Art by Zee

Catherine Deneuve – beautiful, personable, and one heck of an actor, able to be serious, silly or anything else she needs to be to make the characters she plays come to full, rounded life.

SIFF celebrates this magnificent screen star with a careful selection of some of her best films this weekend.

Friday, March 11 see Deneuve in Lars von Trier’s complicated, tragic fantasy drama Dancer in the Dark at 7:30.

Belle du Jour screens at 1 pm on Saturday, March 12. Hold on to your ticket and go see the second half of the double feature, 8 Women, at 3 pm. (Or just go straight to 8 Women if you like, as its a great film. Of course this means you’re missing an equally great film in Belle du Jour, so you may as well go to both.)

The series wraps up with a contemporary Denueve in 2010′s Potiche. Directed by François Ozon, Potiche gives Deneuve the opportunity to shine as the trophy wife faced with catastrophe – how will she handle things? Can she even take care of herself? Also starring French legends Gérard Depardieu, Fabrice Luchini and Karin Viard.

Mark your calendars now: The folks at SIFF and the Moisture Festival have teamed up to give Seattle movie and music fans a real treat in the form of a presentation of The Adventures of Prince Achmed with live music by mutli-talented musical duo Miles and Karina who will be performing a live score with accordion, guitar, viola, banjo, glockenspiel, percussion, slide whistle, and much more.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed was the first full length animated film, released for the first time back in September of 1926. The film was huge sensation at the time and remains exciting today, eighty-some years later. Director Lotte Reiniger invented a silhouette technique that allows for a full range of motion and complex backgrounds that keep the eye drawn to the screen. An exciting adventure tale taken from “The Arabian Nights”, Prince Achmed is a fun film, interesting not simply because of its age.

The film screens on April 4 at 7:30 at SIFF Cinema; tickets are likely to go fast, so you may want to purchase in advance so that you don’t miss your chance to see this great movie with a great live score.

Madness stalks the street of Noir City – and it isn’t any safer inside! Noir City, the annual festival of classic noir films that pays equally loving attention to the well known classics and the seldom seen obscurities, is back at SIFF Cinema for another round of murder and mayhem. Kicking off Friday, February 11 and running through Thursday, February 17, Noir City is a hot collection of cool movies featuring some of the darkest, most disturbing film characters you’ll ever meet. Be glad you’re only meeting them on screen, not in person.

Fourteen chilling thrillers make up this year’s program. Think Marilyn Monroe was just a giggly sex kitten? You’ve never seen the eerie Don’t Bother to Knock where she’s haunting as a babysitter who just isn’t quite the person you want caring for your child. Peter Lorre is thrilling as the Stranger on the Third Floor. There are many compelling performances in this collection of gripping stories. As an added attraction, all films are double features – buy a ticket for the early show and use it to come back to the second half of the bill. Czar of Noir Eddie Mueller is on hand to introduce the evening screenings. And tickets are a mere $12. Don’t miss your chance to take a walk on the dark side.

Noir City at SIFF Cinema:

Friday, February 11, 2011
Double Feature!
High Wall
d. Curtis Bernhardt, 1947, 99 min.
Brain-damaged vet Robert Taylor confesses to murdering his unfaithful wife and is sentenced to a sanitarium. His doctor (sexy Audrey Totter) gradually realizes he might not be guilty. Double Feature with Stranger on the 3rd Floor. 7:30 PM

Stranger On The Third Floor
d. Boris Ingster, 1940, 64 min.
Peter Lorre is The Stranger, haunting a reporter whose testimony sentenced a possibly innocent man to death. Double Feature with High Wall. 9:30 PM

Saturday, February 12, 2011
Double Feature!

They Won’t Believe Me
d. Irving Pichel, 1947, 95 min.
Robert Young is brilliantly cast against type as a married man whose sex addiction leads to murder. Double Feature with Don’t Bother To Knock. 2:00 PM; 7:30 PM

Don’t Bother To Knock
d. Roy Baker, 1952, 76 min.
Marilyn Monroe gives the finest performance of her fledgling career as a mentally unbalanced babysitter (in sheer negligee!) hired by a couple visiting Manhattan. Double Feature with They Won’t Believe Me. 4:00 PM; 9:30 PM

Sunday, February 13, 2011
Double Feature!

Angel Face
d. Otto Preminger, 1952, 91 min.
Jean Simmons is simultaneously sexy and creepy as a Los Angeles heiress who will do anything to get the man she wants. In this case, it’s ultimate noir hero-chump Robert Mitchum. Double Feature with The Hunted. 2:00 PM; 6:00 PM

The Hunted
d. Jack Bernhard, 1948, 88 min.
Laura Mead has served her time for robbery and still claims her innocence. She returns to the city where her former cop lover sent her up. Double Feature with Angel Face. 4:00 PM, 8:00 PM

Monday, February 14, 2011
Double Feature!

A Double Life
d. George Cukor, 1947, 104 min.
In this extraordinary film, Ronald Coleman delivers an Oscar-winning performance as Anthony John, a Broadway actor who discovers madness in his Method. Double Feature with Among The Living. 7:00 PM

Among The Living
d. Stuart Heisler, 1941, 67 min.
Albert Dekker stars as identical twins, one a brain-damaged psychopath who stirs up a Gothic whirlwind of insanity, family skeletons and murder in a small town paralyzed by fear. Double Feature with A Double Life. 9:00 PM

Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Double Feature!

The Dark Mirror
d. Robert Siodmak, 1946, 85 min.
Olivia de Havilland stars as a pair of identical twins, one loving and nice and the other severely disturbed. Double Feature with Crack-Up. 7:00 PM

Crack-Up
d. Irving Reis, 1946, 93 min.
A museum curator survives a massive train wreck, but wakes up an amnesiac. It gets worse… seems the accident never happened, and now everyone is convinced he’s losing his mind. Double Feature with The Dark Mirror. 9:00 PM

Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Double Feature!

The Woman On The Beach
d. Jean Renoir, 1947, 71 min.
Legendary French director Jean Renoir elicits deeply compelling performances from the triangle of Robert Ryan, Joan Bennett, and Charles Bickford, the latter as a famous painter blinded by his beautiful wife. Double Feature with Beware, My Lovely. 7:00 PM

Beware, My Lovely
d. Harry Horner, 1952, 77 min.
The great Ida Lupino plays a lonely war widow who employs a drifter (Robert Ryan) as a household handyman, only to learn—too late—precisely why he has no references on his résumé. Double Feature with The Woman on the Beach. 9:00 PM

Thursday, February 17, 2011
Double Feature!

Loophole
d. Harold D. Schuster, 1954, 80 min.
An innocent bank clerk (Barry Sullivan), made the fall guy in an embezzlement scheme, is pursued to the brink of insanity by a scarily righteous lawman. Double Feature with Crashout. 7:00 PM

Crashout
d. Lewis R. Foster, 1955, 93 min.
Killers on a Furlough from Hell! The rarest of jailbreak films, and one of the best! Double Feature with Loophole. 9:00 PM

The Weekend Film Agenda returns from an extended hiatus to recognize all the excellent film choices available in Seattle this weekend.

First up, Lemmy at Northwest Film Forum. Ian Kilminster, better known as Lemmy, is a living icon, the veritable embodiment of rock’n'roll with his outrageous attitudes and his hard-living approach to life. The documentary that profiles him, called simply Lemmy makes its Seattle premier Friday night and runs through next Thursday. You don’t want to miss this close up look at the man who puts the “hard” in hard rock.

The Grand Illusion presents Luis Buñuel’s L’Age D’Or, an hour long avante garde masterpiece from 1930 that skewers societal pretensions with a sharp wit that at the time provoked riots, a threat of excommunication, and bans. While the movie’s theme isn’t quite as shocking to modern audience, it remains a valuable and fascinating piece of film history.

Central Cinema brings back to back screenings of Alien and Aliens.

SIFF Cinema presents a series of sci fi films on Blu Ray for superior audio and video definition. The series kicks off Friday with a double feature of Dark City and Escape from New York and continues with Forbidden Planet, Serenity, Starship Troopers, Time Bandits, Galaxy Quest and the sure to be brilliant Spaceballs Quote-a-long.

Composer, botanist, physician, playwright, and mystic, 12th century German nun Hildegard of Bingen was a Renaissance woman centuries before the Renaissance began. The founder of two monasteries and the author of letters, liturgical songs, poems, scholarly texts and the first surviving morality play, she was a woman ahead of her time who claimed that her farsighted focus came from divine inspiration. Literally.

Director Margarethe von Trotta’s biography of Hildegard, Vision (opening in Seattle Friday, November 12, at Seven Gables), wisely resists the usual film mystic trope: her Hildegard is neither madwoman nor fool but instead a complex, fully developed character, an intelligent woman whose unshakable religious faith drives her passion for scientific rigor. A prolific writer, Hildegard herself supplies the history from which this film’s script is derived, and it is a story well worth the telling.

Vision begins with a brief prologue about medieval millennial cult before introducing a young, sickly child of nobility, delivered to a co-ed monastery by her family to be raised in the shelter of the religious life. Young Hildegard is an eager pupil of Jutta von Sponheim, herself the daughter of a noble family, and teacher to the girls and women in her care, including also Hildegard’s closest friend, also named Jutta. Although Hildegard dismisses herself as a “weak woman”, when von Sponheim passes away years later, the former student is called upon to replace her master as magistra, the “mother” to all the women in the monastery.

Hildegard’s refusal to be appointed to this role and her insistence that she will take the position only if her sisters elect her to it is her first significant act of rebellion against church policy but it’s far from the last. Despite her initial reluctance to assume the role of magistra, Hildegard is a strong leader who inspires her spiritual daughters to share her passion for learning and considers their welfare a greater responsibility than meekly accepting the authority of the monastery’s abbot.

Hildegard next risks not only her position in the monastery but indeed everything has she has when she reveals to her confidante, Brother Volmar, the visions that she’s been keeping to herself since childhood and declares that god has ordered her to record and share these visions to warn mankind to find his way back to god. Angered by Hildegard’s rebelliousness, the abbot nevertheless allows her to present her case to an ecumenical council in the hopes that having a prophet in the house will bring increased attention from wealthy patrons. Displeased by the abbot’s worldly concerns as she is, Hildegard is not above manipulation to further her own ends, saving herself from serious sanctions by alternately relying on pressure from her own skillfully developed network of important figures and conveniently timed near-death experiences.

German actor Barbara Sukowa plays Hildegard with a cool intensity that artfully reveals the fervor beneath her collected exterior; she seems at times forbidding and remote, but she is filled with a deep reservoir of emotion. Horrified by the practice of self-mortification, she promotes a kinder environment for those in god’s service, rejecting bleak asceticism to encourage her nuns to dance and wear beautiful costumes while they perform her morality plays, declaring that “God loves beauty”. When a visiting priest lends her a library to read, she radiates joy; indeed, every chance she gets to further her studies fills her with an infectious delight. A young nun kills herself rather than face expulsion and yet the unknown monk who fathered her unborn child faces no consequences at all. Hildegard’s despair and rage are palpable and when the abbot refuses to grant her request to prevent this tragedy from recurring by moving her charges to a separate convent, her determination to circumvent his denial emanates from every pore.

Director von Trotta presents Hildegard as admirable and iconic as she truly was, but fully human as well. Her Hildegard is as contradictory as any real person is. Hildegard professes humility but resents attacks on her pride; when a group of nuns unhappy with the backbreaking labor involved in building their new convent want to return to the monastery from which Hildegard fought so strongly to remove them, Hildegard is angered by their refusal to see things her way. When Jutta argues that Hildegard is deviating from the teachings of their “mother”, Hildegard snaps that she is Jutta’s mother now. Hildegard’s immense affection for young novice Richardis seems as much inspired by the young woman’s obvious hero worship as her respect for her intellect. Hildegard takes full advantage of her relationship with Richardis’s powerful mother and brother to pursue her own ambitions, but she is furious when they wish to move Richardis to another convent to further theirs.

Sukowa’s strong performance is enhanced by the excellent supporting cast, particularly Hannah Herzsprung as the appealing Richardis, and Heino Ferch as kindly Brother Volmar, Hildegard’s most devoted ally.

Vision is a captivating portrait of a fascinating woman whose scholarly writings are still considered significant today; a product of her times whose relevance to these times is undiminished.

Boxing is both beautiful and brutal and both of those aspects of the sport are portrayed in Patrick Wiseman’s Boxing Gym, a documentary set in and around Lord’s Boxing Gym in Austin, Texas. Wiseman turns the camera on athletes from all age groups and walks of life as they train and spar, finding a home both physical and spiritual at the gym. At NW Film Forum November 12 – 18. Local boxing gym owner Cappy hosts a Q&A after the 9 pm Friday show.

The Seattle Polish Film Festival continues at SIFF Cinema this weekend. Friday’s screenings include The Lullaby, a thriller about mysterious disappearances at a picturesque village in Poland, and A Little Rose, about a successful writer whose attractive young wife might not be the woman he thinks she is. Saturday’s films are the passionate A Woman Who Desired a Man and dramatic Never Say Never. Sunday learn about astronomer Copernicus, fall in love with A Simple Love Story, laugh through a War of Love, thrill to the supernatural After.Life (starring Christina Ricci and Liam Neeson), and rock out to a punk rock band as Solidarity sweeps the land in All That I Love.

Midnight at the Egyptian: Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom.

One night only at the Grand Illusion: The Destroy All Movies!!! Punk Rock Quado-feature featuring Valley Girl, Class of 1984, Urgh! A Music War, and Get Crazy and all the punk rock you can handle.

Also at the Grand Illusion: experience life on the flat track as Chip Mabry takes a close up look at the Portland roller derby scene in Brutal Beauty: Tales of the Rose City Rollers.

Earshot Jazz joins with NW Film Forum to present a trio of hot jazz on cool film.

Opening Friday, 10/29 are a duo: Howl stars the brilliant James Franco as noted and notorious Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Set in San Franciso in 1957, Howl pays vivid tribute to one of the defining moments in the birth of the counter-culture as it follows the attempts of The Man to silence the poet’s voice by putting Ginsberg on trial for “obscenity” after the the 1956 City Lights publication of his epic, iconic poem.

Ornette: Made in America celebrates its 25th anniversary this year but remains fresh as ever. Shirley Clark focuses her film on jazz musician Ornette Coleman, “a toweringly innovative yet humble figure.” Clark keeps the spirit and the soul of Ornette and his music alive in a story that grabs your attention and never lets go.

Monday, November 1 check out the Seattle premier of Ed Thigpen: Master of Time, Rhythm and Taste, Don McGlynn takes a look at the life of drummer Ed Thigpen. Thigpen, who played on a phenomenal number of jazz albums (at least 900) and has worked with the likes of Ray Brown, Herbie Hancock and Ella Fitzgerald, wasn’t just a great drummer, he was an interesting guy who lived an interesting life.

Dictionary.com is one of the most helpful sites on the internet, saving me from making a complete fool of myself on a regular basis. Besides providing a way to check your spelling and word use, they also have some great word games and useful tools and resources.

Plus, they like to do fun things like make neat little lists like “10 Top Vocabulary-building Horror Flicks of All Time”.

What made the cut?

The Exorcist – This controversial masterpiece not only redefined horror movies, but has also given people nightmares and nausea since 1973 and introduced us to the term pneumoencephalogram.

The Silence of the Lambs – When Dr. Hannibal Lecter insists, “Enthrall me with your acumen,” we can’t help but be enthralled with his. We also have Dr. Lecter to thank for some perverse culinary education – fava beans and Chianti will never taste the same.

The Shining – Stephen King’s imagination for horror + Stanley Kubrick’s cerebral filmmaking + Jack Nicholson’s sardonic wit = neuron-firing chills. Kudos to a film that makes ten words – “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” – one of the most terrifying moments in cinema. Alas, you won’t find “redrum” in any mainstream dictionary.

Jaws – Sure, those of us who were kids in 1975 are now afraid to swim in a pool, but this classic may have done more to generate interest in Carcharodon carcharias than all Shark Week episodes combined. When we weren’t being traumatized, we were educated on the animals’ extreme territoriality as well as nautical and medical terminology.

Scream – A clever plot and satirical dialogue set this one apart within the otherwise mind-numbing teen slasher genre. Randy offers insight into the killer’s actions: “It’s the millennium, motives are incidental.” We dare you to find a line like that in any of the Friday the 13th films.

Suspiria – This English-dubbed, gruesome 1977 Italian Dario Argento classic revolves around unusual words that inspire the viewer to look them up, when you aren’t too busy gasping in terror.

Videodrome – From what we can determine, the only film included in our Quotes section is David Cronenberg’s early, visionary work. Phrases, concepts, even the names of characters play off of word meanings. And who can forget the grotesque yet mesmerizing imagery and the young James Woods’ intensity?

The Omen – We have to give this film credit simply for making its title, a useful and sophisticated term, ubiquitous in popular vocabulary. For better or worse, the series also deserves credit for perpetuating concepts such as the Anti-Christ and the apocalypse.

Alien – This film put Sigourney Weaver on the map and put us into a state of nightmare for about a week. Nevertheless, those with the intestinal fortitude to see past the blood were enlightened by discussions of evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, and corporate politics. The film’s 1979 movie poster corrected a scientific fallacy perpetuated by Star Wars – “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream…”

Psycho – This masterpiece brought the oedipal complex out of the English classroom and made it something so scary that we were afraid to shower. Norman Bates lulls us into a false sense of security with his discussions of taxidermy and armchair philosophy before forever proving that men dressed as old ladies can indeed be terrifying.

Light the Wick is the first ever winter film to use Real D 3D filming to bring alive the excitement of the winter season. Filmed in HD and 3D by the award-winning Teton Gravity Research, known for their ski and snowboard movies, Light the Wick features spellbinding snow sport footage from around the world including Petersburg, Alaska; Croatia; Italy; and BC. Seattle skiers and snowboarders will particularly enjoy the first ever 3D ski segment, shot just up the road at beautiful Stevens Pass, but you don’t have to be a winter athlete yourself to appreciate it – just having the chance to take in some amazing athletes in such a lovely locale in a brand new film experience makes a movie for anyone into the great outdoors. (And who knows, it might inspire you to take up the skis or board yourself.)

Light the Wick screens one night only at the King Cat Theater downtown on October 21; doors at 7 show at 8. Be prepared to be blown away.

(Photo by Damir Frkovic © 2009 small change productions)

Most of us don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about birds unless we have specific reason to do so, but it doesn’t take a dedicated birdwatcher to understand why reported sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker in a small Arkansas town called Brinkley became an international sensation: experts believed the bird had been extinct for sixty years. In a world where extinction seems the inexorable course for far too many living species, how could one’s return be anything but a sensation?

What if that return was only wishful thinking, though? What happens to a place when its people tie their fortunes to a dream that might or might not still be true upon wakening? Is hope for the sake of hope something worth having or is hope empty without a factual base? These are questions that director Scott Crocker considers in his moving and insightful documentary Ghost Bird screening at NW Film Forum Friday, October 15 at 7:00 and 9:00 pm.

Ghost Bird is more than just a story about a bird that might not be as extinct as believed. Crockers takes us step by step through the history of the bird and the town, linking the two together in a tale that is thoughtful, thorough, and always engaging. Optimism, opportunism, humor and poignancy are woven into the story in an honest, natural way. What seems initially straightforward becomes more and more complicated as details emerge, but Crocker never lets the expansion of the story overwhelm; instead, the more there is to learn about complexities of human interaction with the natural world, the more fascinating Ghost Bird becomes. This is a great story told by a great storyteller and well worth watching.

Director Scott Crocker will be on hand for the 7 pm screening.