Mark and Barb Go to the Video Store

Junebug (dir. Phil Morrison) I loved this film. It's based on one of the standard film-plot templates (bringing home the newly-wed partner to meet the family, with ensuing hijinx), but this director makes something special out of it. You've probably heard about the cast, especially Amy Adams, whose motormouthed, open-hearted, transparent young wife (and mother-to-imminently-be) is the obvious (and brilliant) star turn. But the whole cast (Embeth Davidtz as the bewildered-but-warm big-city art babe, Benjamin MacKenzie as the pent-up, taciturn "failed" little brother, Celia Weston as the hard-as-nails mom, and Scott Wilson as the abstracted, escapist dad who is wise when he needs to be) shows amazing empathy and chemistry. This bunch feels like a family really feels, and there are lots of wonderful shots of empty rooms in the house with voices filtering in from another room (when there's not dead silence) that feel the way home looks when you used to live in a place but don't anymore. (There's also a lot of pretty photography of central North Carolina, which looked very familiar from our visits to Barb's brother's place.) The film has a sweet, unsentimental view of family: impossible to deal with but the source of the love that is the most important thing in most people's lives. Mark's review: ****

Markie goes to movies (so you don't have to)

Lucky Number Slevin (dir. Paul McGuigan) While it's fun to see Morgan Freeman play a smooth-talking monster and to see Ben Kingsley repeat his Real Bad Guy performance from Sexy Beast and Bruce Willis his from Last Man Standing, someone really needs to tell screenwriter Jason Smilovic that fantastically complex scripts full of quasi-Tarantino dialogue heavy on obscure pop-culture references were played out within six months of Pulp Fiction's release, which makes them about a decade past their expiration date. (Maybe they're due for a revival. God, I hope not.) Markie's review: **


The Devil and Daniel Johnston (dir. Jeff Feuerzeig) It seems to be a golden age for documentaries about really fucked-up genius artists (cf: Crumb, Be Here to Love Me). I first heard Daniel Johnston's music while driving around the Olympic Peninsula--"Grievances" (from Yip Jump Music) sounded like some old-woman revival singer from and Alan Lomax field recording, but turned out to be a gifted-if-nuts cartoonist/songwriter pounding on a chord organ in his brother's garage in Texas. Sadly, Johnston acquired a taste for LSD while hanging around in Austin, and the drugs overamped his already slightly-bipolar symptoms to the point where he started having major religious/psychotic episodes. My favorite characters in the movie are his long-suffering parents: good, salt-of-the-earth, God-fearing West Virginia people who don't quite get their son but are always there to help when he falls off the psychic tightrope he walks. If you've ever bought into the notion of craziness-as-integral-to-genius, this movie makes it plain how hard those crazy geniuses can be to live around day to day. Mark's review: ****

Markie Live Tunage: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs

with Blood On the Walls--Paramount Theater, Seattle, 4/25/06 The openers were a faithful noise trio with a terrific bass player, a barely-audible guitarist, and a male lead singer who sounded a little bit like Fred from Dead Moon. I admire the headliners for spending most of the set on the new album, which came alive better in concert than on the album. And while I've always kind of liked Nick Zinner's guitar heroics, this show was the first time I really got Karen O. She's got one hell of a rock and roll voice, and she has star power to burn. (The live version of "Maps" was like a bullet through my heart.) But the show was short--an hour before (fairly generous) encores--I wish they'd included one or two more Fever to Tell kamikaze ravers like "Black Tongue," "Y Control," and "Pin" because I could tell how explosive they must have been the first time they played Seattle in '02.

Markie goes to movies (so you don't have to)

Ask the Dust (dir. Robert Towne) Robert Towne is an L. A. homeboy. One way you know is that he wrote the screenplay for one of the great L. A. movies, Chinatown. Not least of that film's virtues are the parallels it draws between 1940s and 19702 L.A. and the amoral hustlers who run both. His own 1940s (actually, '30s) homage shows the city much straighter--like, really, really straight. Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek as pretty and stylized as can be playing the tragically mismatched Italian-and-Mexican lovers. (You'll never guess which is the brooding boozer and which is the fiery pothead.) Imagine Barton Fink done straight (minus the apocalypse) and you're on the right track. Markie's review (stupid points): ??

Basic Instinct 2 (dir. Michael Caton-Jones) Poor Sharon Stone. She's really beautiful in her way, and sometimes, like in this movie, she tries really, really hard. But much as it hurts to say it, girlfriend can't act to save her life. So her murderous, omnisexual act is just that--curled lips, come-way-hither looks. And believe me, the only other interesting thing in this long, fairly complicated, fairly dull (and not nearly sleazy enough) mystery is who David Thewlis owes money to that he has to star in movies like this one. Markie's review (stupid points): ?½

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (dir. Asia Argento) I'll say one thing: this puree of Larry Clark, David Lynch and Oliver Stone (with soupcons of Jerry Springer and Flannery O'Connor) is artful in a visual way: cool hallucinations and dream sequences, cutting that intensifies the horror of its dozen or so most skin-crawling sequences. And I have to hand it to the director for imagining the mom as a redneck Courtney Love, a.k.a. a Very Bad Parent who sets terrible examples in matters of sexual conduct and substance abuse, then casting herself in the part. How much you enjoy it will totally depend on whether you find this vividly-rendered story horrific or over-the-top hilarious. So you've been warned. Markie's review (stupid points): ???

Somewhere up in heaven...

...I know Joe Strummer is laughing his ass off.