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RICK DUPEA TAKES A NEW CAMERA DOWNTOWN >>> This year's springtime rains have refused to go without a fight. Like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, our bad weather has seriously overstayed its welcome. Yet uninterrupted stretches of sunshine continue to grow, and we all know what that means - filmmakers
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MEET WRITER/DIRECTOR FREDERICK MARX >>> Every so often, The Grand Cinema invites a filmmaker to town to share and discuss his or her work with audiences. This Thursday, June 9, the Oscar-nominated writer-director Frederick Marx visits Tacoma along with his 2010 documentary Journey from Zanskar. "Though beings are innumerable, I vow to
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MULTIPLE CHANCES TO CATCH TAYLOR'S WORK >>> Like its wandering father-and-son protagonists, the charming, locally-produced short Scamp is on the move. The film left its Tacoma birthplace and rode the boxcar north to Seattle's Central Cinema, where this Saturday (June 4) you can spot it at the Seattle True Independent Film
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ALL EYES ON TACOMA FEATURE >>> Do you know Joe? In case you don't, actor-producer Joe Rosati has entertained Tacoma for the past several years with a stack of film roles that continues to grow. My own first encounter came in 2008, as I had the privilege of watching Rosati sledgehammer
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FINNIGAN'S FANTASTIC FILM >>> Barely a month remains until The Grand Cinema's last call for Tacoma Film Festival entries (June 15), meaning right now moviemakers in the area are carefully reviewing and fine-tuning their works before sending them off. Since last catching up with Andrew Finnigan at the 2010 festival, the
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"A" FOR AWESOME >>> I hope you haven't forgotten about OAFF. Back in March I reported on the first-ever Olympia Awesome Film Festival and the regrettable delay of its world premiere. Since the event's original venue, The Loft on Cherry, closed its doors earlier than expected, organizers had no choice
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DINING ON A SERIOUS SUBJECT >>> Let's face it: suicide is a bit of a downer. It doesn't usually offer much in the way of entertainment. Making a movie centered on this depressing topic involves financial risk. But treating taboo with humor? That takes grit - and a good script. At first,
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ERIC MOSELEY KEEPS HIS EYE (AND CAMERA) ON HOMELESSNESS >>> Let's begin with a seemingly out-of-the-blue stereotype about the homeless: They don't have their own websites. Another: They lack both the means and drive to engage in artistic pursuits. Well, Eric "Protein" Moseley has set out to trump all the naysayers. Crisscrossing the
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A DIARY: 72-HOUR FILM COMPETITION BRINGS JOKES AND YOLKS, FOLKS >>> Thursday/What are we gonna do? The text message lit up my phone a few minutes after 7 p.m. The message simply read: "Prop: an egg, line: What are you going to do about it?, location: dock or pier, one character must
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ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN WITH THE GRAND'S FILM CONTEST >>> Can you feel it? The suspense is mounting, crackling over the city like electricity. This sensation, communally shared and transmitted by local moviemakers, will only grow as The Grand Cinema's 72-Hour Film Competition dawns at dusk this Thursday. A few vets will
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TACOMA FILMMAKER COMMITTED TO THE IMAGE >>> Since the implementation of audio recording for film eighty-odd years ago, the world has embraced talkies and rarely looked back. A contemporary silent may have trouble finding fans in this sound-saturated age, but that hasn't stopped a few intrepid locals from dabbling in an
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"DOGTOOTH" NOW PLAYING AT THE GRAND >>> We run to movies in part for the illusion of safety they offer, the sweet little lies, whispered in the dark, that reinforce our values and our sense of place and well-being in the world. In this sense films function much like parents do,
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TIME IS RUNNING OUT TO SIGN UP >>> We all have that filmmaker inside us, tapping on the walls of our skulls and pleading for release in patient tones. This time of year, however, the polite knocking turns into an incessant pounding, as less than three weeks remain until The Grand
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THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTRAST AND COMPOSITION >>> If you saw Tom McIntire's Greenspoke at the 2009 Tacoma Film Festival, then you didn't see it. Huh? To clarify, you couldn't watch the short at the Tacoma Film Fest in the way originally intended by its writer/director. Besides the inescapable drop in visual quality when
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THE DAY THE REVOLUTION CAME TO TOWN (AND FILMED) >>> Movies are just fluff, right? Rest stops for escapism before easing back into our daily routines. They rouse our emotions for a short while, but the fire cools soon after. Rarely do we allow them to adjust our actions and change
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BUDGET FRIENDLY AND BRILLIANT >>> Film noir, with its signature chiaroscuro, hard-boiled dialogue and (most important to an independent moviemaker) low-budget vibe, has over the decades spawned countless remakes, spoofs and homages. Falling somewhere amidst these three categories is Quiet Shoes, which hit the Rialto last summer and now returns to
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SEATTLE CONTEST ACCEPTS ENTRIES >>> Cinematic lore tells us that upon witnessing D.W. Griffiths's 1915 epic The Birth of A Nation, President Woodrow Wilson called it "writing history with lightning." Now you have a chance to (re)write your own history with film. Until Friday April 1, Seattle's Museum of History and
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FROM PAGE TO SCREEN ... AND BACK AGAIN >>> Though every film results in a sequence of images, nearly all start life as a story, a script - words on a page. Authors, and particularly poets, use the page as their sole means of expression. But recently, a small band of
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HELP GROW FILM JOBS IN WASHINGTON >>> I'll admit that I give scarcely a thought to film as it pertains to the world of politics (and maybe you don't much either). One comprises a vast collection of freethinking artists and technicians who aim to entertain the masses, the other is a
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MOVIE'S MESSAGE HITS HOME >>> Mick Flaaen, busily PA-ing for the last few weeks on a Seattle feature film called The Dead Men, broke away briefly to premiere his own first short, Welcome to Parkland, this past Sunday at The Grand Cinema. (I wrote about this project in an earlier edition
