The MacGuffin

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) is a film about a family enjoying their vacation lake home. They get set up in their home for a short stay and some friends of the neighbor’s come to visit. Things go south quickly.

The film opens in the rural countryside of England, present day (which appears to be the 8’s, even though the film was shot in 2003). An SUV pulls up to a mansion and out pop four hot blonde women dressed in sheer outfits—guess who? There are bad bad people inside talking about this group of female assassins right as they break into the mansion and apprehend them with all kinds of weird gadgets like James Bond. The ladies are looking for a hard drive with the plan, to erase the whole thing. What they don’t know is that one of the bad guys is from Indiana Jones.

In fiction and in film, in our collective imaginations, there have been a lot of visions of what extra-terrestrial life might look like. The most appealing of these populate worlds like Star Trek—the humanoid species we could easily communicate with. These are slightly more enticing to think about than bacteria in traces of water, though I admit I still get excited whenever scientists think they’ve found that. The other vision is what we really want though, isn’t it? Someone out there in a similar situation to ours? What about exactly the same situation as ours?

Will Canon’s debut feature Brotherhood (2010) is a film that of late I’ve been telling everyone I know to go see—and it’s not because of the film’s relatively clever recontextualization of film noir tropes and elements into a college setting, or how Canon achieves a dirty, blackly humorous note that, barring a fair bit of urban, suburban machismo and posturing that comes off slightly off-hand, and overly repetitive attempts at creating what seem to be new college frat slogans, sings like witching hour magic throughout. No, the reason I’ve been pimping this film so strongly is because it was shot in and exclusively around Arlington, Texas. Which, for the first sixteen years of my life—accounting for all but three and a half, by now—was my hometown; I know the burg like the back of my hand, all the way from Lincoln Square to the Parks, and off. Canon does, too—and while providing for a competent genre exercise, at the same time he gives us a visual snapshot of my home and his, the asshole of Texas, Aggtown.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Film Festival, affectionately known as SFFSFF (say it “siff siff”) returns to the Cinerama theater in Seattle this weekend. The sixth annual event, jointly sponsored by the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum and Seattle International Film Festival, will feature twenty films that span the definition of the genres, and come from around the world.

In Remarkable Power!, late-night talk show host Jack West (played by Kevin Nealon) is found dead at the beginning of the movie. The film flashes back to explain how we got to this point. And I assure you, it’s a complex story.

This past Thursday, I attended quite a rollicking party at KCTS studios to kick off their new series, Reel NW. The series provides a showcase for Northwest independent film, allowing the selected documentaries, narrative features, and shorts to be made available to anyone who can access KCTS, both over the airwaves and online.

There are a few reasons why I was interested in Buried, the film from director Rodrigo Cortés and writer Chris Sparling that opens today. Surprisingly, the Adonis Ryan Reynolds was only number three on the list. The first reason was that I’m always intrigued when a film starts out with a premise that inherently limits in such a way that it feels like a problem to overcome. Whether that limitation comes from setting, perspective, timeline, or something else, I’m a sucker for that sort of thing. The second reason is that, frankly, I weirdly love ‘buried alive’ stories. Whether it’s Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” the greatest sequence in the Kill Bill films, or that one sweet serial killer storyline on Bones—I just have a weakness for the plot point. Call me morbid if you must, but with promising buzz added in, I was definitely psyched for this movie.

In the opening scene of the 2009 indie comedy Punching the Clown, we’re introduced to Henry Phillips, a singer-songwriter whose work is mostly of the jokey, satirical sort. He’s doing a radio show at 3 AM, which sums up immediately the state of his career: maybe kind of improving? Maybe?

What if you could find out the exact moment that you were going to meet your soul mate?  Would you do it?  Would you want to know?  Or would that ruin the excitement of it?  If you want to know the instance when you will first see the person who will make you happier than anyone else in the world, it will just cost you $79.99 and easy monthly payments of $15.99.  However, we are not responsible if you are unhappy with the soul mate you receive or if you are upset by how long or short it may be until you find that one.