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Who Runs Movie Town?
Oh movie pals. This might be a good week to skip the listing after the top picks. We are mostly getting 14-year-old boy movies from the theaters. It might be a good week to pick up a book, talk to loved ones, or get reacquainted with TV.
Pick of the Week:
Femmes Femmes (1974). Directed by Paul Vecchiali. Starring Hélène Surgère, Sonia Saviange, Huguette Forge.
Playing at the Clinton on May 27th from Church of Film. Serge Bozon called this “the best film of the best decade of French cinema.” “Two aging actresses share an apartment in Paris, and a life. Retreating into champagne and fantasies, using the trade of theatre to dress a slowly unraveling existence, they try on feminine roles, and revisit the ones that have failed them.”
This has played pretty often in New York City and, presumably, France. Excited to not have to go to Lincoln Center to catch this. It’s so far and you have to transfer twice.
Check out Church of Film for non Clinton Street Theater films.
Also Playing:
A Woman Under the Influence (1974). Directed by John Cassavetes. Starring Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk.
Opening for a run at the Academy and playing mostly during the traditional work day. This is a great movie. It is very hard to watch, and no one plays a woman falling apart like Gena Rowlands. A good reminder of how menacing Peter Falk can be. Harder to watch if you have experienced mental illness in a family member or watched someone trapped in an abusive relationship. Would be a good Bleak Week movie but it’s not graphic enough for the Hollywood I guess.
This Week:
At 5th Ave: Homework and To Be and to Have play this weekend. Homework is an Iranian documentary by Abbas Kiarostami about school and, uh, homework. It’s very famous. To Be and To Have is a French documentary by Nicolas Philibert about a school year in a France and won a bunch of awards in 2003. Glad that documentaries are getting a push this week.
At the Academy:
Perfect Blue opens for a run. Outside of the Studio Ghibli movies, this is one of the anime films mandated to play in Portland every couple of weeks. If we don’t play it we lose valuable tax incentives.
The Hired Hand opens for a run. Peter Fonda wrote and directed this western that at least doesn’t play all the time.
Boathouse Cinema: Mon, Jun 8 – Jesse Malmed. I would imagine that more details are coming soon.
At Cinema 21:
Them! plays on May 23rd. This is the famous nuclear terror giant ant movie from the 50s. If you know any giant ants please send them to the city to start eating us.
At Cinemagic:
All of the Mad Max movies are playing this week. A couple of things:
These movies play all the time and I do not understand how there is demand to watch these so much. They aren’t bad movies but Mel Gibson is a piece of shit and they are boring if you have seen them more than twice. Tina Turner is the highlight of the third one but she’s not in the whole movie! You have that whole boring plot with the kids.
They are also playing Wheels of Fire, which is an American-Philippines Roger Corman Mad Max rip off production. Can you please throw us all a bone here? It would be a slam dunk to throw us an Agnes Varda movie or something. Just, like anything?
Memorial Valley Massacre plays. I guess it’s great that there was a loving restoration of what sounds like a dumb horror movie focused on Memorial Day. I will be getting my teeth drilled instead. Yes, I’m forcing my dentist to work on the holiday. I don’t know why he listens to me.
At the Clinton:
The Portland EcoFilm Festival returns with a program of new Indigenous films on May 26th. “A showcase of films from this year’s Indigenous Voices series, which centers the wisdom, accomplishments, stories, and struggles of Indigenous people around the living world.”
The Nyback Showdown returns on May 28th. “IT’S SURREALIST MAY AND THE NYBACK SHOWDOWN IS THROWING DOWN SOME OF THE WEIRDEST 16MM SHORTS IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE TO CELEBRATE!
Whether it be Eastern Bloc animations about non-conformity or live-action fever dreams involving furniture, the NYBACK ARCHIVE team will be slinging all things surreal and bizarre in a knock-down, dragout festival of the obscure, obtuse and oblong!” I hope they play Worker and Parasite.
At Detour Cinema: at Word Virus on May 23rd, Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
“Sultry and surreal, macabre and hopelessly romantic, Ava Gardner and James Mason star in this grown-up fairy tale as lovers alternately casting or in the clutches of a powerful spell. She’s an otherworldly beauty driving men to distraction (or worse), he’s a 17th-century sea captain doomed to sail the seas for eternity — unless he can find a woman willing to sacrifice her life for love. Set in the fictional Spanish seaside town of Esperanza and boasting a luscious palette photographed by master Technicolor cameraman Jack Cardiff (Black Narcissus), Pandora unfurls with dreamlike logic somewhere between the physical and the metaphysical, sometime between modernity and antiquity.”
Film School: Bonnie and Clyde plays on May 26th! See, this is a great example of a classic film that I don’t remember well because I watched it once on a laptop and it never plays in town.
From Below: They have been doing some great programming of late. Check out their Instagram to see if there is anything going on this week.
At the Hollywood (It Was Just an Accident is sold out. By far the best movie they are playing this week):
Treasure of the Sierra Madre opens for a run. This is a classic baby boomer dad movie. Please, stop saying “We don’t need no stinking badges” in a questionable accent.
Terminator 2 Judgement Day opens for a run. I wish judgement day would come and take me away.
Taxi Driver opens for a run. This is the bone they are throwing us this week?! Again, not a bad movie but please take a look at your programming. Like give us one arthouse alternative that isn’t played all the time. Something that is not a dude movie.
Aliens opens for a run. Technically there are at least two (or three? I can’t remember) women in this. Again, this plays all the time. Like you couldn’t at least program a dumb romcom to counter balance the action of it all? No rep films directed by women this week here.
Antichrist plays on May 25th. I do not understand why people like Lars so much. I remember watching The Idiots in my 20s and thinking, “this is the guy you all like?!” Melancholia plays at the Academy later this month, and probably a Lars fest at Cinemagic soon. Every movie I have seen of his has left me feeling empty—like there is nothing going on in them. Is that the point? He feels like one of those directors who is just trying to shock you scene after scene. Is there more to this guy? Are the shocks the point?
“Be as experimental as possible.” Some boldness for next week—The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, Stop Making Sense, Terrorvision, The Fisher King, Repoman, The Cyprus Tigers (a B-movie for B-movie BINGO), Cruel Jaws (a 1995 Jaws knock off) and The Portland Horror Film Festival. Right now, we could replace the Hollywood’s rep programming with a Red Box and no one would notice.
At Joy: Weird Wednesday—It returned on May 20th. Will it return for whatever day Wednesday is?
At the Kiggins:
Speed opens for a run. I mean, whatever. Grateful this doesn’t play every other week at least so I don’t have to write jokes about Speed?
2026 NW Undestory Film Festival plays on May 28th. “The Understory NW Film Fest is an annual event hosted by Cascade Forest Conservancy (a Vancouver-based environmental non-profit) that highlights conservation filmmakers in our region and beyond while celebrating our connections to the natural world.”
NW Doc: has started a new screening series. Check out their Instagram for updates but I think they are every Thursday at 7? NO ONE in town has a regular documentary series.
Outer Space Micro Cinema: Check out their Instagram for what’s next!
Spectrum Between: Check out their Instagram for what’s next. These are experimental films that don’t play much outside of places like Anthology Film Archives or good museums, which sadly we don’t have.
Word Virus Books: I don’t see any films now, but that often changes.
At the Tomorrow Theater (the Hub for Cultural Snackers)—please bug them if you haven’t. Keep bugging them if you have.
Mubi, who has recently come under fire for taking Sequoia Capital investment money, has been partnering with the Tomorrow Theater and they are doing another screening in October. Sequoia has ties to the Israeli army. Mubi has released a bunch of mealy mouthed statements. Filmmakers are urging Mubi to cut ties. If the Los Angeles Festival of Movies can cut ties with Mubi so can PAM. You can contact the Tomorrow Theater here through this link and let them know that they should’t partner with organizations like this.
Again, if the Tomorrow Theater working with a company that has direct ties to the Israeli military bothers you please let them know.
Please do not let the bastards win. Let them know you care about genocide.
We’re not talking chump change for the Sequoia investment: $100 million.
There was a good article about Mubi in Vulture recently behind their paywall.
All Us Strangers (2023). Directed by Andrew Haigh. Starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell.
I don’t cry easily but this movie made me cry twice. Andrew Scott is a lonely middle-aged man living alone in a seemingly empty apartment building in London, and he hooks up with Paul Mescal. Scott’s character also takes a train and travels back in time to talk to his parents, who died when he was a teenager, about the kind of adult he turned into.
I am an easy mark when it comes to stories about loneliness. Scott is so fucking good in this movie. He carries and elevates it. Mescal comes to him drunk and adrift, the only other person in this apartment. Scott rejects him and they have a relationship (sort of?). The two moments that made me cry: when Scott’s father apologizes to him and when Scott says, “I found you.”
From the director: “I wanted to pick away at my own past as Adam does in the film. I was interested in exploring the complexities of both familial and romantic love, but also the distinct experience of a specific generation of gay people growing up in the 80s. I wanted to move away from the traditional ghost story of the novel and find something more psychological, almost metaphysical.”
Streaming and rentable in the usual places.
The tip jar is open if you would like to support this thing. Bleak Week is coming and the rep programming in town from the Academy, Cinemagic, and the Hollywood is getting more conservative in terms of what they show. If not for the Clinton, 5th Ave, and various micro cinemas and alternative venues Portland would be cooked as they say. Is this a sign I need a break from this? I complain because we can be better!