CulturePulp.

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Shutter Island,' 'Waking Sleeping Beauty' and my boxes of twentysomething failure

During the Friday, Feb. 19 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we talked about "Shutter Island" and the surprisingly dishy Disney-animation documentary "Waking Sleeping Beauty."

Also: I have "a slight case of the grumpies after a week's worth of pawing through cardboard containers of wadded-up dreams. Tales of stalled-out sitcoms are told.... How Seth McFarlane just became the left's Karl Rove; the last straw with 'Twilight' fans, and how Kid Rock is personally responsible for the decline of Detroit, Michigan."

All this plus an ancient unicorn burial ground and my stepdaughter's fantasy playlist of heavy-metal covers of Disney songs.

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Feb. 19, 2010)

PIFF Week 2: 'Waking Sleeping Beauty'

The Oregonian's coverage of The Portland International Film Festival continues. Here's this week's contribution from yours truly; click here to read the film team's complete Week 2 roundup.

"Waking Sleeping Beauty"

Given that it's financed and distributed by Disney, this behind-the-scenes look at Disney's "animation renaissance" of 1984-94 is something of a pleasant surprise -- because it's a fairly warts-and-all portrait of the creative and ego clashes that gave rise to "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin" and "The Lion King."

Director (and "Lion King" producer) Don Hahn uses a combination of home movies, news reports, interviews, half-finished production footage and even mean caricatures drawn by angry animators to recount the massive upheaval that started in 1984 -- when Roy Disney, Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, Jeffrey Katzenberg and others began the traumatic process of upending Disney's creaky animation division to turn it back into a hugely profitable hit machine.

It's a fast-moving, funny and occasionally sad look at the overworked intersection of the boardroom and drawing table; the behind-the-scenes footage alone makes this a must-see for animation nuts.

B; United States; 86 min. Playing at:

• 1:30 p.m. Saturday (Feb. 20), Broadway;
• 9:30 p.m. Monday (Feb. 22), Broadway

PIFF coverage: Week 2 (The Oregonian, Feb. 19, 2010)

CORT AND FATBOY: 'The Wolfman' and BAM Fest, with special guest Aaron Mesh

During the Friday, Feb. 12 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, Willamette Week film critic Aaron Mesh joined us as we discussed "The Wolfman" and Mesh's really quite awesome Beer And Movie Fest (Feb. 10-26).

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Feb. 12, 2010)

'The Mr. Do & Mr. Don't Valentine's Day Romance Guide.'

Service journalism at its finest! In their latest comic-strip appearance, beloved instructional characters Mr. Do and Mr. Don't teach Portlanders how to delight their sweethearts on Valentine's Day. Sort of.

(Bill Mudron and I believe this comic may contain the most repulsive Mr. Don't drawing thus far. Guess which one. Hint: It's available in the strip's endnotes as a desktop wallpaper.)

The Mr. Do & Mr. Don't Valentine's Day Romance Guide (Webcomics Nation)

Complete CulturePulp comics archives at WCN

PIFF Week 1: 'Protector,' 'Home' and 'The Good, The Bad, The Weird'

The Oregonian's coverage of The Portland International Film Festival kicked off today (Feb. 12). Here are the contributions from yours truly; click here to read the film team's complete Week 1 roundup.

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"The Good, The Bad, The Weird"

This barmy-cool "Eastern Western" pits a cowboy, a murderer, a train-robbing goofball and various armies and bandit hordes against each other while chasing a treasure map across 1930s Manchuria.

The movie's a funny, fast-moving pastiche of Spielberg, Woo, Leone and George Miller, but it's a must-see for its three big action set pieces -- which go on for a million years each and become almost hallucinatory. Did you really just watch a cowboy endlessly swing 100 feet above an open-air market on a rope, picking off bandits with a rifle? Did you really just watch 50 guys on trucks and horses blast each other to bits while chasing one guy on a motorcycle?

You did.

And it was awesome.

B-plus; South Korea; 130 min. Playing at:

• 9 p.m. Saturday (Feb. 13), Broadway;
• 4 p.m. Monday (Feb. 15), Whitsell;
• 9:15 p.m. Wednesday (Feb. 17), Broadway

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"Protector"

This ruthless, great-looking Czech World War II drama charts betrayals both national and marital.

After the Nazis roll into Prague, a radio personality (Marek Daniel) is forced to spew German propaganda to protect his Jewish wife (Jana Plodková). Meanwhile, the wife -- bored to tears after her movie-star career is cut short by anti-Semitic edict -- sneaks out of their apartment to flirt with a dashing, drug-abusing projectionist and engages in minor acts of artistic rebellion.

Director/co-writer Marek Najbrt does a beautiful, careful and relentless job tallying the increasing compromises and acts of unfaithfulness by all parties -- painting marriages, careers and nation-states into horrible corners.

B-plus; Czech Republic; 98 min. Playing at:

• 12:45 p.m. Sunday (Feb. 14), Broadway;
• 2 p.m. Monday (Feb. 15), Broadway;
• 7:45 p.m. Monday (Feb. 15), Broadway

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"Home"

Director/co-writer Ursula Meier crafts a compelling (if not particularly subtle) micro-study of the effects of modern life on the family.

A husband (Olivier Gourmet), wife (Isabelle Huppert) and three kids enjoy a quiet, cuddly existence in a house by an empty, long-unfinished highway, which they use as their epic front yard. Then the government finishes that highway -- and within days, the intrusion of pollution, noise and gawking humanity inflicts every urban stress on the family at once, driving them wall-up-the-windows crazy.

"Home" is carried by strong performances that (mostly) make you sympathize with people completely unprepared for the inevitable, and Meier's clever frame compositions really make you feel the vehicular intrusion.

B-minus; Switzerland; 95 min. Playing at:

• 8:30 p.m. Saturday (Feb. 13), Broadway;
• 3:15 p.m. Sunday (Feb. 14), Broadway;
• 8 p.m. Monday (Feb. 15), Broadway

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PIFF Week 1 coverage (The Oregonian, Feb. 12, 2010)

HAM-FISTED RADIO: 'Oscar Talk and Writing Advice'

The intrepid Dawn Taylor asked D.K. Holm and I to appear on her "Ham-Fisted Radio" podcast -- and we ended up talking with her and Fatboy Roberts for damn near two hours. I'm just going to cabbage Dawn's description of this episode right off her site:

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On this epic, feature-length episode, Dawn Taylor and Fatboy Roberts are joined by film critic/comic artist Mike Russell and author/critic/debonair gent D.K. Holm. Among the vast, mostly cinema-related topics covered:

• The new John Travolta action flick, From Paris With Love;
• The number of British and Australian actors working in U.S. television, and the difficulties of acting while doing an accent;
• The sadness of Harrison Ford's career;
• A special "Ask the Experts" segment with listener questions;
• Much film-geek wonkery about Apocalypse Now's aspect ratio;
• Restored "director's cuts" that we'd love to see;
• Our long-winded advice on starting an writing career;
•  ... and oodles of Oscar talk.

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Ham-Fisted Radio, Episode 012: Oscar Talk and Writing Advice with Mike Russell and DK Holm (HamFistedRadio.com)

CORT AND FATBOY: 'From Paris with Love' and PDX film-fest madness

Discussed during the Friday, Feb. 5 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast:

• "From Paris with Love," quite possibly the most inaccurately titled action film of all time.
  
  
• Portland's ridiculously cinema-rich February -- which includes both the Portland International Film Festival and the Beer & Movie Fest. (Special love is given to the must-see Korean action Western "The Good, The Bad, The Weird.")
  
  
• And also: "a series of rants from Fatboy's angry, hyper-caffeinated ass; DC's strange hintings at sequelizing 'Watchmen,' Nickelodeon jumping in bed with Jessica Simpson's dad; the rules regarding spoiler warnings; why Colin Hay will probably be busing tables soon; the REAL next Spider-Man (maybe); musings on 'Road House'" and Byron Beck's Thursday antics, among other things.

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Feb. 5, 2010)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'North Face'

From the Friday, Feb. 5 Oregonian....

"North Face" is a spectacular, suspenseful bummer. This old-fashioned mountaineering epic recreates (with more than a little dramatic license) the July 1936 attempt by German climbers Toni Kurz and Andreas Hinterstoisser to conquer the Eiger North Face in the Alps.

The then-unconquered North Face was nicknamed the "Death Wall" with good reason. It forces the climbers into survival mode. The German newspaper editor watching the ascent -- who was ready to christen Kurz and Hinterstoisser as the Reich's new heroes -- licks his lips to report a tragedy. And co-writer/director Phillip Stölzl makes the melodramatic choice to follow two rescue attempts: one to save the climbers and one to save the soul of the (fictional) novice photographer (Johanna Wokalek) forced to choose between helping her childhood friend Kurz or advancing her media career.

That melodrama is no doubt a deliberate throwback to some of the German "mountain films" of the '20s and '30s, as is the over-the-top lush musical score by Christian Kolonovits. (Here's a nice little essay on the Bergfilm genre, from the Fall 2007 issue of Cabinet magazine.) Kurz and Hinterstoisser (played by Benno Fürmann and Florian Lukas) care little for German propaganda, but they're frankly sort of blandly heroic and blameless anyway -- and contrasting their suffering on the Eiger with shots of the rich dining on an Eiger-shaped cake in the luxury hotel below isn't exactly trenchant as social criticism.

But the movie's still quite affecting -- in part because of its simple old-school earnestness, but mostly because Stölzl does white-knuckle work behind the camera (much of it on location) to make you feel the height, pain and awe of the grueling ascent and the bottomless terror and exhaustion after everything goes horribly, horribly wrong.
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(126 min., unrated, playing in Portland at Cinema 21) Grade: B-minus

'North Face' (The Oregonian, Friday, Feb. 5, 2010)