DRUNKEN MASTER: Back in college, we had one wild night that involved too much beer, too much tequila, too much KFC, watching Jackie Chan's Drunken Master II, and ended with someone attacking a drug dealer with chicken bones. Craziness! Now you too can have that experience thanks to the good people at Kung Fu Grindhouse. Tonight, they're taking over the Sunset Tavern in Ballard starting at 7 for a marathon showing of three classic kung......

SIFF Cinema's Jean-Luc Godard celebration continues with 1962's Vivre sa vie, showing today through August 28. The mysteriously lovely Anna Karina stars as Nana in this--for the hermetic Godard--popular film about an aspiring young actress's secondary career choice: she becomes a prostitute. Godard is as much a critic as auteur; he keeps a critical distance from his own films. Here, the story is chopped into twelve segments, fighting any sense of cinematic immersion with a......

For eleven more days, it's all Godard all the time, and this week's roster features most of the French auteur's greatest hits. Tonight it's Tarantino's favorite heist flick Band of Outsiders, tomorrow is Masculine Feminine, Wednesday is Pierrot le Fou, Thursday is the startling directorial debut Breathless, and the week-long run of the new 35mm print of Vivre Sa Vie starts this Friday. That leaves Saturday morning for the best Godard film of all time:......

Interior: A mysterious downtown Seattle condo known only as "Seattlest HQ."Characters: A mysterious blond woman slightly cuter than Brigitte Bardot (to be referred to as Femme Seattlest-Hater) and a mysterious man not quite as cute as Michel Piccoli wearing nothing but a towel and black socks (to be known as Homme Seattlest-Hater). Cue that awful Contempt theme music, whatever it's called, that plays over and over again throughout the movie. Homme Seattlest-Hater: What is a......

HAPPY HOUR!: The Seattlest crew is clambering out of our darkened basements, adjusting our sun-starved eyes to the light of day, and exposing ourselves to our readers by showing up to the first ever Seattlest happy hour at Moe Bar, tonight from five to eight. Come, meet (and get hit on) by your favorite Seattlest contributor, share your feelings with us about how much you hate our reviews, or just plain use it as an......

Guy Maddin films are not for everyone. With his love of silent film flourishes and his often bizarre sense of humor, Maddin can easily confound viewers. To wit: we have a good friend who lives and breathes cinema. He likes his films weird and dark and avant garde. But even he says of Maddin, "I just can't handle the guy." Well, think again Nick, because Guy Maddin's latest critically-acclaimed film, "docu-fantasia" My Winnipeg has......

The end is near! You're running out of chances to stand in line for a SIFF film, so if you haven't yet, get on it. Things wrap up this weekend. In the meantime, here's the rundown on our picks for today through Thursday. It's quite a week. For all SIFF screenings, the general/member ticket prices are $11/$9 (and matinees $8/$7), except for gala screenings and other special events, which cost more. It's your last chance......

Now that SIFF is officially kicked off, it's time to look ahead at the films coming up in the next month. For all film screenings, the general/member ticket prices are $11/$9 (and matinees $8/$7), except for gala screenings and other special events, which cost more. The opening weekend's lineup is really solid--kinda a shame, considering everyone's out of town for Memorial Day (including us). Seattlest applies our well-honed knowledge of all things cinema to......

TO TELL THE TRUTH: We in the Seattlest newsroom love a good controversy. When it involves a literary sensation and Oprah, the intrigue is doubly delicious. So you can bet that number one on our list of things to do tonight is go to Town Hall to see James Frey and Josh Kilmer-Purcell for a night of readings from two "memorists turned novelists." Frey admitted on Oprah that what he wrote about getting over his......

DARK, CRAZY MEMORIES: Augusten Burroughs has a new memoir out—A Wolf at the Table. We don't have it yet, but a friend who does says it's exquisite. He'll be hitting Town Hall tonight to read from it. The Town Hall site sums up the story quite well: "Burrough’s dark story follows the radical pendulum swing between love and hate—stunning psychological cruelty, and ultimately, the redemptive power of hope." 7:30 p.m. // Town Hall // Free......

Who doesn't love West Side Story? Communists? Nihilists? Secret Muslims? With Stephen Sondheim's lyrics, Leonard Bernstein's score, and Jerome Robbins' fabulous choreography, the end result is one of the greatest musicals ever brought to big screen. A new 35mm print of West Side Story is showing this Saturday at SIFF Cinema as part of their United Artists 90th Anniversary film series. There's a matinee screening of the film Saturday at 2pm, but Saturday evening's......

Once again, SIFF is upon us. Even though there are still three weeks until opening night, with today's press launch, things are gearing up for the 34th Seattle International Film Festival. Running a full 25 days, SIFF will present 191 narrative features, 57 documentary features, and 170 short films from 69 countries, including 43 World Premieres (16 features, 27 shorts), 38 North American Premieres (19 features, 19 shorts) and 19 US Premieres (10 features,......

There's just a little bit of time left before SIFF 2008's opening night, and in between now and then, SIFF Cinema is hosting the United Artists 90th Anniversary film series. To celebrate the studio's 90th birthday next year, the touring tribute covers films from the mid-'50s to 1980, the decades when UA was at the height of its powers. Not like right now, when the relaunched studio's attempt at a comeback (Tom Cruise's Hitler-killing......

MUSIC: If you're not taking the ferry Friday night to Bremerton's Admiral Theatre to catch Death Cab for Cutie (we understand if you're not, it's a real schlep) and if you don't have tickets to Blitzen Trapper/Fleet Foxes at Neumo's (it's sold out), then my god, what the hell were you planning on doing? How about a trip up to Everett for the Everett Symphony's Tribute to Burt Bacharach. (We agree, Mrs. Hendy, he......

BOOKS: Marjane Satrapi--she grew up in Iran so you don't have to--is speaking at the Moore tonight. Best known for her graphic memoir Persepolis (Now a major motion picture!), Satrapi is also the author and illustrator of Embroideries and Chicken with Plums, along with several children's books. 7:30 p.m. // Moore Theatre, 1932 Second Avenue // Tickets: $25-$32 SCIENCE: Buddhist-friendly pediatric psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, co-director of the UCLA Mindful Awareness Center, has written a......

It took filmmaker Jennifer Fox four years, seventeen countries, and 1,600 hours of footage (which she whittled down to 6 hours of film) to fully cover the cross-cultural confusion of modern womanhood. The project didn't start out that high-minded; Jennifer was dating two men and not entirely happy with either, which led to an identity crisis that inspired her travels exploring what it means to be a woman today. The result is her sweeping,......

Since SIFF is kicking off its Global Lens series this weekend, we stopped in to catch South Africa's Bunny Chow, the film debut from John Barker. We were told it wasn't "about" race and apartheid, but it does begin with some homespun moralizing about bunny chow and how Johannesburg is a melting pot, before it gets going: three comics at various stages in their careers take a road trip to a big music festival. (The......

The above globe-trotting, film-splicing trailer is for the Global Lens Series, starting up at SIFF Cinema this weekend. The series of ten films from nine countries runs now through April 3rd, highlighting the work from several countries not exactly known for their film industries, like The Philippines, Lebanon, and Argentina. Five years ago, Global Film Initiative conceived of a project that would promote cross-cultural understanding through the medium of cinema, and encourage filmmaking in......

Girls Rock! is a documentary about a week-long summer camp in Portland where girls between the ages of 8 and 18 go to learn how to make music, form bands, and perform in front of a live audience at a showcase. Tonight it opens at SIFF Cinema. We got to watch the movie earlier this month and loved it. The stories of the girls the filmmakers followed were funny, touching, entertaining and illuminating. The movie,......

Tonight's show deserves special attention because Reign of Terror is, to our knowledge, the only noir film set during the French revolution. NoirFan62 says: The great Anthony Mann takes a film that would probably play mostly as a colorful, sweeping, epic piece dealing with the French revolution and turns it, with the help of cinematographer John Alton, into a dark, shadowy and claustrophobic film noir/adventure/spy/suspense tale period piece featuring excellent performances from a cast that......

SIFF Cinema's Noir City Festival has a double-feature not many of you have seen before: Moonrise / Night Has a Thousand Eyes. The festival benefits the Film Noir Foundation, whose mission is to find and preserve noir titles in danger of being lost or irreparably damaged. Says Noir of the Week: Moonrise was once to be a William Wellman A-list picture with Jimmy Stewart or John Garfield but ended up in the lap of Charles......

Today SIFF hosts the Seattle opening of the documentary The Rape of Europa, about the efforts to save art stolen and/or desecrated by the Nazis in the runup to and during WWII. The Stranger loves it. The Seattle Times loves it. By all accounts, Seattlest shouldn't be as excited by this movie as we are, but we find something poetic about the preservation of culture in the face of war. For now we'll leave you......

SIFF Cinema's Rialto film series continues through February 7, with a double-feature each night.Pepe le Moki / Quai des Orfevres Monday, Feb 4, 7pm Umberto D. / The Fallen Idol Tuesday, Feb 5, 7pm The Milky Way / Murderous Maids Wednesday, Feb 6, 7pm Mouchette / Au Hasard Balthazar Thursday, Feb 7, 7:30pmTonight is gritty French gangsters, tomorrow, a feast for any Italo-Anglophiles out there: Scorsese says Umberto D. is as good as it gets,......

We can guarantee that when you think of French New Wave cinema, a sultry feeling of cool washes over you. Suddenly, even if you can't name one French New Wave film, you're driven to wander forlornly down moodily lit city streets wondering where your lover has gone while an ultra-cool soundtrack plays in the background and your lover is trapped, desperately trying to reach you. All of that is thanks to Louis Malle's Elevator to......

Ah, those crazy Frenchies, at it again. This time, they're going to pull off a robbery. The gang that couldn't shoot straight, but with accents, The Band of Outsiders. The cute gal is Anna Karina, her boyfriends are Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey, and the director is the embodiment of French cinema's nouvelle vague, Jean-Luc Godard. Ah, callow youth! Squandering your time in darkened cinemas, what good will ever come of it? Invest that time......

When we looked at tonight's SIFF Cinema schedule, what first caught our eye was the first part of the double feature: 10 Years of Rialto Trailers. Thinking it would be a great way to figure out which noir films we should see during the rest of the festival, and get a crash course in the genre, we decided to check it out. Plus, we love trailers. But in preparing to write this preview --......

We haven't yet seen The Battle of Algiers -- we weren't alive in the '60s, we weren't working at the Pentagon in '03, and last time we checked the Criterion release out of the library we never got a chance to watch it. So we're happy to see it turn up on local screens again this Sunday, at the SIFF Cinema. We could point you to a bunch of reviews that mostly tell you......

George Franju's Eyes Without a Face includes one of the most horrifying sequences we've ever seen in a movie theater. It was #1 until Irreversible came along, and this is a different kind of horror, so don't let any lingering Gaspar Noe trauma dissuade you from heading to SIFF Cinema this afternoon. It's horrifying the way Psycho would've been horrifying if we hadn't been spoiled on that film's secrets long before we actually watched it.......

Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Jules Dassin, Federico Fellini -- thanks to distributor Rialto Pictures, their restored films are popping up in theaters around the country, and, happily, here in Seattle. SIFF's classic film series, starting today and running through February 7, commemorates Rialto's 10th year in the movie business. Funny that a classic film company would be just ten years old, but life has a seemingly limitless supply of surprises, doesn't it? Tonight......

Starting tomorrow night, SIFF Cinema is showing Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, a documentary that examines Hollywood's relationship and depiction of one of the 20th Century's defining events. Growing up Jewish in New York City, we were introduced to The Diary of Anne Frank at age 9. We quickly became fascinated by her story (our copy of the book is in tatters we read it so often) and by the subject of the......