Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win Best Director at the Oscars

It was a big weekend for women directors who tackle subjects normally reserved for their male counterparts. The big story, of course, is about Kathryn Bigelow, who last night became the first woman ever to take home the Best Directing Oscar for the independent war drama The Hurt Locker.

Bigelow, who rose to prominence with 1991’s Point Break, has never been one to stick to traditional women’s fare (i.e., rom-coms or period pieces), instead running with action and adventure films. To quote Twitter user gruber, “So proud that a woman has finally won Best Director and Best Picture, and that the movie she made featured huge explosions.”

But Bigelow wasn’t the only woman bringing home a fancy trophy this weekend. Friday night, local director Lynn Shelton—also treading on male turf (the minimalist mumblecore genre, which is dominated by pointy-headed male directors)—won the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes award for her lo-fi drama Humpday. (My review here.)

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The Northwest Film Forum’s 10th annual ByDesign festival opened last night, and will run all week.
Curated by designer and associate programmer Peter Lucas, the ByDesign fest takes a week every year to celebrate the intersection of design and film.
Tonight,  the brilliant Tania Kupczak will moderate a discussion between local animators Read more…

This week, I Totally Agree with the hilarious frivolity of  Slate’s Oscar coverage. Usually by this point, I can’t wait for the Oscars to be over, so I can hear about something else, but reading Dana Stevens’ and Troy Patterson’s emails to each other about, among other things, an axed Sacha Baron Cohen sketch Read more…

“[My brother] Marc would have given anything to be the man I’d have given anything not to be,” says Kimberly Reed, director and narrator of the autobiographical documentary Prodigal Sons.  “We were both haunted by the same ghost.”

Two years after telling her family about her male-to-female transition, Reed has returned to her hometown of Read more…

Recommended viewing for the weekend:  The Seattle premiere of the Red Riding trilogy over at Northwest Film Forum.  Released as a television miniseries in England, this three-part adaptation of novels about the Yorkshire Ripper—a serial killer who ravaged northern England for ten years in the ’70s and ’80s—has been well-received for its performances and its atmosphere, if criticized for an overly involved plot.

Each piece is by a different director (including James Marsh, director of 2008 Oscar-winning doc Man on Wire, which I liked enough to see twice in theaters), and the first two are playing back-to-back this weekend.

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There aren’t very many movies about adolescence that get it right.

Fish Tank does. It’s about desperation, powerlessness, frustration, naivete, heartbreak, painful awkwardness, and sexual and emotional vulnerability.  Living in the British projects with a careless and abusive mother, Mia (Katie Jarvis) is an enraged teen who takes a liking to her mother’s new boyfriend Connor (Hunger’s Michael Fassbender).  He returns the affection, a little too much, and a curious relationship develops between the two. Read more…

I’ve recently become aware of a neat resource for independent film geeks:  IndieFlix.
IndiFlix, based in Madison Park, is a distribution company for independent films that utilizes online streaming, DVD sales, and free community screenings to increase audiences and business for little guy movies.
Movies must have screened as an official selection at a film Read more…

Anybody who’s been following me on PubliCola for a while will know that I’m a huge fan of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.  It’s one of the best portraits of a city ever to hit the silver screen (see my review of it from last March here).  I can’t let a screening go Read more…

Welcome to this week’s “Totally Agree” and “Totally Disagree.”

This week, I Totally Agree with this brainy piece of criticism over at the new-to-me online media magazine FlowTV.  Authors Michael Peterson, Laurie Beth Clark, and Lisa Nakamura dissect Avatar’s relationship with gender and disability, which have largely been ignored in favor of attention to the film’s relationship with colonialism.

I particularly appreciate the measured tone of the piece, which observes, “As media critics, we have a responsibility not just to bash Avatar, but to come to terms with its remarkable popularity, which has occurred either because or in spite of the ease with which the film can be critiqued for its virtual colonialism.”  It has just the right mix of heady concepts and lucid writing that characterizes the best academic criticism. Read more…

If you have any interest in film, ballet, great character study, classic drama, or what Technicolor was really good for, do yourself a favor this week and go see The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger, UK, 1948) at the Northwest Film Forum.  This landmark film about a maniacally driven ballet director Read more…

Ken Kesey’s classic Sometimes a Great Notion is arguably the great novel about the Pacific Northwest; it’s also a damn good movie.  Knockout performances from Paul Newman and Henry Fonda are highlights in this chronicle of a family logging business determined to withstand the encroaching union.

“Never give a inch!” is Read more…