Recent Stories in Film & TV

Back in November, I attended a wonderful short film festival called Couch Fest. Tomorrow, they will be holding a 90-minute screening of their best films at Northwest Film Forum.

The premise of Couch Fest is pretty simple: a few brave souls open up their homes to a slew of random strangers and show a series of short films. They vote for their favorites and sit next to each other in awkward silence or sharing timid conversations. Every hour, the strangers leave and a new batch strolls in.

For socially chilly Seattle, the festival is quite a departure from the stereotypical norm. Even this native Washingtonian found himself chatting with strangers about the short animation that just blew our minds or the awesome one-minute film of a lion roaring. For some reason, sharing a couch in a stranger's house (or garage) with a bunch of other strangers makes us a little less estranged.

To get a taste of how awesome this festival is (minus the couches), stop by the Northwest Film Forum at 1515 12th Ave, this Sunday at 3 p.m. Admission is free.

Last week, I was too caught up in the Sundance bubble to pay attention to what was coming out on DVD (answer: nothing), so let's just focus on this week's releases, care of our good friends at Scarecrow Video. (And check out their take on Tuesday's Oscar noms for all your Academy Award-preparation needs.)

Woody Harrelson may have just received an Oscar nomination for The Messenger--as far as I'm concerned, he should've gotten one for No Country for Old Men--but his work in Zombieland is strong, too. Sure, it's a light-hearted action-horror-comedy, but Harrelson is so, so right as a hick who loves killing zombies. The flick as a whole is downright fun, and there's even a celebrity cameo in the latter half that delightfully has not yet been ruined for everyone by spoiler-happy critics (looking at you, Anthony Lane). 

Speaking of the New Yorker, the mag makes a cameo of its own in Cold Souls, a metariffic existential comedy by director Sophie Barthes, starring America's Schlubheart™ Paul Giamatti as Paul Giamatti. Burdened by the emotional toll doing Ibsen has had on his psyche, Giamatti has his soul removed and put into storage for the duration of Uncle Vanya's run. Of course, things aren't as simple as that, especially when a Russian soul smuggling ring gets into the mix....

Friday, Feb. 5 at 7:30 p.m., SAM begins a three-part retrospective of the films of Richard Pryor with Silver Streak, a 1976 Hitchcockian spoof starring Gene Wilder as a publisher trying to relax by taking a train across the country, only to get caught up in a murder mystery. On Feb. 12, the series continues with Blue Collar, and closes up on Feb. 19 with the legendary Richard Pryor: Live on Sunset Strip. Tickets for the series are $20 ($17 for members) or $7 per film.

Back in the 1970s, low-budget filmmakers pushed the envelope 'til it ripped asunder, parlaying extreme sex, violence, political incorrectness, and mountains of Just Plain Strange before the disbelieving eyes of theater and drive-in audiences the world over.

That reckless maverick spirit's been largely neutered from modern cinema: Multiplexes of the 21st century brim with sanitized, corporate-endorsed product, and reality TV serves as the watered-down virgin cocktail substitute for the megawatt absinthe that was Bell-Bottom-Era Grindhouse Fare. But that spirit of yore's not totally dead as long as director Frank Henenlotter lives.

Henenlotter's been cooking up his own brand of bizarre, extreme, and often grotesquely-hilarious horror/exploitation for quite some time. A child of the epicenter of the Grindhouse (New York's pre-Disneyfied 42nd Street), Henenlotter channeled his own love for the base and the bizarre into cult classics like Basket Case (the story of a cannibalistic Siamese twin who resides in a wicker basket, and the brother who loves him) and Frankenhooker (now that's a title, friends)....

The incredibly charming Julius Shulman is the subject of Visual Acoustics (through February 4 at the Northwest Film Forum). The documentary is narrated by Dustin Hoffman, and takes you on a tour of the great modernist landscape of Los Angeles, with the photographer who chronicled the architectural movement's rise.

It's a surprisingly poignant film, in that it also introduces you to Shulman near the very end of his life (he died in 2009 at the age of 98), as his photographic archives are being transported to the Getty. Sprinkled with L.A. celebrities (both people and homes), the film takes you inside masterpieces both monumental and--in contrast--miniature. If you are a photographer, an architect, or just want to pretend you were there, this is the film for you.