Screen Listings

(500) Days of Summer

I enjoyed parts of this Zooey Deschanel/Joseph Gordon-Levitt romance very much—in fact, I found the majority of it to be light, observant and cheering. I was a little put off by the opening disclaimer, which gave the usual warning that none of the characters should be mistaken for any real people, living or dead. “Especially you, Jenny Beckman,” it added. “Bitch.” This seems to indicate a few unresolved issues on the parts of the writers, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, and director Marc Webb. But the movie quickly sets about confronting those issues. It is, in fact, a movie about being the other guy: the one who doesn’t get the girl at the end of the picture, the one who realizes that he was a footnote in her life and feels rather crummy about it. But I couldn’t decide if (500) Days of Summer felt so familiar because I’d lived it, or because I’d seen it before. The jumbled chronology is a fresh approach, with Webb bouncing through the 500 days of a doomed relationship as if rifling through a Rolodex or—a more appropriate metaphor for this couple—hitting “shuffle” on an iPod. The narrator admonishes at the movie’s beginning, “This is not a love story,” and that’s true—love stories require two people. And Deschanel is a recognizable person only in relation to Gordon-Levitt. There are no real girls in (500) Days of Summer. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower. Laurelhurst Theatre, Mt. Hood Theatre, Valley Theater.

(Untitled)

A very restricted, peculiar piece of filmmaking, (Untitled) is a satire of avant-garde art that will only interest people familiar with avant-garde art but is made by people who have come to despise avant-garde art. Bushy-browed Adam Goldberg (he dreamed of sex with President Lincoln in Dazed & Confused, then made a living playing Shalom-ing sidekicks) is an atonal composer whose compositions are scored for ripping newspaper and wailing voice: They sound like a journalism convention. He falls into an affair with a rubber-clad gallery owner (Marley Shelton); she sells the pedestrian paintings of his brother (Eion Bailey) to hang in hotel lobbies. Vinnie Jones shows up as the most loathsome character, a hands-off taxidermist who drapes stuffed cows with pearls. You must be cackling by now, yes? Writer-director Jonathan Parker’s slow-roasting of posturing does hit a few strong notes—as when Goldberg recalls how his earliest musical inspiration was the death of “Philip, the family dog”—but it mostly feels like a toothless retread of Art School Confidential, minus the blackhearted daring. The biggest problem, however, is the artwork itself: Just because a movie doesn’t ask you to take its caterwauling musical performances seriously doesn’t mean you don’t still have to sit through them. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower. Living Room Theaters.

9

Humanity has once again managed to wipe itself off the planet—oh darn!—leaving cultural preservation to tiny robots. This time they are animator Shane Acker’s mechanic ragdolls, who awaken after some Great Cleansing to find themselves the last nine sentient critters on the planet. The titular figurine (voiced by Elijah Wood) is a burlap sack with his number written on his back, like an offensive lineman in mourning. Acker is a careful student of the Brothers Quay, which goes a long way toward explaining why 9 looks like the first Tool music video for children. My guess is that most tykes will be petrified; the heroes begin by battling a feline android that recalls An American Tale’s Mouse of Minsk, and the metallic villains only get creepier from there. The computer animation is extremely proficient, and some of the ideas nearly match it—twin scholastic monks uncover a newsreel history suggesting George Orwell spilling his dystopian tea on H.G. Wells—but the picture rushes along in a godawful hurry, sequentially offing the tiny characters as if they were victims in a slasher movie. You’d think the extinction of the human race would be enough death for one cartoon, but no. PG-13. AARON MESH. Lloyd Center, etc. Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

A Serious Man

A physics professor living in a tract neighborhood as treeless and sun-scorched as the Holy Land, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is suffering the inverse afflictions of Job—while the patriarch lost his family, Larry’s relations won’t go away. His wife (Sari Lennick) wants a divorce so she can marry the astonishingly supercilious Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), but she won’t leave the house. His brother (Richard Kind) has taken up the couch and the bathroom, forever draining a sebaceous cyst. There are harassing calls from the Columbia Record Company, a student is sinisterly trying to extort his way out of a failing grade, and Larry’s tenure request is met with the ominous assurance that “you should not be worried.” Oh, Larry is worried. He senses a bottomless abyss beneath his life. This is the Coen brothers’ third-straight film—after No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading—to repeat the same gag, with increasing mirth and finality: Don’t look down, because there isn’t anything there. A Serious Man ends about 10 minutes before you expect it to, with brutal, beautiful abruptness—no one does endings like the Coens, because they understand that every story ends the same way. Never before have they so explicitly addressed their ambivalent feelings toward Judaism (aside from The Big Lebowski’s “Moses to Sandy Koufax” speech, maybe), but they’ve been wrestling with God a long time, and they know his moves. R. AARON MESH. CineMagic Theatre, Fox Tower Stadium 10.

All About Steve

All About Steve begins like The Proposal, with Sandra Bullock playing a woman in need of a man. This time, instead of being too “bossy,” she’s too “wacky.” Her character, Mary Horowitz, seems to have Asperger’s and wears bright red boots. She lives with her parents and writes the crossword puzzle for the local newspaper. After an abortive blind date with news cameraman Steve (Bradley Cooper), Mary stalks him across the country. Exasperating everyone with her trivia, Mary is also given to metaphor: “I tried to fill my empty spaces with words, and puzzles, and Steve.” Is this the screenwriter’s confession of method? The film is full of puzzles. Steve and his colleagues, including self-obsessed reporter Hartman (Thomas Haden Church), drive around covering wacky, pseudo-Biblical news, including the debate over a three-legged baby. Charlyne Yi appears for five seconds, like an autistic talisman. Mary escapes a CG tornado and a plague of locusts. A school of deaf children falls down a mine. Then Mary falls down the mine. Steve and Hartman’s boss (Keith David) exclaims, “That’s the way to get your heads out of your assholes!” Eventually, Mary learns to be herself. Unfortunately, I don’t know who I am anymore. PG-13. ALISTAIR ROCKOFF. Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

Amelia

Well, golly, isn’t this a disastrous old tin whistle of a magic lantern show? Dusty as a hangar exhibit, Mira Nair’s biopic of Amelia Earhart gets lost in the first five minutes, and never threatens to return. Every line of dialogue has the creak of exposition, and usually competent actors (Richard Gere, Ewan McGregor) enunciate as if they’re trying to recall how humans speak. Initially this registers as an intentional throwback to early Hollywood sound productions, but it quickly begins to feel like general uncoordination. Still, if you’re in the mood for an old-fashioned night-flying picture…well, Jimmy Stewart in The Spirit of St. Louis is pretty good. If you’re in the mood for an Old Fashioned, don’t you dare: Amelia has an odd subtext about the ruinous influence of plonk. (Co-pilot Fred Noonan does not come off well in this regard.) As Earhart, Hilary Swank gamely embodies toothy Kansan pluck—even waving hello to a flock of sheep—but Amy Adams played this role with far more sex, energy and humor in the Night at the Museum sequel. There’s not much either actress could have done with this script by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan: It never gives the heroine any motivation, or even a childhood, choosing instead to indulge an obsession with the young Gore Vidal. (In case you’re wondering if the kid is Gore Vidal, his name is conspicuously mentioned every time he shows up.) In the last 15 minutes, which are the best because there’s a fleeting signal that something might happen, Earhart keeps checking her watch, an action I could identify with. The movie has no thrill, no mystery, no propulsion. Thud. PG. AARON MESH. City Center Stadium 12, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Tigard 11 Cinemas.

Astro Boy

A robot child saves the world, just like in Osamu Tezuka's comic. PG. Century Eastport 16, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Movies On TV Stadium 16.

Cirque du Freak: The Vampires Assistant

When the inevitable Simpsons on Ice tour takes to the road, John C. Reilly will be a shoo-in for the role of Sideshow Bob. He’s well rehearsed after this performance as Crepsley, a waistcoated, carrot-haired carnival barker with a supercilious mince and a touch of vampirism. It’s sort of sad to see Reilly come to such a pass, the logical next step in a progression away from idiosyncratic projects toward tentpole weekends. Even his dialogue seems to comment on the devolution: “It’s deeply depressing,” he says of life as a bloodsucker. The movie is filled with these awful moments of recognition. Is that Patrick Fugit, the wonderful kid from Almost Famous, painted green as Evra the Snake Boy? Is that The Wire’s Frankie Faison as a fire-eater named Rhamus Twobellies? Poor Patrick! Poor Frankie! How this Paul Weitz eyesore is related to Twilight I don’t know and don’t really care to find out, although Weitz’s brother Chris is directing New Moon, so maybe opportunism is in their blood. Cirque has its own dueling teen vampires, though its origin story owes more to Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man, what with the best friends turned against each other after an arachnid bite and the subsequent bestowal of superpowers. (This at least leads to an immortal line: “I became a vampire to save you, Steve!”) It’s lurid and silly and boring, and around halfway through I was reminded of the circus scenes from The Elephant Man, and became a little obsessed with the idea of sneaking into the movie and freeing the actors. John C. Reilly is not an animal! He is a man! PG-13. AARON MESH. Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

I have only one complaint with the cinematic adaptation of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, that endearing children’s book about a town where the weather is made of food. Still, it’s a significant complaint: I don’t like the food. Ron Barrett’s original pen-and-ink illustrations were intricate and moody, filled with awe and mystery as well as peanut-butter-and-jelly blizzards. The edibles that fall from the sky in Sony’s CGI cartoon look like Fisher Price play food, all bright plastic artificiality. It’s quite a comedown. But just about everything else in Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s movie exceeds any reasonable expectation. The delights begin with the filmmakers' reimagining of the town of Chewandswallow as a sardine-fishing village decimated by the decline of canned-fish popularity; by the time the mayor (voice by Bruce Campbell; hair from Jaws) decides to revitalize the burg with sardine tourism, it becomes obvious why the inventor hero (Bill Hader) is named Flint. A fable about the dangers of overconsumption, Meatballs is one of the few current cartoons with some social bite, and the admittedly hackneyed subplot about Flint’s need to please his father (James Caan, drawn as a walking unibrow) is as affecting as any relationship requiring the line “Dad, I’m surrounded by man-eating chickens right now!” can hope to be. So I won’t complain about the weather. PG. AARON MESH. 99 Indoor Twin.

Coco Before Chanel

Audrey Tautou plays the fashionista in a biopic. WW did not attend the screening; look for a review on wweek.com. PG-13. Fox Tower. Fox Tower Stadium 10, Hollywood Theatre, Lake Twin Cinema.

Couples Retreat

A hymn to settling for whatever’s around: a spouse you don’t like, a shot you don’t bother to frame, a joke you’ve told before. Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau star in a DOA movie about marriage therapy for the improbably well-heeled (if you’re going to get counseling, why not do it in Bora Bora bungalows that run $1,780 a night?) and immensely self-involved—fat schlubs Vaughn and Favreau must summon the internal fortitude to remain faithful to Malin Ackerman and Kristin Davis. Those poor boys. However do they cope? They’ve roped in buddy Peter Billingsley (Ralphie from A Christmas Story) to direct, and I wanted to shoot my eye out. The guy shot on location in French Polynesia and managed to make it look like a soundstage. The comedic scaffold is the same one trotted out by Adam Sandler's Anger Management: Use a grueling regimen of stupid exercises to substitute for writing any actual characters. One by one, each of four rotten marriages is saved for no reason other than the movie’s fear of troubling a complacent audience. Here’s Vaughn exhorting Favreau to save his union: “You’re not going to have anybody to go to Applebee’s with you.” Could there be a stronger case for divorce? PG-13. AARON MESH. Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Forest Theatre, Sherwood Stadium 10.

Crude

Documentarian Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) has taken his vérité approach and applied it to the environmental catastrophe of South American oil drilling. Crude examines the petroleum spillage in Ecuador (a slop 30 times larger than the Exxon Valdez wreck, with much of the oil pooled under people’s homes and leaked into the water supply) and the ongoing lawsuit that will determine whether Chevron is legally responsible for thousands of dead babies and cancer cases. But Berlinger doesn’t harangue. Instead, he documents the process of activism, showing the slightly unseemly effort by environmentalists to recruit celebrities (Sting’s wife is a big catch) and manipulate media coverage. And he does something remarkable in an era of cinematic agitprop: He gives both sides in the trial screen time to make their case. They present their arguments at the scene of the crime, in a series of field inspections where lawyers—including a zealous first-time plaintiff’s attorney, Pablo Fajardo—stand astride the stench of oil pits, deriding each other in Spanish above the din of jungle insects. In Crude’s most profound sequence, Berlinger updates a Michael Moore technique from Roger & Me, but to far more nuanced effect: He layers both sides’ oratory over images of a Cofán woman taking her daughter on the weekly bus journey for cancer treatments. Whatever the verdict, the people of Ecuador have already lost. AARON MESH. Cinema 21. 7 pm Wednesday and Thursday, Nov. 18-19. Hollywood Theatre Friday-Thursday, Nov. 20-26. Hollywood Theatre.

District 9

The aliens in District 9 ran out of gas on the wrong side of the universe. Marooned in Johannesburg, South Africa, on cruel and xenophobic planet Earth, the so-called “prawns”—a human slur that happens to be pretty accurate—actually have quite a bit in common with the earthlings who’ve shunted them into the filthy slum-city that gives the film its name: technologically advanced enough to skip through the cosmos, but sadly hapless and discombobulated once they lose the map. It is an unfortunate frailty that District 9 itself shares, and that first-time director Neill Blomkamp can’t quite overcome. The first act, 20 brilliant minutes of faux-documentary dread, is a mini-masterpiece of harrowing and darkly funny filmmaking. The simulation of documentary style, familiar and comforting to our news-soaked eyes, becomes a delivery system for outlandish visions and uncanny panic. It’s like watching an old home movie only to find your beloved grandmother has been replaced on tape by a giant tarantula. But it slowly skids into a visual spectacle of hectic ambivalence not unlike every other gutless extravaganza you will see this summer. Oh, there are guts, I guess, but they are flung at the screen to distract you from Blomkamp’s loss of nerve. I have faith that Neill Blomkamp will one day make a film that’s a marvel from beginning to end. The question is whether he can muster the necessary faith in us. R. CHRIS STAMM. Academy Theater.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

As the experience of the contemporary summer blockbuster increasingly approximates downing six Slurpees and spending 90 minutes on a Tilt-A-Whirl, it’s a relief to encounter a director willing to take his time. In the latest installation of the teen wizard franchise that has become his vocation, David Yates takes rather a lot of time: 150 minutes, all told, most of it devoted to chronicling who’s snogging whom at Hogwarts. Yates is much more invested in the berobed trio’s boarding-school drama than he is in J.K. Rowling’s sprawling saga. That’s fine by me. As Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson have matured, their characters have grown to be more compelling than the impressive digital witchery that inevitably whirls about them. One may become numb to monsters and explosions, but young love? Never. This year, the trio is concerned with the sinister plots of Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), who is on a mission to compromise Hogwarts’ intense security (the campus is surrounded by a colossal bug zapper) and kill Dumbledore, and—more importantly—the depravity of Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave), who is on a mission to compromise the group’s rapport and bang Ron Weasley. Neither succeeds quite the way they would like. Crying ensues. PG. BEN WATERHOUSE. Academy Theater, Avalon Theatre, Milwaukie Cinema, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

Humble Pie

A would-be actor gets lessons from William Baldwin. If only he had gone to Daniel! Look for a review on wweek.com. PG-13. Living Room Theaters. Living Room Theaters.

Imagine That

So this may sound crazy, but the older Eddie Murphy gets, the more he resembles Kobe Bryant. Not only are their serpentine visages similar, but even when they succeed, they’ve alienated so many people that nobody wants to celebrate their redemption. Last weekend, Bryant won an NBA title, and Murphy released a sweet-natured family movie. Neither won over any fans. Murphy’s $5.5 million-grossing bomb isn’t in the same ballpark as atrocious hits and misses like Norbit and Meet Dave, even though it starts with a comparably awful conceit: Stock trader Evan (Murphy) learns that his daughter’s security blanket and imaginary friends are conduits to picking securities, so he decides to cozy up to the kid (Yara Shahidi, a graduate of the Olivia Huxtable School for Cuteness). Murphy’s ingrained hostility takes him beyond the usual absent dad, but as he softens, director Karey Kirkpatrick shows an honorable restraint, never resorting to CGI displays of gaudy fantasylands and instead allowing the characters to bond in something like the real world. (With its emphasis on the crucial role of fathers in the lives of pre-adolescent girls, this is going to be Atlantic contributor Caitlin Flanagan’s favorite film of the year.) The family values play better than the comedy—Thomas Haden Church grinds away with the role of an ersatz Native American financial shaman—but Murphy’s removal of his aggressive humor to goof around with kids feels like a minor exorcism. If only anybody noticed. PG. AARON MESH. Kiggins Theatre.

In Search of Beethoven

[THREE NIGHTS ONLY] The director of In Search of Mozart goes looking for another composer. Once again, the poor guy is dead. Hollywood Theatre. Friday-Sunday, Nov. 20-22. Hollywood Theatre.

Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino’s opus may feature a Brad Pitt-marshaled squadron of merciless Jewish commandos, but the punishment they visit upon the Third Reich is only a small part of the movie’s five chapters—it serves as a punctuation to intricate dances of dialogue, some stretching as long as 40 minutes and conducted in four languages. The movie ranks among Tarantino’s greatest achievements, but it is not a shiny summer bauble. It is more like a housecat hunting for 152 minutes, depositing a bloody, broken bird at your feet and expecting you to love the gift as much as he does. And make no mistake: Love—the unabashed, full-throated, spelling-challenged adoration of cinema—is what’s at stake here. Inglourious Basterds is surely the first World War II film in which a heroic officer is a former film critic. It is a war movie about other war movies, and a war movie in which the deciding weapon is the movies themselves. It is a fantasy of scorched-earth revenge for the Holocaust, exacted in a Parisian projection booth, through the artistic medium shepherded into existence by the Jews. Until the final hellstorm, enjoy the best of Continental acting provided by Christoph Waltz, who joins the pantheon of feline villains. The experience is like savoring a box of imported French chocolates, only the last one is filled with the wrath of God. This is real moviemaking: polarizing, courageous, dangerous. If it is guilty of bloodlust, at least it has something left in its veins besides novelty and hype. It reminds us of cinema's potential to fulfill impossible wishes. R. AARON MESH. Academy Theater, Avalon Theatre, Bagdad Theater and Pub, Kennedy School Theater, Laurelhurst Theatre, Milwaukie Cinema, Mission Theater and Pub, Valley Theater, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

Late Night Double Feature Picture Show

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] The gay-bar twin-bill movie screenings continue with Best in Show followed by This Is Spinal Tap. Boxxes Video Bar, 330 SW 11th St. 8:30 pm Monday, Nov. 23.

Law Abiding Citizen

An hour into Law Abiding Citizen, action man of the hour Gerard Butler (300) says his revenge plan will “get biblical.” Talk about understatement. Between burying people alive and castration by box cutter, Butler’s pissed-off dad mixes Old Testament carnage with the wackadoo morality of a cultist pouring poisoned Kool-Aid. The film works more like Saw for people who hate horror films but love human suffering. Butler’s troubled genius, Clyde, is a seemingly upstanding American who goes all Man on Fire when a pair of thugs rapes and murders his wife and young daughter. From prison, Butler exacts gruesome revenge on Philadelphia’s corrupt justice system—deal-cutting D.A. Jamie Foxx, the judge, their assistants, parking attendants—through a series of Jigsaw-style traps (Clyde’s the government-trained Rube Goldberg of inventive assassination, employing everything from robots to explosive cell phones). Foxx, continuing a smirking post-Oscar decline of Cuba Gooding proportions, spends the film figuring out how a man behind bars can wreak such havoc as the film races from murder to murder with the urgency of a Final Destination film with a sense of importance. R. AP KRYZA. Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Forest Theatre.

Lens on China

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY] The NW Film Center's series continues with 24 City. Zhang Ke Jia follows up Still Life, which investigated the emotional toll taken by China’s Three Gorges Dam project, with another somber take on his country’s rapid modernization. Mussing the line between fact and fiction, Jia interweaves scripted monologues and traditional documentary interviews to fashion a hybridized history of Factory 420, a munitions plant being razed to make way for a ritzy housing development. 24 City can be chilly and distant, but with his trademark tracking shots gliding along Chengdu’s dusty streets, and his expert handle on both professional and amateur performances, Jia offers further proof that he is becoming one of the great poets of 21st-century tremors. Also screening this week: Meishi Street, a look at the citizens displaced by Olympic stadium construction. CHRIS STAMM. NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium. Meishi Street screens at 7 pm Thursday, Nov. 19. 24 City screens at 4:30 pm Sunday, Nov. 22.

Michael Jacksons This Is It

If nothing else, This Is It—the de facto documentary cobbled together in the wake of Jackson’s death on June 25—helps flesh out the image of Michael Jackson as an all-around creative force. It’s not the rehearsal footage showing us the giant spectacle he had planned for his 50 scheduled shows at London’s O2 Arena that does it, either. Yes, it would’ve been huge. And eye-popping. And, at points, garish and overblown. In other words, it’s what we would have expected from him. But it’s the small moments, captured between the run-throughs and videotaped vignettes, that reveal a side of Jackson not often seen—that of the gentle taskmaster. Kenny Ortega is listed as the director of the This Is It tour and film, but it’s clear within the opening minutes, when Jackson stops “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” to instruct his backing band to make it funkier, who's actually in charge. But the problem is these are, by design, half-performances. Sometimes, the film comes close to capturing how electric it could have been live, such as when, during “Billie Jean,” the music drops out and Jackson launches into a classic solo routine—complete with crotch-grabbing—to the genuine giddiness of his backup dancers. It’s all a great tease, but it can only be a tease. PG. MATTHEW SINGER. 99 Indoor Twin, Broadway Metro 4 Theatres, Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Forest Theatre, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

Moon

Sure, the movie directed by David Bowie’s son Duncan Jones is a moonage daydream. But it’s better described as an unusually satisfying sci-fi picture. There’s not much I can safely reveal about the movie without ruining it; in fact, if you haven’t seen the trailer, you should head straight to the theater before you accidentally encounter any twists. It’s hardly even fair to call the upheavals “twists”—Jones’ direction is so economical, and the story so direct, that the surprises aren’t M. Night Shyamalan abracadabra but the launching site for speculation on how it might feel to experience such things. Mostly it would feel mighty lonely. What I can say is that Sam Rockwell is a mine operator shaving helium-3 off the lunar surface for an energy company that cares deeply about the environment but so little about Sam that they’ve left him for three years with only the voice of Kevin Spacey for company. Exhausted and a little unhinged, Rockwell’s character starts as a fine channel for the actor’s sleepy aimlessness, until he develops facets that allow for a quiet tour de force. Rarely has a performer made so much hay out of talking to himself. The movie flits in and out in 97 minutes, and what sticks afterward—and rattles around, aching, for days—isn’t the ideas (which are no great shakes, really) but the emotional gravity Moon gives them. R. AARON MESH. Laurelhurst Theatre.

New York, I Love You

An omnibus Big Apple tribute inspired by Paris, Je T'Aime includes the directing debut of Natalie Portman. Not screened for Portland critics. R. Fox Tower. Fox Tower Stadium 10.

No.W.Here Lab: Beyond Borders V

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY, CURATOR ATTENDING] Brad Butler arrives from London's art space No.W.Here Lab with film and video works from Pakistan and India. Presented by Cinema Project. New American Art Union, 922 SE Ankeny. 7:30 pm Tuesday-Wednesday, Nov. 17-18.

Paranormal Activity

In the spirit of found-footage horror (see: The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, REC), an increasingly popular mode whose weaknesses and strengths are exemplified by Paranormal Activity, I am forgoing a more traditional review. Instead, I present to you the notes I made while screening the film. “White people.” “Boring white people.” “Will they ever shut up?” “Do they ever go to work?” “Jesus Christ, where are the fucking ghosts?” “I was promised ghosts.” “They're sleeping. This isn't scary.” “More talking.” “Ghosts goddammit, I want ghosts!” “These actors are really good at pretending to be people I'd never want to be stuck in an elevator with.” “Finally, a fucking ghost.” “Oh shit, that was kinda scary.” “A demon, not a ghost.” “More inane blather.” “Idea: horror film about a demon who torments deaf-mutes.” “Pretty scared now, actually.” “Making this note because I'm too scared to look at the screen.” “Sorta relieved that so much of this movie is just talking, as I did not bring an extra pair of underwear.” “This is too much.” “Mommy.” “Will anyone notice if I throw up?” “I don't like this.” “Chris, you'll get through this.” “Wait, that was it?” “Happy I did not piss my pants.” “Kinda bummed I did not piss my pants.” R. CHRIS STAMM. Century Eastport 16, Cinetopia, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Forest Theatre, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Sandy Cinemas, Tigard 11 Cinemas.

Paris

[ONE WEEK ONLY] The “we are all connected” movie visits the City of Light, though it’s less the French Babel than the French Love, Actually. Being Parisian, the road to romance is paved less with stuttering comedy and public singing than with loveless affairs, existential crises and staring out windows. But it’s still a fundamentally squishy thing, a star-studded cavalcade of frogs—Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Luchini, Mélanie Laurent and François Cluzet all amble past each other. The effect is pleasant, creating the impression that Paris is a hard-living urban melting pot that happens to be peppered by all the actors you’ve seen in other movies set in Paris. Albert Dupontel is best as a divorced fishmonger, while Binoche seems more sensual the more harried she becomes, and Luchini—a Rohmer vet—boogaloos to “Land of 1,000 Dances.” But director Cédric Klapisch seems determined to spoil the fun with blasts of poor taste: A nightmare sequence is shot inside a gaudy CG architect’s rendering, while a major character’s fatal motorbike crash is filmed with a quick-cut, flying-body montage right out of a ‘70s Mondo picture. We are all connected—with the pavement. R. AARON MESH. Cinema 21. Friday-Thursday, Oct. 16-22. Living Room Theaters.

Planet 51

Otherworldly suburbanites are horrified when a human spaceman lands in their backyard. WW did not attend the screening. PG. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

Ponyo

The magic of Hayao Miyazaki is a very old magic; overgrown, dilapidated, left out to sit in the rain. The magic in the Spirited Away director’s latest animated feature, Ponyo, is so old it’s prehistoric: In the second half of the movie, the oceans flood into coastal mountains, so that Devonian-era Diplocercides fish schools cruise down the highways, and giant jellyfish nest in the trees. But Ponyo’s ancient sorcery is exceptionally suited to the very young. For the first time since early Miyazaki works like My Neighbor Totoro, it is possible to bring your preschoolers to the theater without fear of frightening them. A good deal of transformation is experienced by Ponyo, a tide-pool creature who is described as a “goldfish” but looks more like a soaked Beanie Baby. She lives with her father, a sea wizard who stole Mr. Magorium’s wardrobe and now must reside in a submarine, where he breeds plankton. (It’s a living.) For reasons that are perfectly logical onscreen but feel very silly to recount here, Ponyo evolves into a frog with chicken legs, then into a little girl in a red dress. The kids might like that stuff, but I’d venture that adults will remember the older mysteries: the reflection of car lights off rain-slicked streets, the distant glimmer of ships in the night and the rocking of the surf, like a lullaby. G. AARON MESH. Academy Theater, Avalon Theatre, Edgefield Powerstation Theater, Grand Lodge Compass Room Theater, Kennedy School Theater, Laurelhurst Theatre, Milwaukie Cinema, Valley Theater.

Repo! The Genetic Opera

[ONE WEEK ONLY] Paul Sorvino and Paris Hilton star in a horror rock-opera about an unscrupulous organ-transplant corporation. Not screened for critics, though we very much wish it had been. R. Clinton Street Theater. Friday-Thursday, Nov. 28-Dec. 4. No showtimes.

Selfless

[ONE WEEK ONLY, DIRECTORS ATTENDING] The incurably protean Pander brothers, Jacob and Arnold, have published reams of graphic novels for Dark Horse Comics, painted velvet murals of giant breasts for Thatch Tiki Bar and established a presence in the local electronic music scene. So why shouldn’t they try making a movie? Selfless, their first full-length foray into narrative filmmaking, is a psychological chiller that carries the imprint of comics in at least one sense: It is wholly engrossing without making a lick of sense. The story, which both brothers wrote, concerns a Pearl District architect (Joshua Rengert) whose life is systematically destroyed by a swarthy fiend (Matt Gallini) he pisses off in a Seattle-Tacoma International Airport terminal. The draftsman’s troubles eventually incorporate identify theft, twin stewardesses and human trafficking—he never quite comprehends what’s happening to him, which is just as well, because otherwise he’d be catatonic with disbelief. No matter: Selfless compensates for its implausibility with Jacob Pander’s chic, Lynchian direction—Portland’s skyline is validated as a nightmare cityscape of gleaming postmodernism—and sheer balls: By the time one character hikes on the shoulder of I-5 from Portland to Seattle for a samurai-sword duel, the movie is kung-fu Pander. AARON MESH. Cinema 21. 7 pm Friday-Thursday, Nov. 6-12, plus 2:30 pm screenings Saturday-Sunday, Nov. 7-8. Jacob and Arnold Pander will attend the premiere on Friday, Nov. 6. Living Room Theaters.

Some Voices

[REVIVAL] Daniel Craig plays a schizophrenic man in love with an equally troubled Kelly Macdonald in this 2000 drama. Living Room Theaters. No showtimes.

Surrogates

Bruce Willis lives in a world of robot doppelgängers and hilarious wigs. Not screened by WW press deadlines; look for a review on wweek.com. PG-13. Portlander Cinema.

The Baker

A hitman lies low in a Welsh bakery. It's a comedy with the chap who plays Dumbledore. Living Room Theaters. Living Room Theaters.

The Box

 Not content with ruining Donnie Darko with one director’s cut, Richard Kelly returns to his cherished phantasm hobbyhorses: gelatinous portals to other dimensions, mad seers demanding a sacrifice for original sin, and the end of the world occurring a couple decades ago. It is pleasant to imagine Warner Brothers suits first contemplating this bravura turkey, which takes a simple Richard Matheson story and gussies it up with two hours of the aforementioned obsessions, plus some new ones: Arthur C. Clarke, NASA, Christmas performances of Sartre’s No Exit, prosthetic feet and people being struck by lightning in the face. Imagining the studio’s reaction is certainly more fun than watching the movie, with its petrified wooden performances. The script is a mercilessness litany of howlers, recited exceedingly slowly: “You’re going to give me this $100 bill as a gift?” Cameron Diaz asks, exactly one shot after Frank Langella gives her a $100 bill as a gift. The plot—in its essence, it’s about whether Diaz should a push a button that simultaneously kills people and tenders cash—crawls at a snail’s pace, yet motivations and moods shift abruptly, incomprehensibly. Eventually it becomes impossible to understand how characters get from one scene to the next. At Kelly’s climax, which features the same Eve-ate-the-apple bullshit as Antichrist, one of these characters goes blind and deaf. Lucky him. PG-13. AARON MESH. No showtimes.

The End of the Line

A documentary addresses the crisis of overfished oceans. Look for a review at wweek.com. Living Room Theaters. Living Room Theaters.

The Find: Claiming Nelscott Reef

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] A surfing documentary checks out the Oregon coast's recently discovered 50-foot wave. This looks kind of amazing, actually. Hollywood Theatre. 7 pm Wednesday, Nov. 18.

The Hangover

Director Todd Phillips’ bro-down film is set in the bro mecca of Las Vegas, a city Phillips (Old School) basically jizzes over in the establishing shots of the opening credits. The plot, too, sounds disturbingly like quintessential bro cinema: Four dudes get wasted at a bachelor party and stumble drunkenly through the repercussions. Only something funny happens on the way to a routine Hollywood man-comedy: Phillips gives a comedic genius his first big break and rediscovers the lost art of screwball. The bros’ night in Vegas is a predictably drunken (and unintentionally roofied) blur. But less predictably, we are shown none of the night’s original hijinks, only the hijinks’ aftermath—which involves a mercifully disappeared groom, an abandoned baby and Mike Tyson’s tiger. In this amnesic construction, The Hangover breaks its mold. As good as Ed Helms is as the most frantic groomsman, it’s Zach Galifianakis who makes this film required summer viewing. The bearded underground comic’s character is essentially his own intense and awkward stand-up persona with a few extra-special needs thrown in for good measure. Dressed in attire that’s supposed to be outlandish but looks like your average Portland show-goer, he’s given the freedom to describe himself as a “one-man wolf pack,” and to lash out with fury when his man-purse is crushed (“Hey—there’s Skittles in there!”). Despite the character’s eccentricities, he’s actually treated with some degree of respect from his new friends. He has to be: He’s incredible. R. CASEY JARMAN. Laurelhurst Theatre, Valley Theater, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

The Informant!

Steven Soderbergh hasn’t settled for making the funniest and flat-out best movie of his career, or for capsizing the corporate-scandal drama into a pool of farce. He’s also managed to do something more subtle and radical: He’s sabotaged all the clichés of voice-over narration in film. The device is often a crutch, used to reveal what a central character is thinking. The question of what agribusiness whistle-blower Mark Whitacre (a mustachioed Matt Damon) is thinking is the central dilemma of The Informant!—it contains the clues to what this apparent naïf is really up to—and yet the more insistent his voice-over is, the less that internal monologue tells us. Much of the supple comedy in The Informant! comes from Soderbergh contrasting his hero’s romantic vision of himself—Damon’s fine performance has echoes of Christopher Walken in Catch Me If You Can—against the banality of his espionage. The rest of the humor—and it is a bottomless well—comes from the alarmed reactions of Whitacre’s FBI handlers (especially Joel McHale of The Soup) and his lawyers (especially Tony Hale, Arrested Development’s Buster) as they learn, along with us, that Mark hasn’t “been telling you guys the whole truth,” as he blithely puts it. There’s also an amazing hairpiece joke. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower. Academy Theater, Avalon Theatre, Bagdad Theater and Pub, Edgefield Powerstation Theater, Grand Lodge Compass Room Theater, Kennedy School Theater, Laurelhurst Theatre, Living Room Theaters, Milwaukie Cinema, Mission Theater and Pub, Portlander Cinema, St. Johns Pub and Theater, Tigard Joy Theatre, Valley Theater, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

The Invention of Lying

The saddest bright-and-chipper comedy ever made, as if Ricky Gervais were apologizing for the happy-ending copout of The Office’s Christmas special, before wrapping up with another happy-ending copout. The movie’s high concept is of a land where no one can tell a fib, though the citizens actually behave like Austin Powers discovering that “because of the unfreezing process, I have no inner monologue.” This means Jennifer Garner telling Gervais that she has just finished masturbating before their dinner date, but will not be having sex with him because she does not find him physically attractive. The movie, which has jokes somewhat better than that, sinks with a scene of Gervais by his mother’s deathbed (in “A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People”) where he consoles the panicked woman by making up a promise of God and heaven, after which she dies and he kneels there, silent, knowing he will never see her again. The audience might at this time be forgiven for sneaking out the back to weep in an alley. But the film plods manfully on, less intent on satirizing religion than treating it as a kindness you might bestow upon your stupider friends. Even sourer is Gervais’ conviction that honesty between the sexes compels brutal Darwinism that excludes the chubby “losers” from any hope of love. He’s grappling with real ideas here, and not sugarcoating the pills, but at a certain point you sense him bitterly resigning himself to living among a species without imagination. Ha? PG-13. AARON MESH. Laurelhurst Theatre, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

The Kabul to Kandahar Antiwar Progressive Fall Film Fest

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] The PSU Progressive Student Union continues its free screenings with A Mighty Heart, Michael Winterbottom's very dull drama about the murder of Daniel Pearl. Every element of A Mighty Heart is a mere precursor to the moment when a colleague says, "I'm sorry, Mariane...Daniel didn't make it," and Angelina Jolie begins to wail. It's an awful sound: half animal despair, half Oscar bid. R. AARON MESH. Laughing Horse Books, 12 NE 10th Ave. 7 pm Monday, Nov. 23.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY] The Clinton Street Theater expands its weekly midnight screenings for Halloween, offering three extra chances to sing along with Dr. Frank-N-Furter. R. Clinton Street Theater. 8 pm and midnight Friday-Saturday, Oct. 31-Nov. 1. Clinton Street Theater.

The September Issue

September is the January of a fashionista’s calendar, the month when new trends are set and designers reveal their fall collections. And if any one publication guides it all, it’s Vogue, ruled by the perfectly coiffed and notoriously cold Anna Wintour. In The September Issue, director R.J. Cutler gained unprecedented access to track the creation of Vogue’s September 2007 issue, the largest and heaviest ever to hit newsstands. (Spoiler warning: Cover model Sienna Miller was almost airbrushed into oblivion.) The look that viewers get behind the office doors of New York’s fashion mecca is sharply comical and richly creative. Wintour, who notoriously influenced Meryl Streep’s The Devil Wears Prada character, causes shakes in the most confident designers and gives stares that equate to a public bitch-slap, but her colorful supporting cast offsets her curtness. Though the liberal spending to produce never-published spreads is baffling, the film effectively peels back the glossy cover of Vogue to tell the compelling story of its industrious creators. But that is the paradox of the fashion industry: absurd artistry. PG-13. ALLISON FERRE. Living Room Theaters.

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 Soloist

Reporter Robert Downey Jr. tries to aid mentally ill musican Jamie Foxx. Perhaps together they can catch the Zodiac Killer. PG-13. No showtimes.

The Stepfather

Mom's new man is a psychotic killer. Not screened for critics. PG-13. Movies On TV Stadium 16.

The Time Travelers Wife

The more I think about it, the creepier the premise of The Time Traveler’s Wife seems. In Audrey Niffenegger’s novel and the movie it has spawned, a man is genetically saddled with an involuntary tendency to pop through time and space without his clothes; more often than not, he drops in on a field where a little girl holds her tea parties. Reader, she marries him. You could call it destiny. You could also call it grooming. Or you could take the view of the movie, and call it a chance for a girl to start planning her dream wedding as early as possible, with a husband conveniently provided. The movie comes across as a handsomely illustrated picture book, with Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams as the lead drawings. They both have pretty faces, and are occupied with hefty queries. What is the nature of free will? If you could know the hour of your death but couldn’t change it, would you want to know? Is it really cheating if you go back in time to fuck a younger, hotter version of your spouse? (This is actually discussed.) The only matter it resolves, however, is that a carefully mounted, conventional weepie is the worst possible medium for addressing metaphysical paradoxes. I had already learned that lesson, with much grief, from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. PG-13. AARON MESH. Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

You mean to tell us there's a movie about vampires fighting werewolves, and they're all hot teenagers? Nobody will be interested in this. Not screened by WW press deadlines; look for a review on wweek.com. PG-13. Broadway Metro 4 Theatres, Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Cinetopia, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Moreland Theatre, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Roseway Theatre, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, St. Johns Twin Cinemas and Pub, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

Treasures from the UCLA Film and Television Archive

[THREE NIGHTS ONLY] The NW Film Center unveils prints from UCLA's vast collection. The series kicks off with Gena Rowland's fierce performance in John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence (7 pm Friday, Nov. 20), but we're most excited about seeing a print of The Prowler (7 pm Saturday, Nov. 21), the L.A. crooked-policeman noir James Ellroy called "a masterpiece of sexual creepiness, institutional corruption and suffocating, ugly passion." Oh hells yes. NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium. See Movie Times for additional showings.

Twilight

I have seen the new face of teen sex, and it looks like Buster Keaton. Yes, that Buster Keaton, the silent-film comedian with his mug painted white as a sheet and his eyebrows arched in sleepy concern. It is an iconic visage, but not one liable to launch a thousand pubescent quivers—or at least it wasn’t until it was pasted onto the figure of Edward Cullen, the antique teenage vampire of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books. In the new Twilight movie, that undead dreamboat is played by Robert Pattinson, and while I’m sure he is a perfectly handsome boy—he has thoroughbred cheekbones—here he is sloppily caked in white base makeup and oil-smeared lashes. I cannot fathom how this plaster-of-Paris ghoul is supposed to turn young girls on—unless he’s supposed to turn them off, which I suspect may be closer to the point. I know I’m stepping on sacred toes here, but erotic panic is manifest everywhere in Twilight. Edward recoils from a make-out session with his human girlfriend Bella, flinging himself from her bed into a nearby wall and groaning, “I can’t ever lose control around you!” This chivalric torment—my boyfriend wants me so bad he can’t even touch me—dovetails neatly with Christian evangelicalism’s youth-group cult of the supposedly exquisite sensuality of agonized celibacy. It also begins to explain why the teen pinup of the moment is coated in white wax, like a body condom. Ed’s attitude toward sex is the same as the one I’d encourage toward this ponderous, stupid movie: Just say no. PG-13. AARON MESH. No showtimes.

Up

Some inspiration has made Pixar’s last three pictures—Ratatouille, WALL-E and now Up—increasingly outlandish and…well, sad. Cartoons may possess an ingrained tendency for cuteness, but not since Disney drew Dumbo has a studio so skillfully exploited the medium’s capacity for pathos. I spent much of WALL-E on the cusp of tears, and started bawling within the first five minutes of Up, pausing only to take notes. In my defense, the prologue of Up is uncommonly poignant. A little boy with huge hornrims sits agog at a 1930s movie-palace newsreel of South American adventure, then meets a little girl who is equally delighted by tales of discovery. In a montage set to Michael Giacchino’s elegiac piano score, the two kids grow up, marry, grow old. They never quite make it to the jungle of their nickelodeon dreams. She slips away in a hospital bed, and Carl—the boy’s name is Carl—has become the forlorn old coot Mr. Fredricksen, his voice growled by Ed Asner, his house besieged by progress he doesn’t understand. When he dodges an impending nursing-home confinement by packing his house with rainbow-hued helium balloons, he’s making an escape, but also retreating into a floating shrine to his late wife. Whatever brainstorming session came up with Up allowed Pete Docter and co-director Bob Peterson to grapple not only with old age, but with the kind of maturity rarely broached by cartoons. PG. AARON MESH. Avalon Theatre, Milwaukie Cinema, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

Where the Wild Things Are

It’s standard practice to praise family movies by saying they’ll be enjoyed by parents and children alike, but in the case of the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s picture book, I suspect that some parents will sink blissfully into a reverie watching the characters throw clods of dirt, while their offspring tug on sleeves to ask when they can go outside and throw clods of dirt. Where the Wild Things Are is like watching a game of Calvinball scripted by Robert Altman—no rules, lots of running in circles and everybody grumbling at once—but at least it looks great. All the truest moments arrive before little Max (a subtly emotive young Portlander named Max Records) sails away from home in a tantrum and projects his feelings onto wonderfully tangible animal puppets, detailed by Jim Henson's people down to the soil clinging to woolly legs and the mucus under nostrils. But the oddly glum cavorting looks like those Olympic opening ceremonies where dancers wander beneath indigenous obelisks, only set to hipster Kidz Bop tapes. The monsters whiz by in an alarming jumble of infantile hurt feelings expressed in a large vocabulary; they don’t sound like children, or even a child’s understanding of their elders, so much as adults who don’t want to be adults. That’s exactly who it was made by, and for. PG. AARON MESH. Broadway Metro 4 Theatres, Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Division Street Stadium 13, Forest Theatre, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Tigard 11 Cinemas.

Whip It

The first 15 minutes of films about the first years of womanhood are such a difficult time. The opening act of Whip It gives little reason to hope it will be anything more than a retread of Juno, which was itself a copy of Ghost World. But as soon as alternateen Ellen Page hops a senior-citizen bingo bus for a ride to roller-derby tryouts—and shares a sympathetic exchange with a fellow bluehair—the movie reveals a capacity for openheartedness and understanding far beyond its predecessors’. Debut director Drew Barrymore’s movie has editing problems, but it’s filled with delights, even beyond the mischief of tiny Page skating “like a weevil” while tatted ladies try to board-check her. Barrymore’s direction grows surer as Whip It goes along. (An underwater make-out session, set to Jens Lekman, is cut so the partners magically never need surface; love seems to have given them gills instead of wings.) With the exception of an obligatory Jimmy Fallon, the cast is superb, with Kristen Wiig, Alia Shawkat and Daniel Stern giving the performances of their careers. But the movie belongs to Marcia Gay Harden, whose interpretation of a controlling stage parent is so understanding it might cause people to forgive their own mothers. PG-13. AARON MESH. Fox Tower Stadium 10, Hollywood Theatre.

Zombieland

The bad news: Only six people on earth will survive the undead apocalypse. The good news: One of those people is Jesse Eisenberg. On the strength of this gob of dystopian cotton candy and the similarly themed (though zombie-free) Adventureland, Eisenberg has nervously scuffed past Michael Cera as cinema’s premier timid comedian. He’s taken the tired archetype of a screenwriter’s virginal alter ego and corroded it with a daub of pre-emptive arrogance and hostility—especially appropriate for his new nerd, who rightly suspects the girls he likes want to eat him alive. He’s paired with Superbad smartie Emma Stone, who wouldn’t sleep with Eisenberg if he were the last guy on the planet. (He’s one of two, and the other is Woody Harrelson, which helps his odds considerably.) His know-it-all narration gives Zombieland a lot of its kick: It’s far from the first zombie comedy, but it revives the joke by picturing Armageddon as a teenager’s romantic-fantasy joyride. Director Ruben Fleischer, a music-video vet, has been studying the florid slo-mo of David Fincher and Zack Snyder for the purpose of sending it up; his insertion of three-dimensional text instructions sets a saucy tone. Zombieland finds time for an extended celebrity cameo that I should not discuss except to say that it is the best celebrity it could possibly be. R. AARON MESH. Movies On TV Stadium 16.

 

A partial list of things destroyed in Roland Emmerich’s majestically shameless end-of-the-world movie 2012: Mayan-calendar cultists (suicide). A dill pickle (consumed by conspiracy theorist Woody Harrelson). John Cusack’s family home (swallowed by the San Andreas fault). The entire Los Angeles freeway system (ibid.). The city of Los Angeles proper. Yellowstone National Park (explodes into gargantuan volcanic caldera). Several airline runways, right after John Cusack’s planes take off. Woody Harrelson’s Winnebago. Woody Harrelson (flaming fir tree). “The vice president’s chopper went down in the ash cloud outside of Pittsburgh.” President Danny Glover’s video feed for an address to the nation—one line into the Lord’s Prayer. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, with major fissures rupturing between the fingers of God and Adam. The whole damn Vatican. The White House (crushed by tsunami-capsized aircraft carrier the USS John F. Kennedy). President Danny Glover (“I’m comin’ home, Dorothy”). The Indus Valley, along with one symbolically important geologist (unspeakably massive tidal wave). Much of the bow of Ark No. 4, one of the floating vessels secretly constructed in Nepal by the world’s governments to save a select remnant from the global flooding (it scrapes some glaciers). The rest of the world. A partial list of things not destroyed in 2012: Hope. John Cusack. A cute lap dog. PG-13. AARON MESH. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Cinetopia, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, St. Johns Twin Cinemas and Pub, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

 

Not since Rolf the friendly Nazi informed Liesl in The Sound of Music that because she was 16 going on 17, he’d take care of her, has a movie contemplated the compromise of a minor with as much good cheer as does An Education. The movie has been lifted by Danish director Lone Scherfig and pop writer Nick Hornby from the memoirs of British journalist Lynn Barber, who in 1961 was herself 16 going on 17, and seduced by a suitor twice her age. Mulligan faultlessly plays the heroine, here called Jenny, as a girl whose worst affectations—snobbery toward her schoolmates, ridicule of her parents, and a tendency to drop French bons mots into everyday conversation—are endearing because they are being tried on for the first time, and tentatively. This is also her attitude, at first, toward David (Peter Sarsgaard), the man who cruises his Bristol automobile to her Twickenham bus stop and offers to give her rain-soaked cello a lift home. The movie’s dramatization of these events is funny and heartening—but praising it begs the question of how funny and heartening a movie about predation ought to be. R. AARON MESH. City Center Stadium 12, Fox Tower Stadium 10, Hollywood Theatre, Lake Twin Cinema.

 

[ONE WEEK ONLY] Michael Jai White and Arsenio Hall star in a note-for-note parodic homage (not a spoof, jive turkey!) of '70s blaxploitation flicks like Disco Godfather and TNT Jackson. Not screened for critics, sadly; look for a review on wweek.com. R. Clinton Street Theater. 7 and 9 pm Friday-Thursday, Nov. 20-26.

 

Like some twitching critter the cat dragged in and plopped onto the doormat, The Fourth Kind produces a spiraling crisis of empathy: As hope that this moribund thing just might recover tightens into the certitude that expiration is imminent, what do you do? Kick the thing out into the weeds to die alone, or put it out of its misery with the sharp edge of a spatula? If you’re like me (God help you), you watch and do nothing and wish the poor bastard had never been born at all. Milla Jovovich and her divinely curved upper lip star as the recently widowed Dr. Abigail Tyler, a comely psychologist with a clutch of sleep-deprived patients all reporting identically distressing night terrors. Could be aliens or ghosts or God or a shared hallucination. It doesn’t really matter, because it’s all an excuse to take us on a whirlwind tour of de rigueur narrative flummery. Framed from the outset as a reenactment of real events, The Fourth Kind slaps together a whatever’s-in-the-fridge sandwich of distorted faux-doc footage, Dateline-style 9-1-1 audio, Brechtian direct address, even a co-starring turn from director Olatunde Osunsanmi, who plays—who else?—himself. The self-reflexive hijinks, none of which are original, and all of which have been put to better use by Errol Morris and Unsolved Mysteries, amount to shoddily forged steel girders propping up a collapsing soufflé of sci-fi cliché. CHRIS STAMM. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Forest Theatre, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Sandy Cinemas, Tigard 11 Cinemas.

 

Like most movies based on investigative journalism, this adaptation of Jon Ronson’s book—about the U.S. Army’s misadventures in telepathic warfare—feels like an appetizer, with the whole story left dangling tantalizingly close. But that frustration is exacerbated by The Men Who Stare at Goats, which, like the military’s secret New Earth Battalion, starts ever so promisingly before realizing it doesn’t know what to do with its powers. It’s a rare film that can treat the freeing of Iraqi prisoners of war as an afterthought, lost behind the freeing of barnyard animals. George Clooney is a psychic soldier, trained by a hippie visionary (Jeff Bridges, coasting blissfully by) to disarm America’s enemies in the nonviolent tradition of “Jesus Christ, Lao Tze Tung, Walt Disney.” The film’s revelations—all too absurd to be concocted—are gleefully staged, as interlopers led by Kevin Spacey find ways to bring colonial oppression back into the mix. But director Grant Heslov (a journeyman actor) stresses the punch lines, as if he’d been watching Coen brothers movies and thought they were only about jokes. Goats is probably the first comedy to show the U.S. military-industrial complex torturing kittens and dachshunds, but it’s one of many War on Terror satires to join its targets in blithe dismissal of brown-skinned collateral. R. AARON MESH. Broadway Metro 4 Theatres, Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Cinetopia, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Forest Theatre, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Hollywood Theatre, Lake Twin Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

 

Move aside, Michael Moore—two “culture-jamming” activists known as the Yes Men take on corporations such as Dow Chemical, Exxon and Halliburton in their wickedly entertaining second film. The duo’s undercover hoaxes are in the style of Sacha Baron Cohen ventures, but these two are able to pull off larger stunts more cleverly and with more conscience. The Yes Men, known as Andy and Mike in the film (Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos in real life), create fake websites of major corporations “we don’t like,” then take advantage of invitations sent to attend major conferences and television appearances. (Vamos, a Reed graduate, honed his skills in Portland: In the early '90s, he organized a red-white-and-blue vomit protest of Dan Quayle, and surreptitiously changed road signs to read "Malcolm X St.") The film begins with their 2004 prank on Dow Chemical, making an announcement on BBC World that Dow would take full responsibility for the Bhopal pesticide-plant disaster of 1984. Their schemes are inspiring, but the Yes Men aren’t perfect. The film lacks the cohesiveness of Borat or Michael Moore’s most recent films, but in turn avoids Moore’s pompous self-righteousness, making the film delightful even if the scope of the Yes Men’s agenda runs away from them at times. Their humor, exemplified by a blue screen which projects satirical backgrounds behind their victims' interviews, makes the audience forgive the amateurism and naiveté, and choose instead to laugh with them the whole way through. ALI ROTHSCHILD. Cinema 21. Cinema 21.

 

[REVIVAL] To infinity...and into your eyeball. Buzz and Woody get three dimensions, twice. G. Lloyd Center, etc.