Caring Is Creepy

After three years of preparing Some Days Are Better Than Others for its Portland premiere this week, Matt McCormick is full of fresh ideas. He could go on a voyage to Mongolia, he says. He could stay in the Mississippi Avenue neighborhood and start a bakery. He could debut the new baked good he's conceived with his girlfriend: a combination muffin and doughnut, called the muffnut. "It would basically be a muffin dipped in a deep fryer," McCormick explains. "It would be delicious. It would be so unhealthy."

Sipping a cup of herbal peppermint tea, the lanky McCormick seems freed—understandable, since he's been working since 2008 on the making and distribution of Some Days, his leap from experimental-cinema ringleader to indie-drama director. (Full disclosure: I spent six hours standing in the rain holding a beer cup filled with water for a house-party scene that was cut from the final film.) He's gotten a lot off his chest: Some Days feels like a distillation of a decade's worth of McCormick obsessions. The director of 2001's ironic DIY manifesto The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal lingers on images of condemned buildings and finds comedy in the nonplussed workers hired to pack up the furniture of the dead; the founder of experimental hootenanny PDX Film Fest pauses his drama to interject the soap-film rainbows 95-year-old Albany filmmaker George Andrus created for the festival.

But if Some Days is a strange hybrid, it is downright accessible compared to McCormick's earlier work: The movie's tagline—"Why do the good times slip by so fast while the difficult times seem so sticky?"—was originally voiced by a robot-voiced parade mascot in McCormick's short film Sincerely, Joe P. Bear. Trying to turn that sensibility into something marketable hasn't been easy. "If I ever see a penny from this movie, it'll be amazing," McCormick says. "I'd just be so elated if we can get our investors' fee back, and make everyone happy. I became very conscious of the fact: 'Wow, I'm making a movie, like, spending other people's money.' That was really spooky. That's a burden."

It turns out to be a difficult movie to classify—part David Gordon Green homage, part study of seasonal affective disorder, part workingman's lament—though an easy one to dismiss: The casting of Shins frontman James Mercer and a pre-Portlandia Carrie Brownstein in the lead roles invites reductionist slagging of Some Days as an indie-rock mood ring. The youthful self-pity does rise to mortifying levels in spots (neither Mercer nor Brownstein are experienced enough actors to recognize their depression as even a little funny), but Some Days reserves its real pathos for a lost city: Mercer's karaoke rehearsal of Bonnie Tyler sounds absurd and poignant over a montage of boarded-up bungalows, while Matthew Cooper of Eluvium scores the demolition of the Virginia Cafe. (What may have been intended as a criticism of gentrification now plays as a record of economic collapse; the movie, which took so long to secure a distributor, feels like artistic commentary on the financial quagmire of a generation both rootless and stuck.) Eclipsing the bigger names is a lovely turn by Renee Roman Nose as a consignment-shop worker who will not abandon an unclaimed urn—like her, the film clings to fragile things worth caring for. It's a thrift-store movie: not wholly original, but touchingly protective of castoffs.

And the movie itself is in a precarious spot, as a piece of art cinema dipped in mainstream-market grease. Maybe that's why McCormick is dreaming of other pursuits—he's been taken aback by how fast mass culture now preemptively strikes out at anything defenselessly sincere.

"I'm still very sensitive to that kind of thing," he says. "It's hard to hear. Even the classic YouTube comment: 'This sucks, you're gay.' I know the movie has flaws. I'm not standing up here and saying, 'Hey, come look at my perfect film.' But I do think the movie is very Portland. I'm definitely proud of Portland, and I hope that reflects in the movie. It's the opposite of Portlandia...I love Portlandia. [But] there are no clowns in my movie. Had I only known."

WWeek 2015