The Daily Wire: Two Cult Films

David Lynch's first freaky love child is reborn at NWFF
Even more than Blue Velvet, when I first saw it in the '80s on VHS, David Lynch's non-narrative 1977 nightmare Eraserhead scratched an itch in my imagination. Here were my two favorite genres, horror and science fiction, spied through a murky crevice of the underground, a perv-o-licious perspective that forever altered my taste in movies. Out of similar fissures, the philosophic horror shows of David Cronenberg would strike deeper and sustain me longer, and I would come to find Lynch's Hollywood Hallucination mode his richest (Inland Empire included). But Eraserhead came first, its swarming spermatozoa impregnating a love of the avant-garde that rapidly metastasized. Through Thurs. Dec. 6; see film section for other Lynch titles this week. Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, www.nwfilmforum.org. $5-$8.50. 7 and 9:15 p.m. NATHAN LEE

A natural, zesty enterprise
Fargo got them a couple Oscars, and No Country for Old Men is getting the raves, but the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski is the cult favorite among their films, spurring its fans (self-dubbed "Achievers") to organize Lebowski Fests across the country. The loosest of plots (told in the most quotable of scripts) is launched as Jeff Bridges, in bathrobe and jellies as the now-and-forever patron saint of slackers (a character inspired by former SIFF organizer and "Seattle Seven" member Jeff Dowd), tries to find out who stole his rug and why, eliciting the help of John Goodman as a militant 'Nam vet/aggressively observant Jew, encountering Julianne Moore in a dream sequence as a bowling Valkyrie and the rest of an indie dream cast that includes Steve Buscemi, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Turturro, and Sam Elliott. Egyptian, 805 E. Pine St., 781-5755. $6-$9.25. Midnight Fri., Nov. 30-Sat., Dec. 1. GAVIN BORCHERT