Screen Listings

Baghead

Four film-industry washouts sequester themselves in a remote cabin to write a scary movie. Between heavy drinking and light relationship drama, however, they never quite get further than an initial concept: a serial killer with a paper grocery bag over his head. (It’s a costume that suggests the psychopath is a fan of a winless football team.) And just as their collaboration is imploding, one of them goes missing…and someone else arrives in familiar headdress. Mumblecore vets Mark and Jay Duplass’ follow-up to The Puffy Chair—which sold more tickets in Portland than in any other city—is likely to prove just as pleasing, since it features the same finely observed narcissists, and adds a clever genre twist. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s mumblehorror! And while it’s burdened with one too many twists, Baghead features four excellent performances (including another charming turn by Greta Gerwig, the fearlessly topless queen of the mumblers) and a mood of desperation that has as much to do with shrinking career prospects as it does with stalking and stabbing. This is what The Blair Witch Project must have been like when the cameras were off—or at least I’d like to think so. R. AARON MESH.

The Gits

[FIVE DAYS ONLY] In 1993, Mia Zapata was a singer with a voice like honey-covered nails, fronting a punk band on the verge of stardom and serving as de facto den mother to the Seattle music scene. Then, for no reason, she was dead: raped and murdered walking home from an evening with friends at a local bar. Her killing became a cold case, and the inspiration for Home Alive, a women’s self-defense training organization. Ten years after the crime, just as DNA evidence led to a breakthrough in the case, director Kerri O’Kane began to chronicle the reverberations of Zapata’s band, the Gits, on Seattle, girl power and grunge. The movie, which reached its completed version last year, focuses more on Zapata’s life—and that bluesy voice—than on her death. That’s exactly as it should be, though the project is hamstrung somewhat by a lack of recorded concerts, and by the reluctance of Gits members to disclose private feelings onscreen. Guitarist Andrew Kessler (whose stage name is Joe Spleen, and who wrote most of the band’s arrangements before Zapata penciled in lyrics) is especially reticent. And good for him, too—it’s rare to see a documentary where the crucial figure isn’t some emotional exhibitionist. But The Gits has a hard time balancing the dignity of Zapata’s survivors with the rawness of her music and the absurdity of her death. It’s still worth a look. AARON MESH. Clinton Street Theater. Sunday-Thursday, July 27-31.

Global Lens

[FOUR NIGHTS ONLY] The NW Film center journeys to the ends of the earth: These are the last four films in its international exhibition. Let the Wind Blow (2004) updates the Bhagavad Gita for India’s nuclear age; (2006) travels with South Africa’s stand-up comedians; The Bet Collector (2006) follows a delicate bookie in Manila; and in All for Free (2006), a Bosnian man mourns the loss of his friends by giving away drinks. Cheers! Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum. Let the Wind Blow screens at 7 pm Wednesday, July 2 and 6:30 pm Sunday, July 6. Bunny Chow screens at 6:45 pm Thursday, July 3 and 9 pm Saturday, July 5. The Bet Collector screens at 8:45 pm Thursday, July 3. All for Free screens at 7 pm Saturday, July 5 and 8:30 pm Sunday, July 6. Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum. Wednesday-Sunday, July 2-6.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

A documentary directed by Alex Gibney (who just won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side), dutifully covers the swath of the mad doctor’s writing, but it is chiefly interested in Hunter S. Thompson the political animal—the man who dogged Nixon through New Hampshire and found his own reflection. It was part of the American genius for polarization that Thompson saw Nixon as his doppelgänger, his mirror. Nixon was his dark shadow. Or maybe it was the other way around. So it makes perfect sense that when Gonzo recounts Thompson’s last serious journalistic assignment—sent to cover the 1974 Ali-Frazier “Rumble in the Jungle” fight, he swallowed a cabinet of pills and wandered off to float in the hotel pool—Gibney re-creates the scene with washed-out footage of azure water and a man in a Nixon mask. The image is inspired on a number of levels, since this was the moment when a genuinely gifted writer decisively sacrificed his talent on the altar of indulgence, and when he slipped on a mask of celebrity that he would never remove. The rest of the movie, while amusing and honest, doesn’t often approach that level of perception. There are plenty of guest appearances by old cronies, few of whom can stir themselves enough to say an unkind word about the man who squandered his last two decades shooting rifles on his ranch until he finally turned a .45 on himself in 2005. R. AARON MESH. No showtimes.

Hancock

Will Smith is John Hancock, a surly Los Angeles superstar with a preternatural vertical leap and open contempt for his teammates, forced to disgustedly mumble his way through image-repairing press conferences after he’s sent to prison. Aside from a strong anal fixation (one jailhouse scene features an inmate’s head literally shoved into another’s rectum, and the film’s chief running gag is that its hero grows extremely peeved whenever he’s called an “asshole”), director Peter Berg’s movie is a disorienting fizz of ideas that never cohere. Its chief conceit—the superhero as a celebrity in dire need of rehab—is established by shots of the crapulous Hancock waking up next to empty whiskey bottles, either on bus-stop benches or in his dreary trailer, with Berg’s distinctive cinematography giving each shot the haze of a hangover. But Berg’s style, an agitated handheld fervor honed in Friday Night Lights, is exactly wrong for this material, which I think is supposed to be a satire. It’s hard to say for certain, since there are no funny jokes. In their place, Berg twirls his camera in paroxysms of emotion. By the time the villains return, still miffed about the head-stuffed-in-bum incident, we’re meant to cry whenever the screen starts to spin. But cry for whom? The gifted Übermensch whose fans just don’t understand him? PG-13. AARON MESH. Avalon Theatre, Bagdad Theater and Pub, Milwaukie Cinema, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

Planet of the Apes

Charlton Heston would probably like to be remembered for championing gun rights. Still, one immortal phrase rings louder than any NRA battle cry: “Take yer stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” Planet of the Apes’ reverse-Darwinist vision of a world ruled by monkeys (a world of human-slave babes in fur bikinis, to boot) became an instant classic in 1968. It resulted in four sequels, the lowest notch on Tim Burton’s belt, and one of the greatest Simpsons parodies (“C’mon and rock me, Dr. Zaius”). Along with phenomenal makeup effects, the film’s trick ending set the watermark for cinematic “gotchas,” and even haters can’t deny that Heston’s charisma rises above his god-awful overacting. Hell, he even makes out with a monkey and prances in a loincloth—it doesn’t get manlier than that. The rifle was finally pried from Chuck’s cold, dead hands, but a brand-new print of Planet of the Apes on the big screen is reason for anybody, armed or otherwise, to rally for Heston. G. AP KRYZA.

Superman

[REVIVAL] With all the superheroes fighting and brooding in multiplexes, it makes you long for a mentally stable hero—and one who rocks package-enhancing tights. Superman is the O.G. pulp hero, and while he has his share of troubles—abandonment issues, nerdiness, and the world’s worst disguise among them—Superman’s just happy to help people. Now’s the perfect time to revisit Richard Donner’s original 1978 Superman, the first true comic-book blockbuster. Sure, it’s a little dated (and its time-twisting fly-around-the-world ending is bullshit), but Donner still makes Bryan Singer’s amped-up Superman Returns look like child’s play. Watch it for Christopher Reeve’s charm, to see Marlon Brando as an Oompa Loompa, to behold the scene-chewing chops of Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, for the Man of Steel’s sexy night flight with Lois Lane (pre-crazy Margot Kidder), or for John Williams’ score. Or watch it as a reminder that just because a dude’s virtually infallible doesn’t mean he’s a Freudian Rubik’s cube. AP KRYZA. Living Room Theaters.