TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME -- A FASCINATING MESS, INDEED-Y

Easily among the most confounding broadcast-to-big screen translations ever produced, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me completely capsized both in terms of critical and audience reception at the time of its 1992 release.  To be fair, a good deal of the once large, built-in, tv fan base for the film had already fallen away during the final season of the show (for more discussion on that topic, see this previous post).  Personally, I recall seeing the film on opening night at a small town, local theater with somewhere around seven other people in attendance; the film was dead upon arrival and limped out of town shortly thereafter.

The reviews were brutal.  The late Vincent Canby wrote that it was "not the worst film ever made; it just seems to be."  Peter Travers declared that "the impulse in the arts to build idols and smash them has found another victim in David Lynch."  My own reaction was a fairly muted response; I liked the parts I liked and remained curious about the other stuff, but it's a film that's difficult to be enthusiastic about on a first viewing.  Time has been kind to FWWM (Fire Walk With Me) and, unsurprisingly, given Lynch's growing reputation as our nation's chief surrealist, a cult audience has been erected around the film after its release on home video.

As an unabashed Lynchophile, I've seen it at least two dozen times now; it was one of my favorites vhs tapes to toss on when I was working graveyard shifts in the late 90s.  Some fans (British critic Mark Kermode among them) now insist that it's his greatest work, an assessment that I find more reasonable each time I view the film.

To a large extent, though the film's plot is explicitly informed by conditions drawn out by the series, the major difference between FWWM and many of the other films in Lynch's oeuvre is that there's such a magnitude of obscurity packed into its many wild and wooly passages that by the time the end credits crawl across the screen it remains essentially unknowable; it becomes an indecipherable mystery that trumps the relatively basic puzzle proposed by the series.

In terms of sheer inscrutability, only Inland Empire, the film that very well end up being Lynch's swan song, can challenge FWWM for pure WTF whiz-bang.  Fire Walk With Me is both an untidy and teetering mess from a master filmmaker and a masterwork that contains many ill-advised and resolutely awful sequences of questionable performance and construction.  A fascinating mess, indeed-y.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me plays one-night-only at the Hollywood Theatre on Wednesday, June 27th at 9:30pm.  More info available here.

 
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GRINDHOUSE FILM FESTIVAL presents DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE

It's that time of the month again: Dan Halsted's back with another installment of his Grindhouse Film Festival at the Hollywood Theatre.  This month's selection is the 1980 Joseph Ellison chiller Don't Go in the House.  It's a rare opportunity to see the film on the big screen and probably the only chance most Portlanders will ever have to see in projected on 35mm.  Don't miss it.

Here's the Grindhouse Film Fest rundown of the event:
Don’t Go in the House (1979) Donald is a young man living with his overbearing mother. When he comes home one day to find she has died in her sleep, his sanity (which was a little shaky to begin with) flies out the window, and the voices in his head become overpowering. When he buys a flamethrower, this becomes one of the greatest horror films of all time. 35mm 70′s horror trailers before the movie!

Don't Go in the House plays one-night-only at the Hollywood Theatre on Tuesday, June 26th at 7:30pm.  More info available here.

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MUSIC FROM THE BIG HOUSE & SURVIVING PROGRESS

Hey there faithful readers, 

I'm in the midst of shooting a couple of projects right now, so, rather than writing two separate posts, here's a couple of capsule reviews of two new documentaries opening today in Portland:

Bruce McDonald directed one of my favorite b-grade road movies of the 90s (Highway 61).  For Music from the Big House, he turns his eye to the real life setting of Louisiana's Angola State Penitentiary, one of the sites where the blues was born.  It's the prison where Leadbelly and countless other inmates suffered and turned that suffering into musical expressions based in their experiences.  

Canadian blues singer Rita Chiarelli has visited Angola off and on for some time now, eventually inspiring her to hold a collaborative concert within the prison walls with several bands made up entirely of inmates.  And while the film is based around that mission, McDonald wisely places the majority of the focus on the inmates, rather than Chiarelli.  It's not that she's particularly uninteresting--quite the contrary, actually--but it would take a lot to trump the moving, personal tales of woe relayed by the inmates to McDonald and his crew.

Recommended.

A still from Music from the Big House

Music from the Big House begins its run at the Hollywood Theatre on Friday, June 22nd.  Rita Chiarelli will be in attendance and will perform at the Friday, June 22nd screening.  More info available here.

A still from Surviving Progress

Surviving Progress is a documentary adaptation of Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress.  It's one of those apocalyptic, doom and gloom eco docs of which there seems to be no shortage of nowadays.  The film sports a sizable cast of A-list intellectuals, such as Margaret Atwood, Stephen Hawking, Jane Goodall and Wright himself, all of which make a strong case against the drive for endless progress; Wright calls out the experiment known as civilization as being what he terms a "progress trap."  

Somewhere around the 2/3rds point, though, the film bogs down as it attempts to cover too much ground for an under 90-minute feature.  The message gets a bit lost as the filmmakers spend an extensive amount of time investigating the theft of Third World resources by multinationals, something already documented quite well in many other films.  Surviving Progress would have benefited from both a bit more focus and, perhaps, some specificity when it came to offering solutions to the problems it presents.

  

Surviving Progress begins its run at Living Room Theaters on Friday, June 22nd.  More info available here.

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IN THE FAMILY: THIS FILM BREATHES

If you see enough movies, you quickly become accustomed to the particular rhythms and stylistic flourishes associated with various genres and levels of production.  It gets to the point where, whether you're headed into a summer blockbuster, the latest indie hit or a made-for-export foreign flick, you can probably reasonably predict the form that the film will inhabit.  This isn't a criticism of what some might term cookie-cutter cinema; it's just an observation.  These conventions exist and are used widely because they're time-tested, work well and help filmmakers engage the audience in a story without having to reinvent the wheel with each new project.

All of which is a means of introducing the level to which Patrick Wang's In the Family upends one's expectations of how low-budget indie fare should operate.  Most indie films try to obscure their lack of means via quick, clever editing schemes that build excitement belying budgetary constraints.  In the Family goes almost the complete opposite route.  This is a shockingly, slowly-paced movie.

To be clear, the film isn't slow in the vein of a Tarkovsky or Malick, where transcendence is imparted to the audience via glacially measured beats matched with technical brilliance.  Instead, Wang fills every scene with the potential for reality to be reflected in the moment; basically, In the Family breathes more than any film I've seen in a very long time.

Those readers who have seen Steve McQueen's Hunger may recall the long sequence where Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a prison priest (Rory Mullen) discuss the political and philosophical angles of Sands' hunger strike; it's an extended display of acting ability, one that seems to last forever without a cut.  In the Family feels like the three-hour version of that scene. It lives in the moment being presented, always.  And, as a result, it soars without relying on cheap tricks or diversionary tactics.  It's a film that leans hard on the writing and performances; there's really little else to the film, both of which are superbly focused and marvelous to behold.  Yes, it's a patiently-moving, long film but, make no mistake, every minute vibrates with a quiet, resonant beauty.

The story itself is simple:  a man's (Wang) life partner (Trevor St. John) passes away and, due to an outdated will, his custody of their son (Sebastian Banes) is called into question.  What's far more complex is the overall impression one gets while watching the film.  To view In the Family is to witness the birth of a new and authentic voice in American cinema.  Wang's work, both in front of and behind the camera, is impressively self-assured, especially given that it's his first time as a director and, as the lead, he's front and center for much of the three-hour running time.  This is an astoundingly great film, easily one of the ten best I've seen all year.

In the Family begins its run at Cinema 21 on Friday, June 22nd.  Director Patrick Wang will be in attendance for the 7pm screening on the 22nd and the 3:30pm and 7pm showings on the 23rd.  More info available here.


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NOT YET BEGUN TO FIGHT: A QUEST FOR HEALING

Following last year's awe-inspiring but nearly hopeless Hell and Back Again, it's refreshing to see the subjects of Not Yet Begun to Fight deal with the everyday struggles of returning home from war with some semblance of optimism that life can be reclaimed, even when facing down strong odds.  The film focuses its attention on a group of severely disabled veterans taking part in a six-day, fly-fishing excursion put on by Warriors and Quiet Waters, the brainchild of Eric Hastings, a retired Marine colonel and veteran of the Vietnam war.

After his combat experience came to a close, Hastings was able to center himself and find healing through the meditative practice of catch-and-release fly-fishing.  Acknowledging the power that it had over his own recovery process, he sought to give others the experience of returning a creature outside one's self back to the waters, an act that he highlights as running completely counter-intuitive to the forms of cruelty one must embrace to survive in combat.  With the other members of the Warriors and Quiet Waters organization, Hastings has made that dream a reality, offering a form of catharsis to veterans that's as uncommon as it is effective.

Directors Shasta Grenier and Sabrina Lee allow each of the men on the trip to tell their own stories.  Most are struggling to relearn physical and mental skills possessed since childhood, while some want nothing more than to return to combat.  The film balances their personal tales with quiet moments of observation and beautiful imagery that evokes the importance that place holds in the form of therapy being practiced.

Perhaps most moving of all, though, is Hastings' own story: here is a man who found peace in the wake of chaos.  In the most frank moment of the film, Hastings frames his use of fly-fishing as therapy as "an absolute desperate, physical and mental need," admitting that he "had to do it or I was going to kill somebody."  Admirably, rather than just focus on his own recovery, the soothing ritual has moved him to help others find respite after unimaginable loss.

Not Yet Begun to Fight is a gracefully-told, inspirational investigation into an often marginalized population's quest for healing.  Highly recommended.

Not Yet Begun to Fight screens at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) as a part of their ongoing Northwest Tracking series on Thursday, June 21st at 7pm.  Director Sabrina Lee will be in attendance at the screening.  More info available here.


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BIKES, ZINES & THE GOONIES: ONLY IN PORTLAND

Proving the theory that in Portland pretty much anything can be cross pollinated with the local bike culture, the Portland Zine Symposium and Independent Publishing Resource Center are joining forces to present a "Zine Bike Ride" followed by a "Bike-In Movie" (yup, that would be a drive-in movie, only with bikes instead of Fords and Chevys) on Thursday, June 21st.  The film selection for that second event?  None other than Richard Donner's 1985 made-in-Oregon classic The Goonies.

The event is a fundraiser for the upcoming symposium.  More info is available on the I.P.R.C. and Portland Zine Symposium websites.

The Goonies screens as a "Bike-In Movie" at the new I.P.R.C. at 1001 SE Division on Thursday, June 21st at 9pm. 


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FOUR SUNS: A CZECH-FLAVORED TAKE ON INDIE DRAMA

Would it be cynical to note that the local screenings of Bohdan Sláma's (The Country Teacher) latest feature Four Suns are scheduled to arrive just in time for Father's Day?  While the movie certainly doesn't belong to any of the genres (action flicks & westerns among them) usually marketed alongside the holiday, one could easily point to it as a meditation on fatherhood or, more accurately, how to completely mishandle that role.

Fogi (Jaroslav Plesi) is a man in his late 30s with a wife and two kids.  Despite his family obligations, he continues to party without purpose, ignoring the passage of time.  His eldest son Véna (Marek Sácha) is running wild, causing Fogi to worry that his willful case of puer aeternus has set a poor example for his kid; he's right, of course.  Meanwhile, Fogi's long suffering wife Jana (Anna Geislerová) is finding her affections tested by her husband's chronic irresponsible nature. 

While this Czech import plays out very much in the standard indie family drama mode, it does quite a few things well, exploring Fogi's existential crisis through his connections to others.  There's also a quirky and unexpected metaphysical component added to the tale involving stones, trees and the quest for a "master" that adds a lot to the proceedings even if it's hard to take it all that seriously.

Traveling a well-worn path, Four Sons is a well-acted, finely produced film that doesn't offer much new in the realm of family dramas but still manages to tells a compelling story.  It comes across like the hybrid, love child of the early films of Miguel Arteta if they settled down with a slightly lighter version of Mike Leigh's output.  All in all, a very pleasant, if not earth-shattering, film.

Four Suns screens at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) as a part of their New Czech Cinema series on Saturday, June 16th at 7pm and Tuesday, June 19th at 7pm.  More info available here.


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