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. Mt. Hood Theatre.

(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.

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.

Astro Boy

A robot child saves the world, just like in Osamu Tezuka's comic. PG. Academy Theater, Avalon Theatre, Milwaukie Cinema, Portlander Cinema, Valley Theater.

Bronson

This splendidly unsettling biopic of Michael Peterson opens by alternating between the brawling antihero adored on a vaudeville stage and naked in a prison cage, greased and battling guards. In Peterson’s mind, these two places are the same. The British convict (who has actually spent more than 30 years in solitary confinement and somewhere in that time renamed himself Charlie Bronson, after the Death Wish star) is imagined by director Nicolas Winding Refn and gonzo actor Tom Hardy as part sinister insinuation, part tantrum-throwing child and mostly barking mad. With his handlebar mustache and shaved bald head, Bronson sees himself as a gentleman bare-knuckle boxer in the style of John L. Sullivan—but he equally resembles a circus strongman and Daniel Day-Lewis’ Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York. The movie’s portrait of an English celebrity-hungry criminal class owes something to the latter novels of Martin Amis, and is greatly enlivened by the appearance of Matt King (Super Hans from the BBC’s Peep Show) playing a polymorphously perverse club owner and fight promoter. Juxtaposing a little of the old ultraviolence with classical music, Bronson practically pleads for comparison with A Clockwork Orange—but it may be more helpful to view it as a counterpart to this year’s Hunger. Both Bobby Sands and Charlie Bronson are body artists with a code of integrity supporting their bloodshed, though Charlie’s politics are no more complicated than the next punch. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower Stadium 10.

Capitalism: A Love Story

“Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil,” Michael Moore proclaims, in a flourish of rhetoric that sounds like a combination of Chairman Mao and David Frum. “You have to eliminate it.” Had you never seen a Michael Moore film, you might assume this edict would be followed by a strategy for revolution, or at least a suggestion for what economic system we might want to use as an evil-reducing substitute. But you have seen his movies, and you know what the pronouncement will be followed by: the end credits. In the fury of the working class, the viewer senses a breeze of possibility: Could Moore at last be demonstrating the guts of a real communist agitator, and suggesting that America might learn something by cracking open Karl Marx? Nah. Instead, Capitalism: A Love Story finds Moore following in the footsteps of populist preachers since the silver-tongued simpleton William Jennings Bryan, using the phrase “Wall Street” as an all-encompassing boogeyman. But populism is a dangerous game. Another name for the people is the mob. This is something Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly know perfectly well. Does Moore know it? Does he know, when he tells the crowds that their down-home values trump any social structure, what he sounds like? He sounds like a Republican. R. AARON MESH. Academy Theater, Valley Theater.

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.

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. Academy Theater, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Edgefield Powerstation Theater, Mt. Hood Theatre, St. Johns Pub and Theater, Valley Theater, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

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. No showtimes.

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

[REVIVAL] You still can't fight in the war room. Living Room Theaters.

Global Lens 2009 Film Series

[THREE NIGHTS ONLY] A touring showcase of international cinema opens with the Chinese Three Gorges comedy Getting Home and the Macedonian meditation I am from Titov Veles. Hollywood Theatre. Friday-Sunday, Nov. 27-29.

Gogol Bordello: Non Stop

[THREE NIGHTS ONLY] Gogol Bordello isn’t your regular up-and-coming band of skinny tie/skinny jeans-clad musicians—director Margarita Jimeno wants to make that clear with her uneven but energetic seven-years-in-the-making documentary. Dynamic, mustache-waxing front man Eugene Hutz leads a group of Ukrainian “gypsy-punk” musicians from cult popularity to national acclaim in an 87-minute film that bores about as often as it entertains. Hutz, whose delightfully curling accent punches out conversational, off-the-lip lyrics about immigrant status, combines klezmer and punk into his sound, trading a bass for a violin and an accordion. The music is exciting. What’s missing from the film is any form of conflict. The musicians are fun, but by the time they perform on Conan, and Hutz gets offered a role in Liev Schreiber’s film Everything is Illuminated, the viewer wishes there had been some visible struggle to make their success feel like a payoff. There are just enough poorly lit, hand-held camera sequences of the band hanging out to bring the film to multiple screeching halts, but a rousing rendition of Gogol’s “Immigrant Punk” just as quickly picks the film up. Jimeno could learn a few things about dramatic storytelling, but in the meantime there’s a refreshing new band nearby to keep you dancing. ALI ROTHSCHILD. Hollywood Theatre. 9:15 pm Friday, Nov. 27. 1 and 9:15 pm Saturday-Sunday, Nov. 28-29.

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. 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. No showtimes.

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, Kennedy School Theater, Milwaukie Cinema, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

Late Night Double Feature Picture Show

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] The gay-bar twin-bill movie screenings continue with Oldboy followed by Forgetting Sarah Marshall. They're both about revenge, right? Boxxes Video Bar, 330 SW 11th St. 8:30 pm Monday, Nov. 30.

Le Combat Dans L’île

[REVIVAL] Romy Schneider stars as a suspicious wife in this rediscovered New Wave political thriller produced by Louis Malle. Hollywood Theatre.

Mad Max

[REVIVAL] A restored 35th anniversary print of the original Aussie cut of Mel Gibson's driving difficulties. Clinton Street Theater. 9 pm Friday-Thursday, Nov. 27-Dec. 3. Clinton Street Theater.

Manufactured Landscapes

[ONE DAY ONLY] What a lovely mess. Canadian doc-maker Jennifer Baichwal follows photographer Edward Burtynsky as he globe-hops from one environmental disaster to the next, making a persuasive case that at least some of the seven wonders of our world are heaps of trash. It's hard to decide which images are most astonishing in scale: Landscapes opens with an eight-minute unbroken pan through a Chinese factory, and goes outside to find even bigger industrial footprints. There are slopes of tires, ridges of rotary telephones and canyons of coal dust. The gargantuan have a sinister enchantment, and I was especially taken by the Chittagong ship-breaking beach in Bangladesh, where workers wait for high tide to strand oil tankers so they can tear them to shreds. Baichwal's pace is appropriately glacial, allowing the scope of these catastrophes to register—though the film could stand to identify its locations more specifically (especially in China, where you get the impression nondisclosure agreements were signed in exchange for access). Without any preaching or panic, Baichwal and Burtynsky capture a portrait of the Earth as a man-made wasteland. They show you fear in a landfill of dust. NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium. 4:30 pm Sunday, Nov. 29. Screens as part of the Lens on China series. Whitsell Auditorium.

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, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Tigard 11 Cinemas.

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. No showtimes.

Ninja Assassin

South Korean superstar Rain plays a...well, WW missed the screening, but we're betting he's a ninja assassin. Look for a review at wweek.com. R. 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, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

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. Forest Theatre, Movies On TV Stadium 16.

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, Milwaukie Cinema, Mission Theater and Pub, Valley Theater.

Precious: Based on the Novel ``Push by Sapphire

Clareece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is 16 years old, weighs 350 pounds, and is pregnant with her second child—conceived, like the first, in a rape by her own father. Over the course of the movie, we will learn that Precious is illiterate, and she will learn that she is HIV-positive. In a menthol-smoky Harlem apartment, her mother, Mary (Mo’Nique), beats and molests her, force-feeding her plates of soul food to literally weigh her down. “Don’t let it get cold,” she warns, “’cause cold-ass pigs feet is nasty.” Everything in Precious’ life is nasty. The movie arrives in Portland as an Oscar frontrunner (backed by Oprah) with a vociferous backlash (deriding it as self-inflicted racism), but what you may not have heard is how much of the picture functions as a horror movie. Even Precious herself is a grotesquerie. I know that’s a potentially inflammatory thing to say about an obese teenage girl, and I mean no insult to Sidibe, who carries her girth with grace. But when a movie shows its heroine running down the street with a stolen bucket of fried chicken, dropping battered thighs on the sidewalk while smearing most of her face with grease, that movie is not shy about pressing its racial stereotypes beyond anything in blaxploitation pictures. But I see how the movie could serve as a uniquely cathartic experience, especially to survivors of abuse. The piling on of cruelty—those “unrelenting circumstances” that threaten to make Precious a scapegoat for every variety of shame and self-hatred—eventually feels like a purging: All of this was done to us, and we won’t look away. Precious escapes the horror show of her world. The movie isn’t so lucky. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower Stadium 10, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema.

Red Cliff

Those who prefer their action served both epic and coherent: Never fear, China is here. The last time John Woo made a movie in his native land was 1992. The movie, Hard Boiled, reached an infernal climax: the hero leaping from an exploding Hong Kong hospital, an infant cradled in his arm. Now, over a decade after the British handover of Hong Kong and Woo’s own departure for Hollywood, he has returned home to film Asia’s priciest production yet, a third-century war pageant, and it starts with an embattled army general rescuing—what else?—a baby. Daddy’s a Han warlord, his people under siege by imperial forces. He sends his adviser (super fly Takeshi Kaneshiro) to pursue an alliance with a rival warlord through his adviser (Hard Boiled veteran Tony Leung). This being a John Woo Film, the two military men are soon bonding. “How about we play a duet?” suggests Tony, whipping out his zither. Woo spends half his budget on a single shot of—what else?—a dove. Though he lacks fellow director Zhang Yimou’s beauty and romance, his campy musicality makes Red Cliff a streamlined answer to The Lord of the Rings. Dig that Tortoise Formation! R. ALISTAIR ROCKOFF. Cinema 21. Cinema 21.

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. Clinton Street Theater.

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.

Storm

Hans-Christian Schmid's drama looks inside a war-crimes trial at the Hague. Living Room Theaters. Living Room Theaters.

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.

Thanksgiving Kung Fu Mini-Marathon

[ONE DAY ONLY, REVIVAL] Seth Sonstein's holiday tradition continues, this time with a showing of Black Dynamite slipped in. Clinton Street Theater. 6 pm Thursday, Nov. 26. Clinton Street Theater.

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 Blind Side

Surely the most odious phrase in movie marketing is “Based on a True Story.” These are the magic words with which Michael Oher, a rags-to-riches NFL draftee, becomes an excuse for Sandra Bullock to play his adoptive mother as Memphis’ most generous, least racist housewife. She kicks off her new film, The Blind Side, with a football commentary on the strategic importance of Oher’s tackle position. Narrating in a Southern accent, she makes Oher’s vocation sound positively divine. If there was more to this story than a white woman’s ego, Hollywood begs to differ. Bullock tries on a Tennessee twang to play Leigh Anne Tuohy: a Christian, Republican and former Ole Miss cheerleader who took a huge, poor black boy into her home and groomed him for football stardom. Football stardom at her alma mater, as it turned out. That conflict of interest is one of many the movie swiftly smooths over in worshipping the Tuohys’ color-blind Christian largesse. Charity, it seems, is next to vanity. Meanwhile, hints of the plantation are hard to ignore: The high-school athlete is compared to a children’s book character—“Ferdinand the Bull”—and bringing him home gives the lady of the house a bedtime thrill, like a marital aid. “Is this some kind of white guilt thing?” Bullock is asked, and remembering her participation in Crash, the answer is obvious. PG-13. ALISTAIR ROCKOFF. 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, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints' Day

The worst Boston frathole movie since Good Will Hunting gets a sequel. Not screened for critics. R.

The Cinematic Practice of Replayed Reality

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, DIRECTOR ATTENDING] Finnish director Susanna Helke comes to Portland with her documentaries, which challenge whether it's really possible to make documentaries. NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium. 7:30 pm Tuesday, Dec. 1.

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 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. 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, Kennedy School Theater, Living Room Theaters, Milwaukie Cinema, Mission Theater and Pub, Portlander Cinema, 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. 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 Sicko, which we think has something to do with death panels. R. AARON MESH. Laughing Horse Books, 12 NE 10th Ave. 7 pm Monday, Nov. 30.

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 Twilight Saga: New Moon

She should so choose Jacob. From an opening dream sequence that echoes Wild Strawberries to a cliffhanger finale featuring an ingeniously hammy Michael Sheen—and especially in the middle, while a shirtless wolfpack broods and brawls across the screen—New Moon is infinitely better than Twilight. Sorry, Portland: The sexually repressed vampire picture Catherine Hardwicke filmed here can’t hold a candle to the woozy vampires-vs.-werewolves sequel Chris Weitz didn’t film here. (He went to British Columbia instead.) The new movie is so much better, in fact, that I find myself wondering if it might actually be…no, it couldn’t be…is it good? God help me. I’ve become a 12-year-old girl. It’s basically a supernatural Dawson’s Creek—a humiliatingly addicting soap opera in the meadows, with glampire Edward (Pattinson) as Dawson and Native American beefcake Jacob (Taylor Lautner) as Pacey. Kristen Stewart continues to play Bella as a twine ball of hormones, yet the events of New Moon proceed with astonishing good humor and an even more surprising lack of hyperbole. The whole affair is like watching Gus Van Sant film a Dungeons and Dragons convention: Shirtless boys jump in the air, and they land as snarling CGI wolves. This is a lot more fun than vampires moaning through a baseball game. So I can’t defend New Moon, but yeah, fine: I liked it. I’m going to go write in my diary now. PG-13. 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, 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 & Television Archive

[FIVE NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL] The NW Film Center continues its rummage through the treasure trove of UCLA film reels with another packed week of features, highlighted by the groundbreaking Sri Lankan drama Gamperaliya (7 pm Wednesday, Nov. 25) and two early John Sayles works: The Return of the Secaucus Seven (7 pm Friday and 9 pm Saturday, Nov. 27-28) and Brother from Another Planet (7 pm Saturday, Nov. 28). NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium. See Movie Times for additional showings.

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. City Center Stadium 12, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema.

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. 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. Academy Theater, Avalon Theatre, Bagdad Theater and Pub, Grand Lodge Compass Room Theater, Kennedy School Theater, Milwaukie Cinema, Mission Theater and Pub, Portlander Cinema, Tigard Joy Theatre, Valley Theater, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

 

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. Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Fox Tower Stadium 10, Hollywood Theatre, Lake Twin Cinema.

 

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. Forest Theatre, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

 

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, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Forest Theatre, Hollywood Theatre, Lake Twin Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas.