Blaze Of Glory

[November 5th, 2008]

Portland moviemaking has never been more nationally relevant than it is right now. In its 35 years, the Northwest Film & Video Festival has never had a better lineup than it has this year. We’re no experts on causation, but there’s probably a correlation here.

In the next two weeks, the NW Film Center’s gala of local cinema will feature the local premieres of Portland-based movies that are early favorites in the Oscar race. Gus Van Sant’s Milk, a biopic of slain San Francisco gay-rights activist Harvey Milk, debuts at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Friday, Nov. 14; the following night at the Portland Art Museum, Old Joy director Kelly Reichardt unveils her Michelle-Williams-loses-her-dog opus, Wendy and Lucy. Neither of these films are available for review (though we’ve seen Milk, and can advise Van Sant to start booking LA hotel rooms around Feb. 22), but the rest of the festival’s nine-day lineup contains plenty of young talent making their cases to become the next names in the limelight.

Great Speeches from a Dying World
Sure, director Linas Phillips has a gimmick—homeless men and women ascend from the streets of Seattle to the pinnacles of Western rhetoric with brief recitations of Abraham Lincoln, Sojourner Truth and Chief Seattle—but what might have been an exercise in condescension becomes, in Phillips’ hands, a meticulously observed chronicle of terror and addiction, softened only by strikes of mordant humor. (“Never play around with your wife’s sister,” advises a man sweeping a parking garage. “It doesn’t work.”) The film eventually narrows its focus to Tomey Smith, an HIV-positive crack addict who explains how his life spiraled after he lost his dog: “It sounds like a corny reason, but after doing 15 years in the joint, you get pretty attached to something.” By the time Smith reads John Donne’s “Meditation XVII,” we sense that the poem is a way for him to see himself as a part of humanity. “Each man’s death diminishes me,” he says, “for I am involved in all mankind.” This is the best documentary I’ve seen this year. AARON MESH. 9pm Saturday, Nov. 8.

Forty Men for the Yukon
After the Yukon gold rush, some men never left. This frustratingly short (20 minutes) documentary introduces us to two old cranks still making a living in the isolated village (pop. 14 and declining) they’ve called home for over a half-century. Every shot is heartbreakingly beautiful. TONY PIFF. Screens with The Corporal’s Diary, 3:30pm Sunday, Nov. 9.

On Paper Wings
Many think the only attack on U.S. soil during World War II was Pearl Harbor. Less is known about six people killed in the southern Oregon town of Bly, resulting in WWII’s only continental-U.S. casualties. The culprit? Japanese balloon bombs: gigantic, hydrogen-filled paper balloons sent into Pacific jet streams and designed—ingeniously in theory, not so much in execution—to autonomously drop bombs on the U.S. On Paper Wings goes beyond simply explaining this strange tactical experiment. Director Ilana Sol focuses on three sets of people, all children when the bomb hit Bly: the Japanese schoolgirls ordered to create the balloons, family members of Bly’s victims (five children and a pregnant preacher’s wife), and a Japanese-American child, interned at nearby Tule Lake, who 40 years later bridged the gap between the groups. In finding such unique connections, Sol transcends boring histrionics. On Paper Wings examines war’s toll on the innocent—both victims and unwilling participants. AP KRYZA. 7pm Monday, Nov. 10.

Fast Break
Amateur psychedelic soundtrack over grainy, slo-mo basketball footage makes the ’70s seem like an ancient, foreign world, but this vintage documentary of the Blazers’ 1977 championship season was never a conventional, sporty sports movie, even in its own time. The film’s backbone (and its most interesting thread) is director Don Zavin’s postseason bicycle ride down the Oregon coast with superstar center Bill Walton, the 7-foot, red-bearded hippie credited for the young team’s first (and only) championship season. Walton seems equally at peace dominating a packed stadium and pedaling his 10-speed along the lonely highway. It’s touching to see these paragons of athleticism swaggering across the screen, oblivious to the fleeting nature of glory, and the impossibly simple age in which they were living. TONY PIFF. 9pm Tuesday, Nov. 11.

Mania
It’s the yin to Fast Break’s yang: an informative, well-structured, linear retelling of the Blazers’ first years. Director Dan Schaeffer weaves together recent interviews from seemingly everyone who was there and gets an impressively coherent story that I expect will keep most Portlanders glued to their seats. The sweetness of the era, as evoked by Fast Break, is not corrupted by Mania. It’s a different kind of strange, seeing former world-class athletes that now look a lot like my dad. TONY PIFF. 6:30pm Tuesday, Nov. 11.

Selfless
The incurably protean Pander brothers, Jacob and Arnold, have published reams of graphic novels for Dark Horse Comics, painted velvet murals of giant breasts for Thatch Tiki Bar and established a presence in the local electronic music scene. So why shouldn’t they try making a movie? Selfless, their first full-length foray into narrative filmmaking (and the winner of multiple honors at last month’s BendFilm Festival) is a psychological chiller that carries the imprint of comics in at least one sense: It is wholly engrossing without making a lick of sense. The story, which both brothers wrote, concerns a Pearl District architect (Joshua Rengert) whose life is systematically destroyed by a swarthy fiend (Mo Gallini) he pisses off in a Seattle-Tacoma International Airport terminal. The draftsman’s troubles eventually incorporate identify theft, twin stewardesses and human trafficking—he never quite comprehends what’s happening to him, which is just as well, because otherwise he’d be catatonic with disbelief. No matter: Selfless compensates for its implausibility with Jacob Pander’s chic, Lynchian direction—Portland’s skyline is validated as a nightmare cityscape of gleaming postmodernism—and sheer balls: By the time one character hikes on the shoulder of I-5 from Portland to Seattle for a samurai-sword duel, the movie is kung fu Pander. AARON MESH. 7pm Thursday, Nov. 13.

Pig Roast & Tank of Fish
With this Chinatown documentary following Knowing All of You Like I Do, her chronicle of the last days of Music Millennium on Northwest 23rd Avenue, Ivy C. Lin has become the movie analog to the community newspaper: She records the neighborhood shifts that other reporters don’t notice. Unfortunately, Pig Roast confirms what the extended cut of Knowing suggested: Lin needs an editor. Her hypothesis sounds about right—Portland’s Chinatown has been crippled by higher rents and homeless shelters, while the Asian residents have moved out to populate supermarkets and assisted-living facilities on 82nd Avenue. But 101 minutes is simply too long a time to watch elderly men show off their favorite historic hallways off Couch Street, especially when Lin (who ably carries her own handheld everywhere she goes) gasps in wonder over each fond reminiscence and revitalization plan. She’s a talented chronicler, but should she really be trusting PDC officials on the subject of gentrification? Forget it, Ivy: It’s Chinatown. AARON MESH. 3pm Saturday, Nov. 15.