THE 34th PORTLAND INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, DAY 16

"cold weather," united states, dir. aaron katz

katz is from portland, but he doesn't live here anymore. he did, however, set and shoot "cold weather" here, so i wasn't expecting much of the film beyond a slightly differently styled fedora tip to the everyone's favorite megalopolitan phenom. i'm not sure whence the title, although the director of the film center used it to make a superlatively lame joke about people being so excited to see "cold weather" that they braved the twenty degree weather to come to the screening, which took place at cinema 21, the architectural embodiment of indie movie culture in portland. maybe, though, katz called his film what he did because his main character, a man named doug who has recently moved back to portland from chicago to live with his sister, has almost all of a degree in forensic science but can only get a job working the night shift at an ice factory on swan island (just like the job i had in the freezer room of the fresh cut flower factory! -- until i got hit by a car two days after starting). and that's a shot (two shots!) of the hill at fremont and mississippi just two blocks from my apartment! and dougie even has my same nokia dinosaur phone!!! i'll admit that for the first half of the film i appreciated nothing more than being able to add to the list of places i recognized -- which i suspect is a sentiment i shared with most of the other people in the audience. but i'll also admit that for all my cynicism i couldn't discount katz's solid and clever writing, especially after "cold weather" transitioned from rose city slice of life to detective fantasies of the underemployed. (doug's ex-girlfriend is in town and the gang gets involved in the mystery of her disappearance.) unfortunately, doug's performance by cris lankenau was just a little too on purpose, and distracting as a result. "cold weather" has been critically received elsewhere as the next step in the mumblecore movement, but lankenau seemed to be the only actor with that genre actively in mind as he made his character. (i doubt that katz ever directed any of his actors not to move their hands from their sides.) even so, and ultimately, i couldn't help but love the shots of the bridges and the river and the rooftop shots of crisscrossing power lines backgrounded by the rainbow gradation of the evening sky over forest park. things like that are, in the end, why we're here, right? or why i am. katz doesn't live here anymore.

"chicogrande," mexico, dir. felipe cazals

after pancho villa invades columbus, new mexico in 1916, woodrow wilson sends 5,000 united states troops to mexico to find the revolutionary general. chicogrande is a villista soldier helping his injured general to safe hiding in the mountains. he needs a doctor, which takes him dangerously close to the camp of an american military detachment looking for villa. under pressure from the mexican military to leave mexico as quickly as possible, the americans have resorted to the humiliation and torture of the local population in their attempts to exact villa's whereabouts. the only american soldier who exhibits any remorse over his army's tactics is the military doctor responsible for keeping the tortured alive. his is also the most overblown of a cast of stilted performances. aside from their initial lines of dialogue at a new meeting, the americans always speak in english, and the mexicans in spanish, a device that successfully conveys the essentials of the racism and classism that fuel the conflict of the movie. (characters obviously gather each other's meanings even as they're speaking in different languages.) but, whether by intentional stylization or poor direction, the dialogue -- already rough and unnatural -- was delivered robotically and made it difficult to associate real emotion with the physical disgust inspired by the many scenes of atrocity in "chicogrande." what's more, the last third of the plot was confusingly disjointed, with the action sidling down too many dead end alleys before resolving completely illogically and outside any of the possibilities established by the narrative before the final two minutes. why didn't the dwarf prostitutes just kill the guy? seriously.