Screen Listings

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.

Czech Dream

Judging from the evidence in this 2004 documentary, corporate advertising is a tad less sophisticated in the Czech Republic than it is in America—and anti-consumerist movies are a bit better. While we get the obnoxious Reverend Billy and his What Would Jesus Buy?, the Czechs get Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda, two film-school students who erect a plastic façade in a grassy meadow outside Prague, and then proceed to persuade thousands of their countrymen that it’s Czech Dream, a megastore with the nation’s lowest prices. It’s an ingenious prank, even if it is carried out on (mostly) innocent souls, and the two masterminds seem more curious than smug. Besides, it’s hard to feel sorry for anyone greedy enough to be swayed by a jingle with the lyrics, “It will be a nice big bash/ And if you’ve got no cash/ Get a loan and scream/ I want to fulfill my dream.” Surprisingly, the patrons who arrive for the grand opening mostly seem to take the practical joke in stride—it’s a nice day, and they’re outdoors—though a number of them seize the opportunity to yell into cameras their opinions about the European Union. Aside from its clever premise, Czech Dream is distinguished by its memorable use of a single musical motif: The 16th-century carol “Hey Ho, Nobody Home,” which is refashioned as a mournful dirge, a foreboding rock song and an Eastern Bloc worker’s anthem. Who needs “L’Internationale”? AARON MESH.

Great World of Sound

A little girl walks into a Birmingham, Ala., motel room to audition a song she wrote called “The New National Anthem.” It begins: “Asked my teacher why folks die/ She said some folks they die for songs/ It’s how they know that they belong.” But this movie isn’t about the little girl. It’s a comedic picaresque about the two men sitting across from her in the room, aiming to pry $3,000 from her daddy’s pocket to record a demo CD. Martin (Pat Healey) and Clarence (Kene Holliday) are “producers” for the Great World of Sound talent agency, a swindle disguised as a big musical break. As the partners travel from Charlotte, N.C., to Lousiville, Ky., trying to sign hapless musicians to contracts on behalf of their increasingly shady employers, Martin begins to recoil from his work—Healey expresses distaste with an averted flick of his eye—while Clarence proves himself a natural huckster. (“Jesus didn’t walk on water until he stepped out of the boat,” he harangues a hesitant mark.) Director Craig Zobel proves plenty of his own talent, showing that his time assisting David Gordon Green (George Washington) has given him a flawless ear for the modern, sweltering South, from the buzzing of cicadas to the rustle of Krystal bags. Great World of Sound features a number of talentless musicians—many people, apparently, harbor a secret dream to be the next Creed—but even the worst anthems invite us into Zobel's humane world. It’s how we know that we belong. R. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre.

Last September

Local filmmakers Chapin Hemingway, Tyson Balcomb and Kasey McCabe premiere their first feature, a story of three friends who try to recover their friendship (and maybe hook up with chicks) after a death. Judging from the trailer, there's going to be some catharsis. Hollywood Theatre. 7 pm Sunday, Dec. 30.

Nina's Heavenly Delights

A woman returns home to Glasgow to find lesbian love, delicious homemade curry and some of the worst reviews of the year. Not screened for local critics. PG-13.

Steep

This dreamy moon wisp of a documentary charts the rise of extreme skiing, from the sport’s French origins in the 1970s at Chamonix to its embrace by Americans in the late 1980s and beyond. Steep opens with a shot of sunlight shining through snowflakes, a bauble effect by which to enter the movie’s winter wonderlands. Director Mark Obenhaus introduces us to a dozen or so scrappy ski bums, notably the blond-mohawked Glen Plake and the eminently photogenic skier-parachutist Shane McConkey, who periodically likes to leap off a bridge with his buddies. Although the movie functions well enough as an ode to these dudes’ gnarly pursuit of good times—it’s a pungent whiff of the ski subculture—Steep serves us best when the camera simply roves over the dramatic spires of Grand Teton, the seemingly sedate charm of La Neige or the velvet-textured vastness of Alaska’s Chugach Mountains. Hypnotic HD footage of rugged hillsides sculpted by blankets of snow, the rolling “ocean waves” that cascade in the wake of a downhill racer’s swirling lines—these are the main reasons to take it all in. “You can almost get a feeling of flying,” states one skier of gliding some 200 feet while scarcely touching the ground. It’s the moviemaker’s achievement that those of us sitting in the dark taste a bit of that sensation, too. PG. N.P. THOMPSON. Hollywood Theatre.

The Soldier's Tale

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] More than two decades after making the twin land-use documentaries Property and Paydirt, Portland native Penny Allen has been roused to her camera again, thanks to an Iraq combat vet who sat next to her on an airplane ride. On a flight from her new home in Paris, “Sgt. R” promised to send her video and photos from operations in Mosul. He kept his promise, and she’s pulled no punches in sharing his story: Within the first 10 minutes, The Soldier’s Tale contains some of the most graphic, appalling destruction of the human body that I’ve seen come out of the Middle East. Little wonder that when Allen and the sergeant meet again in a Pacific Northwest hotel room, he says he’s had trouble adjusting to civilian life. In chronicling her encounters with Sgt. R, Allen has made one half of a great documentary: His recollections of policing people he has come to hate are remarkably candid and discomfiting. A pity, then, that Allen feels the need to break in with awkward, overly dramatic voiceovers reminding us of her opposition to the war and horror at his decision to return to the Army. (Her failure to distinguish between the sources of her footage—some is straight from troops, while other clips appear to be taken from network news—is also a misstep.) There's vital information here, and when Allen’s not interrupting, it’s a mesmerizing account. AARON MESH. NW Film Center. Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum. 7 pm Saturday, Dec. 29.

The Walker

It took me nearly 20 minutes to figure out whether director Paul Schrader’s latest misfire was set in the 1980s or was merely made by a director still stuck in that decade. (It had been a long time since I’d seen so much neon-blue lighting, or heard a synth score.) Fortunately, he clued me in by adding a character who paints images of Abu Ghraib. Woody Harrelson, meanwhile, plays Carter Page, a perfectly mannered, immaculately attired homosexual man who escorts Washington, D.C., society wives from public events to the privacy of card games, where he dishes the latest District gossip. At least that’s his routine until his chaperoning of Kristin Scott Thomas lands him as a prime murder suspect. If this character sounds a little bit like an American Gigolo, he is—all the way down to his precisely arranged necktie collection and his self-recognition in the final act. But The Walker trades Schraeder’s famed “transcendental style” for an earthly minded literalness. As a mystery, the movie is inert; as a political statement, it’s insipid. (Many oblique references are made to the “vicious” partisan climate—I think we’re supposed to understand it’s the Republicans’ fault.) The movie’s sole claim on your interest lies in Harrelson’s performance. Wearing a toupee and speaking in a lilt somewhere between Matthew McConaughey and Vivien Leigh, he delivers what can only be described as a unique turn. It’s the only original thing in the movie. R. AARON MESH.

Three Stooges Mini-Marathon

[ONE DAY ONLY, REVIVAL] Brian Young's New Year's Day celebration of eye-gouging claims to be "the biggest and most thorough Stooge festival west of the Mississippi," and we have no reason to dispute that—not when he's presenting shorts from all three incarnations of the trio. Happy Nyuck Year! Clinton Street Theater. 3 and 7 pm Tuesday, Jan. 1.

Czech Modernism

What a difference a war makes—certainly to attitudes toward Jews in Czech cinema. While 1934's Faithless Marijka (7 pm Thursday, Dec. 27) seems to, if not endorse, at least sympathize with the motives behind a pogrom, 1949's The Long Journey (7 pm Sunday, Dec. 30) is a piercing indictment of Nazism. Marjika, shot in the rugged Carpathian mountains of Western Ukraine (then Romania), is more valuable for its pseudo-documentary portrayal of rugged rural life and the complex relationship between Jews and Gentiles than for its plot or characterizations. Journey, the first feature film made about the Holocaust, is a gripping drama following a handful of characters through the Final Solution's cruel arc: The escalation of legalized anti-Semitism, flight from the Nazis, transport to a concentration camp, and, ultimately, survival and liberation. Ingeniously shot and edited, this NW Film Center presentation is not just history, but great cinema. JEFF ROSENBERG. Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum.