Word came down the pike a few days ago that the scheduled weekend screenings of A Cat in Paris have been canceled at the NW Film Center. While it's a bit of a bummer that the animated, Academy award-nominated feature won't be lighting up the screen at the Whitsell, one can hardly complain about the films filling in the programming gap.
Here's what the folks at the NWFC have brewed up for the weekend:
My Neighbor Totoro on Fri. June 8th at 7pm, Sat. June 9th at 5pm & 8:45pm and Sun. June 10th at 7pm. My review from a few weeks back is here. This will be the English language version, so it's super kid-friendly. One of the best children's movies out there, really.
The Triplets of Belleville on Fri. June 8th at 8:45pm, Sat. June 9th at 7pm and Sun. June 10th at 5pm. Nominated for two Oscars.
More info about the screenings available here. Remember to find and "like" us on our Facebook page.
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It's nearly impossible to talk about Timothy Treadwell without acknowledging the impact that Werner Herzog's 2005 documentary Grizzly Man has had on the public's understanding of him and his work. For most, myself included, Herzog's incredible film was an introduction to the man, one that focused attention primarily on his demise, negating much of what his intent as a naturalist might have been as he spent his summers communing with the natural world.
As Cinema Project's spring season draws to a close, they've put together a rare opportunity for Portland to view Treadwell's work as a filmmaker and photographer, divorced of any commentary associated with his end. Heather Lane, one of the organizers of the collective, states that, "this is an attempt on our part to change the focus on Timothy Treadwell from who he was (and how he died), to what he accomplished as a filmmaker and photographer." "The footage does not include him, but focuses on the animals and landscape. It is amazing that we have been given access to this footage and have been allowed to edit it for this show, something that Cinema Project has never done before as an organization."
The result, 13 Summers, draws from the footage that Treadwell shot over the course of his time in the Alaskan wild. This single-night event, arranged in conjunction with the opening of The Creative Music Guild's Experimental Music and Art Festival, will pair the images with live musical accompaniment, courtesy of an ensemble of local and traveling musicians.
Here's Cinema Project's press release detailing the presentation:
This
program features a multi-screen projection performance of footage from
filmmaker and naturalist Timothy Treadwell. With live accompaniment by
an ensemble of local and international musicians, this event opens the
Creative Music Guild's Experimental Music and Art Festival. Treadwel
spent thirteen summers in Hallo Bay and Kaflia Bay in Alaska, living
among and filming grizzly bears. His life and death have been well
documented, but his work as a filmmaker and photographer has been
somewhat overlooked.
This
screening is an attempt at un-tethering the footage from narration and
from media-driven perspective, in order to highlight the beautiful and
majestic images as they are. With the addition of a live musical
soundtrack, the audience's experience of the natural world and
theanimalsweshareitwith becomes more immediate, and more personal
Timothy Treadwell's footage was generously made available to us through
Grizzly People, a grassroots organization devoted to preserving bears
and their wilderness habitat in the hopes that humans will learn to live
in peace with the bear, wilderness, and fellow humans.
UPDATE: The Creative Music Guild's Facebook page reports that the ensemble for the event will include:
Tim DuRoche- percussion Reed Wallsmith - saxophone Jon Shaw - bass Doug Theriault - guitar, noise Dan Duval - guitar Joe Cunningham- saxophone Maybe more too.
Cinema Project & The Creative Music Guild present 13 Summers at the Bamboo Grove Salon on Friday, June 8th.More info on the program availablehere.
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Just in case anyone needs to catch up with what exactly B-Movie Bingo constitutes, here's the skinny, straight from the horse's mouth:
B-MOVIE BINGO is a game that is exactly like it sounds — OR MORE. It’s simple–we play bingo to the most awesome movie cliches ever committed to celluloid, like: “LONG BORING SCENE OR MALE PONY TALE”, “TEAMED UP WITH ROOKIE OR ANIMAL”, and “WHITE SUIT OR TROPICAL ENDING”. For maybe the first time in a theater, see the relatives and employees of A-list actors you know and love like Sylvester Stallone, whose brother bears a remarkable resemblance to him. Compete for prizes! Yell at your fellow movie nerds over the elusive and mysterious “BLANK SQUARE”! Relax: it’s B-MOVIE BINGO.
Wanna know more about the film? Here's the B-Movie Bingo synopsis: You can take THIS to the bank! In HARD TO KILL Steven Seagal is Mason Storm (best movie hero name ever), an L.A. detective who spends the first twenty minutes of the movie in a seven year coma. (RIP Mason Storm’s coma, 1983-1990). When he wakes up from the coma, he has a huge goatee, which is a sure sign your nurse has the hots for you. Within seconds of becoming aware of his surroundings, he flashes back to the atrocities that befell his family at the hands of a dirty politician… while a hit man roams the halls hunting him down as he wheels around on his gurney. After a narrow escape, his nurse takes him to an Eastern-tinged country estate where he recuperates, enduring various training montages and meditation zones. Once he regains his strength and hones his lone wolf attitude, total violence ensues as he exacts revenge on those who wronged him. Then he goes on a vacation.
The B-Movie Bingo presentation of Hard to Kill happens on Tuesday, June 5th at the Hollywood Theatre. More info available here.
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This is definitely a last-minute posting on my part, since the film being highlighted plays today at 2pm. But, as I mentioned a while back, Carroll Ballard's 1979 adaptation of The Black Stallion was one of my favorite films as a kid. And it's a movie that still stands up when viewing it with adult eyes; the storm sequence at the beginning is thrilling and more than a little bit frightening (but in a good, not gonna make anyone under the age of five begin weeping, kinda way).
Very highly recommended.
The Black Stallion plays today (6/2) at the Hollywood
Theatre at 2pm. More info available here.
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The Color Wheel may very well be the biggest comedy surprise of the year. But what's most surprising about it is that it works at all. "Range-y" might be a word plucked straight from celebrity-host critiques of reality television contestants but it perfectly applies to many aspects of The Color Wheel; from the cinematography to the acting, the individual components of the film veer from brilliant to just kind of awkwardly composed at times. Yet, the things that do work here work really well.
It mostly boils down to the chemistry between the two leads, actor/director/co-writer Alex Ross Perry and his co-writer/co-star Carlen Altman.
They play a brother (Colin) and sister (JR) who feebly attempt to set aside
the strained nature of their relationship long enough for him to help her move
out of her professor's apartment following a failed and probably inadvisable romance. The cease
fire doesn't last for long. JR soon begins gleefully skewering Colin's effectively
platonic relationship with his girlfriend, while Colin takes every
opportunity to point out how unwanted JR is within their family.
The tension surrounding their back and forth squabbling is nearly ceaseless. It's also incredibly funny. As an actor, Perry appears intent on stuffing as many words into a sentence as humanly possible. This would be annoying in most cases. But, as Colin, his never-ending, half-mumbled diatribes offer insight into a character who, outside of his family circle, probably doesn't get listened to all that often; thus, the urgent need to cram all his thoughts into as compact a space as possible. Real people might not express themselves as Colin does but Perry's performance still registers as true.
Altman's take on JR is no less exposed. Her dreams of becoming a broadcast journalist are far out of reach; from her social awkwardness to juvenile way she carries herself, no one is going to hire JR to read the news or anything else. It's not difficult to gather that the end of her bad relationship with the professor is just par for the course. With her brother at her side, she forms one-half of a duo of misfits whose intelligence and talent goes wholly unappreciated by those surrounding them.
Every year I have people asking me about what new films I think are funny.
My answer is usually that "comedy recommendations are hard," followed by
a very short list of movies that I found humorous. With The Color Wheel, I've got another title to add to my chuckle list for 2012. This film has all the makings of a new cult comedy classic. It's a little rough around the edges but glides by on both charm and the crackling wit of the dialogue. And Perry and Altman display a mighty rapport here that makes them incredibly fun to watch. Surprisingly few films have as much going for them as The Color Wheel.
The Color Wheel screens at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art
Museum) on Friday, June 1st at 7pm & 9pm, Saturday, June 2nd at 5pm, 7pm & 9pm, and Sunday June 3rd at 4:30pm. More info available here.
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Right up front, it should be understood that Jon Jost's 1977 deconstruction of the road movie, Last Chants for a Slow Dance (Dead End), nudges the viewer to abandon the need to know where the story is heading for most of the film. Sure, there are familiar signposts and very subtle hints at genre conventions; at times, it appears as if we might be moving into territory once mined by Monte Hellman, but Jost isn't as interested in sustaining an existentially-flavored narrative or tone as much as he is in offering up a character piece that doesn't rely on the safety of a three-act structure. Produced for only $2000, Slow Chants is a film like no other, a
reminder that cinema doesn't always have to embrace the all-too-common formalism of the mainstream to successfully relay a story.
Jost introduces us to Tom (Tom Blair), a man on the road with the expressed goal of finding employment. Except, he's really not looking for a job. He complains about his wife (Jessica St. John), his kids ("I never wanted kids") and his duty to them, never once acknowledging that there might have been choices that lead him to this reality. Although the journey is necessitated by his familial responsibilities, Tom mostly uses it to free himself of them, drifting aimlessly away from the orbit of those that need him the most, expressing only disdain for them when he can be troubled to acknowledge their existence at all.
There's an episodic quality to the situations that Tom wanders
through, whether it be time spent drinking at a bar, a conversation with
a hitchhiker, or an encounter with a man on the side of the road. Jost
stitches these moments together with stubbornly static, visual
compositions (of the road, an abandoned storefront, clouds, etc.) and sustained fades to black, pulling the audience into a disjointed fugue that reflects the protagonist's lost meanderings through an undefined landscape.
At times, it's easy to forget the few details we've gleaned thus far, as
Jost invites us to watch as Tom flips through a stack of postcards in
real time, for instance.
All of which sounds like a recipe for a film lacking meaning; an assessment that couldn't be further from the truth. The last scene of the film; the one that comes after the film's most shocking (and, yet, still emotionally numbed) sequence, provokes one to reassess the entire piece based on what we've just witnessed. It plays out as a clear-eyed, glorious end to an otherwise elliptical portrait of a sociopath.
Last Chants for a Slow Dance (Dead End) plays at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art
Museum) on Thursday, May 31st at 7pm. Jost's Parable (2008) follows at 9pm. Additional information on the screening available here.
On Sunday, June 3rd, two more films by Jost, The Long Shadow (La Lunga Ombra) and Images of a Lost City will screen at 6:30pm and 8:15pm, respectively. More info available here.
Jon Jost will be in attendance for all four screenings. He's also leading a workshop on digital production on June 2nd and 3rd.
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Paul Newman's film adaptation of Ken Kesey's great Northwestern logging strike tale, Sometimes a Great Notion, returns to the Hollywood Theatre this weekend for a limited, 4-day run. Starring Newman, Henry Fonda and Lee Remick, it's a chance to see a rarely screened, regionally-filmed classic; the only known 35mm print in existence will light up the big screen at the Hollywood. Given how tossed off the dvd version of this title is (it's been relegated to the made-to-order, dv-r "Universal Vault Series"), you practically owe it to yourself to check this out this weekend.
Sometimes a Great Notion plays at the Hollywood Theatre on Friday, June 1st through Monday, June 4th. More info available here. Remember to find and "like" us on our Facebook page. Subscribe to the blog's feed here.
