Longbaugh is this weekend!
Rock 'n' roll barbarians, PEZ obsessives and a movie so closely guarded that we can't even give you its name. It's time for Willamette Week's Longbaugh Festival, presented by Comcast and guaranteed to provide you with the kind of ecstatic pleasure you can only find in a dark room with the finest independent filmmakers. For a full list of screenings, turn back to page 62. And don't miss Darius Goes West, a movie that will destroy your notions about disease and human resilience. On page 22, David Walker tells how it changed his life.
300
"No retreat," announces King Leonidas as his waxed, buff troops march into battle. "No surrender. That is Sparta." Actually, that's a Bruce Springsteen song, but sure, I guess it can also be Sparta. After all, these are the people who sent 300 of their finest warriors to the Battle of Thermopylae to hold off Xerxes' vastly superior Persian forces in 480 B.C. I don't think Xerxes was in fact employing a gargantuan rhinoceros, several homicidal mutants and an executioner who moonlighted as Lobster Boy—but that's Frank Miller for you, and he wrote the graphic novel 300, so there's no sense quibbling. The trouble with Zack Snyder's movie it that it contains no sense at all. R. AARON MESH. Pioneer Place, St. John's Twin-Cinema Pub, Lloyd Cinema, Eastport, Cinemagic, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Vancouver Plaza.
Amazing Grace
Director Michael Apted brings the true story of British Parliament rabble-rouser William Wilberforce (a fantastic Ioan Gruffudd) as he rallies to abolish slavery. With a supporting cast of great white-wigged masters—Michael Gambon, Toby Jones and Albert Finney all shine and snarl—as well as gorgeous cinematography and a compelling story, Amazing Grace is a grand...grand...sorry, I just fell asleep thinking about it. PG. AP KRYZA. Lloyd Mall, Division, Bridgeport, Sherwood, Tigard, City Center.
Becket
[SHORT RUN] The re-release of the 1964 film adaptation of Jean Anouilh's play Becket, or the Honor of God might be an attempt to pull a cinematic example of corrupt power out of the past. The idea is that this work of art from the wise past will be put on display in a world seemingly obsessed with corruptions of power, even if that world refuses to do anything about it. Change will follow. Then again, it might just be that Becket is a great fucking movie. It did receive 12 Academy Award nominations, you know. And, actually, you would be hard-pressed to find a lot of parallels between Peter O'Toole's King Henry II and our King George. Henry actually taxes his people in order to fund his war. He even has the gall to demand the same sacrifice of riches from the church, and the church's refusal is the catalyst for this 12th century tale. Henry here is also very open about his womanizing and alcoholism. Which is what makes watching Becket so much more entertaining than watching a White House press briefing. Well, that and the fact that O'Toole is such a fantastic, theatrical actor. MARK BAUMGARTEN. Cinema 21. Wednesday-Thursday only.
Black Snake Moan
Let's not mince words: Black Snake Moan is a movie about Samuel L. Jackson chaining a half-naked Christina Ricci to his radiator. And director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) knows exactly how inflammatory that image is. But Brewer—like any good ol' boy of Southern myth—he flat-out do not care. If he wants to dress Ricci in Daisy Dukes and a halter top festooned with the Confederate flag, he will. If he wants to film Jackson leading his harnessed captive across his acres like a mule, that's exactly what he's going to do. And if he wants to redeem Ricci from her sinful ways—with slavery, blues songs and a double shot of moonshine—then who the hell are you to lecture him on taste? R. AARON MESH. Lloyd Mall.
*NEW* Blades of Glory
Will Ferrell and Jon Heder become ice-skating pairs partners. This concept was chosen, in a tight competition, over Will Ferrell as a prize-winning skier, Will Ferrell as a curling champion and Will Ferrell as a Jamaican bobsled team. Look for review on WWire at wweek.com. PG-13. Pioneer Place, St. John's Twin Cinema-Pub, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Vancouver Plaza.
Bridge to Terabithia
Pretty true to Katherine Paterson's tale, Bridge chronicles the adventures of two fifth-graders: Jesse (Josh Hutcherson) is an artistic loner in a family of four sisters, while Leslie (AnnaSophia Robb) is the spunky, imaginative only child of two writers. Both outsiders, they create the imaginary kingdom of Terabithia together in the woods near their homes: a refuge where pine cones become grenades for safety, fantastic gnomes have ticklish toes and Jesse and Leslie rule the land. Then the climax hits like a ton of bricks, turning the audience to mush and breaking this magical childhood spell of a film. Heartbreaking, yes, but utterly worth it. PG. ELIANNA BAR-EL. 99W Drive In, Tigard, Cinema 99.
Commune
[THREE DAYS ONLY] "I moved there to get away from America," explains one of the founders of Black Bear Ranch—and, certainly, the hippies who turned a Siskiyou County, Calif., gold mine into a 1970s collective farm were shedding national norms (along with most of their clothes). As documentarian Jonathan Berman sits down with former commune members to reminisce, it's no great stretch to imagine an entire convention of Jeff Lebowskis, all kvetching about the kibbutz. But the stories of Black Bear life—chimichanga recipes that served 120, restrictions on how long free-love relationships could last, and the strife caused by interloping child worshippers called the Shiva Lila—contain a messy reality that sweep away the moonchild talk. "Your choices were either chop wood [and] haul water, or become a dead Zen guy," another member explains. The dropouts tried to flee America, but brought American tensions—especially between society and independence—with them. Commune manages to sift through selfishness and misplaced idealism to find that the aging bohemians still have hope, seasoned with wisdom. The dudes abide. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre. 7 pm Wednesday, March 28. 3:20 and 5 pm Saturday-Sunday, March 31-April 1.
Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul
Director Fatih Akin (Head-On) considers a cross-section of musicians in Istanbul. Which was Constantinople. Living Room Theaters. Friday only.
Dead Silence
A mad ventriloquist haunts a small town in this effort from director James Wan (all three Saw movies). Not screened for critics, who have proved notoriously unfair to mad ventriloquists. R. Eastport, Cornelius, Cinema 99.
*NEW* Demon Lover Diary
[ONE NIGHT ONLY] 40 Frames and the NW Film Center present a 16-mm print of the original American Movie—with more guns. In the late 1970s, director Joel DeMott joins her lover Jeff on a trip to the Midwest to shoot a horror movie, and the bare-bones production turns horrifying. Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Ave., 221-1156. 7 pm Tuesday, April 3. $4-$7.
*NEW* Eloquent Nude
Portland director Ian McCluskey's documentary on photographer Edward Weston and model Charis Wilson is brilliant: part archival images, part historical reenactments filmed in the Oregon countryside, and all of it a meditation on love and loss. The story starts in 1934, when Wilson—a graduate of Portland's then all-girl Catlin Hillside School (now Catlin Gabel) and at 19 already a veteran of San Francisco speakeasies—began modeling for (and sleeping with) the up-and-coming Weston, who was 48. She helped transform his photographs, but it took more than half a century for a local filmmaker to turn the lights on Weston's muse again. There's something wistful about a pack of Portland filmmakers drinking PBRs around a campfire as they try to recapture the adventures of two artists—the model a nonagenarian, the photographer long dead. That elegiac mood extends into every frame of McCluskey's documentary. It's the same feeling you get looking at an old photograph, seeing a moment forever lost and eternally present. That's the love story of Eloquent Nude. AARON MESH. Cinema 21. Friday-Thursday, March 30-April 5.
Family Law
A sort of I Never Sang for My Father for the public-defender set, Daniel Burman's light drama is an Argentinean-Jewish elegy to what a mensch dad was. Old Dr. Perelman (Arturo Goetz) is a talented if unconventional personal-injury attorney—perhaps the first positive portrayal of that profession in the history of movies—while young Dr. P (Daniel Hendler) teaches law at a university, marries a student and tries his own hand at decency. And that's it. Everybody's pretty nice, and gets along well, and if young Dr. P picks his son up from day school his wife (Julieta Diaz) will treat him to sex on the Pilates machine. (All happy families are not happy in the same way—or at least not in the same positions.) The performances are pleasant, and there's a clever recurring image of shoes on courthouse steps, but none of the latent tempests suggested in the first act ever break out of the teapot. The case is left unclosed. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.
*NEW* Faux Film Festival
[SHORT RUN] The third annual event is a weekend mostly packed with mockumentaries, or fake documentaries—some are worth mentioning, while others are worth missing. Hide Your 'Stache by Steve Pandola, which piqued my interest because I like mustaches (even though I can't grow my own), concerns a mustache enthusiasts group that helps its members cope with upper-lip-hair discrimination. Superhero, by Sean McCarthy, is the story of an ordinary guy who thinks he's a hero. It provided some good tips ("You block a pipe with your stomach") but like the main character, it fell flat in the end. Two of the most noteworthy films in the bunch are Moosecock and Alive and Well. The first one, starring Brian Baumgartner of Office fame, is a film version of the old joke about two guys playing a guessing game. It's a well executed and funny take on a timeless punch line. The second is a spoof of the movie Alive, which stars Neil Flynn, the janitor from Scrubs. Unfortunately the sound on my screener went bad and I couldn't hear a thing, but it looks hilarious. NATE SMITH. Hollywood Theatre. 7 and 9 pm Thursday-Sunday March 29-April 1.
*NEW* Flannel Pajamas
Stuart (Justin Kirk) and Nicole (Julianne Nicholson) have a difficult marriage to parse. Sometimes they seem like the perfect couple. Sometimes they seem like the couple from hell. Mostly they seem like the product of a writer-director who memorized Annie Hall but forgot all the jokes. Jeff Lipsky steals all manner of Woody Allen material—the Jewish boy meeting anti-Semitic in-laws, the suicidal brother, the relationship based on sexual hunger and neurotic neediness—and explores the lot with sympathy and far too much seriousness. What we have on our hands is the joyless autopsy of a dead shark. R. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre.
*NEW* The Films of Elliot Erwitt
[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Nobody makes documentaries quite like photographer Elliot Erwitt, though it'd be a richer world if they did. Formally composed, arrestingly intimate, his films slice into the strangest corners of America. 1972's Beauty Knows No Pain, the best of the works presented by the NW Film Center, follows the basic training of the Kilgore College Rangerettes, a Texas dancing squad overseen by a beehive-haired drill sergeant named Gussie Nell Davis. As Davis shouts orders from above a poster reading "SMILE," it becomes clear that well before the military accepted women, some girls had their own boot camps—which often ended with wrenching rejection. Erwitt travels to another part of the south for 1973's Red, White and Bluegrass, visiting rural North Carolina to meet fiddlers with names like Lost John and Smather's Old Time Band. He also finds a moptop appropriately named Ned Little, who demonstrates the lost art of buck dancing. He wouldn't make the Rangerettes, but the kid's still worth the picture. AARON MESH. Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Ave., 221-1156. 7 pm Sunday, April 1.
God Grew Tired of Us
[SHORT RUN] Your classic fish-out-of-water tale. With a few twists. The film follows the "Lost Boys," a group of young Sudanese men who traveled over 1,000 miles by foot through Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya as war refugees. Then somehow they wound up in Pittsburgh. With elegant photography and periodic narration by Nicole Kidman, director Christopher Quinn captures their trials and tribulations integrating into American life—complete with scenes of the Sudanese refugees learning how to ice skate, shopping for hoagie buns and rainbow-sprinkled doughnuts at the local supermarket and teaching little white kids how to spell S-U-D-A-N at the local swimming pool. It's too bad God Grew Tired of Us doesn't offer more history and back-story on the conflict in Sudan itself—but this has to be one of the few films that's found an inspirational story to tell amid the Über-depressing backdrop of Sudanese genocide. LANCE KRAMER. Hollywood Theatre.
*NEW* Grand Illusion
[SHORT RUN] More Renoir, more aristocracy, more death: This time it's World War I, and French POWs are torn between nobility and escape. Cinema 21. Friday-Thursday, March 30-April 5.
Head-On
First comes marriage, then comes love in this dark 2004 film about a couple of dysfunctional Turkish immigrants in Germany. Living Room Theaters. Wednesday-Thursday only.
The Hills Have Eyes II
The eyes are still not screened for critics. R. Broadway, Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, City Center, Vancouver Plaza.
The Host
A South Korean art film with monsters! Awesome. When toxic chemicals dumped into the Han River produce a gigantic mutated river creature, things go badly for the people of Seoul—especially for one family whose patriarch and his layabout son work at a waterfront snack shop. The monster nabs the layabout's teenage daughter as lunch to go, and the family bands together (sort of, while bickering) to rescue her. Like any B-movie worth its slime, The Host is full of pointed commentary and outrageously dumb human behavior. (The premise is based on true events, although the monster is presumably invented.) It looks fantastic and features several weird/great cameos. Best of all is how smoothly director Bong Joon-ho takes the mood from hilarious to poignant and back. BECKY OHLSEN. Fox Tower.
I Think I Love My Wife
Who thought the day would come when Chris Rock would seem a limper milquetoast than Zach Braff? But compare Rock's starring role in I Think I Love My Wife with Braff's turn in 2006's The Last Kiss: Braff cheated on his pregnant girlfriend, and felt bad about it. (Really bad. Like, he felt terrible. He was very sorry.) Now here's Rock, who thinks he wants to cheat on his wife (Gina Torres) with a chain-smoking club bunny (Kerry Washington). But then he thinks he doesn't want to after all. And then he frets some more, and thinks he just might cheat. Oh, whatever will he do? Rock, directing himself, has crafted a character with no sense of direction. His portrait of responsible, married life reveals a sluggish discovery that there is no sex in the Champagne Room. Or anywhere else. R. AARON MESH. Broadway, Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Bridgeport, Movies on TV, Cinema 99. Wednesday-Thursday only.
*NEW* Jacques Rivette
[SHORT RUN] Va savoir boasts the distinction of being the single most unwatchable film in the entire NW Film Center Rivette retrospective. A comedy devoid of laughter, it reduces Sergio Castellitto, the Italian actor who was spot-on in movies as dissimilar as The Religion Hour (My Mother's Smile) and the masterpiece Caterina in the Big City, to a boring cipher. Rivette at least manages a serviceable level of entertainment with The Story of Marie and Julien, which plays like an NPR-liberal retread of CÉline and Julie Go Boating. Thirty years after that superb farce on life and death as an endlessly looped maze, Rivette reprises the same themes to somber and ultimately trivial effect, with a resolution that reeks of M. Night Schmaltz-alan. Julien, a beefy, square-jawed pig for whom time literally and figuratively stands still, obsesses over Marie. But what is their fantasy relationship based on besides sex? As Marie, Emmanuelle BÉart, oozing with false seriousness, does her usual child-woman, nonentity number and once again fulfills a seemingly contractual obligation to bare her breasts. Highlights include a cat named Nevermore who gives the liveliest, most warmly human performance of the movie with his commanding meows, and subtitles so vacuous ("the one who is alive killed the one who is dead") that they might have been translated by Roger Ebert. N.P. THOMPSON. Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Ave., 221-1156. Va Savoir screens at 7 pm Thursday, March 29. The Story of Marie and Julien screens at 7 pm Friday-Saturday, March 30-31. $4-$7.
The Last Mimzy
This bizarre family flick feels as if it began life as a two-hour screenplay from which someone removed every fourth page to squeeze it into the limits of a 6-year-old's bladder. The gist of the story as it stands now is that cell phones, computers, and especially the Sony PSP are slowly turning us into violent zombies, but, thanks to the heroic efforts of a creepy, time-travelling robot bunny and a couple irksome—if cute—little Seattleites, we will eventually all become telepathic flying Buddhists. The only merit to be found in this thing, besides a toss-off performance by The Office's Rainn Wilson as—you guessed it!—a socially awkward science nerd, is that it doesn't presume that kids are any dumber than adults. Unfortunately, it thinks adults are pretty fucking stupid. PG. BEN WATERHOUSE. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Mall, Roseway, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Lake Twin, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Vancouver Plaza.
Late Night Shopping
Slacker Brits work the night shift, talk, drink coffee. Think Kicking and Screaming, with accents. Living Room Theaters.
Little Jerusalem
A Jewish girl falls in love with a Muslim in Paris. They'll always have kosher. Living Room Theaters.Friday only.
The Lives of Others
Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich MÜhe) is the best there is at his job. Wiesler works for the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. It's 1984, five years before the Berlin Wall crumbles, but despite the corruption around him, Wiesler remains committed to the cause—until he sees a production by one of East Germany's few loyal playwrights, rising star Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). Wiesler instantly becomes entranced by Dreyman's leading lady, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). When Wiesler is ordered to spy on the couple, the once-robotic Stasi operative is tested beyond imagining. The film, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and the winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, is most memorable as a study of a lonely untermensch, exploited and broken by the system he's devoted his life to preserving. R. BECKY OHLSEN. Fox Tower, Hollywood Theatre, Moreland, City Center.
*NEW* Meet the Robinsons
Disney's computer animation department returns with a time-travel offering that sounds a whole like that cartoon where the Flinstones met the Jetsons. Look for review at WWire at wweek.com. G. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Lake Twin, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Vancouver Plaza.
Miss Potter
Oh, those indomitable British children's writers. They will never cease kicking against the prigs to deliver us their whimsical visions, and movies will never resist the temptation to show them laboring away as their magical worlds come to all-too-literal life. This time it's Beatrix Potter, played by RenÉe Zellweger in full pout, sketching Peter Rabbit as he wriggles off the page and her contemporaries wag their tongues. She finds time to fall in love with her publisher (Ewan McGregor in a highly comedic mustache), but maybe he shouldn't be spending so much time in that cold fog.... If this doomed affair brings to mind the creator of another Peter, it should: The same story was told about J. M. Barrie in 2004's Finding Neverland, and it was shameless treacle then, too. Miss Potter is worse, if only because director Chris Noonan (Babe) has cast Zellweger, who long ago traded away her acting birthright for a pot of nose-crinkling. Damn you, Bridget Jones—you've raped another work of English literature! PG. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.
Music and Lyrics
Looks like Hugh Grant thought it might be fun to play a washed-up '80s pop singer from the fictitious band POP (think Wham!). He was wrong: He comes off looking like the washed-up Brit B-list celebrity that he really is. For those of you thinking you love Drew Barrymore and Grant, and that this movie should be a double winner starring them both—you are wrong. Very wrong. PG-13. ELIANNA BAR-EL. Bridgeport, Cinema 99.
The Namesake
Mira Nair's adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel spans the life of Ashoke (Irfan Khan) and his arranged marriage to Ashima (Tabu), a young girl in India. After immigrating to New York City, they have a son, and to his and everyone else's chagrin, name him Gogol. The grown-up version of the oddly dubbed child is played by a surprisingly mature Kal Penn, who gradually sheds his token stoner-dude persona (À la Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle) and finds a deeper, softer character as a young Bengali-American battling with his family name and traditions. The Namesake winningly translates the customs, heritage and beauty of India, seen through the eyes of first and second generations with tender intimacy and detail. So much so, in fact, that it seems a bit stuffed with circumstances at times, trying to incorporate as much from the book as possible. Despite a few long-winded scenes, Nair's movie manages to address with insightful candidness the bicultural relationship issues so many Americanized children of immigrants face. PG-13. ELIANNA BAR-EL. Fox Tower.
Old Joy
Filmed in and around Portland, Old Joy is a meditative portrait of a friendship gone beyond a crossroads. Will Oldham and Daniel London star as two lifelong friends who reunite for a camping trip, only to face the emotional turmoil and conflict that has arisen from the divergent paths they have taken in life, and the different people they have grown up to become. Peter Sillen's cinematography creates a rich, vibrant canvas that works with Kelly Reichardt's direction and editing to enliven a story in which as much goes unsaid as is said. DAVID WALKER. Living Room Theaters.
Pan's Labyrinth
There's no mistaking Guillermo del Toro's monsters for those hiding under any other bed. In The Devil's Backbone and Hellboy, the Mexican director honed a distinctive species of wraiths—and in Pan's Labyrinth, his latest, best work, the beasties are clawing out of the woodwork. Ofelia, the movie's intrepid 12-year-old heroine, is warned that one of the creatures she must confront "is not human." Considering the humans Ofelia has already met in the Spain of 1944, a year when Francisco Franco was squeezing the life out of his people, "not human" is quite the compliment. More than any other director, del Toro recognizes the brutality and madness lurking within the true believer. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.
*NEW* Peaceful Warrior
Nick Nolte plays a levitating gas-station attendant in this adaptation of Dan Millman's self-help book. Not screened for critics, even though Universal is giving away opening-weekend tickets. It must be great if it's free! PG-13. Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Vancouver Plaza.
Premonition
The first words uttered by Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) are, "I hate surprises." Well, Linda, you're in for a big one, but don't get too excited. About three quarters of the way through this suspense thriller about a wife who has premonitions (natch) of her husband's death, the tone takes an unexpected turn when Bullock's character goes to the church for some answers. Surprise! You're getting a Christian sermon! There's nothing wrong with faith and religion. I'm faithful and religious. But up until about the 80-minute mark, there was no mention of churchgoing in any way. If the movie was one big puzzle, which is a metaphor the writers clearly wanted you to pick up on, then Jesus was a puzzle piece that didn't fit but was jammed in anyway. PG-13. NATE SMITH. Broadway, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Division, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Forest Theater, Hilltop, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, City Center, Vancouver Plaza.
Pride
A former swimming champ (Terrence Howard, on fire since Hustle & Flow) heads to the Philadelphia ghetto and inspires the hell out of a group of misguided youth through the awesomeness of competitive swimming. With the help of a cantankerous janitor (Bernie Mac), the urban underdogs match backstrokes with racist yuppie country-club wusses led by bitchy coach Tom Arnold (yeah, he's still getting work). Pride might as well have been titled Remember The Sirens. It humps every sports movie clichÉ imaginable, from underdogs-to-champs montages to staying in school. It's everything you'd think it is—except it's not utterly horrible. Half-assed movies about inspirational teachers are all but worn out. In the past two years we've seen ghetto kids saved by basketball, ballroom dancing and writing in diaries, all to minor and superficial audience inspiration. Pride doesn't aspire to be anything more than a hyper-saccharinated Prozac fest. It works, but it barely floats. While you can see what's coming a mile away, it's still occasionally exciting—though no amount of fancy editing will ever make competitive swimming fun to watch. PG. AP KRYZA. Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Division, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Cinema 99.
Reign Over Me
The people who died on 9/11 weren't the only ones who lost their lives. Consider Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler), who lost his wife and three daughters in one of the doomed planes. On Sept. 12, he recoiled, erasing the memories of his past in hopes of finding some kind of control and peace, and retreating to a withdrawn routine of playing mindless video games and obsessing over his album collection. Director Mike Binder (The Upside of Anger) eases the audience into post-9/11 life—at first with subtle references, and then further with the stinging realities of Charlie's existence. Then Binder gives us Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle), who runs into Charlie (and Charlie's ever-present motor scooter) on the street, years after they roomed together in dental school, and they slowly reestablish a bond. The heroes reach levels of extreme honesty—a welcome departure from preceding films that have focused on the re-enactment of the abominable events. Reign instead traces the lives of those who have lost their bearings and battle to find their balance once again. Even if it's on a motor scooter. R. ELIANNA BAR-EL. Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Division, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Tigard, Cinetopia, City Center.
Shooter
Boy, director Antoine Fuqua sure has a nose for conspiracies. He started by sniffing out Denzel Washington's hysterically corrupt cop in 2001's Training Day, moved on in 2003 to indict the entire U.S. military for ignoring African genocide in Tears of the Sun, and now has made a movie claiming that everything bad that happens in the world—yes, everything—is the fault of a cabal of oil-hungry D.C. operatives. Fortunately for the world, Mark Wahlberg is Bob Lee Swagger, one of four people in existence who can blow a guy's head off from a mile away. When Swagger is framed in a presidential assassination attempt (having the requisite three names), he takes it upon himself to blow a lot of heads off. Essentially a call for vigilantism against the Bush administration (with Ned Beatty doing his meanest Cheney), Shooter is saved from being unforgivably seditious only by being unfathomably stupid. "I took an oath to protect this country from all enemies, foreign and domestic," Swagger says. To which he adds: "They shot my dog." Those bastards. R. AARON MESH. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Vancouver Plaza.
TMNT
Cowabunga! The Turtles are back and better than ever! I would have preferred a live-action version with a darker tone where Leonardo actually cut people with his katanas. But since this is a franchise built for children, Imagi Studio's version of the half-shelled ninjas is pretty damn good. Leonardo returns from several years of training to find his brothers out of practice. Splinter rallies the team as monsters from another dimension attack the city. Along the way our heroes also encounter the Foot Clan under new management. The action is stellar, and without showing it they hint at Leo using his blades to actually slice some dudes. The story centers on Leo and Raph's conflict, where kids (and I) will learn valuable lessons about controlling their anger. My only complaint is there isn't enough nunchuck action from Mikey. What the chuck? PG. NATE SMITH. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Vancouver Plaza.
Unknown
Five men wake up in a locked warehouse in various states of disrepair (gunshot wounds, broken noses, etc.), sharing a case of amnesia. A paint-by-numbers thriller that comes off badly despite the efforts of a strong cast, including James Caviezel, Greg Kinnear and Joe Pantoliano. Director Simon Brand's freshman effort does not bode well for his future in filmmaking. JAMES WALLING. Living Room Theaters. Friday only.
Where's Molly?
When Jeff Daly was 6 years old, his younger sister, Molly, just shy of her third birthday, was taken away. In the mid-'50s, in the small town of Astoria, Ore., it was a disgrace to have a child anything short of perfect. Molly wasn't perfect. The family doctor delivered a shocking and damaging verdict: Molly was "profoundly retarded." According to one family friend recounting details of the culture, "You didn't educate these children, you warehoused them." Where's Molly? is a poignant documentary recounting half a century of time lost between a brother and a sister, and the measures taken to ensure this kind of story never has to be told again. ELIANNA BAR-EL. Living Room Theaters.
Wild Hogs
Old buddies John Travolta, William H. Macy, Martin Lawrence and Tim Allen abandon their middle-aged, suburban lives to embark on a motorcycle journey across America. Adventure ensues, and along with it jokes about poop, man love and blunt objects to the testes. PG-13. MIKE THELIN. Broadway, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, 99W Drive In, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Vancouver Plaza.
Zodiac
Director David Fincher's long-anticipated Zodiac follows the arc of the famous San Fransisco-area killer's story (adapted from Robert Graysmith's book and real case files) to a T. This is both a blessing and a curse. The first hour of the film is cold, calculated and grates at the nerves as the mysterious killer stalks his prey and plays a dangerous game with police and newspapers, where he sends mysterious puzzles and threatens more violence if they're not printed. It's exceptional filmmaking. But the second 95 minutes (yes, two hours and 45 minutes total) are a total bore. Like the case itself, it seems to take Zodiac about 30 years to come to an inconclusive finish. R. AP KRYZA. Broadway, Lloyd Mall, Tigard Joy Cinema.
