Northwest Film Forum's 10-day, 30-film retrospective celebrates some of the organization's biggest exhibition coups over the past decade—and shares some of the organization's pervasive programming woes. Eclectic to the point of eccentricity, the festival is designed to please the programmers, not the public. The schedule looks like it was decided by throwing darts at a calendar, but as long as you know what you're looking for, the next two weeks are a great opportunity to catch up on major films you might have missed the first time they came along. And you can take comfort in the fact that the random shit only screens once.
This weekend, NWFF is showing Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (Saturday at 7 pm), a film that remains just as stylish and thrillingly amoral as the day it premiered, even as its famous jump cuts have become increasingly commonplace. Plus it's playing with the cool, blue Measure, 33 Fainting Spells' most exciting dance film to date. And I haven't seen it yet, but the story behind Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation (Saturday at 9 and 11 pm) is irresistible. In the early 1980s, a bunch of kids from Gulfport, Mississippi, set out to recreate the Indiana Jones movie shot for careful shot. Director Eric Zola, now all grown up, will be at both screenings to talk about his labor of amour fou. Finally, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's period brothel drama Flowers of Shanghai (Sunday at 7 pm), is a touchstone in any discussion of modern Asian cinema. It's long and slow (some might say suffocating and tedious), but it's also a candlelit masterpiece, with something gorgeous to capture your gaze in every frame.
Next week, the mise-en-scène lesson continues with a screening of Douglas Sirk's 1956 melodrama Written on the Wind (Fri Sept 30 at 7 pm). If you were one of the dopes who pretended to enjoy Todd Haynes's fetishistic Far from Heaven, it's time to learn from the real king of the weepies. Sadly, you have to choose between Sirk and Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, whose fascinating, bizarre Close-Up plays NWFF's other cinema in the same time slot. The current vogue for staged reality has nothing on this whack experiment in reenactment as high art, in which Kiarostami convinced the victims and perpetrator of an actual movie-related identity hoax to restage the crime—with some emotional twists. Other movies worth a look include Olivier Assayas's retro coming-of-age movie Cold Water (Fri Sept 30 at 9:15 pm), Agnes Varda's digital self-portrait, The Gleaners and I (Sat Oct 1 at 7 pm), and First Look Shorts, with great movies by Miranda July, Guy Maddin, and Mike Mills (Sun Oct 2 at 6 pm). Everyone should also see Cremaster 2 (Sat Oct 1 at 6 pm), not because it's good, but because Matthew Barney's a hack, and I want to prove it.
