Your Neighborhood Movie Joint
My new favorite movie theater in Seattle is the Central Cinema at 21st and Union, where you can sit in a booth eating pizza and drinking beer while watching a movie. A very hospitable waitstaff comes by to take your order and bring the food in a timely manner. I had an anchovie pizza with a Hales Cream Ale, and both were first rate.
On the program for the night was a feature called Mobile Exposure, a part of their Independent Exposure Series on the 2nd Wednesday of every month (see more on Mobile Exposure at www.microcinema.com).
I have to say that the series this last Wednesday was a fairly mixed bag. I think every film was shot with a hand-held, digital device of some kind or another, and in more than a few instance this meant a phone. Like the one you have. Sometimes this was interesting, but plenty of times this basically added up to a home movie. Once or twice this added up to a home movie with a plot rather cruelly inflicted upon it. The standout selection was a piece entitled SMS 13 (Stop Motion Studies), directed by David Crawford, consisting pretty simply of lurid shots of people on a subway (by 'lurid' I mean the photography itself, not the subject matter). Really not much more than you might see on your commute home from the Charles MGH stop, but then I think that's the point. Many of the other features were interesting, but sometimes the abstraction of the human form struck me as more dehumanizing than anything else.
On the program for the night was a feature called Mobile Exposure, a part of their Independent Exposure Series on the 2nd Wednesday of every month (see more on Mobile Exposure at www.microcinema.com).
I have to say that the series this last Wednesday was a fairly mixed bag. I think every film was shot with a hand-held, digital device of some kind or another, and in more than a few instance this meant a phone. Like the one you have. Sometimes this was interesting, but plenty of times this basically added up to a home movie. Once or twice this added up to a home movie with a plot rather cruelly inflicted upon it. The standout selection was a piece entitled SMS 13 (Stop Motion Studies), directed by David Crawford, consisting pretty simply of lurid shots of people on a subway (by 'lurid' I mean the photography itself, not the subject matter). Really not much more than you might see on your commute home from the Charles MGH stop, but then I think that's the point. Many of the other features were interesting, but sometimes the abstraction of the human form struck me as more dehumanizing than anything else.
posted by Quin Finnegan at 11:57 PM
2 Comments:
We went to see "The Squid and the Whale" tonight at The Big Picture in Seattle. Have you been there? Extremely cool, a full bar and fancy popcorn buckets.
The movie was good, but I felt dissatisfied with it in much the same way I was dissatisfied with "In The Bedroom" -- great acting, emotionally edgy situation, but needing of further development somehow. Like an entire novel's worth of development. That being said, Lickona has some perceptive comments about the film here and here and here.
No, I haven't; but having checked out the website I'm going to be sure to see something there soon. The opportunity of watching Juliet Binoche (in Caché) with a Maker's Mark in hand is one I won't pass up.
"Squid and the Whale" looks interesting to me, if for no other reason than it has Wes Anderson's name attached to it, whose "Rushmore" I liked a lot. I liked "In The Bedroom," a lot, but yeah, it was hard to see how it got to the point that it did near the end. But I still liked it.
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