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Film buffs, arty types, nostalgic millennials: You now have your own March Madness tournament and there are no basketballs in sight. OK, that’s a lie—there are two.
The Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow—PAM’s film art center at its movie theater, the Tomorrow Theater on Southeast Division Street—is hosting a bracket-style tournament, “March Madness: Millennial Movies,” with screenings scheduled for the entire month of March. The “knock-down, drag-out battle to the finish to decide once and for all which is the best millennial film,” according to organizers, will have participants making impossible choices like picking between heartthrobs Leonardo DiCaprio and Heath Ledger when 1996’s Romeo + Juliet competes against 1999’s 10 Things I Hate About You in the Lit Adaptations category. Don’t make us do it, PAM CUT.
As for those two basketball movies: Love & Basketball and Space Jam have already advanced to the final 12. The Tomorrow Theater’s programmers started with 24 movies and asked followers on social media to help whittle those down to the dozen screening in March. Moviegoers can now cast one vote each for their favorite films, via social media or a Google Form. Attending a screening is worth a two-point vote for that film. The theater will announce the winners online, and the series will culminate in a triple feature of the first three Fast & Furious films because why not?
The tournament is the brainchild of Katie Jenkins, PAM CUT’s producer of screenings and experiences, and her team. WW asked Jenkins to define the high and low points of the millennial film era.
“What it’s celebrated for is the rise of indie film and doing different things like nonlinear storytelling and a lot of experimentation,” she says. “And those films sold well, too. They were in the mainstream, which is interesting.”
And loathed for? “Representation wasn’t great then, and there weren’t many storytellers of color who were celebrated at the level they should have been,” she says.
Jenkins, a millennial herself, is rooting for 10 Things I Hate About You, Mars Attacks! and Bend It Like Beckham.
SEE IT: March Madness: Millennial Movies at PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater, 3530 SE Division St., 503-221-1156, tomorrowtheater.org. March 1-April 5. $5–$25.