PIFF After Dark: RUBBER

 What to say about a horror movie starring a tire?  Unsurprisingly, Quentin Dupieux's Rubber was one of the most unique films showcased at this year's Portland International Film Festival, even among those relegated to the late-night PIFF After Dark screenings.  Despite a completely packed house at the Hollywood Theatre, it was a good call to schedule the film as a part of the newly minted after hours series, especially since it might not have had the same draw without the blessing of local Grindhouse Film Festival overlord Dan Halsted (who programmed all the PIFF After Dark features).

 As for the movie itself, it upended all my expectations of just being a slightly more wacky take on the tried and true splattercore genre.  Instead of riding that old pony to town, Rubber takes a decidedly more conceptual route, fixing its sights on nothing less than a playful examination of the act of observation.  The killer tire of the title ends up being really no more than a sideshow act to the ideas explored by Dupieux and his cast, which pits an in-film audience (watching the movie via binoculars) against the participants of the main narrative.  Those players acting out the narrative--tracking down the tire as it rolls from one corpse to its next victim--desperately want to rid themselves of the audience, 'cause without those eyes watching them they can just relax and go home.

Yes, it is super-meta material for a genre film.  And by the end of the movie, the concept has been stretched a little thin.  Still, Rubber rises above the standard horror fare through its dogged resistance to categorization and the reliance upon ideas rather than just cheap thrills.  Plus, it's wicked fun to see with an audience.

Hopefully, it'll make its way back to a screen in PDX soon, especially since I get the feeling that it just might connect with the same adventurous audiences that came out for last year's week long run of Hausu at Cinema 21.


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Portland International Film Festival preview day 15: OF LOVE & OTHER DEMONS & WHEN WE LEAVE

Hailing from Costa Rica, Of Love and Other Demons is the quite promising debut feature by director Hilda Hidalgo.  Working from a text by Gabriel García Márquez, Hidalgo crafts a deliberately paced film that entrances as much as it provokes.  As far as Márquez adaptations go, this one is especially appropriate in its translation of the great Columbian writer's evocative prose to equally fascinating imagery, especially in the haunting dream passages that are revisited several times during the film.

The story concerns Sierva, a young girl born of nobility who is bitten by a dog presumed to be rabid.  Given that it's set in colonial times, this turn of events ends up being tantamount to a prison sentence, as Sierva's condition is read by the local Catholic bishop as a possible case of demon possession.  Accordingly, she's locked up in a convent and put under the observation of a group of nuns and one sympathetic priest.

 

Simply told and visually stunning, Of Love and Other Demons is a film that absolutely deserves a larger audience.  Being that it's not one of the more hyped films at the festival, it would be easy to miss it in favor of more high profile films.  I'd suggest catching this modest piece now, since it could very well be the only chance to see it on the big screen in Portland.

Of Love and Other Demons plays at the Cinema 21 on Feb. 25th at 9pm and Feb. 26th at 2:30pm.

Sibel Kekilli is quickly emerging as one of the most talented actresses out of Germany.  After making her feature debut in Fatih Akin's Head-On, she was rewarded for her efforts with the best actress award at the German film awards.  With her most recently acclaimed performance in When We Leave, Kekilli has solidified the impression that she's an actress worth following, as well as capturing the best actress award in her native country for a second time.

In Feo Aladag's directorial debut, Kekilli plays Umay, a Turkish-German woman who flees the violence of her husband with her young son in tow.  Arriving at the doorstep of her parents home, all hopes that Umay will find solace in the arms of family are shattered as the strongly patriarchal traditions of her Turkish upbringing trump any concerns over her safety or happiness.

Pitch-perfect performances and Aladag's emphasis on characters over design blend to make When We Leave a completely engrossing piece of cinema, capturing a world that feels entirely lived-in and real.  There's only one moment near the very end of the film that feels even the slightest bit contrived.  But even that slight misstep can easily be forgiven when taking into account the power of the film as a whole.

When We Leave plays at the Whitsell Auditorium on Feb. 23rd at 8:30pm and on Feb. 26th at 8pm.

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.