by Robert Zverina   

It was one of those crisp, brilliant Pacific Northwest fall days that made Jim glad to be back on the mainland after two years on Maui. Yeah, Hawai’i is great, but you just don’t get those kinds of days there and he missed them. Besides, the Northwest was his home and it made him feel good in a certain way that no other place ever would. It was where he was formed, its air and light bound up with his being on a cellular level. Continue reading Sunday Stew: The More Things Change →

by Celia Y. Weisman

The radio is on and the little girl walks into the kitchen.  Her mother, back to the kitchen doorway, is actually sitting at the kitchen table.  This is strange, because the mother rarely would sit down, especially on a Sunday morning with all the kids at home. And even more oddly, the girl discovers when she comes closer, the mother is weeping.   Continue reading Sunday Stew: Birmingham Sunday in New York City →

by Marcus Harrison Green (Painting: The Long Goodbye by Don Perino)

There are days so unbelievably perfect that if life just relented a little in hoarding them there would never exist a reason to do drugs. From sunrise to the yellow orb’s setting, what usually exist as fantasy or chemically enhanced delusion is somehow suffused into your life. For one day all your desires are accommodated. Your heart brims. Your belly burst. And laughter is played on a loop. Those days are ones you wish you could bottle portions of to spray as needed when the fetid aroma from the vast majority of 24 hour increments we experience surfaces to life. Continue reading Sunday Stew: The Language of Love →

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of our series South Seattle Goes To SIFF

We’ve all driven through those towns that seem like no one lives there – or that no one should. Bleak, dusty horizons, the occasional meth head ambling by, and a corner store that looks like it hasn’t had a customer in the last century or two. In BFE, director Shawn Telford seeks to portray the lives of those who live in these forgotten towns – particularly, those still young and figuring their shit out. Sound familiar? It is – we’ve seen this storyline more than enough times over the last 25 years. However, despite numerous glaring issues, the film turns out to be quite entertaining.

The loosely constructed storyline follows three high schoolers in the town of BFE: Ian, preoccupied with caring for his dying Grandpa; Ellie, living in a meth house while trying to protect her baby sister; and Ellie’s boyfriend Zack, who must deal with his attraction to his friend’s mother. Sound like a lot? Just you wait, we’re not done! We still have to throw in Tom, the Korean kid battling against the “old ways” of his stern father; a scraggly crew of drug dealers; and a horde of other teenage boys that are buddies with our leading crew.

Telford has attempted to create a slice-of-life style flick that draws parallels between the intersecting lives of everyone in the town. And largely, he succeeds. The dialogue is witty, the scenes with the boys remind me of my own high school adventures, and there are enough characters to fill a movie three times the film’s length. Which actually turns out to be the problem with this cute little movie: it needs to be three times as long to successfully fit that many stories.

In the first half of the film, we see missed moments happen again and again –scenes that try to be both funny and poignant instead have to rely on the barrage of jokes flying throughout every scene, because with so many characters to get to, we can’t possibly get enough screen time with each to care about them. True, the jokes are well thought out, and everything rolled along relatively seamlessly, but I found myself wanting more from the first half of the film than giggles.

Things start to pack a bit of a punch as the movie progresses. We get a few brilliantly performed villains and start to feel for these teens stuck in a dead-end town. We do wish they would stop stating – very obviously – that they are stuck in a dead-end town… but no matter.

As a whole, the film did about 75% of what it set out to do. The town was there, the characters were there, the clichés were there, and the jokes were certainly there. I was rarely bored, and when I was, the kickass soundtrack was always there to distract me. Telford’s use of close camera shots was aesthetically pleasing, and though the ending was cheesy, it fit with the fluffiness of the movie as a whole.

What I missed from the film were the gut-punches, the investment in the brilliantly witty characters, the desire to watch them succeed and the hurt when they did not. The problem with throwing all of the moments in instead of selecting the best ones is that the audience comes away with none of them. In short, everything was there – just too much of it.
The bottom line: Despite the film’s overall disjointedness and Telford’s desire to cram six storylines into a 90-minute film, the witty dialogue and killer soundtrack made the piece a very enjoyable bit of fluff. Go check it out!

Mary Hubert is a performing artist, director, and arts administrator in the Seattle area. When not producing strange performance concoctions with her company, the Horse in Motion, she is wild about watching weird theater, whiskey, writing and weightlifting.

by Teri Youngman

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Excess is the word of the day in Director Martin Scorsese’s latest film The Wolf Of Wall Street, based on the best selling memoir of infamous finance kingpin Jordan Belfort, is a film that earns every bit of it’s R rating due to its often very graphic depiction of the debauchery filled lifestyle of the key characters of the film, and stars Leonardo DiCaprio in the fifth team up between the superstar actor and legendary director.

DiCaprio stars as Belfort, who we are first introduced to as a Stockbroker for the Wall Street Firm  L.F. Rothschild in 1987.

After losing that job due to the firm’s bankruptcy, Belfort begins selling penny stocks at a small Long Island boiler room, soon turning that firm into a huge success, by aggressively pitching his penny stocks to any person unassuming enough to fall for his song and dance.

Of course this is all a big scam, and he’s really just defrauding these folks by exchanging them crap for money, while he adds gratuitously to his bank account because the penny stocks have a higher commission than the run of the mill ones he would’ve been selling at a conventional Wall Street firm.

Belfort soon befriends Donnie Azoff (played here by Jonah Hill), a salesman neighbor of Belfort’s. The two decide to go into business together, starting their own firm and running the penny stock scam on a much larger scale, recruiting several unscrupulous characters to their cause along the way, including marijuana dealers.

They name their firm Stratton Oakmont and things really begin paying off for Belfort after an article in Forbes Magazine dubs him,The Wolf of Wall Street, attracting many more financiers to his firm along with the attention of the FBI, when agent Patrick Denham (played by Kyle Chandler) begins investigating him.

With the success comes the excess, as Belfort and his associates regularly indulge in wild parties, drugs and prostitutes.

Belfort himself becomes highly addicted to cocaine and quaaludes, and often cheats on his loyal wife Teresa (played by Cristin Milioti) who was with him well before his Wall Street days.

Belfort’s womanizing soon leads him to begin an affair with Naomi Lapaglia (played by Margot Robbie) a beautiful, gold digging piece of arm candy who he eventually leaves Teresa for and remarries.

The high life is great for Belfort until his drug addictions and FBI investigations eventually all catch up with him and his world comes crashing down.

The film is, long, profane, and…funny.

Some scenes are of the laugh out loud variety, such as a particular one in which Azoff offers Belfort a very powerful batch of quaaludes, that take a little long to kick in, but when they do, they really do.

The fallout from the scene is pivotal, but the scene itself is hysterical to watch.

Scorsese is once again at his best exploring the criminal lifestyle and he, along with writer Terrence Winter, really do a great job in bringing a vulgar humor to this film, that really keeps the viewer entertained, even as you watch horrible people do horrible things.

The film belongs to Leonardo DiCaprio who chews up the scenery here, injecting tons of energy, along with his signature charisma and electricity, into every frame, continuing his streak of amazing performances that he’s been on for the past decade or so.

The supporting cast is also mostly strong here led by Jonah Hill, who mainly serves as comic relief in his role as Azoff, but also shows some depth once the film heads to its climax, when the crap really hits the fan.

Matthew McConaughey is also brilliant is his small but memorable role as Mark Hana, Belfort’s boss  and mentor at the Wall Street firm, training him in the decadent ways of Wall Street, and teaching him to embrace drugs, sex and masturbation as keys to success.

Hana also teaches Belfort a bizarre chanting ritual that he adopts and uses again and again throughout the movie, a chant that is a very memorable part of the film.

The women characters unfortunately are mostly just props in the film, without much character development for any of them.

The lone exception is Naomi’s Aunt Emma (played by Joanna Lumley), who is very interesting in another small but important role to the film.

If you’re like me than you might not mind a little T and A in a good movie, but to some moviegoers bits like the Airplane Orgy scene in this movie might be a little much.

The film is long, and the length is definitely something I took issue with, as the movie started to drag a bit towards the end, where it seemed as if 30 minutes or so could have been shaved without hurting the story.

My biggest problem however, is that there is a certain been there, done that feel to the film, due to its similarity to other Scorsese pictures, most notably the 1990’s gangster classic Goodfellas.

Overall this is a very good movie, and while not the best Scorsese picture ever, it’s certainly his best in years and possibly the best team up between he and DiCaprio, though that may be debatable for for fans of The Departed.

I’m giving it 3 and half bags of popcorn out of 5.

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Teri Youngman is an actor and movie fanatic, whose love of South Seattle is second only to that of his lustful obsession with cinema.

📸 Featured Image: Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash.

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