No matter what you think of Starbucks, it’s never good news when a company announces job cuts of around 1,000 people. In a letter to employees, CEO Howard Schultz announced the job cuts, which include about 550 layoffs (the rest will come from natural attrition). About 180 of those positions will be in the Seattle area both at the SODO headquarters and another regional office in the area. This is after February job cuts numbering 600 (220 through layoffs).

They are also closing a number of stores in Australia and laying off 685 workers there as well.

The full story is in the Seattle Times.

Now I personally don’t drinks Starbucks coffee. I don’t much like the taste and given the choice, I’m going to pick a fair or direct trade coffee bean that I know was roasted recently. I could even joke about the fact that there are some intersections downtown where even recently released Mariner (and now Yankee) Richie Sexon could hit a baseball from one store to another. All right, maybe Sexon couldn’t do it. Vidro?

However, not only do I hate to see anyone laid off, but there is one circumstance where I will patronize a Starbucks. When I travel, I often find myself without a car in an unfamiliar location, and while locating an independent coffee shop with fair trade coffee is incredibly easy in Seattle, it isn’t very easy in say, Orlando. Starbucks is predictable and dependable. I know when I walk into a Starbucks, that I can order my triple iced Americano and it will be pretty much the same triple iced Americano I’d get at any other Starbucks.

Hopefully Schultz knows what he’s doing. What do you think? Does he?

Edited to add: And in other Starbucks News, My Ballard has an interesting post on Starbucks’ acquisition of Clover. Apparently they are refusing to sell any more Clover machines to any independent coffee shop. This is one of those moves that prompts all of the Starbucks hate that runs rampant in this town. I have to admit, given how much I love my Clover coffee, this really frosts me as well.

Still from Last Year at Marienbad courtesy SIFF

• If your favorite movies are those that tell an easy-to-follow story in a direct, linear fashion, you might want to avoid SIFF starting this Friday as Last Year at Marienbad is odd even by the avante garde standards of the Nouvelle Vague movement. Both revered and reviled, the 1961 film was directed by Alain Resnais whose earlier work Hiroshima Mon Amour was one of the first films of the French New Wave. As in Hiroshima Mon Amour, Resnais cuts in and out of flashbacks within a scene to suggest the sudden instantaneous recall of memory; in Last Year at Marienbad it is never entirely clear which memories are real or even memories at all. The entire film, gorgeously shot in lush black and white and featuring stunning visuals of elegant men and women at an ornate baroque-style chateau, takes place in a sort of dream state where there is no true sense of time or direction. A man called only “X” speaks to a woman, “A” about their prior meeting and their plans to run away together, but it is never clear if any of this has actually happened. Another man, “M”, may or may not be the husband of “A”. The three interact in various ways with their conversations and actions repeated in different places and with different points of view. Scenes are shown without a definite order and voiceover narration adds to the story without clarifying it.

  Last Year at Marienbad presents its riddles without answers or even clues; the film seems to tell a story but just what that story is is ultimately only answerable by the viewer. You’ll want to take a friend to the fascinating Last Year at Marienbad so you can have many happy hours afterward arguing about just what it was that you saw.

• Northwest Film Forum offers up some uniquely creative cinema of its own with A Slice of Blood and Honey, a collection of short film, video art and documentaries from Macedonia whose emerging artists create works reflecting the environment in their homeland as it grows from its roots in the sluggish past into a fresh, cosmopolitan future.
• Also at NWFF: Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts traces a year in the life of the iconic composer. Director Scott Hicks had unparalleled access to his subject during the filming documentary, allowing him to show an intimate portrait of Glass as both an artist and a man.
• On Sunday, July 20, head to Cal Anderson Park at 4pm for Sustainable Capitol Hill’s Imagine Capitol Hill festival focused on environmentally-friendly urban living and stick around til dusk for their “Bike In Movie”
• Grand Illusion continues their “Best of the Rest: 5 Years of Late Nights at the Grand Illusion” series with Deathstalker, the sort of cheesy swords-and-sorcery epic that’s best seen with an audience so you can all enjoy the unintentional humor together.
• You’ll also want to head to the Grand Illusion for their screening of a brand new print of the 1968 classic Planet of the Apes. The first time I ever saw Planet of the Apes was in a Saturday afternoon revival back in the early 70s and despite all the sequels and remakes of varying and often dubious quality, I still recall the thrill of watching the entire film from the edge of my seat, enthralled and anxious as I watched the story unfold before me in this stunning film. If you think Planet of the Apes is simply some corny flick, think again–this is a sci-fi classic for very good reason.
• The enduring appeal of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a bit of a mystery to me; I’ve just never seen what so many people see in it, really. The movie, on the other hand, is great–I ended up seeing it as a compromise film when a friend and I both wanted very much to see other movies that the other refused to see and ended up being very much impressed by its great humor and exciting action. I know, I know, Joss Whedon himself says the TV show is a more faithful rendering of his vision, but this light-hearted satire of the horror film genre is funny and likeable, Kristy Swanson sparkles at the title character, and, really, how can you go wrong with a film featuring Rutger Hauer? Central Cinema through the 20th.
• If you feel like you’ve been getting way too many good nights of sleep lately, stop in at the Egyptian this weekend for their midnight showings of Aliens. Maybe you’re so used to the creepy alien creatures that they don’t scare you any more (oh, how I envy you for that), but the pulse-pounding action as Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley takes on a whole heaping nest of those nasty critters will definitely get your adrenaline pumped.
• The Dark Knight opens at theaters all across the Puget Sound on Friday, July 18.

Some critics have called Mermaid “the Russian Amelie” but although both films have some superficial similarities, both being centered on quirky young women who isolate themselves from the society in which they live surrounded by colorful eccentrics and who fall madly in love at first sight with men they barely know based on an unusual introduction to them, but Mermaid is an entirely different sort of fairy tale. Even the film’s creator, writer/director Anna Melikian agrees with this assessment, calling Amelie “wonderful” but denying any sort of connection to the film. Melikian also denies a direct connection with Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid” although she does say that it was her favorite fairy tale as a child, “maybe because it is the only fairy tale with a sad ending”. There are some links between the two, and surely the tale is one of the influences on the creation of Mermaid (Russian title: Rusalka), but this strange story stands on its own.

As a young girl Alisa lives in a shack on the seaside with her mother and her grandmother. Both the older women have dreams of their own but it’s Alisa’s bold, bright dreams that propel the plot, along with her belief that she owns magic talents to control the weather and make wishes come true. Life is tough in their worn-down town; when an unexpected change in circumstances after Alisa turnes 17 sends the family to a new life in Moscow, it feels almost like a liberation for Alisa. Just how liberated can a teenaged girl who hasn’t spoken a word aloud be in the materialistic modern Moscow be?

Alisa takes a series of odd jobs and meets an assortment of odd characters around the city. After one of her wishes comes with an uncomfortable price tag Alisa swears off wishing and then falls into despair until she meets a man with despair of his own. Alicia instantly falls for successful salesman Sasha but her attempts to romance him seemed destined to fail. Alisa recovers her voice and finds her magic again, but is that enough to bring about her happy ending?

Mermaid is a beautifully shot, visually arresting film with a rich palette of colors and textures. The camera work is top notch and there’s always something to catch your eye. Melikian and crew successfully created a world both real and fantastic all at once. Particularly enjoyable were the many views of the many views of the rustic rural seashore and the busy metropolis of Moscow. The plot presents some interesting concepts but the story isn’t always interesting–there were several scenes that felt unnecessary and some of the eccentric characters that Alisa encountered seemed added in just to give Alisa something to do for a few minutes while she wandered the city’s streets. Alisa herself is clearly meant to be likeable but I found it hard to warm up to her. Still, the movie has much to offer fans of films that combine fantasy with realism; those who prefer their fairy tales to stay on the sweet side might want to take a pass on this one but those who don’t mind a bit of the sour might find much to savor in Mermaid.

Mermaid plays Saturday, May 24 at 1:15 pm at the Egyptian Theater and Monday, May 26 at Pacific Place.

Despite the absence of last year’s free flowing mimosas that made last year’s press launch for the Seattle International Film Festival such a pleasure for Josh and I, this year’s press launch offered an exciting preview of what is surely to be one the best year’s yet for North America’s largest film festival. 

To give you an idea of just how huge the festival (which runs from May 22 - June 15 this year) is, consider some numbers:  there are 418 films, with 69 countries of orgin represented.  There are 191 features, 57 documentary features, 7 archival films, 4 Secret Festival films, and 170 short films.  Within all those films there are 43 world premieres, 38 North America premieres and 19 US premieres.  That’s a lot of new films.  The festival includes a number of competitions and awards, including the New Directors Showcase, the New American Cinema, the Documentary Competition, the Short Film Competition, the MyFestival competion, and, of course, the Golden Space Needle Awards handed out at the end of the festival to honor SIFF’s most well-received films. 

SIFF presents four gala nights this year: the opening night gala on May 22 features Battle In Seattle, the directorial debut of Irish actor Stuart Townsend that uses a highly regarded ensemble cast including Charlize Theron, Woody Harrelson, Andre Benjamin, Joshua Jackson, Ray Liotta, and many more to dramatize the events of the 1999 WTO riots here in Seattle; the closing night gala on June 14 features Bottle Shock, another based on real life feature, this one about the shockwaves sent around the world in 1978 when the Paris Tastings revealed that Californians could produce wine every bit as good, if not better, than the French; the centerpiece gala on June 6 is the Sean McGinley-directed feature, The Great Buck Howard in which Colin Hanks, son of Tom, plays a law school drop out who takes a job as a personal assistant to a “mentalist” played by John Malkovich, much to the dismay of his father, played by his father, Tom Hanks; and the Gay-la Extravaganza on May 29th which will screen Kiss the Bride in which a man attempts to “rescue” his high school boyfriend from the woman he is about to marry only to discover that the situation is a little more complex than he’d thought.

Other series within the festival include:

Films4Families, an 11:00 a.m. matinee every Saturday and Sunday during the festival featuring programming suitable for children and appealing for adults as well - one highlight of this series is a screening of the French animated film Princess of the Sun during which a cast of professional voice actors will perform the English subtitles live for the benefit of those too young to read them.

Northwest Connections spotlights films made in and connected to the Pacific Northwest, including the world premieres of Good Food, a cinematic tour of Washington state farms and ranches committed to raising their crops and their livestock organically and The Dark Horse, a feature about a Seattle ballet teacher who returns to her childhood home on Orcas Island when her father becomes mentally ill.

The Archival Presentations series screens some rarely seen archival films dating from 1914 to 1968.  Among the films in this stand out series are the epic Alexander Nevsky, a 1938 film from the Soviet Union that will be accompanied by a live performance by the Seattle Symphony of the original score and F.W. Murneau’s 1927 film Sunrise, considered by many film historians and critics to be one of the greatest films ever made.

Alternate Cinema is what SIFF calls its series of avante-garde features and shorts, including the US premiere of Milky Way, a psychedelic and minimalist look at the modern wold and Dust, a documentary about the constructive and destructive qualities of dust.

Documentaries are one of my favorite types of films and SIFF never disppoints with their selections - this year two of the many excellent documentaries that will be screened include Man on a Wire, about Phillipe Petit’s 1974 walk across a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center and Werner Herzog’s Arctic exploration, Encounters at the End of the World. 

Face the Music is a series of eight documentaries about music, including Patti Smith: Dream of Life, a film about the legendary performer filmed over 11 years, and the real-life “Spinal Tap” saga of Anvil, a Canadian metal band who once played stadiums and now scratch out a living in didn’t-you-used-to-be?-land, still hoping for their next big break in Anvil! The Story of Anvil.

Other series within the festival include Emerging Masters, a celebration of four contemporary filmmakers who are poised to become film’s next generation of masters; Contemporary World Cinema, presenting 116 films from more than 50 countries; SIFF ShortsFest Weekend, a full weekend of themed short film packages; Planet Cinema, independent films meant to inspire public action in regards to world’s environmental threats; and Midnight Adrenaline, a series of “the terrifying and the weird”.

Talking Pictures pairs special guests with their favorite films; John Waters speaks presents his film Cecil B. Demented, Seattle Shakespeare Company’s Stephanie Shine presents Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo & Juliet, and Howard Patterson of The Flying Karamazov Brothers presents Jackie Chan’s The Young Master.

The Fly Filmmaking Challenge charged local filmmakers to create, shoot and edit a film in a mere 19 days and 1 hour and SIFF FutureWave inspires the next generation of filmmakers through a series of screenings, workshops and activities, including their own Superfly challenge.

One great addition to the festival is the Northwest Production Summit Panels, designed to educate would-be film producers on how to get their start.

No less great is SIFF Interactive:  MyFestival is an online based audience competition to program a screening on the final day of the festival and SIFF talk, debuting May 8, is behind the scenes podcast featuring SIFF coverage and filmmaker interviews.  Babelbum, a free, interactive internet TV service launches SIFF channel with short films and more from this and previous years’ festivals on May 21 and Film.com offers a short film of the day every day during the festival. 

Tickets for SIFF will be available on May 8 for SIFF supporters and May 11 for everyone else.  

image, via The Astounded Mr. Davis

Where were you people last night? You certainly weren’t at the Crocodile. Were you at the WaMu Theatre for Interpol, which was sure to be the most boring show on earth? At Neumo’s, planning to kidnap Graham Wright to give to me for my fantasy muppet band? At home, huddled in the dark around that charcoal grill we told you not to bring inside? In a way, I’m glad you weren’t there. Part of me wants these bands to get famous because they deserve it, but the rest of me wants their shows to stay in small cozy rooms with little friendly crowds.

It’s difficult for me to review a show from either of the bands, because seeing them play is a lot like the best parts of a long distance relationship–I see them so seldom and so briefly that I just don’t have the time to become accustomed to the quirks, to be annoyed by what might irritate newer, less fond viewers. (Like the reviewer from The Scenester who was made so uncomfortable by MAPC’s lack of stage presence that she found it more comfortable to stare at her own shoes, for example.) I find all of the awkwardness and self-deprecation and occasional forgotten lyrics charming, which would perhaps not be the case if any of them played as often as I’d like them to. I am remarkably uncool, it’s true, but it’s seldom that I descend into squeeing fandom so completely. So it’s most important that you know that you missed something wonderful at the Crocodile last night.
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photo, the parselmouths [flickr]

Because no one (including most of the other metbloggers. silent tear.) read to the end of my post gushing over the thrills of wizard week [mb], a friendly reminder that The University Bookstore is deep in the throes of WizRockStock. The culmination is a massive party tomorrow, when the store will be transformed into Diagon Alley, wonderful wizards will play music, activities abound, and fans will finally be able to get their hands on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at the stroke of midnight.

Until then, there are plenty of ways to avoid spoilers from evil Death Eater-affiliated book reviewers breaking embargoes, nasty filesharers passing around photos of the final volume, and heartless blog posters discussing the former. Join the Dumbledore Lives! protest today at the store and get a limited edition button. Throughout the week, the store also is collecting predictions about what will happen to Harry Potter, whether Snape is good or evil, and who survives Rowling’s final pages. Make your guesses official and the favorites will be read at the release party. Kids can also get their Horcrux Passports stamped for a chance to win great prizes. Finally, for those times that you can’t be in line waiting for a book, there are also a few podcasts featuring the Parselmouths (local snobby, but not evil, Slytherin purveyors of bouncy electro-rock!).

Here’s the massive lineup for Friday night:

Friday • July 20 • 6pm HP7 Release Party

Board the Hogwarts Express at platform 9 3/4 (in front of the U District Store). Pick up your Marauder’s Map at the front door and navigate your way through Diagon Alley, complete with Honeydukes, Ollivanders, Flourish & Blotts, Gringotts, Quality Quidditch Supplies, Gambol and Japes, Madam Malkin’s Robes for All Occasions, and The Leaky Cauldron.

There are plenty of activities to keep you occupied until midnight:

Play Quidditch.

Rock out with The Parselmouths, Catchlove, Alas Earwax!, Firenze and the Centaurs of the Forbidden Forest, and the The Weird Sisters.

Hone your potion-making skills.

Have your picture taken as a Harry Potter character.

Craft your own wand. (Does yours have a phoenix feather at its core?) Design an HP7 book cover.

Screen scenes from The Wizard Rockumentary: A Movie About Rocking and Rowling and participate in a Q & A with one of the creators.

Restore your energy with a couple of Dante’s Inferno Dogs, and try Butterbeer and Pumpkin Juice at our Honeydukes café.

Keep the comments spoiler-free, but feel free to discuss whether revealing plot points is more or less forgivable than using one of the Unforgivable Curses.

Saturday started, not with SIFF, but with Fremont’s annual effort to make Seattle’s other neighborhoods look normal. Yes, it was Solstice Parade time in the center of the universe. Depending on your feelings about body paint, nudity on bicycles, an army of belly dancing Egyptians bringing the procession to a standstill, and other sundry statements on topics ranging from marijuana-friendly slugs, mind-expanding mathematics, and the Bush administration, you can decide whether it’s fortunate or unfortunate that the battery on my camera promptly died as my group stumbled from brunch to our staked-out spot on the sidewalk. Say what you will about Fremonters, but those people respect the sheet! Prime territory marked in the morning with bedclothes and paperweights remained invasion-free until our arrival.

It turned out that the predominant environmentalism in the parade’s floats provided a nice lead-in to the day’s first SIFFing. At the Neptune, Arctic Tale was having it’s world premiere. Part G-rated polar porn with cute overload shots of newborn polar bear cubs, National Geographic also manages to make resolutely weird-looking walruses appealing, overcoming oddness with devoted family structures. Occasional goofy soundtrack moments (”Celebration”, “We Are Family”) and Queen Latifah’s narration lends a more storytelling than science lecture feeling, often with laugh-inducing descriptions including things like walruses “getting up in each other’s business”. In case you miss the environmental points among the walrus farts and stunning wildlife footage demonstrating that melting icecaps are no picnic for wildlife, a cast of children show up along with the end credits with pointers about reversing some of the damage that humans have inflicted on the planet.

A ticket mix-up meant that I didn’t make it to the screening of Evening, which was reportedly very nicely made and entirely enjoyable. I have to confess that I was a little bit relieved that I was forced forgo a sappy love story in favor of Maria Yatskova’s Miss Gulag, ostensibly about a beauty pageant in a Russian women’s prison. While the movie is about the competition, it is also about the bleak conditions in the post-Soviet era, high unemployment rates driving young women to violent crime, and a new model for incarceration and rehabilitation. I suspect that Yatskova and her crew were very limited in what they were allowed to present, because after watching the intertwined stories of three women (one in the middle of her sentence, another up for parole, as well as a recent “graduate” of the system who faced joblessness and insurmountable bureaucracy and almost seemed to long for her days of incarceration), I left thinking that detention didn’t seem that bad. I guess it’s a statement on current conditions in Siberia on either side of “the fence”.

Later, I caught up with my Evening-going friends at the post-screening party at the Daughters of the American Revolution House on Capitol Hill. As if being at a party at the D.A.R. House wasn’t an odd enough sensation, people from two of the most (intentionally, I think) confusing world premieres of the festival were among the guests.

Both Cthulhu and One Day Like Rain [siff] seemed concerned with impending apocalypse and environmental collapse, but beyond that, I’d be hard-pressed to explain the details. The former, made by Grant Cogswell and Daniel Gildark takes H. P. Lovecraft, throws in a gay love story, and transports the action to the Pacific Northwest moodily shot in deeply saturated tones by Sean Kirby. Call me a sucker for art direction and polar bears, but the look of the picture (even in the Neptune, where the director complained about the video projection) makes it worth checking out for locals interested in finding out what was happening in that ominous building behind Piecora. It’s also turning into the biggest source of water-cooler discussion in the Slog’s comments section; so catch it this afternoon [siff] if you want in on the opinion warfare.

One Day Like Rain takes almost the opposite course, to nonetheless interesting if not head-scratching effect. Where Cthulhu soaked the incomprehensible in rich visual textures and heavy performances, Paul Todisco cast most of his story of metaphysical teens that tumbled out of his subconscious over a week with in the flat oppressive suburban Southern California sunlight and disaffected line readings. Reminiscent of David Lynch, if only in its refusal to present a clear explanation for any of the plot points, the interruption scenes of speechless creatures on a parched landscape, and Becky Stark making a dreamlike appearance to one of the characters, I left the screening feeling incredibly uncertain about what I’d just seen. I suspect that was partially the point.

As the party continued, volunteer bartenders generously poured Bombay Sapphire into customized SIFF drinks and I convinced a friend to ask Daniel Waters about whether he and Simon Baker intentionally wore matching shirts to the premiere of their funny Sex and Death 101 [siff], about the agony and ecstasy of receiving a complete list of a lifetime’s worth of sexual partners when you’re only a third of the way through (with a nice performance by Winona Ryder and comedy from Patton Oswalt sprinkled throughout). It turns out that it was a complete accident and that the shirts weren’t as identical as they looked from the audience.

It was around this time that guy appeared in a glowing jacket and carrying what looked like sticks intended to be set ablaze. To my relief, they remained unignited throughout, but this is the sort of thing that only heightens the value of checking out these SIFF parties. Go and you might run into actresses or the guy who played a monster in Cthulhu! The closing gala is tonight, do your best to secure a ticket before the festival disappears for another year.

I’d leave the 3-D glasses at home this weekend, friends: the Egyptian is showing A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of ultraviolence. I’ve never actually seen the film all the way through at once, because I am a big baby, but I’ve read the novel by Anthony Burgess a few times.

The movie follows Alex, the leader of a small gang of thugs, who roams around creating violence and mayhem until his gang turns on him and leaves him at the scene of a robbery. He goes to jail and is eventually subjected to aversion therapy treatment, where his eyes are held open while he is shown scenes of extreme violence. This treatment renders him unable to be violent any longer, not even in self-defense. And then everything really goes downhill.

Clockwork Orange was nominated for a bunch of Oscars, but lost all of them to The French Connection. It caused considerable controversy at the time, mostly because of the extreme sexual violence, and possibly even spawned copycat attacks in the United Kingdom. It’s generally considered to be one of the greatest films ever made.

A Clockwork Orange plays Friday and Saturday at midnight. The Egyptian is located at 805 East Pine St.

quick! can you spot grant cogswell in this cgi melee?

Hello, and welcome to Grey’s Anatomy [abc] ripped from the headlines and made much more horrific! After the jump, a recap of part one (of several) about what happens when a Washington State Ferry and a Cargo Ship meet in a “fog bank”.
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In last week’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy [abc], officially named after a Belle & Sebastian song, Seattle Grace Hospital gets a visit from a dehydrated runner and an escaped Amish. George deals with his dad’s death, the senior doctors scramble upon hearing rumors of the Chief’s retirement, and Bailey has a dream. All of this in the unsurprisingly delayed recap. After the jump.
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