C21: Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st St. CM: CineMagic, 2021 SE Hawthorne Blvd. LM: Regal Lloyd Mall Cinema, 2320 Lloyd Center Mall LT: Lake Twin Cinema, 106 N State St., Lake Oswego PP: Regal Pioneer Place, 340 SW Morrison St. WH: Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Ave. WTC: World Trade Center Theater, 121 SW Salmon St.
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 22
Eternity Critic’s Score: 67 [THAILAND] Though it is at some level a ghost story, Eternity
is much more about absence than presence: The spirit in question is a
lone rider who sees nothing but the land itself, and the haunting is
mostly by memory and loss. And so a film about a compulsively tittering
lover boy and chatterbox is ruled by silence; the sentimental courtship
at the center of the film is bookended by symmetrical depictions of the
time after the wooer’s early death. The film’s pace and woeful
single-mindedness, however, lend to a numbing hypnotism much more than
grief or meditation.
It’d be better if: It didn’t live up to its title so handily. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. LM, 6 pm Wednesday and 8:15 pm Saturday, Feb. 22 & 25.
Trailer:
Pink Ribbons, Inc. Critic’s Score: 80 [CANADA] Few threats are as amorphous and frightening as
breast cancer: It is nature’s violent misogyny, sex and death bound up
far too tightly. And as Léa Pool’s documentary shows handily, if also a
bit diffusely, it is as ripe as any fear to be cynically manipulated for
profit by Yoplait or Ford or Estée Lauder—or by the Komen foundation’s
cheerily self-propagating charity marketing—even as the money that pours
in is siphoned away from research that might actually lead to
prevention. It’s sort of a horror film in PR smiles, flower-painted cars
and pink Niagara.
It’d be better if: It presented hard numbers on spending, instead of frustratingly folding them into a brief pie chart. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. C21, 8:30 pm Wednesday, Feb. 22. WH, 3:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.
Trailer:
THURSDAY, FEB. 23
Corpo Celeste Critic’s Score: 85 [ITALY] Ah, the small urban Italian
church. The priest is a middling, disappointed bureaucrat troubled by
politics; his attendant is a lobotomized, sexually sublimated old maid;
and the janitor beats a bag of 10 kittens against a sidewalk and drowns
them in an inlet. Not a place for a 13-year-old girl from Switzerland,
apparently, but that’s where she is, and it’s all quite confused and
sweetly searching and shot through with disappointment, the way a gentle
European coming-of-age story should really always be.
It’d be better if: The kittens came back for their revenge, backed up by a vengeful, bloody-eyed Jesus. Or not. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. LM, 6:15 pm Thursday, Feb. 23. C21, 6 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.
Trailer:
Short Cuts VI: Made in Oregon Critic’s Score: 70 [PORTLAND] After three weeks of anguish tourism, this raft
of local work feels gratifyingly insouciant and low-stakes. Most
welcome is the return of Orland Nutt, two-time Peripheral Produce
Invitational winner at the lamented PDX Fest, bring with him Dear Peter, Goats and Dear Peter, Yaks: twin mock-poetic animal meditations that may not mock anything. Also noteworthy: Kurtis Hough’s placid giant-slug doc Mossgrove/Bed of Moss, and Jesse Blanchard’s Shine, which communicates the same existential dread as The Turin Horse but in a three-minute 3-D puppet show about a barbershop quartet getting its limbs sliced off.
Whores’ Glory Critic’s Score: 38 [AUSTRIA] In pursuing the world’s oldest prurient
interest, Michael Glawogger doesn’t uncover any bleak truths not grasped
by, say, Born Into Brothels, but he does
manage to be singularly invasive and detached. Trolling the colorful,
ravaged lives of prostitutes in Bangkok, Bangladesh and Reynosa, Mexico,
his camera gains staggering access to degradation. Many of the shots
have a whiff of arty scorn, however, while the CocoRosie and PJ Harvey
songs aestheticize the montages of suffering, not letting these women
speak for themselves. But, look: a 200-peso blow job! The real thing!
It’s a politically conscious mondo film.
It’d be better if: The director had a heart of gold. AARON MESH. C21, 8:15 pm Thursday, Feb. 23.
THE LONELIEST PLANET (l) INVASION OF THE ALIEN BIKINI (r)
Images courtesy of PIFF.
The Day He Arrives Critic’s Score: 78 [SOUTH KOREA] The 12th film by Hong Sang-soo is, as ever, a
metafilmic enterprise about a director—in this case, one who is unable
to film. The flick is essentially a light, black-and-white Godardian
fillip, an ever-repeating set of drunkenly philosophical streetside and
barside encounters that vary as in a fugue, or as the inconsistent
humors of a man in a fugue state; memory seems impossible and life only
improvisational. And as in Woody Allen movies, the awkward old director
somehow always ungratefully gets the girl.
It’d be better if: The aw-shucks main character had any charisma whatsoever that could make us believe he might get the girl. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. WH, 8:30 pm Thursday, Feb. 23.
Trailer:
Toll Booth Critic’s Score: 57 [TURKEY] After a panicked breakdown, insomniac checkpoint
attendant Kenan (Serkan Ercan) is exiled to a sunflower-dappled
countryside so sun-baked and sluggish I promptly dozed off. I awoke
often enough to recognize the guy as an heir to those 1970s Bob Rafelson
heroes clawing at the walls of their lives, and the movie as an
Anatolian Five Easy Pieces. Don’t mistake
early jauntiness as a sign pointing toward one of those droll little
comedies about working stiffs; the road leads to something far more
morbid and distressed.
It’d be better if: I could get a side order of wheat toast. AARON MESH. PP, 8:30 pm Thursday, Feb. 23. LM, 3:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.
Trailer:
FRIDAY, FEB. 24
Snowtown Critic’s Score: 16 [AUSTRALIA] Every PIFF needs its walkout movie, and here’s
the winner for 2012: Even the protagonist keeps trying to leave the
room. A rangy kid who looks just like Jesse Eisenberg, Jamie (Lucas
Pittaway) is molested by his mom’s boyfriend, raped by his older
stepbrother, and finds a rosy-cheeked savior in John Bunting (Daniel
Henshall), the worst serial killer in Australian history. Justin
Kurzel’s film recalls Monster, not least because Dixie County, Fla., and Adelaide could be the same subtropical snake pit. But Snowtown
achieves new lows in the unendurable and loftily gratuitous: Grok those
artful close-ups of contusions, and peer into the relieved eyes of
torture victims allowed to finally die. Or don’t, and keep a little
piece of your humanity.
It’d be better if: You never walked in. AARON MESH. LM, 6:30 pm Friday, Feb. 24. WH, 8:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.
Trailer:
Extraterrestrial Critic’s Score: 95 [SPAIN] Following up on 2007’s much-venerated, sordid metaphysical puzzle box Timecrimes,
director Nacho Vigalondo again cracks the genre box wide open. Across
all of Spain, 4-mile-wide flying saucers have appeared above the cities,
but rather than descend into an alien mind piece or shoot-’em-up, the
film uses the saucers as an excuse to empty Madrid aside from a
terrifically human, comedic love quadrangle in which everyone is in love
with the same woman (Michelle Jenner). Indeed, the whole damn film is a
testament to rampant, ridiculous love gone wild in the old Spanish
style, and to its absolute distortion of the world. Ever-pendant
apocalypse has never been so affectionate or endearing or sweetly sad.
It’d be better if: I thought maybe Michelle Jenner might notice me, too. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. WH, 8:45 pm Friday and 6 pm Saturday, Feb. 24 & 25.
Trailer:
Grandma, A Thousand Times Critic’s Score: 81 [LEBANON] The most pretentiously titled film of PIFF could
also be the most touching. It sounds like a recipe for dour falafel,
but Mahmoud Kaabour’s documentary, in which he interviews his
82-year-old granny in order to preserve her wisdom, is an absolute
delight because of its subject. Teta Kaabour is a sass-pot for the ages,
a loving, illiterate, ball-buster matriarch from another era who smokes
her hookah and screams at street vendors from her apartment’s balcony
all day. We get only 50 minutes with Teta in the doc (part of a
grandmammy double feature, paired with the French homelessness short I Could Be Your Grandmother). I’d be content to listen to her for days.
It’d be better if: Teta, irritated by the misleading title of her grandson’s film, went on a quest to fight 999 other matriarchs. AP KRYZA. WTC, 8:45 pm Friday, Feb. 24.
Trailer:
The Loneliest Planet Critic’s Score: 84 [GERMANY] Featuring the most indelible scenes inside a tent since The Blair Witch Project,
this subtitle-free study of engaged backpackers (Hani Furstenberg and
Gael García Bernal) and their Caucasus Mountain tour guide (Bidzina
Gujabidze) is based on a Hemingway-influenced short story by departing
Portland writer Tom Bissell. As such, it hinges on one instinctual
decision that colors every interaction before and after. That unthinking
choice is made unforgettable by director Julia Loktev (Day Night Day Night), who stages it as a kind of dire dance step.
It’d be better if: You didn’t know that crisis was coming. But then you might not go. AARON MESH. C21, 8:45 pm Friday, Feb. 24.
Kill List Critic’s Score: 67 [GREAT BRITAIN] For the first 84 of its 85 minutes, Ben Wheatley’s Kill List is
an effectively unnerving descent into human depravity. It also features
enough comedic bickering between the leads to resemble The Trip,
if Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon were hitmen and, instead of touring
Northern England’s finest dining establishments, they traveled around
the country bludgeoning people to death with hammers. In other words,
for its first 84 minutes, Kill List is
the most intriguing (and most unflinchingly brutal) genre experiment of
this year’s PIFF. As the violence grows more gratuitous, though, you
get the sense that all it’s building toward is one big, empty shock.
Then it happens, in a final reveal so preposterous it curdles everything
that came before into waste. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
You will.
It’d be better if: Wheatley went with literally any other ending. MATTHEW SINGER. C21, 11:30 pm Friday, Feb. 24.
Trailer:
SATURDAY, FEB. 25
Darwin Critic’s Score: 86 [SWITZERLAND] It’s a town in Death Valley, so you think
you know exactly which 35 people would choose to live there. It’s an
exploration of extreme Yankee eccentricity by a visiting European, so
you think you know exactly what Nick Brandestini wants to find. And yes:
There are elements here of the Paranoid Style in American Burnouts (the
main street keeps catching on fire; we find one fat, bearded anarchist
checking to see where he buried his guns). But there is also something
credible in this portrait. Like the best contemporary essaying—the stuff
by John Jeremiah Sullivan and John D’Agata—it finds dark and light
rhythms running like rock strata through forlorn human lives.
It’d be better if: Looniness weren’t the initial selling point. But that’s to say it’d be better if we lived in a different world. AARON MESH. C21, 1 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.
Trailer:
Kiss Me Critic’s Score: 41 [SWEDEN] Well, the movie certainly isn’t
mistitled. In fact, making out is pretty much the foundation of the
film’s central relationship, between two soon-to-be stepsisters. They
kiss in a tool shed. They kiss in an elementary-school restroom. They
kiss in a dewy meadow populated by grazing deer. Occasionally, they
augment the kissing with sensual lovemaking, sometimes while bathed in
enough gauzy sunshine to light a toilet paper commercial. In between all
the Sapphic tonsil hockey is a stultifyingly standard rom-dram that
only faintly touches on Swedish mores regarding homosexuality, and even
then so tritely it doesn’t matter.
It’d be better if: It was
just a two-hour make-out session set in various odd locations: in the
Vatican; inside a double-wide suit of armor; in the hollowed-out corpse
of a dead camel, etc. MATTHEW SINGER. C21, 8:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.
Invasion of the Alien Bikini Critic’s Score: 41 [SOUTH KOREA] When you shoot a flick for $5,000, the one
thing that isn’t typically compromised is inventiveness, particularly in
a film about a sex-starved alien babe who crash-lands on Earth to slurp
the sperm out of a virginal vigilante. While Invasion of the Alien Bikini looks
great, it’s surprisingly unoriginal. The film starts well—a campy fight
scene and an erotic game of Jenga—before devolving into a stew of South
Korean cinematic clichés: the standard kink, shockingly brutal violence
against women, martial arts, kitsch, oddball humor, and overwrought
metaphors about sexuality and aging. It looks like most of the budget
went into an overlong torture scene. Maybe a couple bucks could have
been invested in a script rewrite.
It’d be better if: There were actually a sentient bikini sidekick. AP KRYZA. C21, 11:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.
Trailer:
GO: The Portland International Film Festival ticket outlet is at the Portland Art Museum Mark Building, 1119 SW Park Ave., 276-4310. nwfilm.org. General Admission $10, Art Museum members, seniors and students $9, children 12 and under $7, Silver Screen Club memberships from $300.
