Screen Listings

Alternative Ride and Drive-In Theater

[TWO DAYS ONLY, REVIVAL] Nifty new biofuel and hybrid cars are lined up to watch enviromentaries like King Corn and The Real Dirt on Farmer John at the Greener Homes and Gardens Expo. Expo Center. 10 am-6 pm Saturday, May 17, and 11 am-5 pm Sunday, May 18.

Bonnie and Clyde

[REVIVAL] They rob banks. Living Room Theaters.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

This C.S. Lewis adaptation is filmmaking designed to appeal to the most bloodless, conformist camps of modern evangelicalism. In assembling the sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—which was not a very good movie either, but at least contained some handsome pictures of furniture—director Andrew Adamson has compounded his errors from his first effort, and once again we’re handed a series of battles shot from a long distance, so that half the film looks like a Where’s Waldo? cartoon on a magical battlefield. Once again, Aslan the lion gets a good deal less screen time than you might expect, and when he does show up, he’s a drag: He reminded me less of Jesus than of the lordly, smug kid who always gets to play Jesus in youth group skits. The film’s message echoes uncomfortably as well: Should megachurched children really be given heroes who battle incessantly over a holy land until a god-king smites their enemies? But I suspect the chief reason that Prince Caspian is a dull, enervating experience is because it is produced by computer technicians pushing buttons to make a movie that looks as much as possible like other bland fantasy movies—with the same talking animals and clanking soldiers and ambulatory trees all wandering through the same artificial glades. Prince Caspian is a triumph of the synthetic, and one more victory for moviemakers who don’t like movies. PG.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] The Broadway Independent Film Revival is showing a real knack for finding cinematic artists at the height of their potential, and keeps the streak alive by showing Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp at their very best—before one of them began indulging his most audience-alienating impulses and the other started alternating between repetitive Tim Burton projects and fat pirate paychecks. Their Hunter S. Thompson adaptation is a deadly speedball careening through the Nevada desert, precisely exposing the places where the hippie dream curdled in its own excess. With Benicio Del Toro at his funniest and most frightening as the sentimental and cruel Dr. Gonzo. AARON MESH. Broadway. 7:30 pm Monday, May 19.

First Blood

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] This winter, he killed one third of Myanmar during a hyper-steroidal midlife crisis. In the ’80s, throbbing with human growth hormone, he ripped through Afghanistan and Vietnam. But before massacring Third World villains by the score, John Rambo rampaged through the Northwest and killed…well, nobody, technically. In 1982’s First Blood, Rambo wanders into small-town Washington, fresh outta ’Nam and vagabonding. Upon arrest by Sheriff Brian Dennehy, Rambo’s PTSD switches to “flashback freakout.” He stabs, he shoots, he blows shit up, busts bones and breaks faces. He even sheds a tear. Yet the ultraviolent First Blood’s onscreen body count is lower than The Lion King’s (although at least a dozen people probably died of Rambo-related injuries a few days later). Now—ahead of the fourth film’s May 27 DVD release—First Blood gets a one-night big-screen revival in all its dumbass glory, fully restored and including a special interview with the aged Sly Stallone. Most interestingly, it also includes an alternative ending in which—SPOILER WARNING—his mentor, Col. Trautman (Richard Crenna), shoots him in the gut, effectively saving the lives of 3,598 Asians in the future. R. AP KRYZA.

Flight of the Red Balloon

Much like its 1956 inspiration The Red Balloon, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s latest project uses attention and the way it is directed to underscore the different values of adults and children, favoring the latter. Overlong at an hour and 45 minutes, it is nevertheless impeccably acted; Juliette Binoche particularly stands out in her role as a Parisian single mother and part-time voice talent for puppet shows. The plot is hard to pin down, but on a surface level at least, it has nothing to do with balloons: Binoche hires a Chinese exchange student (Song Fang) to take care of her young son. At times dangerously meta-cinematic—in one instance, the characters walk around holding a video camera, discussing The Red Balloon—the whole thing risks becoming an academic exercise. JOHN MINERVINI. Hollywood Theatre.

Harold and Maude

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL] Those obsessed with the detailed, melancholic worlds of Wes Anderson would do well to witness what director Hal Ashby accomplishes with a 79-year-old free spirit, a bug-eyed suicidal teen, a flaming Jaguar hearse and an LP full of Cat Stevens tunes. The (grand)mother of all odd-couple stories, this 1971 sleeper hit revolves around the budding romance between rich, disconnected would-be corpse Harold (Bud Cort) and a worldly, whimsical rebel named Maude (Ruth Gordon). The pair's anti-establishment antics (liberating trees from sidewalks, crashing funerals and lifting cars) still often elicit claps and hoots from theatergoers. But perhaps the real reason Harold and Maude has aged so well is that its delightfully oddball theme of intergenerational ugly-bumping is secondary to its sheer generosity of spirit and belief that you can change yourself by touching others—in all sorts of ways. KELLY CLARKE. Cinema 21. 7 pm Wednesday-Thursday, May 14-15.

Jess: To and From the Printed Page

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] A collection of short experiemental films inspired by collaborations with the Manhattan Project scientist-turned-beat poet Jess Collins, including a 10-minute work by Stan Brakhage. Podkrepa Hall, 2116 N Killingsworth Ave. 7:30 pm Friday, May 16. $6.

Mr. Big

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Oh, those insidious Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They ride aboot looking all clean-cut, they make propaganda appearances in Jay Ward cartoons, and they conduct undercover operations using entrapment tactics that are illegal in the U.S. and Great Britain. Television reporter Tiffany Burns returns to Vancouver, B.C., from Cleveland to document the sentencing of her brother Sebastian and his high-school chum Atif Rafay for the bludgeoning murder of Rafay’s family in Bellevue, Wash. She’s intent on revealing how a “Mr. Big” sting coerced the two young men into confessions, and she swiftly exposes a legally sanctioned system of trickery that convinces criminal suspects that they are in the clutches of a mobster kingpin who can help them—but only if they confess to some crimes, eh? (These pretend Mafioso, sadly, are not portrayed by Chris Noth, but they’re fairly effective in eliciting confessions anyway.) Jennifer Burns’ examination of Mountie justice is attentive, and she even finds a legal expert who hints that the justice system is undermined by Canadian niceness: "Compared to, say, the United States or England…we in Canada…are not going to get all uptight about the means, as long as those means produce the desired result.” But her otherwise sterling documentary suffers from a gaping question at its center: What went wrong in Sebastian Burns’ life that, even as he was still under investigation for triple homicide, he was talking about the fateful night with an ostensible hoodlum? The Burns family, otherwise richly sympathetic, declines to address Sebastian's choices, and that decision undermines their claim as victims of systemic injustice. AARON MESH. NW Film Center, Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum. 7 pm Thursday, May 15.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

With the charm of Austin Powers, the looks of James Bond and the aloofness of Inspector Clouseau, Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath (a.k.a. Special Agent OSS 117) is a bravura, tall, tan, hairy-chested, racist, imperialist, womanizing, homophobic spy who’ll kill a Nazi and screw a head of state’s busty niece in the same breath. So naturally the French government decides he’s the perfect candidate to venture to Cairo in the ’50s, with the small task of “making the Middle East safe.” His misadventures with pyramids, medinas and Muslim femmes fatales never veer far from being flat-out dumb (one of the film’s main action sequences involves Agent OSS 117 and a man in a djellaba viciously throwing chickens at each other). But director Michel Hazanavicius’ spy-genre spoof is actually pretty giggle-worthy, and somehow also manages to lay into the dated French post-colonial attitudes toward the Muslim world. LANCE KRAMER. Cinema 21. Friday-Thursday, May 16-22.

Paprika

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY] Even within the strange world of Japanese anime, Paprika deserves special mention for just how ingenious—and weird—it is. The latest contribution from Satoshi Kon (Tokyo Godfathers) concerns a dream-sharing headset called the DC Mini, which looks like an iPod gone very, very sinister, and is mostly a pretext for a movie about dreams within movies within dreams. The standard anime elements are here—cute girls kicking ass, teleportation and a bulging substance that threatens to destroy the world in the final reel—but what distinguishes Paprika is its exploration of the Japanese obsession with kitsch. That preoccupation manifests here as a hulking, pulsing parade of geisha dolls, plush frogs, Shinto gates and porcelain kittens, a procession that consumes everything in its path. It's all rather disturbing, yet it's hard to resist joining the mad party. AARON MESH. Cinema 21. 9 pm Wednesday-Thursday, May 14-15.

A Quest for the Sublime: The Films of Werner Herzog

[THREE NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL] Timothy Treadwell dedicated his life to protecting grizzly bears—hulking carnivores that were, it must be noted, already perfectly well defended by the National Park system—until one of his charges ate him. This made him instinctive fodder for Werner Herzog. Herzog responded with Grizzly Man, the 2005 film at the center of this week's NW Film Center retrospective. As a documentarian, Herzog is never more delighted—or more delightful—than when he finds evidence of nature’s indifference to human passions. “I believe,” he declares in a Grizzly Man monologue, “the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder.” The movie might be a more persuasive brief if Treadwell weren’t such a patent straw man: a deranged, self-pitying drama queen who actively courted his own demise and that of his girlfriend. But Herzog’s editing of Treadwell’s footage flirts with authentic profundity, and the resulting movie, if nothing else, serves as a vital reminder of the ever-present threat posed to America by bears (and bear sympathizers). AARON MESH. Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum. Grizzly Man screens at 9:15 pm Friday, May 16 and 7 pm Saturday, May 17. The Enigma of Kasper Hauser screens at 7 pm Friday, May 16. Heart of Glass screens at 7 pm Sunday, May 18.

Transformers: The Movie

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] Before Michael Bay got his explosive-laden paws all over the Autobots, they battled the Decepticons in a cartoon that also featured Orson Welles' last role: the voice of Unicron, a planet-eating robot. Death be not proud. Clinton Street Theater. 7 and 9 pm Thursday, May 15.