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.

• SIFF screens Love and Honor, the final film of director Yoji Yamada’s samurai trilogy. Lower level samurai Shinnojo dreams of opening his own kendo dojo but his dreams are crushed when he goes blind after being poisoned while testing his shogun’s food. Complicating matters, his devoted wife begins an affair with a higher-ranking samurai in an attempt to secure her husband’s financial future, an affair which inspires the blind samurai to challenge his rival for a duel.
• Saturday at 10 am check out SIFF’s first selection in their Films4Families series, one of the best-known and best-loved films ever, The Wizard of Oz, a movie which is excellent on its own but even better when seen with an auidence.
• Speaking of SIFF selections, Garden Party, a 2008 festival selection, opens at the Varsity. A businesswoman bent on success by any means necessary and three young people trying to find themselves and their own paths are bound together by interwoven stories of the quest for success in up- and down-scale LA. Also at the Varsity are two other 2008 SIFF films: Encounters at the End of the World and Up the Yangtze.
• Midnight at the Egyptian: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the film adaptation of the legendary Hunter S. Thompson’s legendary book. Enhance your experience of the film by going to see it after you’ve seen the documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson at the Harvard Exit first.
• Northwest Film Forum continues their run of The Gits, a powerful documentary on the influential titular NW punk band.
  While most everyone knows the story of lead singer Mia Zapata’s brutal murder, the fim does an excellent job of showing that Zapata and her surviving band mates deserve to be remembered at least as much for their great music as for their tragic history.
• Also at NWFF is a new 35mm print of Charlie Chaplin’s film Monsieur Verdoux, possibly his most underrated movie and definitely one of his most brilliant, a dark comedy in which Chaplin plays the title character as an unemployed bank worker who turns to marriage and murder for profit.
• Enjoy your films outdoors: Friday at South Lake Union Cinema on the Lawn is the brilliant black comedy, Heathers, still easily one of Winona Ryder’s best performances in a film. Saturday night is “Outer Space Night” at Fremont Outdoor Cinema where they are screening Project Moonbase.

As part of their ongoing attempt to reach out to the broadest audience possible to present the finest of films, SIFF has launched a new series called Films4Families. Every other Saturday morning from July through August, SIFF Cinema will be screening a classic film appropriate for the whole family, from kids right on up to grandparents.

Some of the grandparents might’ve been kids themselves when the first film film in the series had its initial release. The Wizard of Oz is one of the most popular movies ever; in fact, it’s fair to say that The Wizard of Oz isn’t just a film, it’s also part of pop culture history. Even those rare few who’ve never seen the film have heard of it and can quote its line and make reference to its plot points. Originally released way back in 1939, The Wizard of Oz continues to charm and enchant people of all ages, including young kids who always seem to manage to look beyond the archaic special effects of the ’30s to discover the sweetness and wonder of its universally-resounding story.

The Wizard of Oz plays this Saturday, July 12, at 10 am.

Upcoming in the series: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, The Secret Garden, The Neverending Story, The Secret of Roan Inish, and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.

The International Fest of Cinema and Technology is a world tour of cinema designed to give exposure to independent films that might not otherwise get much attention from the public eye. Naturally there’s a stop in Seattle since we all love our movies so much here. IFCT takes place in Seattle this weekend, July 5 and 6, at Northwest Film Forum.

This is the 7th year of the ICFT; this year they’re showing a series of shorts programs. Just as short stories can often be more challenging to write than full-length novels, short films can sometimes be more challenging to produce that feature-length films. Having a lot of story to tell in a limited amount of time forces shorts filmmakers to be exceptionally creative in their use of resources both on and off the camera and the results are often amazing.

There are eight screening segments going on during the two days of the festival. Saturday’s segments include Experimental Films, Documentary Showcase, Films about Obsession and Love, and Variety. Sunday’s screenings include Young Actors Showcase, Animated Shorts, Focus on Romantic Stories, and Science Fiction showcase. Each segment offers up a number of great short films on its topic. Among the films are a documentary about bullfighting, a film about a long-distance relationship filmed through Skype and a webcam, and a sci-fi film about travel to an unknown underwater world. The films comes from all over the world, including the US, the UK, Canada, Portugal, Brazil, and more.

Check the IFCT website [site] for the schedule; tickets through their site, Brown Paper Tickets or at the door.

Northwest Film Forum is having a Hal Ashby film series this summer. Even if you don’t recognize his name, you’ve probably seen one of his movie as he was responsible for some of the most iconic movies made in the 1970’s, including Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Coming Home and Being There. All of those films (plus The Landlord, The Last Detail, and Bound for Glory will be screened during the series, which runs from July 1 through August 20.

To kick off the series, NWFF has invited actor/comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, himself an Ashby fan, to introduce The Landlord on Tuesday, July 1. As an added bonus, Goldthwait fans are invited to have a private drink with Goldthwait as part of a small group who will meet at the Grey Gallery before heading over to the film. Tickets for the film will be available at the door, but admission to the special event is by advance ticket only at Brown Paper Tickets.

Watching movies is fun. Being outside is fun. Watching movies and being outside at the same time? Super fun–and if you live in Seattle, very easy to do. There are a lot of outdoor movies this summer.

Last year I tried to create a complete directory of all the outdoor summer movie events around Seattle and discovered that it was a lot like trying to cut the heads off a Hydra. Every time I thought I had them all, I found that there were still more. Previous failure doesn’t mean I’m not going to give it yet another try–follow the jump to see what at least some of your outdoor movie watching opportunities are this season. If you plan it right, you could see Juno four times, The Goonies three times and still manage to fit in the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Seattle Center, which is likely to be a very interesting screening indeed.

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• As previously mentioned [#], SIFF Cinema re-opens with Guy Maddin’s clever and inventive “docufantasia” My Winnipeg
• The Varsity offers up a number of excellent choices: Up the Yangtze about the incredible changes affecting the legendary Chinese river and is one definitely worth seeing.
• By the time I first saw Monty Python & the Holy Grail at The Egyptian a few years back, I’d already seen it at least a dozen times and heard some of the more popular quotes from it at least a zillion but I went, anyway, curious to see if watching it on the big screen is any different from watching it at home. For me, the answer was “yes”. You might want to check it out for yourself at the Egyptian Friday and Saturday night at midnight.
• Central Cinema screens Girlfight, a film about a teenaged girl determined to become a boxer despite all the negative nellies in her life.
• Northwest Film Forum presents Frownland, Ronald Bronstein’s debut film, a black comedy in which a self-described “troll from under the bridge” struggles to make a life for himself in an uncaring New York City.
• Except for the time I idly scanned a dozen pages of one of the novels while waiting for my nails to dry, I have been largely untouched by the Harry Potter phenomenon so while I get that it’s a big deal for a lot of people, I had no idea that there was an entire genre of “wizard rock” bands inspired by the series. Apparently there are lots of “wizard rock” bands out there, enough to inspire an entire film about them. The Wizard Rockumentary: A Movie about Rocking and Rowling opens Friday at the Grand Illusion. Wizard rock bands Hogwarts Trainwreck, Colin and the Creeveys, and the Fizzing Whizbees play between showings on Friday and Saturday.
• Late night at the Grand Illusion: Mausoleum, a creepy 80s horror flick starring Marjoe Gortner and Bobbie Bresee in the tale of a woman turned savage by a devilish family curse. Too bad Harry Potter wasn’t around back then to cure her.
• Want to see a movie but don’t want to give up being inside? Head to Fremont Saturday for the first Fremont Outdoor Movies selection of the summer, Superbad.

If you were charged with creating a documentary about your hometown, how would you tell its story? Would you present a linear history or an examination of cultural trends throughout its various ages? Would you focus on the places or the people? If you were Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, known for his self-concious and surreal films (including The Saddest Music in the World and shorts like Fleshpots of Antiquity), you might create a truly original documentary like My Winnipeg, the film that reopens SIFF Cinema after the break following this year’s festival.

Maddin takes an extremely loose view of the documentary form with My Winnipeg, which he describes as a “docufantasia”, a strange term that perfectly fits this intriguing film. He presents the story of Winnipeg in a uniquely personal way, casting himself (as portrayed by actor Darcy Fehr) as a sleepwalking man trapped in his perpetually sleeping hometown by the power of his past. Maddin seeks escape from the ties that bind him to Winnipeg by recreating on film his personal history, a history which he seamlessly blends with Winnipeg’s civic history via archival footage (both actual and recreated) and old family movies combined with footage shot for the film in black and white to match the old noir films that he loves.

Noir influences one of the best choices Maddin made for his film–casting legendary noir film fatale Ann Savage (Detour) as his larger-than-life and wickedly funny mother. One of the film’s amusing conceits is that “Maddin”’s brother and sister are characters portrayed by actors he has hired to represent him but his other “really” is his mother. This meta-humor adds an excellent element of sly, self-mocking satire. The scenes featuring his mother are both cringe-inducing and hilarious, usually at the same time.

My Winnipeg tells its story in episodic form which allows Maddin room to present different chapters of the city’s history without straining for connection between events from different eras, using his musings on his family’s issues as a springboard to the city’s. If some of the facts he presents about Winnipeg seem too outrageous to be true, well, that’s part of the charm of the story. Ultimately, My Winnipeg becomes a dreamy concoction of a film that is both sharp-tongued and soft-hearted and ultimately offers up a suggestion of what “home” means in a way that seems more honest than a more straightfoward portrait of the city might offer. Maddin’s twisted vision of Winnipeg makes me want to visit it more than any travelogue could and left me happily pondering what makes my own hometown, Seattle, so meaningful to me.

My Winnipeg screens at SIFF Cinema June 27 - July 3.

Most of the films that played SIFF 2008 didn’t have distribution yet, but a some of them did. If you missed them during the festival, or just want to see them again, you’ll get a shot at a few this weekend. Plus, still more films!

• One of my favorite films of this year’s festival was Mongol, a gorgeously filmed historical drama based on the early life of the man who became Genghis Khan, leader of the world’s biggest empire. Epic battles and political infighting blend almost seamlessly with smaller, more intimate moments between the man who will be emperor and the love of his life, all set against a dazzling backgroup of richly detailed ancient cities and the harsh beauty of the steppes. At the Egyptian.
• Also at the Egyptian: this weekend’s Midnight Movie selection is The Crow.
• Savage Grace, at the Harvard Exit, is another SIFF selection. This one stars the incomparable Julianne Moore in the ooky based on real life story of the spectacularly dysfunctional Baekeland family.
• Metro Cinemas has The Children of Huang Shi another film based on actual historical events. (And another SIFF selection.) In this case an English journalist and an American nurse join with a Chinese partisan group leader to rescue 60 orphaned children imperiled in war-torn 1930s China.
• SIFF selection Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a documentary that takes a sharp look at the effect of performance enhancing drugs on our already intensely competitive culture on both a general and a very personal level. At the Varsity.
• Also at the Varsity: The Animation Show, a collection of independent animation from all over the world, collected by expert curator Mike Judge. Not appropriate for children.
• The Grand Illusion continues their “Best of the Rest” series celebrating five years of late night films with a late night showing of Joysticks, an 80s teen sex comedy centered on an overbearing father’s war against the kids at his local video arcade.
• If you’ve only ever seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo on a TV screen, rush down to the Grand Illusion for a 50th anniversary screening of this classic noir. Arguably Hitchcock’s greatest film, definitely one of his best, Vertigo is a complex thriller that’s worth viewing anywhere you see it, but there’s something particularly satisfying about watching it in a darkened theater with an audience perched on the edges of their seats in suspense. James Stewart and Kim Novak put up masterful performances and the excellent cinematography of Vertigo is what made me fall in love with San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge years before I first got the chance to see it in person.
• Northwest Film Forum hosts a benefit for Mercy Corps’ relief efforts in China for the victims of the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, China, with a showing of Made in China, a 2007 SIFF selection and director John Heide’s documentary inspired by his father’s boyhood as a young American in pre-World War II China that focuses on a community of other Americans with similar childhoods. Friday, June 20.
• Also at NWFF: Passing Poston, a moving documentary that examines the lives of four Japanese American former internees at the Poston Relocation Center begins Friday, June 20. The directors will be in attendance on Friday night; Friday and Saturday feature appearance by Ruth Okimoto, one of the film’s subjects, and Saturday after 4 pm there’s a panel discussion with local Japanese Americans to talk about this sad and shameful chapter in American history.
• Rabbit in the Moon, which begins Saturday, June 21, at NWFF is a documentary by sisters Emiko Omori and Chizuko Omari on their own family’s experience at an internment camp, the mysterious silence surrounding the death of their mother there, and the lingering anxieties and social issues that continue to haunt their community even now.

Bottle Shock, SIFF’s closing night gala film, tells the story of the events leading up to the 1976 Paris Tastings when Napa wines first beat French wines in a blind taste testing, putting California wines in the global spotlight and changing the wine industry forever. If you weren’t a serious wine drinker back in the 70s, you might not realize what a big deal this really was but if you’re drinking wines from California or Australia or even from here in Washington today, you are drinking the results of that tasting.

“Growing up, I remember a moment when my parents quit drinking French wine and started drinking Californian wine,” says Bottle Shock director Randy Miller, “but I never really knew why.” As an adult, he and his partner Jody Savin were presenting a film at the Sonoma film festival when they were presented with a script about that very subject. Miller and Savin, co-writers and co-producers of Bottle Shock were impressed by the ideas in the script but it didn’t really suit the type of movie they wanted to make. After doing some research, they met the Barretts, father and son winemakers whose Chardonnay made such an impact on the Parisian judges and found their film’s story in the lives of this contentious and yet loving family who managed an international impact with their dogged determination to prove that you don’t have to be French to make good wine.

You also don’t have to be an oenophile to enjoy Bottle Shock. Wine is the focus of the film but at its heart, it’s a movie about finding success after overcoming what look like overwhelming odds. “I like underdog stories, but I don’t like sports,” says Miller, who believes that a general audience can appreciate the Barretts’ achievment regardless of their knowledge of wine. “It’s not a ‘rah rah US’ movie, not a war or sports movie. It’s not us versus them.” The true story he says is more than California wines “beating” French wines, it’s that until this tasting people really did believe that truly great wine could only be made in France; the tastings showed that common wisdom isn’t always the same thing as truth.

Miller points out that one of the other lingering results of the tastings is that over the years wine has become more and more of a popular drink–it’s not just for connoisseurs. He reports that the Barretts say that wine is starting to pass beeer as the liquor of choice for young adults, even in such unlikely seeming venues as NASCAR. “It’s not just the ‘two-buck chuck’ but nicer wine,” he says.

Bottle Shock stars Alan Rickman, Bill Pullman, Chris Pine, Rachael Taylor, Freddy Rodriguez, Eliza Dushku, and Dennis Farina, all of whom were attracted to the film by its strong story. If you can’t make it to the gala tonight, be on the look out for Bottle Shock when it returns to Seattle in August.

August also marks the 21st annual “Auction of Washington Wines” at Chateau Ste. Michelle. Washington has an excellent wine industry of its own–for more information visit the Washington Wine Commission [site].