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Category: movies (Page 43 of 45)

‘Prometheus’ review: a sci-fi prequel sacrifices storytelling for beauty

June 7, 2012 /

The director of "Alien" prequelizes his brilliant 1979 invention with mixed -- but always handsome -- results.

Prometheus Fassbender.pngMichael Fassbender in "Prometheus"
When he gave the world “Alien” in 1979, Ridley Scott was a young Turk with a eye that had won him honors in the worlds of advertising and television and one gorgeous but under-noted film, “The Duellists,” to his name.  

Now, 33 years later, he is officially Sir Ridley, with more than 20 feature films on his resume, and “Alien” has become a franchise, with five sequels and a number of video games and whatnot in its cabinet.  And Scott, who has directed such films as “Thelma and Louise,” “Gladiator,” “Black Hawk Down” and “American Gangster” (without, to many minds, equaling the one-two punch of “Alien” and its follow-up, “Blade Runner”),  is revisiting the universe of his first great triumph.  Like George Lucas before him, Scott is engaged in a prequel to a hit science fiction series, spelling out the story that the first, classic film only implied.

“Prometheus,” as the prequel is known, is built on a completely different scale from “Alien” and has a completely distinct agenda.  Where the earlier film, based on a Dan O’Bannon script, was a claustrophobic horror movie which sadistically took its time to revealed the fiend at its core, “Prometheus” knows, along with its audience, what the creatures we all call Aliens look like, how they breed and fight, and that an evil corporation hopes to manipulate these horrible killing machines for material advantages.

Screenwriters Damon Lindelof and Jon Spaihts have sent us back to the end of the twenty-first century, approximately 30 years before the events of “Alien.”  The titular vessel Prometheus is carrying a team of scientists led by Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace of the Swedish “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), who have followed clues left by Earth’s ancient civilizations to a remote planet where they believe they will discover the race of giants whom they call “engineers,” the beings whom they believe created mankind in their own image untold millennia prior.  

The expedition is supervised by the chilly Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), an official of Weyland Industries, which funded the mission, and the vessel is captained by the crusty Janek (Idris Elba).  But the fellow who seems to be mostly in charge of things is an android, David 8 (Michael Fassbender), an uncamouflaged nod toward the original film.

Prometheus arrives on the uninviting planet early in the going and the scientists head right into a mysterious and apparently abandoned structure where, with David’s not entirely helpful prodding, they begin to get the idea that the “engineers” may have met a ghastly end.  Soon enough, on cue, the DNA of the Aliens is discovered and unleashed, the competing agendas of the scientists and the corporation surface and clash, and the violent and gory deaths start to pile up.

Little, then, occurs in the way of surprises or revelations.  Rather, themes familiar from the other “Alien” films -- strong heroines, horrific gestations, and cruelly placid androids -- emerge for, chronologically, the first time.  The film is lovely, as is much of Scott’s work, although the heavy use of computer imagery, the 3-D (unobtrusive and involving, as the best 3-D is now becoming), and the general sense that the directing world has, as a whole, caught up to his visual inventiveness, make it something less than special.

Still, “Prometheus” is breezy and comely and sufficiently clever to mitigate most qualms, and Fassbender, especially, is wonderful.  It’s not as good a movie as Scott’s “Alien” or James Cameron’s 1986 “Aliens.”  But it doesn’t perversely toy with the audience as did David Fincher’s 1992 “Alien 3” or Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1997 “Alien: Resurrection.”  If it’s not the most enlightening prequel, it’s nevertheless a sturdy one.  And if it leads viewers to appreciation of its superior kinsmen, well then that’s a bonus.
    
(120 min., R, multiple locations) Grade: B

‘Monsieur Lazhar’ review: a delicate situation, and the perfect man to handle it

June 6, 2012 /

An Oscar-nominated Canadian film is a small triumph of delicacy and restraint.

Monsieur Lazhar.jpgMohamed Fellag in "Monsieur Lazhar"
Discreet, delicate, and cautious, “Monsieur Lazhar” takes you by surprise -- and that goes for both the movie and the man.  

After a ghastly tragedy at a Montreal school, an elegant, soft-spoken and mysterious immigrant named Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag) shows up and offers himself as a replacement teacher.  Though he hasn’t followed the proper protocol, his manner is impeccable, and he’s hired.  In the coming months, he helps his middle-schoolers put the hurtful thing they’ve witnessed behind them.  But there is pain in his past, too, and it gradually emerges, bringing challenges of its own.

Writer-director Philippe Falardeau dances delicately along the razor’s edge of the familiar and the conventional.  But he does so with tact and taste and just the right blend of tension and relief.  He has a wonderfully poised performance from his star and a pair of strong turns from child actors Sophie Nélisse and Émilien Néron.

“Monsieur Lazhar,” which was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign language film, isn’t a world-beater, but it doesn’t need to be to move and impress you.  Sometimes it’s the quiet ones who move us the most with their simplicity and their sincerity -- in life and in art.
    
(94 min., PG-13, Cinema 21) Grade: B-plus

This week’s last-chance movies: ‘This Is Not a Film’ and ‘Polisse’

June 6, 2012 /

Catch 'em while you can!

This Is Not a Film.jpgView full sizeJafar Panahi and friend in "This Is Not a Film"
Two films leaving town this week desrving of attention, especially considering the fact that they only just got here:  "This Is Not a Film," a clever and painful documentary by Iranian director Jafar Panahi about life under house arrest and the threat of censorship; and "Polisse," a French drama about the professional and private lives of a squad of child protection officers in a rough part of Paris.  Both worth a look.

‘Zulu’ and the ghosts of actors past

June 5, 2012 /

The lives of actors are extended into a kind of immortality so long as their films still exist.

Zulu -- Baker and Caine.jpgView full sizeStanley Baker (l.) and Michael Caine in "Zulu" (1964)
I had occasion recently to watch, for maybe the fourth time in my life, Cy Endfield's "Zulu," a terrific 1964 epic about the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, particuarly the famed Battle of Rorke's Drift, when a contingent of perhaps 150 English soldiers managed, for 30 hours or so, to hold off perhaps 4000 Zulu warriors who had the previous day wiped out an English column of more than 1200 souls.

The film is notable for a number of things:  a massive scale, with hundreds of extras waging hand-to-hand (or, more precisely, spear-to-bayonnet) combat; the gorgeous Natal setting; the 70mm photography; the bloody-minded storytelling, almost half of which is battle; the John Barry score; the authentic tribal rituals, music and military tactics on display.

But I was particularly taken by the acting.  The film famously provided Michael Caine with his star-making role, some 12 years and 30 parts into his career.  Ironically, the archetypical Cockney Caine was universally noted for the first time in his working life for playing an upperclassman, Lt. Gonville Bromhead, an actual historic personage who was raised in comfort and never saw battle before that fateful day.  To hear Caine speak in the soft, clipped, exact tones of a posh gent is almost comical -- and, indeed, generations of English comedians have joked about how it might have sounded had Caine played the role in his familiar voice:  "'Ere! Quit pointin' those bleedin' spears at me!"

Beside Caine, there are such faces as Stanley Baker (the headline star and producer), Jack Hawkins, Nigel Green, James Booth and, in the only female speaking role, Ulla Jacobsson.  And as I watched them, I realized that they were all -- save Caine -- dead.  I was moved to look up the status of everyone who had a role of any size in the film and found that virtually every single person whom you might be able to identify the film (which, to be fair, is nearly 50 years old) had passed away.  Caine was an exception, as were one or two relatively obscure minor players.  And, bizarrely, one of the few survivors turns out to be someone rather famous, albeit not for movie acting:  Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the South African tribal leader and political figure who plays his own ancestor, the chieftain Cetewayo who waged battle against the English. 

It's a strange thing, if you think about it, to watch a film and feel so much vitality coming from people who are no longer alive.  Their speech and facial expressions and movements and human quirks -- sweating and coughing and such -- are captured forever and, at the same time, lost forever.  Even given the massive scale of "Zulu" and the fact that it was made during the lifetimes of many people who can remember seeing it on first release, the movie like a time capsule of a bygone era -- a living mausoleum.  Before long, more time will have passed since the release of the film than passed between the events it depicts and its making.  And by then surely no one who can be recognized in it will still be alive.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon in human culture:  the ability to capture lifelike representations of people and experience them anew after the subject's demise.  In the contact of a death-soaked movie like "Zulu" this may seem especially poignant, perhaps, but it applies to any old film or TV show or audio recording. Think of someone clearing his or her throat at a concert performance from the 1940s, still audible today decades after the throat-clearer has died.  The scores of extras in "Zulu" are no more identifiable than that anonymous soul.  And yet they, too, feel strangely immortal for having been captured in a motion picture. 

John Keats was onto a similar thought in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," describing figures who would never age or die or, indeed, change their postures.  But those were representations of people who may or may not have once lived, of course, not captured images of people who were demonstrably alive and no longer are. 

Artists live on through art, yes, but so, too, can the people who happen to be present when artists make their work.  It's a scary thought, but comforting, too, and it gives you an appreciation of the miracle of movies that may bring them more vitally alive to you than ever.

Oregon bank robber says an Oscar-winning movie drove him to crime

June 4, 2012 /

The documentary "Inside Job," about the causes of the global financial crisis, gives a man the idea to get some justice of his own.

raymondcarlson.jpgMultnomah County Sheriff's OfficeRaymond Knudson
Some people are inspired by works of art to change their lives.  You hear of people reading books or seeing movies or visiting great architectural wonders and resolving to be better humans or casting off their everyday lives for something nobler and more selfless.

Raymond Carl Knudson isn't, apparently, one of those types.  

On April 6 of this year, Knudson, having just watched the Oscar-winning 2010 documentary "Inside Job," which points a finger at banks and banking regulators as the culprits behind the 2008 economic crash, walked into a Gresham, Oregon, Bank of America and handed a clerk a note declaring "Give me all the money no marked bills no die pack" (sic).  He was handed $425, stuffed the loot into a paper bag from McDonald's, and left.

To his credit, Knudson, who pled not guilty last week to charges that could land him in prison for 20 years, drove immediately from the bank to the nearest police station and turned himself in -- not three minutes after the heist.  That's where he confessed to having been motivated by watching the movie -- and to his atrocious spelling.

So, in a twisted way, he was inspired to do good after all.  Although you do wonder just what type of movies they make available to prison inmates.....

A noisy ‘Snow White,’ a daring ‘Not a Film,’ a choppy ‘Polisse’ and more

June 1, 2012 /

This week's new releases in Portland-area theaters.

Snow White and the Huntsman 2.jpgCharlize Theron in "Snow White and the Huntsman"
The big multiplex opening this weekend is "Snow White and the Huntsman," but we've also got reviews of the daring Iranian documentary "This Is Not a Film," the French police story "Polisse," the French buddy tale "The Intouchables" and the low-fi American indie comedy "The Color Wheel."  And, yes, "Also Opening," "Indie/Arthouse" and "Levy's High Five."

A gorgeous ‘Stallion,’ a lovely ‘Otter,’ a stoned ‘School’ and more

June 1, 2012 /

New releases in Portland-area theaters not reviewed in this week's A&E.

The Sand Pebbles.jpg
“The Black Stallion” The gorgeous 1979 Carroll Ballard film about a boy and a horse.  (Hollywood Theatre, Saturday only)  

“Hard to Kill” Hard not to make fun of Steven Seagal; B-Movie Bingo makes a community event of it.  (Hollywood Theatre, Tuesday only)  

“High School” Stoner comedy that they forgot to screen in time for print deadlines.  (multiple locations)  

“My American Cousin” Prize-winning 1985 film by Sandy Wilson about growing up in British Columbia  (Northwest Film Center, Monday only)  

“My Grandmother” A Russian silent film from 1929 is accompanied by a live score.  (Alberta Rose Theatre, Sunday only)  

“Otter 501” Documentary about the tumultuous young life of a sea otter pup.  (Fox Tower)  

“The Sand Pebbles” From 1966, a slice of macho starring Steve McQueen.  (Laurelhurst Theater)  

"Total Recall" Those purveyors of late-night fun, Cort and Fatboy, kick off a Summer of Schwarzenegger with the 1990 sci-fi mind-bender.  (Bagdad Theater, Friday only)

“Valhalla Rising” Before “Drive,” director Nicolas Winding Refn made this nearly-silent sort-of action film about medieval barbarism.  (5th Avenue Cinema, Friday through Sunday only)  



Levy’s High Five, June 1 – 7

May 31, 2012 /

The five films playing in Portland-area theaters that I'd soonest see again.

The Deep Blue Sea window.jpgRachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston in "The Deep Blue Sea"
1) “The Deep Blue Sea” Terence Davies is the finest director you’ve likely never heard of, probably because his best films -- the quiet, devastating semi-autobiographical “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and “The Long Day Closes” -- were made more than two decades ago and he’s only had one film (“The House of Mirth,” an anomaly, really) get even a modest release since.  Here, adapting Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play about a passionate woman (Rachel Weisz), her stodgy husband (Simon Russell Beale) and her unreliable lover (Tom Hiddleston), his immense, inimitable gifts for image-making and, especially, turning film into something like music are in full power.  The effect is sometimes funny, sometimes dramatic, sometimes absolutely ravishing.  Davies is a master, and this is his most accessible film.  See it.  Living Room Theaters

2) "Bernie”  It’s a term of deep praise to note that writer-director Richard Linklater (deepbreath: “Slacker,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset,” “Waking Life,” “School of Rock”) is capable more than any contemporary American filmmaker of making terrific movies about nearly nothing.  Here, working with a based-on-truth story, he gives us life in the small East Texas town of Carthage, where a beneficent  funeral director (Jack Black) and a mean, wealthy widow (Shirley MacLaine) become unlikely chums and companions...under she mysteriously goes missing.  Linklater weaves the dramatized version of the story with dry and deft interviews of actual Carthaginians (is that what they’re called?) and even several musical numbers in a perfect frappe of a black comedy. multiple locations

3) "Sometimes a Great Notion" Before the Oscar-winning classic "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," another film crew came to Oregon to adapt a Ken Kesey novel for the big screen. Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, Richard Jaeckel, Michael Sarrazin and Lee Remick were the stars, and Newman produced and, after a dust-up with the guy he first hired, also wound up directing. The result was something of a misfire, but a spirited one (with a singularly indelible death scene), but the stories about wild times during its making are legendary and a real hoot. Oregon author Matt Love has written a charming book about the shoot, "Sometimes a Great Movie: Paul Newman, Ken Kesey and the Filming of the Great Oregon Novel," and -- schedule permitting -- he'll share some of the amazing tales he's uncovered after each screening. Hollywood Theatre, Friday through Monday only

4) "This Is Not a Film" While under house arrest and facing an insanely harsh sentence for his moviemaking, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi filmed an ordinary day in his life: watching TV, making phone calls, drinking tea, feeding his son's iguana, staring out the window, taking out the trash. He edited the footage and smuggled it out of Iran inside a cake, premiering it at Cannes and reminding the film world of the plight of creative artists under the Islamic regime in his country. It's a movie in which the most ordinary details -- that lizard, the trash run, the celebratory fireworks in the street -- serve as subtle metaphors for Pahani's situation. It all seems offhanded, but it's ingenious and, taken in context, devastating. Hollywood Theatre Theatre

5) “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”  Jiro Ono is the owner of a Tokyo sushi bar with 10 seats and 3 Michelin stars, and David Gelb’s gorgeous and intimate documentary about the man and his obsession gives you an idea of how that can not only be so but be fitting.  Jiro and his two sons (bound to the chef’s apron strings, almost literally) devote untold hours of work and thought to the perfection of sushi-making, turning a sometimes makework form of cookery into indisputably high art.  At 85, the old master still works virtually every day, and the fruit of his focus is in servings of raw fish and warm rice photographed so lusciously that you can almost taste them.  A mouthwatering film:  literally.  Lake, Laurelhurst, Living Room Theaters

‘This Is Not a Film’ review: a sly and daring expose of life under house arrest

May 31, 2012 /

An Iranian director subtly -- and bravely -- reveals his fate.

This Is Not a Film.jpgView full sizeJafar Panahi and friend in "This Is Not a Film"
In December 2010, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi (“The White Balloon,” “Offside”) was charged with committing acts of propaganda against his country its security and sentenced to a six-year jail sentence and a 20-year ban from making movies.  

The following spring, while awaiting appeal of his sentence, Panahi spent an ordinary day drinking tea, taking phone calls, watching TV, listening to noises from the street, imagining a new film project, and, subversively, filming it all with the help of documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb. The pair edited the footage, saved it to a flash drive and smuggled it out of Iran inside a cake.  The result, entitled “This Is Not a Film,” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, 2011, and has helped direct the attention of the movie and political worlds to the plight of Iranian filmmakers and to Panahi’s situation in particular.

Predictably, not much happens in “This Is Not a Film”; dude is under house arrest, after all.  But it’s absorbing and clever.  Panahi’s activities -- acting out a potential future film project, letting his son’s pet iguana climb over him, reacting in fear to the noise of fireworks in the streets marking the Persian new year, collecting garbage from the other apartments in the building with the janitor -- all have a metaphorical resonance.  At one point, he replaces the high-quality camera which he and Mirtahmasb have been using with his iPhone, demonstrating how easy it would be for someone with his determination to make a movie and share it with the world, governments, censors and even prisons be damned.

“This Is Not a Film” has no special effects, no soundtrack, no plot to speak of, and yet it is, in many ways, one of the most tense films you can imagine:  the real stakes of real life don’t often have the shape of narrative cinema, after all, and we almost never get to see them played out in real time like this.    

(77 min., unrated, probably PG, Hollywood Theatre) Grade: B-plus


‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ review: a classic tale raucously retold

May 31, 2012 /

A truly evil queen and some delightful dwarves balance out a bland heroine.

Snow White and the Huntsman.jpgChris Hemsworth and Kristen Stewart in "Snow White and the Huntsman"
Sometimes wondrous, sometimes overwrought, “Snow White and the Hunstman” is a big, noisy rendering of the fairy tale has been movie fodder since the silent era and particularly since Walt Disney’s 1937 animated masterpiece.  There have been dozens of versions of the story; two already this year, in fact:  the big screen comedy “Mirror, Mirror” and, with liberties, TV’s “Once Upon a Time.”  But this is, in many ways, the largest in scale.

In the hands of first-time director Rupert Sanders and a small clutch of screenwriters, this “Snow White” adheres more or less to the version collected by the Brothers Grimm, with a vain and evil queen, a beautiful and doomed princess, a sympathetic assassin, friendly dwarves, a poisoned apple, a handsome prince and so on.  

In some cases, the film augments the tale’s supernatural elements:  the queen has an array of horrific powers, a dark forest is terrifyingly alive, and a fairyland is similarly bewitched but in a far happier way.  In other ways, it puts a rather more human face on things than we’re used to:  the dwarves (there are eight) are played, deliciously, by such actors as Bob Hoskins, Ian McShane, Nick Frost, Ray Winstone, Toby Jones and Eddie Marsan, none of whom feels especially cartoonish.

The core of the story, as in virtually all versions, lies in the jealousy of the vain queen (Charlize Theron, absolutely chewing up the scenery) toward the youth and beauty of the princess (Kristen Stewart, looking, as ever, more stricken than inspired).  In this go-round, the queen has a brother (Sam Spruell) who does her awful bidding and Snow White has two champions:  a huntsman who refuses to kill her (Chris Hemsworth. in a nicely roguish turn) and a prince (Sam Claflin) who has loved her since their youth.  A bit of “Robin Hood” has been added, with the queen depicted as a  usurper whose cruel dominion over the realm is contested by rebels who require the sort of inspiration that Snow White can provide.  But otherwise, it’s the tale you know.

What’s not familiar is the scale and the texture and all the special effects.  Sanders combines whimsy and horror in ways that might very well spook the younger members of the audience.  Some of it is quite fetching:  the moss-covered beasties who live among the fairies, the queen’s habit of morphing into birds, the soldiers built of shards of black glass.  But some, too, is heavy-handed, particularly when shot through with the bombastic score by James Newton Howard.  And the film feels long, partly because the story is a bit overstuffed, partly because the pace of the telling can get gummy and loose.

Still, if you’ve a mind to see a classic fairy tale rendered as an action movie, and if you want to see a sizeable handful of fine English actors have grand fun playing grizzled dwarves, there are worse ways to spend two hours than in the company of “Snow White and the Huntsman.”    

(125 min., PG-13, multiple locations) Grade: B-minus


‘Polisse’ review: a multi-threaded tale of French police and their woes

May 31, 2012 /

The personal and professional lives of a child protection squad make for a volatile, uneven drama.

Polisse.jpgMaiwenn, Jeremie Elkai and Joey Starr (l. to r.) in "Polisse"
“Polisse” is a sprawling, pied, uneven policier about the professional and private lives of the men and women on the Child Protection Unit of the Paris police.  Faced with a daily diet of ghastly crimes, struggling to keep the horrors and stresses of their work out of their homes, they’re constantly on edge, as likely to lose control of themselves with suspects as with each other and with their families and partners.  

Directed and co-written by the actress Maïwenn, the film covers a period of several months during which a photojournalist (Maïwenn herself) is embedded with the squad.  She gets close enough to her subjects to begin an affair with one of them (Joey Starr), a turn of events which is known to all and yet never mentioned as a possible problem with her work.  That’s but one of perhaps two dozen stories the film encompasses, the lot of them knit together very loosely in the manner of an episodic TV series.

Some of the drama, comedy, sexuality, and human tension in “Polisse” (the title is meant to evoke a childlike spelling of the word ‘police’) is genuinely engaging.   And a few of the actors (especially Starr and Karin Viard as a divorcing policewoman) are quite strong. But the shagginess of the thing, the lack of a throughline, and the fleeting nature of the incidents make the whole thing feel arbitrary.  When the chunks are strong, you can imagine whole films being built around them; when they’re not, you wish someone had found the resolve to cut them out.  “Polisse” won a jury prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, but it’s only a patchwork success.
    
(127 min., unrated, surely R, Living Room Theaters) Grade: B

‘The Color Wheel’ review: mumblecore becomes fumblecore in comic road movie

May 30, 2012 /

An indie comedy about bickering siblings lack the polish of its low-budget peers.

The Color Wheel.jpgAlex Ross Perry and Carlen Altman in "The Color Wheel"
If you think that the tiny indie movies known as ‘mumblecore’ -- movies like “The Puffy Chair” and “Quiet City” -- are easy to make, watch one that systematically botches the staging and framing and pacing and all the other little aspects of film craft that those movies get right.  Watch “The Color Wheel.”

The fitfully funny comedy follows a quarrelsome brother (director and co-writer Alex Ross Perry) and sister (co-writer Carlen Altman) on a road trip to fetch her belongings from an ex-beau’s apartment.  Along the way, they abuse each other, and everyone they encounter -- stranger or acquaintance -- piles on and adds to the woe.  

They’re an appalling pair, deliberately, but the unsteadiness of the moviemaking means that the line between laughing with the filmmaker/stars and laughing at them is blurred in ways that Perry can’t control.  Maybe the characters will grate on you, maybe you’ll find them quirky fun, but the sheer clumsiness of the enterprise is patent and undeniable.  The best mumblecore movies -- the best low-budget films of any stripe -- make virtues of their restrictions of scale and means.  “The Color Wheel” succumbs to them without the least hint of a fight.  There’s handmade and then there’s amateurish.  This, alas, is the latter.
    
(83 min., unrated, probably R, Northwest Film Center, Friday through Sunday only) Grade: C


Movies: a breezy ‘Men,’ a hard ‘Hit’ and more

May 25, 2012 /

This week's new releases in Portland-area theaters.

Men in Black 3 2.jpgJosh Brolin (left) and Will Smith in "Men in Black 3"
Not a heck of a lot new at the multiplex this weekend, but the big picture, "Men in Black 3," a sequel that nobody eagerly awaited, is a nice surprise. We've got only one other in-house review:  "Hit So Hard," a documentary about grunge drummer and addiction survivor Patty Schemel.

Other than that, the old standbys:  "Also Opening," "Indie/Arthouse" and "Levy's High Five."

‘Angry Men,’ ‘Girl Power,’ Jon Jost and more

May 25, 2012 /

New releases in Portland-area theaters not reviewed in this week's A&E.

12 Angry Men.jpg
“12 Angry Men” Sidney Lumet’s classic 1957 courtroom (well, jury room) drama, with Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb and 10 other fired up actors.  (Laurelhurst)  

“Ambrosia” Free premiere of a 39 minute sci-fi action film made in Oregon.  (Living Room Theaters Thursday only)  

“Chinese Take-Away” Story of an unlikely friendship between a Chinese emigrant and a Buenos Aires shopkeeper.   (Living Room Theaters)  

“Drone: Minimalism and Meditation” A selection of avant garde and experimental short films.  (Hollywood Theatre, Monday only)  

“Girl Power” A compilation of vintage Saturday morning cartoons originally geared toward young girls.  (Hollywood Theatre, Wednesday only)  

"Jon Jost at the Northwest Film Center” The great independent filmmaker (and sometime resident of Oregon) presents two films -- the 1977 classic “Last Chants for a Slow Dance (Dead End)” and the 2008 “Parable” -- as the kickoff to several days of screenings and workshops.  (Northwest Film Center, Thursday)  

“Michael Crichton Double Feature” Portland State professor Dustin Morrow presents and discusses “Looker” (1981) and “Runaway” (1984), both of which the famed sci-fi author wrote and directed.  (Hollywood Theatre, Thursday only)  

“Mighty Fine” Chazz Palminteri and Andie MacDowell in the story of a family that moves from New York to New Orleans.  (Fox Tower)  

“Point Break” The great surfing bank robbers film (shot partly in Oregon) presented in Hecklevision, which allows you to text your jokes and jabs to the screen.  (Hollywood Theatre, Friday only)  

“Saving Private Ryan” Steven Spielberg’s monumental 1998 World War II film.  (Hollywood Theatre, Saturday and Sunday only)  

“Squirm” Killer worms!  1976 cult fare.  (Hollywood Theatre, Tuesday only)  

“Ten” Abbas Kiarostami’s 2002 meditation on womanhood in modern Iran, built around ten conversations between female passengers in a moving car.  (5th Avenue Cinema, Friday through Sunday only)  

“Trannysnatchers!” Avant-garde horror with demon worship, gender-play and whatnot, all of it made in Portland.  (Clinton Street Theater, Friday only)  



Levy’s High Five, May 25 – 31

May 24, 2012 /

The five films playing in Portland-area theaters that I'd soonest see again.

Sometimes a Great Notion poster.jpgView full size
1) “The Deep Blue Sea” Terence Davies is the finest director you’ve likely never heard of, probably because his best films -- the quiet, devastating semi-autobiographical “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and “The Long Day Closes” -- were made more than two decades ago and he’s only had one film (“The House of Mirth,” an anomaly, really) get even a modest release since.  Here, adapting Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play about a passionate woman (Rachel Weisz), her stodgy husband (Simon Russell Beale) and her unreliable lover (Tom Hiddleston), his immense, inimitable gifts for image-making and, especially, turning film into something like music are in full power.  The effect is sometimes funny, sometimes dramatic, sometimes absolutely ravishing.  Davies is a master, and this is his most accessible film.  See it.  Living Room Theaters

2) "Bernie”  It’s a term of deep praise to note that writer-director Richard Linklater (deepbreath: “Slacker,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset,” “Waking Life,” “School of Rock”) is capable more than any contemporary American filmmaker of making terrific movies about nearly nothing.  Here, working with a based-on-truth story, he gives us life in the small East Texas town of Carthage, where a beneficent  funeral director (Jack Black) and a mean, wealthy widow (Shirley MacLaine) become unlikely chums and companions...under she mysteriously goes missing.  Linklater weaves the dramatized version of the story with dry and deft interviews of actual Carthaginians (is that what they’re called?) and even several musical numbers in a perfect frappe of a black comedy. Fox Tower

3) "Sometimes a Great Notion" Before the Oscar-winning classic "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," another film crew came to Oregon to adapt a Ken Kesey novel for the big screen. Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, Richard Jaeckel, Michael Sarrazin and Lee Remick were the stars, and Newman produced and, after a dust-up with the guy he first hired, also wound up directing. The result was something of a misfire, but a spirited one (with a singularly indelible death scene), but the stories about wild times during its making are legendary and a real hoot. Oregon author Matt Love has written a charming book about the shoot, "Sometimes a Great Movie: Paul Newman, Ken Kesey and the Filming of the Great Oregon Novel," and he'll be sharing some of the amazing tales he's uncovered after a screening of the film at the Hollywood Theatre on Saturday night at 7 p.m.

4) “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”  Jiro Ono is the owner of a Tokyo sushi bar with 10 seats and 3 Michelin stars, and David Gelb’s gorgeous and intimate documentary about the man and his obsession gives you an idea of how that can not only be so but be fitting.  Jiro and his two sons (bound to the chef’s apron strings, almost literally) devote untold hours of work and thought to the perfection of sushi-making, turning a sometimes makework form of cookery into indisputably high art.  At 85, the old master still works virtually every day, and the fruit of his focus is in servings of raw fish and warm rice photographed so lusciously that you can almost taste them.  A mouthwatering film:  literally.  Lake, Laurelhurst, Living Room Theaters

5) "The Cabin in the Woods" A slasher movie inside a horror movie of another sort inside yet another narrative, one which looks out and the audience and asks why they (that is, we) keep lining up to watch other people get slaughtered.  A group of college students head to the titular location for a weekend’s bacchanal, only to be preyed upon and killed in grisly fashion, as per the familiar genre rules.  At the same time, a group of bureaucrats/scientists in a control room manipulate the victims and their killers in the service of...something.  Director Drew Goddard and his co-writer Joss Whedon have fun in the vein of “Scream” and in the vein of “The Truman Show” -- and they come up with an intriguing theory to explain the allure of horror films as well as a (literal) hell of a climax. Bloody, funny, clever. multiple locations

‘Men in Black 3’ review: an unsought sequel affords surprising delights

May 24, 2012 /
Josh Brolin adds a dash of droll magic to a time travel subplot and lifts a film above its expected quality.
Men in Black 3.jpgJosh Brolin (l.) and Will Smith in "Men in Black 3"
It’s rarely worth assessing a movie by considering what it might have been, but in the case of the third film in a series that has been dormant for a decade after a brilliant launch and a catastrophic follow-up, it’s almost unavoidable. “Men in Black 3” reunites stars Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith with director Barry Sonnenfeld in a sequel that almost nobody but corporate moneymen was itching for.  The Lowell Cunningham comic book series that inspired the previous two films about secret government agents keeping a lid on the activities of alien creatures who live on Earth hasn’t been active for almost 20 years, there haven’t been new episodes of the animated version of the material since 2001, and the 2002 “Men in Black II” seemed to have effectively killed off the franchise, possessing none of the verve or charm of its 1997 predecessor. Factor in Sonenfeld’s absence from the big screen since the horrific 'comedy' “RV” (2006) and Smith’s steadily diminishing boxoffice stature, and it’s no wonder that expectations for a new “MIB” should be at rock bottom, a premonition only bolstered by word that the new film would have a plot involving time travel -- frequently a mark of creative desperation in these sorts of things. How pleasant, then, to find that “Men in Black 3” is a fairly brisk, sometimes funny, periodically inspired film.  Yes, it’s a special-effects sequel, with all the noise and excess that implies.  But there’s more freshness to it than you would expect, and there’s a performance in the center that honestly makes it all worthwhile. That would be the work of Josh Brolin, who is simply astounding as the 1969 version of Agent K (Jones in the present tense), whom Agent J (Smith) must go back in time to rescue from  a time-traveling bad guy (the blustery Jemaine Clement) who seeks to kill the young K both for personal reasons and to facilitate an invasion of the Earth by his species. Brolin does an uncanny Jones -- the still, probing eyes; the stiff, hunched shoulders; the brow and mouth pursed in doubt; the deadpan voice that somehow mixes a drawl with staccato.  It’s an impression, yes, but also an interpretation:  Brolin’s K hasn’t hardened into the Jones incarnation yet; his youthful verve and openness continually surprise J.  And the wit comes as much from Brolin’s timing and control as from the sheer fun he obviously has playing the part.  It’s not the sort of thing that will be remembered come awards time, but it’s one of the most enjoyable performances you’ll see in a movie this year. Actually, “MIB 3” has a couple other terrific acting turns --  Michael Stuhlbarg (“A Serious Man,” “Hugo”) plays a sweetly prescient alien and Bill Hader, joins the ranks of, among others, David Bowie, Crispin Glover and Jared Harris in creating a droll and sharp Andy Warhol for the screen. The latter appears as part of the time-travel story (turns out, per the script, that Andy was an MIB agent and his scenesters were mostly aliens), as are the 1969 Mets and the Apollo 11 space mission.  These are all woven cleverly into a script credited to Etan Cohen (with, it seems, a small team providing assists) that manages to accrue depth and layers as it moves forward toward an action finale (something which “The Avengers,” which is a better movie in many ways, did not).  And Sonnenfeld, who has sometimes been guilty of gratuitous garishness, keeps the gimmickry minimal, employing flourishes only occasionally and using 3-D almost naturalistically -- or as naturalistically as can be hoped for in a movie in which the villain has a deadly dart-spewing spider-thingy living inside of his palm. So did the world need another “Men in Black”?  No, not at all.  But if there had to be one, then it’s certainly a relief that it should be one as agreeable as this. (105 min., PG-13, multiple locations) Grade: B

‘Hit So Hard’ review: a grunge musician’s real-life survival story

May 23, 2012 /

She drummed for Hole and babysat for Kurt and Courtney -- and lived through hell and tells the tale.

Hit So Hard.jpgDrummer Patty Schemel, star and subject of "Hit So Hard"
In many ways, “Hit So Hard,” the story of Patty Schemel is familiar to the point of being clichéd:  a ‘90s Seattle rocker spirals into alcoholism and drug abuse until she winds up homeless, then slowly achieves sobriety and a new life.

But Schemel ran in heady circles:  she was chummy with Kurt Cobain and his missus, Courtney Love, and she played drums in Love’s band Hole at that group’s height. So her tale of downfall and survival has absorbing echoes and connections.  What’s more, Schemel was an ardent videographer who, somehow, held onto her tapes, which means that her personal archives provide a truly rare view into the musical world known as grunge at something like its media-hyped height.

Director P. David Ebersole combines frank interviews with Schemel, her family and friends, and her bandmates to assemble this portrait of a talented woman dealing with the weighty pressures of the rock world, the drug world, and her own sexuality.  But it’s a long film for such a familiar story.  And, despite Schemel’s appealing candor, the highlight of the film is, by far, those precious images of Cobain horsing around with his baby daughter, helping Love write songs, and behaving like an ordinary fellow:  peace, love and normalcy in the midst of madness and pain.
    
(103 min., unrated, probably R, Hollywood Theatre) Grade: B-minus

This week’s last-chance movies: ‘We Have a Pope,’ ‘Mansome,’ ‘Sound of My Voice’ and more

May 23, 2012 /

Catch 'em while you can!

We Have A Pope.jpgMichel Piccoli in "We Have a Pope"
The busy spring cleaning of local moviehouses continues this week, with a number of notable titles on their way out of Portland-area theaters after Thursday's final shows.  These include the Italian papal comedy "We Have a Pope"; Morgan Spurlock's male grooming documentary "Mansome"; the tale of a creepy religious cult "Sound of My Voice"; and two maligned film: the raunch-comedy sequel "American Reunion" and the shaggy dog (literally, in this case) marital comedy/drama "Darling Companion."

Washington moviegoer charged with slapping someone who wouldn’t stop talking

May 22, 2012 /

We've all wanted to do it. One dude did, and now probably wishes he hadn't.

theater talker.jpgunrealitymag.com
We've all wanted to do it, and now we know why we shouldn't.  A Seattle-area man has been charged with felony assault for slapping the face of a fellow moviegoer who wouldn't stop talking or throwing popcorn at others during an April film screening. As irresistable as it may seem to champion the slapper at the expense of the boor, it turns out that the person who was ruining the movie for others was a 10 year-old boy who lost a tooth in the incident and his assailant was a 21 year old man. Which kind of puts a different spin on things. 

I have no doubt the little so-and-so needed to be tossed from the theater.  But as a parent (whose kids were taught IMPECCABLE theater manners), I can't condone this particular outcome.  I can get behind the corporal punishment of in-theater talkers, texters and food-throwers, no question.  But when minor children are involved, I think that the parents should be summoned and that the offended party should be allowed one free shot at each of 'em, with the tacit understanding that mom and dad will determine appropriate justice for their little darlings when they get 'em home.

Thanks to Movieline for posting the story, which leaves out one vital detail:  what film were they watching?  Given the date of the incident -- April 11 -- and the fact that 3-D glasses and a 10-year-old were involved, I'm guessing "The Hunger Games".....which is, of course, about violence among children. 

You. Cannot. Make. This. Stuff. Up.

Woman making a film in Oregon or SW Washington? You’ve got a Faerie Godmother with funding money!

May 21, 2012 /

Applications for a $3000 grant are now open.

Faerie Godmother2.jpg
Filmmaking is an expensive enterprise, which makes it hard. And indepedent filmmaking in a town like Portland is even harder. And it almost goes without saying, sadly, that it can be harder still for women filmmakers in Portland or hereabouts to raise money for their projects than it is for their male peers.

Heartening to learn, then, of a potentially game-changing grant being offered by Women in Film, Portland Oregon, an organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the work of women filmmakers in Oregon and Clark County, Washington.

In conjunction with the Faerie Godmother Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation, WIF-PDX is accepting applications for its 2012 Faerie Godmother grant, a package of services, goodies and support topped by a $3000 cash grant.  The completed application, which is available online, is due on July 31.  Bon chance!


Tugg combines crowdfunding and video-on-demand to let moviegoers program the theater

May 18, 2012 /

A new online system allows film lovers and local communities to bring special film events to theaters near them.

One Day on Earth.jpgfrom "One Day on Earth"
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could reconfigure the moviegoing experience, if you go out to see a film and feel relatively confident that the people you’d be seeing it with would be were sufficiently invested in the show that they’d treat it -- and you -- with the appropriate attention, decorum and courtesy?

Heaven knows the modern multiplex experience -- a torture of in-theater advertising, unrepentant texting and telephoning, noisy snacking, and various other indicators of impending cultural collapse -- isn’t like that any more.  And that’s without even factoring in the quality and monotony of the films that you can choose from, which, as we all know, are rarely as good as the best of what’s on TV on a given night.

But now there may be another way to go to the movies, to see films with a like-spirited community, to select what you’d like to see and when you’d like to see it, and to be joined in the screening by others, known to you or not, who share a similar passion for the same sort of thing, no matter how unusual or specialized it may be.

That’s part of the idea behind TUGG,  a new service that combines crowd-funding, like Kickstarter, with the build-your-own-entertainment model of video-on-demand -- but in a movie theater. With relationships with movie theaters all across the country and a library of more than 400 feature-length films, including new independent films, classic Hollywood and foreign movies, dramas, documentaries, and genre pictures, Tugg allows film lovers or people with a common interest in a particular subject matter to create a screening at a local theater at a time and date of their choosing.  

The system was developed over the past two years in Austin, Texas, and it has been out in the world in beta format since the South by Southwest festival in March.

In mere months, Tugg has been used across the US to spread new independent films outside of the traditional channels of distribution, to showcase small films that can’t necessarily sustain an weeklong run at a theater in certain communities, and to combine social issue campaigns with nights out at the movies.  In April, an Earth Day screening of the documentary "One Day on Earth" resulted in 1800 tickets being sold through TUGG to screenings in 11 different cities; one Los Angeles theater alone had 400 attendees.

It’s a truly simple system:  You create an account on Tugg and connect it to your social networks (Facebook, Google+, or Twitter), select a movie from Tugg’s library, choose a date and time, and select from among the theaters in your area that work with Tugg (the list includes many Regal and Cinemark theaters as well as local houses such as Portland’s Living Room Theaters).  An invitation goes out to the people on your network, who can then reserve a seat for the event with a credit card.  When a minimum percentage of the seats has been reserved, the screening is guaranteed as a go and credit cards are charged for the tickets.  And then you and your friends (and friends of your friends) attend just as you would any ordinary movie screening -- with the novelty that everyone in the theater is connected by the fibers of social networks as well as by the desire to see this film at this particular time with this particular group.

ReGeneration.pngfrom "#ReGeneration"
Portland has already seen one successful Tugg event -- a screening of “#ReGENERATION,” a documentary about the contemporary wave of social activism among young people, held at the Living Room Theaters earlier this month.  Chris Baker, a Lake Oswego native who co-produced the film, says that he and his colleagues immediately recognized that Tugg was particularly well suited to a film like theirs about new ways of imagining society.

“We heard about Tugg through our distributors,” Baker explains, “and we decided it was a great way to promote our project.”  In Portland, Baker and company had a triple-threat of promotional tools:  a strong interest in the subject matter of the film, a community which is already very supportive of independent movies, and Baker’s own web of personal connections.  “Being born and raised in Portland,” he says, “I reached out to several people within the community to help spread the word.  And of course I had some family and friends take part in the screening.”

“#ReGENRATION” is coming back for another bite of the apple in Portland, on June 6 (details). But another screening, of the documentary “El Bulli,” about the famed chef Ferran Adrià, was due to be held at the Living Room but failed to garner enough ticket reservations in time for the film to be shown.

Tugg co-founder Nicolas Gonda explains that, so far, the system works just as well for classic or narrative films as for new and issue-driven movies.  “The films we’ve shown have really run the gamut, from classics like ‘Dr. Strangelove’ and ‘The Good, The Bad & The Ugly,’ to recent releases like ‘The Tree of Life’ and cult films like ‘The FP.’”

According to Gonda, “It may not make sense for a theater to program a weeklong run of a small independent film with no marketing budget attached.  But in almost every community there is potential for like-minded individuals or organizations to facilitate a one-off screening through Tugg.”

The films are principally shown in the digital DCP format, but Tugg can also work with 35mm film prints and other formats.  Currently, Tugg is in negotiations with major distributors to get even more films -- both back-catalogue and current releases -- into its system, and is seeking more theatrical venues in more communities as potential host sites.

“People nationwide are using Tugg to bring their communities together,” says Gonda. “We’ve received feedback from Tugg users who say it’s particularly rewarding to share a film with a theater packed full of your friends, family and fellow film fans.”


The dazzling ‘Cunningham,’ the lost ‘Jobs,’ Chilean zombies and more

May 18, 2012 /

New releases in Portland-area theaters not reviewed in this week's A&E.

Bill Cunningham New York.jpg"Bill Cunningham: New York"
“Bill Cunningham: New York” Dazzling and delightful Oscar-nominated documentary about a New York Times photojournalist and unlikely pillar of the fashion world and high society.  (5th Avenue Cinema, Friday through Sunday only)  

“Daughters of the Dust” Director Julie Dash will be present for a screening of her 1992 feature about life in the Gullah regions of Georgia and South Carolina.  (Northwest Film Center, Monday only)  

“H. P. Lovecraft double feature” The silent short feature “The Call of Cthulhu” and the full-length “The Whisperer in Darkness” help keep Portland’s love of the cult writer alive.  (Clinton Street Theater, Friday to Sunday only)  

“The Killing” Stanley Kubrick’s great, tense, doomy 1956 heist movie. A perfect film noir.  (Laurelhurst Theater)  

“NW Animation Festival” A selection of short films from around the world.  (Hollywood Theatre, Friday to Sunday only)  

“Payback” Documentary, based on a Margaret Atwood book, about the culture of debt and bankruptcy.  (Living Room Theaters)  

“The Perfect Family” Kathleen Turner in a dark comedy about a mom trying to reshape her family into an ideal.  (Living Room Theaters)  

“Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview” Feature-length chat with the computer guru from the days when he was running the doomed company NeXT.  (Hollywood Theatre)  

“Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” Before the internet meme featuring a sarcastic Gene Wilder, before Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, um, revisited it, the original 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book became a classic for good reason.  Presented in a sing-along version. (Hollywood Theatre, Saturday only)  

“Zombie Dawn” Low-budget zombie movie from Chile. And if that isn’t intriguing enough, you get a free comic book with your ticket.  (Kiggins Theatre)


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