Valentines to Presidents

Area walked, roughly:



I saw seven films, six of which I'd originally planned on. 24 City (China) will be playing in Seattle this spring, and its replacement, Fermat's Room (Spain) was not showing, so I settled on Cape No. 7 (Taiwan), probably less good than the eighth film of the weekend, High School Musical 3 (Disneyland), shown on Amtrak Cascades enroute to Seattle.

Wolf (Sweden) was disappointing from a number of angles, including the extremely polished style and constant dramatic score, as well as the profoundly uninteresting plot. The herds of reindeer and arctic mountainsides looked nice, though. Scenery was also pretty much the only saving grace of Terra Nova, the nihilistic near-future Russian sci-fi film featuring a bizarre, and unsurprisingly uncredited, cameo by Michael Clarke Duncan. The Friend (Switzerland) was merely lackluster, not bad by any means, but less of an original twist on the suicide/grieving film than expected. As Simple As That (Iran) had some profound moments, but felt a bit too precious here and there, particularly right at the end. From some origins, this film probably would have seemed powerfully original, but as part a national cinema that's given us The White Balloon and Ten, this didn't shine too brightly.

The two really good films I saw were both Saturday evening. While waiting in the long line, I questioned the logic of attempting to see Shall We Kiss? (France) on Valentine's Day-I honestly hadn't considered the occasion-but eventually found a seat. In retrospect, it would have been worth waiting much longer to see this. Much of the plot is roughly as inevitable as Wolf, but even the twists near the end aren't all that necessary due to the buoyant comedy that sustains the whole enterprise. Light and endlessly likable. Stars the director, Emmanuel Mouret, and Virginie Ledoyen, whose only obvious English film seems to have been The Beach, directed by the astonishingly vapid Danny Boyle. Said vapidity was only recently discovered via his interview with Elvis Mitchell, on KCRW's The Treatment.

So Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain (Korea/US) was even better though, perhaps because as much as I love a delicious puffball, miserabilism is where my sympathies really lie. I had a hard time getting into her first film In Between Days, as angsty a portrait of adolescence as a Cure-inspired title might imply. While this is certainly the more beautiful film (ie not shot in New Jersey during winter), I suspect the difference lies mainly in the culpability of the protagonists. The adorable, neglected, mischievous little girls of Treeless Mountain (seven and four years old, I believe) were tragic but resilient, whereas thirteen-year-old (?) Aimie of In Between Days struck me as much more responsible for her ennui, boredom, misery, etc.

Further proof of Treeless Mountain's greatness: collecting, skewering, roasting, and selling grasshoppers is a major plot point. Also, the film ends with the girls wandering across a field on their grandparent's farm, at once abandoned and saved, like something out of Miyazaki-though live-action, of course. Even better, they're singing Grandaddy's "Nature Anthem," which I didn't quite get because it's in sung Korean and neither sounds particularly like Jason Lytle, but the lyrics seemed strangely familiar, and the credits confirmed it.

Besides the movies I managed to visit Pizza Schmizza, Rocco's (pizza), Bailey's Taproom, brewpubs by Laurelwood, Rogue, Deschutes, and Bridgeport, avoided an ungodly line at Voodoo Doughnut and instead ate Thai food from a trailer outside a tent for the Jazz festival in Pioneer Courthouse Square. I saw much of downtown, the Pearl and Alphabet districts, and even made it to Powell's, where I was overwhelmed by the appeal of their ugly-beautiful trucker hats.