David Matthews Portable Bohemia

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Sep 27, 2018
5 min

Scarred Hearts, a film by Radu Jude

Scarred Hearts (Romania) dir. Radu Jude (141 mins) Trailer NW Film Center/Whitsell Auditorium at Portland Art Museum It is a special treat to walk into the theater with no expectations, knowing nothing of the film or its director beyond viewing the trailer, not even remembering the title or the director's nationality, and to walk out feeling almost exalted. Radu Jude's Scarred Hearts did that for me. The film is set in Romania in the 1930s in a sanatorium on what I take to

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Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, June 2, 2018

Jun 3, 2018
6 min

Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, June 2, 2018

I took Bolt Bus down to Eugene on Tuesday morning and enjoyed a delightful midweek sojourn with my old pal Williston and her people, Sylvia and Pete. That's Williston with me in the photo. Eugene is home to the University of Oregon and its football team and a mecca for running and teen runaways. My friends explained that any town whose main focus is the football team is a town with the mentality of a 19-year-old male. That seems to be about right. We had a grand time anyway,

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May 25, 2018
10 min

Woman in the Dunes: a compelling excursion into the absurd

Woman in the Dunes (Japan, 1964) dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara screenplay by Kōbō Abe (247 mins) Trailer NW Film Center Japanese Currents series, April 2018 The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe tr. by E. Dale Saunders Vintage International 241 pp., 1991 (orig. pub. in Japan, 1962) Woman in the Dunes was part of my introduction to foreign film when I began wandering into the campus theater during my freshman and sophomore years in college. Films by the likes of Bergman, Felli

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Mar 31, 2018
6 min

Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, March 31, 2017

This week's film recommendations Faces Places (Visages Villages) is a collaboration between 88-year-old French New Wave director Agnès Varda and 33-year-old visual artist JR. Varda and JR travel around France taking photographs of ordinary people they meet and pasting them on the sides of houses, buildings, shipping containers, train cars. It's a delight. A Fantastic Woman won this year's Oscar for best foreign film. A trans waitress faces hostility and hatred while dealing w

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Mar 20, 2018
3 min

Faces Places (Visages Villages), a film by Agnès Varda and JR

Faces Places (Visages Villages) dir. Agnès Varda and JR (89 mins) Trailer 88-year-old filmmaker Agnès Varda and 33-year-old visual artist JR travel around France taking photos of ordinary people they meet by chance—a café waitress, factory workers, the wives of dockworkers, farmers, goats, &c.—and pasting them on walls, train cars, shipping containers. There are emotional moments when subjects view their larger than life images. Some are moved to tears. This is a sweet film

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Mar 8, 2018
10 min

PIFF 2018: Wrapping Up

The gentle shadow of a sweet melancholy fell across my days as the 41st Portland International Film Festival drew to a close. The festival proper ended on March 1, with encore screenings of audience favorites shown on March 2–4. I saw 27½ films this year, by far the most ever. It was a comfortable number. Before this year I thought I was doing great if I made fifteen to twenty. Maybe I should have made an effort to see more. Thirty-five or forty could have been within reach

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Mar 1, 2018
1 min

PIFF 2018: Index of Reviews, Notes, and Impressions

Index of Reviews, Notes, and Impressions from the 41st Portland International Film Festival A Chiambra (Italy/Germany/France): PIFF 2018: Take 1 Ava (Iran/Canda): PIFF 2018: Take 2 Claire's Camera (dir. by Hong Sang-soo; with Isabelle Huppert and Kim Min-hee) (South Korea/France): PIFF 2018: Take 2 The Day After (South Korea): PIFF 2018: Take 5 The Death of Stalin (United Kingdom): PIFF 2018: Take 1 Foxtrot (Israel/Switzerland/Germany/France): PIFF 2018: Take 4 The Great Budd

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Mar 1, 2018
6 min

PIFF 2018: Take 6

41st Portland International Film Festival (February 1 – March 1, 2018) Lean on Pete (United Kingdom, 2018) dir. Andrew Haigh (121 mins) Trailer Based on a novel by Willy Vlautin. Charlie (Charlie Plummer) lives with his father who works in warehouses, takes up transitory affairs with women, and drinks a bit. Charlie's mother was given to fits of moodiness and depression, if I remember correctly and have not mixed this one up with another film, and left sometime in the past.

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Feb 26, 2018
5 min

PIFF 2018: Take 5

41st Portland International Film Festival (February 15 – March 1, 2018) What Will People Say (Sweden/Norway/Germany, 2018) dir. Iram Haq (106 mins) Trailer Nisha's parents came to Norway from Pakistan to offer their children a chance at a better life. With her school friends she is a typical 16-year-old Norwegian girl living in Oslo. At home family life remains rooted in the Pakistani culture of her parents. When her father catches a boy in her bedroom, he assumes they had se

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Feb 21, 2018
5 min

PIFF 2018: Take 3

41st Portland International Film Festival (February 15 – March 1, 2018) Ice Mother (Czech Republic/France/Slovakia, 2017) dir. Bohdan Sláma (106 mins) Trailer Ah, where am I? Which one is this? I may be reaching saturation. Hana is a widow, age sixty-seven, living alone. Her two sons are pieces of work. I believe that would be the technical term. One is brought to the edge of financial ruin by his compulsive investment in rare books that he hopes to sell at a huge profit so

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Feb 19, 2018
7 min

PIFF 2018: Take 2

41st Portland International Film Festival (February 15 – March 1, 2018) La Villa (The House by the Sea) (France, 2017) dir. Robert Guediguian (107 mins) Trailer Three siblings are brought together by their elderly father's illness. Their childhood home is in a lovely setting on the coast near Marseille, a house by the sea in what had been a small, vibrant community when they were young. Now only their father and an elderly couple remain of the original residents. The others

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Feb 17, 2018
5 min

PIFF 2018: Take 1

41st Portland International Film Festival (February 15 – March 1, 2018) The Death of Stalin (United Kingdom, 2017) dir. Armando Iannucci (106 mins) Trailer The opening night film came with some buzz what with the director being the creator of Veep. Alas, 'twas a letdown. My thought as I watched was that this comes straight from the Mel Brooks hammer-you-on-the-head school of comedy. The next day two PIFF-goers characterized it as British humor. Be that as it may, I can enjo

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Jan 26, 2018
3 min

The Shape of Water, a minority report

The Shape of Water dir. Guillermo del Toro (123 mins) Trailer Living Room® Theaters "partly a code-scrambled fairy tale, partly a genetically modified monster movie, and altogether wonderful" (A.O. Scott, Review: 'The Shape of Water' Is Altogether Wonderful, The New York Times, November 30, 2017) "a marvelous film"; "...perfectly calibrated. Its humor, its heart, and its horror all work in beautiful concert." (Richard Lawson, The Shape of Water: A Strange and Soaring Monste

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Nov 22, 2017
3 min

Lucky, a film with Harry Dean Stanton

Lucky dir. John Carroll Lynch (88 mins) Trailer Academy Theater No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad. — Roger Ebert In the end, you end up accepting everything in your life – suffering, horror, love, loss, hate – all of it. It’s all a movie anyway. — Harry Dean Stanton (quoted in Andrew Pulver, Harry Dean Stanton, cult American actor, dies aged 91, The Guardian, September 26, 2017) Harry Dean Stanton is L

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Nov 11, 2017
4 min

The Big Sick: sometimes a film just draws you in...

The Big Sick dir. Michael Showalter (120 mins) Trailer Academy Theater The Big Sick is a sweet romantic comedy based on the true story of script co-authors Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon. Kumail (Nanjiani) is a standup comic honing his craft and searching for an audience on the Chicago open mic scene while moonlighting as an Uber driver, Emily (Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of director Elia Kazan) a grad student studying psychology. They enjoy what each anticipates will be

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Oct 13, 2017
4 min

Atomic Blonde, a movie

Atomic Blonde dir. David Leitch (115 mins) Trailer Academy Theater Lest anyone harbor the misconception that I traffic only in highfalutin cinema... In search of diversion I took in an afternoon screening of Atomic Blonde at the historic Academy Theater in Montavilla, just the other side of Mt. Tabor from my Belmont neighborhood. The Academy is among Portland's premier neighborhood theaters, offering a selection of second-run and vintage films at $4 a ticket, $3 for seniors

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Sep 30, 2017
5 min

Columbus

Columbus dir. Kogonada (100 mins) Trailer Cinema 21 An intriguing trailer and a friend's recommendation got me to the theater for Columbus. I came without expectation, with little notion what the film is about, director unknown, actors all but unknown. And I found myself transported, almost enchanted. I love it when that happens. A Korean man and a young American woman cross paths by chance against the backdrop of a town with a remarkable story, also unknown to me, in th

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Sep 11, 2017
6 min

Flashback to the Sixties with Blow-Up

Blow-Up (1966) dir. Michelangelo Antonioni (111 mins) Trailer NW Film Center/Whitsell Auditorium Michelangelo Antonioni borrowed the idea of a crime discovered by making a photographic enlargement from a short story by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, who according to IMBd makes an uncredited appearance in Blow-Up as a homeless man. The film's cast includes an array of hip and happening actors of the era: David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, Jane Birkin, and

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Aug 29, 2017
3 min

The Midwife

The Midwife dir. Martin Provost (120 mins) Trailer Living Room Theaters A synopsis of The Midwife reads like the standard stuff of melodrama. Claire (Catherine Frot) is an accomplished 49-year-old sage-femme (midwife) at a small clinic slated to close because it is not profitable. A succession of scenes where Claire helps deliver babies in a variety of circumstances show her to be a woman of compassion and skill, cool under fire, the sort of person a mother would want in

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Apr 15, 2017
3 min

Frantz, a film by François Ozon; & a note about Hidden Figures

Of late, and by that I have in mind a dismaying stretch of six months or more, I have seen few films apart from February's Portland International Film Festival. There are periods when little that is on tap piques my interest. Other times I dither and fail to catch a film I intended to see at some point. Elle with Isabelle Huppert is prominent among the latter. Things to Come, Huppert's other recent film, is a favorite. Moonlight and Fences are fine films, deserving of the acc

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