Portland can count the the Hollywood Theatre's monthly Grindhouse Film Festival events among its many blessings. Where else but at these screenings are you gonna have the opportunity to see 35mm prints of b-grade & Euro-horror fare with an enthusiastic audience of folks willing to imagine a world where these films are equal, if not better than, the established classics of the cinematic canon? Or more specific to tonight's screening: where else are you likely to be treated to a non-digital presentation of Douglas McKeown's 1983 cult-classic The Deadly Spawn on a big ass screen? Nowhere else, that's where.
Take it away, Grindhouse press release:
The Grindhouse Film Festival presents a rare 35mm print of The Deadly Spawn! This is one of the great crowd-pleasing horror movies of the 1980's. The Deadly Spawn (1983) A meteorite crashes to Earth, bringing with it an angry three-headed alien beast. The alien hides in the basement of an old house, and starts devouring it's residents and giving birth to hundreds of eel-shaped shark-toothed spawn. Now it's up to a young boy and a small group of teenagers to fight the rampaging spawn, kill the alien beast, and save humanity. This film is a low-budget 80's horror masterpiece. 35mm 80's alien horror trailers before the movie!
The Deadly Spawn plays one-night-only at the Hollywood Theatre on Tuesday, August 28th at 7:30pm. More info available here.
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Let's just get straight to the point: Bart Layton'sThe Imposter is among a handful of must-see documentary features this year. Relating the details of the 1994 disappearance of a child in San Antonio, Texas and, as the title indicates, the emergence some three years later of an individual claiming to be that missing person, the film winds in and around competing versions of the truth, employing dramatic re-creations, a clever editing scheme that delays reveals and heightens suspense, and intimate interviews with some of the most unreliable subjects this side of the Watergate hearings. In The Imposter, the truth is never certain.
This is a maddening, fascinating watch, demanding an immediate
post-screening breakdown with fellow viewers. And, like the best
mysteries, (much) more than a little ambiguity remains after the
final shot hits the screen. A mind-boggling treat of a film. Do not miss it.
Highly recommended.
The Imposter begins its run at Cinema 21 on Friday, August 24th. More info available here.
Bart (David Anders) hasn't been the same since he returned from Iraq. You see, he didn't quite make it back alive but, then, he's not exactly dead, either. The Revenant is a low-budget, horror comedy that embraces the campier side of Bart's unique problem. Rather than adopting a gothic-inspired tone for this vampire-zombie hybrid, director D. Kelly Prior and crew play the situation for laughs, sending Bart and his best friend Joey (Chris Wylde) on nocturnal missions that revel in the more ridiculous end of blood-sucking pool.
The Revenant is at its best when it remains focused on Bart and Joey's adventures, which are generally cast as two guys up to no good during an endless series of nights on the town. Whenever it moves away from this dynamic, the subplots that emerge (be they the one about the bereaved girlfriend or the expertise on the occult offered up by her Wiccan friend) end up feeling like needless filler.
To be perfectly honest, there's no reason why this film (or the majority of low-budget indie fare) needs to be two hours long. There's enough good stuff going on here that one can imagine a much stronger version of The Revenant would exist if as much as a half an hour were excised from the overstuffed plot. Still, fans of campy horror along the lines of Fido or Near Dark will find plenty to love here.
The Revenant begins its run at the Hollywood Theatre on Friday, August 24th.More info available here.
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Drugstore Cowboy was the first film I ever saw with a conscious awareness that it had been made in Oregon. It screens tonight as a part of the NW Film Center's Top Down series. The following is an unused essay that I wrote about the film about a year or so ago.
Thurston Moore has spoken of Lou Reed’s tales of junk-addled characters as being especially seductive to people who, like himself, had a relatively sheltered upbringing, something to do with the kind of degradation and darkness that is appealing only to those who are fortunate enough not to experience it. It was my own fascination with such themes that set me up as an ideal viewer of Gus Van Sant’s 1989 breakthrough feature, Drugstore Cowboy. It’s a film that over the years, whenever I stumble upon it on cable, I end up watching the entire thing, dropping more immediate concerns as I’m drawn once more into the curious ebb and flow of its hazy and understated narrative.
The picture, centered around a crew of addict/thieves who go directly to the source, breaking into pharmacies and hospital storerooms for their fix, resists the urge to depict its characters in either clichéd moralistic or nihilistic terms, the usual gold standard for cinematic explorations of junkie experience (see Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm for the moralistic side of things and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream for the “scathing ride through a personal hell” flavor).
Instead, Van Sant positions his characters as willful rebels, thumbing their collective noses at a society that promises freedom but, more often than not, delivers safety in routine, something that becomes all the more ironic when one realizes that Bob (Matt Dillon) and his crew are merely trading one form of routine for another. Still, there is an enchanting rhythm that forms around the adventures of these people, blurring together the days and nights while placing emphasis only upon the events and cycles impacting this cloistered circle of comrades in track-marked arms.
Drugstore Cowboy is Robin Hood without the poor as beneficiary, Oceans Eleven without the organization. In short, it’s a study in self-involvement masquerading, somewhat sporadically, as a heist movie. It depicts a narcissism flowing out of Drugstore’s near singular focus on Bob, his more than healthy sense of superiority in the face of contrary evidence and, eventually, his instinctual attempt to save himself when the going gets rough. Though adapted from James Fogle’s novel of the same name, the film owes more than a small debt to the junkie prose of William S. Burroughs, whose presence in the film, inhabiting the role of Tom the priest as a slow-drawling giver of sage advice, hints at a connection between the piety infused within Burroughs own visions of users in a junk-filled universe and the worldview espoused by Bob throughout the film. There’s a holy center to both Bob’s belief system and junk use in general that neglects acknowledgement of and adherence to social norms, a near-religious fever managing to help Bob float above it all, enabling him to feel as if he’s the only one who understands the game.
And speaking of floating, Van Sant channels some seriously trippy and evocative imagery related to drug use during several key points in the picture, pulling the viewer into a space of surreality without constantly poking us in the eye with these visual inventions every time someone shoots up in the film. There’s the repeated floating objects placed against the cloud-filled Portland skies, representing at various times the oncoming rush of a narcotized state, Bob’s worries about hats on beds and incarceration, and even a slight homage to the discombobulating weightlessness experienced by Dorothy Gale in her journey to Oz. Van Sant also switches up film stocks a few times, nostalgically channeling the good old days, brilliantly using grainy, color Super 8 footage of Bob and his crew as they cavort around the streets of Portland. The exaggerated use of space and tracking shots in the scene where Bob and his estranged wife Diane (Kelly Lynch) part for the final time also springs to mind as one of the many perfectly visualized moments in the film.
To the credit of the filmmakers, the visual technique rarely gets in the way of the storytelling. The universality of that story, the notion Bob forwards when saying that, “most people…they don’t know how they’re going to feel from one moment to the next,” becomes a reasonable, albeit dreadfully flawed, rationalization for the path he and his crew have chosen. We’re all emotional animals, supremely uncomfortable with the unknown, whether it lies outside us or within us. It’s this humane rendering of Bob's disease, posited as a cure for an entirely different and more common illness, that of uncertainty, that makes the film so compelling, ultimately allowing it to transcend genre and stand as a singular piece, not necessarily about addiction as much as life itself.
The NW Film Center's Top Down Rooftop Cinema series presents Drugstore Cowboy on Thursday, August 23rd at 8pm. More info available here. Remember to find and "like" us on our Facebook page.
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A Todd Solondz movie is largely an in or out proposition. He doesn't make family friendly fare; regularly interrogating social taboos in his films, and there's little to no effort on his part to dumb down or soften his stories for wider acceptance. After scoring a cult following for divisive early works like Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, there's been a noticeable drop off in audience numbers and critical support for his subsequent releases. You'd be totally forgiven at this late date for writing Solondz off as a has-been miserablist taking out his angst on both his characters and viewers.
Chances are, if you hold that opinion, you didn't see his last movie, the darkly, funny Life During Wartime, and probably plan on avoiding his latest comedy, Dark Horse. That last move would be a mistake. Straight up, Dark Horse is the best film Solondz has made in over a decade and, without hyperbole, I'd go as far as to label it one of the funniest releases of the year.
Dark Horse takes place, like most all of Solondz' films, in the suburbs. Jordan Gelber plays Abe, a college dropout in his thirties, still living with his parents (Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow) and (barely) working at his father's firm. It's safe to say that Abe's a bit of a non-starter, an observation that is only reinforced when contrasted with his brother Richard's (Justin Bartha) success as a physician. Very early in the film, Abe encounters Miranda (Selma Blair); a thoroughly depressed woman with a similar living situation, at a wedding and basically sweet talks a phone number out of her.
An uneasy relationship develops between the two, due chiefly to Abe's persistence and the absurdly positive facade that he adopts whenever Miranda is present. Solondz explores Abe's mood swings through both simple observation and the relentlessly saccharine pop music that enters the soundtrack via Abe's cell phone and the stereo of his comically large, yellow Hummer. This highly obtrusive music serves a dual purpose, working as both an obvious (and hilarious) punchline and as a counterpoint to Abe's unacknowledged and growing angry, depressive state.
As it proceeds, the film ends up moving into areas that aren't necessarily meant to reflect reality as much as comment on internal damage wrought from years of not living up to one's potential. Some audience members might have difficulty taking the leap as the film transitions away from a more literal mode of storytelling. Personally, I wanted to watch Dark Horse a second time as soon as it was over. Solondz doesn't pull punches or make it easy to embrace his work but the humor he spins out of the wretched lives of his characters has a whiff of truth and authenticity that can't be denied.
Highly recommended.
Dark Horse begins its run at Living Room Theaters on Friday, August 17th.More info available here.
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It's been 3+ years since locally-based animation house Laika released their first feature Coraline. Since then, the studio and Coraline's director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach) parted ways, causing many to wonder what shape their next feature would take. Cue ParaNorman, another stop-motion animated children's film that retains the supernatural context of Coraline while chucking the pervading, overly serious tone of Laika's debut.
Co-directed by Chris Butler and Sam Fell, ParaNorman relays the story of Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee), a young social outcast living in the New England town of Blithe Hollow who can, to quote a popular 90s thriller, "see dead people," much to the chagrin of his father (Jeff Garlin) who is frightened by his son's increasingly peculiar behavior. It's not long before Norman and his only friend Neil (Tucker Albrizzi) are approached by Blithe Hollow's resident hermit Mr. Prenderghast (John Goodman) who's looking to recruit Norman's gifts in the fight against zombies and a witch's curse.
Visually, this is one heck of stunner, among the best looking stop-motion animations released by anyone outside of Aardman Animations. The characters are all clean lines, loose-limbed and expressive. Best of all, the backdrop of Blithe Hollow, a tourist town shamelessly trading in on its dark history (resembling Salem, Massachusetts in more than a few ways) is filled to the brim with witch-themed attractions, offering a colorful array of oddly named businesses ("Witchy Wieners," for instance) that catch the eye throughout the picture.
Story-wise, Norman's family life, supernatural abilities, and persecution by a school bully keep things lively and interesting. But, once Norman and Neil set off to stop the curse, the film settles into a pattern embraced by far too many kids films nowadays: the plot points diminish in favor of something resembling a treasure hunt (a few of the Harry Potter films operated this way, too) with the characters needing to accomplish one goal before setting off on another. Kids are unlikely to be bothered by this development but adults may find the thinly-veiled repetition monotonous. Fortunately, there's always something visually arresting onscreen to distract whatever complaints one might have about the story. All in all, this is a solid, fun film with better than average use of 3D technology.
Oh, and a side note: in a less than scientific study, I noticed during last night's screening of the film that kids don't really get artful fades to white. During the three or four occasions that it happened in ParaNorman, many children in the audience thought something was wrong with the projection, eliciting questions to parents along the lines of "what happened?"
ParaNorman opens at several Portland area theaters on Friday, August 17th.More info available here.
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Way back in the early 90s, Nancy Savoca was making a name for herself as one of the rising directors in the indie film world. Thanks to critical hits like Household Saints and Dogfight, a lot of attention was coming her way and then...well, not much happened. Since then, Savoca has worked sporadically in television, producing only a few under the radar films (of which I've only seen the not so great Rosie Perez vehicle, The 24 Hour Woman). Now nearly a decade and a half past her initial success, Savoca's got a brand new flick hitting screens this week.
Union Square pairs Savoca with fellow "what's she been up to" girl Mira Sorvino (okay, to be fair, Sorvino's IMDb page reveals that's she's been working a lot, just not in many high profile pics) for a tale of longstanding strife between sisters. Sorvino plays Lucy, a chronically anxious and self-obsessed extrovert who arrives in Union Square with the misguided intention of spending some unscheduled time with her lover. He shuts down her plans before they can even meet up, generating a outsized dose of public phone rage from Lucy. Quickly formulating a backup plan, Lucy lands unannounced at the doorstep of her estranged sister Jenny (Tammy Blanchard) who lives with her fiance Bill (Mike Doyle). Jenny's got her own issues, hiding her Bronx origins from Bill and swallowing her anger like it's going out of style.
Sadly, the script is severely myopic about how the audience should view these characters. Instead of allowing us to observe their flaws honestly via their behaviors and interactions, the tone of the piece constantly modulates forcing the actors, especially Sorvino, to go from funny to sad and quiet to overblown repeatedly and without warning, dulling the overall impact of what actually works here.
In its favor, the first third of Union Square is incredibly funny and tense. Sorvino delivers a great performance, close to her best ever, and cinematographer Lisa Leone's handheld camerawork offers a perfect balance of looseness and intimacy. Ultimately, though,
it is the writing that proves too histrionic, leaving me wishing that the same
improvisational feel present within the look of the film had bled into
the telling of its story.
Union Square begins its run at Living Room Theaters on Friday, August 17th.More info available here.
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I don't really have much to add to what I said about the film when it last played in PDX, except that when a Fritz Lang film, especially Metropolis, plays on a big screen in your town, you'd better get your ass in a seat for it. A world class filmmaker's (arguably) greatest work matched with a live original score is an occasion worth leaving the house for, friends.
Here's the trailer:
And, as a bonus, a fascinating, 50 minute-long interview with Lang conducted by director William Friedkin:
Filmusik Organ Grinders presents Metropolis with Bent Knee at the Hollywood Theatre on Friday, August 17th at 8pm. More info available here. Remember to find and "like" us on our Facebook page. Subscribe to the blog's feed here.
