Idiots and Angels [PORTLAND]

Only four days left in the Portland International Film Festival! Only four days left to cash in on the Dominican pitchers, New Wave memoirs and insane cartoons! (And if you still haven’t seen PIFF’s flashiest model, Coraline, you’ve been left out: It has now grossed more than $35 million in its first 10 days.) We’re so crazy for this festival, we’ve sent our team of experts to discover deals you won’t find anywhere else! It’s a limited-time offer! Act now!

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Katyn
[POLAND] Venerable director Andrzej Wajda (Man of Iron) lost his father to the massacres at Katyn, a Polish forest where the nation’s officers were murdered and buried in mass graves in 1940. Like many next of kin, Wajda had to bow to the party line that the executioners were German, not Soviet, and Wajda’s film proves the perfect medium for redressing this constant face-slapping from the Red Army. But Wajda avoids the pitfalls of agenda and masters form and story, focusing on captain’s wife Anna (Maja Ostaszewska) and the fates of her military husband and professor father-in-law to examine an entire nation systematically undermined and broken. There’s the requisite amount of Anna’s graceful suffering; luckily, this tardy history lesson is by turns alluring and devastating, even beyond the moral obligation driving it. SAUNDRA SORENSON. BW, 6 pm Wednesday and 8:45 pm Thursday, Feb. 18-19.

Idiots and Angels
[PORTLAND] Legendary scribble animator Bill Plympton’s hand-drawn Idiots and Angels couldn’t be further from PIFF golden child Coraline in presentation. Plympton’s often-grotesque images morph together almost crudely as a soundtrack rife with songs by Tom Waits and local group 3 Leg Torso take the place of dialogue. But its narrative conventions aren’t far from Coraline author Neil Gaiman, or fellow fantasy smartasses Christopher Moore and Terry Pratchett. The film concerns a low-life barfly who sprouts wings that make him do good deeds, much to his chagrin. The sleazeballs around him see dollar signs and plot to steal the wings for their own benefit. Fantasy blends with noir, action, comedy and dark thrills to create a chilly cocktail Kafka and Aesop could enjoy together, and the art is a wonder of eye-popping ingenuity. It may not have cost $70 million, but Plympton remains in a class all his own. AP KRYZA. WH, 6 pm Wednesday, Feb. 18. BW, 6:45 pm Thursday, Feb. 19.

Lemon Tree
[ISRAEL] As metaphors go, this one couldn’t be more heavy-handed: The new Israeli defense minister moves next door to a lemon grove on the West Bank border and deems it a security risk, threatening the livelihood of a long-suffering Palestinian widow. She refuses a token reparation, and instead pushes her case to the Supreme Court. But within these parameters is a lush, detailed study that is arguably more about feminism than it is a free state: On both sides of the fence, the women (widow or defense minister’s wife) are cowed into some form of surrender—political or social. Thankfully, director Eran Riklis allows them to stop short of martyrdom, instead creating story out of allegory and even-handedly acknowledging a seemingly irreparable situation. SAUNDRA SORENSON. WH, 8:30 pm Wednesday, Feb. 18.

Sugar
[UNITED STATES] On the strength of just two movies, directing team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have proven their mastery at evoking drug-addled states: They persuasively strung out Ryan Gosling on crack in 2006’s Half Nelson, and with this study of a rising Dominican baseball phenom, they evoke the alarming buzz of performance-enhancing pills. But the burst of creatine is just one of many things the movie intimately understands: It takes such themes as the thrill of youthful achievement, the camaraderie of long bus rides and the generosity of Midwestern evangelicals, whittling each of them down to expertly realized tableaus. The story of Miguel “Sugar” Santos (Algenis Perez Soto), a pitching prospect in a fictionalized Kansas City Royals farm system, Sugar is Bull Durham without the aging-male fantasizing, Maria Full of Grace without the nightmarish hysteria. It’s a hymn to the reach of American dreams, beginning with a group of Dominicans blissfully crooning “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and culminating in refreshing the long-clichéd montage set to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—by performing it in Spanish. AARON MESH. WH, 6 pm Thursday and 2:15 pm Saturday, Feb. 19 21.

The Beaches of Agnès
[FRANCE] Agnès Varda’s doc The Gleaners and I was somewhat spoiled by the navel-gazing “I” part of that equation, but without another subject to intrude upon, her giddy, free-form look back at her life here is most welcome and enchanting. She delves into everything from her childhood to her films (including the New Wave classic Cleo from 5 to 7) to her marriage to fellow director Jacques Demy, using photographs and film clips merged with fanciful real-world visual concoctions, all guided by her winningly insouciant charm. What results is a portrait not just of a life but of how a life is made. ANDY DAVIS. BW, 6:15 pm Friday and 12:15 pm Saturday, Feb. 20-21.

The Chicken, the Fish and the King Crab
[SPAIN] Yet another in a long line of formulaic, formally underwhelming, yet utterly irresistible competition documentaries. The climactic cooking tournament is more exhilarating than it has any right to be, and proves that cutting away to a ticking clock can make anything—yes, even garnishing—suspenseful as all get out. CHRIS STAMM. WH, 2 pm Sunday, Feb. 22.

Risky!

Lake Tahoe
[MEXICO] When teenage wisp of a thing Juan crashes the family Nissan into a pole, his odyssey to find the right part and a capable mechanic will resonate with anyone whose AAA membership has lapsed. That Juan is running from a recent family loss quickly becomes clear, but the tone of the film is quirky ennui, not devastation. Colorful characters and unlikely bonds abound. Unfortunately the subtlety wears thin; it’s a long, strange trip to satisfaction, in which director Fernando Eimbcke proves that true grief is the exhausted kind of purgatory that sets in once the sting has died down. Although to his credit he also seems to be suggesting that perhaps hell really is other people—the ones who seem in no rush to find you a distributor harness. SAUNDRA SORENSON. BW, 6:45 and 9:15 pm Wednesday, Feb. 18.

The Garden
[UNITED STATES] South Central L.A.: bucolic? Panning over America’s largest city garden, director Scott Hamilton Kennedy makes an easy connection between this post-riot Eden and urban revitalization. When city subsistence farmers (mainly immigrants and the odd ex-Black Panther) are given their eviction notice after 11 years, they discover a shady closed-door land deal between the city and a private investor. But in Kennedy’s ardor, he pushes the Zapata comparisons a little too hard, committing one of the worst sins in documentary filmmaking: blatant manipulation. With issues of gentrification and immigration swirling in most major U.S. cities, he shouldn’t have felt the need even to nudge. SAUNDRA SORENSON. BW, 7 pm Wednesday, Feb. 18.

Milking the Rhino
[UNITED STATES] Here’s a new perspective on safaris: The locals guiding the sightseeing feel like gardeners pointing out the aphids and weevils to astonished gasps. The Masai and Himba cattlemen view zebras, giraffes and elephants (especially those goddamned elephants) as crop-crushing pests, and they take to eco-tourism with some reluctance. David E. Simpson’s documentary charts their conversion with smooth public-television assurance. But it turns a blind eye to problematic cultural norms: One Masai warrior insults another with the quip, “He sleeps with uncircumcised women,” and everyone enjoys a hearty chuckle. AARON MESH. BW, 6 pm Thursday, Feb. 19.

Tulpan
[KAZAKHSTAN] The value of Sergei Dvortsevoy’s film depends on whether you need to see a documentary-style depiction of yurt-dwelling and dustbowl farming out on the steppes. What little narrative is allowed screen time concerns a young man in love with the hard life despite having seen some of the larger world as a sailor, experience he deliciously inflates into tall tales meant to capture the attention of a prospective bride’s family. He’s highly charismatic in that opening scene but barely speaks for the rest of the picture, and it’s hard to have patience with a movie in which most of the drama derives from the fact that something is wrong with the sheep. ANDY DAVIS. WH, 6 pm Friday, Feb. 20.

Worlds Apart
[DENMARK] Of the things Denmark is known for—modern furniture, quasi-socialism—its fringe religions rarely get a mention. So the Scandinavian peninsula makes an understated backdrop for the tale of Sara (Rosalinde Mynster), a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness who stumbles into religious doubt and first love simultaneously. Her bright, unquestioning acceptance of fire-and-brimstone sermons and her own brother’s excommunication is thrown into harsh relief against the palpable chemistry she shares with Teis, a man first introduced in a manner that suggests would-be date rapist, who becomes a loving boyfriend. Mynster nails it as a guileless devotee navigating her way through family hypocrisy and alienation. Though the message (religion is a trap; instinct trumps dogma) is worn-down, Mynster floats the film by virtue of her artless questioning. SAUNDRA SORENSON. WH, 8:30 pm Friday and 4 pm Sunday, Feb. 20 22.

The Friend
[SWITZERLAND] Here’s a bit of advice for any depressed emo singers out there: If you’re toying with the idea that you could off yourself without guilt so long as you conscript some schmuck to tell your family he was your lover and you were very happy and the whole business with the ungrounded electric-guitar amp was definitely an accident…well, don’t do it. You’re just going to create a lot of misery for everybody involved—especially the bogus boyfriend (Philippe Graber), who will probably end up crushing on your sister (Johanna Bantzer) and torturing himself with guilt for a situation that isn’t his fault. Is that what you want, emo singer? Maybe you do: Micha Lewinsky’s movie is the kind of placid personal-healing drama that conveniently absolves the dead of all sins. That’s all the more disappointing when you notice the many details the movie gets right, including the killing kindness of being rejected gently. AARON MESH. BW, 5:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 21.

Sell!

Karamazovs
[CZECH REPUBLIC] A group of actors rehearses of an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The sort of loathsome theater that makes you feel like maybe the actors and audience did not get enough childhood in. ANDY DAVIS. BW, 8:30 pm Wednesday, Feb. 18.

Jerusalema
[SOUTH AFRICA] A kid named Lucky Kunene rejects his dear mother’s Bible in favor of Karl Marx and hatches a scheme to forcibly redistribute ownership in Johannesburg’s low-income towers. The movie is Slumlord Millionaire. AARON MESH. BW, 8:45 pm Wednesday, Feb. 18.

Tehran Has No More Pomegranates
[IRAN] The history of Iran’s capital is compelling documentary material, and Tehran Has No More Pomegranates director Massoud Bakhshi is wise in tackling only a century of the city’s history. But with the industrial boom and rapid-clip modernization of the region, the director may have bitten off more than he can chew. There’s a lot of information, but none of it is particularly engaging. What we get is a film composed of a series of time-lapse shots of cars driving on highways, archival footage both real and re-created, shots of people staring blankly at the camera, and droll voice-over from the director. The result is infused with some dry humor but comes off like a pieced-together student film. AP KRYZA. BW, 8:15 pm Thursday, Feb. 19.

Fermat’s Room
[SPAIN] This debut by directing duo Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeña nicks the premise of House on Haunted Hill and squanders it on a run-of-the-Saw-mill exercise. CHRIS STAMM. BW, 9:45 pm Thursday and noon Sunday, Feb. 19 22.

Lion’s Den
[ARGENTINA] Prison’s a bitch, especially if you’re a young pregnant woman who may or may not have mutilated her boyfriend. Alas, that’s the hard-knock life of Julia (Martina Gusman), the heroine of Lion’s Den, an Argentine women-behind-bars movie that’s not as sexy as it sounds. Julia’s cellblock is reserved for mothers and pregnant women, a prison in which children live until they are 4. But for all its gritty filmmaking, the story itself—that of a mother trying to keep her child by her side without considering the consequences—teeters on the kind of separation torture we’ve seen since Barbara Stanwyck’s Stella Dallas. The film flirts with something more daring, but it’s stuck in the prison it built. AP KRYZA. BW, 8:45 pm Friday and 7:45 pm Saturday, Feb. 20-21.

Dean Spanley
[NEW ZEALAND, CLOSING-NIGHT FILM] A bewildering, mind-boggling concept is executed with complete—not to say dogged—sincerity. There’s no discussing the movie without revealing its premise, so look away if you want to be surprised (and disappointed): Sam Neill plays Spanley, an Edwardian cleric who, when he indulges in Takay wine, reminisces about his previous life as a dog. (He was, as his name suggests, a spaniel.) These memories are delivered with great eloquence—Spanley is in rare form when elucidating how the moon cannot be trusted because it has no smell—and they facilitate the reconciliation of Jeremy Northam with crabby dad Peter O’Toole. There’s no faulting director Toa Fraser’s execution of Lord Dunsany’s occult short story, but who convinced O’Toole that the best way to spend his remaining days was to listen to a man explain how canines talk to each other through the aromas in their pee? AARON MESH. WH, 8:15 pm Saturday, Feb. 21.

Insider Trading!

WW couldn’t screen the following movies by press time.

Opium War
[AFGHANISTAN] American soldiers wander Taliban territory. BW, 6:15 and 9:30 pm Wednesday, Feb. 18.

Salt of This Sea
[PALESTINE] An oppressed woman robs a bank. BW, 6:15 pm Thursday, Feb. 19.

Loss
[LITHUANIA] Six people’s fates are enmeshed. BW, 7 pm Thursday, Feb. 19.

The Great Buck Howard
[UNITED STATES] Colin Hanks, being John Malkovich’s personal assistant. WH, 9 pm Thursday, Feb. 19. BW, 3 pm Saturday, Feb. 21.

All Around Us
[JAPAN] A shotgun marriage hits the rocks. WH, 5 pm Saturday, Feb. 21.

Best of the Shorts
A program of the festival’s most popular short films. Names not revealed. WH, 10 am Sunday, Feb. 22.

Portland International Film Festival Ticket Outlet:
Portland Art Museum Mark Building, 1119 SW Park Ave., 276-4310,
nwfilm.org General admission $9, PAM members $8, children 12 and under $6, Silver Screen Club memberships from $250.

BW—Regal Broadway Cinemas, 1000 SW Broadway

WH—Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Avenue

Everlasting Moments!

PIFF scenes we’ll always remember—and a few we’d rather forget.

• PIFF’s best soundtrack belongs to Eldorado, and while it’s bolstered with a few choice classy indie tracks, it’s the Repo Man-reminiscent, rockabilly-inflected score by Renaud Mayeur that brings the honors. On the other hand, Gomorrah and Treeless Mountain both derived much of their power from having no soundtrack at all, and I wish Terra Nova had followed suit. It was saddled with an absurdly overwrought, misguided score, shoving bombastic emotion down your throat like John Williams drunk at a party. ANDY DAVIS.

• Spoilers ahead: In South Korea, a woman is bound in a killer’s basement. She frees herself, only to meet the killer in a convenience store. The hero arrives moments after she’s murdered. In Austria, a thug stalks the cop who accidentally shot his girlfriend. He takes aim as the unknowing cop, tortured by guilt, makes him feel sympathy for the first time. He throws the gun in a lake. Films like The Chaser and Revanche aren’t afraid to defy audience expectations. AP KRYZA.

• Seven years since City of God, and still no director can film the Third World without agitated cutting from one shuddering shot to another—it’s as if they think poverty can be digested only when served out of a drive-thru window. Nothing in PIFF depressed me quite as much as the first three minutes of Jerusalema, all blood and helicopters, promising to warm over the trend once more. Contrast that with the most virtuoso shot in the festival: the 17-minute single take in Hunger. Two men sit smoking at a prison table, the camera never moves, and the audience is glued to its seat. AARON MESH.

• There’s a moment in The English Surgeon when the good doctor becomes subtly disoriented, discussing a striking 22-year-old Ukrainian woman’s death sentence in front of (but unbeknownst to) her. She goes along her way none the wiser as he tells his colleague that she’ll die of a tumor within three years, but go blind long before. Devastating, too, is how at a loss the doctor is about how to proceed—he is never certain he’s done right by her. SAUNDRA SORENSON.

• Like a bully who, for lack of wit or guile, punches you in the gut so that you’ll have something to remember his worthlessness by, director Anna Melikyan killed a main character in the final five minutes of Mermaid in a last-ditch attempt to justify the film’s insipid existence. Steve McQueen’s Hunger also ends in death, but every single frame devoted to Bobby Sands’ slow suicide is necessary. Not since Liv Ullman’s last gasps in Cries and Whispers has a big-screen expiration struck me as so terrible and beautiful and true. CHRIS STAMM.