36th NW Film & Video Festival

[November 4th, 2009]

(L) NATURE ON IT’S COURSE (TOP R) PEOPLE CAN’T WAIT (BOTTOM R) NATHAN AND NORDRICH

Other film festivals get more press, or draw bigger crowds. Other film festivals lure big-name guests, or have more lesbians riding bicycles. Other film festivals (including one sponsored by the NW Film Center) have the audience-pleasing movies about old folks who turn into dogs. But no other film festival has, year in and year out, kept its finger on the pulse of what cinema is actually being made in our backyard quite like the NW Film Video Festival. This year’s event is distinguished by guest judge Kenneth Turan, the L.A. Times film critic who awarded the top prizes. But do you really trust a guy from California to tell you what to see? Of course you don’t. You trust us.

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SEE IT: The 36th NW Film and Video Festival screens Friday-Saturday, Nov. 6-14, at the NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium.

Shorts I

The strongest films of any length in this year’s festival both undermine the putative glamour of life on the Portland streets, a myth almost as old as the city’s filmmaking culture. Seattle director Travis Shields travels south to profile Randy Leonard’s 24-hour loos with People Can’t Wait; his comprehensive interviews (which include Victoria Taft again making an ass of herself) are distinguished by a chat with toilet cleaner Rodney Haven, who summarizes his assignment to “make sure everything’s sanitized properly, each and every day”—then glances away, lost in existential reflection. Further along the bus mall, Karl Lind’s 122 Random Seconds is an experimental film turned into an accidental documentary when the shoot is interrupted by a man in a Randy Moss jersey, who denounces TriMet and the military before asking for a cigarette. Like most actual encounters with the homeless, it is sad and frightening, without the protective casing of artistic intent. These two minutes stuck with me more than any of the more considered entries here—though Don’t Worry, It’s a New Century includes an amusing, nude homage to Matt McCormick, and Best of Show winner Nous Deux Encore gains poignancy through restraint, telling the story of a marriage and bereavement solely through old photographs. It’s the first example I’ve seen of cinema taking a helpful cue from scrapbooking. AARON MESH. 7 pm Friday, Nov. 6, and Wednesday, Nov. 11.

Shorts II and Shorts III

As is often the case with short film round-ups, the animated works here outshine their live-action brethren. Unhindered by the violently bad acting, makeshift sets borrowed from mom and dad, and criminally dull subjects that hobble so many human-inhabited shorts, animated works take a direct flight to wonder and mystery. Ink (or paint) and paper make for very cool, very cheap and very special effects. While the growing ranks of backyard farmers in Portland will probably get a kick out of The Fancy, a short doc about chicken breeding, the highlight of what I saw of Shorts II was Su-An Ng’s Nature on Its Course, a pop song-brief animated trek into snowdrifts of crumpled paper. Shelley Jordon’s Family History, which screens during the Shorts III program, layers paint on a single sheet of paper to capture the flux of time and involution of memory. It’s a minimal and moving demonstration of the power of low budget animation. CHRIS STAMM. Shorts II: 7 pm Saturday and Thursday, Nov. 7 and 12. Shorts III: 7 pm Sunday, Nov. 8, and 8:45 pm Friday, Nov. 13.

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle

Seattle director David Russo’s feature debut opens with a virtuoso montage of a wine bottle whisked through a rapid-fire series of seascapes, while always maintaining its position in the center of the screen. It arrives at the feet of Dory (Marshall Allman), a janitor at a market-research company, who opens it to discover a message of hope: “Fuck You.” The movie continues in this vein, perfectly keeping its balance even though you suspect Russo is having a go at the audience. The plot is certainly outlandish: Dory and his fellow nocturnal cleaners become addicted to prototype self-heating chocolate-chip cookies, until the men develop stomach pains and give birth to translucent blue fish out of the only orifice they’ve got available. Yeah, dudes poop blue fish. The last time I remember seeing the male-birth conceit, it was on a very bad episode of The Cosby Show—yet here I found myself sort of buying it, because Russo has confident storytelling chops, and the actors (especially the gutter charismatic Vince Vieluf) commit wholeheartedly to the office-space absurdity, which echoes Being John Malkovich. Little Dizzle is the rare avant-garde comedy that not only transcends its crackpot subject matter but elevates it. I found myself, well, moved, which is probably as far as blue-fish pooping can go. AARON MESH. 9 pm Saturday, Nov. 7.

American Collectors/The Golden Age of Junk

These no-nonsense documentaries devoted to junk and doodads and the people who love them are formally uninspired, but they evince a laudable reluctance to condescend, a quality far too scarce in nonfiction treatments of the dotty and the kooky. American Collectors is a straightforward series of short portraits of various bedroom curators: One woman collects gumball machine jewelry, one young man amasses Duran Duran posters, and, shitting you I am not, there is a gentleman sharing our four dimensions who has accumulated a library of AOL disks. Adam Dowis, the charmingly squeaky subject of The Golden Age of Junk, isn’t a collector, but a scavenger and repurposer. Think of him as a cross between WALL-E and Robert Rauschenberg. His post-Katrina New Orleans is like some sick careful-what-you-wish-for joke, but he makes the most of his proximity to destruction with clever functional art that dynamizes detritus and glorifies wear and tear. CHRIS STAMM. 6 pm Monday, Nov. 9.

To Pay My Way With Stories

Brian Lindstrom is still completing his documentary on the death of James Chasse; for now, he offers this 49-minute study of distressed Portlanders who were not abandoned by the city. A close reading of the Write Around Portland creative writing seminars, To Pay My Way With Stories follows a girl with Down’s syndrome, a wife stricken with cancer, and a very lonely 79-year-old woman as they describe their lives in impromptu essays. Understandably, these compositions tend to return to the same themes of tribulation: “Writing,” says one participant, “is how I purge when I’m forced to binge on life.” Less expectedly, observing this catharsis is rewarding, if only as a reminder that words can cut through the isolation that envelops all our lives. AARON MESH. 7:30 pm Tuesday, Nov. 10.

Nathan and Nordrich

Schoolhouse Rock! quaintness catches a case of the Dr. Katz jitters in this endearingly rough-hewn and slyly touching animated short by Noah Dorsey, who should have won a Judge’s Award this year. Or perhaps they should have created a new category for him: “One to Watch” or “Most Likely to Succeed” or “Young Filmmaker Who Actually Has an Original Thought in His Head.” The titular duo are conjoined twins with a lung disease, two weeks left to live, and a far-flung brother whom they’ve never met. They have just enough time to find Noah, a neurasthenic shut-in who can’t fathom why his parents chose the two-headed oddity over him, and take one of his healthy lungs. Bonds are forged and lessons are learned, but Dorsey spikes the sentimentality with quietly surreal asides and a deadpan morbidity, lending a streak of darkness and melancholy to an otherwise sweet and charming take on family and the freaks it takes to make one. CHRIS STAMM. 8:45 pm Thursday, Nov. 12.

Uncle Tom’s Apartment

I didn’t like former WW critic David Walker’s previous forays into moviemaking, but there’s much to admire in his latest domestic drama. Yes, the editing still uses a shot/reverse shot grammar as a crutch, and yeah, Todd E. Freeman’s cinematography makes it look like a filmed play. And it is possible that the story of an overgrown adolescent forced by chance to raise two small children has been addressed in other movies. But most scenes in Uncle Tom’s Apartment (the allusion of the title is mercifully not pursued beyond character names) are charged with good humor and camaraderie. As the central comics geek, Alan Wone has the slacker charisma of a black Jeffrey Lebowski, Walker himself is very funny improvising in the best-buddy role, and Ted Lange (the bartender on The Love Boat) dominates the picture, imbuing the rhythms of classic African-American oratory to the Spider-Man theme song. The director of Black Santa’s Revenge has put away childish things—but not too far away. AARON MESH. 8:30 pm Saturday, Nov. 14.