Party snap
Category: shawn levy (Page 1 of 5)
My lastest, out today wherever book-on-paper and/or -in-digits are sold.
Sabas among the mortals
Film critic Shawn Levy is taking time off to write a book. Until he returns, movie reviews will be handled by able film writers Marc Mohan, Stan Hall and Mike Russell.
Friends, I am off on a voyage of discovery, researching and writing a book, chasing into the unknown with only my gumption to guide me.
Until then, I leave the film department of The Oregonian in the hands of my fellow film writers Marc Mohan, Stan Hall, and Mike Russell and a cadre of fabulous editors.
You are in good hands.
Until we meet again, then....
Paul Thomas Anderson's tale of a man drawn into a quasi-religious cult is puzzling and provoking, with remarkable performances at its heart.
Joaquin Phoenix in "The Master"“The Master” is cool and puzzling and almost feels more like a novel than a movie.
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson came onto the scene as a brilliantly gifted scamp of a storyteller, with the portraits of underground culture “Hard Eight” and “Boogie Nights” and the web-of-life epic “Magnolia.” But since then he has moved away from familiar narrative forms, first in “Punch Drunk Love,” then in “There Will Be Blood,” the last of which, in light of this new film, seems the dawn of a new phase in its maker’s art.
Like “Blood,” “The Master” concerns a strong, charismatic man determined to reshape the world no matter the personal costs. Like “Blood,” it is a film in which big ideas are chewed over but not necessarily digested, in which the world is slightly distorted to accommodate large and even grotesque characters, in which the accumulation of episodes weighs more heavily than the ‘through line’ of a ‘plot.’ It vexes and dares, it frustrates and goads, but it is powerful and singular and doesn’t leave your mind easily. It’s not as appealing, at least on the surface, as Anderson’s early films, nor does it wallop you like “Blood.” But it is something, you must admit that.
Joaquin Phoenix, back from his bizarre decision to shut down his career, plays Freddie Quell, an alcoholic, emotionally troubled seaman who finishes his service in World War II and finds himself unable to reintegrate himself into society. Adrift, he winds up aboard a yacht commanded by Lancaster Dodd (Anderson staple Philip Seymour Hoffman), a man of mysterious authority who is engaged in rethinking ideas of human psychology, history, and self-empowerment. Quell, who, in fact, needs quelling badly, is drawn into Dodd’s world, seeking to silence the demons in his head and striving to gain status among the writer’s traveling cohort of family members and apostles. But Freddie’s troubles may be too profound for any cure to avail, and Dodd’s work might not be able to offer him, or anyone else, credible answers.
Dodd is, plainly, a version of L. Ron Hubbard, author of “Dianetics” and founder of the Church of Scientology. But “The Master” isn’t a critique or expose. Yes, there are passages in which it seems that Dodd’s work is a sham, but there are also moments in which true believers profess their faith, and nothing that we see distorts the actual legal and doctrinal struggles faced by Hubbard and his followers during the period the film depicts. There will (probably) not be lawsuits.
Besides, the focus isn’t on the spiritual movement so much as the relationship between off-kilter Freddie and grandiloquent Dodd, the itchy, gaunt acolyte and his robust and Olympian master. Phoenix is almost perversely out of sync -- gangly and twitchy, speaking out of one side of his mouth, hands on hips inside-out, arms akimbo like a scarecrow. The forces inside him have gnarled and twisted his form. Just seeing him on screen makes you shift back in your seat.
Hoffman, on the other hand, brings a grand Falstaffian quality to Dodd, a fondness for food and flesh and thrills and ideas, an outsized confidence camouflaging a sometimes thunderous temper, a blend of certainty and doubt, a need to control all of those around him while giving them the impression that they command themselves. Orson Welles would’ve loved the guy.
These two herculean performances more or less wipe everyone else off the screen, and Anderson knows it. He’s got Amy Adams as Dodd’s missus, and Laura Dern as a significant devotee, both small roles, really, and there are very few other faces you might recognize. That lack of familiar faces makes it easy for him to immerse us in the post-war era of skirts and suits and big cars and no-tech living. Like the blasted-out landscape of “Blood,” the sparsity of “The Master” allows the two lead actors and the various competing ideas to play out against a relatively clean backdrop.
In speaking of the novelistic quality of the film, I specifically refer to the sense that, like Tolstoy or Dreiser or Bellow, Anderson is deploying characters and events in an effort to give shape to ideas. There’s nothing prosaic about the filmmaking, however, which is conceived in sequences of motion and light that sometimes recall the abstraction of Terrence Malick rather than the hopped-up energies of Martin Scorsese or the jazzy flow of Robert Altman, to name two of Anderson’s chief influences. Gorgeously shot by Mihai Malimare Jr. (who has photographed Francis Coppola’s last few films), with a spooky and compelling score by Jonny Greenwood, it’s exquisitely made. Anderson may be thinking like a writer, but his movies are movies.
But they are not always warm movies, and the aridity of “The Master” is, finally, its most lingering impression. It’s a film you admire, with two powerhouse performances, but it’s aloof and self-involved and eccentric. “Blood” was a head-scratcher, yes, but it galvanized, if only through the strength of Daniel Day-Lewis at its heart. “The Master” doesn’t have the same magnetic power, but it does excite you at the prospect of Anderson’s future. Once upon a time people talked quite seriously about the “Great American Novel,” a chimerical blend of intelligence, entertainment and import that would forever change and define literature. Anderson, god love him, seems determined to make the “Great American Film.” “The Master” isn’t it, but you come away from it with the sense that may be on the right path.
(137 min., R, TBD) Grade: B-plus
A based-on-truth tale about people manipulated into criminal acts by stranger on the phone.
Ann Dowd in "Compliance"“Compliance” is a slice-of-life film that sneaks up on you nauseatingly, and not just because it’s set in a fast food restaurant.
Writer-director Craig Zobel’s movie is based on the true story of a predator who phoned various businesses pretending to be a policeman and asking to speak to the manager. When he hooked an unwitting victim, coerced the person on the other end of the line into performing degrading and even criminal acts on a subordinate: confinement, strip searches and worse.
Zobel, whose previous film was the little-seen but worthy con man story “Great World of Sound,” is adept at finding actors who make the unimaginable seem completely real. The restaurant manager (Ann Dowd, painfully believable) is harried and over her head; the target of her ministrations (Dreama Walker, also utterly credible) is frightened and confused; nobody in the film feels like an actor, which is a point of praise.
There’s a skin-crawling effect to watching it all unfold, and a sense of slowly falling into a hole without a bottom. In large part that’s Zobel is less interested in the perverse motive behind the crime than the slow descent of the victims into its twisted logic. We watch these dupes make choices, some of which we might have made ourselves, and then we’re sickened to see the consequences of those choices played out.
Zobel isn’t a sadist about all of this as, say, Roman Polanski or David Lynch or Todd Solondz might have been. There’s a humanity here, even for the restaurant manager. But that still doesn’t make “Compliance” easy to ingest.
(90 min., R, Cinema 21) Grade: B
Melanie Lynskey and Blythe Danner are fine in this small family comedy, but it's a
Melanie Lynskey and Christopher Abbott in "Hello, I Must Be Going"You want to root for “Hello, I Must Be Going,” a soft and heartfelt little film built on the backs of two all-in performances, but the film’s lack of credibility and flabby craft keep defeating your goodwill.
Todd Louiso, the sometime actor who previously directed “Love, Liza,” is empathetic enough with his actors to draw good work from them. But the screenplay by newcomer Sarah Koskoff is wan and sometimes even silly, and Louiso never finds a tone to sell it.
The fault isn’t with his stars. Melanie Lynskey is quite good as Amy, a newly divorced thirtysomething forced to move in with her parents in her childhood suburban home. Listless, lifeless and self-pitying, she only emerges through the most unlikely of avenues: an affair with Jeremy (Christopher Abbott), the 19-year-old son of her dad’s business acquaintance. As she navigates the various passages of life, she must endure the scorn of her mother (Blythe Danner), who dreams of a life that hasn’t quite come to her.
Danner is, in fact, the best thing in the picture: brittle and frank and cool toward a daughter who has flat-out disappointed her. She’s terrific. And you can’t help but feel at least some sympathy toward Amy, at least at the start, particularly as embodied by the winning Lynskey. But the script’s contrivances and the director’s lax handling aren’t enough to hold you.
(93 min., R, Living Room Theaters) Grade: C-plus
Reviews of this week's new releases in Portland-area theaters.
Susan Sarandon and Richard Gere in "Arbitrage"A series of little-known film noir titles crackles with energy and a sense of discovery.
Little festivals of film noir -- ‘40s and ‘50s crime dramas starring Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Ryan and their ilk -- have been pretty commonplace over the past few decades.
But “Dangerous Desires: Film Noir Classics,” a series beginning tonight and running through the end of September at the Northwest Film Center, stands out. Curated by the Film Noir Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving and promoting the heritage of these dark little nuggets of post-war American angst, it’s filled with discoveries, including some films that aren’t available for home viewing in any form.
Only two of the dozen titles in the film -- “The Glass Key” and “The Blue Dahlia,” both starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake -- can be said to be familiar, and those play on a single night, almost as if being dealt with as an obligation.
The rest of the series peers more intently into the unknown corners of noir. Tonight’s opening film, presented, by film noir scholar Eddie Muller, is a perfect example. “The Prowler” is a 1951 Joseph Losey thriller starring Van Heflin as a cop obsessed with a lonely housewife (classic noir girl Evelyn Keyes). Like many of the films in “Dangerous Desires,” it deals with issues of men uprooted after the war, the threat of rupture to the traditional model of the family, and the fatal lures of sex and money.
Another of the opening weekend’s offerings, “The Hunted” (1948), about a woman seeking revenge, is among those in the series that can’t be readily seen elsewhere. Also in that category is the remarkable “The Window” (1949), which plays on September 23. Based on a story by Cornell Woolrich, it’s a story about a boy (the gifted and tragic Bobby Driscoll) who witnesses a murder but who can’t get anyone to believe him because of his long habit of telling tall tales. Shot on location in New York by director Ted Tetzlaff, it’s tense and fresh and, at 73 minutes, remarkably taut.
Through the series we get exactly what we want from noir: dark shadows, flawed heroes, mean little schemes, psychological dysfunction, fallen women, and a pervading sense of claustrophobic, paranoid fear. The world of noir often looks normal, but the characters have just survived a horrific war and they know how easily ‘normal’ can vanish. Their urges, longings, and fears drive them to places they never would have imagined visiting in their halcyon days -- and their journeys make for deeply exciting viewing.
The Northwest Film Center presents “Dangerous Desires: Film Noir Classics” through September 30 at the Whitsell Auditorium of the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Ave. Tickets are $9 general; $8 for PAM members, students, and seniors; $6 for NFC Silver Screen members and children.
“The Prowler” Friday, September 14, 7 p.m.
“The Hunted” Saturday, September 15, 9 p.m.
“Nobody Lives Forever” Sunday, September 16, 7 p.m.
“Pitfall” Thursday, September 20, 7 p.m.
“The Glass Key” Saturday, September 22, 7 p.m.
“The Blue Dahlia” Saturday, September 22, 9 p.m.
“The Window” Sunday, September 23, 7 p.m.
“Caught” Friday, September 28, 7 p.m.
“High Wall” Saturday, September 29, 7 p.m.
“99 River Street” Saturday, September 29, 9 p.m.
“Loophole” Sunday, September 30, 5 p.m.
“The Naked Alibi” Sunday, September 30, 7 p.m.
New releases in Portland-area theaters not reviewed in this week's A&E.
"Bachelorette" Comedy about high school mean girls asked to be bridesmaids to one of their former victims. Kirsten Dunst and Isla Fisher star. (Hollywood Theatre)
“The Bridge on the River Kwai” David Lean’s 1957 Oscar-winner about British prisoners in World War II. (Cedar Hills, Clackamas Town Center, Eastport; Thursday only)
“The Camino Documentary” Work-in-progress screening of Portland filmmaker Lydia B. Smith’s movie about the famed pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. (Northwest Film Center, Wednesday only)
“Clue” The original murder mystery game as adapted for the screen in 1985. (Laurelhurst Theater)
“Icon Motosports Film Festival" A night of noisy rides, with free admission. (Clinton Street Theater, Thursday only)
“Last Ounce of Courage" Drama about a family and community dealing with war-inflicted loss. (multiple locations)
“Queen Live in Budapest, 1986” Freddie Mercury and company rock you, as promised. (Living Room Theaters, Thursday only)
“Resident Evil: Retribution” It continues, this time in 3-D (multiple locations)
“Resonance” Snowboarding documentary. (Hollywood Theatre, Friday only)
“Sports, Leisure and Videotape” A selection of films from the oddest corners of the sporting world, as curated by the folks from Seattle’s Scarecrow Video. (Hollywood Theatre, Wednesday only)
“West of Zanzibar” Tod Browning’s silent potboiler about lust in the jungle, with Lon Chaney, Lionel Barrymore and Warner Baxter, with live musical accompaniment by Subterranean Howl. (Hollywood Theatre, Thursday only)
“Wild Horse, Wild Ride” Documentary about the taming of mavericks (the four-legged kind) in the American west. (Living Room Theaters)
Everything old is new again!
View full size"The Seven Samurai" (1954)"Branded to Kill" Deliciously demented yakuza-noir from the master Seijun Suzuki. (Hollywood Theatre, Saturday only)
"Clue" The curiously-structured 1985 film based on the beloved board game. (Laurelhurst Theater)
"Crippled Avengers" 1978 martial arts film starring the famed Venom Mob. (Hollywood Theatre, Tuesday only)
"Ferris Bueller's Day Off" Often quoted, often imitated, never equalled. (Burnside Brewing, Saturday only)
"The Seven Samurai" This could be the greatest action film ever made, and a masterpiece of world cinema to boot. Among Akira Kurosawa's many triumphs. (Hollywood Theatre, Saturday through Monday only)
"West of Zanzibar" Tod Browning's silent lust-in-the jungle drama, presented with live musical score. (Hollywood Theatre, Thursday Sept. 20 only)
Catch 'em while you can!
Matthew McConaughey in "Magic Mike"A mini-fest of movies about soccer rivalries before the Portland Timbers play one of the biggest rivalry matches of the year.
from "Gringos at the Gate"It only follows that the world’s most popular sport should have a lot of movies made about it. But perhaps because soccer is still something of a novelty game in the United States, Hollywood isn’t making them.
Fortunately, it’s not that hard to find soccer movies, and even more fortunately there are the good folks behind the traveling film festival “Kicking + Screening” making it possible to see them.
“K+S” is a three-year old endeavor marrying the love of cinema with the love of the beautiful game. It’s been held in New York and Liverpool and Amsterdam and India, and it arrives here this week with a program built around Saturday’s epochal match between the Portland Timbers and their eternal antagonists the Seattle Sounders.
The theme of the program is, naturally, soccer rivalries, and the program consists of two nights of two films each. On Thursday, there are two films about the passionate teams and fans of South America, the feature film “Argentine Football Club” about the great enemy teams from Buenos Aires, Boca Juniors and River Plate, and the short “Loucos de Futebol” about a lesser-known rivalry in Brazil. On Friday, the focus is North America, with the feature film “Gringos at the Gate,” about the rivalry between the national teams of the United States and Mexico, and the short “A Most Improbable Life,” about a Mexican immigrant finding his love for the game in the USA.
On each night, there will be post-screening discussions with one of the filmmakers or another expert, including, on Thursday, Portland Timbers (and former Seattle Sounders) forward Mike Fucito.
Screenings will be held at Urban Studios (935 NW Davis) tickets for each night’s screenings are $13.
The festival launches on Wednesday night with “K + S Word,” a literary event featuring readings and presentation by a variety of local and national writers (including yours truly) discoursing on the subject of soccer rivalry and passion. The event is free, but donations are encouraged, with all proceeds -- including those from a raffle of soccer collectibles and other goodies -- going to Operation Pitch Invasion, a Portland not-for-profit charity dedicated to building, restoring and maintaining soccer fields in the parks and schools. (Yet more full disclosure: I serve on the board of OPI.)
The curator of a Northwest Film Center crime film series talks about the hardboiled Hollywood movies he loves.
“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” quipped Jean-Luc Godard famously, and while there are girls and guns in westerns and war films, you can’t help but think that Godard had in mind the sort of movie that French critics called film noir.
Movies about cynical private eyes, crooked cops, scheming dames, and fallen angels, about double-crosses, botched capers, framed innocents and psychopathic kill sprees, movies shot in dark shadows and sweaty close-ups, with titles like “D. O. A.,” “Gun Crazy,” “Kiss of Death,” and “The Devil Thumbs a Ride,” and stars like Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Ryan, Gloria Grahame, Lizabeth Scott, Claire Trevor: that’s Noir.
Just before World War II, the traditional Hollywood gangster movie began to give way to a new strain of crime story, often inspired by the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, often made, at least in part, by directors and screenwriters who had arrived in California from Europe as war-time refugees. By the end of the ’40s, Noir was the essential American crime style, resulting in key works by such directors as Orson Welles, Otto Preminger, Raoul Walsh, and Jules Dassin and giving starts to the careers of, among others, Samuel Fuller, Phil Karlson and even Stanley Kubrick.
The story of Noir has been celebrated in documentaries and film festivals for decades, but one of the most notable collections ever to grace Portland is being shown this month at the Northwest Film Center. “Dangerous Desires: Film Noir Classics” is an impeccably curated selection of a dozen titles, all but two of them fairly obscure, and some of them not available for home viewing in any format.
The series has been mounted for the NFC by the Film Noir Foundation, which is, in its own words, “an educational resource regarding the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of film noir as an original American cinematic movement.” For the opening weekend of the series, Film Noir Foundation founder and president Eddie Muller, author of several books about Noir, will be on hand to present two of the titles, both in 35mm prints: “The Prowler,” Joseph Losey’s 1951 tale of a crooked cop (Van Heflin) lusting after a housewife; and “The Hunted,” a 1948 drama about an ex-con (the English actress Belita) out to seek vengeance against the people who sent her to prison.
In advance of his visit, Muller answered some questions about Noir in general and “Dangerous Desires” in particular via e-mail.
Film Noir historian Eddie MullerIn a sense, Noir is like jazz in that it was an American form first recognized as great in Europe. But Noir also has deep American roots. So is it an American art form or a European art form or something in between?
I was just using the jazz analogy with my fellow jurors at a film festival in Montreal. Slightly different context. I was suggesting that genre films -- especially crime films -- are like jazz in that the stories typically feature a familiar plot, the way many jazz classics derive from familiar structures and melodies, and we appreciate how different artists interpret the standard piece. Generally speaking, the foundation of noir--the writing, the style of the language--comes from America, specifically that fresh American masculine voice that emerged post WW1, most famously in Hemingway. When his style was adapted to crime stories in the late 1920s and '30s, most successfully for writers such as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler, the seeds of noir were planted. The visual allure of noir, however, the classic chiaroscuro lighting and heightened theatricality, largely came with the influx of European directors trained in Berlin: Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger -- even Alfred Hitchcock to some extent. Noir is the result of a tough American attitude mixing it up with a sophisticated European style.
So many Noir classics were made at small studios or by second- (or third-) tier units at the big studios, which makes me wonder if there was, during the classic era, a size beyond which Noir could not go. Could there have been (or are there any) A-movie Noirs?
Absolutely. Every studio produced "noir" on both A and B levels. Once “Double Indemnity” was a box office hit, and was nominated for five Oscars, films of that type became extremely popular. Alan Ladd was Paramount's biggest box office draw, and he made film noir almost exclusively for awhile -- “This Gun for Hire,” “The Glass Key,” “The Blue Dahlia,” etc. Bogart is almost synonymous with noir and he was Warner's biggest draw of the 1940s. Over at Fox, films like “Kiss of Death” and “Nightmare Alley” were absolutely A-list films utilizing the studios biggest stars. At MGM, Louis B. Mayer HATED these kinds of films, but that didn't stop the studio from making them -- and MGM rarely made ‘cheap’ movies. In this series, “High Wall” is a classic example: Robert Taylor was one of the MGM's biggest stars, and this film is almost definitive noir, and a definite "A" production. Poverty Row studios loved this type of film because it required so little in terms of locations, cast size, production. “Detour” is the obvious example. I always say: "All you need to have a good film noir is a man, a woman, and a locked hotel room."
The Noir era was over when the Hays Production Code (Hollywood’s self-imposed system of film censorship) finally collapsed. But Noir did so many great things in a kind of friction or dialectic against what the censors might've quashed. Could the classic Noir have flourished had there been complete freedom of content and themes?
Excellent question! I'm not sure of the answer, but I absolutely believe that the existence of the Production Code and the rise of film noir are organically entwined. And I also believe that the Code made filmmakers -- from writers and directors right through to editors and wardrobe designers -- more innovative and creative. The goal was to tell more daring and adult stories without being ‘obvious’ about things like sex, addiction, abortion, homosexuality, you name it. But all that stuff is in there, albeit often in codified fashion. But that's part of the reason the films remain timeless -- they are rarely as simple as we believed them to be. I've had the advantage of watching many of these films with people who worked on them or acted in them and they left me with little doubt about what was being suggested. The filmmakers were often playing a game with the censors, seeing how they could get things into the films. We're really just catching up.
Leaving out the US, France and Germany, which are its chief homes or the places of origin of so many of its innovators, what nations have Noir traditions worth exploring that might not leap readily to mind?
I'm investigating this right now. I plan to do a festival of International Noir. What's obvious to me, having traveled abroad with just this notion in mind, is how wrongly Hollywood-centric the study of film noir has been. As far back as the 1940s there was a trans-Continental give-and-take going on, and not just between the U.S. and Europe. There is an extensive ‘noir’ history in Japan, in Britain, in Spain, in Mexico, Italy, Greece, in Argentina. I've recently seen some wonderful noir films from Buenos Aires, made contemporaneous with the late 1940s noir classics from Hollywood. Many of them have never been seen outside Argentina! Hollywood undoubtedly had the greatest influence on filmmaking around the world, and it's thrilling to see how the noir style was adapted to, or reinterpreted in, different cultures.
What films in this series do you reckon most people haven't seen and should not miss?
All of them, frankly. I'm a true believer: If you haven't seen it on movie screen, projected in 35mm, then you haven't seen the actual film. Some of these -- like “The Hunted,” “Pitfall,” “Loophole,” and “Naked Alibi” -- you simply cannot see right now anywhere else than in a series like this. There literally are single prints of these films, and many of them are in the Film Noir Foundation Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. We have funded the preservation of these titles, and the only way they get shown is with our say-so. So I'm glad the Northwest Film Center asked, because I like to spread the Noir gospels.
Where: The Whitsell Auditorium of the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Ave.
Tickets: $9 general; $8 PAM members, students, seniors; $6 NFC Silver Screen members, children
“The Prowler” Friday, September 14, 7 p.m.
“The Hunter” Saturday, September 15, 9 p.m.
“Nobody Lives Forever” Sunday, September 16, 7 p.m.
“Pitfall” Thursday, September 20, 7 p.m.
“The Glass Key” Saturday, September 22, 7 p.m.
“The Blue Dahlia” Saturday, September 22, 9 p.m.
“The Window” Sunday, September 23, 7 p.m.
“Caught” Friday, September 28, 7 p.m.
“High Wall” Saturday, September 29, 7 p.m.
“99 River Street” Saturday, September 29, 9 p.m.
“Loophole” Sunday, September 30, 5 p.m.
“The Naked Alibi” Sunday, September 30, 7 p.m.
Reviews of this week's new releases in Portland-area theaters.
from "Samsara"Two documentaries of diverse style and aims show what can happen when first-world filmmakers take a look at other cultures.
from "Samsara"Two films new to town open some fascinating questions about the nature of non-fiction filmmaking and the ways in which First World artists and journalists confront the Third World.
“Samsara” is a sumptuous film by Ron Fricke, who directed “Baraka” and was cinematographer of “Koyaanisqatsi.” Like those films, “Samsara” is a non-narrative vision of the panoply of the world -- people, animals, geological and meteorological phenomena, buildings, wastelands, metropolises -- edited together to a musical accompaniment.
The word ‘samsara’ means ‘continuous flow of life’ in Tibetan, and Fricke and company surely experienced that sensation in making the film, which took them to 25 countries in a span of five years. They have put together a thoughtful and profoundly gorgeous film in which the works of humanity are celebrated and questioned, the colossal scale of nature is revealed, the cruelties and grotesqueries of life are laid bare. It was shot in 70mm, and it’s one of the most immersive things the screen has shown us in years.
There’s a lot of immersion in “The Ambassador,” a documentary which ‘stars’ its director, Mads Brugger, a Danish journalist who, in an undercover expose of corruption in Africa, dives into the world of false diplomatic credentials, crooked governments and blood diamonds. Buying, outright, the title of consul from the Liberian government, Brugger sets himself up in the Central African Republic as a businessman-slash-diplomat, pretending to be interesting in building a match factory but actually forming liaisons with diamond miners and using his diplomatic passport to remove the gems from the country illegally.
Mads Brugger in "The Ambassador"Brugger isn’t like Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock, puckishly tweaking a perceived ill in the world at the service of an agenda. He’s more like a Graham Greene character or a sober (-ish) Hunter S. Thompson, diving into the darkness and taking an active role in it so as to shed light on it. (With his cigarette holder, riding boots and combat glasses, he strongly evokes Thompson’s Raoul Duke persona.) There’s a touch of whimsy to his misadventures, but the malfeasance he uncovers -- often using hidden cameras and microphones -- is anything but a joke.
The superficial differences between the films are stark. Fricke and company set out to create a work of art and have an emblem for their efforts in a gorgeous mandala created by Himalayan monks. Billions of grains of colored sand are used to ‘paint’ an extraordinarily complex image which, eventually, is wiped away into nothingness, a perfect metaphor for human life. Brugger, on the other hand, provokes (albeit without much effort) specific acts of criminality and his subjects tumble into holes they themselves have dug. In his wake, there’s something of a mess: a lot of money changes hands, some illegal diamonds are in circulation, and no one is arrested or put out of business; the ugly little world he has detailed carries on.
It would be easy to point a finger at Brugger as a provocateur and hold up Fricke as a pure chronicler, but it’s not as simple as that. Fricke has a point, too, and the way “Samsara” juxtaposes, say, overfed folks shopping at Costco with people picking the stuff of life out of a garbage dump in South America makes a case as damning as anything in “The Ambassador.” Every edit in cinema has the potential to carry a moral argument, establishing equivalences or disparities between the subjects of two shots, and “Samsara,” for all its holism, isn’t free from the sort of specific contingencies and perspectives that “The Ambassador” explicitly embraces.
In a sense, too, both films present us with portraits of the world as seen from a vantage of privilege. Brugger, as a white man in sub-Saharan Africa with bags of money and a diplomatic passport, is able to get people to say and do things as shockingly and disturbingly raw as anything Sacha Baron Cohen has ever managed. He isn’t exactly preying on innocents, but he’s certainly engaging in subterfuge to make bad folks behave badly: a fairly obvious point. And you strongly suspect that he’d have a far less easy time pulling off his elaborate hoax in a culture more familiar with his brand of journalistic stunts.
Fricke’s intent is, for the most part, nobler -- a vision of the world as unified by the works and forces of humanity and nature -- but he, too, puts people in a frame of his own devising. The visions of “Samsara” can be breathtaking -- a field of temples in ancient Myanmar, the sand-sculpted canyon walls of Utah, the neurological web of nighttime traffic in Los Angeles, the stupefying power of Iguazu Falls. But when he focuses on people, the mask of aesthetic indifference drops and you sense yourself being pushed toward a point of view about sex, food, guns, labor, what have you. Maybe you agree with him, maybe you don’t, but an argument is being made under the guise of objective revelation. The extraordinary beauty of the work doesn’t change the fact that there’s some preaching going on behind the screen.
“The Ambassador” (93 min., unrated, probably PG-13, Hollywood Theatre) Grade: B
“Samsara” (102 min., PG-13, Fox Tower) Grade: B-plus
A story about a novel about a novel should have been erased from the word processor, not made into a film.
Jeremy Irons in "The Words"Several words are suggested by “The Words,” and none of them are, you reckon, the ones its makers had in mind.
Let’s start with ‘nitwit.’
“The Words” is a nitwit story about a nitwit author who has written a nitwit novel about a nitwit author who has published a nitwit novel which, in fact, he has stolen wholecloth from another writer whose personal behavior, as fictionalized in the novel-within-the-novel-within-the-film, can charitably be described as...nitwit.
There’s also ‘phony.’ Everything about “The Words” feels phony: the depiction of the writing life; the story of the ‘real’ novelist (that is, the one in the outermost circle) being preyed upon by a journalist; the working and private lives of the novelist in the ‘real’ fellow’s novel; the tale of love and loss in wartime at the innermost core of this utterly unengaging not-really-a-puzzle.
For the record, Dennis Quaid is epically miscast as the ‘real’ novelist, a miscue you almost don’t notice because Bradley Cooper, whom it is hard to imagine reading anything more challenging than a Ziggy cartoon, is playing the purloining novelist in his creation. Jeremy Irons appears, crusty and lovelorn, as the wronged author at the core of it all, and he’s the only one of the three who seems remotely capable of having composed a sentence, which I suppose adds to the theme of how cruel fate and publishing are, but not in a way the writer-directors of the film intended, surely.
Oh, and one more word comes to mind: ‘kidding,’ as in, ‘you’ve got to be....’ The writer-directors of “The Words” are, you see, Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, whose sole previous behind-the-camera screen credit came as the co-writers of...“TRON: Legacy.”
You know, I take it back: There are no words.
(96 min., PG-13, multiple locations) Grade: D
A film meant to evoke "Do the Right Thing" is more muddled than powerful.
Clarke Peters in "Red Hook Summer"In the 23 (!) years since the fiery summer's day of "Do the Right Thing," Spike Lee has had some moments of glory ("Malcolm X," "Inside Man," "4 Little Girls") and inspiration ("Crooklyn," "Clockers," "25th Hour"), but he's never been able to capture the same power, pop energy, passion and polemic force as in that epochal film.
To see his newest work, "Red Hook Summer," is too see how far Lee is from his impressive best. A companion, of sorts, to "Right Thing," the film takes place in another Brooklyn summer, with young Flik (Jules Brown) dropped by his Georgia-based mom to live for a few months with her dad, Enoch (Clarke Peters), a storefront preacher and boiler repairman in the local housing projects.
It's something of a coming-of-age story, with Flik learning the harsh ropes of big city life alongside an almost-sweetheart (Toni Lysaith) and avoiding the neighborhood tough guys (led by Nate Parker). Mookie the pizza man (Lee himself) makes an appearance (illogically still delivering pies on foot from Sal's Famous, which is nowhere near Red Hook), and there are other diversions, both filmic and narrative which sometimes engage but more often eat up time frustratingly.
The highlights, without question, are Bishop Enoch's fiery, musical, galvanizing sermons, which dot the story and are implicated with a sensationalist turn in its final portion. Peters ("The Wire") is superb in these scenes, without which "Red Hook Summer" would be a vague and somewhat desperate attempt to rekindle past promises. Lee is, as ever, a gifted image-maker, but his storytelling has gotten so lax over time as to barely register. This isn't the "Right Thing" in any sense.
(121 min., R, Hollywood Theatre) Grade: C-plus
The comedian/filmmaker will barnstorm Portland on Saturday.
Mike Birbiglia in "Sleepwalk with Me"The indie comedy "Sleepwalk with Me," about the struggles of a lovelorn comedian/monologist looks more than a bit autobiographical: it was co-written and co-directed by its star, Mike Birbiglia, who is, you guessed it, a comedian/monologist who has made some comic/philosophical hay of his star-crossed professional and romantic ups-and-downs.
You'll get a chance to compare the on-screen fellow to the real one this Saturday when Birbiglia comes to Portland's Cinema 21 to introduce the film and participate in q-and-a sessions after some screenings. Specifically, Birbiglia will chat with the audience after the 4:30 and 9:00 shows and introduce the 7:00 shows. Inbetween, he'll be participating in the live taping of an episode of the Live Wire radio variety show.
Busy lad: hope he has time to visit Powell's or take in a food cart....
New releases in Portland-area theaters not reviewed in this week's A&E.
from "Iron Sky"“Batman” Tim Burton’s 1989 revival of the DC Comics hero, with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicolson; presented by Cort and Fatboy. (Bagdad Theater, Friday only)
“Beloved" Real-life mother and daughter Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni in a tale of women finding confusion in romance. (Living Room Theaters)
“The Best of the Northwest Animation Festival” A selection of highlights from the recent event. (Hollywood Theatre, Saturday only)
“Chinatown” Roman Polanski’s fabulous 1974 noir, with Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston and a near-perfect Robert Towne script. (Cedar Hills, Clackamas Town Center, Eastport; Thursday, September 13 only)
“The Cold Light of Day” Thriller about kidnapping and CIA hijinks. With Bruce Willis and Henry Cavill. (multiple locations)
“The Inbetweeners” English coming-of-age comedy based on cult hit TV series. (Fox Tower)
“Iron Sky” Nazis have been hiding out on the moon, apparently (thanks for the warning, Neil Armstrong!), and now they’re coming back. (Living Room Theaters)
“Kicking and Screening” A collection of four films about soccer rivalries around the world. (Urban Studios, 925 NW Davis, Thursday September 13 and Friday September 14 only)
“Moving Mountains” Made-in-Portland documentary from 1991 about Southeast Asians settling in the Pacific Northwest. (Northwest Film Center, Thursday only)
“Rumbon Tropical” Documentary about Cuban dance masters. (Clinton Street Theater, Friday only)
“This Is Now” Drama about a man traveling from Portland to Seattle as part of a quest for meaning in his life. (Clinton Street Theater, Saturday through Wednesday only)
“Turn Me on, Dammit!” Norwegian coming-of-age comedy. (Clinton Street Theater, Saturday through Wednesday only)
“Uncle Buck” The late John Candy stars in the late John Hughes’ comedy about an inept but big-hearted surrogate dad. (Laurelhurst Theater)
“Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up?” Documentary about the long history of hostilities between Cuba and the United States. (Clinton Street Theater, Thursday only)
New releases in Portland-area theaters not reviewed in this week's A&E.
from "Iron Sky"“Batman” Tim Burton’s 1989 revival of the DC Comics hero, with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicolson; presented by Cort and Fatboy. (Bagdad Theater, Friday only)
“Beloved" Real-life mother and daughter Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni in a tale of women finding confusion in romance. (Living Room Theaters)
“The Best of the Northwest Animation Festival” A selection of highlights from the recent event. (Hollywood Theatre, Saturday only)
“Chinatown” Roman Polanski’s fabulous 1974 noir, with Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston and a near-perfect Robert Towne script. (Cedar Hills, Clackamas Town Center, Eastport; Thursday, September 13 only)
“The Cold Light of Day” Thriller about kidnapping and CIA hijinks. With Bruce Willis and Henry Cavill. (multiple locations)
“The Inbetweeners” English coming-of-age comedy based on cult hit TV series. (Fox Tower)
“Iron Sky” Nazis have been hiding out on the moon, apparently (thanks for the warning, Neil Armstrong!), and now they’re coming back. (Living Room Theaters)
“Kicking and Screening” A collection of four films about soccer rivalries around the world. (Urban Studios, 925 NW Davis, Thursday September 13 and Friday September 14 only)
“Moving Mountains” Made-in-Portland documentary from 1991 about Southeast Asians settling in the Pacific Northwest. (Northwest Film Center, Thursday only)
“Rumbon Tropical” Documentary about Cuban dance masters. (Clinton Street Theater, Friday only)
“This Is Now” Drama about a man traveling from Portland to Seattle as part of a quest for meaning in his life. (Clinton Street Theater, Saturday through Wednesday only)
“Turn Me on, Dammit!” Norwegian coming-of-age comedy. (Clinton Street Theater, Saturday through Wednesday only)
“Uncle Buck” The late John Candy stars in the late John Hughes’ comedy about an inept but big-hearted surrogate dad. (Laurelhurst Theater)
“Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up?” Documentary about the long history of hostilities between Cuba and the United States. (Clinton Street Theater, Thursday only)
Catch 'em while you can!
Ai WeiWei in "Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry"Everything old is new again!
"Chinatown" Whenever I'm asked what my favorite film is, I always say this one, even if, at that moment, it's really something else. A perfect film which I happened to see at just the right moment of my cinema education. (Cedar Hills, Clackamas Town Center, Eastport; Thursday, September 13 only)
"The Devil, Probably" A despairing vision of teen ennui from Robert Bresson from 1977, marking one of the last films of his career. (Northwest Film Center, Sunday and Monday only)
"Pickpocket" Another Bresson, this one from 1959, echoing "Crime and Punishment" in its depiction of a thief whose heart turns toward the light. A classic. (Northwest Film Center, Saturday only)
"Uncle Buck" The late lamented John Candy under the aegis of the late lamented John Hughes. Bittersweet, in that light, for a comedy.... (Laurelhurst)
A new medium makes classic movies come alive more vividly than ever before.
View full sizeAn image from "8 1/2" that changed one critic's view of an entire technology.I’m often asked if I ever watch movies for fun.
It’s kind of an odd question, implying that the movies that I watch for my working life are somehow inherently toilsome. But I get it: most of the world thinks of watching a film as a leisure activity, whereas for critics moviegoing is, in fact, work.
Anyhow, whenever I’m asked, I always say ‘yes,’ but with two conditions. The first is that I almost always go to the movies at least once when I’m traveling abroad; the experience of watching a film in another culture is always enlighteningly and excitingly odd. And the second is that when I do watch movies for fun, it’s almost always at home, and it’s almost always classic films -- either the things that I grew up watching and that turned me onto cinema in the first place, or things that I’ve been meaning to see my whole life and am only catching up with now.
And as it turns out, that activity -- digging into the past for old favorites or new (to me) discoveries -- can be almost as expensive as traveling to another country to take in a movie.
You see, to put it bluntly, I have a problem saying no to Blu-ray releases of classic films, particularly black-and-white classics. My name is Shawn, and I am addicted to black-and-white on Blu.
Blu-ray, as you ought to know, is a digital disc format with approximately five times the capacity of standard DVD. That extra storage space means that there is more visual and audio information on a Blu-ray than on a DVD, which, in turn, means that they look and sound better on any TV and they look and sound really good on an HD-TV.
Blu-rays have been on the market for about six years, starting out in a two-horse race with a format called HD-DVD. In 2008, that format was dropped by all hardware manufacturers and film distributors, leaving the field to Blu-ray as the newest -- and, truly, best-ever -- format for home viewing. At first, Blu-ray players and titles were rare and pricey. But that, inevitably, changed, and now Blu-ray is almost certain to pass DVD as the standard for home viewing, and soon.
Naturally, most of the action in the Blu-ray world has been in the release of blockbusters: the “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings” films, “Avatar,” “The Dark Knight,” some Pixar titles, and so on. There’s also a very strong market for Blu-ray editions of TV series, if for no other reason then that the storage capacity of Blu-ray means you buy fewer discs than in a DVD version.
But for a certain breed of cinephile, the most stirring innovation that Blu-ray brings is the enhancement of classic films to a clarity that they’ve never had since they first premiered in cinemas. A well-mastered Blu-ray of an older film -- particularly a black-and-white film -- reveals depths of imagery that may never have been seen by any audience ever, given the vagaries of print projection in movie theaters and the relatively degraded quality of VHS and DVD versions.
View full sizeThe cast of "Stagecoach" (1939): the flies are in there somewhere....Consider: Last year, I watched a newly-released Blu-ray of John Ford’s 1939 Western “Stagecoach,” a film that I’ve seen perhaps a dozen times over the years. One of its most famous sequences is set in a cantina and involves an intricate dance of manners, with a gambler finding a polite way to escort the wife of an army officer away from a seat next to a prostitute at the dining table.
Watching the scene, which I know by heart, I was startled to see something I’d never noticed before: flies! Buzzing around the cantina, above the tortillas and frijoles and John Wayne and Claire Trevor and Andy Devine were a couple of ordinary houseflies. I was giddy: flies, decades dead, whirling about Ford’s nonchalantly but perfectly composed frames. I felt like I’d figured out the plot twists in “The Big Sleep” that baffled even the film’s director, Howard Hawks. It was a new world inside a world I felt I already knew inside-out.
Now, it’s possible that I’d been inattentive on previous viewings and not noticed those pesky flies. But I’m convinced that it was the enhanced contrast of the Blu-ray -- the deeper and sharper blacks and whites -- that made them stand out. “Stagecoach” had always had a slightly dusty cast to it in my mind, as, I’d imagined, Ford and his Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bert Glennon had intended. This Blu-ray version, though, looked as clear and bright as any contemporary black-and-white photography I’ve ever seen. Like all Westerns, “Stagecoach” is, in part, a fantasy. But it seemed more realistic to me on Blu-ray than it ever had before.
A similar epiphany hit me while watching a Blu-ray of “Sweet Smell of Success,” another film I’d seen multiple times. It’s set in the nighttime jungle of New York’s Times Square and thereabouts, circa 1957, and James Wong Howe’s photography is filled with gleaming cars, flashing neon signs, storefront plate glass, barroom mirrors, and so on. The reflections and distortions these cause become overwhelming in Blu-ray; you almost feel at times like you’re underwater. And the tiny details of newsprint -- so crucial to the story’s milieu of showbiz and gossip -- have a billboard-sized impact in the enhanced format.
In the last two years or so, I have acquired more than 25 black-and-white feature films on Blu-ray, ranging from “M” and “Modern Times” to “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Buck Privates” (gorgeous, I swear) to “Breathless” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” to “On the Bowery” and “Wings of Desire.” I’ve bought a collection of Buster Keaton short films, the complete works of the French master Jean Vigo, and a four-film box of David Lean directing Noel Coward. And I have watched virtually all of them the very day they arrived in the mail, some more than once, all with immense pleasure.
View full sizeGlistening: Ray Salyer (l.) and Gorman Hendricks in "On the Bowery"Most of these Blu-rays are, as those of similar affliction will have noted, released by the Criterion Collection, the home-viewing distributor that specializes in restored and remastered films with copious special features, such as scholarly audio commentary, attached. That’s partly because Criterion happens to put things out that I particularly enjoy and, perhaps even more, because Criterion happens to hold half-price-off sales throughout the year, which is just about like offering half-off the cost of a bag of crack to a hopeless drug fiend.
In fact, it was a Criterion Blu-ray that started me on this costly slide. A couple years back, I complained to a film critic friend that one of my favorite films, Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2,” was being released on a Criterion Blu-ray and that I felt that I was being tricked by a technological scam into buying yet another copy of a film that I already owned on VHS and DVD. He suggested to me that Blu-ray would, in fact, be the last physical medium on which I would own the film, and that assurance -- desperate fool that I am -- was enough to convince me to go ahead.
Came the Blu-ray in the mail, and I put it in the player and...oh my: the dense and gleaming and smoky and cluttered frames Fellini and his crew devised looked vibrant and bold and screamed out at me as they never had before. The black areas were deep and immersive; the whites shone strong against them; the lines between the two were definitive. The film, which I truly adore, had never seemed lovelier.
In one very famous shot, a performing illusionist is seen, head and shoulders only, facing the camera in stark silhouette -- a mere outline of black against black, barely defined by gleams of white against his top hat, ears and collar. It was always a striking image, but in this Blu-ray version, it was overwhelming. I think I literally gasped to see it. And I knew instantly that I would never watch my VHS or DVD copies of “8 1/2” again.
Now, to be clear, I own and continue to purchase contemporary and, especially, classic color films on Blu-ray; in the latter category, I can strongly recommend “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “The Red Shoes,” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” and I’m positively panting for the expected November release of “Lawrence of Arabia” on Blu-ray.
But I am far more eager to get my hands on high-quality transfers of certain silent films and films noir and the early works of foreign masters and see them in the best possible fashion. Because, as far as I’m concerned, I have seen the future of cinephilia, and it is black-and-white on Blu.
Reviews of this week's new releases in Portland-area theaters.
Matthew McConaughey in "Killer Joe"Matthew McConaughey astounds and disturbs as a hit man preying on a wicked family.
Thomas Haden Church (l.) and Matthew McConaughey in "Killer Joe"The NC-17 designation was devised by the Motion Picture Association of America to distinguish films with strong and pervasive adult content (read: sex, mostly, and violence) from outright porn, the producers of which had co-opted the similarly restrictive X rating, rendering it meaningless.
In the 22-odd years of its existence, the NC-17 has been slapped on approximately 120 new releases. Most of them were recut and then resubmitted to the ratings board to obtain R ratings (major movie studios generally won’t release NC-17 titles, and lots of theaters can’t, because of lease restrictions, show them). A couple dozen, including the likes of “Y Tu Mamá También” and “Requiem for a Dream,” were released unrated, their makers deciding not to cut them but, rather, to distribute them without the scarlet stigma of a restrictive rating.
A handful of films, though, have gone into theatrical release wearing an NC-17 as a kind of badge of honor, a certification of their resolve to show and deal with themes, images and ideas that other films simply won’t touch. These include “Henry & June” (the first NC-17 title), “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!,” “Happiness,” “Mysterious Skin,” and, now, “Killer Joe,” an inky dark comedy from director William Friedkin -- who might’ve garnered an NC-17 for “The Exorcist” or “Cruising” if it had existed when he made them.
“Killer Joe” isn’t the most violent movie in theaters right now, nor is it the most sexually provocative or the most profanity-laced. But it is so focused on the depravity at its heart that watching it is like subjecting yourself to a nightmare that sucks the air slowly from your lungs. Art of any sort should have the power to make us feel, and while you may not like what “Killer Joe” makes you feel, there is absolutely no denying that it has an effect on you. It’s far more straightforward, but the only movie I can compare it to for immediate recognition is “Blue Velvet,” and I say that as praise.
The film is based on a play by Tracy Letts which was suggested by the true story of a Florida father and son who hired a hit man to kill their ex-wife/mother so that they could collect a small life insurance policy. In Letts’ version, the events are moved to a Texas trailer park, the hit man is a police detective, and the greed, lust, callousness and animal stupidity of the characters is plain and unguarded -- base, unfiltered, animal humanity. That, frankly, is the stuff of art: Take these people out of their jeans and pickup trucks and give them togas or horse-drawn landaus and it could be a Greek or Jacobean tragedy.
Playing the detective, in a breathtakingly chilly performance that tops a fine year on screen, is Matthew McConaughey, snaky, lascivious, casually violent, wiser by half than the people on whom he’s preying. Emile Hirsch and Thomas Haden Church are equally good as Chris and Ansel Smith, the avaricious son and father, respectively, and Gina Gershon is raw and convincing as a truly wicked stepmother who helps spark the talk of murder. In the middle, eerily still, Juno Temple is a strange and compelling blend of the innocent and the oracular as Chris’s sister, Dottie, who is given by the family -- just outright given -- to the hit man in lieu of prepayment for the murder.
Such is the fallen state of our world that reading the story, learning the details, and even imagining how it plays out makes “Killer Joe” seem no more shocking than something you might see on cable TV. But Friedkin takes two scenes -- a dinner between Joe and Dottie, and another between Joe and the three conspirators -- and turns them into horrorshow scenes of perversity and terror. There are laughs scattered throughout the film (Letts is a truly darkly funny fellow), but the two dining sequences inside that double-wide blast all the light out of the film. On the strength of that pair of scenes alone, the film can boast its NC-17 rating like a combat scar.
To talk so much of the ratings board’s classification of “Killer Joe” slights the film somewhat, because it is a tremendously capable and assured work. Friedkin, who has also directed an adaptation of Letts’s “Bug,” has never been an ostentatious director; rather, in the vein of Howard Hawks or Robert Aldrich, he’s a master craftsman of plain, solid American vernacular. He has shown some baroque tendencies in the past (off-screen, he actually directs operas, for heaven’s sake!). But here, as in “The French Connection” and “To Live and Die in L. A.,” he cedes center stage to a very strong cast and a compelling story, while getting captivating work from cinematographer Caleb Deschanel.
If “Killer Joe” is, finally, too much for certain audiences to stomach, so be it. In the hands of Letts, Friedkin and this cast, it feels, despairingly, terribly real, and you can’t blame artists for reporting what humans are actually like.
(102 min., NC-17, Fox Tower) Grade: B-plus
Frank Langella is exquisitely dry and crusty as a retiree who devises a unique use for his robotic househelp
Frank Langella and chum in "Robot & Frank"There’s a terrific balance between human comedy and just-this-side-of-science-fiction in “Robot & Frank,” the debut feature of director Jake Schreier and his writing collaborator Christopher D. Ford.
Frank Langella is splendid as the irascible Frank, a small-town retiree whose absent children have determined that he needs a household robot to manage his diet, medication and lifestyle. The little white gizmo (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) drives Frank nuts. But then he is inspired: the obliging robot can help him keep a hand in his life’s work -- which happens to be burglary. And suddenly Frank has a spring in his step and a purpose to his days.
There are other angles to the story involving the town library (and its librarian, played by Susan Sarandon), and those are nicely handled. But the chief spectacle here -- and it’s a good one -- is Langella in gruff, curdled mode, an underappreciated master actor slipping seamlessly into a bespoke role.
Other science fiction spectacles of the summer have offered us mind-boggling technologies, but there really is no better special effect in the movies than a fine actor given a wonderful part. And for that alone (although it’s not all it offers), “Robot & Frank” is a real treat.
(90 min., PG-13, Fox Tower) Grade: B-plus
A rehabbed drug addict traverses his home town in search of a new start in a compellingly quiet film.
Anders Danielsen Lie in "Oslo, August 31"The generic quality of the title “Oslo, August 31st” couldn’t be less like the experience of watching the new film from the Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier. Adapting “The Fire Within,” a 1931 novel by Pierre Dieu La Rochelle (which Louis Malle filmed in 1963), Trier follows his 2006 breakout film “Reprise” with another careful, painful and precise meditation on human desire and confusion.
Anders Danielsen Lie (also of “Reprise”) plays Anders, a journalist who has been given a day’s leave from a suburban drug rehab clinic to interview for a job in the city. In the span of a day, he visits old friends and colleagues, people-watches at a café, attends a party, meets a girl, reunites with his sister, and stops in at the family home, which his parents are selling.
The actual incidents sound dry, and Anders isn’t exactly an easy fellow to read. But the slowness and stillness in the film are, actually, a slow boil, and in Lie’s taciturnity there is pain and even horror. The world is goes on without him, and the things that he has done to himself and the possibilities that might rise before him are tiny compared to all that is around him.
That much we all know (or should); the challenge for Anders is to reinsert himself in the quotidian flow of life. Without a note of sensationalism, Trier makes real drama of the question of whether or not he can do it. In a single day, through a single pair of eyes, Trier and Lie give us an emblem for the world.
(95 min., unrated, probably PG-13, Living Room Theaters) Grade: B-plus
New releases in Portland-area theaters not reviewed in this week's A&E.
Ice Cube in "Boyz N the Hood"“Charisma" 1999 drama about a Tokyo cop who migrates to a rural community and gets involved with the fight to preserve an unusual tree. (Northwest Film Center, Wednesday September 5 only)
“Do the Right Thing” The astounding 1989 Spike Lee film about racial and social tensions boiling over on a Brooklyn street one hot summer day. (Hollywood Theatre, Friday through Monday only)
“Doctor Zhivago” David Lean's lavish 1965 adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel about love and political conscience during the Russian revolution. (Cedar Hills, Clackamas Town Center, Eastport; Thursday, September 6 only)
“Don’t Follow Me (I’m Lost): A Film about Bobby Bare Jr.” Documentary about the life of a touring musician (Northwest Film Center, Wednesday only)
“The Evil Dead” The inimitable Sam Raimi cabin-in-the-woods movie; often imitated, never equaled. (Hollywood Theatre)
“A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet” Documentary about the history, impact and operations of the environmental movement, in all its faces. (Hollywood Theatre, Thursday only)
“Rear Window” Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 treatise on voyeurism, sexual repression and murder; a great cinematic achievement and ravishing entertainment. (Hollywood Theatre, Saturday and Sunday only)
“Showdown in Little Tokyo” Dolph Lundgren and Brandon Lee chase down drug dealers in a dubious 1991 entertainment. (Hollywood Theatre, Tuesday only)
“Suzaki Paradise: Red Lights” 1956 drama by Yuzo Kawashima about a couple trying to survive life in the underworld in post-war Tokyo. (Northwest Film Center, Saturday only)
“Writing Myself” Portland director Brian Lindstrom’s documentary about an immersive playwriting workshop at Portland’s night-only high school. (Hollywood Theatre, Wednesday only)
Joanna Priestley's "Clam Bake" is an interactive treat for you iDevice.
View full sizefrom "Clam Bake"Watching movies on tablet computers can be grand, but something about the devices makes you want to touch them, and most movies don’t exactly allow you to reach into the screen and, you know, do things.
Portland animator Joanna Priestley has, however, found a compromise with “Clam Bake,” a new app for Apple’s iOS mobile operating system for iPhones and iPads. Kind of an interactive animated film, “Clam Bake” gives you a chance to get inside one of Priestley’s signature abstract films and make things happen -- even as there is something like a beginning, middle and end to it.
On launching the app, you’re greeted by a dozen or so rounded shapes and no text or instructions. Eventually, inevitably, you tap one of them, and then it transforms and makes noises, and you tap another, and it transforms and makes noises, and so on. Each object does multiple things after multiple taps, and ultimately, in a different order each time, you come to a final image.
There’s no point, as such, to “Clam Bake,” but it’s playful, it’s witty, it’s soothing, it’s charming, it’s frivolous -- and, I suspect, it will be inspirational to other film artists who just new that there was a way to render their work specifically for tablets.
“Clam Bake” was created by Joanna Priestley, with sound by Seth Norman and programming by Jed Bursiek. It sells for $1.99 on the iTunes App Store.
Catch 'em while you can!
Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine relax in "Bernie"Everything old is new again!
"Charisma" 1999 drama about a Tokyo cop who migrates to a rural community and gets involved with the fight to preserve an unusual tree. (Northwest Film Center, Wednesday September 5 only)
"Do the Right Thing" The astounding 1989 Spike Lee film about racial and social tensions boiling over on a Brooklyn street one hot summer day. (Hollywood Theatre, Friday through Monday only)
"Doctor Zhivago" David Lean's lavish 1965 adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel about love and political conscience during the Russian revolution. (Cedar Hills, Clackamas Town Center, Eastport; Thursday, September 6 only)
"The Evil Dead" The inimitable Sam Raimi cabin-in-the-woods movie; often imitated, never equaled. (Hollywood Theatre)
"Rear Window" Alfred Hitchcock's treatise on voyeurism, sexual repression and murder; a great cinematic achievement and ravishing entertainment. (Hollywood Theatre, Saturday and Sunday only)
"Showdown in Little Tokyo" Dolph Lundgren and Brandon Lee chase down drug dealers in a dubious 1991 entertainment. (Hollywood Theatre, Tuesday only)
"Suzaki Paradise: Red Lights" 1956 drama by Yuzo Kawashima about a couple trying to survive life in the underworld in post-war Tokyo. (Northwest Film Center, Saturday only)
"The 10th Victim" Campy 1965 film with a "Hunger Games"-ish plot about televised murder-as-entertainment, elevated by the presence of Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress. (Northwest Film Center, Thursday September 6 only)
An 'eat local' week is built, in part, on a selection of films about where our food comes from.
from "Big River" (2010)Three screenings will be held in three different cities, each focused on daily issues surrounding how we eat and where the things we eat come from. On September 9, "Mad City Chickens" will show at the Ashland Community Center in an afternoon dedicated to instruction and resources about keeping chickens in your backyard. On September 12, "Food Stamped," a documentary about feeding a family a healthy diet on a budget of food stamps, will screen at the RCC Higher Education Building in Medford. And on September 14, a pair of films about modern farming and its effects -- "Truck Farm" and "Big River" will screen at Summer Jo's organic farm and restaurant in Grant's Pass.
The event is sponsored by Thrive, which is an acronym for "The Rogue Initiative for a Vital Economy." For more information about the films or the organization, visit their web site or call 541-488-7272
The director of "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist" is still capable of pushing us where we don't necessarily want to go.
William Friedkin“I view it as a piece of material that was challenging to me, and I thought would be challenging to audiences.”
A statement like that coming from most moviemakers might leave you feeling dubious: ‘What do you know about “challenging,” fella?’
But this is William Friedkin talking, the man who made “The French Connection,” “The Exorcist,” “Cruising,” and “To Live and Die in L. A.,” among others. So when he talks about taking moviegoers places where they’ve never been, well, you pay attention.
At nearly 77 years old, Friedkin has found new ways to dare and provoke in “Killer Joe,” a hair-raising and darkly funny film, which opens in Portland on Friday, August 31, and is based on a play by Tracy Letts which, in turn, says Friedkin, was based on a true story.
“Tracy originally read this story in a newspaper,” the director explains in a phone interview. “A father and his son in Florida hired a hit man to kill their ex-wife and mother for a very small insurance policy. So when you ask what’s at the bottom of it, what it’s ultimately about, the answer is greed and the extreme lengths that some people will go to to get out of their unbearable situations.”
Letts transposed the story from Miami to Dallas, turned the hit man into a dirty cop, and turned it into something as horrifyingly and disturbingly human as a Greek tragedy about a morally corrupt family.
Friedkin saw the play some time ago, before directing the film of Letts’ play “Bug,” and then he heard from the playwright that he’d adapted “Killer Joe” for the screen. Friedkin wanted immediately to make it, but there were problems. The film is filled with blood, profanity and depraved sexuality, and would present real problems with the movie ratings board (who, finally, slapped it with an NC-17, its most restrictive designation): how would you finance such a thing? And who could play the seductive, sociopathic title character -- a cop who hires himself out for murders and has a taste for teenaged girls?
Money was the first hurdle. “Obviously,” says Friedkin, “no major studio was going to do anything like this, no matter who was in it. So I had to go to independent producers. I went to Nicolas Chartier, who produced ‘The Hurt Locker.’ And he’s sort of a courageous guy with a number of such projects. And he does commercial sorts of things so that he can pave the way for things like ‘Hurt Locker’ and this film. And he picked up on it right away.”
Matthew McConaughey in "Killer Joe"But that still left him with a hole in the middle of the film. One night, Friedkin was watching a TV interview show and saw, of all people, Matthew McConaughey, talking about his life. “He wasn’t the first guy I thought of,” Friedkin confesses. But I was very impressed with him. I didn’t know too many films he’d made before. I remembered him from (2001’s) ‘Frailty.’ And it occurred to me that he would be exactly the right sort of guy to play Killer Joe. Not some gruff old grizzly bear, but a really charming guy, good-looking, and unexpected.”
Friedkin reached out to McConaughey, and was, at first, rebuffed. “Matthew didn’t care for it at first at all,” he remembers. “He had no interest. But then he started to think about it, and after a lot of thought he realized the dark humor of it and the truth of it. And so he said he’d like to meet with me. We met, and we had about a two hour meeting, and we were on the same page, and we went ahead.”
As it happens, “Killer Joe” comes in the midst of what we might think of as the Summer of McConaughey, with the actor providing real energy, wit and strength in “Bernie” and “Magic Mike” prior to “Killer Joe,” in which he’s joined by Emile Hirsch, Gina Gershon Thomas Haden Church, and Juno Temple. Friedkin says that he’s not terribly surprised to see an actor best known for light comedy turn out capable of something deeper. It is, he explains, a matter of technique.
“A good actor,” he says, “has to be able to go inside himself or herself, into his or her own psyche, to find the character that he or she is playing inside themselves. They’re not putting on masks, per se. But even if they’re playing Quasimodo or Hitler, you have to find that character somewhere inside yourself. You have to find those triggers which, when you use sense memory, will bring you back to those moments when you were angry or afraid or loving or threatening. You have to find those emotions in yourself.”
Over the years, he continues, he’s developed a sense for when an actor is really probing and delivering something honest, as well as strategies to help an actor who isn’t going deep enough find something true in a performance.
“When I see an actor just putting on an act, so to speak, and not becoming the character, I’m out of the show, I don’t believe it,” Friedkin says. “So before I cast someone in a film I’ll spend quite a bit of time with them, individually, and learn as much as I can about them, about the things that they’ve experienced that trigger certain emotions. And then, if necessary, during the shooting or even in rehearsal, I’ll call upon those things, very casually. I imagine it’s similar to the way a psychiatrist works. You’re calling on emotions that you know the actor has experienced so that they can draw on those in creating the character. And then, when you get on the set, you have to provide an atmosphere where the actors feel free enough to create, free enough to draw on their sense memories and not feel like they’re being judged.”
In a way, Friedkin speaks from personal experience when he talks about the freedom from being judged. Along with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, he was a lynchpin of the generation of so-called movie brats who remade Hollywood in the early ‘70s, that golden era between the death of the old studio system and the rise of the blockbuster movie.
View full sizeWilliam Friedkin directs Emile Hirsch and Juno Temple in a scene from "Killer Joe"As Friedkin recalls, “I guess you’d have to say it was a special time, because so many people think that it was. Having lived through it, I can certainly say that it wasn’t that we had a lot more freedom than there is today. Several things were different. The guys who ran the movie studios were interested in all kinds of films, not just one kind of film. Not simply comic books or video games as movies. They were interested in all kinds of stories, they would take chances. And films cost a lot less money to make then. A lot less. So they could take those chances.”
At the same time, he says, it wasn’t like the keys to the studios had been handed over to a bunch of lunatic kids. “We were all watched very closely,” he says. “We weren’t given a totally free hand by the studios. They were all over us, making sure we came in on budget, on schedule. But they did allow us to undertake themes that were clearly different. Nobody knew we would make hits going into it. But studios were more interested at that time in challenging audiences. They weren’t interested in sequels or remakes. They were much more interested in, well, frankly, trying to replicate the success of ‘Easy Rider.’ They got the feeling that us young guys knew what the hell we were doing. And, frankly, we didn’t!”
Reviews of this week's new releases in Portland-area theaters.
Robert Pattinson in "Cosmopolis"David Cronenberg's adaptation of a Don DeLillo novel is an exquisitely built torture machine -- for its protagonist and, perhaps, for its viewers.
Paul Giamatti (l.) and Robert Pattinson in "Cosmopolis"There’s a fearlessness knit into the very core of David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis” that you cannot help but admire, even if the film finally pushes you away. It’s a movie of ideas, of talk, of resistance to the norm. Even within the context of Cronenberg’s knotty oeuvre (think how dense and oblique he’s been in, oh, “A Dangerous Method,” “Crash” or “Naked Lunch”), this film is a tough sell. But it’s never less than daring, poised or deliberate. It doesn’t go down easy, but it clings.
The film, based on a Don DeLillo novel, is an odyssey through the streets of Manhattan in the back of a custom-built limousine. Our protagonist, Eric Packer, is a young titan of finance whose empire is crumbling based on his misreading of global markets just as his psyche is unraveling because of his failure to connect coherently or significantly with anyone in his life.
One by one, employees, lovers, doctors, and bodyguards enter his opulent world (or, in the case of his strangely remote wife, he hers), with each encounter serving to confuse or vex Packer further. Under a credible threat of violence, through streets choked by anarchist rioters, a funeral cortege for a rap star, and a presidential visit to New York, Packer insists on being driven to his old neighborhood for a haircut. It is, of course, also a rendezvous with meaning, fate, identity.
For Cronenberg, the sleek limo with its plush, high tech interior is a physical space, a mental space, an object of fetish, a challenge in filmmaking. Sitting in the rear of his car like a paranoid king, amid moody lights and information-spewing screens, heavily guarded and yet desperate enough to step out into the world unprotected, Packer is like a film director who has lost control of a production. Cronenberg invests his protagonist with an air of power and authority, but he constantly shifts perspectives on him; we never feel that Packer is fully settled, safe, or certain. And eventually the dread that he feels creeps into the viewer.
In the center of this paranoid parade, Cronenberg has placed Robert Pattinson, the English heartthrob best known for the “Twilight” films. He’s credible as a New Yorker, less so as a business genius, least of all as a man of iron will. If he’s meant to be uncomfortably weak, as many of Stanley Kubrick’s protagonists were, it’s a successful bit of casting. But that would undermine Packer’s status as a villain, so there’s a bit of a problem at the core of the film.
There’s a problem at the end, too, when Packer’s journey ends in a muddled debate with the man who has been threatening him. That encounter is one of a series that range from steamy (Juliette Binoche, Emily Hampshire), to creepy (Samantha Morton, Gouchy Boy), to icy (Sarah Gadon, playing Packer’s wife), to frantic (Jay Baruchel) to farcical (Mathieu Amalric). They don’t quite add up as narrative, but they do create a series of moods that accumulate an increasing sense of despair and hopelessness -- which, too, is stifling.
It’s a credit to Cronenberg’s sheer strength as an artist that he makes “Cosmopolis” compelling: Packer, after all, is a creep who lacks the magnetism of, oh, Gordon Gekko, and yet we are magnetized through force of craft and a sense of mystery at the heart of the film. The journey on which he takes us may not satisfy in the ways we normally ask of movies, but if it did it wouldn’t be a Cronenberg, would it?
(108 min., R, Fox Tower) Grade: B-minus
A man poses as a missing boy, even though he's nothing like him, and pulls off the hoax with the boy's family.
Frederic Bourdin in "The Imposter"From the very start of “The Imposter,” we know that Frederic Bourdin is 1) a real person and 2) a fake; that is, he’s a con artist. He himself tells us so.
But director Bart Layton’s film takes us to such strange and emotionally-charged places that we cannot believe that what we’re seeing is real, even though it demonstrably is.
Some facts: In 1997, Bourdin was found by police in Spain, and, when they demanded to know who he was, claimed to be Nicholas Barclay, a teenager from San Antonio, Texas, who went missing three years earlier. Disposed to believe him, Spanish authorities contacted their counterparts in Texas, who called the Barclay family, who had long believed the worst about their missing boy. Naturally, they were elated.
Nicholas’s sisterflew to Spain for the remarkable reunion, and even though she was confronted with a brown eyed man with a Mediterranean accent, rather than blue-eyed, Texas-drawling Nicholas, she accepted Bourdin as her brother. She took him home, where the whole family embraced him, if somewhat tentatively, and he proceeded to integrate himself into normal life before having the truth revealed by a private investigator working for a tabloid TV show.
It’s an astounding story, truly, and Bourdin is the most chillingly sympathetic sociopath: frank, remorseless, matter-of-fact. He’s kind of a titanic figure, easily capable of carrying a whole film. It’s a shame, then, that Layton takes us on a macabre wild goose chase for the truth about the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay, distracting us, for the most part, from an appropriate sense of outrage toward his central figure. Bourdin is a heel, but, like so many people over the years, “The Imposter” lets him slip, by and large, away.
(95 min., R, Cinema 21) Grade: B
Visiting relations turn a Manhattan couple's life into utter chaos, comically.
Chris Rock (l.) and Albert Delpy in "2 Days in New York"Slight but winning, “2 Days in New York” is a comedy about ambition and cultural conflict starring, directed by and co-written by Julie Delpy, which rather makes it an example of some of its themes.
As in “2 Days in Paris,” which she also handmade, as it were, Delpy plays a French artist with an American beau who comes into conflict with her French family. This time, Chris Rock is the fella, a journalist and radio talk show host, and, once again, Delpy’s actual dad, Albert, plays her cinematic père, Alexia Landeau plays her sister, and Alexandre Nahon plays her sister’s boyfriend.
During a weekend in Manhattan when both Delpy and Rock have big career moments pending, the visiting French relations create good-humored havoc with the neighbors, with bosses, with shopkeepers, and so on. It’s a predictable sort of humor, but it’s played with intelligence, wit, charm and, blissfully, very little pretense.
In its final movement the film forces itself a bit much, venturing into screwball comedy territory when it had been more like a slice-of-life before that. But by then you may well be won over and agree that “2 Days in New York” compresses a mad weekend nicely into 90 or so minutes.
(95 min., R, Living Room Theaters) Grade: B
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is riding against the clock and a dirty cop in an energetic, if ordinary, thriller.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt in "Premium Rush"“Premium Rush” is a rather routine thriller that’s got two things going for it: the ticking of a clock and the clickety-click of bicycle wheels. Both impart a sense of exhilaration to a thin and even silly story, engaging you when, really, you ought to know better.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Wilee, a hotshot Manhattan bike messenger who rides a fixie like a bat out of hell. One afternoon he makes a pickup and winds up with a dirty cop (Michael Shannon) on his tail. There are subplots concerning Wilee’s girlfriend (Dania Ramirez) and the urgency of the delivery (it’s to do with a Chinese underground economy and illegal immigration). But chiefly it’s a race against time -- and against cops on two wheels and on four -- on a bike.
Director and co-writer David Koepp (“The Trigger Effect,” “Stir of Echoes”) is wise enough to get out of the way, for the most part, sticking to chase sequences and stopping occasionally (maybe too often) for an expository flashback. He allows Shannon to go a bit overboard, and he doesn’t get much out of Gordon-Levitt save his innate charm. But the film doesn’t reach too high, and it keeps you involved so long as it keeps moving, which is most of the time.
(91 min., PG-13, multiple locations) Grade: B-minus
The closing of a N. Mississippi video store further marks the end of an era of movie-watching.
View full sizeAdieu, Video Verite!Video Verite opened in November, 2003, as the first movie rental store in town that didn't stock VHS tapes, just DVDs (and, eventually, Blu-rays). Mohan opened the store after his long years working at Trilogy Video in Northwest Portland, first as a clerk then as manager. Sensing the population change in the Mississippi neighborhood near his former home Mohan opened one of the first new-style shops on the street, and he enjoyed a reasonably good run for an indie startup retail business.
The fate of the store, like that of so many other video stores -- including the big national chains such as Blockbuster and Hollywood Video -- was sealed by the trend toward video-on-demand, streaming video and video-by-mail. Folks would rather not leave the couch, and with tens of thousands of options at their fingertips, they can't be blamed.
Those familiar with Mohan's writing wouldn't have been surprised to see the shelves at his video store. Video Verite always carried the major studio releases and family-oriented fare you would find at any of the big video chains, but the real allure of the place was the many shelves devoted to foreign, independent, classic, cult and alternative movies and TV episodes. From the day it opened it was one of the go-to spots for any serious cinephile in the city. They even used their basement as a makeshift screening room now and again: you could go to rent a movie and wind up watching one for free.
Speaking on the phone this evening, Mohan reflected that when the store closes -- after a sale of its inventory -- "it will be the first time I haven't worked in a video store since 1991."
I have often joked darkly, with Mohan and others, that the video store clerk, a character immortalized in our pop culture mythology by Kevin Smith's "Clerks" and the legend of Quentin Tarantino's rise from the check-out counter at Video Archives to the director's chair, has been like the Pony Express rider: if you were of a certain age, you saw a career appear out of nowhere, spread across the nation, and, now, disappear again. The closing of Video Verite is further proof of that sad truth.
Portland still has independent video stores, notably the insanely great Movie Madness and, in my corner of town, the surprisingly deep and reliable Impulse Video. But they're becoming like cobbler's shops or milliners -- outposts for devotees and those who wish to experience nostalgia with their movie-watching.
New releases in Portland-area theaters not reviewed in this week's A&E.
Mel Gibson in "The Road Warrior""The Apparition" A horror movie so terrifying that they wouldn't let critics see it in advance! (multiple locations)
“Computer Errors" Austin’s famed Alamo Drafthouse presents a program of egregious computerized filmmaking to make the case for real movies. (Hollywood Theatre, Wednesday only)
“The Deadly Spawn” Campy horror film from 1983 about an alien creature which arrives on Earth via meteor. (Hollywood Theatre, Tuesday only)
“Everything Is” A selection of musical oddities. (Hollywood Theatre, Thursday only)
“High Noon” The 1952 Gary Cooper Western with the awesome Tex Ritter theme song, back on the big screen. (Cedar Hills, Clackamas Town Center, Eastport, Thursday only)
“The Road Warrior” The middle film of George Miller’s Mad Max trilogy -- and, inarguably, the best. A great, great action film. (Hollywood Theatre, Saturday and Sunday only)
“The Speak” Oregon-made horror film shot in one take. This one-week engagement, with director Anthony Pierce attending, marks the film’s U.S. premiere. (Hollywood Theatre)
“Vengeance” Hong Kong director Johnnie To’s 2009 film about a man who seeks revenge for a crime against his family. (5th Avenue Cinema, Friday through Sunday only)
Catch 'em while you can!
Roberto Benigni in "To Rome with Love"Everything old is new again!
"Alone Across the Pacific" Kon Ichiwara directed this 1962 film about a man sailing across the Pacific from Japan to San Francisco single-handedly. (Northwest Film Center, Saturday only)
"Batman & Robin" The dreadful 1997 Batman film with George Clooney as the Caped Crusader, presented in Hecklevision, which is, really, how it ought to have been made in the first place. (Hollywood Theatre, Friday only)
"The Deadly Spawn" Creature-from-outer-space movie from 1983. (Hollywood Theatre, Tuesday only)
"High Noon" The classic Gary Cooper Western, with its themes of loyalty, betrayal and courage and its great Tex Ritter theme song, back on the big screen. (Cedar Hills, Clackamas Town Center, Eastport; Thursday, August 30 only)
"The Road Warrior" The middle film of George Miller's "Mad Max" trilogy -- and the best, by a reasonably fair distance. A great, great, great action movie. (Hollywood Theatre, Saturday and Sunday only)
"The T.A.M.I. Show" The 1964 concert film featuring James Brown, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones and more -- and the final Top Down film of the summer. (Northwest Film Center, Thursday, August 30 only)
Dax Shepard writes, directs and stars, with real-life girlfriend Kristen Bell, as a man with a past on the run.
Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard in "Hit and Run"Spirited and saucy, “Hit and Run” is a small movie with big spirit, a Tarantino-ish sensibility, and a scattergun ethos that results in more hits than misses. It’s continually funny and surprisingly tenderhearted, so much so that even when it runs into dead ends and confusions you stay with it.
Dax Shepard, who wrote and co-directs, stars as Charlie Bronson, a mystery man living in the witness protection program in rural California with his girlfriend, Annie (Shepard’s real-life sweetie, Kristen Bell.) When Annie gets a job opportunity in Los Angeles, Charlie determines to help her get there, even though it’s the most dangerous place in the world for him. And the danger has been heightened by Annie’s jealous ex, who forces Charlie to reveal his true identity and deal with his past.
Along the way, there are outlandish visual and verbal jokes, fistfights and car chases, and some unexpected cameos (including a quite funny performance by Bradley Cooper as a gangster). It can get sloppy and silly and gratuitous at times, but “Hit and Run” never feels tired. Its energy and verve overcome its misfires.
(99 min., R, multiple locations) Grade: B
A solid if not eye-opening boxoffice performance is accompanied by good-but-not-glowing reviews.
View full size"ParaNorman": not quite cleaning but, but still doing nicely.The widely-predicted frontrunner, "The Expendables 2," which also premiered on Friday, took in $29 million for first place, and the spy thriller "The Bourne Legacy" added $17 million to its gross in its second weekend.
"ParaNorman," which was made for a budget estimated at $50-60 million, earned an additional $5 million in limited release overseas.
In comparison, Laika's 2009 film "Coraline" opened to $17 million domestically en route to an eventual North American total of $75 million, with another $49 million earned overseas.
Critically, "ParaNorman" was well-received. On the review-aggregating site "Rotten Tomatoes," it scored 87%, meaning that 83 out of 95 reviews were positive. On another site, "MetaCritic," which applies a more analytical formula to reviews, it scored a 73 on a scale of 0-100: a solid if not spectacular 'yes' score. And according to Movie Review Intelligence, yet another aggregating site, reviews for the film were 69.3% positive.
The master filmmaker describes the making of his challenging new film and praises its surprising star.
David CronenbergJust when you reckoned you had the Canadian writer-director pegged as a master of sci-fi and horror (“Scanners,” “The Fly,” “Videodrome”) he turned to tales of sexual confusion (“Dead Ringers,” “M. Butterfly,” “Crash”), then to crime stories (“A History of Violence,” “Eastern Promises”) and then, just last year, to a biopic about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung (“A Dangerous Method”).
Now he’s back, very quickly, with “Cosmopolis,” an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel about Eric Packer, a financial tycoon riding in a limousine through a tumultuous Manhattan day as his fortune is buffeted by global markets and his state of mental well-being decays. Ostensibly, the troubled fellow is trying to get downtown to get his haircut. But like Odysseus’s voyage home in “The Odyssey,” there’s much more to it than that.
Describing the story in a telephone interview from his Toronto base, Cronenberg explains that “the barber shop is not just a place where you go to get a haircut. It is his past. He’s returning to his childhood, to capture or reconnect with something that in his young adulthood he has lost.”
Packer is an unsympathetic protagonist, a titan of finance at age 28 who browbeats his employees, cheats on his wife, and presumes (and often incites) the worst in every person and every situation he encounters. It’s no wonder that he travels in an armored car, with a bodyguard, under constant fear of death threats. And yet, Cronenberg, following DeLillo, finds a poignancy to his situation.
“As the movie progresses,” he says, “he becomes more and more vulnerable and childlike, and he begins to confess that he doesn’t know how to interact, how to talk to his wife. He says, ‘This is how people talk, isn’t it?’ Although he is incredibly powerful and successful in his abstract bond-and-money-trading way, he has disconnected himself. Just as he has insulated his limo, he’s insulated his life from the vibrancy and human energy of the city. And he’s trying to connect with that.”
There’s a terrific claustrophobia to “Cosmopolis” based simply on the fact that (again, following DeLillo), it’s predominantly set in the interior of the protagonist’s high-tech limousine. Cronenberg, who confesses that “For me to just do what is normal is not that interesting,” was excited by the challenge of making a movie in such a confined space.
“I really like the structure,” he says. “I showed my crew two movies. I showed them ‘Lebanon,’ which takes place entirely inside an Israeli tank, and I showed them ‘Das Boot,’ which takes place almost entirely inside a German submarine. And in some ways this limo of Eric’s is a tank and a submarine. But it’s also a kind of vacuum tube or bell jar. It’s his environment that he’s created. The limo becomes something surreal. It becomes his moving environment that he forces everyone to come to, not just for conversations and business but for sex and medicine. You come into my environment and I control the space. Even the way he sits: it’s like he’s on a throne at the back of the limo. And it gives you the sense that this is his place of power, and he’s created this environment to exercise and demonstrate that power.”
David Cronenberg (behind camera) directs Robert Pattinson in "Cosmopolis"“It’s just intuiting that he can do the role,” he says. “Because you’re asking him here to do things he hasn’t done before. But I was convinced by the time that I had done all my work that he was the right guy. I knew he was good, and he surprised me by how good he was.”
One of Pattinson’s challenges was the sheer density of the dialogue. “Cosmopolis” is filled with deep, thick, abstract conversations that can feel more literary than cinematic. But Cronenberg says that it’s a mistake to think of cinema as a more purely visual than verbal art. “If you ask me ‘What is cinema?,’” he says, “I would say that the essence of cinema is two people talking. That’s the thing we photograph most in a movie: a person’s face, usually talking. Even in an action movie you get a lot of that, percentage-wise. I’ve never shied away from dialogue because, as I say, I find it innately cinematic. You find people who say, ‘That’s theatrical,’ because for them theater is dialogue. But to me that’s completely wrong. Dialogue is innately cinematic, and when you think of something as ‘theatrical’ you’re thinking of something else, you’re thinking of something structural.”
Robert Pattinson in "Cosmopolis"That said, Cronenberg continues, his “Cosmopolis” is not DeLillo’s. “My approach to adapting his book,” he explains, “was to accept the difference between the two media, and to be brutal about it and not to resort to voice-overs reading the book to you and so on. I’ve said it many times: to be loyal to the book you have to betray the book. And I did that with ‘Cosmopolis.’ Although in the case of ‘Cosmopolis,’ almost every word of dialogue in the movie is directly from the book.”
The finished film is a chilly look at this unstable moment in American culture, with unrest on the left and the right, a financial system seemingly on the verge of collapse, and all the traditional ways of understanding ourselves and our world challenged. Cronenberg says that, as a Canadian, he feels that he’s got a front-row seat to the spectacle of a superpower in a state of change and tumult.
As he puts it, the Canadian cultural critic Marshall McLuhan believed “that not being in America but being in a kind of backwater and observing America gave him a perspective that an American couldn’t have. And there could be some truth to that. You can’t claim it as a triumph or victory; it’s just happenstance. But in Canada we are uniquely positioned to observe America, because in one way we’re obsessed with America, and our destinies are very linked, and in another way we really are a very different culture. So I think that being a Canadian and living in Toronto gives me kind of a perfect perspective to do a New York story.”
("Cosmopolis" opens in Portland on Friday, August 24.)
Reviews of this week's new releases in Portland-area theaters.
"ParaNorman"A primal form of filmmaking finds its latest expression in Laika Entertainment's "ParaNorman."
"Fantastic Mr. Fox" (2009)Think of it: Alfred Hitchcock tells Cary Grant to walk across the set. The camera exposes the film frame-by-frame, 24 still shots per second. Later, the developed film is run through a projector at that same speed so that, as if paging through a flipbook, the hundreds of still images flipping past create the impression that someone is moving in front of us.
We know it’s an illusion: the two dimensions of a movie screen, even when augmented with 3-D technology, never look as entirely real as the action in a live stage play or opera or dance recital. But the sense of motion through time and space in motion pictures is so convincing that we suspend disbelief. We’re convinced we’re watching Cary Grant -- who might be decades dead, or at least not in the room with us or 40-feet tall -- walk.
Compare the work of stop-motion animators such as Chris Butler and Sam Fell, the directors of “ParaNorman.” Like Hitchcock, they’ve got actors whom they can touch and move into whatever positions they require for a scene, all with the aim of creating that same sense of lifelike motion when the finished film is projected. Their leading man, Norman, strides and stumbles and struggles before us just as if he were doing so right in front of us, the illusion of life complete.
Of course, as Norman is a puppet, the achievement is, in a way, more remarkable. Every iota of motion we see in “ParaNorman” was not only photographed by Butler and Fell but actually manipulated by them and their team of animators, millimeter by millimeter, inch by inch, frame by painstaking from -- which is a lot more work than Hitchcock ever had to do. And, what’s more, they had to build Norman, craft his clothes, render his every expression by hand and bit of body language and every wrinkle of his clothing and hair.
Yes, it’s a ton of work. But there are benefits, too, to consider: Stop-motion actors never think for themselves, never complain about retakes, never tire of long hours, and more or less do whatever is, in a manner of speaking, asked of them. Hitchcock always claimed that he never said that actors are cattle (“I said, ‘all actors should be treated like cattle,’” he half-jested), but he never denied noting enviously of Walt Disney, “If he didn't like an actor, he could just tear him up.” Hitchcock was never an animator, but he knew that, among filmmakers, only animators approached something like 100% creative control over their casts.
As Hitchcock would have known, stop-motion animation is virtually as old as the narrative cinema. There were lots of short films made using puppets, cutouts, clay figures and ordinary household objects from the silent era on, and there were memorable bits involving puppets in such feature films as “The Lost World” (1925) and “King Kong” (1933), among many others.
Still, it wasn’t until the mid-‘60s, when several successful television series and specials were made using puppets and stop-motion technology, that the prospect of full-length stop-motion features became easier to imagine for both filmmakers and audiences, culminating, in a sense, in the great, award-winning work done at Will Vinton Studios and Laika Entertainment, both, of course, of Portland, and Aardman Animations of Bristol, England.
The history of stop-motion is filled with iconoclasts, visionaries, crackpots, clowns and magicians -- in other words, it’s pure cinema. Have a look.
KEY FILMMAKERS
View full sizeRay Harryhausen
View full sizeWill Vinton
View full sizeJan Svankmajer
View full sizeThe Brothers Quay
View full sizeNick Park and Peter Lord
View full sizeHenry SelickNOTABLE TITLES
"Gumby" The great stop-motion animated star of 1950s TV was Art Clokey’s strange green creature who, with his orange horse, Pokey, had simple adventures in a spare (and never fully explained) animated world. A massive hit, the show aired on network television for more than a decade, spun off millions in toy sales, and inspired later TV series and a famous Eddie Murphy gag on “Saturday Night Live.”
"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (1964) The animation studio Rankin/Bass achieved instant immortality with this holiday classic, a 47-minute made-for-TV film. The studio followed up successfully with a series of similar works based on Christmas songs (“Frosty the Snowman,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”), but was never quite so fortunate in branching into stop-motion feature films or TV series.
"Davey and Goliath" If you are of a certain age, you’ll recollect that the only children’s entertainment available on TV on Sunday mornings was this 1960s Christian show, created by Art Clokey of “Gumby” fame, about the moral and life lessons learned by Davey and his dog, Goliath (who, like Calvin’s Hobbs in the comic strip, could talk only to his owner). The dozens of episodes were made with real attention to detail and, notably, featured African-American characters.
The California Raisins Starting with a 1986 commercial in which they sang and danced to Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” these claymation characters became the stars of a massively popular advertising campaign for raisins (featuring music by Ray Charles and Michael Jackson), appeared in award-winning TV specials, and became a brief but highly successful merchandising craze. And all of it originated in Northwest Portland’s Will Vinton Studios.
"Celebrity Deathmatch" A funny, irreverent MTV series which ran from 1998 to 2007 and combined the vogue for professional wrestling with a thick dose of satire aimed at the culture of celebrity. Featuring a cast of regular commentators and such bouts as Charles Manson vs. Marilyn Manson, Hilary Clinton vs. Monica Lewinsky, Dean Martin vs. Jerry Lewis, and The Three Stooges vs. The Three Tenors, it used clay animation to comically gory and deliciously shocking effect.
"Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" (2005) A follow-up, of sorts, to Henry Selick’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” which Burton produced, it’s a creepy fantasy about a wedding proposal gone wrong. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter provide voices (naturally), and the whole thing is, ironically, more human than anything Burton has made in years.
"A Town Called Panic" (2009) Based on the Belgian TV series of the same name, this wildly dreamlike feature film used low-fi stop-motion to render the remarkably strange story of a horse, a cowboy, an Indian, an infinite pile of bricks, and an army of aquatic aliens. None of it makes a whit of sense, but it was played with terrific verve and wit. Bonus: most of the short films from the original series are online to enjoy.
"The Fantastic Mr. Fox" (2009) Director Wes Anderson has always been a meticulous tinkerer, so it almost seemed natural that he chose stop-motion animation (using puppets) to adapt Roald Dahl’s story about a felonious fox, his claque of collaborators, and the nasty farmers trying to stop their wave of pilfering. Made with the most delicate and intricate of craft, it’s a pure pleasure.
The directors of Laika Entertainment's second feature talk of influences, rainy days and hard work.
View full size"ParaNorman" men: Chris Butler (l.) and Sam Fell
Making an animated feature is a big job, and thus it’s not at all unusual to find a pair of filmmakers at the helm. In the case of “ParaNorman,” that team is composed of Chris Butler, who wrote the script, and Sam Fell, his co-director.
The pair recently spoke about their fondness for stop-motion animation, the artistic vibe of Portland, and other matters “ParaNorman” in a conference call. Their comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Can you point back to any stop-motion films that made you want to work in the medium?
Fell: I’d have to say it was the films of Ray Harryhausen. I’m too young to have seen them when they first came out, but they were in rerelease when I was young and I saw them on the big screen. And then later, when I was in college and trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I saw the films of Jan Svankmajer, the Czech surrealist, especially his version of “Alice in Wonderland,” which was mind-blowing.
Butler: I think I’d also have to say Harryhausen, with all those amazing creatures. I really loved the “Sinbad” movies. And then when I was a student I saw films by Ladyslaw Starewicz and Jiri Barta, and those really impressed me.
So many of the best stop-motion films have a dark aspect to them. Is there something inherently creepy about the technique?
Butler: We’ve talked about this, actually, and we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a little bit magical and a little bit ghoulish. In 2-D animation you’ve got a drawing of an object and in CG you’ve got a representation of the object, but in stop-frame you’ve got the actual object itself, and you’re manipulating it a little like a god. It’s a kind of black magic.
Fell: They would have hung us for this 300 years ago!
You’re both English, so I’m curious if you see any similarities between Bristol, the home of English stop-motion animation, and Portland, the home of the American brand.
Fell: Well, it rains a lot in both places, so you might as well stay indoors playing with dolls!
Butler: They’re both kind of hippie towns in the sense that they kind of nurture creativity and a kind of homemade scale of things. They’re not too big and they’re not too pricey, especially compared with London or Los Angeles.
Stop-motion seems like such an arduous process. Wouldn’t it be easier to draw the film or render it on a computer?
Butler: Well, it does seem larger than life when you see it getting made, because it involves so much physical effort. You visit the set and it’s noisy and there are armies of people making things and shooting off sparks. And if you visit another animation studio where they’re working in 2-D or CG then you just see people quietly working at their desks.
Fell: There’s much more direct interaction with the material if you’re working in stop-motion. You’ve got the models right in front of you and you can see what’s happening. You wouldn’t dare touch it for fear of breaking it, but you can see it, which is a big help. You have the ability to look at every single frame before you shoot it. On 2-D or CG films, you have people emailing you their work, which is a different feel.
Butler: But it is ridiculously difficult. I think that’s why it’s only done by people who are mad enough not to care about how hard it is.
Fell: Our most productive week was two minutes of finished footage.
There’s so much wonderful craft in the film. Do you have a favorite bit?
Fell: I liked Norman’s little bicycle quite a bit. It’s a lovely thing and it actually worked. Like a tiny Swiss clock.
Butler: I really liked when we were able to see the light coming through Norman’s ears.
There have been more stop-motion features on American screens in the past five or ten years than perhaps at any time. Is the medium on the rise?
Butler: I think it is. Laika is gearing up to increase their output over the next few years. And it’s not only the numbers of films but the stories are so different. The medium is able to tell so many types of stories, and there are many more opportunities with each success.
The second feature by Portland's Laika Entertainment garners kudos. And now we wait for the boxoffice results....
"ParaNorman"Over at MetaCritic, the film currently gets a 69 rating (out of 100, which means the low side of "go see it"). At Rotten Tomatoes, it's currently pulling an 82 (again, out of 100). The two sites differ in that MetaCritic reads reviews, assigns them a number grade and then uses a secret formula to derive the final score; RT simply sees a review as a thumb-up or thumb-down and counts them all accordingly, arriving at a percentage. It's a pretty good start, although still early; by this time Friday, I expect nearly 175 reviews to be up at RT and 45 or more at MetaCritic.
It's not the wall-to-wall raves enjoyed by Laika's 2009 debut, "Coraline," but it's good news. In all, like me, folks are more enamored of the filmmaking -- the handmade puppets, the painstaking animation, the 3-D, the voice talents -- than the script and story. But few people, if any, are outright hostile (though some do wonder about whether the film is appropriate for pre-tweens).
Here are some passages to ponder:
"'ParNorman,'a dark and slightly dotty 3-D fable about a boy who communes with the dearly and not so dearly departed, sometimes gets a little out of hand, especially at the end. Even so, it may be the most fun you'll have with ghosts and zombies all year." -- Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times
"Far more than Norman’s adventure, which takes him from home to a cemetery and deep into his town’s history, what pulls you in, quickening your pulse and widening your eyes, are the myriad visual enchantments — from the rich, nubby tactility of his clothes to the skull-and-bones adorning his bedroom wallpaper. When Norman pauses while brushing his teeth to make a scary face in the mirror, the foamy toothpaste dripping like zombie drool, you may find yourself tapping into your own inner monster and goofily grinning right back." -- Manohla Dargis, New York Times
"Unlike 'Coraline,' which focused intently on the childhood terror of suspecting your parents may not be who they seem to be, the story of ParaNorman sprawls in a dozen directions. There are zombie attacks (mostly funny, rarely scary), teenage antics (the kids drive around in a van that bears a faint resemblance to Scooby-Doo’s Mystery Machine) and a third-act revelation that changes the tone of the film from spooky to beautiful, gentle tragedy. None of this is all that engaging. But the art design of the movie makes up for the slack story." -- Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald
"What works about "ParaNorman" is its subtle interweave of the stoical and the heroic. The voice work is inspired, without a lot of theatrical flourish. The low-key musical score by Jon Brion, one of the year's best, teases out the macabre humor in each new challenge faced by Norman. For all their painstaking detail, I never much took to the Tim Burton universe of stop-motion,"The Nightmare Before Christmas"or "Corpse Bride." But "Coraline" and "ParaNorman" are several steps up in terms of ... well, everything that makes a film successful and interesting. The stories seduce rather than bully. The throwaway gags are choice....And despite a heavy-going and not-great final 20 minutes, "ParaNorman" gets you in Norman's corner and keeps you there." -- Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Like many of the Amblin' films of the '80s, "ParaNorman" has a kid as the protagonist, but the film doesn't speak down to its audience. Instead, it tells a sometimes sad, often scary story about perception and institutionalized lies and the things that we are driven to do by fear, and it treats all of its characters, even the most cartoonish of them, with respect. Whatever I expected from the film, it wasn't something this smart and mature." -- Drew McWeeny, HitFix
The most negative review so far has come from Marshall Fine, the longtime Gannett newspapers critic who now plies his trade at his own web site. Even in dismissing the film, though, Fine declares appeaciation for the filmmaking:
"Directed by Sam Fell and Chris Butler from a script by Butler, “ParaNorman” is a marvel of stop-motion animation, built on a script of flat jokes and frantic, frenetic but uninvolving action. It wants to be a horror comedy, but the horror is mild-mannered and the comedy never ignites." -- Marshall Fine, Hollywood and Fine
Shawn Levy is the author of 11 books, including the best-sellers The Castle on Sunset, Rat Pack Confidential, Paul Newman: A Life, King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis, and Dolce Vita Confidential.
He also wrote and narrated the podcast Glitter & Might. The former film critic of The Oregonian and KGW-TV, he has written for Sight and Sound, Film Comment, American Film, Interview, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Black Rock Beacon. He jumps and claps and sings for victory in Portland, Oregon.
