Cinema Schedule - Portland, September 2011

I've got a working draft of a cinema schedule for this and next month: doc.

Woody Allen's latest (Midnight in Paris), about expatriates in '20s Paris (I bet with all sorts of fun references to Hemingway etc) is now playing at the Hollywood... I am so full of snide things to say I'll just leave it at "I don't plan on going to this one". Tree of Life is still playing there as well, so anyone who missed that one should definitely get on it now for a unique and very emotional experience. Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3D has returned to Living Room Theaters;  I missed that one myself in its first runs here and in NY, so I'm going tonight. Errol Morris' latest, Tabloid is also showing there at present. I've loved everything I've seen by him, and with subject matter as outrageous as this I'm excited to see what he's come up with. Back at the Hollywood later this month are two grindhouse adventures: kung-fu "classic" Snake in the Monkey’s Shadow, which I know I've seen but can't remember for the life of me (not a good sign), and Italian zombie flick Burial Ground: Nights of Terror, of which I am skeptical simply because it's from the '80s. Finally, on the 25th Gus Van Sant himself is presenting James Franco's assemblage of My Own Private Idaho outtake footage, called My Own Private River. It is funny to me that one prettyboy would be so enamored by another, but I am in fact interested to see this, despite the fact that I don't really care for Idaho. In a similar project, somebody's finally taken the time to put together some of the Merry Pranksters' voluminous stoned road-trip footage into a supposedly watchable (if not coherent) object; much of this was released on a series of video cassettes produced (with hand-painted covers!) by the old fogies themselves ten or fifteen years ago. Having seen those, I think I may stay away from this one, cleverly titled Magic Trip, playing at a few places this month including Living Room.

Cinema 21 offers us The Adults in the Room, a 2010 indie Portland part-drama/part-documentary-about-itself that I remember wanting to see when it came out. It's about complicated relationships. I still think it looks interesting; it starts Tuesday, as does The Man Who Fell to Earth, Nicholas Roeg's disappointing almost-scifi meander starring David Bowie as an alien and Rip Torn as an asshole. I saw this film for the first time a month ago and, Roeg's other '70s films being among my all-time faves, was actually shocked at how awful it is. Its bad acting, stupid idea, shoddy workmanship, overlength, and sleep-inducing music is not even close to balanced by its beautiful and impressive cinematography.

The NW Film Center has quite a few fun things, but not nearly as many as next month. I'm most excited about The Conformist, which gets a full weekend run, as does Blank City, a documentary about the famous Lower East Side Scene of the late '70s, and World on a Wire, early '70s scifi by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Count me in. Bobby Fischer Against the World is a documentary about Bobby Fischer. James Benning's minimal masterpiece Ruhr is playing on the 14th, 15th, and 17th: you can read what I wrote about it here, or not; either way, know that it kind of changed my life. In the year since I've seen it, I've thought about that movie at least a couple times a week. If there's one not to miss this month, it's Ruhr- but be ready for a challenging experience.

Aside current run garbage the Laurelhurst is programming The Goonies which I will probably never see and Blow-Out, which has its moments but is pretty much just bad.

Projected Highlights of Next Month: 3-hour Scorsese documentary on George Harrison, three '60s films about avant-jazz, double feature Performance and Vertigo with Todd Haynes in attendance, and The Rules of the Game.

Enter the Void - 1/20 (?), IFC

Enter the Void is a 2½hr-long visual trip that uses sound, lighting, and montage to replicate first-person living experience. POV sequences may be standard fare in movies, but this is the only one I've ever heard of that sustains the gimmick the whole way through. Offering more than the mundane, director Gaspar Noé runs a gamut of sensations by including a drug trip, memories, dreams, and the protagonist's death and subsequent reemergence as a disembodied psychic entity, all of which essentially happen to the viewer. In this way Void feels more like an amusement park ride than a movie, complete with induced motion sickness as well as periods of extreme boredom.

Your death occurs not far into the film and then you're a ghost for the rest of the movie; perhaps more accurately, Oscar (the main character) dies, then haunts the people and places of his life, particularly his beloved sister Linda. I can't speak highly enough of the incredible job these people did on the effects: with its steady, constant movement and flickering lights, the screen really does resemble human vision more than anything else I've seen, and the swirling surround sound of air and traffic effectively simulates a jaded, drugged wandering in the night-bright excess of underground Tokyo, down to the awkward characters who look and speak just like the many junksick alternative people I've known. The sensational domineering of the movie theater on one's consciousness goes a long way to this end, and I can only wonder how artistically effective Void will remain in the world of home video.

Besides the film's phenomenal veracity and sumptuousness, also impressive is the attachment to certain characters it manages to create given their silly dialogue and the camera's detached drifting. The latter at times actually works to the characters' advantage, showing us enough of their private lives to let us have sympathy for all, like Oscar's charmingly skeezy friend Alex and Linda's bigshot boyfriend Mario, which is nice if a little corny. That adjective also applies to the central premise of the movie, which after all, is a gimmick: at the beginning a character recounts to us/Oscar in brief the pilgrimage of the soul according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The film follows suit by taking us on that journey, exactly as described.

Offsetting Void's technical achievements are some problems that are worse than platitudinous. The story itself isn't really interesting; the behavior of Oscar's former community is insipid and occasionally soap-operatic; the aimless floating around between scenes gets really boring; and a few sequences (zooming in and out, in and out, on an aborted foetus that looks like a tiny baby; being inside a vagina while a giant penis thrusts in your face and then spews its load) are among the stupidest things I've ever seen in a movie. Still, in its psychedelic flashing between vision, memory, and dream, it manages never to be confusing or unclear, with the exception of one scene wherein we visit Linda's nightmare, which we are deliberately led to mistake for reality in a fake-out familiar to all moviegoers ("oh it was a dream").  The novel idea that ghosts can go into people's dreams makes a kind of sense, and it follows that a confused, newly-incorporeal being would accidentally slip into a dream of the person he's obsessing over and be absolutely bewildered until she wakes up. As participants in his subjectivity, our experience adheres.

It is ultimately ambiguous whether any of what we see really is happening, because Noé manages to get across the idea that it may be all a dream without ever condescending to really even imply it. Since at least the appearance of Ambrose Beirce's story "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in 1890, the notion of a sustained dream/hallucination taking place in the seconds immediately surrounding the moment of death has become an increasingly replicated meme, and Noé doesn't have to resort to any kind of explanation of the concept as, say, Richard Linklater did in Waking Life; Noé's audience, ten years later, already understands it. This is the kind of assumption that Enter the Void makes to be, from its bombastic techno opening credits to the nouvelle vague "film's run out" ending,  perfectly of its time in both the history of western culture and the development of film. While its moments of boredom and inanity may outnumber its moments of brilliance, I think that for anyone invested in film as art, a cinematic experiment of this magnitude shouldn't be passed over. 

Kwaidan - 12/11, Film Forum

Masaki Kobayashi, director of a number of famous features including the post-Samurai flick Harakiri and the '50s epic Human Condition (which played last month at Anthology Film Archives), adapts four stories from the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-Irish author who specialized in Japanese folklore at the turn of the century, into psychedelic poetry. 

I call it that because Kwaidan is more of an aesthetic experience than anything else. The breathtaking imagery with which it skirts its characters' fabulous thinness is so constant that I regard this lengthy collection as an absolute masterpiece, successfully combining several sets of opposites: intricately decorated, impossibly stylized sets coexist with beautiful nature shots; heavily made-up masques cut to grainy flesh faces and back again; and the metamorphosing backdrops and lighting seem simultaneously high and low quality, lush and vivid like a big-budget epic yet hypnotic and saturated as a surreal cheapie. Each vignette has a distinctly different style, tone, and palate, and all of these various atmospheres come across very effectively. Looking back it seems obvious to describe the film as 'theatrical', but it was a comparison I never made while watching it because of the fluid and varied cinematography. I'd say the expressionistic backdrops and metamorphosing lights actually belong more to B-movie or technicolor TV staginess than anything in the world of drama.

Aristocratic Japanese customs make for wonderfully symmetrical static shots, but more often Kobayashi's camera follows characters in their mad dances, drifting Tarkovsky-like through the film's eerie and dark studio world. Highly choreographed, the way characters interact with Toru Takemitsu's kabuki-concrete score (or is it a soundtrack?) is particularly interesting. My very small complaints are with some overly long stretches of non-action,  sloppy overdubbing, and the last story being a bit too silly (I loved it anyway). Kwaidan is a successful exercise in presenting essentially tongue-in-cheek material with deep seriousness for a real emotional impact. I can also say with certainty that the film captures more effectively than any other I've seen that certain type of strangeness unique to the genre of ghost stories, perhaps its most impressive feat.