Weekend Film Agenda: October 24
By Zee Grega
- The Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival winds up its remaining days with films at a variety of venues including NWFF, The Admiral Theater, The Harvard Exit, the King Cat Theater, Central Cinema, and more. Films include shorts from Canada, a documentary about the band Pansy Division, The Art of Being Straight, the Online Indie Fest winners, and the closing night gala, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark with a live, onstage interview by Peaches Christ of Elvira herself.
- The Grand Illusion screens a trio of horror films: Halloween III: Season of the Witch got a bad rap for deviating from the “Halloween” franchise’s established universe, but I’ve always thought that its flaws are more than made up for by conspiracy-theory plot that alternates between seriousness and satire. Asylum is an anthology movie framed by device of having a young psychiatrist apply for a job at a mental institution where the current director challenges him to listen to four stories of madness from the asylum’s inmates and identify which one of them is the former director gone mad. Peter Cushing and Charlotte Rampling have starring roles in stories by noted horror writer Robert Bloch, author of Psycho. Galaxy of Terror is a sci-fi horror tale in which an alien being turns a spaceship crew’s deepest fears against them. Friday the 24th is the Grand Illusion’s Cocktail Fundraiser: Enjoy a drink or two with your films and help support the Grand Illusion’s quest to continue showing movies that often can’t see anywhere else.
- Hordes of women consider John Cusack’s character in Say Anything to be the embodiment of romantic charm, but if you ask me, I’ll tell you that Lloyd Dobbler is a creepy stalker and I just don’t get the appeal. I do like him very much in this weekend’s Midnight at the Egyptian selection, the lesser known but far more entertaining Better Off Dead. Teenaged Lane Meyer loses his girlfriend, struggles to deal with his frustratingly quirky family, feuds with a pesky newspaper delivery boy, competes with the jerk his girlfriend dumped him for, and falls in love with a French foreign student who must pretend she knows no English to survive the horrible family with whom she’s staying, all with failing miserably in his various attempts to take his own life. A big part of what makes the dark comedy so appealing is that no matter how outlandish the humor gets, Cusack’s character plays like a real person.
- SIFF kicks off its “Dark Nights” series with a Frankenstein double feature.
Better Off Dead is possibly the best John Cusack film period, not that there’s really anything particularly bad on his list. 1408 is probably the closest I’d put to bad.
I could really go for some Pushing Tin, Con Air and Grosse Point Blank now.