NOIR BY NORTHWEST, SEATTLE FILM NOIR WEEK"NOIR CITY SEATTLE" OPENS WITH TWIN BILL OF RARITIES by Alex Deleon, for <www.filmfestivals.com> Tuesday, July 9, 2007 The traveling all-Film-Noir festival known as "Noir City", introduced personally by the San Francisco based "Czar of Noir", Eddie Muller, opened here at the SIFF theater in the Space Needle dominated Seattle Center on Friday, July 6, with a pair of seldom seen and hard-to-find dark films of the late for...

"NOIR CITY SEATTLE" OPENS WITH TWIN BILL OF RARITIES by Alex Deleon, for <www.filmfestivals.com> Tuesday, July 9, 2007 The traveling all-Film-Noir festival known as "Noir City", introduced personally by the San Francisco based "Czar of Noir", Eddie Muller, opened here at the SIFF theater in the Space Needle dominated Seattle Center on Friday, July 6, with a pair of seldom seen and hard-to-find dark films of the late forties, "Thieves' Highway&quo...

To start at the end, the final film of the now fabulous "Noir City" festival in Seattle, closing out a solid week of non-stop black-hearted delight, was "Wicked Woman" (1953) -- arguably, the purest 'noir' ever made. This was billed along with Fritz Lang's far more famous and far more arty "Scarlet Street" (1945), and the contrast between these two striking studies in wickedness is almost as striking as the films themselves. To start with, Lang was a very European "art director" and "Scarlet S...

CHAOS is just a theory in physics, but it's a full blown practice at the Minneapolis film festival. Whether or not a can of film will arrive at its designated venue at all, or, if it does arrive, whether it will be wound on backward or inside out -- therefore unshowable -- is often a toss-up. One such instance, Werner Herzog's latest, "The Wild Blue Yonder" -- an astronaut fantasy in a post-Armageddon world -- arrived at the Oak Street theater projection booth cut into unmarked segments, so th...