AP Film Studies: Also Showing 7/23/14

AP Film Studies is currently on a two-week summer vacation, but because Professor Kryza is a jerk, you have homework. Here's what's playing in Portland's repertory theaters this week. There will be a quiz. The answers will all be Keanu Reeves. 

Also Showing: 

1. This summer marks the 50th anniversary of The Endless Summer, a documentary considered the best surfing film ever shot. Considering its lack of skydiving, I call bullshit. Cinema 21 and Kiggins Theatre. 7 pm Wednesday, July 23.

1. Re-Run Theater rolls out a nostalgia reel of cable TV cartoons for adults, with clips from Beavis & Butthead, Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Aeon Flux. Hollywood Theatre. 7:30 pm Wednesday, July 23.

1. As part of the Fin de Cinema series, live musicians—vocalists, synth players and classical players—perform a new soundtrack to the 1968 Soviet biopic The Color of Pomegranates. So, yeah. Maybe get high first. Holocene. 8:30 pm Wednesday, July 23.

1. If you can watch 1979’s The Muppet Movie without feeling like a kid…well, your childhood probably sucked. Pix Patisserie. Dusk Wednesday, July 23.

1. The NW Film Center’s Top Down series returns to the roof of Hotel deLuxe for a screening of Notorious, Hitchcock’s classic about love, deception and the cost of innocence in wartime. Hotel deLuxe. 8 pm Thursday, July 24.

1. The Hollywood’s celebration of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s tales of spirituality and wandering Christ figures continues with 1973’s The Holy Mountain. Hollywood Theatre. Opens Friday, July 25.

1. I’m just going to come out and say it: Jack Nicholson is a better Joker than Heath Ledger. It’s not a better performance. It’s just that, y’know, Jack played him like a goddamn comic-book villain, not a realistic psychopath. That’s because Tim Burton’s Batman remembered that movies about dudes in capes should be fun. Academy Theater. July 25-31.

1. If it were made today, The Jerk’s Navin Johnson probably wouldn’t have been born a poor black child. Unless, maybe, Seth MacFarlane wrote the screenplay. Regardless, it’s unlikely it would be one of the funniest movies ever made. Laurelhurst Theater. July 25-31.

1. The NW Film Center’s Wes Anderson series continues with a pair of films that inspired the director (read: they feature eccentrics in twee jackets). First up is Orson Welles’ 1942 comedy The Magnificent Ambersons, about spoiled goofballs who might be called the Tenenbaums if they traded their tuxes for track suits. Next is Brewster McCloud, Robert Altman’s absurd, surreal and kinda stupid 1970 take on Icarus. They’re screening alongside The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson’s best film, which deftly balances melancholy, humor and the positive power of shooting children with BB guns. July 25-26. See nwfilm.org for schedule.

1. Six years before Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro teamed up with a young Brian De Palma for Hi, Mom!, another film about a disturbed Vietnam vet with voyeuristic tendencies and seriously skewed ideas about dating. 5th Avenue Cinema. 9 pm Friday, July 25.

1. Before Zack Snyder’s brooding, hyper-emotional downer, Superman was a bright symbol of American do-goodery. In 1941, Fleischer Studios brought the Man of Steel to animated life, and that complete set of Superman cartoons are on display here. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 4 pm Saturday, July 26.

1. Rewatching The Dark Crystal is a trip, and not just because it explains most of your childhood nightmares. This is Jim Henson at his strangest and most innovative, and it’s a sterling high-fantasy adventure. Hollywood Theatre. July 26-27.

1. Brit stop-motion heroes Wallace and Gromit remain delightful, and the NW Film Center has assembled a marvelous collection of their shorts. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 4:30 pm Sunday, July 27.

WWeek 2015