NW FILMMAKERS' FEST PLACES THE FOCUS ON REGIONAL MAKERS

As the 39th Northwest Filmmakers' Festival gets underway this evening at the NW Film Center, it's worth noting the marked difference between it and the MANY film fests hosted within the city limits each year (seriously, Portland, do ya like film much?).  Whereas POWFest, PIFF, QDoc, and all the other acronym heavy festivals populate their schedules with submissions around the globe, the NW Filmmakers' Fest places the emphasis on the makers, themes, and film community that's risen out of the NW region.

Call it a flavor, if you will, but one can't help but detect something different percolating below the surface of films made here in the Northwest.  Maybe it comes from being surrounded by more trees than buildings or perhaps it's the rain (or the coffee), but the political, social, and narrative concerns broached by so many of our region's filmmakers tend to shy away from the formulaic patterns thrown down by the big H-Wood (that's Hollywood, for those weary of made up slang).

Chel White's Bird of Flames

Given the small amount of time that I have to blog today, I'm just going to cut straight to the chase here.  I've only been able to view a small slice of the films screening at the fest, so there's bound to be gads of fine films programmed into the schedule that have yet to pass before my eyes.  With that in mind, I can definitely recommend a large handful of titles to catch over the next week and a half.

Lewis Bennett's The Sandwich Nazi

Let's start with the shorts:

Tonight's Shorts I presentation, which repeats again next Friday, contains several must-see short form works, including Lewis Bennett's The Sandwich Nazi, a beautiful and profane portrait of a deli shop proprietor with an endless series of outrageous stories to tell.  It's definitely not for the kiddies (unless your kids love hearing about some aging dude's sex life), but adults will be cackling throughout.  I'm also fond of Orland Nutt's bizarrely engaging Dear Peter, Wood Chips, an open letter to a friend that has the effect of transforming the mundane into something far more epic.  Nathaniel Akin's animated short A Tax on Bunny Rabbits, winner of the judge's award for best animated work at the fest, bounces around the screen for two minutes in a most pleasing and silly way.  I haven't seen Joanna Priestley's Dear Pluto yet, but I have viewed enough of her past work to know to seek out anything she makes.

Nathaniel Akin's A Tax on Bunny Rabbits

The compilation of works that make up the Shorts II program (scheduled for Sat. the 10th & Thurs. the 15th) includes the stunningly surreal Chrysta Bell music video Bird of Flames, directed by Chel White, likely the best (and weirdest) short at the fest that I've seen; of course, one would absolutely expect strange imagery matched to a song produced by and featuring David Lynch.  Also worth getting excited about: Kimberly Warner's CPR, which I raved about when it played POWFest earlier in the year, and Bahar Noorizadeh's Lingo.

Kimberly Warner's CPR

Shorts III has Tess Martin's beautifully animated piece The Whale Story, based on the Radiolab segment "Animal Minds."  I also really enjoyed Melissa Gregory Rue's Century Farm, Jarratt Taylor's The New Debutantes, and Rob Tyler's The Way We Melt (full disclosure: I'm friends with those last three filmmakers, but, y'know, if I didn't like the work, I would just neglect to mention it).  Shorts III plays on Sun. the 11th and Sat. the 17th.

Rob Tyler's The Way We Melt

As for the feature-length films on the schedule, the easy picks are Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister and James Westby's Rid of Me, both of which received high profile releases and favorable press.  Just as worthy of recognition is Tom Olsen's The Crime of the D'autremont Brothers, a non-fiction piece exploring the forgotten history of a 1923 train robbery in Ashland, Oregon.  Matt McCormick's The Great Northwest returns to the Film Center for the fest (see my earlier review for it here).  And Jon Garcia's much talked about locally-produced film The Falls gets another local go-round.  I'm personally hoping to see Steve Doughton's Buoy over the next few days (it plays at the fest on Sat. the 17th), so keep an eye on the blog, since I expect to review it before the screening.

Tom Olsen's The Crime of the D'autremont Brothers

Anyone in the mood for some trailers?
Here, now, are the coming attractions (some of which I didn't mention, chiefly because I haven't seen the films):

Coast Modern Trailer from Coast Modern on Vimeo.

The Crime of The d'Autremont Brothers from Anchor Pictures on Vimeo.

The 39th Northwest Filmmakers' Festival begins on Friday, November 9th.  The festival website can be accessed here.

Remember to find and "like" us on our Facebook page.
Subscribe to the blog's feed here.   

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME -- A FASCINATING MESS, INDEED-Y

Easily among the most confounding broadcast-to-big screen translations ever produced, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me completely capsized both in terms of critical and audience reception at the time of its 1992 release.  To be fair, a good deal of the once large, built-in, tv fan base for the film had already fallen away during the final season of the show (for more discussion on that topic, see this previous post).  Personally, I recall seeing the film on opening night at a small town, local theater with somewhere around seven other people in attendance; the film was dead upon arrival and limped out of town shortly thereafter.

The reviews were brutal.  The late Vincent Canby wrote that it was "not the worst film ever made; it just seems to be."  Peter Travers declared that "the impulse in the arts to build idols and smash them has found another victim in David Lynch."  My own reaction was a fairly muted response; I liked the parts I liked and remained curious about the other stuff, but it's a film that's difficult to be enthusiastic about on a first viewing.  Time has been kind to FWWM (Fire Walk With Me) and, unsurprisingly, given Lynch's growing reputation as our nation's chief surrealist, a cult audience has been erected around the film after its release on home video.

As an unabashed Lynchophile, I've seen it at least two dozen times now; it was one of my favorites vhs tapes to toss on when I was working graveyard shifts in the late 90s.  Some fans (British critic Mark Kermode among them) now insist that it's his greatest work, an assessment that I find more reasonable each time I view the film.

To a large extent, though the film's plot is explicitly informed by conditions drawn out by the series, the major difference between FWWM and many of the other films in Lynch's oeuvre is that there's such a magnitude of obscurity packed into its many wild and wooly passages that by the time the end credits crawl across the screen it remains essentially unknowable; it becomes an indecipherable mystery that trumps the relatively basic puzzle proposed by the series.

In terms of sheer inscrutability, only Inland Empire, the film that very well end up being Lynch's swan song, can challenge FWWM for pure WTF whiz-bang.  Fire Walk With Me is both an untidy and teetering mess from a master filmmaker and a masterwork that contains many ill-advised and resolutely awful sequences of questionable performance and construction.  A fascinating mess, indeed-y.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me plays one-night-only at the Hollywood Theatre on Wednesday, June 27th at 9:30pm.  More info available here.

 
Remember to find and "like" us on our Facebook page.
Subscribe to the blog's feed here.  

THE FILMS OF NICOLAS WINDING REFN: FEAR X (2003)

For his third feature, Fear X, Danish-born director Nicolas Winding Refn brings his uniquely effective eye for cinematic violence to America.  He couldn't have chosen two more appropriate symbols for the country than the film's setting--a shopping mall--and the violence with which the plot concerns itself; it's located in the past, connoting a history of violence, as well as the dark potential for future mayhem.

Harry Caine (John Turturro) spends his days as a rent-a-cop in a Midwestern shopping mall.  He squanders his nights pouring over vhs tapes filled with security footage.  What Harry is looking for is an answer to his grief; his wife was murdered in the parking lot of his workplace.  He says he's not in search of "who" as much as "why."

With a tightly-wound script written by Refn and novelist Hubert Selby Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn, Requiem for a Dream), the film offers little solace to the viewer that such questions will be answered, focusing instead on the obsession and repetition that has supplanted the vitality that one assumes once constituted Harry's existence.

As in Drive (as well as other works by its director), the influence of David Lynch is palpable in Fear X.  Refn's co-opting of Lynchian atmospherics doesn't attempt to replicate the great surrealist's works, necessarily.  Whereas Lynch employs his stylistic excesses to explore the extremes of human nature, Refn is less interested in the analytical than he is in scenarios and environments that sort individuals into the roles they are compelled to perform.

We're not talking Joseph Campbell here, though; Harry is neither a hero, nor particularly suited to the task that he must complete.  He does undertake a journey that, depending on how you read the ending, is either frustratingly literal or symbolic in nature.

And that ending is a humdinger, I tell ya.  It's likely to upset the same people who strongly disliked the conclusion of No Country for Old Men.  But adventurous film goers (you know who you are); those who love nothing more than a post-screening breakdown of a movie, will be thrilled by what's offered up here.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I enjoyed Fear X more than Drive.  BOOM!  I said it.

Fear X will screen at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) on March 11th at 5pm & March 14th at 7pm.  The film is part of the retrospective series, Driven: The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn.


Related links:
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands 
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Drive


Remember to find and "like" us on our Facebook page.
Subscribe to the blog's feed here.

THAT GUM YOU LIKE IS GOING TO COME BACK IN STYLE @THE HOLLYWOOD THEATRE

David Lynch and Mark Frost's early 90s series Twin Peaks certainly qualified as event television during its first season.  It's a phenomenon that rarely occurs nowadays; a mass audience gathering around a single show, now that seemingly endless options on cable, audience time-shifting (via dvr, streaming options, etc.), tv on dvd and video-on-demand (VOD) have significantly fractured the way in which we view content, thereby reducing a given show's possibilities for the level of water-cooler potential (keep in mind that even something as critically celebrated as a Mad Men or Breaking Bad is, as far as Nielsen ratings are concerned, more of a cult-hit than a commercial success) that 20th century shows enjoyed.

But back to Twin Peaks; a show that, when it premiered in April of 1990, seemed to possess limitless potential for expanding notions of what television could do but, by the time of its cancellation just over a year later, ended up frustrating the majority of its initial fan base.  Plenty has been written about the mishandling of the show by ABC, so I won't waste time or energy detailing how both the creative and marketing teams behind the series failed to fulfill audience expectation.

Far more interesting is the show's continued influence on how television operates as a medium.  There's a phrase that's invoked quite often in critical circles to describe the current state of the tv landscape: a new golden age of television.  What's usually being referred to here is not the countless permutations of reality shows being hocked by the networks but the popular movement away from episodically-driven series to a more serialized form of scripted content.  Shows like The Sopranos and Lost (as well as the aforementioned Mad Men) are regularly cited as high water marks within this revolution in televisual storytelling.

 

It's difficult to imagine the current climate existing without the groundwork laid by Twin Peaks.  The show effectively showed how a series could break out of the self-contained episode trap that plagued much of tv before it.  Lynch and Frost also taught creatives like J.J. Abrams/Jeffrey Lieber/Damon Lindelof (Lost), David Chase (The Sopranos) the value of injecting soap opera tropes into prime-time dramatic fare.  But, beyond that, Twin Peaks helped usher in the notion that television could strive to be as good (and sometimes better) than cinema.  After all, what are the best shows of today other than extended films that just happen to be exhibited via television?

Watching Peaks now it's possible to appreciate the struggle between the creative, the commercial and the audience reception during its short run.  Lynch has stated on numerous occasions that he never intended for central mystery of the show ("Who Killed Laura Palmer?") to be resolved; a question for which, quite understandably, the average viewer wanted an answer.  Despite never really returning the heights of the initial 10 or so episodes, there are only a few truly awful missteps (this episode is a particularly stinky one) once that struggle was in play.

I'd even argue that the series finale is a brilliant slice of surrealist cinema smuggled into the average joe's living room; I can't personally think of a more subversive hour in broadcast television history (outside of, maybe, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour).

The pilot episode of Twin Peaks will be screened at the Hollywood Theatre tonight (3/7) at 9:30.  Beginning next Wednesday (3/14), the Hollywood will screen two episodes on Wednesday nights until "we find out 'who killed Laura Palmer.'"  More info available here. 

Remember to find and "like" us on our Facebook page.

Subscribe to the blog's feed here.