Screen Listings

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem

The funny thing is, there was a movie last year at this time called Requiem: a depressing little German film about epilepsy. That movie was screened for critics. This one was not. R.

Casablanca

[REVIVAL] Because Casablanca is considered by many to be the greatest American film ever made, it’s surprising to learn that it was born out of the same convoluted production process as every other Hollywood film made that year. The finished product bore almost no resemblance to the play it was adapted from, and underwent revisions by at least three screenwriters. Furthermore, director Micheal Curtiz was the producer’s second choice and leading lady Ingrid Bergman was under contract with another studio. While production was underway, the famous ending had still not even been conceived—it wasn’t until late in the process that it was decided Bergman’s Ilsa would leave Casablanca with her husband (Paul Henreid), rather than Humphrey Bogart’s Rick. It’s hard to imagine that even the most beloved climax in film history was, like so many other things in Hollywood, pulled straight out of someone’s ass. And it’s hard to imagine missing a chance to watch it again, with state-of-the-art high definition projection. JOE JATCKO. Living Room Theaters.

Charlie Wilson's War

To the complex foreign policy debates of our time, Charlie Wilson’s War adds a simple question: Wouldn’t this War on Terror be going better if Josiah Bartlett were in charge of it? The heroic congressman at the center of the movie may be a real person, and he may be played by Tom Hanks instead of Martin Sheen, but make no mistake—this is an Aaron Sorkin statesman. For four seasons, Sorkin oversaw TV's The West Wing, and now that he has scripted Charlie Wilson’s War for director Mike Nichols, all the cozy elements are back in place—including the protagonist, who may have a Texas drawl and a drinking problem but is still the same admirable idealist, this time placed in the 1980s and bent on defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan. Not that it’s anything less than a pleasure to return to Sorkinland, with its chivalrous, slightly patronizing love of women, its eloquent defense of substance abuse and, above all, its assumption that the audience knows a little something about world events, and that we care. The characters are as Sorkin has written them since his first show, SportsNight: They’re wiseacre romantics. Rep. Charlie Wilson has a weakness for scotch, cocaine and buxom assistants—one of them, I am happy to report, is played by Amy Adams—and an even larger vulnerability to the plight of desperate refugees, especially when their enemy is Russian. The film shares his concerns, even as it cocks an eyebrow at unintended results looming on the horizon. (Most of the eyebrow-cocking is beautifully handled by Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the blunt, foul-mouthed CIA analyst Gust Avrakotos.) The result is the smartest and most entertaining political movie in recent memory, and the first film within shoulder-missile firing range of the Middle East to display a principled internationalism. It’s just smart enough to disguise the fact that it doesn’t quite know what its principles are. R. AARON MESH.

Chuck Close

[TWO DAYS ONLY] Here’s an irony: a painter named Close whose work requires distance to register as an intelligible image. Chuck Close describes his work—photorealism constructed from abstract patterns, resulting in portraits that look like faces seen through patterned glass—as “hopefully a beautiful, powerful image out of stupid marks.” And here’s another paradox: a documentary about a highly dramatic life that studiously keeps its eye on the art that life produced. Close suffered a spinal artery collapse in 1988, and has been a partial paraplegic ever since, painting first with his mouth and now with a brush strapped to his hand. But director Marion Cajori isn’t aiming to pluck any heartstrings; her film is resolutely technical, likely to appeal only to those who either know who Close is or are predisposed to learn. Which doesn’t make it bad. There’s plenty here to reward the viewer with a sturdy constitution, as artists from Nancy Graves to Philip Glass ponder the emergence of painting that values the process of creation over the meaning of the content. In that sense, Cajori’s movie is certainly true to its subject. AARON MESH. NW Film Center. Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum. 4 pm Sunday, Dec. 30.

Diva

[ONE WEEK ONLY, REVIVAL] In 1981, Jean-Jacques Beineix founded the “cinéma du look” with Diva, a mystery movie about a bicycle messenger, an opera singer and a bootleg recording that leads to no end of intrigue. That might have been the end of “cinéma du look” and its sleek images of white Citroën coupes and plastic ponchos, if not for good old Pauline Kael, who decided to compare Beineix to Orson Welles and generally do backflips over his movie. (Not literally, although that would have been amazing.) The producers of The Bourne Supremacy should be placing wreaths of Kael’s grave: Beineix’s film movement didn’t last into the ‘90s (it incorporated Luc Besson and that’s about it), but Diva provided the source material for any number of Eurothrillers, from corrupt investigators to moped chases. Still, at 26 years' remove it’s hard to see what all the fuss was about. Was it the young hero’s bachelor pad, painted with murals of classic-car crashes? The showdown in an abandoned train station? (Come to think of it, that scene is pretty cool.) The dagger-wielding hit man who looks like Flea? Time has worn the luster off Diva—just because it did crunchy French trash first doesn’t mean it did it best—but a bit of the sheen is restored in a new 35 mm print making its way across America. R. AARON MESH. Cinema 21. Friday-Thursday, Dec. 21-27. No shows Monday, Dec. 24.

Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains

The title has no colon, and the movie has no spine. Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs) joins the ranks of directors sycophantically following their favorite political figures—men ranging in stature from Al Gore to Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky—in their various crusades. Demme has focused his documentary on former President Jimmy Carter and, if nothing else, he has captured the vulcanized boredom of a national book tour. The series of tedious interviews with glib public-affairs hosts is made even less interesting by the drummed-up controversy of Carter titling his 2006 Middle Eastern blueprint Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. And so we are treated to two hours of Carter defending his provocation, as handlers and Demme stand at the ready to aid him. Carter is unvaryingly portrayed as a plainspoken Georgia boy with statesmanship on his conscience, but he emerges as a pious self-promoter whose overriding concern is wrangling an invitation from Brandeis University to debate Alan Dershowitz. Demme’s account of this process is drab and humorless (when a shot of Carter taking laps in a hotel pool faded artistically to white, I could barely suppress my disappointment that the next image did not feature a giant swimming rabbit). Carter has achievements to take pride in—Habitat for Humanity, to cite merely the first example—but this profile isn’t worth a hill of peanuts. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre.

Kurt Cobain About a Son

Dead Rock Star Movies have become a genre, complete with repeating tropes of artistic suffering and foreshadowed tragedy. So how do you make a film on Kurt Cobain—who’s already had his share of screen time—without lurching into the same old story? If you’re A.J. Schnack, the director of About a Son, you start by obtaining more than 25 hours of all-night phone conversations between Cobain and biographer Michael Azerrad, recorded a year before the shotgun. Then you juxtapose the quotes against verdant images of the places Cobain is talking about—decaying Puget Sound hamlets from Aberdeen to Olympia. The result feels like Kurt offering a DVD commentary on his own life, in a soft, cawing voice that at times sounds eerily like that of Owen Wilson. Schnack’s footage, with its roiling cloud cover, blank faces and industrial decomposition, owes some debt to the work of David Gordon Green, and it subtly amplifies Cobain’s recollections, which are elegiac and sometimes contradictory. (He was large; he contained multitudes of drugs.) The biggest surprise here, however, is Cobain’s resistance to pity himself. “I’ve thought about dying all my life,” he muses—but adds without a pause, “I’m a normal person.” For once, that seems possible to believe. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

Director Jon Turteltaub’s treasure hunt continues with a second chapter, in which we find Benjamin Franklin Gates (Nicolas Cage) down on his luck. “My girlfriend kicked me out, I’m living with my dad, and my great-great grandfather killed Abraham Lincoln.” If Gramps was anything like Cage, all the Confederate conspirators needed to do was offer him a paycheck. Cage pocketed $20 million from the last National Treasure movie, so here he is again, pretending to be immensely upset by the smearing of his family name—at least until something even more implausible can occur. Ben Gates’ skills suggest what might have happened had Indiana Jones taken an early interest in cryptography and limited his reading to middle-school American history textbooks. His adventure takes him to a second Statue of Liberty in Paris (if you look out your left window, you’ll see we’re passing The Da Vinci Code), the Oval Office, tunnels underneath Mount Vernon and even deeper tunnels beneath Mount Rushmore. His colleagues are kept busy trying to master their accents: Ed Harris makes a game attempt at the Deep South, while German actress Diane Kruger occasionally gets through two consecutive lines sounding like she has spent a couple of months stateside. In between, there are puzzles to be solved with offhand ease; the solutions would be more impressive if we didn’t know each code would be cracked in time for popcorn refills. By the time the featherbrained improbability reaches the point where Ben Gates realizes that to access the book he needs (it contains—you guessed it—secrets) he would need to be elected president of the United States, I half expected a montage of successful campaigning. (He opts for kidnapping instead, and the prez is cool about it.) Watching Book of Secrets is exactly like doing a crossword in a children’s magazine—every problem is goofy, painless and insultingly simple, and eventually the whole project feels like a waste of time. PG. AARON MESH.

P.S. I Love You

In writer-director Richard LaGravenese’s follow-up to Freedom Writers, Hilary Swank’s toothy charm can’t mask the fact that her half of a romantic duo, Holly, would be hell to live with—extensive coat and lingerie collection notwithstanding. The film is off to a choppy start when Holly’s bitchy tirade is culled by her dashing Irish rogue of a husband, Gerry (the endearing but often ill-cast Gerard Butler), who—not to give too much away here—will be dead after the opening credits. Luckily, succumbing to a brain tumor gave him time to make the proper arrangements with bakeries, travel agencies and the post office, so as Holly lubricates her grief with Jameson and an eccentric cast of supporting characters, and as LaGravenese relies on spousal abuse (Holly’s annoying habit of throwing shoes at her husband’s face, in flashbacks) as comic relief, Gerry attempts to guide Holly’s meandering life. From beyond the grave. With a series of letters. The mere presence of Gina Gershon, Harry Connick Jr.’s turn from arrogant leading man to dopey jerk with a bad case of social ineptitude, and liberal application of the Pogues to the soundtrack all come within spitting distance of redeeming this film. PG-13.  SAUNDRA SORENSON.

Silent Night, Deadly Night

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] There are some cinematic memories that warm our hearts every Christmas, bringing cheer with each viewing. Little Virginia finding out that yes, indeed, there is a Santa Claus. George Bailey realizing how wonderful life can be. A deranged, sexually repressed psychopath in a Santa suit making kebabs out of gratuitously naked ladies. Silent Night, Deadly Night, presented annually by the Grindhouse Film Festival, is by no means a good movie, which should be evident from the fact that it’s a slasher flick made in 1984, a time when Friday the 13th ripoffs piled up quicker than dead sorority girls. Still, there’s a great deal of guilty pleasure to be had watching a Santa-clad mental case, with a vested childhood fear of Papa Noel, hack his way through a horde of naughty and naked cheesecakes for 80 gruesome minutes. R. AP KRYZA. Hollywood Theatre. 9:30 pm Saturday, Dec. 22. No showtimes.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

It’s not a Christmas movie, but Sweeney Todd is nonetheless a gift, a grisly musical confection wrapped in a blood-splattered package. Adapting Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp each turn in their best work since Ed Wood. Burton has disappointed in recent years, but with Sweeney the director displays new bravado with his trademark gothic style, sculpting a 19th-century London seething with malice that penetrates even good men. Said good man is barber Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp), whose wife catches the eye of Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who then falsely imprisons Barker, ravages his wife and takes his young daughter prisoner. Years later, a gnarled Barker returns looking for blood, taking the name Sweeney Todd and enlisting the help of equally whacked-out Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who runs the worst meat-pie shop in London. It’s a match made in hell—Sweeney has bodies to dispose of, and Mrs. Lovett needs ingredients for her pies. With the flash of a razor, the Demon Barber is cutting a swath through London’s scumbags on his way to the Judge, and Mrs. Lovett’s pies are the most popular in the city. (“Try the priest,” she croons.) Depp and Bonham Carter (neither experienced singers) dig deep into their characters, and Depp’s voice—a gravelly, cockney baritone—is perfect for the part, striking a believable balance. Rickman (who does evil with the best of ’em) plays Turpin with perverted glee. Timothy Spall, as Turpin’s crony, personifies sadism and arrogance, while Sacha Baron Cohen makes a hysterical turn as a flamboyant rival barber. Burton took a gamble in tackling Sondheim’s musical—gorehounds have to sit through a musical, musical fans are asked to endure unflinching, if cartoonish, gore. Neither should be disappointed, save Sondheim devotees miffed by song cuts and some slow moments. Sweeney is the blackest sort of comedy, one that asks audiences to laugh at mutilation, child abuse, cannibalism and seas of crimson. But it’s also a heartbreaking tragedy, a tasty piece of horror and a miracle of set design, acting and direction—simply put, one of the year’s best movies. R. AP KRYZA.

The Big Lebowski

[TWO DAYS LEFT, REVIVAL] For those foolish holdouts who remain unconvinced that The Big Lebowski is the funniest movie ever made, here are 12 reasons: a check made out for 69 cents. Marty the Landlord’s dance cycle. Lingonberry pancakes. Jesus and the Gipsy Kings. Sobchak Security. “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm once they’ve seen Karl Hungus?” Whale songs. The proximity of the In-N-Out Burger. Logjammin'. Arthur Digby Sellers’ iron lung. The Malibu Police Department coffee mug. “Dude’s car got a little dinged up.” Really, I could go on like this for days. R. AARON MESH. Clinton Street Theater. 7 and 9 pm Wednesday-Thursday, Dec. 26-27. No showtimes.

The Great Debaters

Denzel Washington may be demonstrating an increased willingness to portray villains of late—but whenever he directs himself, he’s all inspiration all the time. In his 2002 debut behind the camera, Denzel cast Denzel as the psychologist mentor to Antwone Fisher; this Christmas he returns as Melvin B. Tolson, the debate-team coach who led a black Texas college to face Harvard’s debate squad in 1935. The Great Debaters is based on a true story, but it feels like every inspirational overcoming-bigotry-through-sports movie ever made, with oratory substituted for, say, basketball. It’s a sign of the movie’s realism that the Wiley College debate team is invariably assigned to argue the progressive liberal side of every issue. Still, the film is painless uplift, with a young cast hitting all its emotional marks on cue. Another Denzel, 17-year-old Denzel Whitaker, has an especially affecting presence in his first big-screen role since Training Day. (Less fortunate is John Heard, whose talent is wasted here: Being a racist Southern sheriff is a thankless job.) It’s hard to say how the material could be significantly improved—except by retitling it The Master Debaters, which would be awesome. (Full disclosure: I initially went to the wrong theater for this screening and, as a result, missed the first 30 minutes of the picture. So it is entirely possible that the first quarter of The Great Debaters is a surrealist triumph that evokes Buñuel and Dali. But I doubt it.) PG-13. AARON MESH.

The Kite Runner

Due to sweeping establishing shots and earnest performances—most impressively from the child actors who were infamously manipulated into filming a rape scene—Marc Forster’s adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, can rightly be categorized as “epic.” The coldly beautiful Afghan landscape (in reality, China) is deftly paired with euphoric, handheld montages of Kabul street life, and devastation—which happens at least once in every act of the film—is handled with visual ambiguity nothing short of poetic. But aesthetics and acting aside, the film comes across as a true translation of the source material: heavy-handed. Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) is a weak-willed boy of privilege who is raised with servant’s son Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada). Steve McQueen fans both, they play out their fairly idyllic—though motherless—childhoods in the streets of late-’70s Kabul, engaging in the distinctively Afghan sport of kite-fighting. But when Amir fails to save Hassan from bullying that is beyond the pale, childhood effectively ends for both boys—just in time for Amir to be ushered out of the chaotic country by his father, played with quiet nobility by Homayoun Ershadi. Multiple book deals and an American citizenship later, Amir (played in his 20s and 30s by a striking Khalid Abdalla) is handed an opportunity to set things right, at the considerable cost of navigating the treacherous land of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Hosseini’s tale weighed itself down with death-knell chapter endings that made it a natural for Oprah’s venerated book club. What salvaged it—just enough to put it on display beside Starbucks’ bags of free-trade grounds—was its detailed pre-Soviet occupation, pre-Taliban perspective of the worldly society that was Kabul. Little of this is lost in the screenplay, and the final product makes the transformation from “painful histrionic tale” to “recommended holiday viewing” by way of compelling performances. PG-13. SAUNDRA SORENSON.

The Red Balloon, White Mane

[TWO DAYS ONLY, REVIVAL] French director Albert Lamorisse was a man of diverse accomplishment: When he wasn’t shooting documentaries, he was inventing the board game Risk. But for those more interested in world cinema than world domination, Lamorisse is best remembered as the director of two brief, crystalline children’s movies: The Red Balloon and White Mane. Presented in restored prints, the twin bill is the perfect antidote to the holiday season’s glut of loud, cluttered family trash. In crisp, naturalistic frames, Lamorisse traces two stories of young boys and the creatures they love: a wild horse and a personable balloon. Neither movie contains much dialogue, but the kids won’t be bored—they’re in the careful hands of a filmmaker who understands the capricious whims of the young, and reflects their freedom in his fables. AARON MESH. Cinema 21. 1 pm Saturday-Tuesday, Dec. 22-25.

The Savages

Scarcely have we recovered from his obscene performance in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, when who should come galumphing along but Philip Seymour Hoffman? The single most unprepossessing and overrated actor of his generation has been granted yet another starring role in which the camera pulls in tight to his doughy cheeks and multiple chins. Hoffman’s onscreen persona has never varied much—even his Elmer Fudd meets Carol Channing caricature in Capote wasn’t a stretch. In The Savages, Hoffman stars as Jon, a bearded and burly drama professor who looks as if he rightly belongs at a truck stop. Writer-director Tamara Jenkins inherently grasps Hoffman as a cartoon, purveying him as a buffoonish “intellectual,” as befits the received wisdom engulfing the actor off-screen. Jon’s elderly, estranged father (Philip Bosco) has begun to show signs of dementia, thus Jon and his sibling Wendy (Laura Linney), a struggling playwright, squabble over the “correct” nursing home for dear old Dad. Linney, wearing a brown fright wig that makes her resemble a Medusa with dead snakes, has been given a homely married lover who sports a comb-over, lest we miss the point that Wendy has low self-esteem. Alexander Payne executive-produced this outing from Jenkins, and the Payne-ful touch is evident: condescension as a substitute for humor, cheap irony as a stunt double for insight. Jenkins, who writes pauses around her dialogue (she believes gales of laughter will accompany her deathless one-liners), doesn’t know whether she’s satirizing white liberal guilt or perpetuating it. Slicing through The Savages’ phoniness, Bosco screams at his children, in response to their eggshell-sticky questions on what to do after he dies: “BURY ME! WHADDYA, IDIOTS?” Splendid advice. R. N.P. THOMPSON. Fox Tower.

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep

A campy reimagining of Free Willy by way of E.T. and The Guns of Navarone, Jay Russell’s movie tells the story of Angus MacMorrow (Alex Etel), an ickle wee lad who finds an unco streenge egg on the shore of Loch Ness. A horrible lizard hatches out, which turns out to be a water horse (like other highlanders of note, “there can be only one…in the world at any one time”) that Angus names Crusoe. Then some bloodthirsty infantrymen show up, and the movie goes its predictable way from there as Crusoe grows up, breaks a lot of valuable antiques, moves into the loch and, finally, with a familiar aerial flip, escapes to a happier life in the open ocean. Which is a good trick, seeing as how the loch is landlocked, a good 30 miles from the Scottish coast. The flick would be unbearable if Russell (Ladder 49), who seems fully aware of the silliness of his subject matter, had not piled on the cheese with absurd character acting, a wailing, Celt-ish soundtrack by four Irishmen and a Spaniard, and a handful of scenes stolen straight out of creature films past. With all that, it’s actually kind of fun. PG. BEN WATERHOUSE.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

By creating Walk Hard—a parody of musical biopics in general and James Mangold’s Johnny Cash film, Walk the Line, in particular—producer and writer Judd Apatow has gathered his stable of performers from Knocked Up and Superbad and declared, “We can make whatever the hell kind of movie we like, and it will be funny.” Which would be a disturbing development if not for the even more frightening fact that he's basically right. If the test of satire is whether its targets can ever be taken seriously again, director Jake Kasdan’s work is a resounding success. It is now impossible to watch Walk the Line’s childhood sawmill accident without thinking of young Dewey Cox slicing his brother in half with a machete. (“You’ll never be half of what he was!” Dewey’s father rages. “Hell, you’ll never be half of the half of what he was after you cut him in half!”) It’ll be even more difficult to sit through the addiction-and-recovery fables of Ray without thinking of 14-year-old Dewey—already played by swarthy John C. Reilly—getting introduced to the joys of reefer by bandmate Tim Meadows. And no inspirational ghost is safe after Dewey’s brother reappears...as Jonah Hill, still in obscene Superbad form. The only reason Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There survives is that it wasn’t around for the mocking when Kasdan was shooting—though Bob Dylan and Don’t Look Back certainly take it on the chin, as do the Beatles (with Paul Rudd delivering what is simultaneously the worst and best John Lennon impression in history), Elvis and, in a particularly inspired bit, Brian Wilson. Walk Hard flies gleefully off the rails in its second half, often abandoning any pretense of narrative in favor of chasing the best jokes. (The faux-country songs, which are startlingly tuneful and include the unforgettable lyric, “In my dreams you’re blowing me/ Some kisses,” are sometimes all that glues the project together.) This means the movie, despite Reilly’s sincere performance, is the first Apatow production since Talladega Nights not to bother with a soft, poignant center. It’s sheer Hard candy. R. AARON MESH.

West Side Story

[REVIVAL] Revisit the timeless story of what happens when well-trained Broadway performers fall through the cracks of society. Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s 1961 adaptation of the Great White Way hit based on Romeo and Juliet—starring Natalie Wood with a Puerto Rican accent—won 10 Oscars in 1961, including Best Picture. Though it might require a little more suspension of disbelief than your average musical—as those inexplicably breaking into song are supposedly street hoodlums—West Side Story is a little aged but still charming. Relive all the singing, all the dancing, all the snapping in unison, from that brief moment in time when belonging to a musical street gang was badass. JOE JATCKO. Hollywood Theatre.

A Man Vanishes

Onward drives the NW Film Center into the canon of Japanese director Shohei Imamura, whose films focused on what he termed "the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure." In its final installments, the series focuses on Imamura's work from the past 20 years. That means a hairdresser-cum-brothel owner (Zegen, 7 pm Thursday, Dec. 20), a man whose only friend is an eel (The Eel, 7 pm Friday, Dec. 21) a physician fixated on curing hepatitis (Dr. Akagi, 7 pm Saturday, Dec. 22) and, most memorably, a woman whose orgasms flood the local canals (Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, 7 pm Sunday, Dec. 23). You go, lower parts!

Czech Modernism

[REVIVAL, ONE NIGHT ONLY] The NW Film Center’s retrospective of Czech cinema continues with Heave Ho!, among the socialist comedies from “famous slapstick duo of Voskovec and Werich.” Oh, those wacky Commies! Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum. 7 pm Wednesday, Dec. 19.