Pop Culture Petri Dish

The Columbia City Theater in South Seattle celebrated its Grand (Re-) Opening with two free shows June 25 and 26, and it was a pip by all accounts. Duties with Bizarro Movie Night kept me from seeing the June 25 show (a Hip-Hop extravaganza featuring Mash Hall, Cloud Nice, and DJ Suspence), but I was in attendance, camera in hand, for the Saturday performance by Kelli Schaefer , Drew Grow and the Pastors' Wives , and Grand Hallway . Details (and a slideshow) can be accessed at the Seattle Concerts Examiner by going here . I had an embarassment of riches, photos-wise: Chock it up to great good luck, and great subjects. Only a small portion were used for the Examiner slideshow, and I had to severely truncate the photos that did make the cut, so enclosed please find some of my favorite snapshots of the evening, in all their un-shrunk, un-cropped beauty. Click on each to see a larger version if you like. Kelli Schaefer: Drew Grow and the Pastors' Wives: Grand Hallwa

If'n you read the last entry, you know I've been a movie-watchin' mole lo, these last three weeks, and it's been quite the adventure. In addition to seeing more movies in theaters in that span than I did in the preceding six months, I was able to freeload my way into the Seattle International Film Festival Opening and Closing Night Galas, where neon-colored cocktails and much shared movie geekery amongst fellow nerds/journalists flowed freely. And I met some talented and fascinating filmmakers, to boot. I saw 28 feature films during the run of SIFF. Almost all of them were good-to-great; only a couple were straight-up disappointments. Enclosed please find my evaluations of everything I saw, along with accompanying ratings. The Extra Man : **1/2 The Fest opening film was a quirky comedy featuring Kevin Kline as a struggling playwright who escorts elderly rich women and takes recently-unemployed Ivy League professor Paul Dano under his wing. Kline's a hoot, as al

Damn, I love this poster. Just saying. And it does have a bearing on this overdue Petri Dish missive. The last two to three weeks of my life have been spent split between my day job and the glorious rigor that has been covering the Seattle International Film Festival for the SunBreak.com . I've seen a ton of great movies, and better yet, I've been able to interview some of the makers of those films in detail. It's been the most inspiring couple of weeks I've had, writing-and-movie-lust-wise, in awhile; though the writing part's been hard to squeeze in 'twixt dashing madly between theaters, home (sleeping and eating can be quite the nuisance sometimes), and the W Hotel (site of most of the interviews I've conducted). I'm enjoying an actual vacation (or, more likely and aptly, a stay-cation) for the next couple of weeks and plan to use that time to get a lot of creative/writing things up to speed. I'll, of course, be getting the ol' Petri Dish c