Every Story Contains the World.
I have many alarming and unsettling thoughts swimming in my head on a regular basis, akin to a piranha eating away at my identity, sanity, and psychological safety. I’d like to think these are common: the unforeseen malignant brain tumor developing in my head, and the inherent paranoia of some ominous, all-seeing ‘big eye’/’power that be’ pulling the strings of …
Continue reading “Enjoyable Eclectic Collection at Northwest Filmmakers Festival”
The more one lives life, the more they realize that it is not an experience that can very easily be tied up in a pretty bow. Things get dark, weird, confusing, and very rarely offer the privilege of a pretty conclusion; that however, does not mean our documentaries can’t be like that! Crescendo! The Power …
Balikbayan #1 Memories of Overdevelopment Redux III screens on Friday, May 1st at 7 PM at the Whitsell Auditorium. Stories told through a logic of unrestrained chaos are often maddening and seemingly unnecessary experiences. Nothing alienates an audience further than the feeling that an artist is splashing paint on a wall; allowing “the powers that be,” …
Continue reading “A Cross-Media, Cross-Cultural, Free-form Cinema Extravaganza”
I knew there was going to be trouble within the first 10 minutes of Koinonia, an independent film directed by Andrew Finnigan and premiering at the Northwest Film Center March 19th. Koinonia begins well with delicate and ethereal imagery of lush, green forests, serene river streams, and abstract imagery of a bearded man and a …
No matter the context, the first feature from any director is always interesting. Sometimes their debut manages to be one of their best. Richard Linklater’s Slacker comes to mind as a feature that is one of his most powerful; it is simple, emotionally profound and adventurous in its execution. There is also the debut that falls short of …
Continue reading “Güeros: Artfully Imperfect Depiction of Youth”
I once owned a VHS copy of Fantastic Planet that had been abandoned in the basement of an old Portland home, cluttered with signs of musician life. There is something very appealing about this film to musicians, myself included. We tend to seek unique visual experience in line with our musical pallet as well as …
Wes Anderson is not predictable but he is consistent. You can identify any film of his if you have seen at least Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums. But that is not a flaw, it is vision, it is clarity by voice. The voice is young and you can hear it cracking in his mid-career films. Not …
Mamele & Cupcakes at the 22nd Portland Jewish Film Festival Two films and seventy-five years can make for two experiences a world apart from each other. I watched two films back to back at Whitsell Auditorium on Sunday as part of the 22nd Portland Jewish Film Festival presented by NWFC and the Institute for Judaic …
As a kind of soft opening to the Improvisation Summit of Portland in 2014, Creative Music Guild partnered with Northwest Film Center to screen a film called, The Reach of Resonance. Although not many ideas are particularly new and few techniques presented there are truly groundbreaking in contemporary art, I found extraordinary value to it. …
Continue reading “The Reach of Resonance Grabs the Highest Fruit”
