Screen Listings

Autism: The Musical

The kids-in-performance documentary reaches its logical conclusion: a movie about children who are only cursorily aware that they’re performing. Tricia Regan’s perceptive film tracks the preparation of a small stage show by a group of Los Angeles children who share the brain-development disorder. Autistic children struggle with communication and impulsive behavior, which doesn’t make them the best interview subjects—so Regan wisely focuses on the parents, who lurch between overprotection (especially the moms), mournful distance (especially the dads) and makeshift, determined love. Autism: The Musical wants to be a heartwarmer, but it’s best in the moments when it coolly observes people bravely persisting through trials that song-and-dance won’t cure.  AARON MESH.

Ballot Measure 9

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] As compelling as when it was first released in 1995, Heather Lyn MacDonald's Ballot Measure 9 chronicles one of the darkest times in this state’s history. In 1992, a small band of anti-gay Christian “warriors”—calling itself the Oregon Citizens Alliance—vowed to enshrine second-class citizenship for homosexuals in the Oregon Constitution. Attempting to strip gays and lesbians of their so-called “special rights,” their fearless leader, Lon Mabon, manned a campaign of fear that consumed the state at the time, leading to an increase in hate crimes and even death. Another small band of gay rights leaders, including Donna Red Wing and Kathleen Saadat, risked their lives in opposition to this cause. A must-see for those out there who think bad things can never happen in such an idyllic place as Oregon. BYRON BECK. Q Center, 69 SE Taylor St. 7 pm Friday, Jan. 11. Guests will include MacDonald, Red Wing, Saadat and Portland Mayor Tom Potter.

Chronicle of an Escape

Claustrophobia is a dread-inducing cinematic technique filmmakers attempt with varying success. Ditto for torture: Nowadays it's seldom used to tell a story rather than simply to shock. What sets the Argentinian nail-biter Chronicle of an Escape apart from other films focused on the horror of captivity is its restraint. The story focuses on innocent Buenos Aires soccer stud Claudio (Rodrigo De la Serna), who is kidnapped by the government, accused of being a revolutionary and forced to endure months of torture alongside fellow captives. Adrián Caetano's dark and grainy film is full of shadows and overwhelming claustrophobia, as the prisoners are blindfolded, beaten and subjugated. A harrowing, true account of governmental abuse, Chronicle should establish director Caetano as a name to watch. The torture scenes—done mostly off-camera—are grating and terrifying. We never see much of the brutality, only its aftermath, mapped out on the bruised bodies of the victims and in their ever-sinking eyes. It's almost as if we're strapped naked to a bed beside our wary protagonists, listening to their muffled screams. It’s a gut-wrenching story of survival and, though it takes considerable stamina to reach it, hope. AP KRYZA. Living Room Theaters.

First Sunday

Ice Cube is not funny. Ice Cube has never been funny. Yet year after year, he is inexplicably given the task of carrying comedies. Generally, he is teamed up as the straight man with someone only slightly less not funny (this time Tracy Morgan), and the two try to pull off some kind of far-fetched scheme (in this case robbing a local church). Midway through, Cube adapts his permanent What have you gotten me into, man? expression and begins shouting all of his lines. On its own this formula is pretty much harmless, but when he shouts all of his lines while pointing a gun at a room full of frightened churchgoers, it’s not only unfunny, it’s a little uncomfortable. While Morgan and Katt Williams (as the hostage choir-director) take turns being the most degrading stereotypical black character and the token white guy inevitably attempts to speak ebonics, the most disturbing part still has to be Ice Cube pointing a gun at a room full of church people. PG-13. JOE JATCKO.

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

German tax-shelter abuser Uwe Boll is consistently labeled the world’s worst living director, which is a little unfair. Yes, his video-game adaptations (Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne) are startlingly incompetent—but they’re video-game adaptations, after all, and there’s something reassuring about knowing all the people who actually get excited about movies based on video games are getting what they deserve. What they get is a director who snagged the rights to the Dungeon Siege game and decided it afforded the perfect opportunity for his visions of Orcs fighting ninjas. Technically, they aren’t called Orcs here—they’re known as the Krug—but they look as if Boll grabbed a rack of rubber Lord of the Rings Halloween costumes and went to town. The entire movie is lovingly stolen from Peter Jackson (complete with dueling wizards, mountain fortresses, fiery CGI mines, and elfin folk who swing through the trees), with a number of plot points from Gladiator thrown in. Jason Statham plays Farmer (yep, he’s a farmer), whose son is killed and wife kidnapped by the Orcs—sorry, Krug—leading him on a journey through incoherent action sequences all the way to Burt Reynolds, who endures a frosted white buzz cut to indifferently play the mighty King Konreid. They have an emotional conversation about seaweed. Boll’s instincts, reliable in their wrongness, occasionally make the movie enjoyably ripe: Any scene with Ray Liotta, as a magician whose leather coat and silk scarf help him look like he’s in a Vegas revue, is a hoot. There are a lot of dull patches, though, and plenty of time to wonder how so much German-investor money was so badly misspent. Still, while Boll may be the world’s most hapless filmmaker (he actually forgets about several characters halfway through), he’s far from the worst. Plenty of scenes here are dopey enough to be memorable, while I defy you to recall a single scene from the last video-game movie, Hitman. Laughably bad beats soul-numbingly bad any day. R. AARON MESH.

Looking for Cheyenne

French director Valérie Minetto’s film about idealistic lesbians learning to compromise and live together boasts compelling performances by beautiful women. Unfortunately, it’s hamstrung by an unfocused script. High-school teacher Sonia (Aurélia Petit) is having second thoughts about her breakup with hippie journalist Cheyenne (Mila Dekker): Her love affairs with barfly Béatrice (Guilaine Londez) and dandy anarchist Pierre (Malik Zidi) just aren't doing it for her. But getting back together means bridging huge ideological chasms—and no one can lay a convincing claim to the moral high ground. The movie opens promisingly enough: Much as in early Woody Allen films, characters break the third wall, look directly at the camera, and say what’s on their minds. What they disclose is interesting, especially when they start meta-talking to one another. But before long, the plot frays and heads off in four or five directions at once. A more carefully crafted screenplay might have been able to handle this altered plot structure, but Looking for Cheyenne sags under the weight. The sex is disappointing—abridged, politely hinted at, and mostly off-camera. Probably Minetto’s choice not to get spicy was made out of an enlightened sense of self-restraint, but a little heavy breathing would have livened things up a bit. Meanwhile, the ways in which social problems affect the lives of Sonia and friends are not investigated, and so the characters’ responses—staging strikes, or lighting candles and living in a barn—seem arbitrary, and sometimes downright unimaginative. JOHN MINERVINI. Living Room Theaters.

Summer ’04

“Miriam, light of my life, flower of my loins.” It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it—a fact that Miriam (Martina Gedeck) is all too aware of once her son’s 12-year-old girlfriend Livia (Svea Lohde) arrives at their summer lake house and begins rivaling Miriam for the affections of hunky neighbor Bill (Robert Seeliger). A Lolita told from the perspective of a smarter, more conniving Charlotte Haze, director Stefan Krohmer’s drama has the Nabokovian knack for treating shocking material with a deft serenity. Wind wafts through sailboats in long, unbroken shots, family meetings are conducted with mature, nonjudgmental attitudes, and something very nasty feels inevitable. Krohmer has a fine sense of tension, and he crafts a cutting appraisal of liberal German attitudes to parenting. Gedeck, last seen as the leading lady in The Lives of Others, wisely underplays Miriam’s conflicting desires, and Lohde is nearly frightening in her precocious, knowing sensuality. But as captivating as the project is, its final twists feel a touch too calculated. The movie, like poor little Livia, is both a great surprise and a victim of its own clever manipulation. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre.

The Bucket List

Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play terminal cancer patients who make a list of things they want to do before they die. Here’s what I hoped would be on the list: “Play characters unlike the same characters we’ve been playing for the past 20 years.” Alas, it was not to be. Nicholson and Freeman continue pretending to be themselves. Jack is crabby and mischievous (and unfortunately shot to resemble a frog); Morgan is an ecumenical saint, providing voice-overs that may have been cadged directly from The Shawshank Redemption. Together they travel to a series of poorly lit soundstages; my suspicion that the exercise was completely artificial was confirmed when I glanced out the window of the old boys’ Mediterranean dining room and noticed the sea's waves weren’t moving. The entire movie is that lifeless, and it’s depressing to see two iconic actors reduced to such death-with-dignity shtick, especially when they’ve both deftly handled films about aging before (Nicholson especially well, in Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt). Rob Reiner’s disaster has all the wit and emotional impact of a bad sitcom; it might as well be titled My Name Is Corpse. PG-13. AARON MESH.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Director Julian Schnabel’s adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s 1997 memoir begins sublimely. Charles Trenet croons “La Mer” over opening credits, and his song floats through shadows of bone and muscle. The X-rays, in grayish black-and-white, are striking in themselves; when set to a jaunty, Gallic pop tune of 1946 vintage, sight and sound merge into a nifty emblem for the movie’s subject—a bon vivant confronting mortality. Bauby, editor-in-chief of Elle, suffered a debilitating stroke in his early 40s that paralyzed him entirely, save for his left eye. That’s how we enter the movie’s world, through the fluttering of that eyelid as it closes and opens. Schnabel uses a swing-and-tilt lens to achieve stunning distortion effects: blurring and rippling, point-of-view shots as Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) awakens before a team of doctors in a blue-green hospital room. Bauby’s memoir, blinked out a letter at a time, was filled with fantasies and dreams; in the best of these onscreen, the gourmand Bauby, now fed through a tube, imagines a lavish meal in which he and his transcriber smear oysters on the half-shell into each other’s mouths, before exuberantly kissing across the table. But there’s a problem. In the pages of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, what endures is the testament of a romantic sensibility whose desires ranged from elite to plebeian and back again. Amalric, who was an ideal choice for the role, doesn’t fully inhabit Bauby, because of what Ronald Harwood’s screenplay leaves out: the author’s voice, his humor. The movie misses the spirit of the man. PG-13. N.P. THOMPSON.

The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound to Lose

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] On the Easy Rider soundtrack, the Holy Modal Rounders memorably warble through "If You Want to Be a Bird," a flight of acoustic, psychedelic whimsy that nevertheless closes with a sobering warning: "When you come down, land on your feet." Bound to Lose is the wild, fascinating tale of how one of the Rounders did, and one didn't. When the band relocated to Portland from NYC in the early ’70s, as the film shows, it spelled the dissolution of the partnership between Rounder founders Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber. The bookish Stampfel stayed behind, kicked speed and raised a family, while the gonzo Weber relished the Northwest's high-quality heroin and cheap living. Reunited here, they make a natural musical—and comic—duo, albeit a sometimes frighteningly dysfunctional one. The film's anticlimax is Weber's notorious no-show at a mooted 40th anniversary concert at the Crystal Ballroom in 2003. But never fear: He's slated to appear live in concert after the movie's screening. JEFF ROSENBERG. Hollywood Theatre. 7 pm Friday, Jan. 11. $12.

The Orphanage

“PLEASE DO NOT REVEAL THE ENDING,” screams a line in the production notes for this unthrilling Spanish thriller. (So much for the review I intended to write, giving away the whole sordid show.) The request for secrecy isn’t because the film, about a lady (Belén Rueda) who unwisely reopens her childhood asylum, will be less suspenseful if you know the outcome, but because the filmmakers fear that critics will alert clueless moviegoers to just how patently offensive this overproduced bomb’s resolution truly is. Any movie that places an HIV-positive 7-year-old in peril from the undead hasn’t exactly staked a claim to the moral high ground. Rest assured, equal-opportunity exploiters: The Orphanage contains at least one parental endangerment pratfall at the hands of an evil, mask-wearing tyke. (Poor Rueda, splendid as the disabled attorney in The Sea Inside, royally embarrasses herself here, especially when coated with the floury bone meal of decomposed skeletons—eeeeaaghhhh, ahhhhhg!) What unassailably stinks, however, is that Juan Antonio Bayona's movie sentimentalizes insanity and one other taboo subject to ensure a “happy ending.” The ending, trust me, will seem “happy” only to viewers who spent their formative years decapitating Barbie and Ken. At least there’s nice photography of the Asturian mountains and seashore, plus a cameo by Geraldine Chaplin, whose pantomimed psychic trance would do her papa proud. N. P. THOMPSON.

The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie

Naval vegetables sing about religion. Not screened for critics, though we hear Jesus got to see it early. G.

Youth Without Youth

At first blush, Francis Ford Coppola appears to be having a late midlife crisis. Using his wine money to bankroll grandiose cinematography that spans continents, he displays an over-dependence on upside-down camera angles and appears to be cribbing from directors who have come before. Add to this the almost indecipherable text—religious historian and philosopher Mircea Eliade’s labyrinthine reflection on chronology, mortality and, oh hell, linguistics—and Youth Without Youth should be a disjointed, pretentious mess. But it is inexplicably successful. A lightning strike grants professor Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) near-superhuman abilities to absorb information and master languages, and a strong resistence to aging. The isolation of old age (he is at heart an octogenarian) and academic pursuit is interrupted by Matei’s newfound virility and flashbacks to his lost (and dead) love, as well as Romania’s impending occupation by the Nazis. For all the highfalutin concepts crammed into the next 124 minutes, Youth doesn’t demand too much intellectual investment to get off the ground. It’s dreamy and lyrical, an unholy hybrid of political thriller, florid romance and superhero epic. R. SAUNDRA SORENSON.