King Arthur (2004)

KING ARTHUR  (2004)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Antoine Fuqua

    Clive Owen, Keira Knightley, Ioan Gruffud,

    Ray Winstone, Stellan Starsgard, Til Schweiger,

    Stephen Dillane, Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen

It's the Dark Ages, and King Arthur and his knights are little more than a well-tailored band of mercenaries, conscripted by the Romans to fight the Woads, a fierce, dirty, long-haired race of barbarians in a desolate, godforsaken backwater called Britain. After 15 years of more or less nonstop killing, the guys are looking forward to retirement and safe passage back to their own pagan lands, when, wouldn't you know it, they're dispatched on a last suicidal mission north of Hadrian's Wall. This leads to a lot more killing and some of the knights don't make it, but Arthur (Clive Owen) does get it on with Guinevere (Keira Knightley), who teaches him that not all Woads lead to Wome. It's transparent storybook moviemaking, as enjoyable as it is disposable, complete with castles and catapults, broadswords and battle axes, flaming arrows fired from longbows, and nasty-looking men with knives clenched in their teeth. Highlights: Stellan Skarsgard as the Saxon chief, a tense standoff on a frozen lake, and the sporty leather harness Guinevere wears into the final battle. A guilty pleasure.

Piranha (1978)

PIRANHA  (1978)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joe Dante

    Bradford Dillman, Heather Menzies, Kevin McCarthy,

    Keenan Wynn, Barbara Steele, Dick Miller,

    Belinda Belaski, Bruce Gordon, Paul Bartel

"Lost River Lake. Terror. Horror. Death. Film at eleven." A tongue-in-gill monster movie in which ravenous aquatic creatures with sharp pointed teeth are released from a secret Army research station and head downstream to the sea, chewing up campers, fishermen, water-skiers, beach bunnies and anybody else unlucky enough to get in their way. Think "Jaws" with a B-movie budget and much smaller fish. Roger Corman produced. John Sayles wrote the script and plays a small role as the sentry who gets flashed by Heather Menzies.

Kevin McCarthy

(1914-2010)

The Girl Cut In Two (2007)

THE GIRL CUT IN TWO  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Claude Chabrol

    Ludivine Sagnier, Benoit Magimel,

    Francois Berleand, Mathilda May

French psychothriller about a TV weather girl who gets involved with a kinky older novelist and an emotionally unbalanced playboy, with mostly unhappy results. Maybe she has horrible taste in men, or maybe she just makes real bad choices. Maybe shit happens, or maybe these characters just get what they deserve. Chabrol isn't being judgmental. The moral equation is up for grabs.

Claude Chabrol

(1930-2010)

What's New Pussycat? (1965)

WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT?  (1965)  ¢ ¢

    D: Clive Donner

    Peter O'Toole, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen,

    Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentiss,

    Ursula Andress, Jess Hahn, Sabine Sun

A mod, mid-'60s farce set in Paris, with O'Toole as a lecherous magazine publisher who can't help pursuing - and being pursued by - every woman he meets. Woody Allen's first film - he wrote the script and acted in it, but did not direct. It's a silly, ragged mess of a movie, but Woody's early style comes through in some of the lines and gags, and it picks up steam in the madcap final reel.

Clive Donner

(1926-2010)

Please Give (2010)

PLEASE GIVE  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Nicole Holofcener

    Catherine Keener, Rebecca Hall, Oliver Platt,

    Sarah Steele, Amanda Peet, Ann Guilbert,

    Lois Smith, Sarah Vowell, Josh Pais

A smart ensemble comedy about some city dwellers facing issues like living and dying, guilt and infidelity, illness, old age, acne, used furniture and overpriced blue jeans. A lot of it's inconclusive. There are subplots that don't go anywhere, and not everybody's issues get resolved. The characters are imperfect and not always likeable. And somehow it hooks you anyway. You keep wanting these people to come through for each other and do the right thing. When they do, in little ways mostly, it feels like a small victory for the human race. $230 for a pair of blue jeans, though. That's too much.

"Casablanca" At the Grand Illusion

    This is a pitch.

    The coolest movie theater in Seattle is a cozy, old, hole-in-the-wall art house called the Grand Illusion, in the U District at the corner of 50th and the Ave. It's a completely independent, all-volunteer cinema, run by a bunch of people who love to watch and show films.

    To help keep the wolf from the box office door, the Grand Illusion is throwing a benefit bash with a screening of "Casablanca" on Saturday, September 25. There will be drinks and music, and reports indicate Bogart himself plans to attend. (This I gotta see.) Admission is $25, but it's for a terrific cause, and you can't go wrong with "Casablanca" on a theater screen. Doors open at 5:30 for the first show, and 8:30 for the second. Showtimes are 6:30 and 9:30. The Movie Buzzard will be there for sure.

    To find out more, go to grandillusioncinema.org.

    A personal note: The late CBS newsman Harry Reasoner once said that you never forget the girl you first saw "Casablanca" with. He was right. Here's looking at you, kid.

The Wild World of Lydia Lunch (1983)

THE WILD WORLD OF LYDIA LUNCH  (1983)  ¢ ¢

    D: Nick Zedd

Portrait of the artist as a young punk. Lydia Lunch rambles on about how broke and alienated she feels, while somebody follows her around with a camera. Then there's some weird music and she pushes a kid on a swing in the park and wanders around some more in a diaphanous white dress and plays with a dog and takes off on a motorcycle and smashes a mirror and hugs a dead tree and chases some sheep across a field. It's not all that wild, really. Sometimes she's almost in focus.

Harry Brown (2009)

HARRY BROWN  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Daniel Barber

    Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, David Bradley,

    Liam Cunningham, Charlie Creed-Miles, Iain Glen

Michael Caine plays Harry Brown, a pensioner living alone in a rundown housing project that's not the kind of place you'd want to call home if you were hoping to avoid being mugged. Harry moves slowly now and he's wheezing from emphysema, but he spent some time as a marine in Northern Ireland when he was a lot younger, and when his best friend gets beaten to death by a gang of thugs, he starts to put some of his old military skills back into practice. A lot of critics have compared this (unfavorably) to Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino", which isn't quite fair to "Harry Brown". This one's a straight-up, no-frills, down-and-dirty vigilante flick in the tradition of "Death Wish" or "The Brave One". The set-up is cut-and-dried, with the population divided into two polarized segments: the decent silent majority, who had better learn how to fight back and defend themselves, and the violent, smack-shooting, lowlife scum who deserve only to be exterminated. As pure, primitive exploitation, it gets the job done, and Caine is brilliant, as usual. Emily Mortimer's in it, too. That's another good thing.

The Fighting Kentuckian (1949)

THE FIGHTING KENTUCKIAN  (1949)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: George Waggner

    John Wayne, Vera Ralston, Philip Dorn,

    Oliver Hardy, Marie Windsor

Marching back to Kentucky after the War of 1812, the Duke stops in Alabama, where some French settlers loyal to Napoleon are trying to make a go of it, and some greedy land-grabbers are trying to rip them off. A lively western (though it all takes place east of the Mississippi) with cavalry battles, fistfights, chases on horseback, broad comic relief, coonskin caps and a dash or two of John Wayne's trademark frontier populism. One of only three features Oliver Hardy appeared in without Stan Laurel after the two teamed up.

Anatomy of Hell (2004)

ANATOMY OF HELL  (2004)  ¢ ¢

    D: Catherine Breillat

    Amira Casar, Rocco Siffredi

A brooding French art film about a woman who picks up a man at a gay nightclub and hires him to spend four nights at her place watching her expose herself. For somebody who makes such explicit films about sex, Breillat seems incapable of finding any joy in it, and this might be the ultimate case in point. She does like to push the envelope, though. Her graphic approach just skirts the edge of hardcore, and the scene where the two leads share a glass of tampon tea is probably a first.