Harry Shearer is best known for being funny. He voices Mr. Burns and a host of others on The Simpsons. He was a writer and cast member on Saturday Night Live. He starred in This Is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind.
But there is nothing funny about The Big Uneasy, Shearer's documentary about why New Orleans flooded in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The film is showing Saturday in Olympia, along with a Q&A with Shearer via Skype.
Saturday, July 30, 6:30 p.m. $8.50, $5.50 for Olympia Film Society members, $4 for kids Plus Q&A via Skype with filmmaker/actor Harry Shearer Capitol Theater, 206 Fifth Ave. SE, Olympia 360.754.6670 or olympiafilmsociety.org
1. If one needs proof that the minds behind local nonprofit Tacoma Community House are sharp, they need look no further than Scrabble Rousers, a growing Tacoma tradition held on the fourth Wednesday of every month that was created and designed to help raise funds and awareness for Tacoma Community House's mission - providing "education, employment, multilingual services, and advocacy for refugees, immigrants, and English speaking adults and youth." At 6:30 p.m., Scrabble Rousers will present a "Clowns vs. Mimes"-style Scrabble throwdown, inviting players of all ages and skill levels to break out their face paint an drubber noses at King's Book's. It'll be totally worth it just to see King's Books' owner sweet pea emcee without saying a word. Honk!
2. Hot colors in bold abstract configurations are the order of the day at B2 Fine Art Gallery/Studio in Hot Fusion: Explorations into Abstraction, which you can see from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Hot Fusion, part one of a two-part show, is currently on display and features works by Todd Clark, Yvette Neumann, Judy Hintz Cox and Scott J. Morgan. To read Alec Clayton's full review, click here.
3. Nashville singer Katie Armiger drops in on The Music in the Park outdoor concert series at 7 p.m. at Sylvester Park. No doubt Sam The Cat Man will enjoy her modern country tunes.
4. Since October, experimental filmmaker Devon Damonte has been curating Northern Flickers - a monthly film series at the Northern space in downtown Olympia. Tonight at 7 p.m., from the animation faculty at Dartmouth, Jodie Mack drops in on the Flickers with her "Sing It Out Loud" tour featuring bushels of magnificent motion graphics, plus original songs performed live, in harmony, with cello. In addition, the Crackpot Crafters debut the group film, The Artifacts Of Life, with a multitudinous menagerie of once-living stuff, stuck onto 16mm film, and reanimated, cast aloft on wings of light.
5. The Sammy Steele Band adds some alt-country to Lady Luck's Cowgirl Up's Military Appreciation Night every Wednesday beginning at 8 p.m.
Rick Tobin's dark work shall soon see the light of day. The shooting of Tobin's horror short, The Resolution, is scheduled to commence July 31, with Rick Walters of Tacoma-based production company Adventus Films directing. In the tradition of films like Four Rooms and Twilight Zone: The Movie, this project will eventually appear as a feature-length anthology with three other shorts (also written by Tobin) called ...in my best Vincent Price tones... Twisted Tales of Madness and Murder. Sounds spookier than Shark Week.
Auburn-born and now living in Federal Way, Tobin spends his days as a mild-mannered repairer of safety appliances on freight trains, yet at nightfall he hammers away on, well, twisted tales like Resolution. The script follows a jilted lover who sets in motion a fiendish plan of comeuppance for his former girl. Tobin calls it "a revenge story with a twist."
The screenwriter has a soft spot for plots that pile on surprises and toy with an audience's expectations. His writing emulates classics in textbook suspense like John Carpenter's The Thing. Recalling that movie Tobin says, "From start to finish, I thought it was great the way the characters were developed, the way the story unfolded."
When completed, The Resolution will tour festivals with hopes to build buzz for Twisted Tales.
The Grand Cinema received around 60 submissions during the Tacoma Film Festival poster competition. While most of the entries were from the Tacoma area a few came from outside the city - including past TFF poster winner and Paris resident David Mackey (the Godzilla poster below). This year's theme/tagline was "CATCH IT FIRST".
You can check out the submitted posters - which are hanging in The Grand's lobby - during regular hours.
A panel of Tacoma Film Festival staff and volunteers will chose the winning poster soon. We hear The Grand folks have grown tired of posters that include Mount Rainier and the Narrows Bridge.
Here are a few submitted posters hanging on The Grand's walls:
There's something about "Grease," at least for the romantic. It's a story as old as time: Girl meets boy. Girl loses boy. Girl gets boy back via makeup, hair products, tight clothes and high heels.
It's kind of like Romeo and Juliet, except instead of drinking poison because his true love appears to be dead, Romeo is bummed that she's a prude in a poodle skirt, so he goes drag racing and listens to advice from friends who are, it seems, even stupider than he is.
In any case, the '50s seem to continue to hold a weird fascination as the last time that anyone believed life was simple or that anyone was playing by the rules. And pop-culture cred of the 1978 film and 1971 theatrical musical continues, with revivals and tours and even songs featured on "Glee."
Why this walk down memory lane?
The City of Lacey is featuring a sing-along version of the 1978 film as part of its free summer movie series. That means there'll be words on screen - not that I'd need them, because I know every word. The film screens Saturday, July 23 at dusk.
Ready? Here goes:
"I got chills, they're multiplyin', and I'm losin' control, ‘cause the power you're supplyin', it's electrifyin'."
[Huntamer Park, dusk, free, 618 Woodland Square Loop SE, Lacey, 360.491.0857]
FILM COMPOSER CATHERINE GREALISH KNOWS THE SCORE >>>
In plenty of Buzzes I've given due attention to mainly the writers and directors (and sometimes writer-directors) of local films. Yet so many more contributors to a movie's production go largely unacknowledged. Composers, for one, go unsung (sorry) possibly because of their rarity in the indie sphere - a zero-budget production can barely afford food for its crew, let alone a professional score. But I think another reason has to do with the nature of film music itself: like its creator, an effective piece of music works on its listener "quietly" or invisibly, on a barely conscious level. (And as I write this, as if on cue, Henry Mancini's Pink Panther theme begins purring from my radio.)
Ask Catherine Grealish about her favorite movie soundtrack and the answer may surprise you. "The score to Starship Troopers...is exquisite," she says. She cites that particular music as "one of those quintessential scores that bridges the history of film scoring," because it "honors the music that came before it, but also has a real modern flavor."
Grealish certainly knows this topic, since at this point she's scored a total of seven films. With mom as a concert pianist, the Tasmania-born composer grew up surrounded by music. At age 18 she left Australia for the States with hopes to advance her career. "If you break into the American scene, you break into the global scene, but if you stay in Australia you'll be lucky to break into the UK-European scene," she says.
For the past decade Grealish has called Seattle home, and this year has already brought success. Ego Boost won Grand Prize in the 2011 Seattle Times Three-Minute Masterpiece Contest; listen to how Grealish's arrangement enhances the comedy:
Her current work has ties to Tacoma. Among her various projects Grealish is assembling a soundtrack for the crime feature The Dead Men with local actor Mick Flaaen, and soon she begins on director Rick Walters's newest short, The Resolution. Her talents have apparently found a home in the world of film.
"I knew I was supposed to do music, but I didn't know where I fit," she says. "But I found this [film scoring], and it's been such an exciting time." I can't wait to hear more. You can find her growing portfolio at www.catherinegrealish.com.
Last night at midnight, in movie theaters far and wide -- including ones in Lakewood -- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 debuted, thus closing the cinematic door on one of the most popular and followed stories of all time. People will always remember where they were when the last Harry Potter movie dropped (or something).
Volcano photographer Jen Cook-Asaro certainly will, as she was stationed at the Regal Lakewood Cinema, tasked with capturing the magic ...
Things have been fucked for a very long time in the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Since Harry's first year at the magical boarding school of Hogwarts, there has been a steady slide away from the whimsy that marked the first couple installments, and into a state of constant dread. Oh, how the students of Hogwarts must miss the days when the most they had to fear was Professor Snape taking points away from their house's tally. Those were such sweet salad days, filled as they were with jelly beans of ridiculous flavors instead of Death Eaters and ethnic cleansing.
This latest installment picks up where Part 1 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows left off: things are looking very dire, indeed, as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named has obtained the most powerful wand ever created, and Harry and his friends have freshly buried yet another in a soon-to-be-overwhelming string of dead friends. Hogwarts has been turned into a dismal work camp, and Harry, Ron and Hermione still need to find and destroy several more horcruxes!
1. After disbanding the Los Angeles new wave/power pop group the Plimsouls , Peter Case launched a career as an important American singer/songwriter specializing in the flat-pick guitar style and semi-autobiographical stories of drifters delivered in a narrative style. Case performs at 8 p.m. inside Morso Wine Bar.
2. Gastropods in general are believed to have lost half of their original bilateral symmetry somewhere during the evolutionary process; so a snail's intestinal tract twists around and evacuates near its head, where the genitalia are also located. This physiological tidbit was probably not in artist Chris Thompson's mind when he linked his paintings to snails. Thompson's show, Trails - which also includes paintings of slugs - will open at the Telephone Room Gallery from 5-9 p.m.
3. Say you go to the Tacoma Cemetery at 48th and South Tacoma Way at 6 p.m. to do a little thinking and writing in your journal. As you sit there taking hits off a flask in the E.A. Poe-ness of the place, you're joined by a strange bunch of people. Their leader, a former Dungeons and Dragons freak, is decked out in a cape and carries a lantern. He's telling his suburban entourage that the graveyard where you're sitting is full off strange stories from Tacoma's past. You slowly realize that you're smack dab in the middle of the Third Annual Living History Cemetery Tour lead by the The Fort Nisqually Time Travelers, a select group of living history re-enactors. "Cool" you whisper under your breath. Later, after the crowd shuffles off, a homeless man plunks himself down across from you to root through his plastic bag of stuffed animals, and a kid speckled with metal studs and zits and wearing a Dead Boys T-shirt strides by, giving you the old hairy eyeball. Man, Tacoma is so great sometimes.
4. In a way the Tacoma Film Festival party never stops at The Grand Cinema. As TFF's founder and continuing planner, the theater's staff and volunteers work throughout the year on each new festival. And in 2011 they've figured out a way to share even more of the festival with us. TFF doesn't officially commence until Oct. 6, but who says we can't have fun now? Not the Grand; its first-ever Tacoma Film Festival Sneak Peek happens at the theater at 6:30 p.m. Let's pre-party! For the party details, click here.
5. DJs dAb, Suga Jones, Mr. Clean, Chris Savenetti and rotating guests spin New Wave, funk, pop, old school hip-hop and club classics from the 1980s as part of Beat Boxxx night at the Tempest Lounge beginning at 9:30 p.m.
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