KUNG FU THEATER presents INVINCIBLE SHAOLIN

Kung Fu Theater hits the Hollywood Theatre once again with a screening of Chang Cheh's (The One-Armed Swordsman) 1978 film Invincible Shaolin.  Hollywood Theatre programming maestro Dan Halsted claims it's "one of the greatest films in the Shaw Brothers canon."   He's got the only existing 35mm print of the film and will be sharing it with the faithful Kung Fu congregants for one-night-only.

Halsted's got a couple of things planned before running the film, too.  Here's what he's got in store for ya:

I'll be showing a slideshow from my adventure unearthing the largest collection of 35mm kung fu films in the Western Hemisphere (including this film). 
I'll also talk about my experience being a victim of excessive force by the Portland Police, my recent lawsuit, and how the city attorney tried to use my kung fu collection against me in the case. The issue with the Portland Police using excessive force has been tolerated for far too long. See the KATU story about my case here.

And here's the Kung Fu Theater synopsis of Invincible Shaolin from their press release:

Kung Fu Theater presents the only known 35mm print of INVINCIBLE SHAOLIN. One of the greatest kung fu films of all time! INVINCIBLE SHAOLIN (1978) The Venom Mob is back! 
The stars of FIVE ELEMENT NINJAS return as a group of fighters who are pitted against each other in a North Shaolin vs. South Shaolin kung fu showdown! Three South Shaolin students start intensive (and extremely strange) training to master various fighting styles and martial arts weaponry. Funky style and huge sideburns reign supreme, colliding with director Chang Cheh's trademark violence and homo-eroticism. Get ready for non-stop kung fu mayhem, and some of the best training sequences in martial arts movie history. A true classic.

Invincible Shaolin plays one-night-only at the Hollywood Theatre on Tuesday, May 8th.  More info available here.


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PSU FILM presents MANHUNTER

A last minute heads-up:  the Portland State film department is presenting a one-night-only screening of Michael Mann's Manhunter tonight (5/7) at the Hollywood Theatre.  Professor Dustin Morrow will introduce the film, no doubt offering up some context or lens through which to read the film.


Here's what the Hollywood's press release has to say about the presentation:
Michael Mann writes, produces, directs and edits his own films. He has a hand in the costuming, the art direction, and the cinematography. Mann’s films demonstrate a cinema of control – he obsesses over every single frame. No contemporary filmmaker over the last two decades has more delicately straddled the line between mainstream big-budget blockbusters and personal, art-house films. Mann’s psyche is always front-and-center in his films, questioning masculinity, professionalism, bureaucracies, authority, corruption, and the roles that modern man is expected to play in society. His films are simultaneously authentic and dreamlike, deliberate, surreal and stylized. Mann is a filmmaker of fierce vision, an original and influential voice in contemporary cinema. 

On May 7th, the Hollywood Theater, in partnership with the Portland State University Film Program, will present a screening of the film many consider to be Mann’s masterpiece, Manhunter. An adaptation of Thomas Harris’s bestseller Red Dragon, and the first film to introduce the character of Hannibal Lector, Manhunter follows FBI profiler William Petersen as he attempts to track down a vicious serial killer known as the Tooth Fairy.

Manhunter plays one-night-only at the Hollywood Theatre on Monday, May 7th.  More info available here. 


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THE RAIN FALLS DOWN ON PDX: WEEKEND ROUNDUP FOR 5/4

It's been a long, busy (mostly non-blogging) week.  Here's a short nod to several films playing around PDX this weekend:

First up, the Hollywood Theatre has a zombie flick set during the Cuban revolution.  It's called (what else?) Juan of the Dead.

Cinema 21's is giving everybody another week to catch Terrence Davies' excellent new film, The Deep Blue Sea, starring Rachel Weisz.  My review from last week can be accessed here.

Nanni Moretti's (The Son's Room) latest feature, We Have a Pope opens this week at Living Room Theaters.  Everyone at the PIFF press screening I saw this at laughed a lot.  Me, not so much.

 

NW Film Center begins their Studio Ghibli retrospective tonight with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.  They'll also be screening Castle in the Sky and fan-favorite My Neighbor Totoro (here's my earlier piece on the last film) this weekend.

The Laurelhurst Theater's got a sure thing going with their screening of John Huston's time-tested classic, The Maltese Falcon.  Humphrey Bogart stars as Dashiell Hammett's hardened detective Sam Spade.

Meanwhile, 5th Avenue Cinema is hosting an event dubbed Visuals: A Community Film Festival on Fri. the 4th, featuring works by locals.  Below is a preview from The New Debutantes, directed by Jarratt Taylor:




 



And the Clinton Street Theater's got the documentary The Clean Bin Project lined up this week, along with their usual weekend shenanigans involving late night screenings of Repo! The Genetic Opera and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

And, of course, there's this lil' super hero movie opening all over God's green earth this weekend, too.  Looks like I'll be joining the masses by heading out to the 99W Drive-in to catch it tonight:

Until next time...



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THE FILMS OF STUDIO GHIBLI: MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO

Okay, I'll admit it: I'd never seen My Neighbor Totoro or the majority of the output from the geniuses at Studio Ghibli until very recently.  That's part of the pleasure of writing for the newsroom site (as well as covering NWFC content on the blog); since a good chunk of what's programmed at the NW Film Center is repertory-based, I get the chance to wax philosophical about old favorites as well as other works of note that may have passed me by somewhere down the line.

So, yeah, many of you have probably seen the film more than a few times with your kids, grandchildren or friends.  But, since it's new to me, I'm going to willfully ignore everyone else's superior knowledge of all things Totoro and just let this play out as if we're all looking at a new, unbelievably great anime.  (The author takes a deep calming breath).  Okay, here we go...

Two young girls, Satsuki and Mei, move into a large, dusty house with their father, preparing the home for when their convalescing mother is well enough to rejoin the family.  The girls waste no time, rushing to explore their new surroundings and, what do you know, they happens upon otherworldly creatures, unlocking a world teeming with magical possibilities.

I know what you're thinking; these are fairly standard tropes within both children's stories and coming of age flicks.  My Neighbor Totoro, however, is no common children's entertainment.  It's a wondrous work of beauty that takes familiar elements and blends them into a highly accessible, ageless masterpiece that transcends cultural and generational barriers.

The animated feature hails from 1988, long before Disney turned Hayao Miyazaki into a household name in the West.  With Totoro, Miyazaki draws more than a little from the atmospherics (and some of the imagery) of Lewis Carroll's most famous story.  It's impossible to watch Mei travel through the arched thicket without being reminded of Alice's trip through the rabbit hole.

Miyazaki would later dip again into Carroll's iconic tale when making Spirited Away (2001), but, between the Cheshire cat-like bus and the white "rabbit" (or whatever it is) spirit that Mei bounds after through a field of tall grass, Totoro's borrowing of these recognizable features feels more in line with the sense of discovery forwarded in Carroll's writing than it does in that later film.

Discovery is what drives this film.  And Mei and her older sister findings aren't limited to just Totoro and his spirit companions.  As the story progresses, the girls deal with some fairly advanced emotional material: worries about the future, their mother, each other.  It brings to mind what Slavoj Žižek says in Sophie Fiennes' The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema about how to read the films of Alfred Hitchcock.  Žižek observes that if one peels away the supernatural or fantastical event, it's far easier to see what is really happening in the story.

Read this way, Totoro reveals itself as a film about the anxiety felt when first entering into the knowledge of harsh universal truths, such as coming to terms with the vulnerability of loved ones and, by extension, one's own mortality.  It's pretty heavy content for a kids film but, in Miyazaki's masterful hands, it's deftly balanced with a boundless sense of wonder that lifts the work into the stratosphere, where hope can fly in the face of despair. 

My Neighbor Totoro screens as a part of the retrospective series, Castles in the Sky: Miyazaki, Takahata, and the Masters of Studio Ghibli.  More info about the Studio Ghibli series here.
It plays at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) on Saturday, May 5th at 4pm and Sunday, May 6th at 7pm.  
The film will be presented in the original Japanese w/ English subtitles. 


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A FORCE OF NATURE: A VERY INSPIRING WHIRLWIND

Vibrating like a raw nerve, Ellen Ratner makes for a fearsome presence at the fore of Academy award-winning director Barbara Kopple's biographical profile on the journalist/philanthropist, A Force of Nature.  Ratner's staff appears half-inspired/half-frightened of the woman; one staffer takes most of a minute to verbally feel his way through a positive spin on his working relationship with her.  And yet, everyone in the small office easily spills their assessment that Ellen is a good or kind woman; it's just the delivery of that kindness that can be a little rough around the edges at times.

The film's title comes from one of those staff interviews.  It's a thoroughly appropriate label, as well as being a clue to Ratner's way of working, something which (at least in the film) she seems to always be doing.  Kopple catches her at work, challenging both conservatives and liberals to engage in discourse; she tries to explain to a friend that despising Michele Bachmann's rhetoric doesn't preclude her from befriending the conservative politician.

While Ratner's repartee with pundits and players of the Washington D.C. political scene is highly entertaining, the film really blooms when it looks beyond the day job and to her work as an advocate for the oppressed and suffering.  Kopple travels with her to south Sudan where she engages in work opposed to modern day slavery.  The film also visits the Katrina-ravaged regions of Mississippi where Ratner began a recovery non-profit after a chance meeting with a woman on a plane.

 

Remarkably, I found my opinion of Ratner shifting during the course of the film.  Her energy comes off as a little too overbearing at first but, by the end of the film, I found myself wanting to shake her hand for her tireless efforts.  A Force of Nature reveals her as someone who never passes up an opportunity to advocate for positive change.  A very inspiring whirlwind, indeed.

 

POWFest, NW Documentary and the Hollywood Theatre present "A Night with Barbara Kopple" on Friday, May 4th at the Hollywood Theatre.  

A Force of Nature will screen at 7:30pm with Kopple and Ellen Ratner in attendance.  

A POWFest Classic screening of Kopple's Academy award-winning documentary Harlan County U.S.A. will follow at 9:15pm.

More info about tickets and a pre-screening reception event can be found here.

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THE GREAT NORTHWEST: A LONG JOURNEY, REPEATED

The past haunts and predetermines the path taken by Matt McCormick's latest film project, The Great Northwest, a nearly wordless, travelogue-based documentary that returns the director to his experimental roots, following the more narrative-based musings of his feature debut, Some Days Are Better Than Others.  McCormick traces a long journey taken by four women in the late 1950s; a recreational odyssey of the past unearthed by the filmmaker when he purchased a scrapbook filled with photos and various other ephemera from the trip.  Inspired by his find, he decided to repeat the voyage, traveling the same route and comparing the sights as they stood in 1958 with how they appear in the present day.

The women (Bev, Berta, Sissie and Clarice) were all nearing 40 when they headed out on the road, before the interstate highway system made such journeys as direct as they often are today.  But even before the lonely stretches of I-5 and its paved brethren came into being, theirs was a path that appears loosely planned, guided by whim and the spirit of spontaneity.  Sure, they (and McCormick) hit some pretty significant landmarks (Yellowstone National Park, Multnomah Falls, etc.) but the majority of the stops are at small, lesser known restaurants and attractions.

The Great Northwest rarely strays from the structure that McCormick lays out at the introduction of the film.  If the ladies visited a spot, he and his camera are headed there, too.  With a form some might unfairly dismiss as smacking of NPR-aesthetics, the piece easily could have descended into dry journalistic cliches but there's a winking humor and intelligence present throughout that prevents the piece from unraveling in familiar or expected ways.

Finer details of the journey, such as overheard bits of conversation as McCormick visits various locations, a long, slow drift through a cattle cluttered stretch of road, or, especially, the sole moment where the filmmaker steps out in front of his camera to be photographed atop an (once living?) animal, keep the film humming along at a rhythm all its own.  And, speaking of the person behind the camera, it certainly doesn't hurt that McCormick exhibits a great eye for capturing landscapes, either.

The Great Northwest (excerpt) from matt mccormick on Vimeo.

The Great Northwest screens  at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) on Wednesday, May 2nd and Thursday, May 3rd at 7pm.  Director Matt McCormick will be in attendance both nights.  More info about the screenings available here.

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IT CAME FROM DETROIT: THE WILD SOUND OF AN INDUSTRIAL CITY

Chronicling the contemporary garage rock music scene of Detroit, James Petix' It Came from Detroit doesn't stray too far from the standard formula for how these types of documentaries operate.  If you've watched Hype!, High and Dry or the locally-produced Northwest Passage: The Birth of Portland's DIY Culture, you know what to expect but, as with the vast majority of music scene documentaries, the draw is in the scene being profiled.  And, whad'ya know, Detroit's got more than its share of great, loud punk/garage bands that aren't named The Stooges or MC5.

Petix traces the scene from the mid-80s emergence of The Gories up through the rocket-like ascendance of The White Stripes and beyond.  Along the way, he highlights bands within the scene as diverse as The Von Bondies, The Hentchmen, The Electric Six, Blanche, The Detroit Cobras and more.  Fans of any of these bands or gritty rock sounds, in general, should be pleased.  Folks hoping to see interviews with or a lot of footage of The White Stripes in action...well, there's quite a bit of talk about them and at least one clip of them on stage.  But, again, this is a documentary focused on the wild sounds of the entire industrial city, not just their most famous recent export.  And you could certainly take another look at Under Great White Northern Lights after seeing It Came from Detroit, if you'd like; no one's stopping you.

It Came from Detroit plays one-night-only at the Hollywood Theatre on Friday, April 27th.  More info available here.

The film opens in Seattle on the 28th at The Grand Illusion Cinema.


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