Seattle Parks Department is busy planning the newest park in our excellent public park system. The new park will be located at 12supth/sup Ave and E. James Court and the Parks department is seeking public input on the community’s priorities for this space.

Join the Parks Department at SU’s Admissions and Alumni building at 824 – 12thAve on Tuesday, May 18 at 5:30 pm.
For more information check out the project’s web page.

Harvey Fierstein in Fiddler on the Roof, photo c. 2010 Carol Rosegg

Fiddler on the Roof is a Broadway classic. Opening in 1964, it was the first run of a musical to break the 3000 performance mark on the Great White Way and was the longest-running musical in Broadway history until Grease came along a decade later. It’s still the fourteenth longest running show in history, no small potatoes. The original production won an astonishing nine Tony awards; a mark of the show’s enduring appeal is that all its major revivals have been acclaimed as well.

Based on a book published in 1894, Fiddler on the Roof tells the story of Tevye, a poor milkman in 1905 Russia, his sharp-tongued wife, Golde, and their five daughters. Tevye struggles to keep his family together and the cultural traditions alive as each of his three oldest daughters insists on choosing her own path while all the while their entire village is threatened by the Tsar’s campaign of pogroms and expulsions.

The much loved musical’s best known numbers include “Matchmaker”, “If I Were a Rich Man”, “Miracle of Miracles” and “Sunrise, Sunset”.

Fiddler on the Roof comes to Seattle’s Paramount Theater for eight shows starting May 25 with Harvey Fierstein, a multiple Tony winner himself, in the pivotal lead role. Fierstein won praise for his performance as Tevye in the most recent Broadway production and considers it one of his favorite roles.

Tickets are available online and at the Paramount box office.

RoboGeisha plays SIFF 2010 May 28, June 8.

The first truth about Midnight Movies is that any movie can be a midnight, it simply needs to be screened at midnight. The second truth is that some movies make better midnight movies than others. Just what makes the ideal midnight movie is a question that could lead to endless debate, but the primary difference between a true midnight movie and just a movie screened at midnight is some slight edge to the film that makes it mean something at midnight that might not be there at another time of the day.

Take Rocky Horror Picture Show, for example, perhaps THE midnight film of all midnight films. Watch it at home on video in the afternoon sometime and it’s just not the same movie that you grew to love in the theater. I discovered the strength of the midnight effect a few year ago with The Wizard of Oz.

Like most cinephiles, it’s impossible for me to name just one favorite film, but The Wizard of Oz comes close. Having lost track of the number of times I’ve watched the movie all the way through somewhere around 150 many years ago, I was sure that nothing about the film could surprise me – and then I went to a screening of Wizard at midnight at The Egyptian and quickly learned that watching Wizard with a group of openly-vocal Friends of Dorothy definitely made it a whole new experience.

Audiences are a key factor in what makes a good midnight movie – midnight movie audiences are definitely unique.

SIFF’S Midnight Adrenaline programmer Dan Doody says that one of the biggest misconceptions about midnight movie audiences is that they are drugged out or just plain bizarre. He allows that a very small minority might be weirdos out for mischief, but adds that even they want a film that will engage them. Perhaps more so than any other movie audience, midnighters have a real need to interact with the movie they’re watching. This doesn’t have to be physical interaction – it’s not all shouting out lines or tossing rice – but midnight audiences aren’t into passive entertainment. They embrace the unusual, the quirky, the outright strange. Midnight audiences want a movie that moves: “The biggest criteria,” Dan says, “is that it’s well-paced and gets its hooks into you.”

He adds that the midnight audience is “the hardest to please. If they get bored, the audience has no compunction about walking out.”

As a long time midnight movie fan myself, I know this to be true myself, but I’ve also noticed that in some ways midnight movie audiences are also quite generous. As long as it brings the fun and keeps the story flowing, audiences will embrace midnight movies that aren’t quite technically perfect. It’s how the movie feels that matters most.

Over the years Dan has watched enough midnight audiences to have a good feeling about what will sustain an audience’s interest and he’s pleased with this year’s selections. Having seen a few of them already myself, I agree with his enthusiasm. My hate/hate relationship with zombies will (probably) keep me from the new Romero flick, but otherwise I’m hoping to see you all at this year’s screenings.

The 2010 Midnight Adrenaline series features:

Amer: A three-part giallo style erotic thriller from Belgium about three key stages in a woman’s life, all of them more than just a bit gruesome. Directors élène Cattet and Bruno Fortet are scheduled to attend.

Centurion: A small platoon of Roman legionnaires survive an ambush by the Picts they have sworn to exterminate. Quintus Dias must lead his small band of soldiers through the dangerous wilds of Scotland to rescue their general while being pursued by the remorseless, relentless “barbarians” out for revenge.

Dream Home: Cheng Lai-Sheun’s dream is to own her own home and she will stop at nothing, not even vicious murder, to make her dream come true in this bloody thriller from Hong Kong.

George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead: Romero forever changed the shape of cinema, most notably that ever-growing genre that’s grown around the idea of zombies that he himself helped create, with his classic Night of the Living Dead. He’s continued to use the undead as a metaphor for society’s various ills; in Survival of the Dead, a group of soldiers find themselves trapped between a zombie apocalypse and a human one.

RoboGeisha: Sibling rivalry reaches a whole new level when sisters Yoshie and Kikue are recruited by a company bent on world domination through the use of cybernetic-enhanced geisha assassins in this kitschy, fun, sci-fi actioner from Japan.

Splice: Two scientist lovers go undercover to experiment with injecting human DNA into things that aren’t human, eventually producing a winged chimera that forces them to have to decide where being a scientist stops and being a parent begins.

Ticked Off Trannies with Knives: A tribute to the old grindhouse exploitation films featuring, well…you know.

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil: Tucker and Dale are a couple of hillbillies who rescue a young college student from drowning and get more trouble than thanks when her misunderstanding friends become convinced they need to rescue her from harm. That’s when all the messy dying begins.

The Wild Hunt: Erik’s girlfriend Evelyn leaves him to immerse herself into the elaborate LARP (live action role play) game beloved of his brother Bjorn who is extremely dedicated to his life as a “Viking chieftan”. Despite his misgiving, Erik decides to follow Evelyn into the game in hopes of bringing her back home with him. Soon Erik discovers the dangers that arise in crossing the fine line that separates fantasy from reality. An extremely engaging debut from Canadian director Alexandre Franchi.

This year’s SIFF presents 189 narrative features, 54 documentary features, 13 archival films, and 150 short films from 67 countries. Twenty-five of those films are world premieres. Thirty-six are North American premieres and 12 are US premieres. No matter you how slice it, that’s a lot of films – and those are just the films that made it into the festival programming. Every year SIFF gets thousands of submissions for their festival. So how do they decide which films make it in?

Dan Doody, programmer of the Midnight Adrenaline series, and Clare Canzoneri, who programs Face the Music, explained the process to me.

The work of the programming panel – the group of programmers responsible for deciding what goes in and what doesn’t – begins in winter of the previous year, around November or December, although SIFF programming manager Beth Barrett tracks films from other festivals all throughout the year, festivals like Toronto, San Sebastian, Sundance, Rotterdam, and Berlin. While the SIFF team are keeping an eye on other festivals to see what’s other there, they’re also sending out the word that they’re accepting submissions.

And submissions they get. When the programming panels start meeting in January to talk about what films they might want included in the upcoming festival, they’re facing around 4,000 submissions, each of which needs to be reviewed along with the many films the programmers have solicited directly after seeing them at another festival or by keeping their ears open for buzz about new films.

The winnowing process starts early, says Dan. The first order of business is to weed out films that aren’t quite SIFF quality. This doesn’t necessarily that they’re bad films, just that they don’t fit; for example, “We got a bunch of Asian films that were very region specific and weren’t a good fit for Western audiences.”

By February, the programmers start “hammering down” in their panel dicussion: “I liked this – can someone else take a look at it?” is the primary question of the day. Sometimes the decision to include a film is easy – all, or at least a majority, of the programmers feel confident that a particular movie is a great fit for SIFF. Sometimes there’s equally agreement in the other direction. And sometimes there’s disagreement – a specific film’s champion might have to fight for it and win over the rest of the panel.

All of the films do get watched. SIFF manages this amazing job by utilizing a team of pre-screeners who take home boxes of films to review. While sitting around watching movies all day sounds pretty easy and fun, there is some serious work involved. Surely you’ve brought home at least one movie that you disliked enough to turn it off a few minutes in and move on with your life. The pre-screeners are required to log the amount of time that they watch the films – there’s a required minimum – and it turns out that most of them do watch every single frame.

Clare says, “I’m unable to not watch the whole film.”

Dan, on the other hand, says, “If I’m not interested in 20 minutes, it won’t work with an audience.” He says he can usually tell in the first five minutes if it’s going to be worth it. If the movie gets to the 20 minute mark without becoming engaging, he may move forward in the film to see if it does get better. He adds that if the film is solicited, the whole thing should be watched regardless of the 20 minute rule. “Something may not be bad – it’s just not my thing – but it may please a bigger audience.”

That’s the ultimate key to which films get included in the festival – how likely they are to fulfill the SIFF mission of presenting the best cinema available to the audience. “We can’t always get everything we love, but we have a wide perspective of films.”

The Social Security Administration just recently released its annual list of the most popular baby names for the proceeding year.

In Washington state in 2009, more little boys were named Alexander and more little girls were named Isabella than given in any other name. The show not being what it once was, it’s hardly likely that Grey’s Anatomy‘s Alex and Izzy are immediate influences but could the effect be a lingering one?

Okay, probably not. Isabella is not only Washington’s most popular girl baby name, it’s the country’s, and it’s very much because of that series of vampire stories set in Forks. Jacob, another name from the series, is the most popular boy’s name in the US and the second-most popular in Washington. (Then again, Jacob’s long been a popular name for boys, so it’s not much of a leap for it to hit the top five.)

The top five baby names in Washington for 2009:

Boys:
Alexander
Jacob
Ethan
William
Daniel

Girls:
Isabella
Olivia
Sophia
Emma
Abigail

The festival kicks off Thursday night, but you don’t have to wait until next week to see great film at SIFF Cinema. SIFF celebrates the work of screenwriter Stewart Stern, now a Seattle resident, who has an amazing place in Hollywood history. The nephew of Adolph Zukor, the man who created Paramount Pictures, and the cousin of the Loews who controlled MGM, Stern is an award winning screenwriter whose works include The Ugly American, Sybil, and Rebel Without a Cause. Friday through Tuesday, SIFF screens eleven of his films, all worth seeing. As a special highlight, the Friday at 7:30 screening of The Ugly American begins with screenwriter, producer and director Christopher McQuarrie interviewing Mr. Stern and discussing his long and illustrious career.

Central Cinema presents the Alfred Hitchcock classic North by Northwest in which dashing Cary Grant is mistaken for a spy and chased across America by a group of thugs intent on stealing the microfilm they believe he has. Along the way Grant meets and romances lovely Eva St. Marie, a femme fatale with her own motivations, and is chased by an airplane in one of the most iconic scenes of movie history.

Live at the NW Film Forum: Performance, video, song, dance and fantasy explore the ongoing urban history of Seattle as written and directed by Marya Sea Kaminski, inspired by the transformation of the Pike-Pine corridor.

Jean-Paul Colmor lives near Montreal, surrounded by old cars and other discarded objects. Four teenagers with Down syndrome enter his life, joining him in his unique landscape as refugees from the outer world. Director Denis Côté examines this unusual man in his extraordinary self-made world in the documentary Carcasses, making its Seattle premiere at The Grand Illusion.

Late night at the Grand Illusion: the second weekend of early 80s voyeuristic nerd fantasy Getting It On.

Midnight at the Egyptian: Malcom McDowell is creepy as all get-out in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Clockwork Orange, a sharp, disturbing movie whose trenchant commentary on violent society seems to get more and more relevant with every viewing.

Like a good number of his fans, I first heard Landon Pigg while I was watching TV. One of his songs was played on Grey’s Anatomy and another on One Tree Hill but the song I first noticed was “Falling in Love at a Coffee Shop” which was first featured in a De Beers commercial and then in a commercial for AT&T.

As anyone who has ever gone to see a performer based on a single song know, you never really know what you’re going to get. When Pigg came to Seattle last fall, I found him to be a warm, engaging performer whose style encompasses a number of different influences and ranges; plus, I really liked that he had enough confidence in his material to open with his “hit”.

He’ll be back in Seattle on Saturday, May 22 at the Triple Door and you do not want to miss this show. Tickets are $12 in advance or $14 at the door, but one lucky Metblogs reader will get to go for free.

E-mail your name to seattle.metblogs@gmail.com no later than noon on Tuesday, May 18 and you could win a pair of tickets for the show. Make sure to put “Landon Pigg tickets” in your subject line, winner will be drawn at random.

If you love fashion, the place for you to be this weekend is the Seattle Fashion Week Fashion Expo at the WAMU Theater.

The Fashion, Beauty and Lifestyle Expo opens at 2 pm on both Friday, May 14, and Saturday, May 15, giving patrons a chance to view and purchase hot new fashions from designers both locally and internationally based. Each day concludes with an evening fashion show at 8 pm. On Friday night, the show focuses on Urban design featuring the work of the Comcast Student Fashion Designer Top 4 Runners up Cameron Levin (New York Fashion Academy), Jonguen Kim (Seattle Pacific University), Justin Bartle (Art Institute of Seattle), and Michelle William (Art Institute of Seattle).

Saturday the focus switches to Established and International Designers including the IDCW-Product Runway in which interior designers, architects, and students demonstrated their design chops by crafting couture garments from interior materials and finishes. Also represented on the catwalk: B’ZMA of Dubai, Romania’s Catalin Botezatu, Eva Chen of Canada, House of Versailles Styles from Washington (DC), MONAPALI from India and Seattle’s own Richard Blayne Walsh.

Tickets for each show start at $35 and include admission to the expo; expo only tickets are just $10.

The search for Seattle’s next Police Chief progresses; yesterday the search committee made their final recommendation of three candidates for the office. Mayor Mike McGinn will select one of them to be the new police chief.

The candidates are:

John Diaz, currently acting police chief; Rick Braziel of Sacramento and Ronald Davis of Palo Alto.

The candidates are currently scheduled to appear at the City Council’s Public Safety and Education Committee at 9:30 a.m. on June 2. Mayor McGinn expects to make his decision in early June.

Mountlake Terrace High School student Nicholas Terry makes his film directorial debut with Senior Prom this year at SIFF

Two of SIFF‘s most exciting programs are the closely aligned Films4Families and FutureWave, both aimed at giving young audience members a chance to get to know quality film from both sides of the camera. Both programs have year-round components but get a special gloss during the festival, with films from all over the world, including our own backyard.

FutureWave’s focus in on teens and young adults. This year’s festival features nine feature films curated specifically with them in mind. FutureWave Features 2010 includes such films I Kissed a Vampire, an American made musical about teen vampires balancing budding romance and bloodsucking; New Zealand sci fi film about psychic twins Under the Mountain and Samson and Delilah, an Australian love story about two Aboriginal teens.

Of particular note in this year’s FutureWave features is Senior Prom, an improvisational comedy along the lines of Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman that was shot by local director Nicholas Terry, 17, and features his Mountlake Terrace High School classmates as actors in a seriously funny look at the drama and excitement of the senior prom, told in a series of intertwined stories by actors who are as close to the subject as one can possibly get.

SIFF Educational Programs Coordinator Dustin Kaspar says that the goal of FutureWave is to give young people a chance to see as much as possible of what’s out there, presenting films that anyone at the festival can enjoy but that particularly appeal and engage youth. He recommends Bilal’s Stand, an inspriring story based on real life by 25 year old first time director Sultan Sharrief; Turn It Loose, a documentary about the World Championships of Breakdancing, held in Soweto, South Africa; and Regeneration, a world premiere film that “takes a hard-hitting look at youth and young adults and the culture of apathy” featuring appearances by the likes of Howard Zinn, Mos Def, and Amy Goodman in an examination of why the current generation of youth are not more active and how to get them engaged, a film that seeks to be a catalyst for change for people of all ages.

The FutureWave Shorts program takes youth film a step further – these films aren’t just aimed at young people, they’re made by them. Young filmmakers use a variety of film forms – documentary, fiction, animation – to tell stories encompassing all kinds of different subjects, from body image issues to family dynamics to pollution to identity issues and much, much more.

Kicking off the FutureWave Shorts program is the always exciting SuperFly Filmmaking challenge. Partnering with Longhouse Media, SIFF’s SuperFly Filmmaking Workshop takes 50 young people from all over the country and hooks them up with experienced mentors to create short films based on a script by Peter Bratt, giving them a mere 36 hours from start to finish.

Another great aspect of the FutureWave program is the FutureWave jury, a diverse group of young people from the Seattle area who will watch all the films in the program and cast their votes for the best films in the festival, making their award presentation at the Golden Space Needle Awards. YouthWave jurors might be budding filmmakers themselves or they might just be kids who are very interested in watching movies. In either case, the young people on the panel must learn that while it’s easy to say “This is my favorite film”, it’s a little harder to find consensus with the whole group but once they’ve made their decision it’s always a chance to for a fresh perspective on what makes a film worth watching.

The Films4Families program presents children’s films from all over the world, suitable for the whole family to watch. Short and feature length fiction and documentary features include live action and animation. Among this year’s standouts:

Eleanor’s Secret is a French animated film (dubbed in English) about a seven-year-old boy who moves into his late aunt’s house and discovers that Tante Eleanor left him an entire library of classic books. Problem one: Nat can’t read. Problem two: since Nat seems disinterested in the books, his parents sell them to a collector. And that’s when the real trouble begins – the character’s in Eleanor’s books come to life only in the library and if left unread will disappear, taking all their stories with them. Nat has to join them to save them but can he make it in time?

White Lion uses actual white lions to dramatize a folktale in which a legendary white lion, a messenger from the gods in Shangaan culture, must struggle to survive on his own with only a young Shangaan named Gisani to protect him from the dangers of the wild.

A young Spanish orphan named Carlos manages a dual life as an obedient student during school hours and a member of the Spanish national junior team behind the back of nasty orphanage director Hipolito in Carlitos and the Chance of a Lifetime.

Other films include From Time to Time, a British story of a time travelling boy who discovers a secret that could change history forever; Princess Lillifee, an animated film from Germany about the fairy who rules over the magic land of Pinkovia; Turtle: The Incredible Journey, the story of 25 years in the life of a sea turtle; and The Family Picture Show, a program of animated and live action shorts.

This year for the first time Films4Families has its own youth jury, consisting of kids from Seattle area elementary and middle schools.

Every year, some of the best films in the festival happen as part of one of these programs. Whether you have kids or ARE one, there’s definitely a lot on screen for you to enjoy, but even if you don’t fit into one of those groups, you should definitely check these films out.