Willamette Weekend

Eight things to do in Portland, April 13-15

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Friday, April 13

Alcest, Amber Asylum, Eight Bells, Anne

[MUSIC] Although blunted black metal spikes do occasionally pierce the diaphanous haze of Alcest’s most recent album, Les Voyages de l’Âme, they are but tastefully applied adornments to a ranging, frequently epic sound. Alcest mastermind Neige (Stéphane Paut to his parents), late of Peste Noire and Amesoeurs, arrives at blastbeat catharsis only after traveling through vast post-rock soundscapes, shoegaze drifts and even brief stretches of cheeseball balladry. It’s not an immediately gripping listen, but Les Voyages de l’Âme’s twilit evocation of mossy caverns and drippy crypts and other Romantic spaces rewards patience and perseverance. Sit back and let it swallow you. CHRIS STAMM. Someday Lounge, 125 NW 5th Ave. 9 pm. $10. 21+.

TurkkuSex Contest

[SEX] TurkkuSex, “northern Europe’s largest sex festival,” is hosting a local competition to find Portland’s most talented erotic performer with the TurkkuSex International Stripsearch. One lucky entertainer (ladies only!) will win a cash prize and a trip to Finland to perform at TurkkuSex 2012. Expect stiff competition. Dante’s, 350 W Burnside St., 226-6630. 9 pm. $10. 21+.

Opera Theater Oregon
[FILM, MUSIC] The innovative little company with the big ideas continues its increasingly ambitious and improbable mashups of film and opera, this time with a rarely screened silent 1920 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that stars the great Shakespearean stage actor John Barrymore. Tenor Daniel Buchanan, pianist Douglas Schneider, percussionist Ian Kerr and flutist Jayde Weide will improvise their way to a new soundtrack using music from John Adams’ acclaimed 2005 opera Doctor Atomic, about nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer. Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St., 223-4527. 7 pm. $9-$12.

Saturday, April 14

Bridgetown Comedy Festival
[COMEDY] This weekend, the Bridgetown Comedy Festival will bring more than 200 comedians to nine venues along Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard. That’s a lot of funny people. Thursday-Sunday, April 12-15. $70-$150 festival passes, $10-$30 single shows. Full schedule and tickets at bridgetowncomedy.com.

Soul'd Out Festival: Curtis Salgado

[MUSIC] Blues is one of the few genres of music in which an artist can hit his or her stride around what would normally be considered retirement age. At 58 years old, Portland's Curtis Salgado is ramping up to his prime: New disc Soul Shot, his debut for the seminal Alligator label, is among his best-produced outings to date. The disc features Salgado's able band blasting through blues, soul and funk cuts, but it also features a number of notable contributions from artists like legendary Latin percussionist Lenny Castro and Pleasure/Dazz Band alum Marlon McClain. Jimmy Mak's, 221 NW 10th Ave. 9 pm. $20 advance, $25 day of show. 21+.

Best of the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival

[FILM] The NW Film Center pulls together a highlight reel from the shorts it screened last fall. The best by a country mile is Basin, David Geiss’ ominous, wordless travelogue of Alberta’s oil sands. Images of factories shooting flames into the sky make Canada look like Mordor. The longer, dramatic features don’t resonate as deeply (though Woman Waiting tries damned hard to suffocate you in economic despond), and the overwhelming memory from this omnibus is of skittering stop-motion: unspooling cassette tapes in Strands, screen prints in Old-Time Film, and the time-lapse rain forest of Kurtis Hough’s placid giant-slug doc, Mossgrove. What kind of slugs are they? I don’t know. Big-ass slugs. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Friday-Saturday, April 13-14.

Sunday, April 15

North by Northwest

[FILM] North by Northwest is not a suspense film, though those remembering the oft-homaged cropdusting attack and the climactic melee atop Mount Rushmore can be forgiven for remembering it as such. Those scenes are iconic. But they’re also kind of stupid. So is NxNW, and that’s the point. When most of us remember Hitch, we forget the master of suspense was also a cut-up, and the fourth and final pairing of Hollywood’s greatest director and its greatest star is a gas from front to back, a mistakenidentity caper in which Cary Grant plays Cary Grant on a train-hopping adventure that serves as an excuse to watch the man crack wise in nice suits and romance a dame half his age. The charm of the whole goofy affair is augmented by Eva Marie Saint oozing sexuality, and amazing turns by James Mason and Martin Landau, who play it straight as the film’s villains and score by layering nuance on top of stereotypical scumbaggery. AP KRYZA. Fifth Avenue Cinema, 510 SW Hall St. 7 pm, 9:30 pm Friday-Saturday, April 13-14; 3 pm Sunday, April 15.

Guitar Wolf, The Transistors, Mean Jeans

[MUSIC] In Japanese music culture, imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery. Over there, bands are judged less by artistic innovation than by how accurately they mimic their chosen Western source material. In the case of Nagasaki’s Guitar Wolf, the band has been pulling off a pretty great Ramones impression going on 25 years now. Wrapped in leather jackets that never seem to come off, the group basically put its collective head down in 1987 and charged through the proceeding two decades, releasing a dozen albums of dirt-simple punk rock. Even the death of its original bassist in 2005 barely slowed the band down. Its shows play out the same way its career has: loud and fast, with hardly any pauses in the action. Hawthorne Theatre, 3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. 8 pm. $13.50 advance, $15 day of show. 21+.

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