The five films playing in Portland-area theaters that I'd soonest see again.
Shirley MacLaine and Jack Black in "Bernie"
1) "Beasts of the
Southern Wild"A dreamy and joyous film about life, death, hope, dreams and
wonder on an island in the Mississippi Delta. The miraculous young Quevezhané
Wallis stars as Hushpuppy, a wee girl who experiences life in the feral
community known as the Bathtub as a stream of wonder and delight, even though
her dad (Dwight Henry) is gruff, her mom is absent and a killer storm is
bearing down on her home.
Writer-director Behn Zeitlin, in his feature debut, combines poetry
and audacity in ways that recall
Terrence Malick, but with a light and spry touch. Still, all his great work pales in comparison
to the stupendous little Wallis, whom you'll never forget. Cinema
21, Kiggins
2) "Moonrise Kingdom"
Wes Anderson films are such a specific taste that I'm a bit hesitant to suggest
that this might be his most approachable (but surely not crowd-pleasing)
work. In the wake of the delightful "The
Fantastic Mr. Fox," Anderson returns to live-action and his familiar tics and
habits in a tale of young (as in 'pre-teen') lovers on the run. Newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward fill
the lead roles delightfully, and Anderson's muses Bill Murray and Jason
Schwartzman are joined ably by Edward Norton, Bruce Willis and Frances
McDormand, among others. It's a light
and breezy film with a very sweet heart and old-fashioned sturdiness. Even if you were left puzzled by the likes of
"Rushmore" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" (still his best non-animated films, for
me), this is likely to win you over. multiple locations
3) "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. Hollywood Theatre
4) "Your Sister's Sister" Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton spins a sweet and sad and true-feeling variation on a Hollywood romcom, with shlubby leading man Mark Duplass caught unexpectedly between two half-sisters, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt.
There are machinations that could have been drawn from a higher-gloss
(and less appealing) film. But, as in her not dissimilar "Humpday,"
Shelton finds real grounding for the story in the personalities of her
cast, who improvised some of their scenes within guidelines. The result
feels theatrical and human at once, with three wise, low-key
performances and a credible air of confusion and hope. A sly winner. Fox Tower
5) "Monsieur Lazhar" This delicate, sweet and, surprisingly,
harrowing little drama was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign language
film, and it's a mark of its quality that it's a very good film despite that sometimes dubious
distinction. Mohamed Fellag stars as the
title character, a secretive and formal man who arrives at a Montreal school
out of the blue and volunteers to take the place of a teacher who has left
under horrid circumstances. Gradually
his compassion and wisdom come to heal wounds, just as his own personal pains
are revealed. Writer-director Philippe
Falardeau dances around the clichés inherent in the scenario as if they didn't
exist, eliciting wonderful performances from his cast (especially the kids) and
real emotions from the audience. Laurelhurst, Living Room Theaters
Reviews of this week's new releases in Portland-area theaters.
Christian Bale in "The Dark Knight Rises"
The big release of the weekend -- and likely the month and maybe the season or even the year -- is "The Dark Knight Rises," the final installment in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. We've also got reviews of Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen in the marital drama "Take This Waltz," the musical documentary "Neil Young Journeys," and "Trishna," a reimagining of Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" in India starring Freida Pinto. All that plus "Also Opening,""Indie/Arthouse" and "Levy's High Five."
The five films playing in Portland-area theaters that I'd soonest see again.
"Beasts of the Southern Wild"
1) "Beasts of the
Southern Wild"A dreamy and joyous film about life, death, hope, dreams and
wonder on an island in the Mississippi Delta. The miraculous young Quevezhané
Wallis stars as Hushpuppy, a wee girl who experiences life in the feral
community known as the Bathtub as a stream of wonder and delight, even though
her dad (Dwight Henry) is gruff, her mom is absent and a killer storm is
bearing down on her home.
Writer-director Behn Zeitlin, in his feature debut, combines poetry
and audacity in ways that recall
Terrence Malick, but with a light and spry touch. Still, all his great work pales in comparison
to the stupendous little Wallis, whom you'll never forget. Cinema
21, Kiggins
2) "Moonrise Kingdom"
Wes Anderson films are such a specific taste that I'm a bit hesitant to suggest
that this might be his most approachable (but surely not crowd-pleasing)
work. In the wake of the delightful "The
Fantastic Mr. Fox," Anderson returns to live-action and his familiar tics and
habits in a tale of young (as in 'pre-teen') lovers on the run. Newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward fill
the lead roles delightfully, and Anderson's muses Bill Murray and Jason
Schwartzman are joined ably by Edward Norton, Bruce Willis and Frances
McDormand, among others. It's a light
and breezy film with a very sweet heart and old-fashioned sturdiness. Even if you were left puzzled by the likes of
"Rushmore" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" (still his best non-animated films, for
me), this is likely to win you over. multiple locations
3) "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. Hollywood Theatre
4) "Your Sister's Sister" Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton spins a sweet and sad and true-feeling variation on a Hollywood romcom, with shlubby leading man Mark Duplass caught unexpectedly between two half-sisters, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt.
There are machinations that could have been drawn from a higher-gloss
(and less appealing) film. But, as in her not dissimilar "Humpday,"
Shelton finds real grounding for the story in the personalities of her
cast, who improvised some of their scenes within guidelines. The result
feels theatrical and human at once, with three wise, low-key
performances and a credible air of confusion and hope. A sly winner. Fox Tower
5) "Monsieur Lazhar" This delicate, sweet and, surprisingly,
harrowing little drama was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign language
film, and it's a mark of its quality that it's a very good film despite that sometimes dubious
distinction. Mohamed Fellag stars as the
title character, a secretive and formal man who arrives at a Montreal school
out of the blue and volunteers to take the place of a teacher who has left
under horrid circumstances. Gradually
his compassion and wisdom come to heal wounds, just as his own personal pains
are revealed. Writer-director Philippe
Falardeau dances around the clichés inherent in the scenario as if they didn't
exist, eliciting wonderful performances from his cast (especially the kids) and
real emotions from the audience. Living Room Theaters
A third pairing of the great director and the great musician is strictly for die hards.
Neil Young in "Neil Young Journeys"
“Neil Young Journeys” is the third documentary/concert film focusing on the great Canadian songwriter that director Jonathan Demme has made since 2006, and it’s the weakest of the three, even as it sporadically charms.
The film combines a road trip Young takes through the Ontario towns of his youth with a 2011 solo performance at Toronto’s Massey Hall. The show, which consists of a lot of material from his 2010 album “Le Noise,” will primarily be of interest to fans (although, one song, the lacerating “Ohio,” is expanded grippingly with a glimpse back at the 1970 tragedy at Kent State which inspired it). The tour of Ontario, too, lacks virtually any context for those who don’t already feel an affinity toward the artist.
In a sense, this film finishes a cycle that began with the homey and impressive “Neil Young: Heart of Gold” and continued with the raucous “Neil Young Trunk Show” of 2009. In that regard, it’s almost not even a stand-alone but rather a piece of a triptych. And, as it happens, the creation was far more compelling in its origin than in this final act.
The final chapter in an gigantic trilogy is more impressive as spectacle than as story or meditation.
View full sizeBane (Tom Hardy) vs. Batman (Christian Bale) in "The Dark Knight Rises"
It’s been eight years, in movie time, since the hooded vigilante known as Batman cleared Gotham City of the deranged scourges of the Joker and Harvey Dent and took the blame for what should have been deemed an act of heroism.
In that time, Dent has become an emblem of the city’s purity and unity, Batman has vanished, and billionaire Bruce Wayne, the man behind Batman, has become a recluse, hiding his broken body and spirit behind the walls of his mansion, making quixotic business decisions, speaking only to servants, lost to the world.
Thus begins “The Dark Knight Rises,” the final entry in a Batman trilogy by director Christopher Nolan, co-written with his brother, Jonathan. In three films approaching eight total hours in length, the Nolans have drawn from some of the grimmest Batman comics to bring forth a deeply conflicted, eternally mournful, gravely reluctant hero who seeks inner peace by imposing justice -- real moral justice -- on the outer world, no matter the personal cost. Defying terrorists, organized criminals, corrupt politicians, a ravaging media, and a fickle public, sacrificing his body, heart and soul for the greater good, he’s an unnerving enigma, a man with everything who fights as if he had nothing, a shrouded beacon of light, a faceless icon.
The Gotham City of “The Dark Knight Rises” has no need for Batman -- or so it thinks. And then the crimes start. Some are little, such as the body of a homeless teen washing up in a storm drain. And some are massive, such as the invasion of the stock exchange by a masked vigilante known as Bane, a villain so horrifying that his emergence occasions the unthinkable: the reappearance of the Caped Crusader.
But the reborn Batman is no match for the musclebound, determined Bane. Tapping deep, mysterious resources of money, science, and ordnance, possessed of savage ruthlessness and intelligence, Bane is set on crippling Gotham City and, indeed, the very culture and economy at the center of which it stands. And, of course, he’ll happily crush Batman in body and heart in the process.
There’s more to “The Dark Knight Rises” -- much more, actually. The film’s threads include Catwoman, an accomplished jewel thief involved in a come-hither tango with both Wayne and Batman; John Blake, a decent cop who senses something bigger behind the small crimes he’s investigating; a business plot in which Wayne staves off a hostile takeover of his empire and considers a partnership on a clean energy project with a beautiful philanthropist; and a sentimental dance of loyalty and sadness between Wayne and his butler/confidant Alfred.
It’s a lot of movie, but if there’s one thing we know for sure about Christopher Nolan is that he’s capable of telling massive, multilayered stories with agility and verve. “The Dark Knight Rises” is overstuffed, and sometimes its components are drawn out excessively, but Nolan always infuses it with energy and grace. It approaches three hours in length but never feels that long.
But that isn’t to say that all of its part are rewarding or that it always compels. Particularly in its first hour or so, this is a glum and chatty movie, and even when it perks up with action and multiple plot lines it never quite shuts up: you can’t imagine a comic book panel crammed with all the verbiage that portions of this script are forced to bear.
And, too, there’s little to lighten the load. The first film of the trilogy, “Batman Begins,” carried a predominantly leaden, sober tone that the second, “The Dark Knight,” shattered, chiefly through the epic performance of Heath Ledger as the Joker. Bane, though, is humorless, his baroque voice (imagine Sean Connery providing the vocals for a cartoon opera tenor) spewing monotone taunts and insults. And while Catwoman is a droll presence (especially as played by Anne Hathaway, confidently scene-stealing), she’s never around long enough to truly lighten the mood. Not even the ostensibly merry bits of this film exactly shine.
View full sizeCatwoman (Anne Hathaway) in "The Dark Knight Rises"
Elsewhere in the cast, Christian Bale once again brings earnest doggedness to the lead, Michael Caine provides genuine pathos as Alfred, Joseph Gordon-Levitt brings an air of street smarts to the Boy Scoutish Blake, and Tom Hardy is mainly a swaggering body as Bane, hidden behind a baroque mask and a fog of insinuating declamations. No one particularly ignites the screen, and you get the feeling that no one is meant to. Like their director, the actors are in the service of a Big Thing, and the emphasis is on streamlining rather than showcasing.
There is tremendous technical ability on display in “The Dark Knight Rises.” Nolan may not have as strong a personal stamp as, say, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson or Sam Raimi, but he is a gifted filmmaker and, especially, orchestrator. The action sequences are tight and coherent, and the inevitable climactic battle brings new stakes and dimensions to the film (unlike that of “The Avengers,” a more entertaining film with a rather redundant final act). The film is shot, blessedly, in only two dimensions, but never lacks visual immediacy or authority.
It does, though, lack a certain coherence of thought. Bane and company co-opt some of the rhetoric and look of Occupy protestors and unleash a latent fascism when they become ascendant. Wayne is a child of privilege whose Batman persona depends on his colossal wealth, yet he yearns to be free of money and encumbrance. This may sound heavy for a comic book movie, but “The Dark Knight Rises” is not only heavy but heavyhanded on these points. Worse, the points are mud: clichés of left and right mixed willy-nilly until they have no real color, flavor or meaning.
And such musings on wealth and power feel particularly inappropriate when couched inside the $250 million entertainment product of a multinational megacorporation based on a brand that has produced billions of dollars of revue in its 75 years. Nolan is many things as a filmmaker: athlete, visionary, even magician. But deep thinker: not so much. “The Dark Knight Rises” is reasonably accomplished as a gigantic superhero movie; as a meditation on capital and its personal and social discontents, it’s strictly from the funny pages.
A chance encounter tests a woman's marital resolve.
Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen in "Take This Waltz"
“Take This Waltz” is a film about a romance that looks hotter than it is. It’s a tale of lust-at-first-sight between a writer (Michelle Williams) and her artist neighbor (Luke Kirby). She’s married, mostly happily, albeit with childish undertones, to a cookbook author (Seth Rogen, born to play cuckolds), and she tries to resist temptation. But it’s summer, and she’s stifled, and that intense fellow across the street keeps popping up with soulful looks and leering innuendoes.
“Waltz” is written and directed by Sarah Polley, the actress who made the highly regarded “Away from Her.” Like that film, which starred Julie Christie as a woman disappearing into dementia, the new one is built around a strong leading lady and painted with genuinely brilliant light and color. It’s somewhat less affecting, though, as the heroine here is less formed and her plight less moving. The marriage in which she’s involved is flawed, yes, but the chemistry she’s supposed to feel for the fellow across the street doesn’t quite translate for the viewer. It feels more like mooning than wild passion.
Williams, as ever, fills an ordinary person with credible emotion, but little around her feels equally real (one exception: a remarkable scene in the shower of a women’s locker room at a swimming pool). There’s often real beauty and poetry in the moviemaking, but “Waltz” requires you to be on board with it from the start and doesn’t often enough rouse itself to magnetize you if you’re not.
The five films playing in Portland-area theaters that I'd soonest see again.
"Moonrise Kingdom"
1) "Beasts of the
Southern Wild"A dreamy and joyous film about life, death, hope, dreams and
wonder on an island in the Mississippi Delta. The miraculous young Quevezhané
Wallis stars as Hushpuppy, a wee girl who experiences life in the feral
community known as the Bathtub as a stream of wonder and delight, even though
her dad (Dwight Henry) is gruff, her mom is absent and a killer storm is
bearing down on her home.
Writer-director Behn Zeitlin, in his feature debut, combines poetry
and audacity in ways that recall
Terrence Malick, but with a light and spry touch. Still, all his great work pales in comparison
to the stupendous little Wallis, whom you'll never forget. Cinema
21
2) "Moonrise Kingdom"
Wes Anderson films are such a specific taste that I'm a bit hesitant to suggest
that this might be his most approachable (but surely not crowd-pleasing)
work. In the wake of the delightful "The
Fantastic Mr. Fox," Anderson returns to live-action and his familiar tics and
habits in a tale of young (as in 'pre-teen') lovers on the run. Newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward fill
the lead roles delightfully, and Anderson's muses Bill Murray and Jason
Schwartzman are joined ably by Edward Norton, Bruce Willis and Frances
McDormand, among others. It's a light
and breezy film with a very sweet heart and old-fashioned sturdiness. Even if you were left puzzled by the likes of
"Rushmore" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" (still his best non-animated films, for
me), this is likely to win you over. multiple locations
3) "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
4) "Your Sister's Sister" Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton spins a sweet and sad and true-feeling variation on a Hollywood romcom, with shlubby leading man Mark Duplass caught unexpectedly between two half-sisters, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt.
There are machinations that could have been drawn from a higher-gloss
(and less appealing) film. But, as in her not dissimilar "Humpday,"
Shelton finds real grounding for the story in the personalities of her
cast, who improvised some of their scenes within guidelines. The result
feels theatrical and human at once, with three wise, low-key
performances and a credible air of confusion and hope. A sly winner. Fox Tower, Kiggins
5) "Monsieur Lazhar" This delicate, sweet and, surprisingly,
harrowing little drama was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign language
film, and it's a mark of its quality that it's a very good film despite that sometimes dubious
distinction. Mohamed Fellag stars as the
title character, a secretive and formal man who arrives at a Montreal school
out of the blue and volunteers to take the place of a teacher who has left
under horrid circumstances. Gradually
his compassion and wisdom come to heal wounds, just as his own personal pains
are revealed. Writer-director Philippe
Falardeau dances around the clichés inherent in the scenario as if they didn't
exist, eliciting wonderful performances from his cast (especially the kids) and
real emotions from the audience. Living Room Theaters
There’s a sense in watching any movie that you’re dreaming, albeit wide awake and amid a community of strangers. We sit with our eyes open and we gaze at the impossible: instant shifts of space and time, improbable plots, music from nowhere, animation, computer effects, montages.
So if all movies are, to some extent, living dreams, what to say about a film like “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which is dreamlike and poetic and symphonic and magical in ways beyond the ordinary movie -- and beyond quite a few extraordinary ones, too.
“Beasts” is a fantasy, perhaps, or maybe an alternative history of recent events, or it could simply be a depiction of the world as seen and felt by a curious, apt, precocious, and intuitive young child. At times it moves like a hallucination; at times it feels like journalism or, perhaps more to the point, sociology. You’re continually leaning into it, wondering what’s real and what’s imaginary, what the physical and moral laws of its universe are, and where it all might go. The only thing you’re sure of, virtually from the very start, is that you’ve never seen anything quite like it.
The film is the feature debut of director Benh Zeitlin, who is adapting (albeit, surely, very loosely) a play by Lucy Alibar. It centers on a little girl named Hushpuppy who lives on an island in the Mississippi Delta known by its couple of score of inhabitants as the Bathtub.
The Bathtub sits outside of what Hushpuppy calls “the Dry World,” that is, the land protected by the levees, just as it sits outside of what the rest of us might call ‘civilization.’ It’s a broken-down place, built of and strewn with garbage, overrun by weeds and feral animals, bereft of work and school and government and media, and yet (or, perhaps, ‘hence’) it’s a paradise. The children are raised communally, the lines between the manmade and natural worlds have dissolved, a sense of play permeates the lives of young and old alike, there’s little longing or despair because there’s little need or want. From some vantages, life on the Bathtub might look like mere subsistence; from others, maybe, it looks like purity.
And yet, even through the eyes of wise-beyond-her-years Hushpuppy, who narrates and is largely the focus of the film, we can see that there are things missing from the Bathtub, and dangers in it. For one thing, Hushpuppy has no mother, and is being raised, if that’s the word, by her gruff and often drunken dad, Wink. And for another, an apocalyptic storm a la (if not actually) Hurricane Katrina hits the Delta, inundating the Bathtub and threatening its way of life. The residents take drastic measures to save their community, and Hushpuppy herself sets out on a personal voyage of discovery.
Zeitlin, in the vein of Terrence Malick, dances through his story like a milkweed seed in the thrall of a breeze. He brings us close to Hushpuppy but never quite puts us inside her head; she informs us and counsels us, but we’re mostly on our own in trying to puzzle out who the inhabitants of the Bathtub are to one another and which of the events that we watch are actual and which make-believe. The ominous, destructive creatures Hushpuppy refers to as aurochs, for instance: do they exist only in myth, or are they real, or can’t she tell the difference? And, finally, does it matter? What Hushpuppy believes is, in this universe, what we must take to be true. And whether she’s dreaming or hoping things rather than experiencing them in an objective fashion matters not from the side of the screen through which we experience the movie.
“Beasts” is shot, quite beautifully, by cinematographer Ben Richardson on 16mm, which gives it a raw, documentary feel, but it gracefully includes some moments of computer-generated magic which give life to Hushpuppy’s speculations on the nature of time and the universe. And it moves to strange and intoxicating music Zeitlin composed with Dan Romer.
But for all the beguiling quality brought to the film by its creators, the most unforgettable contribution is made by Quvenzhané Wallis, the tiny slip of a girl who plays Hushpuppy with enormous heart, authority and daring. Looking impossibly fragile and yet enduring whatever the Bathtub and the fates throw at her, she turns Hushpuppy into the most unlikely movie hero you can imagine: a child of nature able not only to withstand but to comprehend the infinitude around her. Wallis is, like crusty Dwight Henry, who plays Wink with offhanded, hazy humor, a newcomer to acting. But despite her greenness she carries the film on her wee little shoulders like a titan. It’s breathtaking.
“Beasts” won the Grand Jury and cinematography prizes at January’s Sundance Film Festival and four prizes, including the one for best first feature, at Cannes in May. Inevitably, that has led to a backlash, with some people complaining that the film is a muddled headscratcher and others that Zeitlin infantilizes and patronizes Hushpuppy and the other inhabitants of the Bathtub in a way that reeks of colonialism, white privilege and liberal guilt.
I would argue, rather, that what disconcerts here is not only deliberate but liberating: just as she lives outside of what the rest of us think of as civilization, Hushpuppy has no concern for ordinary notions of narrative, whether that mean causality or the obligation to differentiate realism from fantasy. As for Zeitlin somehow demeaning his subjects, surely that charge is leavened by the deep intimacy the viewer feels with Hushpuppy. “Beasts of the Southern Wild” brings you into a world you didn’t know existed with a closeness that the movies almost never achieve. If that constitutes exploitation, then it’s a crime which all works of art should aspire to commit.
Greta Gerwig shines through a dim and uninspired indie romcom.
Zoe Lister Jones (l.) and Greta Gerwig in "Lola Versus"
The best thing about the wan comedy “Lola Versus” is the extended opportunity to watch the emerging star Greta Gerwig, even if the material she has to work with isn’t always worthy of her offbeat gifts and charms.
The film, co-written by director Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister Jones (the latter of whom plays Gerwig’s best chum), is the tale of a woman who’s about to get married and finish her Ph.D. on the cusp of her thirtieth birthday. It all falls apart, and in the ensuing throes of angst she relies heavily on her pals (Jones and Hamish Linklater) and her parents (Debra Winger and Bill Pullman) and endures the sort of embarrassing miscues and coincidences that only befall the heroines of bad romantic comedies.
Gerwig manages to infuse her role with dignity and heart, despite the goofy permutations of the script. As in “Damsels in Distress” and “Greenberg,” she combines a real-girl aspect and an arch, knowing calm that feels theatrical and distanced and yet intimate and warm. That strong presence in the center almost makes “Lola Versus” watchable even as it starts to get formulaic, preachy and tiresome.
The five movies playing in Portland-area theaters that I'd soonest see again.
Emily Blunt (l.) and Rosemarie DeWitt in "Your Sister's Sister"
1) "Moonrise Kingdom"
Wes Anderson films are such a specific taste that I'm a bit hesitant to suggest
that this might be his most approachable (but surely not crowd-pleasing)
work. In the wake of the delightful "The
Fantastic Mr. Fox," Anderson returns to live-action and his familiar tics and
habits in a tale of young (as in 'pre-teen') lovers on the run. Newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward fill
the lead roles delightfully, and Anderson's muses Bill Murray and Jason
Schwartzman are joined ably by Edward Norton, Bruce Willis and Frances
McDormand, among others. It's a light
and breezy film with a very sweet heart and old-fashioned sturdiness. Even if you were left puzzled by the likes of
"Rushmore" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" (still his best non-animated films, for
me), this is likely to win you over. multiple locations
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) "Your Sister's Sister" Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton spins a sweet and sad and true-feeling variation on a Hollywood romcom, with shlubby leading man Mark Duplass caught unexpectedly between two half-sisters, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt.
There are machinations that could have been drawn from a higher-gloss
(and less appealing) film. But, as in her not dissimilar "Humpday,"
Shelton finds real grounding for the story in the personalities of her
cast, who improvised some of their scenes within guidelines. The result
feels theatrical and human at once, with three wise, low-key
performances and a credible air of confusion and hope. A sly winner. Fox Tower
4) "Monsieur Lazhar" This delicate, sweet and, surprisingly,
harrowing little drama was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign language
film, and it's a mark of its quality that it's a very good film despite that sometimes dubious
distinction. Mohamed Fellag stars as the
title character, a secretive and formal man who arrives at a Montreal school
out of the blue and volunteers to take the place of a teacher who has left
under horrid circumstances. Gradually
his compassion and wisdom come to heal wounds, just as his own personal pains
are revealed. Writer-director Philippe
Falardeau dances around the clichés inherent in the scenario as if they didn't
exist, eliciting wonderful performances from his cast (especially the kids) and
real emotions from the audience. Living Romm Theaters
5) "Abraham Lincoln:
Vampire Hunter" Yes, I know it's an absurd premise and that in many ways it
exists only to be absurd, but there's genuine skill and relish in director
Timur Bekmambetov's adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith's novel. The action, as in Bekmambetov's "Night
Watch," "Day Watch" and "Wanted," is spectacular, the 3-D effects are
top-notch, the woodenness of the historical bits is deliberate and cheeky, and
Benjamin Walker is actually quite good as the title character, embodying the
clumsiness and self-mocking qualities of the real man and the bloodthirsty
venom that this over-the-top story requires.
As a summer goof, it's swell. multiple locations
A quartet of stories set in the Eternal City find the director in a late-career glide.
Roberto Benigni in "To Rome with Love"
In the wake of the popular and critical success of “Midnight in Paris,” Woody Allen has caught a flight to Italy and whipped up “To Rome with Love,” a hodgepodge of jokes and stories which adds up to little more than a simple -- and intermittent -- pleasure.
In one tale, a young architecture student (Jesse Eisenberg) is counseled (a la Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam”) by the spirit of an older architect (Alec Baldwin, drily funny) as he veers between his steady girl (Greta Gerwig) and her flighty friend (Ellen Page).
In another, an ordinary Roman citizen (Roberto Benigni) becomes a celebrity overnight -- hounded by paparazzi, lusted after by women, sought for opinions -- with no explanation or rationale.
A third story features Allen as a retired opera impresario who discovers that his daughter’s prospective father-in-law, a Roman undertaker, is a brilliant tenor (opera star Fabio Armiliato plays the role) who can only perform at his best in the shower.
The last is a virtual remake of Federico Fellini’s 1952 comedy “The White Sheik,” with provincial honeymooners Alessandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi coming to Rome only to be separated and fall in with other lovers, he with a prostitute (Penélope Cruz), she with a movie star.
The tales have no points of common contact save the setting and are woven together willy-nilly; the story of the honeymooners, for instance, transpires in a single day but is intercut with the other tales, some of which transpire over weeks. This isn’t “Fellini’s Roma,” a personal meditation on the history of the city and one’s life in it, nor is it an anthology like “Love in the City,” in which Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and others crafted characteristic short films on themes of romance.
Rather it feels at times that Allen has pulled a few story ideas out of his desk drawer, none of which could stand on its own, and made a patchwork quilt of them. Some moments are inspired -- a staging of “Pagliacci” with a portable shower as a centerpiece, a confession of love during a thunderstorm -- and the settings are uniformly handsome (cinematographer Darius Khondji has a virtual love affair with the light and colors of the city). But most of the film seems content simply to pass like a gently rolling stream, however illogical, however random.
There’s an impulse to come down hard on an artist who doesn’t seem to give his all to a movie, but consider this another way. In his late ‘70s, Allen only has so many working days left in him, and if he has stories and ideas that he’s eager to get down on film, he’s earned the right. Decades from now, when the thumbs-up/thumbs-down have been totted up and the boxoffice accounts settled, “To Rome with Love” is likely to be seen as a single episode in the longer story of his art and career.
We don’t denigrate John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock or, pointedly, Fellini for not being as inspired toward the ends of their lives as they were in their artistic and mortal primes, and Allen’s 40-plus year career ought, at this point, to be seen in a similar light. So what if “To Rome with Love” isn’t a masterwork? We’ll always have “Paris”....and “Manhattan” and so on.
Jean Renoir's 1937 prisoner-of-war drama is one of the standards to which all films must aspire.
Erich Von Stroheim in "Grand Illusion"
Sometimes I’m asked why I almost never give a film a grade of ‘A,’ and I reply that to do so is to declare a movie an immortal classic on a par with “Casablanca” or “The Godfather”: works of perfection as both art and entertainment and survivors of the test of time.
I’d add “Grand Illusion” to that list. In 1937, with the threat of war slowly rising to a boil around him, director Jean Renoir looked back with a combination of nostalgia and horror at the War to End All Wars, as the conflict which we now call World War I was known.
It’s a prisoner-of-war drama, with a French officer (Pierre Fresnay) and enlisted man (Jean Gabin) shunted from one form of incarceration to another, often under the guard of a German aristocrat (Erich von Stroheim). In its course, issues of class, race, history, love, and art are considered with the most delicate of touches, the personalities of cast ooze through the masks of their characters, and the daily life mixes seamlessly with greater events.
“Grand Illusion” is humane and funny and profound and light and sober and dreamlike and hopeful and sad all at once. It’s showing in a new 35mm print (that, too, makes it something of a classic). See it and you may begin to appreciate the sorts of standards for greatness that the cinema is capable of setting.
(114 min., unrated, probably PG, Cinema 21) Grade: A
A sexy, gory, drug-infused novel gets a treatment worthy of the Oliver Stone of "Natural Born Killers" and "The Doors."
Blake Lively and Benicio Del Toro in "Savages"
It’s been a while since Oliver Stone exercised his chops on something as juicy as “Savages,” Don Winslow’s novel about a pair of Laguna Beach pot growers waging war against a Mexican drug cartel that wants to buy their business. What ought to be a straightforward negotiation becomes personal -- and very bloody -- when the Mexicans kidnap the girl whom the two California dudes share and love.
With all the smoke and skin and violence, with dazzling cinematography by Dan Mindel, and with a pair of gleefully wicked performances by Salma Hayek as a drug lord and Benicio Del Toro as her henchman (kudos, too, to John Travolta as a corrupt federal agent), Stone seems truly to be enjoying himself for the first time in ages.
The trio at the center of the film -- Blake Lively, Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch -- are thoroughly credible as ironic innocents who find themselves in something deadlier than they could imagine. Stone seems to take a little vicarious pleasure in making these relative lightweights squirm in fear and confusion. He briskly navigates the Elmore Leonard-style twists of the story, and, as he did in films like “Salvador,” “Natural Born Killers” and “The Doors,” he transmits his hedonistic pleasure directly to the audience. It’s nice to have that Oliver Stone back.
Steve Zissis (l.) and Mark Kelly in "The Do-Deca-Pentathalon"
In “The Do-Deca-Pentathalon,” the writing-directing brothers Duplass, Jay and Mark (“The Puffy Chair,” “Cyrus,” “Jeff Who Lives at Home”) once again confront questions of maturation and family ties. It’s a slight and likeable film that doesn’t go very far dramatically but churns up some interesting waves. Steve Zissis and Mark Kelly play Jeremy and Mark, estranged brothers who have engaged in an unhealthy and quite petty lifelong competition. When Jeremy, joined by his wife and son, travels to his mom’s to celebrate his birthday, Mark, uninvited, crashes the weekend, and the pair revive a contentious boyhood pursuit: a contest of 25 events (the do-deca-pentathalon of the title) to determine which is the “greatest” brother. Needless to say, it’s a bad idea.
There’s a real lifelike quality to the film: you squirm with both of these unformed boy-men as they struggle with their emotional issues. And it never balloons into parodic Hollywood-level comedy, which is a blessing. But there’s something a bit pat and staid to it as well: there’s never a real sense of stakes or danger. Still, the Duplasses know how to put a small film like this together with soothing ease, and they never tax the audience with contrivances or excess baggage. NOTE: Kelly, who was raised in Oregon, will be on hand for the first evening shows on Friday and Saturday night to introduce the film and conduct post screening q-and-a sessions.
A superhero franchise is rebooted, and while it's not a disaster, it is a puzzle.
Andrew Garfield in "The Amazing Spider-Man"
The tale of Spider-Man, the teen nerd turned web-slinging superhero, has been part of popular culture for 50 years now, which means that Baby Boomers who remember his debut might well join their grandkids in seeing the newest version, “The Amazing Spider-Man,” and that some of those grandkids will do the driving.
As evinced by his longevity, Spidey, like such similarly long-lived comic book heroes as Batman and Superman, is one of the truly mythic characters of our time, a figure whose legend has been remade and retold over the years in different cultural moments to suit different generations. That’s one of the functions of myths, after all: to allow each subsequent epoch to define itself within a shared tradition by refashioning a standard icon in a way that expresses its particular sensibility and communal wishes, fears and needs.
None of which explains, exactly, why the folks at Marvel Comics and Columbia Pictures have given us a new Spider-Man a mere 10 years after Sam Raimi brought the character to the big screen so spectacularly in “Spider-Man” (followed by a splendid sequel in 2004 and a rotten third act three years later). Raimi’s origin tale, following more or less the story credited to Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, was filled with energy and zest and skewed humor and featured one of the greatest of screen kisses, with costumed Tobey Maguire literally turned upside down for Kirsten Dunst. It still feels fresh in the mind, a Spider-Man worthy of several decades tenure, surely.
But, no. Once again commerce trumps culture at the multiplex, and Spidey has been rebooted in “Amazing,” which has the shape of its predecessor but only a portion of its pep and wit. The film is directed by Marc Webb, whose sole previous feature, “(500) Days of Summer” was deeply charming but hardly seemed the work of a blossoming wizard of effects-driven 3-D action cinema. He’s pretty good with the human stuff, but little here is as vitally alive as the action that Raimi, a poet of kinetics, whipped up.
At times, such as in the sequences when a newly super-powered Peter Parker tries his abilities out for size, Webb sparks the film into life. And his star, Andrew Garfield (best known as the friend and partner stabbed in the back by Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network”), has a pleasantly saucy, angsty air. But there was an exhilaration in Raimi’s first two “Spider-Man” movies that this film never equals. As “Amazing Spider-Man” carries on, it accrues bulk rather than depth and becomes increasingly slow and murky, and during the unengaging moments that pile up, you can’t help but ask why it exists at all.
For non-initiates, the story involves high schooler Parker bitten by a genetically altered (as opposed to radioactive) spider and becoming infused with superhuman strength, the ability to cling to walls, uncannily acute sensory powers, and so on. One night, he allows a thief get away from a holdup, and when the stickup man subsequently kills his Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen, quite good), Parker dedicates himself to vigilantism as a costumed do-gooder.
Spider-man’s deeds and celebrity earn him the enmity of the NYPD, embodied by Captain Stacy (Dennis Leary), who happens to be the father of Peter’s sweetheart, Gwen (Emma Stone). And, worse, the scientist (Rhys Ifans) whose experimental spider bit Parker has turned himself into a giant, murderous lizard bent on transforming all of New York similarly. Parker, who’s partly responsible for the success of the mad doctor’s schemes, is the only one who can stop him.
In many ways, any Spider-Man movie is can’t miss material, with a hero much more irreverent and human than Batman or Superman and easier to empathize with, being, as he is, an ordinary fellow who receives an extraordinary gift. Simply by serving as a vessel for that story, “The Amazing Spider-Man” is agreeable. And occasionally it’s more. But, as with the American remake of the Swedish film of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” you can’t help but feel that you’ve not only heard the story before, but that you you’ve seen it before, too -- and recently.
Sixteen years elapsed between Tim Burton’s first Batman movie and Christopher Nolan’s, and that span of time, plus the depths into which the series had fallen under Burton’s successors, justified a reboot -- and, of course, Nolan’s truly was a fresh vision. Whatever you may think of “The Amazing Spider-Man,” though, it’s hard to credit that the world was crying out for it or that Webb’s version of the story is on a par with Raimi’s. It’s not a dud, but it is a headscratcher -- and that’s something no summer blockbuster wishes to be.
Reviews of this week's new releases in Portland-area theaters.
Matthew McConaughey in "Magic Mike"
There's an intriguing variety of new titles in Portland this weekend: the foul-mouthed living teddy bear comedy "Ted"; the male stripper seeking meaning drama "Magic Mike"; the dysfunctional family tale "People Like Us"; the moving Japanese tale of boys trying to reunite their estranged parents, "I Wish"; the Oscar-nominated animated film "A Cat in Paris"; and the based-on-truth comedy about politics "Grassroots." And when you've worked through all that, check out "Also Opening,""Indie/Arthouse" and "Levy's High Five."
The five movies playing in Portland-area theaters that I'd soonest see again.
Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman (and Jason Schwartzman's head) in "Moonrise Kingdom"
1) "Moonrise Kingdom"
Wes Anderson films are such a specific taste that I'm a bit hesitant to suggest
that this might be his most approachable (but surely not crowd-pleasing)
work. In the wake of the delightful "The
Fantastic Mr. Fox," Anderson returns to live-action and his familiar tics and
habits in a tale of young (as in 'pre-teen') lovers on the run. Newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward fill
the lead roles delightfully, and Anderson's muses Bill Murray and Jason
Schwartzman are joined ably by Edward Norton, Bruce Willis and Frances
McDormand, among others. It's a light
and breezy film with a very sweet heart and old-fashioned sturdiness. Even if you were left puzzled by the likes of
"Rushmore" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" (still his best non-animated films, for
me), this is likely to win you over. multiple locations
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) "I Wish" In
"After Life," "Nobody Knows" and "Still Walking," the Japanese writer-director
Hirokazu Koreeda has approached weighty issues of life and death with a rare
blend of respect and levity. It's a
deeply humane stance, and it's not surprising to note that he's also a gifted
director of children, as in this story of two brothers, living in different
cities because of their parents' separation, who concoct a wish-fulfillment
scheme in hopes of reuniting their family.
The music, film craft and acting are quite fine, but perhaps the most
heartening thing is the way in which Koreeda throws open the theme of childhood
fantasy to embrace the various adults in the story who, too, have dreams,
realized and not. A charming, shambling,
uplifting film. Living Room Theaters
4) "Your Sister's Sister" Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton spins a sweet and sad and true-feeling variation on a Hollywood romcom, with shlubby leading man Mark Duplass caught unexpectedly between two half-sisters, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt.
There are machinations that could have been drawn from a higher-gloss
(and less appealing) film. But, as in her not dissimilar "Humpday,"
Shelton finds real grounding for the story in the personalities of her
cast, who improvised some of their scenes within guidelines. The result
feels theatrical and human at once, with three wise, low-key
performances and a credible air of confusion and hope. A sly winner. Fox Tower
5) "Monsieur Lazhar" This delicate, sweet and, surprisingly,
harrowing little drama was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign language
film, and it's a mark of its quality that it's a very good film despite that sometimes dubious
distinction. Mohamed Fellag stars as the
title character, a secretive and formal man who arrives at a Montreal school
out of the blue and volunteers to take the place of a teacher who has left
under horrid circumstances. Gradually
his compassion and wisdom come to heal wounds, just as his own personal pains
are revealed. Writer-director Philippe
Falardeau dances around the clichés inherent in the scenario as if they didn't
exist, eliciting wonderful performances from his cast (especially the kids) and
real emotions from the audience. Living Romm Theaters
Channing Tatum's sizzle is skin-deep in Steven Soderbergh's dark film about male strippers.
Channing Tatum (center) in "Magic Mike"
The come-on of “Magic Mike” is pretty obvious: watch hardbodies Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey, Joe Manganiello, and Alex Pettyfer perform striptease routines without enduring the cost and, um, ambiance of an actual strip joint.
But if that sounds like a blast, “Magic Mike” might surprise you, and not necessarily in a good way. Directed by Steven Soderbergh from a script by Reid Carolin, it deliberately echoes such iconic films as “Shampoo,” “American Gigolo,” and “Boogie Nights,” in which shiny, sexy surfaces hide dark and creepy interior worlds. That’s an impressive pedigree, but there are clunkers with the same agenda: “Cocktail,” say, or “Coyote Ugly.” And while “Magic Mike” isn’t as vacuous as those latter two, it doesn’t compel as powerfully as the former trio nor, I suspect, will it fulfill the expectations with which it teases its audience.
Tatum plays the title character, a Tampa schemer with a professional life cobbled together out of a variety of low-level pursuits and a personal life filled with boozing and bed-hopping. At his day job as a roofer, he meets Adam (Pettyfer) and takes him under his wing, eventually inducting him, without warning, into the world of stripping. There, under the tutelage of club owner Dallas (McConaughey), Adam starts to bloom, but in ways that his protective sister (Cody Horn) doesn’t condone.
As in “The Girlfriend Experience” and “Full Frontal” (and, for that matter, “Sex, Lies and Videotape”), Soderbergh promises raw sexuality and then holds back. There’s a lot of skin on display in “Magic Mike” -- male and female -- but there’s an iciness to its sensuality. The film is at least as much about the cost of self-exposure as it is about the pleasure of it, and the sex in it never seems particularly ecstatic or warm.
Indeed, the darkness of “Magic Mike” might push people away. The sheen of sweat on taut torsos may be comely, but the physical abandon of the striptease is never accompanied by an emotional or spiritual release. The film is almost always in shadow, even when bathed in glaring Gulf Coast light. It’s a broody male stripper movie, and that doesn’t sound quite so hot as the ads.
That said, there is electricity in a few of the staged routines and, it goes almost without saying, in Soderbergh’s craft (he simply cannot do dull). If Tatum still wobbles as a leading man and Pettyfer and Horn never quite spark to life, McConaughey is positively crackling as a preening, scheming peacock, infusing his role with personal touches and self-deprecating humor. He steals every moment he gets.
“Magic Mike” doesn’t sizzle often enough as either cinema or beefcake, though. It’s medium-strength Soderbergh, which is better than the full-strength stuff most filmmakers can manage but not exactly the brand that keeps you coming back for more.
The director of "After Life" and "Nobody Knows" weaves a sweetly shambling story about hopes and dreams.
Ohshiro (l.) and Koki Maeda in "I Wish"
A sweet and shambling film about children with grand dreams, “I Wish” is yet another impressive work from Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda, whose previous movies, including “After Life,” “Nobody Knows” and “Still Walking” evinced a rare combination of playfulness and empathy and blended weighty subject matter with light, deft touches.
In this film, a pair of young brothers (real-life siblings Koki and Ohshiro Maeda) are forced to live in different cities by their parents’ separation but concoct a plan to reunite. They believe that if they can witness two high-speed trains passing in opposite directions, they can make a wish, as if on a falling star, and knit their broken family back together. They each enlist a cadre of chums to help reach a remote spot where such a synchronicity of trains will occur, and each of those kids brings a dream of his or her own along.
There’s much to enjoy here: inventive photography, a breezy soundtrack, engaging performances by the child actors, and flashes of heart and humor where you may not expect them. What’s refreshing, too, is that Koreeda presents the adults in the children’s lives as harboring dreams of their own, making the theme of wish-fulfillment universal. The result is a film that’s both entertaining and illuminating, no matter your age.
A living teddy bear with decidedly grownup issues gives Mark Wahlberg a hangover and a headache.
Mark Wahlberg and chum in "Ted"
Ted the living teddy bear is crude, crass and sporadically hilarious, and “Ted” the movie is pretty much the same. Writer-director Seth MacFarlane makes the leap from the animated TV sitcoms “Family Guy,” “American Dad” and “The Cleveland Show” with a splash, if not exactly chops, and the laughs more or less carry you through the clumsy bits.
The title character is a walking, talking teddy bear (voiced by MacFarlane) who came to life when his owner John (Mark Wahlberg) made a wish as a lonely boy. That was sweet, but now John is in his thirties with a job and a girlfriend, Lori (Mila Kunis), and he still spends excess hours with Ted, albeit on a diet of pot and beer and dirty jokes instead of milk and cookies and TV cartoons. When Lori threatens to dump him because of his codependent friendship with Ted, John is in crisis. And Ted finds that life outside the familiar comfort of John’s house is a dangerous business.
In its storytelling and film craft, “Ted” is as unpolished as its jokes, but it spews a sufficient amount of random and occasionally rancid comic energy to recall, in a good way, the more raw works of, oh, the Farrelly brothers or the “South Park” guys or Judd Apatow’s gang. At times -- as in a melee between Ted and John in a cheap hotel room or a cocaine-fueled night of partying , it’s surreally funny. And Wahlberg is actually quite good working opposite a co-star who, technically, isn’t there. “Ted” may not be profound or deft, but when it hits the sweet-sour spot, which it does regularly, it can win you over.
An Oscar-nominated feature that's lovely to look at but short on story.
"A Cat in Paris"
A surprise nominee for Best Animated Feature at the most
recent Academy Awards, the French animated film "A Cat in Paris" is handsome
and perky and built around a story so simplistic that it almost feels like it
wasn't written down.
The title character (who is not, oddly, the protagonist of
the story) is a kitty who lives by day with a little girl whose mom is a
detective and by night with a cat burglar (get it?) who runs across rooftops,
parkour-style, to purloin loot. Mom is chasing after a crime kingpin whom
the thief happens to run across, and pretty soon we're involved in kidnapping,
chases, shootouts, and more, all centered around the little girl.
Directors Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol favor a
modish visual style and a jazzy score, both of which are charming. But
their storytelling is exceedingly familiar even for kiddy fare, resulting in
fairly tired -- if pleasantly brief -- going.
A freakish brain tumor turns a little indie horror film into a half-decade long struggle, with the payoff -- a premiere -- in sight.
View full sizeFilmmaker and cancer survivor Andy Koontz with his wife and collaborator, Chrissy
It’s hard enough to get an independent film made, what with the inevitable shortages of money, time, equipment and support. But throw a freakish brain tumor and a half-decade of recovery into the mix, and your production schedule is pretty much guaranteed to crash.
That’s exactly what happened to “Ekimmu: The Dead Lust,”an ultra-low-budget horror film shot in Portland in 2004 but only finished-finished this week, just in time for its premiere.
Six years ago, when he thought he was just about done with the movie, Andy Koontz, the Portland man who wrote, directed, edited, and scored it (and, by the way, built the sets, did the lighting and makeup, and made the food the cast and crew ate) just about died from a life-threatening malignancy and the subsequent treatment it required.
On Saturday night, Koontz will be joined by his wife, Chrissy, his friends, family, and crew, and anyone else curious enough to buy a ticket, at the premiere of the completed feature-length film at a downtown church. It’s only about five miles from his Southeast Portland home, but given how long Koontz has come, it might as well be on Mars.
In 2006, Koontz was 30 years old and finishing the first pass of editing and sound work on “Ekimmu.” He was already a musician of more than a decade’s standing, fronting the band Valhere, which released an album, “This Lonely Highway...,” recorded in Koontz's home studio. He had made a couple of short movies, including one, “Clearwater: Abduction,” which had developed an international cult following.
“Ekimmu,” he remembers, was his effort to do “something I had never seen before.” Sitting in the producing and editing studio in his basement, Koontz explains his creative urge. “I can’t repeat something I’ve seen. I have to do my own thing,” he says. “And I saw Rob Zombie making movies, and I was inspired to see that another musician could direct films, and it got me thinking, ‘I can do this.’”
He nearly had, when he started to feel strange. “I was doing the sound editing and dialogue recording,” he recalls, “and I was working down here (in his home studio) with one of the actors. I told him that I was having dizzy spells. I actually have a recording of that conversation.”
The dizzy spells became more common, as did bouts of nausea. Then, one morning, he woke up with an overwhelming sense of vertigo.
“I felt like I was going to tumble right out of bed and through the door of the bedroom,” he says. “It felt like that scene in ‘Titanic’ where the people are tumbling down the deck of the ship.” The sensation became a daily ordeal — he could only sleep sitting an upright — and the diagnoses from his doctors were all over the map: allergies, ear crystals. Finally, an X-ray revealed a mass in the left side of his brain that turned out to be a medulloblastoma tumor, a type of malignancy most commonly found in children ages 3 to 8.
What followed was a battery of surgeries (11 on his head, 20 overall), chemotherapy, blood clots, feeding tubes, medication, incapacitation and despair. Because his tumor was the sort that is primarily found in kids, Koontz was treated at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital(he has added the hospital’s little-doll-girl logo to his impressive canvas of tattoos). The cancer itself was contained early in the process, but the removal of the tumor and the subsequent recovery was a long fight.
“I was in bed for two years,” Koontz remembers. “I went from 215 pounds to 140 pounds. I had to learn how to walk again. I still can’t play the guitar properly.”
By 2009 he started to feel more like his old self, but he still struggles with memory loss and other cognitive issues, suffers from nerve damage and pain, and finds himself extremely low on energy. “I have little ‘energy packets,’” he explains, “and I’ve learned to budget them and know when to use them.”
Throughout the ordeal, Koontz had some good fortune. Unlike a lot of musicians and indie filmmakers, he had a job that gave him health insurance (as it happens, he worked at the time in a non-editorial position at The Oregonian). He had a strong religious faith, which had been inculcated in his youth and continued through his musical career (“I performed in several worship bands,” he says) and in his adult life.
And he had Chrissy. The pair married young — he was 20, she was 17 — and Koontz credits her with keeping him positive and sane during his illness and recovery.
“To me, that woman is holy,” he says. “She possesses something that I don’t have. She’s my best friend and she’s my collaborator and she gets me. We do everything together. We edited this movie together.”
Finishing the film was almost a recuperation project for Koontz, but he more than once found himself on the verge of abandoning it, only to have Chrissy help him refocus and persevere.
“When I was sick,” he recalls, “there were five or six times when I nearly destroyed this movie. Literally. I wanted to burn the hard drives and all the notes. And she would say to me, ‘You’ll get through this.’ I wound up writing a song with that title.”
Of course, being told you’ll finish a job is one thing, and finishing it is another. When he finally did get around to resurrecting “Ekimmu” in 2010, Koontz discovered that the material that he had to work with from 2006 and earlier was technologically out of date. “The files were all in the wrong format,” he says, “and none of it was in widescreen or in HD.”
That turned out to be a bit liberating, artistically. “There were things in that cut of the film that I wanted to take out or rework,” he remembers, “and this was a good chance to do it.” He added new music. He also created a new character, an evil spirit whom he refers to as the Queen Demon. She appears sporadically throughout the film as a kind of chorus and was played by Portland actress and model Nina Tomica, covered in red latex paint and ominous tattoos.
from "Ekimmu: The Dead Lust"
Which brings up the question of just what kind of movie “Ekimmu: The Dead Lust” is. The name “Ekimmu,” from ancient Sumerian, refers to undead spirits who prey maliciously on the living (“sort of the beginning of the vampire legend,” Koontz explains).
The film, made for $9,000, is set in the fictional Northwest town of Briar Creek (actually Koontz’s hometown of Colton, Oregon), where a string of murders and inexplicable crimes baffle and frighten residents and authorities (Koontz, in his chunkier pre-cancer body, plays a killer in the early minutes).
It’s dark and bloody and a bit chock-a-block, but deliberately so. And it’s got a densely atmospheric score, including a rich and brooding rap song which Koontz composed with the Detroit-area hip hop artist Mic.Hunter.D, whom he met online.
“Comparing to something else would be hard,” Koontz says. “It’s kind of a mix of Italian horror, which I love, and Asian horror, and then a twisted, David Lynch-like story.”
There’s irony, Koontz admits, in premiering a film of this sort in a church (“I designed the posters and I took a lot of pentagrams off of the images,” he confesses). But perhaps it’s not so inappropriate when you think of the event as a celebration, marking six years since his cancer has been in remission. Koontz will perform music at the event — his first time singing on stage in 11 years — and he hopes that the film will be received in the spirit of fun in which he conceived and made it. There will be giveaways to all ticket buyers and, of course, a chance to meet and chat with the filmmaker.
It’s all a way, he says, of sharing his gratitude for the chance life has given him to finish his film and share it with an audience.
“I had brain cancer,” he says. “I spent six years being sick and thinking I’d never get this movie done. To go from that, and from wanting to destroy it, to be here and have it finished and show it to people....I could cry.”
“Ekimmu: The Dead Lust” will screen on Saturday June 23 at 9 p.m. at The Old Church, 1422 SW 11th Ave. Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door. Full information
The five films playing in Portland-area theaters that I'd soonest see again.
Emily Blunt (l.) and Rosemarie DeWitt in "Your Sister's Sister"
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) "Moonrise Kingdom"
Wes Anderson films are such a specific taste that I'm a bit hesitant to suggest
that this might be his most approachable (but surely not crowd-pleasing)
work. In the wake of the delightful "The
Fantastic Mr. Fox," Anderson returns to live-action and his familiar tics and
habits in a tale of young (as in 'pre-teen') lovers on the run. Newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward fill
the lead roles delightfully, and Anderson's muses Bill Murray and Jason
Schwartzman are joined ably by Edward Norton, Bruce Willis and Frances
McDormand, among others. It's a light
and breezy film with a very sweet heart and old-fashioned sturdiness. Even if you were left puzzled by the likes of
"Rushmore" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" (still his best non-animated films, for
me), this is likely to win you over. Fox Tower
4) "Your Sister's Sister" Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton spins a sweet and sad and true-feeling variation on a Hollywood romcom, with shlubby leading man Mark Duplass caught unexpectedly between two half-sisters, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt. There are machinations that could have been drawn from a higher-gloss (and less appealing) film. But, as in her not dissimilar "Humpday," Shelton finds real grounding for the story in the personalities of her cast, who improvised some of their scenes within guidelines. The result feels theatrical and human at once, with three wise, low-key performances and a credible air of confusion and hope. A sly winner. Fox Tower
5) "Monsieur Lazhar" This delicate, sweet and, surprisingly,
harrowing little drama was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign language
film, and it's a mark of its quality that it's a very good film despite that sometimes dubious
distinction. Mohamed Fellag stars as the
title character, a secretive and formal man who arrives at a Montreal school
out of the blue and volunteers to take the place of a teacher who has left
under horrid circumstances. Gradually
his compassion and wisdom come to heal wounds, just as his own personal pains
are revealed. Writer-director Philippe
Falardeau dances around the clichés inherent in the scenario as if they didn't
exist, eliciting wonderful performances from his cast (especially the kids) and
real emotions from the audience. Cinema 21
A potentially ludicrous what-if history is transformed into a thrilling horror film by a gifted director.
You have to be batty to take seriously the very notion of Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” in which the sixteenth President is revealed to be a slayer of undead bloodsuckers. But the movies may not have a battier director than Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian wizard behind “Night Watch,” “Day Watch” and “Wanted,” and it’s a pleasure to report that he dives into an adaptation of the book with wild zest, wicked humor and a hot-blooded spirit of fun.
Benjamin Walker in "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter"
A certain unsteady risibility always threatens the film, in which Benjamin Walker, who has played Andrew Jackson in a Broadway musical, portrays Lincoln as a slightly doofy, knowingly ironic buttkicker who wields an axe in the fashion of a samurai spinning a sword. The dry humor in his performance is echoed in that of Mary Elizabeth Winstead (“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”) as his wife, Mary Todd, and, especially, in Bekmambetov’s attitude toward history, staging and the more melodramatic aspects of the plot. None of it feels real or tries to; it’s purely cinematic in a sense.
The story (his mother murdered by a vampire, Lincoln spends his life fighting the undead, a struggle which turns out to be the real reason for the Civil War) is clearly of secondary importance to the director, who stages one action scene after another, some grippingly intimate, some (a horse stampede, a fight on a train that’s doomed to derail) thrillingly audacious. Bekmambetov approaches these sequences with inspiration derived from martial arts films, from the Wachowski brothers, and from something not quite seen in movies other than his own. He’s not afraid to risk seeming ludicrous while putting his signature touch on things; indeed, he courts credulity so blatantly and so often that you sense him getting lost in the magical tools at his disposal. He enjoys himself so much that it’s hard not to be roused along with him.
Look, this is a ludicrous premise, and it’s sometimes played stiffly as to seem willfully inept. But when Bekmambetov is in full stride and the gore, oaths and silver bullets are flying, it’s a kick. The title may sound like a joke, but “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” is serious fun.
A trio of engaging actors in a sweet, sad, lowkey romcom rondelay.
Mark Duplass, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt (l. to r.) in "Your Sister's Sister"
“Your Sister’s Sister” is a cockeyed semi-romcom that feels like it started with a ‘what-if’ concept and then, unusually, deepened and improved.
As in her offbeat charmer “Humpday,” Seattle writer-director Lynn Shelton builds the film on the personalities of her lead actors, the charismatic and credible trio of Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt and Mark Duplass. There’s an improvised and offhanded feel to the film, but it’s carefully built -- almost like a stage play, really -- and it touches on humor and emotions in ways that are never showy or contrived.
Duplass is Jack, mired in sorrow after his brother’s death and lost in life and love. His best friend, Iris (Blunt), offers him a chance to recharge himself at her father’s San Juan Islands cabin, not knowing that her half-sister, Hannah (DeWitt), is there recovering from a breakup with her longtime girlfriend.
There’s some comedy and drama in the storytelling, but the chief interest is in the flow of the characters, their emotions, their choices, their desires, and their abilities to accommodate one another. In that, Shelton and her cast are note-perfect. In the very best sense, “Your Sister’s Sister” almost feels like it’s being made up as it goes along: organic, fluent and true.
The tale of a plucky Scottish lass feels more like second-tier Disney than the top-shelf stuff its Pixar subsidiary usually turns out.
Merida lets fly in "Brave"
In January, 2006, the great independent animation studio Pixar was acquired by the Walt Disney Pictures in a move that, it was assumed, would inject spirit, class and quality into the larger company’s fading animation division.
Pixar had made a remarkable string of six critical and commercial hits in the previous decade (two “Toy Story” films, “A Bug’s Life,” “Monsters, Inc.,” “Finding Nemo,” and “The Incredibles”), while Disney, which had admirably revived feature animation as a genre in the late 1980s, foundered with such flops as “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” “Treasure Planet,” “Brother Bear,” “Home on the Range” and “Chicken Little.”
As an animation studio, in fact, Disney was still principally beholden to its two generations of princess movies, the classic trio of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty,” and the contemporary masterworks “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast.” Pixar, surely, would be able to retool the studio from an admittedly lucrative princess factory into something fresh and exciting.
But corporate cultures have a funny way of mutating everything that touches them, and here we are, six years later, with Pixar, following its first widely-acknowledged disappointment, 2011’s “Cars 2,” with “Brave,” its first...princess movie. It’s like seeing your favorite punk band get hired to run a record label and then release an album of Barry Manilow covers. No matter the execution, the very idea appalls. And frankly, as it turns out, neither the story nor the execution of “Brave” quite approaches the potential genius of punk version of “I Write the Songs.”
“Brave” is the story of Merida, a plucky, spirited, flame-haired lassie in medieval Scotland who rejects the traditional tutelage administered by her prim mother in favor of archery, horseback riding, wilderness adventures, and other boyish pursuits. When her parents effectively name her the prize in a contest between the bachelor sons of the local tribal lords, Merida rebels in ways that threaten the stability of her father’s kingdom and, even more gravely, her mother’s very life.
You don’t exactly require a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature to see the similarities between this story and those of “The Little Mermaid,” “Mulan” and “Pocahontas.” And while I don’t often stress originality of plot in evaluating a film, the spectacle of a Pixar film being squeezed into the mold of Disney production line product is deflating. (In comparison, the short which precedes the feature, the sweet little fable “La Luna,” is a pure, Pixarish pleasure.)
There’s a letdown, too, in the look and feel of the film, which is usually such a strong suit for Pixar. Merida’s headful of ginger locks is more or less the star of the production, shimmering and bouncing in extraordinarily lifelike fashion. Most of the 3-D animation, however, is very flat and dark, and the many action scenes are more cluttered than they are gripping. Now and again, directors Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman manage something rousing -- Merida’s triumph at an archery contest, the pranks of her triplet brothers, the comportment of a large mammal possessed of a human spirit -- but in all this is the least visually inventive and appealing film Pixar has ever made.
If it seems unfair to compare “Brave” to its Pixar siblings, then it should also be noted that it falls quite far from the heights of the great Disney features of 20 or so years ago. It simply never engages you with its grandiose posturing and desperate jokes and trite moralizing. And there’s a twist at the end that absolutely betrays the ostensible lessons of female empowerment; without spoiling the story, let’s just say that Merida’s scheme to save the day repudiates the very spirit that presumably makes her heroic to begin with.
There’s an element in “Brave” that’s worth noting, namely the depiction of a credible mother-daughter relationship in an animated feature, something that’s usually given scant -- if any -- attention. But that effort hardly makes this tepid, boilerplate production worthy of its lineage or even its title.
“Not Yet Begun to Fight” Documentary about a Vietnam War veteran in Montana who helps other vets heal through the therapy of fly fishing. (Northwest Film Center, Thursday only) “Some Like It Hot” The great 1959 Billy Wilder comedy starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. (Hollywood Theatre, Saturday and Sunday only) “That’s My Boy” This Adam Sander/Andy Samberg comedy wasn’t screened for the press. Wonder why.... (multiple locations) “Tombstone” The 1993 telling of the tale of the Shootout at the OK Corral. “I’m your huckleberry,” indeed! (Academy Theater)
“Ultrasonic” Drama about a man haunted by an ominous sound that nobody else can hear. (Cinema 21)
The five movies playing in Portland-area theaters that I'd soonest see again.
"Bernie"
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) "Moonrise Kingdom"
Wes Anderson films are such a specific taste that I'm a bit hesitant to suggest
that this might be his most approachable (but surely not crowd-pleasing)
work. In the wake of the delightful "The
Fantastic Mr. Fox," Anderson returns to live-action and his familiar tics and
habits in a tale of young (as in 'pre-teen') lovers on the run. Newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward fill
the lead roles delightfully, and Anderson's muses Bill Murray and Jason
Schwartzman are joined ably by Edward Norton, Bruce Willis and Frances
McDormand, among others. It's a light
and breezy film with a very sweet heart and old-fashioned sturdiness. Even if you were left puzzled by the likes of
"Rushmore" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" (still his best non-animated films, for
me), this is likely to win you over. Fox Tower
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) "Monsieur Lazhar" This delicate, sweet and, surprisingly,
harrowing little drama was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign language
film, and it's a mark of its quality that it's a very good film despite that sometimes dubious
distinction. Mohamed Fellag stars as the
title character, a secretive and formal man who arrives at a Montreal school
out of the blue and volunteers to take the place of a teacher who has left
under horrid circumstances. Gradually
his compassion and wisdom come to heal wounds, just as his own personal pains
are revealed. Writer-director Philippe
Falardeau dances around the clichés inherent in the scenario as if they didn't
exist, eliciting wonderful performances from his cast (especially the kids) and
real emotions from the audience. Cinema 21
The five films playing in Portland-area theaters that I'd soonest see again.
Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton and Bruce Willis (from l.) in "Moonrise Kingdom"
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) "The Triplets of
Belleville" Before he made the utterly charming "The Illusionist," animator
Sylvain Chomet made this utterly charming film about gangsters, music, bicycle
racing, kidnapping, a sad-eyed boy, a fat dog, and a heroic grandmother. In some ways it's impossibly French, with the
hot jazz and the Tour de France and the noirish touches. But the sheer imagination of the thing, the
execution, the relentless eccentricity, and the infectious (and Oscar-nominated)
music make it, I think, universally accessible.
It was no surprise to see Chomet go on to adapt a Jacques Tati script in
his subsequent film: this one, with all
its quirks and its purely cinematic heart and soul, would have delighted the
comic master. Northwest Film Center,
Friday through Sunday only
4) "Moonrise Kingdom"
Wes Anderson films are such a specific taste that I'm a bit hesitant to suggest
that this might be his most approachable (but surely not crowd-pleasing)
work. In the wake of the delightful "The
Fantastic Mr. Fox," Anderson returns to live-action and his familiar tics and
habits in a tale of young (as in 'pre-teen') lovers on the run. Newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward fill
the lead roles delightfully, and Anderson's muses Bill Murray and Jason
Schwartzman are joined ably by Edward Norton, Bruce Willis and Frances
McDormand, among others. It's a light
and breezy film with a very sweet heart and old-fashioned sturdiness. Even if you were left puzzled by the likes of
"Rushmore" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" (still his best non-animated films, for
me), this is likely to win you over. Fox Tower
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
The tale of 12-year-old sweethearts on the run is delightfully light and filled with the director's iconoclasm and quirks.
Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman (and Jason Schwartzman's head) in "Moonrise Kingdom"
“Moonrise Kingdom” is Wes Anderson’s seventh feature film, and in some ways it’s typical of all of them, with tropes and tics and themes and actors familiar from the likes of “Bottle Rocket,” “Rushmore,” and “The Royal Tenenbaums” and the rest. (Indeed, so strong is Anderson’s artistic stamp that it even permeated 2009’s “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” a stop-motion animated movie based on a Roald Dahl novel.)
And yet, there’s a freshness and vitality to “Moonrise” that was absent from Anderson’s two previous live-action films, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” and “The Darjeeling Limited,” in which the writer-director trod his wonted territory with heavy -- and heavily mannered -- feet.
Yes, “Moonrise” gives us the predictable feckless fathers and decent-hearted surrogate dads, the precocious kids spouting archaic lingo, the old-timey technology, French pop music, symmetrical visuals, young adult fantasy books, amateur theatricals, pup tents, suitcases, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman and an awkward, ardent romance: the stock ingredients of the Andersonian stew. And yet somehow there’s a zest and lightness that had been missing of late. The film feels more spry and unencumbered and inspired than Anderson’s recent work (the delightful “Mr. Fox” excluded). It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s charming.
Set in 1965 (with a few flashbacks to the previous year), “Moonrise” centers on the romance of two 12-year-olds, Sam Shakusky (debuting actor Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward, another newcomer). Sam has fled his Khaki Scout summer camp and Suzy the stifling home of her lawyer parents (Frances McDormand and Murray) to live together in the wilds of (the fictional) New Penzance Island, sustaining themselves on his outdoorsmanship and her sense of culture.
Naturally, the adults (including scoutmaster Edward Norton and local cop Bruce Willis) are in eager pursuit, as are the other Khaki Scouts, who pretty much loathe Sam, and a Social Services operative (Tilda Swinton) who means to send the orphaned Sam to an institution. And with a famous (and also fictional) storm ominously en route, it all takes on an especially freighted air.
The craft is at the high level we always get from Anderson, who is working with some of his usual creative team. But you can’t help but feel that it’s the young actors -- the lumpy but sober Gilman, with his coonskin hat and pipe, the svelte and cool Hayward, with her eye shadow and Francoise Hardy records -- who have helped the director find his artistic fountain of youth. As often, Anderson has trouble sticking the landing, but “Moonrise Kingdom” is in many ways the most satisfying flight he’s taken us on in years.
The director of "Alien" prequelizes his brilliant 1979 invention with mixed -- but always handsome -- results.
Michael 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.
An Oscar-nominated Canadian film is a small triumph of delicacy and restraint.
Mohamed 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.
The documentary "Inside Job," about the causes of the global financial crisis, gives a man the idea to get some justice of his own.
Multnomah 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.
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.....
The five films playing in Portland-area theaters that I'd soonest see again.
Rachel 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
An Iranian director subtly -- and bravely -- reveals his fate.
View 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.
A truly evil queen and some delightful dwarves balance out a bland heroine.
Chris 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.”
The personal and professional lives of a child protection squad make for a volatile, uneven drama.
Maiwenn, 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.
An indie comedy about bickering siblings lack the polish of its low-budget peers.
Alex 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.
After an immensely successful four-month run, Wim Wenders' superb 3-D dance documentary "Pina" has but two days left in town. And dancing out of town along with it after Thursday night's final showings are the Edgar Allan Poe-as-action hero thriller "The Raven" and the money hole sci-fi extravaganza "John Carter."
This week's new releases in Portland-area theaters.
Josh 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.
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
Josh Brolin adds a dash of droll magic to a time travel subplot and lifts a film above its expected quality.
Josh 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
She drummed for Hole and babysat for Kurt and Courtney -- and lived through hell and tells the tale.
Drummer 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.
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."
Shawn Levy's books include 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.
Shirley MacLaine and Jack Black in "Bernie"
