some ancient fad from their grandparents’ day will get the message and the humor. (For another popular film in which a musician plays himself, stop by Metro Cinemas on Wednesday the 9th to see Prince in Purple Rain.)
- Another film that combines a legendary director with a legendary rock band is Shine A Light at the Neptune. The director is Martin Scorsese and the band is the Rolling Stones, filmed live at the Beacon Theater in New York City in the fall of 2006.
- A mother dreams of a better life for her nine-year-old son and hopes to achieve it by leaving him in Mexico in the care of his grandmother while she works illegally in the US. Unexpected challenges force both Rosario and her son Carlitos to undertake dangerous journeys in their quest to be reunited as a family. Under the Same Moon opens at Seven Gables.
I spent too much money at some LA film fest back in November and saw Caramel. It was alright. Noting groundbreaking. (SPOILER)It’s just your standard salon movie, with chicks crying about love, old chicks falling in love and chicks liking other chicks. Definitely not worth the $15 I wasted to see it…