Portland International Film Festival preview day 14 pt.2: THE LAST CIRCUS

Álex de la Iglesia isn't likely to become a household name anytime soon.  Embraced by a certain type of film nerd, the director of 800 Bullets and La Comunidad tends to push the envelope when it comes to blending representations of violence, humor and sex in darkly unhinged ways, resulting in a concoction of pure crazy that resembles the work of pretty much no one else.  My personal favorite film by him, El Crimen Perfecto, ratchets up a fairly standard take on workplace competition to murderous and (possibly) demonic heights, disregarding all notions of taste or decency.

The Last Circus travels the same path as most of de la Iglesia's best work.  Basically, this means that the legibility of the plot is sometimes obscured by the action unleashed on the screen.  For a good deal of the run time, it hardly matters, since the sheer audacity on display substitutes quite nicely for more fleshed out characters and motivations.  At the same time, the tale of two killer circus clowns battling it out in post-Franco Spain for the love (or is it the hate?) of another circus performer doesn't really need to be strongly grounded in the real to play well with audiences accustomed to cult cinema.

Honestly, I'm surprised that this one didn't get picked up for the late night PIFF After Dark programming, as it would probably click best with the same audience that showed up for Friday night's screening of Rubber.  I enjoyed The Last Circus quite a bit while still acknowledging its weaknesses (a muddled third act drowned in endless and, eventually, numbing madcap action, for instance).

I almost feel like this sort of film needs a disclaimer for the uninitiated, indicating that its concerns are tied more into b-movie aesthetics than the average festival film.  To take it too seriously would be a mistake, drastically reducing one's chances at enjoying what actually does works about the movie.
To quote a friend after the press screening: that was a complete mess.  My take: yeah, it's a mess.  A beautiful, enthralling mess.

The Last Circus plays at the Whitsell Auditorium on Feb. 25th at 8:45pm.  An additional screening is scheduled at the Broadway Theater on Feb. 26th at 5:15pm.

Portland International Film Festival preview day 14 pt.1: EVEN THE RAIN

This weekend is the busiest of the fest with additional venues (Hollywood Theatre, Cinema 21 & Cinemagic) joining the PIFF army.  Between working at the fest & my regular job, it's 3 full days of doubles for me.  So here's a quick 1/2 day posting on the first of the two films screened at last Thursday's press screenings.

A Spanish film crew arrives in Bolivia to begin a production about the exploitation of the natives by Christopher Columbus.  At the same time, the indigenous people who are being cast in the film are in deep conflict with the Bolivian government over water rights, which are controlled by interests from abroad.

Icíar Bollaín's well-intentioned film pushes this parallel between historical and modern forms of colonialism well past the breaking point, reminding us at every turn how little things have changed.  It's a frightfully valid observation but the repetition of this single point lessens the overall impact of the film, especially when it feels like the recurring reminders are meant to compensate for the stragglers in the audience who may have not caught on the first five or so times that the comparison is made.

Oh...and it's also difficult to figure out who our protagonist is until more than halfway through the film.  Which would be fine in a more experimentally (or even playfully) written piece but this is one exceptionally conventional narrative film.

Even the Rain  plays at the Whitsell Auditorium on Feb. 24th at 9:15pm.  An additional screening is scheduled at the Broadway Theater on Feb. 26th at 8pm.

Portland International Film Festival preview day 13: BLACK BREAD & PASSIONE

I ended up skipping the press screenings on Wednesday.  Here's what I missed:


Agusti Villaronga's Black Bread:

and John Turturro's Passione:

Black Bread plays at the Broadway Theater on Feb. 6pm and again at 8:30.  An additional screening is scheduled on Feb. 25th at 3:15pm.


Passione plays at the Whitsell Auditorium on Feb. 20th at 5pm and Feb. 21st at 7:30pm.

Portland International Film Festival preview day 12: MY JOY & THE DOUBLE HOUR

Set against the depressed landscape of the Ukrainian roadside, Sergei Loznitsa's My Joy hitches a ride with a young trucker, Georgy, as he hauls wheat to an unnamed destination.  Along the way, he encounters a young prostitute, an elderly war veteran, a gang of homeless robbers and no end of human misery.

And then a violent shift in the action and story occurs, leaving the audience stranded with a new and oddly inaccessible principal character, which is beyond confusing since there's very little in the way of a transition leading up to this change.  The only holdover from the first part of the film being a dark, malignant tone that never lets up.

My Joy plays at the Broadway Theater on Feb. 19th at 8pm and Feb. 20th at 6:45pm.  An additional screening is scheduled at Cinemagic on Feb. 21st at 2pm.

 

Guiseppe Capotondi's The Double Hour is an odd duck of a film, starting out as an exploration of one genre before hitting the brakes and setting off in an entirely different direction.  The first third of the film had me floored as it promised to be the most original, mature and honest love story since David Gordon Green's All the Real Girls. 

Alas, it wasn't meant to be, since the narrative quickly drops a bomb in the lap of the audience, sending the remainder of the film off onto a more conventional, thriller-based path, which is still very entertaining but left me wishing that the filmmakers had held true to the initial thrust of the story.  It's absolutely worth seeing for that first section but somewhat diminished by the decision to move away from a simple tale of connection between two lonely people.

The Double Hour plays at Cinemagic on Feb. 19th at 4pm.  Additional screenings are scheduled at the Broadway Theater on Feb. 21st at 2pm, Feb. 22nd at 8:45pm and Feb. 23rd at 9:15pm.

Portland International Film Festival preview day 11: HOW TO DIE IN OREGON & POETRY

Peter D. Richardson's second feature-length documentary, How to Die in Oregon, is the hot ticket at the 34th annual Portland International Film Festival.  Setting his sights on showing the real life beneficiaries of Oregon's "death with dignity" law, Richardson isn't as much interested in seriously debating the political aspects of that landmark voter approved legislation as he is in exploring the comfort that its options bring some of the terminally ill subjects of his film.  As many of those individuals express for themselves, their choice to partake in physician-assisted suicide represents a final reclamation of control in the face of illnesses that have denied them that ability in every other aspect of their lives.

Winner of this year's Grand Jury prize for the best U.S. documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, How to Die in Oregon is not an easy film to watch.  At the fore of the film, we're placed in a room with a terminal cancer patient as he ingests a prescription cocktail that will bring his life to a close.  At its center, the film tells the story of Cody Curtis, a woman in her mid-fifties whose recurrent liver cancer has brought her to embrace the idea of ending life on her own terms.  Cody's story is by far the most harrowing and persuasive in a film filled with difficult themes and heart rending moments.  As she and her family openly struggle with end of life issues, the film blooms into one of the finest documentaries I've seen in many years.


How to Die in Oregon plays at the Whitsell Auditorium on Feb. 19th at 5:30pm.  Additional screenings are programmed at the Broadway Theater on Feb. 20th at 9:30am and Feb. 21st at 7:30pm.  
Advanced tickets for all three shows are sold out, so anyone looking to get in should arrive at least 1/2 hour early to take advantage of any rush tickets that may be sold.

Poetry, the newest film from South Korean director Lee Chang-Dong, is a slow-moving character piece built around a late in life awakening to beauty that is marred by a cruel and irresolvable tragedy.  The film follows Mija, an aging woman who enrolls in a poetry seminar.  Mija and her classmates are given the task of writing a single poem by the time the final session comes to a close.  Her instructor's advice for writing poetry involves opening up to one's surroundings, noticing the ordinary as if encountering it for the first time.  To this end, Chang-Dong places Mija into moments of discovery that resemble visual poetry--the first drops of a rainstorm scattering over a sheet of notebook paper, for instance--while simultaneously forcing his protagonist into a terrible awakening about the nature of her grandson, Wook, and his friends.

I really enjoyed Poetry even while acknowledging my impatience with its very deliberate pacing.  Chang-Dong's slow-movement through the plot of the film gives the viewer the opportunity to crawl into the skin of Mija, feeling the horror of the truths she must face, as well as the euphoria offered up in her embrace of the poetic.

Poetry plays at the Whitsell Auditorium on Feb. 19th at 2:30pm.  An additional screening is scheduled at the Broadway Theater on Feb. 21st at 6:30pm.

Portland International Film Festival preview day 10: THE FOUR TIMES & THE HOUSEMAID

Every year 'round festival time, I tend to encounter at least one feature that I end up considering my little secret.  It's usually something that didn't get a lot of advance press and/or awards gathered from Cannes or Sundance.  A couple of years ago, my "secret" was Jens Lien's The Bothersome Man.  This time around, it's Michelangelo Frammartino's The Four Times from Italy.

Frammartino's second movie is an entirely dialogue-free investigation of the transforming nature of existence, featuring an almost completely unexpected and very original shift in both the narrative and subject about a quarter of the way into the film.  It's a picture that successfully captures the most mundane aspects of rural life in ways that I've never seen depicted on celluloid.  Imagine a movie that gives equal billing to an elderly gentleman, a goat, a tree and a pile of charcoal.  Can't quite picture it?  Well, that's why you should catch The Four Times, which along with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Certified Copy is one of my favorites playing at PIFF this year.

The Four Times plays at the Whitsell Auditorium on Feb. 19th at 8:30pm.  An additional screening is scheduled at the Broadway Theater on Feb. 20th at 2:45pm.

Hailing from South Korea, The Housemaid is a melodrama featuring more than a small dollop of the extreme situations that cinema fans have come to expect of films from the region.  Psychosexual tension based around issues of class?  Check.  Spooky older backstabbing ladies?  Yes, indeed-y.  Ridiculously over the top endings that still kind of work due to their sheer audacity?  You betcha.

There are moments in Sang-soo Im's (The President's Last Bang) film that don't work.  Many of the salacious sex scenes have a straight from late night cable feel that reduce the impact of the impeccable design on display in much of the film.  And the meddling mother-in-law poised as an Iago-esque adviser pushes the tone of the melodrama past the breaking point at times.  But, all in all, you could do a lot worse than to include The Housemaid as part of your PIFF experience.

The Housemaid plays at the Broadway Theater on Feb. 18th at 8:15pm.  An additional screening is scheduled at Cinemagic on Feb. 19th at 8:45pm.

Portland International Film Festival preview day 9: LA PIVELLINA and THE WHISTLEBLOWER

Walking into the Whitsell Auditorium on Wednesday, memories of Uncle Boonmee still dancing in my head, I really had no preconceived notions about either La Pivellina or The Whistleblower, other than thinking that the synopsis of the second film resembled Norma Rae or Silkwood meets The Constant Gardener.

Hailing from Austria but set in Italy, Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel's La Pivellina revolves around the discovery of an abandoned child on a playground swing by Patty, an aging woman with a shocking red dye job.  Patty lives in a rundown trailer park with her husband, Walter.  She brings the child home, a decision that distresses Walter, as he believes that their class position will only add to any judgment that might be brought against them if the child were discovered by others.

This is a film that is, despite what I wrote above, absolutely not plot driven.  It meanders along in a way that resembles life, even if the decision made by Patty doesn't necessarily register as something that most folks would find themselves doing. 
The image quality of the digital transfer was problematic during Thursday's screening.  The imdb.com page for the film claims that the original source material was 16mm.  What I saw at the Whitsell often looked like a consumer grade camcorder image that was falling apart.  Severely underexposed passages with jagged diagonal lines were common, as were moments where objects with strongly vertical or horizontal lines seemed to bounce in and out of the image.  These rough spots were contrasted with incredibly beautiful moments of well-lit cinematography, making it apparent that the theater's equipment wasn't to blame for the marred sections of the film.

Given that very little happens in the movie, it was a shame that these image problems occurred, since it made it difficult to become fully engaged with the meandering flow of the film.  I might have liked it more if there hadn't been so many moments where I was busy being critical about the overall look of it.

La Pivellina plays at Broadway Theater on Feb. 14th at 6:15pm, Feb. 16th at 9:15pm and Feb. 17th at 8:45pm.

Larysa Kondracki's debut feature, The Whistleblower, is based on the true story of Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska police officer who takes on a position as a U.N. peacekeeping officer in post-war Bosnia.  After aiding the first successful prosecution of a domestic abuse case in the country, Kathryn is given the opportunity to work as a gender relations official.  It's not long before she discovers that what appears to be a local prostitution is actually a highly organized human trafficking ring, protected by the very people who are supposed to be aiding the Bosnian people.

The film is extremely heavy-handed in its storytelling.  Every bit of dramatic tension that can be wrung out of the story is exploited beyond its limits.  Each moment in the film seems to boldly exclaim its own significance, begging the audience to be moved by even the most minute of details.  Yes, producers and filmmakers of The Whistleblower we do realize that sex trafficking is bad.  We (and, yeah, I'm kind of speaking for the audience here) also think that a professional police officer from a major city probably would have heard of human trafficking before stumbling upon it.  We also think that Rachel Weisz and David Strathairn deserve better than the thankless roles they struggle to flesh out in this film.

The Whistleblower plays at Cinemagic on Feb. 18th at 6:15pm.  There are additional screenings at the Broadway Theater on Feb. 20th at 12pm and at Cinemagic on Feb. 21st at 5pm.