For homegrown innovation in collaborative performing arts, one can turn with confidence to Seattle’s Degenerate Art Ensemble. Their latest, Silvering Path is up through this weekend at the intriguing experiment in urban reclamation, Free Sheep Foundation.

Ninjas attack the Weeble Wobble - a dreamer (as vividly expressed in the video work of Leo Mayberry) wearing a fantastic musical dress (made by Anna Lange and Circus Contraption’s Colin Ernst). The foes have a wonderfully percussive battle. See below for a glimpse of the dress being tested out.

Next we watch the beautiful, seemingly circuitous relationship between the sower and the slug princess in a film by Ian Lucero featuring the fiber work of Mandy Greer (whose work was shown this summer at the Bellevue Art Museum).

And finally we meet the slug princess in person (donning Greer’s impressive work) and learn a bit more about her in a dance solo by Haruko Nishimura with live music by Jeffrey Huston and Joshua Kohl.

The show was unique and wonderful, so hurry out to see it. Pick up your tickets before hand, too, as it has sold out every night so far. Finally, be prepared to imbibe as there are very distinctive cocktails to be experienced as well.

Here’s that weeble wobble dress test footage:

Weeble Wobble 4 from joshua kohl on Vimeo.

9 Movies That You Should Look Forward To Seeing

With 109 movies still waiting to be released in 2008, it’s nearly
impossible to see them all within the next 3 months. So for all you
movie addicts out there, we decided to compile a list of 9 movies you
should watch before the year ends.

Max Payne - October 17th

W. - October 17th

Zack and Miri Make a Porno - October 31th

Australia - November 14th

Twilight - November 28th

The Day the Earth Stood Still - December 12th

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - December 19th

The Spirit - December 25th

Revolutionary Road - December 26th

Enjoy!

CultureMob

Comicbookmovie.com heard a rumor that WB (that’s Warner Bros) is interested in casting the legendary One-named singer as the Catwoman for Batman III the movie. They have a Poll asking the good nerds of comicbooksville (me) what we think of Cher being cast. www.comicbookmovie.com/news/articles/4981.asp

They’re not saying it’s true, they’re just saying that’s what they heard. I mean, that’s about as crazy as Johnny Depp buying the Crocodile Cafe in Seattle…um! Oh and speaking of which, there’s another rumor that Mr. Depp is being tapped to play the Riddler in Batman III.

Batman is of course the big bank comicbook movie blockbuster that…well, you know what I’m talking about. Look, the fact is, there’s no way they want Cher to play the Cat. My guess is this is just another of those clever diversions devised by director Christopher Nolan. You know, keep people guessing??? Do not take the bait! But hey, stranger things have happened. I mean, you do remember the movie DareDevil right?

Catch the Dark Knight for a fifth time! Find it here at culturemob.com.

Arguably one of the top 5 film festivals to see this year is the Rawstock Light & Dark Film Fest. Last week I promised to bring you an interview of Justin Freet (previous blog) of Rawstock. Justin took a minute to tell me about their big event of the year. It was super windy out but I managed to get some good quotes from this very enthusiastic artist. In this video you’ll literally be able to see the long hours and the day to day grind that is required of a successful filmmaker (hint: look at his eyes in the first part of the video and tell me if that ain’t dedication).

If you’re looking for a No Holds Barred film festival, this is your event. I think they should let culturemob submit this video!

The festival is sponsored by Bullit Bourbon, Wishlisting.com, and Rockstar Energy Drink.

Friday July 25th
Act Theatre
8pm
$15

for more information go to: http://rawstockmedia.com/

The Rawstock Short Film Festival is back in Seattle. For some reason, it’s all I can think about! Here’s the link to the event: http://culturemob.com/events/131978

RAWSTOCK LIGHT and DARK Film Fest to open July 25th @ Seattle’s ACT Theatre

20 all-new films; heavy with local filmmakers. Split into two min-screenings; one “Light”, one “Dark”.

ACT Theatre’s Bullitt Theatre is downstairs via elevator. It’s an attractive room to see a film and party like rock stars!

This event promises to be cutting edge. Here’s the warning issued by the people of Rawstock.
*WARNING* The films in the “DARK” portion of the show contain graphic violence and shocking images.

Justin Freet (filmmaker) promised to do a video interview with me. I’ll post it next week

For more info, go to rawstockmedia.com

That’s right, you heard me. IFCT is giving away 6 pairs of free tickets to CultureMob readers.

The International Fest of Cinema and Technology will be screening a wide variety of foreign film shorts on the 4th of July weekend.

Where: Northwest Film Forum
Price: $6, $3 students
When: 12:30pm Sat 7.05.08 http://culturemob.com/events/121650
When: 2:00pm Sun 7.06.08 http://culturemob.com/events/121651

News this good bears repeating. IFCT is giving away 6 pairs of free tickets to CultureMob readers. These tickets are good for any of the screenings over the weekend. These passes will go to the first people who respond to admin@ifct.org. If you are one of the ticket winners, the festival will write you back with confirmation. Your free tickets will then be held for pickup at the festival reception area at the Northwest Film Forum. The films are highly unique, spanning various genres ranging from experimental to animation to sci-fi. Most of these shorts have never before been seen in the United States! This year the festival also takes place in Washington DC, Los Angeles, Melbourne, The Philippines and Florida. The Seattle fest will be taking place at the Northwest Film Forum 1515 12th Ave, July 5th and 6th. Check out the website at www.ifct.org/seattle.html

Find more film events here at culturemob.com

I finally saw the Incredible Hulk and it was a smash. I mean that literally. Mr. Green got all up in the evil hulk-like monsters face and mixed it up old school style. The Hulk came to theaters everywhere to kick ass and chew bubble-gum. And he was all out of bubble-gum.

Ed Norton (aka Ali) vs. Tim Roth (aka Foreman) with William Hurt as the unlikely Don King. Throw in the extremely talented Liv Tyler and you have yourself a remake of the “Rumble in the Jungle”

A classic comic book story!

Find movies like this at culturemob

Most guys out there probably think that Sex in the City is all about sex.

Most guys are wrong. (I know, it’s a shocking revelation).

Sex and the City is about relationships.

The HBO series definitely had heaps of humping, scorching hot love affairs and brunch conversations about randy nights spent with multitude of men, no doubt about it. Like the Mary Tyler Moore show before it, Sex in the City stared in the face the prevailing stereotypes and conceptions about single women and what they want, although the Paris-studded finale did end up with all four of the ladies happily attached to their man of the moment. Sure, Sex in the City is about sex. But the most important theme of the movie is also the most important part of a female’s life, and that is the story of relationships, the undulating aspects of our connections with other human beings, be they children or mothers or friends or sweaty lovers.

I went to the Sunday matinee at the Guild 45th Landmark Theatre along with a crowd that was over 95% females from about their 20’s to 50’s; a few were accompanied by men hoping to earn points with the female and catch a glimpse of T & A (it’s a win-win, boys). A few cheers went down as the curtain went up, and as soon as the story began we were wrapped in attention, right back in New York City with Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte. Judging from the estrogen-fueled crowd’s sighs, belly laughs, chuckles, gasps, and tears, I know that women will love this movie. We may not all buy $525 shoes and have assistants and strut like peacocks down 5th avenue, but we have lived the same relationship themes as these women. We have loved wildly and unreasonably. We have been hurt tortuously. We have found good friends and have lost them. You might think that women are loud as hell in big groups (true) and can never be quiet, but you could hear a pin drop in the theatre when one of the character’s men admitted an affair with another woman.

“It didn’t mean anything,” he pleaded. “I never meant to hurt you.” Dead silence. These women in the theatre had heard it before, perhaps even the exact same words. You could taste the deep silence, broken only in several moments by sniffles. Women were crying; not because of the made-up characters but for the true stories those characters were living.

Although parts of Sex in the City are tear-provoking, it is also a very funny movie, and there was peals of high-pitched laughter to offset those sniffles. One particular scene proves that women think toilet humor is absolutely hilarious, just as we all know men do. And yes, there’s lots of sex and raunchy talk and gratuitous scenes of male anatomy.

But the main point of the movie, the reason the TV series was so popular, and the dominant theme of our female lives is that of relationships: building them, nurturing them, living them, and being rendered to absolute, flat-line silence when those relationships are destroyed. For 99% of human existence, broken human relationships could mean death for a female and her offspring. That is why we go to the bathroom in groups, chat loudly with our friends in the ticket line, obsess about minor details of our relationships and look over often to make sure we are being accepted and loved by our peers. We have Stone Age female brains, even if our feet are wearing Manolos and our head is wearing a bird. And those female brains are as different from male brains as are our bodies and our taste in movies.

Sex in the City is a total chick flick. Do you have two X chromosomes? You will love it, just as sure as you wish you could be as ballsy as Samantha, as quick-witted as Miranda, as persistently optimistic as Charlotte and as good of a friend as Carrie. Bring some girlfriends and do what you do best: nurture your relationships.

Stuck with a Y chromosome along with a male brain? You just might enjoy the movie anyway- after all, it’s all about sex.

Find theaters and show times for Sex and the City here.

What if Sex and the City was set in Seattle? It might be a little like this.

Get some buttered popcorn and a large blue Slurpee and make sure you have arrived at the theatre early for good seats and in time see the coming attractions, because Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the ultimate movie experience. The movie is best seen at a ridiculous theatre like the AMC Loews Alderwood Mall 16 which has all the pomp of a Roman arena along with the glitz and glamour that represented La-La Land before Hollywood surrendered to the leagues of talentless poster-children for nepotism with no panties on.

First of all I will tell you I am a huge Indiana Jones fan. HUGE. I know every single line of the first three movies, a standard characteristic brought about by a childhood with an older brother. If I wanted a playmate I had my choice: Legos or Super Mario Brothers. Even as a young girl I was aware that knowing is half the battle, that the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs, and that anything is possible by the power of Grayskull. But my favorite boy-toy was Indiana Jones; I wanted to be an archaeologist until I realized that they spent far more time painstakingly digging through dirt than romping the world in hot pursuit of fortune and glory.

That said, I LOVED Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. You know who is in it, you know who directed it, you know it will start off with the fade from the Paramount Logo to a real “mountain” of some sort. And you will love this movie too. Of course there are always the whiners who complain that it is no fun to watch an old guy romp around in a fedora and that the movie is cheesy and unrealistic; however I don’t subscribe to the Church of Worshipped Youth and I also realize that OF COURSE it’s unrealistic- it’s a movie! We don’t want to watch the admirable Dr. Jones sorting his laundry, we want to watch him crawling around in haunted tombs, searching for hidden treasure while avoiding snakes, curses, booby traps and Commies- all of which he does in the latest epic adventure. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is non-stop action.

Do you want quicksand and motorcycle chases and jungle ruins and ancient secrets? Do you like fast-paced stories which combine coming-of-age themes with world travel and a romantic edge? How about waterfalls, dark paths through thick trees, dangerous car chases, secret codes, kidnapped professors, crazy monkeys, bad guys who are so evil they look it, carnivorous ants and a hero who can take punch after punch and ends up getting the girl in a happy ending? Of course you do. These archetypal stories have been told as long as humans could tell them. 

Just like our ancestors we live in a world where there are no pure heroes or totally bad guys, where you don’t always get what you want and there is seldom a happy, sunset-drenched ending. Modern Americans wouldn’t know an adventure if it hit them in the face like a giant rolling boulder, and if they did they would certainly run back to their couches and frozen pizza. Hollywood knows us. You can try to insist that you like deep dramas with twisted characters and sordid finales, and I might believe you there, but everybody likes stories about booby-trapped tombs and quicksand.

And carnivorous ants go so well with popcorn.

For theaters near you and showtimes for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, click here.

Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha strut onto big screens this Friday not just in New York City but in metropoli all over the country. All of you Sex and the City fans know that the fifth character in the HBO series was not Aidan or Stanford or Steve or even Mr. Big- no, that most important player was the Big Apple itself. There is no sex without The City.

Or is there? What if you took away the character of Manhattan and replaced it with, say, Seattle? Would the show have been so different? Pour yourself a cosmopolitan (or better yet, have your man-toy do it) and relax into the world of Sex and the City: Seattle Style:

• Miranda is a lawyer for Boeing who lives in Belltown and regularly bitches to the city about the crackheads and prostitutes on her street. Luckily for Miss Smarty-Pants there are plenty of well-read men with frayed library cards in this town to keep up with her in conversation- though no one on earth can match her knifelike wit, propelled by the fine forces of cynicism and sarcasm. Miranda’s favorite club? The see-and-be-seen venue of conspicuous consumption Club Venom, of course.
• Charlotte arranges exhibits at the Seattle Art Museum and does charity work for singles’ group Space City Mixer, a group who she considers in need of charity indeed. This unapologetic yuppie lives on uppity Mercer Island and spends her evenings online ordering designer clothes and hanging out with metrosexuals at The Last Supper Club in Pioneer Square.
• Samantha handles PR for Microsoft, giving her plenty of opportunities to play with rich men. Though she works in Redmond, she would never live in a place as sterile and un-hip as the Eastside and instead has purchased a new and fancy condo in the grittiest, most interesting neighborhood in Seattle: Capitol Hill. Samantha fits in well with the flavor and color of the quarter and gives as good as she gets with the street kids, buskers, and bums. She relaxes with her favorite bunch of people at The Cuff Complex.
• Carrie writes a sex column for the Seattle Weekly which is giving Savage Love a run for its money for the naughtiest, dirtiest, and best love and sex column in the country; ‘Date Girl” now writes for a more appropriate publication, Teen Magazine. Carrie lives in Fremont and shops at all the annoying chi-chi boutiques, somehow buying $200 teeshirts and $500 purses on a writer’s salary. She hangs out where all the hot guys in Fremont are: the Nectar Lounge, of course.

The four women meet for Sunday brunch at Julia’s in Wallingford, wearing not Manolo Blahniks but Tevas with rolled-up jeans (acceptable fashion in the rainy city- admit it, you’ve done it); drinking double espressos and diving into plates of Eggs Benedict (they don’t have to starve themselves quite so much outside of NYC).

For a long weekend the girls vacation not in the Hamptons but in Hawaii, which is the closest and most accessible beach to Seattle (and by most accessible I mean you can actually swim in the water, not that our four heroines would dream of doing so). There is no strolling with beaus in Central Park for Carrie, only walking around Green Lake- and she’d better walk, not meander, or the rollerbladers/runners/multi-tasking women jogging with a double stroller and two large dogs while talking on the phone will run her ass over.

So who do these alpha-women date? It’s a little harder in the Emerald City where most men hale from the Land of Passive-Aggressiva; there are no eager stockbrokers here, no modelizers, no models, and no tycoons of any sort, save the software brains and Boeing boys. Our girls are left with:

Mr. Bike-to-Work Guy: With skin-tight duds and shaved legs, he often gets asked the question, “Do you really need an all-spandex outfit to ride from Wallingford to Queen Anne?” The answer is always NO, people, and Miranda lets him know it, before rolling her eyes and moving on.
The Outdoorsman: Bad news for Carrie and her hatred of squirrels which are “just rats in cuter outfits,” because all over Seattle you find this R.E.I. gear-wearing, head-to-Tiger-Mountain-after-work, long weekend on the Peninsula, boat-loving guy who rarely brushes his hair, and despite herself, Carrie can’t get enough. Hope she has waterproof gear for the spring nights spent in the Cascades.
The Rocker: Found all over the streets of Seattle, the musician is passionate, a little dirty, preoccupied with his band but prone to grand romantic gestures. Charlotte is a goner for this type, until she realizes he has gestured romantically for half the females in the city.
Mr. No-Balls: He epitomizes the saying, “He’s just not that into you,” because he’s just not into anything- living is a bit risky, after all. He is eaten alive by Samantha before he opens his mouth. One lost, 200,000 to go. Good thing she is hungry.
The DJ: A species almost as numerous as The Rocker in Seattle, the spin-master lives the conundrum which Carrie must use all of her journalistic training and wicked flirting skills to figure out: all the DJs are man-whores, yet all the DJs have girlfriends. Carrie susses the mystery out, and the answer is not pretty.
The Hipster: Recognizable by his tight black jeans, chunky silver jewelry, perfectly beaten-up skate shoes and hair mussed just so over the right eye, the hipster is too cool to care about anything really, except himself. Is it possible that the hipster is just an emo who is too old to be an emo anymore? Discuss amongst yourselves, at brunch.

So there you have it; Sex in the City Seattle Style is a little bit the same, and a whole lot different. To really understand the women we must walk a block in their Choos; don’t miss the movie Sex and the City, opening all over the area on Friday, and on Thursday at midnight at select venues like the Regal Meridian 16 in downtown Seattle, Lincoln Square Cinema in Bellevue, and AMC Loews Alderwood Mall 16 up north.

Will the movie be any good? Abso-F*cking-Lutely.

Read my review of Sex and the City the Movie here.