Top Down Film Series

[July 23rd, 2008] Outdoor movies have returned for the summer, and while Portland doesn’t lack for cinema under the stars—it’s entirely possible that Bee Movie will buzz through every single one of the city’s parks—the NW Film Center’s Top Down Film Series is the season’s literal high point. Five stories above Southwest 15th Avenue and Yamhill Street, the screenings on the Hotel deLuxe parking garage offer a grown-up alternative to familial al fresco fare. This year’s bill includes Robert Mitchum as a Tennessee moonshiner (Thunder Road, Aug. 14), Sesame Street’s Gordon as a flamboyant pimp (Willie Dynamite, Aug. 21) and ’80s kitsch tour de force Flight of the Navigator as itself (Aug. 7)—each movie paired with a live performance by a local band. “We like to call them parties in the sky,” says NWFC marketing manager Jessica Lyness. That’s a good description, but I prefer to think of the programs as cosmopolitan picnics, with the audience free to grab another microbrew and gander at the vistas of Goose Hollow, while the soft cheers of Timbers fans drift up from PGE Park to mingle with MAX trains behind the soundtrack.

This week’s noises come courtesy of Tom Waits, without whom no good party is complete. Top Down kicks off Thursday night with Big Time, director Chris Blum’s endlessly entertaining 1988 montage of Waits performing his Frank’s Wild Years and Rain Dogs catalog. Filming the pencil-mustachioed Waits prancing and growling on a series of stages lit in primary colors, Blum cuts between shows in unanticipated rhythms. “MTV hadn’t quite caught up to that irreverent ‘continuity is for sissies’ effect,” Blum recalled in a recent interview with WW, “but we did it and it worked.” The inspired editing makes Waits seem a uniquely malleable figure: At different moments in the show, he resembles Will Ferrell, Prince, Warren Oates in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and the original inspiration for Heath Ledger’s Joker. The only through line is the music—a melancholy cabaret death-rattle—and Waits’ pokerfaced humor. It’s a shame Big Time isn’t available on DVD, but that makes it all the more imperative to catch the rare showing.

So: Will I see you tomorrow night, on a downtown parking garage?