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Lynn Shelton Charms the Bagger

New York Times media reporter and blogger David Carr, aka The Carpetbagger, ran into Seattle director Lynn Shelton over the weekend at Sundance. And though he hadn't actually, you know, seen the her new movie Humpday, he was thoroughly smitten with Shelton and her scrappy band of indie stars and crew. Soon thereafter, the movie signed a distribution deal (reports Carr), which is a major coup for any Seattle filmmaker. Shelton's last feature, My Effortless Brilliance, played SIFF last year to less than steller notices. Let's hope Humpday plays SIFF this year, and goes on to full national arthouse distribution (i.e., the major cities, then Netflix).

Not All Clowns Are Bozos. Some Are Mimes.

Last night, a group of female physical theater performers set out to prove, as the title of their TOJ show plainly suggested, that Not All Clowns are Bozos. They succeded wildkly at their mission of proving that their corner of the artistic universe could be enjoyed by adults as well as kids. While the first half of the show was a little uneven (full disclosure: we arrived 20 minutes late after a leisurely supper at Maneki), the second half crackled, with hilarious solo and duo performers relieving one another well before any one sketch had the chance to get stale.

Here's the thing, though: none of these performers fit my definition of "clown." I'm sure the artists would argue that this was part of the point, and I'd get that point were it not for the fact that their mostly silent acts veered far, far closer to the supposedly moribund art of mime. After taking in this show, I'd submit that purebred whiteface pantomime is dead only because the people who possess the skills to be keep it alive don't want to anymore. Which is a fair choice, I guess, but still a little sad.

Before I forget, one awesome thing about Theatre Off Jackson is they sell Wells Banana Bread Beer, which sounds horrible but tastes heavenly. Another awesome thing is the availability of Arrested Development lapel buttons for $1 a pop. I bought one of Tobias Funke (David Cross) in fully-body Blue Man Group paint, announcing, as he did on the show: "I just blue myself."

Our First Report From Sundance

SW contributor and critic Scott Foundas is in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival. He begins by reporting the following:

"Will everyone be wearing black?" a friend asked over dinner the other night when the subject arose of my imminent departure for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. "I'm so glad I'm not going to Sundance," confided one longtime film publicist at this week's Los Angeles Film Critics awards dinner, as if she had escaped sentencing to a leper colony. Indeed, this year, it feels like a funereal pall has descended on Park City, Utah before the curtain has even risen on January's annual powwow of independent filmmakers, distributors and deep-pocketed passholders hoping to catch a glimpse of Jennifer Aniston as she tries not to slip on the ice. When the festival does kick off tomorrow evening, with the world premiere of Oscar-winning animator Adam Elliot's debut feature, Mary and Max (featuring a clay-mated Philip Seymour Hoffman as an obese Jewish man with Asperger's syndrome), it will do so at the center of a perfect storm of indie-film bad voodoo.

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And the Fifth Cylon Is...

Really, the only major plot-hole was expecting you to believe the characters actually thought that this woman was a human.

Not to worry! Several friends called to say they have "lives" on Friday night—whatever that means. So they recorded the Battlestar Galactica 4.5 premier. If you are one of those people, do not click below the jump. Everyone else, the real geeks, yeah, I'm talking to you, the person trolling the internet looking for BSG discussions, please continue:

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Holy Frak! BSG Tonight (and Other Dork News)

The final episodes of Battlestar Galactica start airing tonight at 10! Who is the final cylon? Will the formerly warring nations survive on Earth without killing each other? What about all these half-cylon kids running around? And will Leigh Adama finally cut that mangy hair?

In other sci-fi news, the beloved Japanese cartoon Cowboy Bebop (the inspiration for Joss Whedon's Firefly) is slated for a live-action production. The Hollywood Reporter says Keanu Reeves is set to star as Spike Spiegel. Nerd-dom is on fire with rage—there are so many ways in which it's a terrible choice, not the least of which is Spike's ability to laugh at himself—a skill Keanu conspicuously lacks. Sorry, nerds, we might just want to watch the original series in all its animated glory—you know, again.

Tonight! Azar Nafisi at SPL

Just a reminder from our Laura Onstot:

In 1979, Iran went through a transformation straight out of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. Overnight, new leadership and laws mandated chadors for women, banned anything un-Islamic, and made the country a pariah for our next four presidential administrations. Azar Nafisi lived through it, and she wrote about it in the 2003 bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran. But her follow-up memoir, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories (Random House, $27), isn't just another eyewitness account of that tumultuous revolutionary period. It's mainly Nafisi's own story, that of a woman with troubled parents, a weakness for deceitful men, and a stubborn streak that gets her fired from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear a veil. There is history, too, but Nafisi combines national and personal narratives. Today a professor at Johns Hopkins University, she reminds us how her fellow expatriates still love their broken, distant home. LAURA ONSTOT

Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., 386-4636, www.spl.org. Free. 7 p.m.

Steven Soderbergh Interviewed

Soderbergh with Del Toro (Photo: Teresa Isasi/IFC Films)

Our colleague Scott Foundas sat down recently with the director of Che (review here), which opens Friday, Jan. 16 at the Varsity.

Steven Soderbergh tends to travel light — even when he has a movie camera tucked away inside his suitcase. That's how the filmmaker set off on a recent Japanese press tour where, in between interviews, he used a lightweight high-definition video camera known as the Red One to steal some Tokyo exteriors for his upcoming movie The Informant, a darkly comic thriller based on New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald's nonfiction best-seller.

Although The Informant stars Matt Damon and will be released later this year by Warner Bros., Soderbergh's moviemaking M.O. has changed little in the 20 years since his first dramatic feature, Sex, Lies and Videotape, won him the audience award at Sundance (then called the United States Film Festival), the Palme d'Or at Cannes and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay—all before his 28th birthday.

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Tonight! Two Openings to See

Adam Putnam. Untitled, 2009. Mixed media. Dimensions vary.
Image via www2.seattleu.edu/artsci/finearts/Default.aspx?id=2516

Tonight: Void Blank Blank (1 of 3)
Adam Putnam Opening at the Hedreen Gallery
This is curator Yoko Ott's inaugural exhibit at the gallery, and the focus is the lush red passageway between the gallery and the theater.
Thursday, January 15, 5-8pm
Instead of denying that the gallery is an acting theater lobby, Ott's exhibit line-up aims to explore this fact.
Through March 21.


Joe Park, 1992
can't remember if the brick came first of the tissue dispenser, although they are both numbered so i guess i could check. Image via www.cornish.edu/exhibitions/joepark

Also Opening Tonight: The Hotness: A Sort of Retrospective by Joe Park
Thursday, January 15, 5-7 p.m. at Cornish
Cornish art alum Joe Park shows what could be considered a road map of how he got to his current painting style, including selections of his work as an art student, furniture designer, sculptor, and performance artist. Online catalog and gallery info here.
Through February 20.

Mime Kampf?

A few months ago, a meeting of the mimes was held at Stumptown Roasters near the Seattle U. campus, where it was agreed that the pure art of whiteface was pretty much dead. There was also something of a consensus reached as to who should be blamed for mime's demise: Shields & Yarnell, a Marceau-trained San Francisco duo who had their own televised network variety show in the late-'70s. This duo has been rather quiet (ha!) for quite some time, but we just learned that they're due to launch a thunderous reunion tour in the Greater Phoenix area at the end of January. So if you've got some time for mime, get down to the desert.

Khaaaaaaaan!!

"I know my own needs ... I request nothing beyond the thickly COO-shunned seats available even in soft Corinthian leather."

Goodbye, Ricardo Montalban. The world has just become a lot less sexy.

Local Link to Che

(IFC Films)

Steven Soderbergh's four-hour epic treatment of Che Guevara (played by Benicio Del Toro) opens Friday at the Varsity. (Our review here.) Among the credited screenwriters is Peter Buchman, once a playwright here in town associated with the old Annex Theatre during the '90s. After a script collaboration with part-time local screenwriter Chris McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects), Buchman left town and began getting work in Hollywood, including Jurassic Park III. (Also Eragon, ugh.)

His stage productions here included Airsick (1995) and Zero G (1997). Neither of which, unfortunately, featured dinosaurs or Catalina Sandino Moreno (pictured above with Del Toro).

On View: Michael Dailey at Greg Kucera Gallery

Image: Dunraven Night, 1999, Acrylic on canvas, 45.5 x 57.5 inches
Courtesy of Francine Seders Gallery, via gregkucera.com

As part of the Color, Light, Time, and Place exhibit (Selected Works, 1965-1999) Michael Dailey shows luminous abstractions in oil at Greg Kucera Gallery (with newer works in acrylic at Francine Seders Gallery) through February 14 (and 9, respectively).

Another Good Reason Not to Own a TV

File this one under the category of creepy press releases from skeezy publicists. Last Friday, the same day the event was being promoted, we were offered a chance to come report on (leer at?) the following:

"Gold Diggers" produced by David DeLay of Grandpa's R.V. Productions and Josh Hodgins of Jh Productions both of Washington State, will be filming for DeLay's reality show at Centerfolds this Friday. The reality show is an insider's look into the bizarre and sometimes difficult world of Exotic Dancers; much like the shows "Deadliest Catch" and "Dirty Jobs", as young women look to pay their bills, put themselves through school, all with hopes of one day landing a millionaire.

Where is Centerfolds? Up in Crown Hill, I think, and I am certainly not driving there to watch meth-addicted trailer-trash girls audition for yet another permutation of Girls Gone Wild. Moreover, as we found from the following Craigslist ad, said show will be taking gullible women out of state:

"I am searching for beautiful girls to be on a stripper reality TV show. The girl will have to be willing to do strip tease on camera. The show is similar to the Real Life just with strippers! You do not have to have any dancing experience but we do prefer experience. The girls will have to move to Tampa for a few months and live under the camera during designated hours. All expenses will be covered and girls will be paid well. If you are interested please send me your picture and contact number. Auditions will be 1/9/09 which is tomorrow at 12 noon. Please send email as soon as possible so I can set up your audition."

Classy! But you know what reality TV show I would like to watch? David DeLay and Josh Hodgins being chased down the street and beaten with clubs by a bunch of angry Seattle women. We could call it Pimp Beaters.

Safe Sextet

What to do tonight? Our Gavin Borchert suggests you see eighth blackbird (yes, they spell it that way) at the Benny:

My guess is that in the future, it'll become apparent that Arnold Schoenberg's most lasting and significant contribution to music history was not the twelve-tone composition method he codified (which never became the lingua franca he envisioned), but his establishment of the "Pierrot ensemble"—the grouping of violin, cello, flute, clarinet, and piano he used in his 1912 work Pierrot lunaire, which has become the dominant template for contemporary chamber music. With or without percussion, it's basically the 20th century's answer to the string quartet. (Locally, Quake was an example, and the Seattle Chamber Players comprise the core of one.) At the top of the heap sits Chicago-based eighth blackbird, one of the most acclaimed and audience-friendly new-music groups around—thanks not only to their talent and energy but to their savvy Internet presence; just search their name on YouTube for several rehearsal and performance clips. They'll perform tonight (music by Reich, Rzewski, and others) on a concert showcasing musicians from their alma mater, Ohio's Oberlin Conservatory. GAVIN BORCHERT

Benaroya Recital Hall, Third Ave. & Union St., 292-2787, www.ticketmaster.com. $20. 7:30 p.m.