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“
HORROR MOVIES OF THE YEAR”. - IGN
of fear, y d u t s “A over it.”
mph and- LtOrS iAuNGELES TIMES
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The Mercury Music Blog citadelmovie.com
HECKLEVISION: GHOST Not pictured: Academy Award winner Whoopi Glodberg.
ADDICTED TO FAME A documentary about the final film project of Anna Nicole Smith. This won’t be depressing at all! Hollywood Theatre.
ANIMATED CHRISTMAS SHORTS
Old Christmas shorts, presented in 16mm. Hollywood Theatre.
★ ANNA KARENINA Prediction: Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina is going to be the Speed Racer of literary adaptations—defended by nerds, derided by other nerds, and baffling to the public at large. It’s an audacious interpretation of Leo Tolstoy that’s overstuffed and overflowing with style. I can’t be sure that it’s a good movie—but I was so overwhelmed by its boldness that I can’t deny I kind of loved it. JAMIE S. RICH Bridgeport Village Stadium 18, Century Clackamas Town Center. ★ ARGO If you snoozed through the Iranian hostage crisis by not being born yet, a refresher: The US and some other imperialists have historically been major assholes to Iran, so in 1979, the Iranian people were like, “Actually, no!” and they rose up and stormed the US embassy, where some 60 Americans were frantically trying to shred stuff and not be murdered. Six Americans escaped through a back door. (Nice embassy-storming, amateurs!) While the world was focused on what was happening to the dozens of hostages inside the embassy, those six were stuck at the Canadian ambassador’s house—with no way to get out. Enter: Ben Affleck as a CIA hostage wrangler with an insane plan to create a fake sci-fi movie called Argo, call the six escaped hostages a film crew, and then GTFO. And you guys: This actually happened. I did a crappy job at explaining all of that, but Argo does not; Affleck’s direction delivers a brilliantly simple telling of a complicated story. Detailed without ever feeling dense, the film should satisfy nearly all classes of nerds (history! Politics! Science fiction! Movies!), as well as normals who just want to watch something entertaining. ELINOR JONES Various Theaters. ★ B-MOVIE BINGO The Hollywood’s series features B-movies, with the audience marking down clichés on a custom-made bingo card. This time around: Vin Diesel’s XXX. Hollywood Theatre.
BUOY
See review this issue. Hollywood Theatre.
★ CHASING ICE National Geographic photographer James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey took photos of glaciers as they melted over hours, days, months, and years—and captured remarkable, time-lapse images of climate change in action. Chasing Ice spends too much time on Balog and the challenges he faces in getting his footage, but the footage itself is gorgeous, majestic, and horrific. Spliced with clips of Fox News dipshits insisting global warming isn’t real, Chasing Ice will largely preach to the choir—which is too bad, because as calls to action go, this visually devastating documentary is hard to top. ERIK HENRIKSEN Hollywood Theatre.
CLOUD ATLAS
David Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas has long been considered unfilmable, and make no mistake: It still is. The new movie by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer is very much an adaptation, borrowing the basic outline of Mitchell’s book to create something entirely its own. The film juggles six characters with six distinct storylines, set in time periods ranging from the 1830s to a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Given the audacity of
its undertaking, Cloud Atlas is remarkably cohesive. Some storylines resonate more than others, but they’re all efficiently told. But for all the energy and flair this adaptation possesses, it’s so focused on pulling off the logistics of adapting Mitchell’s novel that there isn’t room for much depth. ALISON HALLETT Century Clackamas Town Center.
#whatsyourfear
OPENS HOLLYWOOD THEATRE NE SANDY BLVD. FRIDAY, 4122 PORTLAND NOV. 30 (503) 281-4215
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Portland Mercury 11/28 1x4 (1 col=2.25)
THE COLLECTION Wha? Another crappy-looking horror flick that wasn’t screened for critics? Why, I never.... Various Theaters.
FLIGHT A clumsy, preachy, feature-length infomercial for AA. ERIK HENRIKSEN Various Theaters.
★ FRESH FRENCH SHORTS Completely unsurprisingly, one of the films in the Northwest Film Center’s Fresh French Shorts program is about a man who has an existential crisis when he realizes his whole life is being captured on camera. FRENCH PEOPLE, am I right??? But this is a rewardingly diverse program that ranges in subject matter from a gritty look at a single mother in Paris desperately trying to make ends meet, to an animated short about a vampire’s coming of age. There’s even a man who thinks he’s a donkey! Because… French people. ALISON HALLETT Northwest Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium.
GETTING TO KNOW YOUTUBE Local presenters help you to “climb into YouTube’s deepest caverns of collective consciousness and unearth hidden treasures, stretching the boundaries of what tubes and you were meant for.” Okay! Hollywood Theatre.
★ GIRL MODEL Girl Model completely sneaks up on you. It at first seems like a fairly mousy documentary. It builds slowly, like the room is getting colder and colder—this is you, being drawn into the subzero, subhuman world of the movie. All at once, finally, in a single shot where a central deception is revealed, the movie rears up, bites, and is full of venom. It was a thriller. Model is not just about preteen modeling, which would be creepy enough. Instead, it’s about the indentured servitude of Siberian girls at the hands of people who are either self-congratulatory or dead inside—and who are not too ashamed to talk on camera because there’s really no single place to lay blame, anyway. JEN GRAVES Clinton Street Theater. ★ HECKLEVISION: GHOST See My, What a Busy Week!, pg. 17. Hollywood Theatre. ★ KILLING THEM SOFTLY See review this issue. Various Theaters. ★ LIFE OF PI Ang’s Lee’s overblown but nonetheless quite beautiful adaptation of Yann Martel’s 2001 novel of the same name. Like the novel, it’s a parable disguised as an adventure story; like the novel, some people will think it contains profound truths, and some will find it unbearably overwrought. Others—me!—will appreciate some of the best 3D we’ve seen to date, and enjoy the adventure despite its self-seriousness. ALISON HALLETT Various Theaters.
LINCOLN Oscar bait doesn’t get much more baiting than this: Steven Spielberg directing Daniel Day-Lewis with a Tony Kushner script about the final months of America’s most beloved, tragic president. By and large, Lincoln wanders many of the same paths Spielberg’s other Oscar bait-y films have taken—this one feels particularly like Amistad, though there’s some War Horse in here too. Lincoln
★ MEANS WE RECOMMEND IT. THEATER LOCATIONS ARE ACCURATE FRIDAY NOVEMBER 30-THURSDAY DECEMBER 6, UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED. FILM TIMES AND SHORTS ARE ALSO AVAILABLE AT PORTLANDMERCURY.COM.
November 28th, 2012 portlandmercury.com 45