Teza

The story of one man's journey from Ethiopian idealist to exile and back, and the third of three films in my day at the Columbia City Cinema.

"Teza" isn't quite an epic but over a couple-plus hours it covers a LOT of ground. The Fascists (note to Tea Partiers: here be real Fascists). Haile Selassie. Gangsters, Communists, butchers, and exile in Germany. In Germany, FFS!

And taboot, when's the last time you heard of a historical-political personal journey drama coming out of Ethiopia? That alone makes it worth your time.

I walked out of the Columbia City Cinema after having spent most of the day inside it, and the streetlights perfectly illuminated the drizzle on Rainier Avenue, a quietly theatrical ending to a day spent at the movies.

Doubt

Just when you think Meryl Streep has done it all, she comes up with a hardass Jersey nun. With zero irony.

The only irony was in the splash ad for Miramax Films at the start of the DVD. RIP, Miramax. We'll always have "Cinema Paradiso."

The Wrestler

Some Saturday night rasslin'! Who needs Netflix when the Seattle Public Library (with a 50-items-at-once limit which I may never get close to reaching) is right down the street?

I like that the very first scene of this film is captioned, "20 Years Later." Tells us everything we need to know right there.

Religulous

Also one of the first movies I saw at the beginning of 2009, this time a repeat viewing at the request of Harrison.

Bill Maher sure is Über-snark personified, ain't he? Making fun of everyone whether they deserve it or not -- Christians, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Scientologists ... OK, most of them deserve it. As a spiritual, non-religious person who celebrates both Christmas and Beltane, I know I would deserve it. But all of that overshadowed the beginning of the film, which I hardly remembered from the first viewing.

When Maher sits down with his sister and mother and goes over his own family's religious history, the humor and openness shone through again. And it reminded me that spending one's formative years in the same house with his mom and dad (a Jewish nurse married to a Catholic newsman) would've led any somewhat average smart-ass kid to become as snarky as he did. Maybe that's why he and director Larry Charles put that part at the beginning of the movie -- so you'd understand *why* he feels this way.

Synecdoche New York

After a touch of English melodrama and an art-house sensation, it's nice to have a simple, down-home story, isn't it? Maybe after this movie, I'll watch something like that.

There are books that seem "unfilmable," impossible to translate from written word to moving picture. "Synecdoche New York" seems the opposite, impossible to translate from moving picture to written word. Doing so makes me think of this article from The Onion.

How about this: Theater director Caden Cotard is abandoned by the one woman he truly cares about -- his daughter Olive, of course -- and spends the rest of his days surrounded by women who want him, despite his ambivalence toward them. Is that angle different enough from anything else written about the film? Probably not. I'll watch it again sometime and I'm sure I'll see something I didn't catch the first time around.

I'll probably find it in the comedy of manners that resulted when actors hired by Cotard to portray the people around him for his mega-play, ended up doing the opposite of what the people they were portraying had actually done in the first place.

And yet it didn't work out for them, either....