By Zee Grega
August 7th, 2008 @ 11:27 PM
film
- Northwest Film Forum has a couple of interesting films this weekend: Chimes at Midnight is a 1966 film by Orson Welles that blends scenes from Shakespeare’s plays Richard II, Henry IV (parts 1 and 2), Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor with a commentary from Elizabethan historian Holinshed to produce an original work centered around the character called Falstaff, played by Welles himself.
- Full Battle Rattle, the other film at NWFF examines the Mojave Desert facility built by the US Army for a billion dollars to give soldiers headed for deployment to Iraq the chance to train in simulated “virtual Iraq”. The film follows one Army battalion through the simulation during which time they will try to quell a staged insurgency and prevent a staqed civil war before they are transported to Iraq to put their newly-acquired skills to the test where the action is 100 percent real.
- SIFF kicks off their Jean-Luc Godard tribute series with Contempt, the brilliant director’s first big budget film. Legendary sex kitten Brigitte Bardot stars as the not-quite-loving wife of a screenwriter (played by Michel Piccoli) whose marital discord neatly mirrors the confict between art and commerce examined in the film both directly as part of its film-within-a-film storyline and indirectly as a matter of philosophical reflection.
- Also at SIFF: The Films4Families series continues Saturday morning with a showing of the best of the film adaptations of classic children’s novel The Secret Garden. This version, released originally in 1993, is beautifully shot and well-acted by excellent young actors who bring to vivid life the story of three neglected children who restore themselves as they restore an abandoned garden on an isolated English country estate. An excellent film for children, The Secret Garden is also appealing to adults. (August 9, 10 am)
- The Grand Illusion presents Monster Camp, a documentary that provides a peek into the world of live action role playing, or, LARPing, for short. At NERO Seattle, the local branch of an organization that role plays games all across America, serious gamers spend 48 hours fully immersed in their imaginary world, transforming from ordinary folks into the fantastical beings they imagine, limited only by their own creativity.
- Midnight at the Egyptian: Family adventure film turned cult classic, The Goonies.
- One of my favorite films of SIFF’s 2008 Festival was Baghead, a film that asks: “Is a guy with a bag on his head really all that scary?” Four struggling actors head to the woods with the idea of writing their own screenplay and discover that the answer to that question is a resounding “yes”. Baghead isn’t just scary, though, it’s also funny and charming and totally likeable. It’s at the Varsity.
- If you’d rather see The Goonies outside, you can catch it Friday night at the Seattle Center’s Mural Ampitheater or Lynnwood’s Lynndale Park. Also on Friday night: South Lake Union’s Cinema on the Lawn screens Juno. On Saturday head to Fremont Outdoor Cinema for “Big Giant Monster Night” featuring Cloverfield, to West Seattle’s Sidewalk Cinema for Finding Nemo, the Mural Ampitheater for Batman Begins followed by a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or Hing Hay Park for Transformers.
