Remember when The Fast and the Furious came out in 2001? I recall it being pretty damn watchable--although to be honest I haven't had the guts to go back and see it again to challenge the memory. That said, Fast Five is almost certainly a worse flick. The cars aren't as sexy, the plot's more predictable, and The Rock's teeth-gnashingly bad delivery makes Paul Walker look like he's won more than a couple of Teen Choice Awards.

But the flick's one winning factor is the gorgeous panoramic shots of Rio de Janeiro, favelas and all, where much of it was set. And accompanying the locale is a score dotted with local music, from tropicália artist Carlinhos Brown to rapper MV Bill. Knowing almost nothing about Rio's rap, the musical accompaniment to Fast Five offered a couple of entry points--none better than Marcelo D2's "Desabofo."

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At long last, Jennifer Maas's highly anticipated documentary on Seattle's early funk and soul scene is getting a proper debut (see Brian Barr's excellent profile of Maas over here for more background). Wheedle's Groove will be making its official Seattle premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival on Sunday, May 30th at 9:30 PM at SIFF Cinema. Over the past few months, the film has been receiving rave reviews and awards at festivals around the country, including the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival, Oxford Film Festival, Portland's Reel Music Film Festival, Indie Memphis (winning the Audience Award), Olympia Film Festival, and the Atlanta Film Festival. Grab your tickets over here; a clip from the film focusing on Pastor Patrinell Staten Wright and the Total Experience Gospel Choir's gospel rendition of Soundgarden's "Jesus Christ Pose" is below:

Richard Lefebvre's remake of Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki's Calamari Union was shot with a cast made up almost entirely of musicians from Seattle and Portland, including Soundgarden's Ben Shepherd, the Spits, the Girls, Mike Maker, Mudhoney's Mark Arm, Slats (R.I.P.), Caustic Resin's Brett Netsen, punk-informed marimba player Erin Jourgenson, and Eugene Wendell & the Demon Rind's Kwab Copeland.

Copeland has one of the movie's most striking scenes, shot at a Lynchian motel in Georgetown, with him playing guitar under a blinking neon sign. The song is and acoustic version "Those Fuckers", which later appeared on Eugene Wendell & the Demon Rind's debut. Calamari editor Sean Donavan recently made a video to accompany the studio version of the song, using footage from the film.

Eugene Wendell & the Demon Rind play the Funhouse on May 8.

Long story short: John Cameron Mitchell's punk rock fable about a traumatized tranny trying to make it out of the underground remains as heartbreaking and hilarious today as it did upon its release in 2001:

The late Roy Orbison possessed a voice that was as lovely as it was eerie, so it's no wonder it made the perfect accompaniment to David Lynch's beautifully rendered cult classic, Blue Velvet. That actor Dean Stockwell is lip-synching this song while psycho protagonist Dennis Hopper wordlessly conveys a myriad of disturbing emotions just ups the creep factor even further.

It just doesn't get more meta than this: fictional record store owner sells the Beta Band's 3 EPs; Beta Band subsequently sells a gazillion records in the 'real' world:

Much of what drives P.T. Anderson's turn-of-the-millennium masterpiece is its meditation on the universal preponderance of loneliness. Every character, from Tom Cruise's egomaniacal self-help guru to the preternaturally talented boy genius (played with understated, but powerful grace by Jeremy Blackman), feels varying degrees of acute isolation. While some critics and audiences had issues with the characters bursting into song during the film's climactic scene, it was also a pretty brave and jarring way of showing that people can sometimes be connected and comforted by loneliness, not withered by it. In the clip below, Aimee Mann's vocals remain underneath as each character sings a few lines from "Wise Up":

When Owen Wilson's character in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums finally melts down over his failed tennis career and unrequited love for adopted sister Margot, Elliot Smith's delicately plucked, minimalist ballad about a futile search for psychic peace is a brilliant and disturbing accompaniment:

​Tom Waits songs are almost always cinematic by nature, so it's no surprise they've showed up in pivotal movie scenes, such as the first basement brawl in Fight Club. I'm especially fond of the use of his songs in Streetwise, the award-winning 1984 documentary on Seattle street kids.

He's also an actor that's appeared in more than a dozen film roles, including a grace-saving, scenery and bug-chewing turn as Renfield in Francis Ford Coppola's questionable 1992 remake of Dracula and more recently in the surreal and morose indie Wristcutters: A Love Story.

Perhaps his most striking role, however, is that of himself, as was the case with Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes in 2003. In the scene that follows after the jump, Waits does his best to convince Iggy Pop that he has a second career as a doctor, and manages to insult Pop by insinuating he's a "Taco Bell kind of guy"--and it's as sweetly charming as it is wildly uncomfortable.

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​Rollerderby has always been something I'm a little uneasy with. I'm all for female-centric sports, certainly, but the thought of women kicking the crap out of each other while brandishing titillating stage names and ripped fishnets seemed more for the benefit of a drooling male audience than in the name of empowering athleticism.

That said, Drew Barrymore's directorial debut and valentine to the sport has given me reason to reconsider my perspective. Granted, perhaps I was just manipulated by the fact that Whip It! feels like a Lifetime Network tearjerker for Gen X riot grrls, but Barrymore's depiction of plucky Ellen Page persevering in that world was charming as hell, and helped in no small part by the use of the Go Team's "The Power is On" during the film's climatic match (the CD soundtrack lists the song "Doing it Right" as a selection, but "Power" was definitely in there too). Unfortunately, that scene can't be tracked down on YouTube, so I'd just recommending going out and renting it (confidential to Scarecrow Video: I'm bringing it back today, I promise). There's some good behind-the-scene stuff out there, however. Clip after the jump.

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