Screen Listings

ArchaeologyFest Film Series: Best of 2008

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY] Distressed by Indiana Jones' cavalier attitude toward relic preservation? Take comfort in these four documentaries: From Hutong to Highrise: The Transformation of Beijing (7 pm Friday, Jan. 23) and Yamana: Nomads of the Fire (7 pm Saturday, Jan. 24). 5th Avenue Cinemas, Portland State University.

Inkheart

“When will you tell me what’s going on?” young Eliza Hope Bennett demands of daddy Brendan Fraser after they’ve been thrown into a dungeon by a cackling maniac who materialized from the pages of a storybook. Audiences unfamiliar with Cornelia Funke’s fantasy novel might ask the same question: By that point in the movie, all I could say for certain was that Fraser had been attacked by an angry ferret, and fended it off with a briefcase. The looking-glass disorientation is one of the movie’s charms: Director Iain Softley (K-PAX) is in no rush to explain the rules that govern the adventure. (But keeping an aquatic mammal within city limits…. That’s not legal either, dude.) Eventually it emerges that Fraser is a “silvertongue,” a kind of accidental literary sorcerer who can conjure characters out of books by reading aloud. Among the brigands he summons are cowardly fire-swallower Paul Bettany and crimelord Andy Serkis (stripped of the CGI coating he wore as The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum, he looks like a skinny Sydney Greenstreet). Doddering author Jim Broadbent is enlisted to tame his unruly creations, and the plot warps into a battle of authorial intent vs. reader response: Inkheart is the first children’s movie that could have been scripted by Charlie Kaufman. It grows more enchanting the more bizarre it gets—which makes the ending, ripped wholesale from the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark, all the more of a letdown. (The sight of villains’ faces sloughing into dust in the presence of a supernatural deity also makes the movie far more disturbing than the PG rating indicates.) In keeping with the premise, Inkheart is simultaneously wildly inventive and hopelessly derivative. PG. AARON MESH. No showtimes.

Killshot

Mickey Rourke tries to kill Diane Lane in an Elmore Leonard adaptation that the Weinstein Company hoped to chuck out the back door. They settled for releasing it in February, and not screening it for critics. R.

My Bloody Valentine 3D

This slasher flick isn’t good—though it does score high marks for sound effects (who knew that human flesh squelched like that underfoot?). But as an example of what’s possible when your only goal is to showcase a technology, it kicks major ass. Bloody, dripping hunks of ass. Plus a few pulverized rib cages and a mangled jawbone that comes hurtling straight toward moviegoers’ faces like some grisly piñata detritus. The charm of My Bloody Valentine—which I can happily report does include a big red box of holiday chocolates containing a drippy human heart—lies in the way director Patrick Lussier (Dracula 2000) latches on to the inherently goofy possibilities in making a 3-D horror movie and lets the visuals wander where they may. Blond gut-bait Betsy Rue garners props for getting naked. Not only during the movie’s requisite full-frontal sex scene but in the subsequent eight-minute odyssey involving long-haul truckers, video cameras, split skulls, midgets, creaky bedsprings and eventual evisceration. All shot with Rue running stark naked in a pair of platform heels. In 3-D. R. KELLY CLARKE. No showtimes.

Rwanda: Hope Rises

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] A documentary profiles the restoration of a marriage—and the rebuilding of a nation—after genocide. Hollywood Theatre. 8 pm Friday, Jan. 23.

The Shining

[REVIVAL] Twin girls hacked to pieces. Torrents of blood spilling from an elevator. Shelley Duvall (shudder). Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is full of creepy imagery. But it’s the film’s family dynamic that’s the stuff of real nightmares, and what makes The Shining among the most frightening films of all time—the feeling that those you love and trust are the real bogeymen. Isolated in a secluded hotel, author and recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson, one of the screen’s scariest monsters, subbing erratic eyebrows for claws and fangs) slowly descends into madness, with a literal ax to grind with his wife (Duvall) and psychic son (Danny Lloyd) as his inner demons get friendly with the real ones roaming the hotel. The simmering evil—prodded along by Kubrick’s patient buildup, then-revolutionary sound mix and Stedicam work, and a brooding score—imparts a blood-boiling sense of dread throughout. Just in time for Halloween, The Shining hits Living Room Theaters in glorious HD, while Timberline Lodge—the source of the film’s freaktastic exterior shots, but sans the hedge maze—is replicating the film’s climactic 1920s “fish and goose soiree” on All Hallow’s, complete with in-room screenings. Tell ’em Delbert Grady sent you…and stay away from Room 237. R. AP KRYZA. Living Room Theaters. Timberline Lodge party on Friday, Oct. 31. No showtimes.

The Soviet Story

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Latvian director Edvins Snore examines atrocities under Lenin and Stalin. Hollywood Theatre. 2 and 7 pm Saturday, Jan. 24.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

Kate Beckinsale departs, but the vampire-werewolf war rages on, with Bill Nighy in sad-eyed command. Not screened for critics. R. No showtimes.

Yonkers Joe

Chazz Palminteri plays a craps-table swindler whose plans for one last score are complicated by a grown son with Down syndrome. It is certainly an original premise. Look for a review on wweek.com. R. Living Room Theaters. No showtimes.