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SHOWING UP
**** Though First Cow and Old Joy sometimes flashed soft cosmic smiles, Kelly Reichardt films aren’t known for their comedy. Yet her sixth Oregon-made film, Showing Up, methodically mines humor from the Portland studio-arts scene. Days before a show, sculptor Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is needled by life’s distractions: her broken water heater—and her friend and landlord Jo (Hong Chau) prioritizing her own exhibition over fixing it—a time-sapping day job, a troubled brother (John Magaro), and why not throw nursing a wounded pigeon onto the pile? Meanwhile, the many artists surrounding Lizzy—seen calmly creating at the (now defunct) Oregon College of Art and Craft—only clarify her foul mood and broken focus. As always, Reichardt’s movies hinge more on experiencing a reality than a plot, and provoking questions flow from Showing Up’s quiet contrasts of objectivity and character building. Is it ridiculous or confirming that Lizzy’s labor of love causes her misery? Are the machinations of a tiny arts scene trifling or buoying? Is Jo and Lizzy’s friendship fraying, or is selfishness required to brave show week? Like Lizzy’s unassuming anthropomorphic sculptures, Showing Up reveals more the nearer you lean toward it. Community, inspiration, validation; clay’s got little to do with it. These are the myths and truths—impossible to untangle—that animate our every day. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Cinema 21, Hollywood.
SOMEWHERE IN QUEENS
**** Without a punch thrown or montage cued, Ray Romano’s directorial debut meaningfully channels Rocky. The Everybody Loves Raymond star plays Frank, a Queens, N.Y., construction worker who routinely invokes Rocky Balboa to motivate his son, a promising high school basketball player. The reference is rightfully mocked as dad-core, but there’s depth to it. When he does speak, the bashful 18-year-old beanpole “Sticks” does so in a vulnerable Balboa-esque mumble. It’s a warm, affecting performance by newcomer Jacob Ward, playing the quietest member of a brassy Italian family that perpetually overlooks him and his father. Even more, Somewhere in Queens understands—even if its characters don’t—how shyness can be both painful and easily misinterpreted, and how Frank believing himself to be the underdog in a blue-collar, outer borough culture is a messy, pathological business. Granted, there is a more overt comedy premise tucked inside Queens, but the farce potential never takes over. Instead, Romano’s self-effacement creeps beautifully over every scene, while fellow sitcom icon Laurie Metcalf (mother to Sticks and spouse to Frank) is aces as ever at balancing ball-busting comedy and poignant conversations. Having built the best version of the “Sundance” family dramedy, ironically, Romano is the rare rookie filmmaker with nothing to prove. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Bridgeport, Cascade, Clackamas, Fox Tower.
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE
**** Recent films to tangle with uncivil climate resistance—First Reformed, Night Moves, Woman at War—tend to weigh the meaning and cost of radical activism through their characters’ sometimes intense subjectivity. In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, ideological development is yesterday’s news. Per the title, director Daniel Goldhaber (Cam) unfurls a steely and process-driven thriller about eight activists attempting to detonate a West Texas oil pipeline. With Gavin Brivik’s Tangerine Dream-esque score guaranteed to quicken heart rates, Pipeline (based on a nonfiction book by Andreas Malm) thrives on ratcheting tension and detail: It’s all titrating, wiring and metadata editing. For amateurs, the activists are remarkably capable, but it’s bracingly apparent their sabotage has zero safety net—even in cinematic terms. When characters defy realistic authority to this extent, the audience has no playbook for what happens next. The story flashes back to reveal, one by one, how the activists arrived in arid oil country, but the vignettes are finely calibrated to suggest the various righteous rages without turning polemic. As in the conspiracy itself, every actor knows their precise role, with Forrest Goodluck (playing a self-taught demolitions expert) achieving the deepest impression. His permanently furrowed brow is a sculpture of maniacal determination, and like How to Blow Up a Pipeline, he never flinches. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Bridgeport, Cinema 21.
THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE
*** On the one hand, there’s something disturbingly cynical about The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s threadbare plot and paper-thin characters, as if the exercise is less a standalone film and more a pitch document for a forthcoming Mario Extended Universe. On the other hand, it’s hard to argue with the results. Thirty years after their first cinematic outing, Mario (a shockingly serviceable Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) return to the big screen in a lovingly made animated extravaganza. There’s a clear passion for the material that directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic bring to the proceedings, blending the vibrant colors and iconic architecture of the Mushroom Kingdom with kinetic visuals that are a genuine treat to behold, buoyed by Brian Tyler’s score and its clever incorporation of Koji Kondo’s iconic chiptune orchestrations. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is certainly lacking in depth or narrative complexity, but like Star Wars or Avatar, it uses the basics of the monomyth as a jumping-off point to create a world that captures the imagination and leaves the audience begging for more. Older moviegoers will likely be turned off by the simplicity of it all, but for fans who are young or young at heart, it’s an entertaining trip down the warp pipe. Let’s a-go! PG. MORGAN SHAUNETTE. Academy, Bagdad, Cedar Hills, City Center, Eastport, Empirical, Fox Tower, Joy Cinema, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, St. Johns, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Wunderland Beaverton, Wunderland Milwaukie.