While you were away . . .

The Wild Blue Yonder
Tuesday November 8, 7:30pm Seattle Art Museum

An evening with Werner Herzog featured the North American Premier of his latest, "The Wild Blue Yonder", a strange, fictitious, quasi-documentary starring Brad Dourif as an alien and self described failure. Herzog uses a combination of vintage newsreel, NASA and exotic Antarctic Ocean footage along with bizarre narration from Dourif shot in the California Ghost town of Niland to tell a story of human travel to a far off planet and convince the viewer that interstellar space travel is utterly absurd. "My firm belief is that there will be no space travel of any significance. There is nothing out there for us. There is nothing out there period!" Running over the montage of otherworldly images is a musical score of Sardinian and Senegalese folk music, including "Shepherd’s songs that date back to pre-history." The combination is at times tedious but at other times beautiful and hypnotic. The post-show discussion revealed Herzog to be thoughtful and engaging. He described Dourif as "My face, my appearance, my voice and my thought." Dourif chimed in with his own anecdotes, "I remember Werner calling me and saying, Brad, aliens suck!"
A big shout out to Scarecrow and SAM for this memorable evening!

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Tuesday November 15, 7:00pm The Harvard Exit

Tristram Shandy begins and ends with two bickering actors. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon start off crabbing over who gets top billing and end in a ridiculous competition of dueling Al Pacinos. Michael Winterbottom’s attempt to film Laurence Sterne's unfilmable novel tries hard to be part Fellini and part Rob Reiner, "A book that thick doesn’t have an index?" It is terribly funny and tremendously annoying at the same time. Nino Rota’s score from Amarcord is amusing for a minute but seems lazy and gauche after forty. Coogan as the adult Shandy narrates the birth of his character, over and over, and over, and over, and over, and over. At one point the filmmakers place him naked in a giant cutaway womb! The combination of idiotic humor, dirty jokes and hysterical laughs make Tristram Shandy a genuine guilty pleasure.

Coming attractions:

Turner Movie Classics will broadcast nine Harold Lloyd films to coincide with the dvd release of "The Harold Lloyd Collection" Sunday November 20, beginning with Safety Last, 1923 at 5:00pm and ending with Speedy, 1928 at 1:15am.

Michelangelo Antonioni's rarely seen 1975 masterpiece "The Passenger" starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider shows at the Varsity Theater Friday through Thursday, November 18 - 24. Familiar themes of ambiguous desperation in a beautifully austere setting rank this film among the directors best and make it a must see for Antonioni fans

Seattle Theater Groups continuing series of silent film resumes in January with three Cecil B. DeMille films. The Ten Commandments, 1923, a grand epic still unequalled, is followed by Carmen and The Cheat, both from 1915, Sundays at the Paramount Theater