The Frances Farmer Show

After a lengthy absence, The Frances Farmer Show returns as Melissa and Sean take a quick look at some films playing on Seattle Screens, including a preview of Terence Davies's Emily Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion, which opens here on May 5th. They also discuss Wong Kar-wai's mid-90s masterpieces Chungking Express and Fallen Angels.

This week Mike and Sean, for the third time, trek out to downtown Seattle to catch the opening night of the new Johnnie To film, the hospital-set thriller Three, with Louis Koo, Zhao Wei and Wallace Chung. Paired with it is another thriller set in a hospital, Samuel Fuller's 1963 Shock Corridor, about a journalist who goes undercover in a mental institution and comes unglued.

On this special episode of The Frances Farmer Show, recorded last summer for another podcast which ended up not being published, Sean talks about director Hong Sangsoo with Thomas Prieto and Ty Landis, specifically focusing on Hong's 2010 film Oki's Movie.

As the Seattle International Film Festival draws to its close, we get together the low-points and high-points of the local juggernaut marathon. Movies discussed include: Dragon Gate Inn, Mountains May Depart, Trivisa, I am Belfast, Under the Sun, The Bacchus Lady, and Creepy.

Almost halfway through the marathon that is the Seattle International Film Festival, we take a break to talk about some of the films we've seen so far. Movies discussed include: Chimes at Midnight, Sunset Song, Love & Friendship, Long Way North, Our Little Sister, Alone, The Island Funeral, Concerto, A Bride for Rip Van Winkle, Cameraperson, Women He's Undressed, In a Valley of Violence, The Final Master, Lo and Behold, The Lure, Tiny, The Seasons in Quincy and A Scandal in Paris.

With the Seattle International Film Festival fast approaching, we discuss earlier films by two prominent directors whose films will be bookending this year's SIFF. Terence Davies will be kicking the festival off with his Sunset Song, while Kiyoshi Kurosawa will bring it to a close with Creepy, and so we talk about Davies's 1992 masterpiece of poetic memory The Long Day Closes and Kurosawa's 2008 surreal domestic melodrama Tokyo Sonata. We're joined as well by Melissa to preview this year's festival, running down some new obscurities, interesting documentaries, much-anticipated archival presentations and more. All that, plus cameo appearances from TS Eliot and Paul Verlaine.

With Mike on vacation his week Sean is joined by Seattle Screen Scene writer Melissa Tamminga to discuss Edward Yang's long sought after 1990 epic A Brighter Summer Day, which has just recently been released by the Criterion Collection, and Soi Cheang's action film SPL 2: A Time for Consequences, starring Tony Jaa and Wu Jing, which will be released here in the US as Kill Zone 2 in a couple of weeks. They also pick their essential Violent Youth films, take a look ahead to what's coming soon to Seattle (and Bellingham) Screens and talk about Prince's classic 1984 film Purple Rain.

This week, to mark the on-going Seijun Suzuki retrospective at the Grand Illusion and the Northwest Film Forum, we discuss the idiosyncratic Japanese director's career and one of his more famous and influential gangster films, 1963's Youth of the Beast. We also talk about the Yakuza film in general, and all the crazy things Suzuki did to it, and take a look at actor/director Takeshi Kitano's own take on the yakuza film in his 1993 film Sonatine. All that plus more goings on around town, including an upcoming tribute to a great director at the Film Forum and the novelty of the Cinema showing something on film.

With the First Folio in town at the Seattle Public Library, we take a look at a couple of unusual Shakespeare adaptations. First is Peter Greenaway's 1991 adaptation of The Tempest, Prospero's Books, with John Gielgud and Mark Rylance. Then we discuss Matías Piñeiro's 2014 riff on Love's Labour's Lost, The Princess of France. We also pick our Essential Shakespeare films, look around at what's coming soon to Seattle Screens, and discuss the 1946 film Dirty Gertie from Harlem USA, directed by Spencer Williams and playing as part of the Pioneers of African-American Cinema here in town and touring around the country.

With Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest film Cemetery of Splendour making its debut on Seattle Screens this week, we take a look at his debut feature, from 2000, the experimental documentary-fiction hybrid Mysterious Object at Noon. The narrative of that film being based on the surrealist parlor game "the exquisite corpse", we also discuss a 1946 film that was written by one of the original participants in the exquisite corpse game, Gates of the Night, written by Jacques Prévert and directed by Marcel Carné. We also take a look ahead at what's coming soon to Seattle Screens, a look back at Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups, and a look all around the career of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the greatest director who made their feature debut in the 21st Century.