I've reposted this review of Terribly Happy, which I first caught at PIFF a month ago, to coincide with it's opening this weekend at Fox Tower downtown. I wasn't a huge fan, and it doesn't appear to be getting many good reviews around town, but for lovers of the funny cruelty the Coen brothers have made their name with (or for lovers of the Danish the countryside) this is definitely worth a look.

Terribly Happy - Directed by Henrik Ruben Genz - Denmark - 2009

Opens Friday March 12 at Fox Tower 10, 846 SW Park

by Alex Peterson

Somewhat along the lines of the darkest work of the Coen brothers, this slick piece of Danish cynicism has a psychologically frail young police chief (Robert Hansen) become helplessly entangled in the sexual politics of an incestuous rural town, with nothing but bad consequences. His earnest-yet-warped good intentions are never a match for the town brute, the town brute's damaged-goods wife or any number of oily, smirking townspeople. It's all funny, in a way, and is only aimed at stylish black comedy, but still.

Oh, boo hoo, the Sentinel Street Edition has perished. Who cares. That bloody newspaper never printed even one of our video selections. What did the Street Edition ever for do us at SMV? Nothing, that's what! So, crocodile tears is all you get from us. But since everyone is getting all nostalgic and clogging up SMV's precious bandwidth with all their blubbering, we might as well join in. 

We can be nostalgic too.  Remember 'the aughts'? Remember when bands in 2002 and 2003 made us nostalgic for the bands who did identical music in 1982 and 1983?  That's what we miss. We miss a time when we could really feel nostalgic from a really nice clean piece of nostalgia.

Take Swedeish electo-poppers The Knife's 2002 song "Heartbeats," for example. That song makes us miss when new music sounded really old. The song was re-released in 2004 after Jose Gonzales did a seemingly more popular cover of the song on 10-string guitar. The lovely irony is, the cover sounds less nostalgic than the orginal.  The Knife's official video brings it all together, combining Super 8 footage with really old analog video affects. The whole things just makes us wish we could go back in time 7 years when the new stuff made the past look so much cooler than it ever was.

[PS- in SMV's humble opinion, March 4th, 2010 Daily Show- tightest, investigative, self-satirizing, infotainment media artifact in years...is it just a funny show with a unsettling ending or a vast left wing media conspiracy to get the Quants?]

I've reposted this review of Fish Tank, a tight, affecting and maybe a touch too symbolic (if that's a bad thing) drama of the British lower class, because it's been lucky enough to garner a normal theatrical run only weeks after its Portland premier at PIFF. I want to encourage people to check it out, and to consider its similarity to the Oscar-nominated An Education, which will no doubt itself get a second theatrical run in order to try and cash in on its nominations. An Education is a slick, lazy and cloying period piece about a middle-class British girl seduced by a smooth-talking lothario. Fish Tank could pass with the exact same plot synopsis, but there is nothing lazy or cloying about it. An Education is your feel-good movie about a young girl being ruined, and it's essentially an empowerment fantasy; Fish Tank has no desire to let you off the hook for watching a pretty young girl get exploited by an older man. Fish Tank takes things seriously, An Education is lost in movieland. Maybe the best idea is to see them both and compare.

Fish Tank - Directed by Andrea Arnold - Great Britain - 2009

Opens Friday March 5th at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave

Mia, a young girl  with an awful homelife and understandable anger issues, takes refuge in a few precious, fleeting things as she stumbles through her teenage years in poor, urban London. She likes to practice hip-hop dancing in an abandoned apartment. She has an ongoing project to save an inner-city horse from certain death. And her mother's handsome lover has taken the kind of shine to her that most young girls would mistake for an adult relationship. The dancing leads to an audition as a stripper, the horse is killed, and the boyfriend takes advantage of Mia while her mother is passed out drunk.

Portland’s theatre scene has yet another small company in its ranks with the new Northeast troupe BaseRoots. This fledgling company, however, sets itself apart through its mission: to promote African American actors and present work that “showcases the unique African American experience.”

Founded in the spring of 2009 with the help of sponsorships from Miracle Theatre Group and the Regional Arts and Culture Council, BaseRoots is a self-identified African American theatre company in a city where such groups are exceedingly rare.

According to Andrea White, a BaseRoots co-founder, Portland has historically offered few roles for black actors. Those that have been available are often ones where the character is explicitly defined by race, an experience she describes as “tiresome.”

In SMV's humble opinion this is the finest show on TV (even it if only really speaks to "liberal coastal urban types". They've managed to keep up the manic pace of short turn around, hyper referential jokes, mixed with elitists satire tinged with absurdist spectacle without getting cancelled. Normally only cartoons can get away with that. These guys are funny even when they screw up. Keep on 30 Rockin' in the free world guys! (eew..that was bad..)

Exciting news from our friends at St. Johns' own Writers' Dojo: They're teaming up with Reading Local to present Read to Rebuild: A Haiti benefit reading. Set for March 16, the event boasts an impressive slate of writers/readers, including Tom Spanbauer and Ariel Gore. 100 percent of proceeds will go to Mercy Corps. All the details are below, courtesy of Reading Local:

Haiti still needs our help. They must rebuild. Let the Portland literary community come together to do our part and help Mercy Corps in their efforts to support Haiti. (You can see our Fundraising Page Here.)

At SMV we often cultivate what we call "emotional texture" meaning things that intentionally produce multiple conflicting emotional experiences at once. Here is a tribute to the great pioneers of this form of affect, the great BBC, 'The Office' (single quotes used in tribute to the Queen's English). We're not sure that the American version ever got as edgy as the British one.  So if you haven't see the BBC version be prepared for the best/worst.

Fish Tank - Directed by  Andrea Arnold -  Great Britain - 2009
Plays Friday February 19, 6 PM, Northwest Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium 1219 SW Park

 Mia, a young girl  with an awful homelife and understandable anger issues, takes refuge in a few precious, fleeting things as she stumbles through her teenage years in poor, urban London. She likes to practice hip-hop dancing in an abandoned apartment. She has an ongoing project to save an inner-city horse from certain death. And her mother's handsome lover has taken the kind of shine to her that most young girls would mistake for an adult relationship. The dancing leads to an audition as a stripper, the horse is killed, and the boyfriend takes advantage of Mia while her mother is passed out drunk.

This is  a bleak portrait of ruined youth and a sober, if cynical, take on the presumed future of kids born into very low-income families. Yet for all of it, Fish Tank is never less than gripping "social-realist" filmmaking, which means that great efforts are taken with the sets (actual apartments, junkyards, city streets), the music and the sound editing, the photography and the performances, to make everything here look, sound and feel lived in, ultra-realistic.

Vincere - Directed by Marco Bellochio - Italy - 2009
Opens Friday, February 19, 8:45 PM NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium 1219 SW Park - Also plays Sunday, February 21, 4:45 PM.

When is a biopic not a biopic? When it's directed by  Marco Bellochio, one of Italy's oldest and best filmmakers. His most famous film, Fists in the Pocket, sneaks up on and surprises  the viewer in much the same way that Vincere, an ostensible "life of Mussolini," slowly and irrevocably becomes something else entirely.

The Girl on the Train - Directed by Andre Techine - France - 2009
Opens Wednesday, February 17, 8:15 PM, NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium 1219 SW Park Avenue

A few things about modern Paris stand out in this film:  twenty-somethings forming a romantic bond through video-chatting and rollerblading;  the way that the sounds of traffic in a un-air conditioned office can have a calming effect on work. Old  French master Andre Techine adds a lot of detail and professionalism to his direction. This is a movie that, despite whatever inconsistencies in its overall construction, has a rhythm and nuance to individual scenes that is undeniably effecting.  But ultimately, The Girl on the Train is a movie about sedentary intellectuals discussing social problems, and said social problems arise primarily from an over-written and over-intellectualized plot.

We really have no idea if this is real or not. But it doesn't matter.

A Prophet - Directed by Jacques Audiard - France - 2009
Opens Saturday, February 13, 8PM, NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park St.

A 19-year-old Muslim, Malik (Tahar Rahim), serving time as a consequence of his misspent youth, is recruited by his prison's ruling gangsters to kill another Muslim. He does, at the expense of whatever decency he had before prison. He becomes the Muslim dog of the head gangster, who rules the prison more efficiently, it seems, than even the guards do. For six years Malik works for the gangster, Luciani (Niels Arestrup, who's performance is reasonable enough proof for the existence of evil), and meanwhile learns to be a better criminal than he ever had a chance to outside of prison.

Hipsters - Directed by Valery Todorovsky - Russia - 2009
Opens Friday, February 12, 8:45 PM at the Broadway Cinemas, 1000 SW Broadway
Musicals are a notoriously tough genre to pull off; achieving the delicate balance of realistic characterization within the (possibly glorious) unreality of singing and dancing is about the hardest cinematic high-wire act I can think of. Hipsters doesn't come close, but it's glossy and polished  enough to prevent its audience from minding too much.

Terribly Happy - Directed by Henrik Ruben Genz - Denmark - 2009
Plays Friday February 12, 6:45 PM, at the Broadway Cinemas, 1000 SW Broadway

By Alex Peterson

Somewhat along the lines of the darkest work of the Coen brothers, this slick piece of Danish cynicism has a psychologically frail young police chief (Robert Hansen) become helplessly entangled in the sexual politics of an incestuous rural town, with nothing but bad consequences. His earnest-yet-warped good intentions are never a match for the town brute, his damaged-goods wife or any number of oily, smirking townspeople. It's all funny, in a way, and is aimed primarily at stylish black comedy, but still.

A film only interested in setting up grotesque caricatures  for inevitable doom, and then having a laugh about how neatly awful the whole world is, has only the thinnest ability to entertain on any level. You can't preconceive little tales of ugliness and expect people to agree that the world is a terrible place, or that we should all just give in to the eventual corruption towards which we're all headed: that message is as corrupted as the fictional town it grows out of.

Sentinel PIFF Coverage: The 33rd Portland International Film Festival

This year, our little neighborhood paper has finagled its way into the press screenings for the biggest movie event that the state of Oregon features all year: the Portland International Film Festival, hosted by the Northwest Film Center. As The Sentinel's film critic in residence, I've seen it as my duty to take time off from my day job to attend as many preview films as possible, the reviews of which I'll be posting as each film's premiere date draws near. I'll also be attending a fairly ludicrous number  of regular festival screenings (at nonpress prices) simply because PIFF is my favorite Portland event of the year, and I'll be blogging as much as possible on those.

Beginning today, and stretching to the end of the festival, Saturday, February 27, expect near-constant Sentinel posts on the pros and cons of the most international array of films you could ever hope to see within these city limits.

[preview of I Am Love below the cut]

Ok, so this isn't Saturday Morning, but it still is Saturday and this is a video. This one was shot two weeks ago, at the opening night of the Beaterville Cafe's new bar at 2201 N. Killingsworth St. The new space is directly next door to the cafe. It's spacious, with lots of beer on tap, and its got that down home Beaterville auto-mojo all over it.  The James King Band from Danville, Virginia stopped in for a foot stomping old timey kick off. Beaterville has been in North Portland's Overlook neighborhood for over a decade. It's a bit of an institution around here, and like the James King Band, it has a following. Folks came up from as far as Eugene to see the band and give old "Beaterville Bill" a bluegrass congratulations on his new place.

North Face - Directed by Philipp Stolzl - Germany - 2009
Opening at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave, Friday February 5th

A lot of trouble was clearly taken to get this movie shot. The occasional footage of actors, playing mountaineers, attempting to scale Germany's famous Eiger North Face just before the Berlin Olympics of 1936, is impressive. It's expansive, it's breathtaking, it's perilous, it focuses the movie into what is essentially and rightfully an adventure/survival story. That footage comprises the best parts of this film: professional climbers climbing, running into dangerous passes, nearly losing their footing,  helping their comrades up or down belaying ropes, etc.

Frustratingly, up to its final third North Face is too concerned with exposition and some really standard character conflicts to let loose the climbing scenes and craggy-peaks footage. Since it's relatively easy  to drum up excitement by putting hard-bitten professional types in harm's way, and considerably tougher to build realistic people  out of dialogue and scenes, it should have been a quick decision for a filmmaker as reliant on cliche as Philipp Stolzl to just put the majority of the emphasis on the action and the mountain, a la Cliffhanger.

Nena Botto is ready for her close-up – and so is St. Johns.

Botto, an actress and St. Johns resident, has given her neighborhood a starring role in her new web series, Blue Fiddles. Billed by Botto as “Sex and the City meets Lucille Ball,” the series chronicles the everyday adventures of three female friends in the Rose City. 

An economy-battering recession has daunted many aspiring nonprofiteers. Not Balam McNally, who founded Circadia Arts Center in early 2009 despite the downturn. 

The CAC, an Oregon nonprofit, is a multi-use facility that houses rehearsal spaces, classrooms, a gallery, banquet hall, woodworking and metalworking shop, and private artist studios available for rent. The center offers courses in various fine and industrial arts, including screen-printing, painting, and film. There are also courses in martial arts, yoga, and dance, all of which are held in an area called the “movement space.” Courses in puppetry, life drawing, and video editing are currently being developed.