The Rain Falls Down on Portlandtown: Mar 6, 2012

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

POWFest 2012: Opening Night is All About Local Talent

POWFest (Portland Oregon Women's Film Festival) 2012 hits the ground running on this coming Thursday with a night of short films produced by local artists. The presentation underscores the festival's ongoing commitment to Portland talent. Even as they've tapped notable guests from without (for instance), POWFest has always strongly reflected and honored women's contributions in the local film community and this year's edition is no exception.

Highlights include:

Not To Be Taken, directed by Emily Setzer
A pensively-pitched drama that takes place across two time periods, featuring an outstanding performance by Patricia Zapp as a woman haunted by past events.

A still from Emily Setzer's Not To Be Taken

The Lost Van Gogh, directed by Jessica Lyness
A whimsical piece centered around the provenance of a neglected artwork, smartly captured entirely from the painting's POV.

A still from Jessica Lyness' The Lost Van Gogh

Stella's Flight, directed by Courtenay Hameister
A very funny film about ennui and what it takes for one women to break out of the cycle of chronic boredom.

A still from Courtenay Hameister's Stella's Flight

CPR, directed by Kimberly Warner
My favorite of the bunch, drawing dual inspiration from the visual aesthetic of Mad Men and the narrative sensibilities of The Twilight Zone. Cinematographer Gary Nolton's impressive images leap off the screen.

A still from Kimberly Warner's CPR

Festival passes can be acquired at this link and tickets for individual screenings can be purchased here.

The opening night Shorts 1: Locals Showcase kicks off this year's edition of POWFest on Thurs., March 8th at 7pm at the Hollywood Theatre. An opening night party will follow at 9pm @Large Films.

THE FILMS OF NICOLAS WINDING REFN: PUSHER III: I'M THE ANGEL OF DEATH (2005)

Fans of the Pusher trilogy are especially fond of Milo (Zlatko Buric), the Copenhagen-based drug boss who hunted Frank (Kim Bodnia) in the first film and appeared briefly in the second installment (in a subplot involving secondary character "Kurt the Cunt"). In Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death, a much older-looking Milo takes center stage for his turn in the spotlight. Of course, following suit with the treatment of the other antiheroes populating Nicolas Winding Refn's trilogy, the film catches up with Milo on a day where everything he touches falls apart.

As the film opens, Milo is attending a narcotics anonymous meeting. When it's his turn to share, he glosses over his addiction, preferring to share his stress about plans for his daughter Milena's (Marinela Dekic) 25th birthday party. After leaving the meeting, we see that Milo's still involved in the drug trade, although he's got a bit of a supply problem at the moment; a much younger set of traffickers are forcing him to accept their terms on a bad deal. It's not long until the situation spirals out of his control, setting him up for both a relapse and an über-violent solution to his problems.

Refn is more in control of his craft here than in any other chapter in the trilogy. Take, for instance, the moment where Milo's craving for junk returns; it's accompanied by the most frightening conveyance of addiction I've ever seen onscreen, telegraphed entirely by a sound cue and tight cutting. Buric is frighteningly good as Milo here, affable at one moment, psychotic in the next. It's his show and he makes the most of it, delivering a full-bodied portrait of the type of man it takes to succeed at a high level in the underground drug trade.

A warning: the film contains a level of gore in its third act that borders on the cutting-edge makeup and practical special effects that Tom Savini pioneered in 70s and 80s horror classics like George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. It's extremely repulsive but doesn't diminish the knockout performance by Buric one bit. It only makes him more frightening.

Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death will screen at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) on March 10th at 9pm & March 11th at 7pm. The film is part of the retrospective series, Driven: The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn.

Related links:
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Fear X
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Drive

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THE FILMS OF NICOLAS WINDING REFN: PUSHER II: WITH BLOOD ON MY HANDS (2004)

Arriving some eight years after Pusher, Nicolas Winding Refn revisits the dour environs of Copenhagen for the second film in his trilogy, Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands. For this installment, he picks up with Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen); the former best friend of Frank (our protagonist from the first film), just as he's being released from prison.

Looking quite a bit more dim than he did in Pusher (anyone who has seen that film knows the reason), Tonny heads straight to see his father, Smeden (Leif Sylvester), hoping to work for him in order to pay off an outstanding debt owed to a former cellmate. His father's reception of him is, let's just say, less than ecstatic, but he begrudgingly allows him to take part in the family's car theft business.

Pusher II doesn't have Tonny actively dealing drugs like the other leads in the series, although he does help his friend Kurt (Kurt Nielsen) in an ill-advised deal with Milo (the great Zlatko Buric, revisiting his role from the first film). There still is quite a lot of drug abuse in the film. Tonny uses cocaine and other substances liberally throughout it, as do his friends and the mother of his infant son; a child that Tonny denies siring.

Exploiting those layers, Refn has his troubled character struggling against assuming a parental role at the same time that he's dealing with his own father's disapproval. To further exacerbate his daddy issues, Tonny has a much younger stepbrother and a best friend that Smeden favors over him.

The nice thing about this trilogy of films is that you can drop in on any of them without needing to see the other films in the series. Having said that, the manner in which the supporting characters of one film morph into the focus of a subsequent chapter only adds incentive to watch them in sequence.

But, if you can only catch one of the three, the second feature is the one to see. Mikkelsen portrays Tonny here as an injured animal, woefully damaged but not beyond redemption, albeit redemption of a most compromised order. In this second swing at setting a story in his version of Copenhagen, Refn aims to tell a far more nuanced and universally applicable narrative; the second time's absolutely the charm.

Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands will screen at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) on March 9th at 9pm & March 10th at 7pm. The film is part of the retrospective series, Driven: The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn.

Related links:
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Fear X
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Drive

Remember to find and "like" us on our Facebook page.
Subscribe to the blog's feed here.