The Portland International Film Festival came to an end last Sunday. This was my first year covering it as a member of "the press." Here's a quick, belated wrap-up:

Number of films I saw out of 80 or so films screened: 9.5.

Wait, what's the .5 for? I walked out on a press screening of Everlasting Moments after the film broke halfway through. Yeah, yeah, yeah, some online film critic I am. What can I say? The sun was shining outside and I decided my afternoon might be better spent hiking down to Powell's instead of watching a very slooooow film about a Swedish mother and her passion for turn-of-the-century photography.

The number of films my friend Dan's father, a member of the Film Center's Silver Screen Club, saw this year? Over 40.

How did he manage that? I have no idea but I think it may involve a combination of retirement and amphetamines.

What did he think of that really depressing movie about the actors in the factory? He actually liked it.

The best film that isn't Coraline I saw this year: The Baader Meinhof Complex.

The worst film that isn't Coraline I saw this year: Karamazovs.

The biggest "You'd Never See That in an American Movie" moment of the fest: The last two minutes of Mermaid.

Total estimated viewing time of unpleasant middle-aged nudity in the films I saw: At least 20 minutes.

Number of Silver Screen members that hissed at me like a snake after I made the mistake of sitting in front of them at a press screening: 1.

Number of awkward encounters involving Teri Hatcher: 1.

Would I do this again next year: Absolutely.

Click here for the Portland Mercury's festival wrap-up.

Labels: PIFF

One morning a jerk with a flattop haircut wakes up and discovers that he's grown a pair of wings overnight. As if this weren't enough of a problem, they begin making him do good deeds. The latest animated feature from Plymptoons is a gothic trip through seedy bars and suburbs and a bit of a dark turn for former local Bill Plympton. It's a long way from those Taco Bell commercials he did in the early '90s.

Idiots and Angels is full of the animator's signature brand of physical humor and surreal imagery. The main character attempts a multitude of things to rid himself of his new appendages, a bar owner takes out his competitors with grenades and a crowd of burn victims wrapped up like mummies all frantically run around looking for a still-open watering hole where they can wash away their troubles. With its noir-ish shadows and visuals, the movie is also Plympton's best looking feature to date and the soundtrack includes songs from Tom Waits and Pink Martini.

Mr. Plympton was at the screening I went to last night and said that he came up with the premise for Idiots and Angels while in France on the spot after a teenager asked him about his next movie. After the screening, he signed postcards in the lobby with sketches of bulldogs. What a cool guy.

Grade: B+

Rating on the PIFF Pretentiousness Meter: 4

Showtimes: Tonight at 6:45 PM at the Broadway Cinemas

Labels: PIFF

I think it was around the time that an elderly audience member started yelling back at the screen in Polish that I decided I should have stayed home to watch last week's episode of 30 Rock instead of going to see Karamazovs. This film from Czechoslovakia incorporates all the worst elements of art house cinema: it's too bleak for its own good, it's completely convinced it's brilliant and it includes way too much flabby middle-aged male nudity.

The film begins well enough. A group of actors descends upon a run-down factory to stage an unusual production of The Brothers Karamazov. They laugh and joke but once they arrive they become completely obsessed with pouring over Dostoevsky's words. What starts out as a decent comedy-drama immediately mutates into a meandering stage adaptation of the novel. The actor's various subplots established in the opening moments are all but forgotten and are never wrapped up. Karmazovs jumps the tracks fifteen minutes in and what follows is a cinematic wreck worthy of a serious industrial plant accident.

I've walked out of movies maybe twice in my life and the only thing that kept me from ditching Karamzovs was the fact that I would have had to trip over ten people to get to the aisle. Plus, I wanted to find out what was going to happen to the old Polish guy who wouldn't shut up. He finally pipped down after about ten minutes but the characters on screen? They kept prattling on. The film's only redeeming moment? When one of the actors decides to grab a puppet and engages in an amusing but snide mockery of Doltovesky's writing habits.

I get the movie. I understand that the actors become so immersed in their own pettiness and devotion to their craft, like the educated classes that came before them, that they do nothing to help out a struggling member of the proletariat in their midst. Nonetheless, I still think this one sucked.

Grade: D

Rating on the PIFF Pretentiousness Meter: 10

Showtimes: Tonight at 8:30PM at the Broadway Cinemas

Labels: PIFF

Rembrandt van Rijn. A creator of masterpieces. A legend in his own time. And a guy who was really quite randy. I saw one of his most famous paintings, the colossal-sized The Night Watch, up close during an ill-advised trip to Amsterdam a few years ago. I remember being handed a laminated piece of paper offering details of all the hidden meanings in the painting but nothing about the murderous accusations it may or may not contain.

While the Rijksmuseum may shy away from these allegations and rumors, Nightwatching doesn't, diving full-bore into the legends surrounding the museum's most famous painting and the artist behind it. According to the film, Rembrandt was not only daring and weird when it came to his personal relationships (at one point he mischievously attempts to sketch his wife's womb as she's giving birth), he was pretty bold in his studio as well. After hearing about the deplorable crimes of a local militia group who he's been commissioned to paint, he sets about reveling their twisted hobbies through art and metaphors on a gigantic canvas.

Nightwatching is the sort of movie I wish my high school art teacher had shown in class instead of dreary public broadcasting documentaries about Renoir. While the film falls apart in the last act as it hastily tries to sum up Rembrandt's decline through convoluted conspiracies and an odd series of encounters with an orphan who may or may not be the angel of death, it's a solid costume drama.

Grade: B+

Rating on the PIFF Pretentiousness Meter: 5

Showtimes: 2/13 at 8:30 PM in the Whitsell Auditorium and 2/15 at 2 PM also in the Whitsell Auditorium

Labels: PIFF

Downsizing and having your job shipped overseas: two phenomenons not entirely exclusive to wage slaves in the United States. When Japanese salary man Ryûhei Sasaki discovers that his job has just been shipped to China, the lives of both him and his family slowly begin to untangle.

This film from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa follows Ryûhei as he struggles to keep up appearances and as he spends his work days hiding out in bookshops with others like him. While his family remains oblivious, he whiles away his days with another unemployed manager who sets his cell phone to automatically ring five times an hour just to make him feel like he's keeping busy.

The film is both a serious drama and a bleak satire of corporate culture in Japan. The crowd I saw it with didn't quite know what to make of it, laughing awkwardly at various points throughout the movie, especially during the final twenty minutes.

Grade: B-

Rating on the PIFF Pretentiousness Meter: 7

Showtimes: The last showing was last night. Ooops.

Labels: PIFF

We didn't quite make it onto the red carpet but we were at the tail end of the carpet, wedged between latinoreview.com and a film crew from the PSU Daily Vanguard. Talk about a weird night. The Vanguard kids made fun of the blog, Teri Hatcher offered a great response to my snarky question about Desperate Housewives, Dakota Fanning signed my copy of the book and we also talked to Phil Knight, Neil Gaiman and others. All the interviews will go up on the blog on Monday after I fulfill the duties of my day job and get some sleep.

The after-party at the Portland Art Museum was also pretty amazing, all pomp and glitz with Phil Knight and son holding court in a VIP section. Laika rolled in several of the sets and puppets from the movie in addition to the artists' workshops. The film's enormous "Pink Palace" served as the ballroom's centerpiece.

More to come. In the meantime, here's a Flickr gallery of photos from last night. A tip of the hat goes out to the folks at Focus, Laika, my photographer Pete who took all the red carpet photos and a certain PR rep who put us on the list and talked security out of dragging me out of the Schnitz after I ran down to Safeway for more batteries (Mr. Levy, if I'd known you could have had them. We got through the night without needing 'em).

Labels: Coraline, PIFF

It's been a weird day and I've got an even weirder night ahead of me. My photographer for the evening, one Mr. Pete Hunt, and I are about to head down to the red carpet for the world premiere of Coraline at the Schnitz. Earlier today, two other online media types and I had the pleasure of talking with the film's director Henry Selick and this fellow:

I really didn't think any of this was going to come together and was kinda surprised when I showed up for the interviews to discover that my name was actually on the list. More photos and today's interviews with Neil Gaiman and Henry Selick will be posted here on the blog over the course of the next few days.

Also: this is Another Portland Blog's 2,000th post. Huzzah!

A red letter day? Sure.

Labels: Coraline, PIFF

I'm a graduate of Nike College, also known as the University of Oregon. While I was working towards my degree, a group of students decided to camp out on the front steps of Johnson Hall to protest university president Dave Frohnmayer's decision to sign a controversial Worker Rights Consortium contract. They held out for ten days and a friend of mine, along with a small band of her fellow demonstrators, staged a sit-in before getting dragged out of Johnson Hall on the heels of having mace rubbed in their eyes by members of the local police department. The whole thing made national headlines and eventually caused enraged Nike founder Phil Knight to relinquish his substantial financial contributions to the school for a number of years. You can read all about the fallout from the protests here.

My contribution to the controversy? I threw a wad of paper at Phil Knight during a basketball game at Mac Court, inspiring everyone around me to do the same. How did Phil deal with this abrupt assault? He got up and walked out without so much as glancing in our direction. A classy response to a bunch of fiesty undergrads.

Knight and Nike are no strangers to controversy. They've been getting knocked around for over a decade for sweatshop labor practices, overpriced sportswear and Knight's decision to pull the rug out from under Will Vinton and partially hand over his Portland film studio to his own son Travis. Coraline, the first film to come out of the renamed Laika Inc has its Portland premiere at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall tonight at 7:30, a few hours from now. The screening sold out quickly when they went on sale a few weeks ago.

Given the history surrounding Coraline and the origins of the cash that went into financing the film, I guess I should automatically hate it for purely political reasons. After all, wasn't Coraline at least partially made off the sweat and tears of international child labor and Will Vinton's broken dreams?

Regardless of all of that, I gotta call this one like I see it.

As much as it might annoy the former wannabe student radical in me to type this, Coraline is an incredibly well-made animated film. In terms of ambition, story, visual splendor, voice work and characters it rivals the best of Disney and is on the level of Pixar's output. The icing on the cake? It's even set in Oregon. According to The Oregonian the film takes place outside of Ashland (link). That would explain the Shakespearean actors hanging around town when Coraline and her mother go shopping.

Based on Neil Gaiman's New York Times bestselling novel, Coraline follows the adventures of a pre-teen who moves from Michigan to Oregon. Ignored by her workaholic parents, bored out of her skull and disgusted with the Pacific Northwest's gloomy weather, she finds a doorway into a parallel universe much like her own. There Coraline's greeted by her "other mother," the polar opposite of her distant real one who presents her with everything she could ever hope for.

In this alterna-reality Coraline can eat whatever she wants, ride around an elaborate garden in a cricket carriage, visit a circus populated by acrobatic mice and attend nightly performances in a concert hall populated by hooting Scottish Terriers. Even her annoying neighbor, the one who talks to much? In this world he never utters a word. There's just one little problem: everybody in this wonderland has buttons instead of eyeballs.

Of course, nothing in this parallel world is what it seems and Coraline is about to get hit with a substantial amount of fantasyland hassles and headaches. The movie is marinated in the pathos of Gaiman's source material and it refuses to shy away from the novel's Brothers Grimm-esque horrors. Coraline is downright scary. Maybe not on the level of the Pleasure Island sequences in Pinocchio or Bambi's mother taking a bullet but it could traumatize especially timid kids. The tougher tykes are gonna love it though.

Director Henry Selick assembled an amazing crew that put a tremendous amount of painstaking work into integrating Coraline's stop motion animation with its elaborate 3D effects. Reportedly the filming took over two years to complete. Coraline's splendors and set pieces are a pretty trippy treat for the eyes, both normal ones and button ones. At the very least, it's the best set-in-Oregon movie ever made.

Will Coraline out-gross pop-culture reference spewing garbage like the Shrek movies at the box office? Unlikely but here's hoping it's at least nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature next year.

It's nice to see that Phil's shoe money going to produce a film on this level. Here's hoping Laika continues to rise above its roots and keeps cranking out stuff like Coraline. Sadly, the studio's future, according to this week's cover story in Willamette Week is dicey. Mr. Knight (current net worth, $9.8 billion) recently laid off 65 of Laika's employees in December and is waiting to see how much cash Coraline pulls in before bankrolling a second feature. I guess he doesn't like to lose.

Grade: A

Rating on the PIFF Pretentiousness Meter: 2

Showtimes: It screens tonight at a sold-out screening at the Schnitz and opens in theaters around Portland tomorrow.

Labels: PIFF

If Amelie had been born in a small Russian fishing village instead of Paris she would have probably turned out a lot like Alisa, the precocious hipster heroine of this incredibly quirky and really weird fantasy film. Things like Mermaid just don't get made in the states. Here's a quick rundown on the premise:

Alisa is a free-spirited girl living in a seaside ramshackle made out of empty water bottles with her overbearing mother and senile grandmother. She wiles away her days dreaming of the day her father, who she can't quite remember and thinks might resemble the monster from Bioshock, will return. She desperately wants to become a ballerina and she can magically make things happen ala that kid in Firestarter when she gets overly emotional. After a fire destroys their home, the family relocates to Moscow where Alisa grows up and gets a job handing out fliers on the street while dressed in a cell phone costume. She later saves the life of a self-destructive entrepreneur who sells plots of land on Mars to millionaires with too much money and time on their hands. Oh, and one afternoon a huge soccer riot breaks out after Alisa has a bad day at work.

Director Anna Melikyan turns Moscow into a vibrant, electric wonderland reminiscent of Sofia Coppola's portrait of Tokyo in Lost in Translation. Don't judge the movie by its cloying trailer and its fairly terrible first ten minutes. Mermaid and its offbeat, Beck-lookalike protagonist should be an annoying mess but somehow it works like a rusted-out VW van with 500,000 miles on the odometer. Just when you think the movie is going to finally fall into the cliches of your typical romantic comedy it jumps the rails with a finale that slaps you across the face like a sloppy, radioactive smooch from Chernobyl. It's a damn shame that only around fifty people in the US will see this one.

Grade: A-

Rating on the PIFF Pretentiousness Meter: 3

Showtimes: 2/6, 6:15 PM at the Broadway Metro and 2/10, 6 PM at the Broadway Metro

Labels: PIFF

Just when I thought that everything that ever needed to be said about the mafia had been said along comes Gomorrah, an Italian film based on real-life incidents that exposes a new level of nastiness festering in Naples. Filmed documentary-style, it falls somewhere between The Sopranos and City of God presenting an unblinking overview of the city's crime world and the life cycles of its participants. Teenagers are recruited and forced into an ugly initiation ritual involving bulletproof vests while their older counterparts are massacred in tanning salons.

It's a bleak ride but not without its moments of grim humor. In one subplot, a pair of clueless, Scarface-obsessed newbies make the mistake of striking it out on the own against a local don after uncovering a cache of machine guns. The film's biggest flaw is that it tries to cover a huge amount of material while juggling a multi-generational cast of characters all diving into or trying to escape their lifetime gigs. The best of Gomorrah's various stories: one unwitting goon's struggles to come to terms with his boss' unwavering vileness and what could be the most repugnant mafia job in the history of film. Tony Soprano and Michael Corleone may as well be Mercy Corps volunteers in comparison to this guy's employer, the impossibly corrupt Don Franco.

Grade: B

Rating on the PIFF Pretentiousness Meter: 4

Showtimes: 2/6, 6:30 PM at the Whitsell Auditorium and 2/9, 6 PM at the Whitsell Auditorium

Labels: PIFF

You know you're in for some pure art house arrogance when a documentary opens not only with a pair of theater curtains parting but a lengthy James Joyce quote. Director Terence Davies' love letter to his lost youth and the Liverpool of yore is certainly heartfelt and the historical footage he acquired is nothing short of amazing. The film weaves together hypnotic clips of bonfires, beauty contests, boardwalks, piers and slums. Unfortunately, his heavy-handed narration adds a lofty, pompous air to the proceedings, making the whole thing feel like a lecture from a grandparent that not only thinks everything in human history that happened after 1962 is completely awful but who also not-so secretly hates you.

For Davies, post WW2-era Liverpool was nothing short of a paradise that was a cultural epicenter until those pesky Beatles came along and ruined everything. Yes, he actually bashes the Fab Four and admits that, as a teenager growing up in the city, their songs turned him off from rock music forever. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. He also makes the mistake of including ill-fitting music over several sequences. I'm still wondering why he decided to slap the Hollies 1969 hit "He Ain't Heavy" over footage of the Korean War.

Grade: C-

Rating on the PIFF Pretentiousness Meter: 9

Showtimes: 2/8, 3 PM at the Broadway Metro and 2/12, 7 PM at the Broadway Metro

Labels: PIFF

The Baader Meinhof Complex taught me an important life lesson. Don't piss-off German hippies. If you piss off German hippies they may just toss a Molotov cocktail into your car while you're stuck at a stoplight.

Based on a true story and a nominee for the Academy Awards Best Foreign Language Film, director Uli Edel's thriller follows a group of recklessly idealistic and uncompromising Vietnam-era militants as they tear through the fatherland fighting a threat they deem as serious as Hitler. You see, they weren't too into the whole "American Imperialism" thing so they spent the '60s and '70s robbing banks, blowing up federal buildings and shooting guns at freeway signs when they weren't too busy hiding out in Italy or smoking cigarettes while looking cool.

Of course, their escalating wave of terror eventually gets the better of them, landing four ringleaders in prison. As their cause unravels, so does the film as its last act becomes heavily mired in courtroom drama. It's an exhaustive look at a period of left-wing radicalism almost entirely unknown to most of us in the US. Still, The Baader Meinhof Complex attempts to cover too much rather than the moments in the group's history that audiences are more likely to be interested in (ie, all the explosions, riots and gun battles).

Grade: B+

Rating on the PIFF Pretentiousness Meter: 3

Showtimes: 2/8, 7:30 PM at the Whitsell Auditorium and 2/9, 7 PM at the Broadway Metro

Labels: PIFF

So, yeah, I landed a press pass to this year's Portland International Film Festival (link). I've got the festival guide sitting here on my desk and I've been flipping through it. There's just no way I could do this thing justice. By my count, seventy-eight feature-length films will screen over the next few weeks, in addition to numerous short films. I wonder how many of them I'll get through between now and closing night on the 21st. So far I've seen 5.5.

Yeah, so I kinda, sorta walked out on one of them when the film broke at the halfway point during a press screening this afternoon. I decided I'd rather be running around outside in the sun. A desire to expose myself to natural light on a day off? Pfffft. Some online movie critic I'm turning out to be.

Anyway, I'll be running reviews on the blog over the next few weeks and I wanted to come up with something that none of the other blogs and publications in Portland are going to offer. Something straight-forward, honest and, yeah, more than a bit snarky. I give you, THE PIFF PRETENTIOUSNESS METER.

I wish I could have found a more impressive GIF, and a better name for the meter, but maybe this fits. The PIFF Pretentiousness Meter doesn't need to be big and flashy with a huge budget and a catchy title, ok? It subsists outside the Hollywood mainstream. It's the sort of meter you're not going find at your average shopping mall chain cinema. Go back to suburbs and watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop with actual mall cops if you don't like it.

Anyway, in addition to trailers, upcoming screening times and reviews, I'm going to rate each movie I see on how overwhelmingly snotty and art house-y it is. A "1" rating on the scale means that a movie is as mainstream and accessible as something like Kung-Fu Panda. A "10" rating means it's as unbearable and highfalutin' as the smuggest student art movie ever made or, say, the worst five minutes of Inland Empire.

As with any film festival of this scale, this year's PIFF is sure to offer plenty of gems and lots n' lots of pap. So far I've seen more of the former than the later.

Labels: PIFF

I've been stuck with an unusual work schedule since right around Labor Day. Through the middle of February I'll continue to be trapped at my office every Thursday through Sunday, which isn't exactly ideal for someone like me who enjoys things like occasionally seeing friends and family.

While it's allowed me plenty of time to do laundry while everyone else I know is at work, I'd have to say my "weekend" is almost completely useless and annoying. That was until Tuesday afternoon came along.

The good folks organizing the 32nd Annual Portland International Film Festival have agreed to let me cover this year's fest. I've attended the annual festival for years but this will be the first time I've been involved as a member of "the press."

On Tuesday I was given a shiny, new press pass enabling me to spend the next three weeks sucking down as many arthouse and indie films as I can handle on all these otherwise worthless days off. Naturally, I plan to use this pass only for good and I have no intentions of revealing what goes down at the fest's press screenings, complain about the lack of vampire movies, attempt any gonzo journalism stunts or write about what Shawn Levy talks about before the movies start. Not that I've been eavesdropping or anything.

So far I've seen four films that will screen for the public once the festival kicks off with the premiere of Coraline at the Schnitz on February 5th. I'll start posting reviews the early part of next week. I hope to see as much as I can but the festival is a Unicron-sized cinematic behemoth (click here for a rundown on this year's selections). Even the Oregonian's staff has a hard time keeping up with the dozens upon dozens of movies, shorts and documentaries that will screen over the course of the next few weeks and I am but one bored blogger with a craptacular full-time work schedule.

Labels: PIFF