The 36th Annual Northwest Film and Video Festival: The North Portland filmmakers Part II
The Final Inch- Trailer Above
Imaging Home- Photo Teaser

Imagining Home – Directed by Sue Arbuthnot and Richard Wilhelm

This is an endearingly made if occasionally digressive documentary that conveys a clear sense of a Portland neighborhood, which most people would otherwise completely skip over. I’ve only twice taken the bus through the New Columbia community, formerly Columbia Villa, Portland’s affordable housing, low-income project. But one's vantage point from a bus reveals nothing ostensibly scary or crime-ridden about the area, and community members I’ve talked to speak very highly of it. If you’re unclear about even where Portland’s oldest housing project area sits, take a No. 4 Bus from the Interstate and Lombard intersection of North Portland toward St. Johns. It’ll stand out, because New Columbia doesn’t resemble in the slightest the miles upon miles of modest one-story houses that comprise NoPo. It looks modern, all recently laid concrete sidewalks and aluminum-siding condos. From simply looking the neighborhood over you wouldn’t guess all of the history that filmmakers Sue Arbuthnot and Richard Wilhelm dutifully uncover in their feature-length documentary, Imagining Home.

The Box - Directed  by Richard Kelly - US - 2009
An Education - Directed by Lone Scherfig - UK - 2009

I saw three movies on Sunday, November 8, getting all around inner Portland, hopping from theater to theater, my favorite thing to do. The first was a British drama rolling at the Fox Tower, where occasionally very good movies play but where the screens are generally reserved for movies with a certain high-class, message-oriented, Oscar-type reputations, and audiences by and large expect to feel smart for having gone to see them. The British drama, An Education, was a lot of excellent period photography (movies set in a certain period are almost always shot as if to look like they were actually produced in that period) and dramatic acting, enough of each to carry the superficial story along for two hours as if it were very important, which it turned out not to be as soon as I left the theater.

The Men Who Stare At Goats
Directed by Grant Heslov - US - 2009

Making a comedy that highlights the problems of the current Iraq War seems to require a bit more precision and cohesion than this grab-bag of contemporary targets and warmed-over jokes. Two central stories – one about a secret faction of the military, known as the “earth army,” which was tasked with developing psychic warfare techniques that would peacefully resolve conflicts, and the other about a buddy-buddy adventure through private contractor-infested Iraq taken by a reporter and an ex-earth army soldier – mesh awkwardly, with the help of an absurd amount of narration. The resultant movie winds up missing the chance to lampoon gung-ho Mid-East policy wonks, private contractors, journalists, ex-hippies and common soldiers, all of which it targets at one plot-point or another.

36th Film and Video Fest - the North Portland Filmmakers, Part 1

Axioms of a Dishwasher

Vance Malone's Axioms of a Dishwasher is fueled by a sober internal narration delivering exactly what its title suggests: the rules that a restaurant dishwasher has decided to live by in order to get through his job. In seven minutes we see the dishwasher efficiently performing the wash as we hear about the life philosophy that has made him efficient.  It has startlingly good cinematography for a seven-minute short with an esoteric subject (not dishwashing itself so much as speculation on the neuroses of a hypothetical dishwasher.) Good music combines with the professional color and off-center compositions to create the tone, which is somber and workaday, and the editing is precise and rhythmic. This is unimpeachable, about as far as a filmic excerpt of everyday minutiae can go.

Antichrist
Directed by Lars Von Trier – Denmark – 2009

by Alex Peterson

A few months before this story opens, a young mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her son have gone to a cabin in the woods so that the mother can quietly write a college thesis on such things as witch burnings and the history of violence against women. The following winter, while she and her psychologist husband (Willem Dafoe) are making love, the boy escapes from his crib, falls out of an open window and is killed. An immense  wave of grief renders the mother alternately catatonic and violently self-blaming. This eventually forces the husband to bring her back to the cabin, where he can make her confront the fears which prevent her from passing out of grief.

Late this past July the St. Johns store of locally owned Videorama unveiled a plan to combat its main competitor, national home delivery and Internet rental giant Netflix.  As of late October, the St. Johns Videorama has more than 40 subscribers to their new monthly DVD rental plan that they’ve modeled after Netflix.

“The reason we decided to go into the subscription program is, we really felt like a lot of people were using Netflix, and Netflix does nothing for the local neighborhood,” says Videorama co-owner Terri Chadney. “For us to survive we felt like we needed to offer people options.”

Where The Wild Things Are - Directed by Spike Jonze - US - 2009

If you know anything about Spike Jonze the person, as apart from his three movies, it’s probably that he’s a loveable goofball with a childlike vigor for making those movies. This is, according to various interviews with Maurice Sendak, why Jonze was chosen by the author to cinematize Where the Wild Things Are. In Being John Malkovich Sendak understandably saw something of the mixture of the unreal, the sense of awe and the encroaching darkness with which he had written his most famous children’s story. The result of Sendak’s decision is a good movie, not a great one, even though it truly doesn’t seem like another director may have been able to handle it better.

A Serious Man - Directed by the Coen brothers - US - 2009
Since the massive effect of No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers have been elevated to a much coveted position in American movies: they are Our Artists, in the same way that Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino and even the Andersons, Wes and Paul, were once the premier filmmaking talents from the States. The Coens have been making major movies for twenty-five years, and have been flirting with the above title on and off since Barton Fink in 1992. Though they started out strong (Blood Simple, still my second favorite of theirs) they’ve arguably improved quite a bit, having taken their signature ultra-fussy visual style and cynical world-view to Olympian heights of structural precision and tone control (No Country, an excellent movie, which in my view, after having re-watched it twice, has a quality almost entirely attributable to Cormac McCarthy.) They are respected, with their Oscars and Palme D’Or; they are serious, with their weighty themes, heavy, heady darkness and surgical way with violence, and best of all, for makers of movies that are popular along quality lines, they do it all without relinquishing a reputation as entertainers. Despite all this they’ve become, if anything, more cynical as they’ve aged into veterans.