I was skeptical of Mistaken for Strangers at first, because I'm not a fan of The National (when I told my friend this the other day she looked at me like she couldn't understand the words coming out of my mouth. It was seriously AWKWARD), but this documentary is actually less about the band itself, and more about Tom Berninger, the brother of lead singer Matt, who is both the Director and subject. 

The trailer has a lot of "whoa" moments,  including my favorite: listening to Matt Berninger talk about how his brother is a metalhead, and thinks "indie rock's pretentious bullshit". HAHA. Ha. (I hope you guys are laughing with me!) And the ouchy "The only reason you ARE here is because you're my brother". 

Anyway! Watch the trailer. It looks cool, and we've got two tickets to each show for a very lucky Imaginary! The film screens on Monday 5/20, 7pm and again Tuesday 5/21, 4pm at The Egyptian. For a chance to win, email us at tig {at} threeimaginarygirls {dot} com with the subject line "Indie Rock is Bullshit" anytime between now and 3pm Friday 5/17. And make sure you tell us WHICH screening you want tickets to! We'll notify the winners Friday night. 

I know, I know. ANOTHER Kickstarter post, Amie? Don't worry, this one isn't for Zach Braff. Remember a few weeks ago when I posted the trailer for The Glamour & the Squalor? It's a documentary about Marco Collins, and covers a huge, important part of his huge, important life -- as well as the local music scene.

Anyway! They're in the home stretch and trying to raise at least $50,000 in order to finish the film up (and if they get to $125,000, the music they score the film with will be AWESOME). Anything helps, and you can score a digital download of the film, signed DVDs, bragging rights -- hell, even a DJ set with Marco himself if you put up enough cheddar.

I dare you to watch the trailer and not tear up just a little. And, you know, if you have some money to give, giving it to locally-created film about a local guy who's pretty damn cool seems like a boss idea.

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{The Source Family opens Friday, May 3 at 9 PM at the SIFF Cinema at the Film Center in Seattle Center, 305 Harrison Street, and runs through May 9, 2013. Source Family members Makushla, Omne, and Rain Aquarian will be at the premier in person.}

For underground music fans of the god-jam variety (namely, psyche heads) the names Father Yod and Ya Ho Wa 13 can evoke mystical states of I want I want I want. Most fans of even just some of the hundreds of releases these often free-form musicians put out since the late 60s are aware there is a wild cultural backstory to their creation; and some of those LPs feature pivotal artists such as Sky Saxon of The Seeds, who converted to the unabashed cult which formed the bands which made their sounds. 

That's right, FY and YHW 13 are actual cult artists, the former once known as Jim Baker, a Judo master and Marine and miracle-magus who underwent a Yogic conversion in the 60s and charismatically collected together something called The Source Family at the height of the West Coast New Age wampum.

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Hello, Imaginaries! This year's Face the Music program at the Seattle International Film Festival contains some music documentaries I AM SUPER EXCITED ABOUT!!! You can buy passes to SIFF now, and inividual tickets go on sale this week on Thursday, 5/2. And so, let us (stage) dive in: 

First up: a few special events put together by Ms. Hannah Levin of KEXP! The Maldives are doing their thing at The Triple Door this year, performing music for The Wind, a 1928 Lillian Gish film. And the documentary Muscle Shoals will also have a tribute evening at The Triple Door, with music provided by Patterson and Dave Hood with Jeff Fielder and friends. {The Maldives & The Wind, June 7 at The Triple Door, two shows: 7pm & 9:30pm; A Muscle Shoals Tribute, May 30 at The Triple Door, 7pm}  

Speaking of Muscle Shoals, in case you didn't know, it's the studio where "legendary musicians including Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett gathered to create music that would later inspire the likes of Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and many more." I'm not gonna lie, the trailer makes me drool a little bit. {Screens 5/29, 7pm at SIFF Cinema Uptown, and again 5/30, 7pm at the Egyptian} 

Power Pop fans rejoice! Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me is coming to SIFF!!! Promising never-before-seen footage, rousing musical tributes, and in-depth interviews with members of the band and the musicians they’ve inspired. Yes, yes, yes, and YES. I was hoping this would make it to SIFF. Hooray! {Screens 5/21, 9pm, and again 5/26, 8:30pm at SIFF Cinema Uptown} 

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The trailer for The Glamour & The Squalor has finally been released! (And there was much rejoicing) Warning: I got a little choked up around the 1:43 mark. I’m super excited for this documentary about the amazing Marco Collins to hurry up and come out—although I know we have kind of a long road ahead of us. From the Facebook page:

The Glamour and the Squalor is a feature-length documentary film project about the rise, fall and reemergence of Hall of Fame radio personality Marco Collins, the creation of Seattle’s 107.7 The End, and how together they shaped the future of music – launching the careers of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Beck, Weezer, Death Cab for Cutie, Foo Fighters, Garbage and others. The film will also explore Marco’s current battle to stay clean after a decade of drug abuse, his return to breaking contemporary music, as well as his role in the heated and historic marriage equality vote in Washington state.

Oh man I CANNOT WAIT. Coincidentally, I found a 107.77 The End sticker that I had saved from my community college days while spring cleaning yesterday. I loved listening to Marco on the radio during his heyday and I’m so, so, so pleased he’s still around and doing his thing on Jet City Stream, and that I’ll be able to see him sharing his story (and his struggles) on the big screen soon.

Who else is excited for this?!?!?!

{My Amityville Horror is screening at Grand Illusion Cinema on Friday 4/12 & Saturday 4/13 at 11pm, and again on Monday 4/14 at 9pm}

When I was a preteen, I saw the 1979 version of The Amityville Horror, which kicked off an obsession with spirits and demon possession, and learning everything about the family that had lived in the real house and what they had experienced. So I was pretty psyched when I saw that Daniel Lutz, one of the kids who lived through the actual thing, was the subject of this new documentary, My Amityville Horror.

But whoa. WHOA. This guy, who is now in his mid-40s, is clearly messed up about whatever went down in that house. Whether is was actually poltergeists causing the scares, or the active imaginations of the children (via patriarch George Lutz), is left up to you to decide. Regardless, it’s clear that the scars Danny bears from it will never heal completely. 

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{Room 237 opens in Seattle on Friday, 4/5 and is screening at SIFF Uptown Cinemas through 4/11. Director Rodney Ascher will be on Skype for a Q&A after the 6:45pm showings on both Friday and Saturday night—and you can catch a screening of The Shining directly after the documentary on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday}

“This is not “The Making of The Shining.” This is not a biography of Stanley Kubrick. This is: After the film has left the filmmaker’s hands, how does the audience grapple with it and make sense of it?” ~ Director Rodney Ascher from an interview with Vulture

After viewing a film (in particular, viewing a film over and over and … over) some fans latch onto the tiniest details, stringing them into clues that they then weave into a larger meaning that is personally important to them—and then convince themselves that the Director obviously meant that ONE THING.

In Room 237, the film in question in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and those “one” things include The Holocaust, the massacre and betrayal of the Native Americans, something-something about a Minotaur and the maze, an analysis of impossibly constructed rooms and hallways, a look at the interesting imagery created when it’s played backwards and forwards at the same time, and awestruck respect at how the whole thing is inlaid with hidden meanings.

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{The American Scream screens at the Grand Illusion Cinema on Saturday, October 6 at 9pm and 11pm as part of their Curse of All Monsters Attack! Program this month}

The American Scream is one of those amazingly awesome documentaries full of people that make you cry because they are so damn passionate about what they’re doing.

And in this case, what they’re doing is setting up “Home Haunts”, which means running full-scale haunted houses every Halloween that they put together themselves, and pay for with their own money. (I swear, if we ever got trick-or-treaters at our house, and our yard was bigger than a walk-in closet, I’d be doing the same thing!)

Directed by Michael Paul Stephenson (who played the kid in Troll 2, and directed Best Worst Movie), this intensely personal doc follows three families in Fairhaven, MA who put on complicated haunted houses every year: Victor Bariteau, Manny Souza, and Matt & Rick Broudeur work all year long to make sure the neighborhood kids have a good time on All Hallows’ Eve.

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{The Seattle premiere of An Encounter with Simone Weil is at The Northwest Film Forum Monday, 9/24, and it screens through Thursday, 9/27. The Thursday showing includes a special introduciton by The Stranger editor Chrisopher Frizelle.} 

Totally intense philosopher, political agent, and spiritual worker Simone Weil was sort of the Ian MacKaye, Henry Rollins, and Dave Bazan of the 20th century revolutionary world. Born in 1909 and raised in a standard French bourgeois home, she was obsessed with the plight of the suffering, and the mechanics of oppression. All over the world, on every level of human existence. The way that a lot of artists and musicians are, or want to be seen as if they are. But when it comes to revolution, her drive was actualized in her own habitual writing, union organizing, mystical visions, and eventual death in 1943.

Some might think of it all as a neuotic waste, but a lot of others (including cultural maven Susan Sontag) found deep inspiration from even its most pathological extremes. 

Weil's tornado of doubt-infused living is solemnly and seriously documented by historical and activist filmmaker Julia Haslett in An Encounter with Simone Weil, who approaches the material with the ferocious focus required.

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"Bill W." was a synthesizer. A human synthesizer, that is, someone who took an analogue expression and somehow craftily made something needed out of it for the world in a pinch. Something that was there before, but not easily accessible without a lot of training or experience on the part of the person who wanted in. He put together ideas about how we need so desperately to talk to each other, to earnestly fellowship in equality, to have secret societies where he can be utterly humble and deeply admit our weakness.

Like his fellow 20th century replicant of addiction-prophecy, "Wild Bill" Burroughs, their raspy, patrician voices start off in bomb-bursts of declaration ("laying it all outh there, no matter what you think of me") then likewise trail off into momentary flickers between naked universal connection and alien observation. As if they're both astronauts floating in a glass bowl spaceship above time, growing sadder and sadder at humanity (their own and in general) by the minute. They both made many mistakes, they both owned up to most. But the ideas they put together -- these are inside everything you are, make, and do now. Bill W., however, dove from the limelight, and would never have endorsed anything resembling celebrity. He also deeply changed a large chunk of humanity, more than just expressing ideas about it. 

William S. Burroughs has nothing to do with this documentary about the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, don't be deluded. But this is about the past, and the future, and seems like science fiction, which Burroughs wrote. What's even more astonishing is that the Bill we're actually talking about created a utopia, which serves citizens kindly to this day -- not a bitter-land of ancient impulses repeated into madness and murder. Bill W. is about William G. Wilson, who put together a movement in post-Depression era American based on the mathematics and manipulations he learned whilst a stockbroker before the big crash of '29, and oh yeah, his tragically driven desire to get well. 

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