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.

Irma Vep - 10/10, BAM

Most likely Top 10; three days later I am still floored. I was eight years old when this came out in 1996 so I can't really be upset with myself for being unaware of it at that time, but after finally seeing Irma Vep I am so filled with crackling thoughts and huge feelings I have to demand that anyone interested in film at all see it immediately. 

Oh, why did I wait so long?! I should have seen this back when I was first discovering Welles, Fellini, French New Wave, and Tarkovsky. More than a masterpiece, I'd go so far as to call this film perfect. Less controversially I can say that it's at least perfect to my own aesthetic: Maysles-style cinematography, complex symbols (true symbols- inexpressible any other way, explanation impossible), great music, ecstatic ambiguities, and Maggie Cheung. Its most impressive feat for me is its achievement of a perfect balance of hyper-realism, formal experimentation, and highly developed characters who are easy to understand and care for immensely. No two of these things coexist easily, and three is impossible... except for in Irma Vep.

A movie that good will be impervious to having its effect lessened by pre-viewing information, but rather than any more details I'll restrict myself to repeating the one demand: seriously, don't wait. Get it tonight. Holy God, what a movie.

Reservoir Dogs - 10/8, Film Forum

The drama in Reservoir Dogs is intense, it has classic heist figures (and heists Classic figures: the lit prof dad of my first girlfriend once remarked that it was the film most resembling "The Greek Tragedies" he'd ever seen), and by label at least it's also an action movie. For these reasons it has been and will continue to be very popular. The self-conscious artistry with which it's made calls attention to itself in such a way that it's become one of those movies that inspires teenager after teenager to take films more seriously. This may sound absurd to some Tarantino detractors, but I can attest for one that it offered me a serious step in this direction, the direction that currently dominates my life and mind (for good or ill) (.....).

I assumed I'd seen it too many times already, but since it was playing on a double bill with Kansas City Confidential (one of about a dozen films plundered by Dogs for core motifs, this one providing the 'team of men who are kept strangers assembled for a heist by a mastermind who knows them all' concept) I decided to stay for the sake of experiencing it on the big screen. Even though I was practically reciting the dialogue along with the characters, I enjoyed every minute of it. Scenes I'd thought were amateurishly melodramatic I read this time as intentionally funny. The male bonding through violence I'd thought was just corny I now see as a kind of close-reading of this certain type of relationship that we see so often in "guy" films (gangster/western/action/etc.), exploring more overtly (yet not totally overt! not at all, in fact, to my 13-year-old self) the homosexuality implicit therein. I hadn't quite realized that the men the movie is about are all so lame, so weak, so behind the times, such pathetic wind-up toys struggling to perform the jobs they once chose. Despite the strength of this satire (which becomes almost an indictment), the hipness and charm that became the focus of so-called "independent" films in the '90s is slightly stronger.

Also present in embryonic form is Tarantino's reverence for his dreamland characters, obviously an extension of his great love for (or obsession with) movies. A short time later this reverence combined with his developing smart-kitschy-chic to muscle out all aspects of intelligent satire in his following films, until it returned in a rather more bombastic form in Inglourious Basterds (which also shares with Dogs the trait of a perplexing title). Although in terms of cinematic art I'd rate Jackie Brown higher, Reservoir Dogs may have a bit more to chew, and it's still remarkable to me that 17 years' worth of copycats have not dulled its sickly glamor.

Kansas City Confidential - 10/8, Film Forum

I knew Phil Karlson from the '70s grindhouse movie Walking Tall, but until I saw The Phenix City Story a few years ago (at the suggestion of Martin Scorsese, somewhere) I didn't realize the high caliber of artist I was dealing with. Phenix is a classic of '50s angst, and for good reason considered a must-see. Kansas City Story, although more typical, is also more exciting and perhaps just as good.

Each of the three films deal with a corrupted system and one person fighting to cleanse it. Kansas City Confidential is different from the others in that while their protagonists wage war out of the goodness of their hearts and their commitment to their communities, the main man here is out for revenge because he almost got screwed. This gives the film a more classically noir perspective, and although it's partly the lack of those kind of tropes that makes Phenix unique, the drive it gives the (anti)hero is welcome here. We still have greed spread through every rotting bone of America's justice apparatus. We have shades of gray within each character. And we have a protagonist who, although resourceful, is not as smart as he thinks he is. The surprisingly frank portrayal of the corrupt and brutal police here demonstrates truth to the cliché that lower budget movies could "sneak" things past the censors that would never be allowed in a major film; despite which there is the obligatory happy ending, although it doesn't seem too tacked-on. A young, lizardlike Lee Van Cleef is a cherry on top.

Solaris - 10/7, Anthology Film Archives

This is obviously one of the greatest films ever made. What can I say, except that it was wonderful to finally see it in the cinema (after three viewings on video) despite a slightly faded print. Three commonly-told lies about Solaris: "it's not really scifi"; "it's a lot like 2001"; "it's boring". Jonas Mekas even selected it as this month's entry in his "Boring Masterpieces" program; there is a large lake full of apt adjectives to choose from to describe this movie but "boring" is one I would never think of using, for in each viewing I was riveted through the whole film. I assume it was picked to lend some class, sparkle, or substance to his collection- a bad call, because adding Solaris to any list can only make the other items look worse. Of course it's more so a good call, because we got to see it.