Screen Listings

2001: A Space Odyssey

The apes howl, the spaceships dance. Stanley Kubrick's peek down the wormhole is back on the big screen. Living Room Theaters.

All In This Tea

Americans have too much time and money on their hands. That is the lesson you will take away from this positively pointless, directionless documentary on the production and importation of Chinese tea. It chronicles the journey of one silly man in a straw hat and khakis, David Lee Hoffman, who travels the Chinese backcountry making faux pas and sniffing sacks of tea and attempting to purchase them, often without success. Not a comedy, although it does feature Werner Herzog in an unintentionally hilarious cameo. Beware any documentary that utterly ignores the ethical ambiguity of commerce with human rights-impaired China in favor of idyllic stock footage of peasant farmers set to the music of the pipa and the erhu. JOHN MINERVINI. Hollywood Theatre. Saturday-Sunday, Feb. 16-17.

Blood Tea and Red String

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] It took Christiane Cegavske 13 years to complete her stop-motion figurine fairy tale. Judging from the trailer, she's achieved some impressively eerie effects with porcelain mice and spiders. Clinton Street Theater. 7 pm Thursday, Feb. 14.

Brother, Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, DISCUSSION] Brother to Brother, the Q Center and QDoc present a documentary on Rustin, who advised Martin Luther King Jr. and A Phillip Randolph in the Civil Rights movement, but whose homosexuality forced him to march out of the public eye. Q Center, 69 SE Taylor Avenue. 7:30 pm Thursday, Feb. 14.

Caramel

Caramel has the spirit of a Lebanese Sex and the City, and that’s quite a feat, considering the Middle East isn’t exactly the most sexually liberated region of the world. With the kind of woman-centered energy and gusto reminiscent of a Pedro Almodóvar film, the movie deftly follows the desires and exploits of five vivacious female beauticians in recent (but pre-bombed) Beirut. Though not quite as masterful or outrageous as Almodóvar, the extremely talented and beautiful writer, director and leading lady Nadine Labaki still manages to bring together extramarital sex, premarital sex, feminism, lesbian attraction and the schism between traditional values and modern society in an entertaining film full of metaphors and Maxi Pads. PG. LANCE KRAMER.

Definitely, Maybe

Abigail Breslin emerges from her elementary school sex-ed class and demands that daddy Ryan Reynolds tell her everything about the three women he’s fooled around with—Elizabeth Banks, Isla Fisher and Rachel Weisz—one of whom is her mom. Writer-director Adam Brooks’ premise—How I Fucked Your Mother—is undeniably ghastly, but if you can get past the first 10 minutes, in which Breslin can’t stop saying the word “penis,” the movie is a disarming surprise. Some of that is due to Reynolds, a comedian who in every new movie is funnier and a little less bland than I remember him. But the lion’s share of the credit goes to three of the most appealing actresses currently working in Hollywood. Weisz’s charm is well documented (and undiminished), but not nearly enough has been said about the cool blond allure of Banks (Slither) and the bubbly redheaded sweetness of Fisher, who has resisted typecasting since breaking out as the nymphomaniac in Wedding Crashers. The casting of three women as intelligent, three-dimensional characters? That’s about three more than most romantic comedies dare. PG-13. AARON MESH.

George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

[ONE WEEK ONLY] Forty years ago, director George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead redefined the modern horror film and created a zombie subgenre that has proven very resilient these past four decades. And while there have been some great entries in the genre, nearly all have fallen short in one way or another, including Romero’s most recent contribution, Diary of the Dead. Going back to the beginning of the zombie apocalypse Romero started in 1968, Diary of the Dead takes place at the onset of the dead coming back to life—only this night of the living dead takes place right here, right now.The movie is shot as if it were an actual documentary: filmed on digital video, edited on a laptop and uploaded onto MySpace. But coming on the heels of Cloverfield, a similar but far more ambitious film, Diary doesn’t have the impact that it should. The one thing that has always set Romero’s work apart is that his zombie films are social statements. And while he has never been one to be subtle in what he’s saying, he has certainly never been so obvious as he is with Diary of the Dead, driving home his scathing indictment of the media with all the subtlety of Spike Lee. Rather than creating a film that fits nicely into his epic vision, Romero has instead made a movie that feels like an imitation of a Romero movie. DAVID WALKER. Clinton Street Theater.

In Bruges

The previews for this Sundance opening-nighter made it look like another glib and obnoxious cockney shoot-’em-up in the unpleasant tradition of Guy Ritchie. They lied: British playwright Martin McDonagh’s feature-film debut has a bad-tempered integrity that makes it as satisfying as any criminal enterprise you’ll see this year. As the guilt-wracked Irish hit man forced to lie low amid medieval architecture, Colin Farrell continues to provide a clinic in little-boy-lost charm—and adds the overactive eyebrows and lilting brogue of an anxious leprechaun. Brendan Gleeson’s even better as his principled mentor, but nothing you’ve heard about the movie can prepare you for Ralph Fiennes as their boss, whose obscenity is matched only by his sentimental affection for the “fairy-tale city” he proceeds to wreck. R. AARON MESH. Cinema 21.

Jumper

Hayden Christiansen discovers he has the ability to teleport. It makes him no less boring. Nothing in Doug Liman’s movie—not pouty Rachel Bilson, not a fun performance by Jamie Bell, not even Samuel L. Jackson’s powdery white hair—can make Hayden Christiansen less boring. He is a black hole of infinite dullness. At 88 minutes, Jumper is a flick so swift and fragmented that it’s almost a trailer for itself (or its inevitable sequel), but it at least contains a ton of kinetic energy. Liman (The Bourne Identity) manages to keep his orientation during action sequences that literally bounce across the globe; no mean feat when most of his peers can’t handle chase scenes in one location. But the movie is oddly amoral: Christiansen’s hero shows a criminal indifference toward the safety and well-being of bystanders, including his best girl Bilson. He’s a handsome, entitled, supernatural jerk who learns no lessons. Maybe we’re supposed to feel sorry for him because he was bullied as a kid. But who wouldn’t want to knock Hayden Christiansen around? PG-13. AARON MESH.

Nanking

Neither easy to watch nor to listen to, the documentary Nanking recounts in stomach-churning detail the violence perpetrated by Japanese military on unarmed Chinese civilians during the winter of 1937-38. Taking their cues from the late historian Iris Chang’s groundbreaking book The Rape of Nanking, co-directors Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman edit covertly shot home movies of the mutilation of innocents (taken by an American missionary) into staged readings from the diaries and letters of a handful of Westerners who stayed behind as the city fell to invaders, and who did their best to save as many lives as they could. The genocide would soon be overshadowed by the Holocaust, then ever after largely denied by Japan. (The issue remains such a hot topic that the film, despite being short-listed for an Oscar and garnering much acclaim, has neither received distribution in Japan nor admittance to any Japanese film festivals.) Nanking’s most significant achievement lies in the firsthand recollections by a dozen or so survivors—women and men now in their 80s who were children during the Sino-Japanese War. Their remembrances are the soul of the movie. We hear one man, his voice breaking as he recalls how “the Japanese devils” tormented his mother, describe his mother’s determined struggle to breast-feed his infant brother while she was dying from a bayonet wound. Guttentag and Sturman also interview a few ex-military, and it’s frightening how dispassionately these ancient-looking men recall the slaughter from 70 years ago. One former soldier says of his victims, “I don’t think it took more than 30 minutes to dispose of thousands of them.” Another, dragging on a cigarette, confesses, “It did not leave my ears—the sound of their pitiful voices.” And that’s as close to an expression of remorse as we get. R. N.P. THOMPSON.

Spiral

[MADE IN PORTLAND, ONE WEEK ONLY] There’s something a little off about Mason (Joel David Moore). Maybe it’s his thousand-mile stare; or his mouth-breathing, Napoleon-Dynamite-in-a-cubicle personality. Or maybe it’s the way he dreams of tossing body-sized trash bags in the Dumpster behind his South Waterfront apartment. That nobody finds Mason a trifle unnerving—especially Amber (Amber Tamblyn), the girl who poses for his oil paintings—is the big implausibility hindering this otherwise nifty Stumptown thriller, an indie project far superior to the usual psycho-killer dreck shot in these parts. Moore, a lanky Portland native last seen holding a paintbrush in Art School Confidential, co-directs with horror vet Adam Green, and together they create a central character that grows more believable (and, against all odds, rather touching) as Spiral progresses. The movie isn’t without its serious flaws: The music is working far too hard to spook, and there’s just no buying that the spunky, pretty-as-a-peach Tamblyn would spend more than 30 seconds with unstable ol’ Mason. But Spiral deserves a lot of credit for letting its characters develop, and for choosing suspense over gore: Moore and Green could teach big-budget horror directors a few lessons in suggesting more than you show. When the movie isn’t trying desperately to be creepy, it often succeeds. PG-13. AARON MESH. Clinton Street Theater. 9 pm Friday-Thursday, Feb. 15-21.

Step Up 2 the Streets

When we first meet the 410 gang, they make headline news for the brutal crime of street dancing ferociously on a subway train. Damn, do they dance. They dance the fear into the other passengers. They dance the cops whimpering into a corner. Later, when a rival gang tries to infiltrate their favorite club, the 410 dances the living shit out of everybody who messes with them. They pop. They lock. They worm and clown and crunk and windmill. Daaaaaaamn! If you’ve seen any of the previous entries in the harmlessly teenybopper Stomp the Last Dance in the Yard and Bring It Until You Get Served genre, you might know what happens next. But this time there are trampolines! Daaaaaaaaaaayamn. PG-13. AP KRYZA.

The 2007 Academy Award Nominated Live Action Shorts

I can’t say as much for the Academy’s taste in live-action shorts: They like ’em European, they like ’em with mugging kids and women in peril, and they like ’em dull. The sole pleasant exception is the Belgian comedy Tanghi Argentini, about a cubicle dweller who needs to learn the tango in a hurry. The rest of the entries are unremarkable. Even the Elmore Leonard adaptation The Tonto Woman is a ponderous, poorly acted slog. But special notice must be paid to the Danish film At Night: The 39-minute saga of three women dying in a cancer ward on New Year’s Eve ranks among the most relentlessly depressing movies ever made at any length. At first I held out hope one of the three girls would show signs of recovery; when it became clear director Christian E. Christiansen had nothing of the sort in mind, I hoped they would die faster, so they could at least stop suffering. Also I could stop suffering, which would have been a bonus. “You better take a tranquilizer,” a nurse whispers to one of the patients after some particularly bad news. It’s good advice for potential audiences to heed as well. AARON MESH.

The 2007 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts

A rapid bombardment of pure imagination (and no small amount of technical wizardry), the Oscar-honored cartoons are short on narrative and long on visual wonder. If you’ve ever wanted to watch the album cover of the Arcade Fire’s Funeral brought to life, the John Lennon daydream I Met the Walrus is a must-see; art-gallery denizens will be equally delighted by Aleksandr Petrov’s My Love, which uses oil painting on glass to achieve the look of Renoir subjects gliding between the frames of their paintings. The stop-motion Peter & the Wolf contains a particularly appealing duck, which looks like an ambulatory stuffed animal, while Even Pigeons Go to Heaven features a stingy, pear brandy-swigging old man with a child’s trilling voice. But the truly extraordinary entry, and the most representative of the batch, is Madame Tutli-Putli. A tiny, sculpted heroine with the biggest eyes this side of Audrey Tautou embarks on a train journey that makes absolutely no sense: It somehow involves burglars, missing persons and fire. But there’s no forgetting the sight of a locomotive careening through deep woods, setting the trees aflame. AARON MESH.

The Spiderwick Chronicles

Depending on the all-too-familiar premise of recently single-parented family that must now move out to a sketchy house in the middle of nowhere, The Spiderwick Chronicles pits a young, bitter boy (Freddie Highmore, of Finding Neverland fame) against his mother (Mary-Louise Parker) and two siblings. With the family laid bare for some supernatural goings-on that threaten to break them apart, there are a few witty digs at New Age parenting philosophy, but the story is essentially formulaic. While enfant terrible Highmore rails (in dual duty as twin brothers who apparently had unfortunate dialect coaching), he finds occasion to sneak into the creepiest inner crevices of his new home as his family sleeps. He finds a bipolar bogart (voiced by a theatrical Martin Short) and book of fairy secrets written by his great-great-uncle (David Strathairn). Far cooler aspects of fairy lore are thrown over—the precarious relationship between fairies and humans, for example—and the flick maintains flimsy tension by referring to the danger of goblins and ghouls just outside the house’s protective perimeter. We’re left with an epic battle between good and a demonic Nick Nolte. Joan Plowright cameos as a questionably delusional great-aunt, but as tiresome and age-inappropriately graphic battle scenes abound (would you want your elementary schooler to watch goblins get decapitated?), the flick is more of a study in the restorative powers of Strathairn, who lends an unprecedented elegance and even legitimacy to the mythology of the story. We are teased by shots of the book’s secrets; what we get is a very limited field guide and some CGI-style ass-kicking. PG. SAUNDRA SORENSON.

Valley Girl

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] It could have been just another in a long list of teen sex comedies that dominated multiplexes and late-night cable in the 1980s. But, thanks to a breakout performance by Nicolas Cage, a killer soundtrack and a timeless tale of ill-fated lovers from opposite sides of the tracks, director Martha Coolidge's time-capsule romantic comedy has endured the test of time, like, totally, fer sure. R. DAVID WALKER. Clinton Street Theater. 9 pm Thursday, Feb. 14. No showtimes.