Willamette Week Online | Screen Listings for the week of Wednesday February 28th thru Tuesday March 6 ... - Bob Dylan Lyrics - Bob Dylan

NEW Attack of the Wise Women!

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Local filmmaker Joanna Priestly presents a celebration of "the creativity of the older gal." Priestly herself is one of those gals, as she debuts Streetcar Named Perspire, her menopausal movie combining hot flashes and Flash animation.

The program also features The Danish Poet, this year's Academy Awards choice for Best Animated Short. Living Room Theaters. 7 pm Thursday, March 1.

$8. Who else but the French could make a film about a groupie and the pop star she's obsessed seem strange and darkly intriguing? Americans would just turn it into something idiotically tame, an insipid cousin of the current Music and Lyrics, but Backstage is all demented sex, passion and betrayal.

It's an intense look into the life of celebrity culture and the perplexing dependencies that lie between celebrities and their undying fans. Lucie (a relentless and severely convincing Isild Le Besco) is a force to be reckoned with, fighting for the attentions of her idol, chanteuse Lauren Waks (Emmanuelle Seigner, third wife of Roman Polanski). Somehow Lucie, through a stream of tangled events, becomes the star's confidante.

The very love that binds Lucie to Lauren becomes an addiction that eats away at the idol mentally, and promises the demise of the pair's ill-fated relationship. ELIANNA BAR-EL. Hollywood Theatre, Wednesday-Thursday only.

As overstated as her eccentric wardrobe, Daphne (played by a whimsically earnest Diane Keaton) is a destructive, overbearing single mother. Her latest project? Setting up her youngest daughter, Milly (a charming Mandy Moore), with a worthy suitor mdash;starting with an online personals ad, and then going further.

Director Michael Lehmann (Heathers) finds sharp moments of mother-daughter collision; more of these might have elevated the movie above its trifling rom-com status. Instead, Because I Said So merely skims the surface of familial issues, parenting methods, love and sex, opting for candy-coated girl-gets-guy territory. PG-13.

ELIANNA BAR-EL. Bridgeport. Roman Catholic tradition holds that the ninth circle of hell is reserved for traitors.

Robert Hanssen is a Catholic, and a traitor mdash;he sold state secrets from the FBI to the Russians until his arrest in 2001. Fortunately, he has director Billy Ray as his patron saint. Breach marks the second chapter in Ray's consideration of liars in high places: In Shattered Glass, he watched a journalistic fraud implode, and here he returns, gloriously, to the subject of tortured deceivers in antiseptic hallways.

As Hanssen, Chris Cooper is his own enigma code: pious, authoritarian, fond of Catherine Zeta-Jones photos and ballpoint pens, and silently obsessed with proving his intelligence. "I matter plenty," he hisses to the lackey (Ryan Philippe) assigned to bust him. He does matter, and Ray shows exactly why.

PG-13. AARON MESH. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Cinema, Eastport, Division, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Sandy, City Center.

Those damn Newbery Medal-winning books mdash;always inspiring movies that pull at your heartstrings and make you whimper like a little bitch! Well, Bridge to Terabithia is no different. Pretty true to Katherine Paterson's tale, it chronicles the adventures of two fifth-graders: Jesse (Josh Hutcherson) is an artistic loner in a family of four sisters, while Leslie (AnnaSophia Robb) is the spunky, imaginative only child of two writers.

Both outsiders, they create the imaginary kingdom of Terabithia together in the woods near their homes: a refuge where pine cones become grenades for safety, fantastic gnomes have ticklish toes and Jesse and Leslie rule the land. Boasting a uniformly well-played cast, Bridge to Terabithia moves at a pitch-perfect pace, drawing the audience into the children's friendship, their family lives and their school surroundings. Then the climax hits like a ton of bricks, turning the audience to mush and breaking this magical childhood spell of a film.

Heartbreaking, yes, but utterly worth it. PG. ELIANNA BAR-EL.

Lloyd Cinema, Eastport, Division, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, City Center. [ONE NIGHT ONLY] It's a night of trout, salmon and fly rods at this celluloid fish fry: three documentaries mdash;The Hatch, Trout Bum Diaries and Trout Grass mdash;chronicle the joys of release fishing and the threats facing our scaly friends. Clinton Street Theater.

6:30 pm Thursday, March 1. Free. [SHORT RUN] It's Women Filmmaker's Week at Portland Community College's celebration of African culture.

That means screenings of The Night of Truth, the first full-length movie made by a woman in Burkina Faso, and Sisters in Law, a documentary charting the efforts of a prosecutor and judge to convict abusive spouses in Kumba, Cameroon. Moriarty Arts and Humanities Building, Room 104, PCC Cascade Campus. The Night of Truth screens at noon Thursday and 7:30 pm Friday, March 1-2.

Sisters in Law screens at 7:30 pm Thursday, March 1. Free. For more information on Cascade Festival screenings, call 244-6111, ext.

3630. Imagine you're a 15-year-old girl in Argentina. One day you're summoned to a judge, who tells you that your parents aren't really your parents, your name isn't your real name, and then mdash;surprise!

mdash;introduces you to your real grandmother, with whom you'll be living from now on. Your birth parents were part of "the disappeared": nearly 30,000 political activists who challenged Argentina's military dictatorship in the late '70s and were consequently kidnapped and most likely killed in the government's Dirty War. This is the reality of Cristina Quadri (born Sof i a Lombardi) in Gaston Biraben's Cautiva.

Working simultaneously as a detective story (with Cristina as Sherlock, searching for the truth about her parents) and a scathing critique of the amnesty granted to military officials involved in the Dirty War, Biraben's debut film slows to crawl by the second act. But the film's tragically beautiful third act mdash;where Cristina learns who the villains are and who heroes mdash;is worth the wait. PAIGE RICHMOND.

Hollywood Theatre. Director Fatih Akin (Head-On) considers a cross-section of musicians in Istanbul. Which was Constantinople.

Living Room Theaters. Disparate lives are united by mdash;wait for it mdash;a dead girl. Look for review on WWire at wweek.

com. Fox Tower. [SHORT RUN] Legendary film archivist Dennis Nyback has a lot of cartoons he wants to show you.

And some of them sound pretty damn cool. His 21-night program, which showcases animation from 1908 through the '70s, continues with nights dedicated to the earliest incarnations of Porky Pig and Daffy Duck mdash;but for our money, Sunday's "Cartoons Go to War" program looks like the best bet. Watch Popeye battle the Japanese, and Dr.

Seuss draw military training movies. I do not like them, Sam I Am/I do not like the Third Reich. Disjecta, 230 E Burnside St.

, 286-9449. 7:30 pm nightly from Friday, Feb. 23, through March 15.

$6, with consecutive-night discounts. Proceeds benefit a documentary on Oregon animation. When Effie (Jennifer Hudson) mdash;who has been replaced as lead singer of the Dreamettes by the slimmer, more "likable" Deena (Beyonc e Knowles) mdash;realizes she's been booted from the group entirely, the shit hits the effin' fan.

Filmgoers familiar with the Broadway score wait for her song ("And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going") like manna from heaven. Those who know little about it will be frozen in their seats when it arrives. And Hudson's rendition is good mdash;Oscar-winning good.

Her performance is worth sitting through the rest of the movie for. That's why I'm telling you I will go see it again. PG-13.

BYRON BECK. City Center. Eugenio has always had a crush on the same girl.

Since she left town 20 years ago, he's learned a variety of skills that should impress her: cooking delicious pasta, cultivating a charming smile and tending the sick. Now his love has returned. There's just one problem: Eugenio has Down syndrome.

An Italian cousin of that despicable American genre, the lovable-disabled-guy movie, Eugenio, I Love You is at least handled by director Francisco Jos Fernandez with restraint and an admirable lack of condescension. (At least until the final, cloying freeze-frame, which betrays the entire spirit of the picture.) But there's something uncomfortable about seeing Giancarlo Giannini (Casino Royale), an actor whose mental capacities are not in doubt, playing handicapped to the crowds.

"I don't know if it'd be better to exist or not to exist," Eugenio ponders. It's not so hard to decide about the movie: it may be done well, but it shouldn't have been done at all. AARON MESH.

Living Room Theaters. Lovely to look at. Impossible to ignore.

An utter waste of good money. Apt descriptions for both the life of Edie Sedgwick and the movie that's based on her life, Factory Girl. Current Brit "it girl" Sienna Miller looks and acts the part of the '60s Big Apple "it girl" she's supposed to portray mdash;right down to the thick eyeliner and buttsores.

But she's a student actor compared with Guy Pearce as pasty pop artist Andy Warhol (topping previous takers David Bowie and Crispin Glover). Teetering between Edie's mentor and tormentor here, Warhol comes off a little too much like Emperor Palpatine any time he shares the screen with Hayden Christensen as Edie's Bob Dylan-esque lover, but that said, even Warhol himself would be impressed (or horrified) by how Pearce is able to personify him so completely mdash;right down to his blotchy skin. But the surface is about as far as this so-called American tragedy goes.

Edie's story is too big for documentary-based director George Hickenlooper, and even though it starts off hopeful, like Edie herself, it ends up as just another star-fucking, name-dropping wannabe mess. R. BYRON BECK.

Hollywood Theatre, Wednesday-Thursday only. Nicolas Cage's long-documented desire to play a comic-book character has finally come to fruition in this adaptation of Marvel's hell-spawned antihero. Cage stars as motorcycle daredevil Johnny Blaze, who in his misguided youth sold his soul to the Devil (Peter Fonda) and is now forced to do the evil one's bidding.

At night, Blaze turns into the Ghost Rider, a leather-clad, flaming skeleton that tears around on a flaming chopper, acting as Satan's bounty hunter. But it seems Ghost Rider is also a bit of a vigilante, as he comes to the aid of people in need, all the while being chased by the cops. Not only does this movie sound ridiculous, it is ridiculous.

The film is almost redeemed by not taking itself too seriously. But hack filmmaker Mark Steven Johnson (whose other comic-book movie, Daredevil, was unwatchable excrement) does not actually seem to be aware that he's suffering from a major talent deficiency, and that the movie only works because of Cage's whacked-out performance. PG-13.

DAVID WALKER. Broadway, Lloyd Cinema, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Sandy, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, City Center. Hannibal Lecter loves Chianti, but his fans are continually asked to drink piss.

Hannibal Rising mdash;based on a book that wasn't finished when filming started mdash;simply demystifies Lecter, as director Peter Webber (Girl with a Pearl Earring) tries for an arty edge. Sadly, what should have been a nice making-of-a-killer prequel becomes a one-dimensional revenge pic, as Hannibal coped with being an orphan, trains in the art of the samurai (what?!

) and enters medical school (though, for some reason, not for psychiatry). Systematically, he tracks and murders the soldiers who killed his family in World War II..

.and that's about all there is. French actor Gaspard Ulliel tries all of Anthony Hopkins' creepy tricks as young Hannibal, yet can't muster a grain of Hopkins' disarming, eerie charisma.

As a sadist, Lecter would love Hannibal Rising mdash;it's torturous to watch. R. AP KRYZA.

Eastport. First comes marriage, then comes love in this dark 2004 film about a couple of dysfunctional Turkish immigrants in Germany. Living Room Theaters.

Slacker Brits work the night shift, talk, drink coffee. Think Kicking and Screaming, with accents. Living Room Theaters.

The companion piece to Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers mdash;the two were filmed at the same time mdash;Letters from Iwo Jima is the stronger of the veteran director's recountings of the pivotal battle waged on the tiny island during World War II. Telling the story from the Japanese point of view puts a deceptively original spin on a film that is otherwise conventional in all manner and content. More deserving of an audience than its cinematic sibling, Letters is a solid film that never fully lives up to the advance praise bestowed on it.

R. DAVID WALKER. Broadway, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cornelius, Sandy, City Center.

A Jewish girl falls in love with a Muslim in Paris. They'll always have kosher. Living Room Theaters.

Spying on people can make you crazy mdash;anybody who's ever spent a little too much time on MySpace knows that. So it's no surprise that when spying is your job, you turn weird. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich M u he) is the best there is at his job.

He's also decidedly odd: a tense, quiet man with tunnel-vision eyes and a flat, unbending line of a mouth. Wiesler works for the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. It's 1984, five years before the Berlin Wall crumbles, but despite the corruption around him, Wiesler remains committed to the cause mdash;until he sees a production by one of East Germany's few loyal playwrights, rising star Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch).

Wiesler instantly becomes entranced by Dreyman's leading lady, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). When Wiesler is ordered to spy on the couple, the once-robotic Stasi operative is tested beyond imagining. The film, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and the winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, works on all kinds of levels.

But thanks to M u he's heartbreaking performance, it's most memorable as a study of a lonely untermensch, exploited and broken by the system he's devoted his life to preserving. R. BECKY OHLSEN.

Fox Tower. [SHORT RUN] Watching this documentary about Matthew Barney mdash;a multimedia artist obsessed with the same kind of petroleum guys use to whack off mdash;without seeing any of his previous projects is like watching the closing minutes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind without seeing the rest of the film. Spectacle with little subtext doesn't make much sense, but it looks good.

As does jack-off art star Barney. A Boise-bred hotshot athlete and big-city model, he's traded his good looks for the wizened visage of a cutting-edge visionary. Documenting the creative process behind an ongoing movie series (in which he places obstacles in his way mdash;and up his butt mdash;to "make something greater"), the documentary zooms in on Drawing Restraint 9.

It's a film project he did on a Japanese whaling vessel with his Icelandic singing girlfriend Bj o rk in 2006. Here K-Y jelly becomes a metaphor for whale blubber and both Bj o rk and Barney end up stripped to the bone, as does the viewer who tries to figure out what Barney means by all this "art." BYRON BECK.

Hollywood Theatre. 3:50 and 5:30 pm Saturday-Sunday, March 3-4. In their stateside debut, Hong Kong's Pang Brothers have helped themselves to the staples of American horror: the creepy old farmhouse (with conveniently sharp implements), the sullen teenage girl (innocent enough for sympathy) and a bevy of Hitchcockian birds.

Regrettably, they can't resist other, more infuriating tropes. It's no great score for originality when the heroine (Kristen Stewart) descends into a dark basement on three separate occasions. (Don't go down there!

Don't go down there! Don't go..

.aw, whatever.) But the story of Dylan McDermott's attempt to grow sunflowers on haunted North Dakota ground has some spiriting moments of visual style (the unhappy crows' arrival is a throwaway homage to the biplane in North by Northwest), and the Pangs exhibit something resembling affection for their characters mdash;refreshing in an era when their colleagues are obsessed with seeing how many limbs they can sever in an hour.

PG-13. AARON MESH. Division.

Looks like Hugh Grant thought it might be fun to play a washed-up '80s pop singer from the fictitious band POP (think Wham!). He was wrong: He comes off looking like the washed-up Brit B-list celebrity that he really is.

The only entertainment in Music and Lyrics is the video for POP's mega hit, "Pop! Goes My Heart." It's so bad, it's infectious mdash;teased '80s rock bangs, tight white pants, dance thrusts and all.

Reduced to banking off of his has-been status with an ex-celebrity boxing match, Grant's Alex Fletcher just about gives up when a rising star, moved by his age-old work, chooses him to be her duet partner. The catch? He needs to come up with a song in 72 hours.

Enter Drew Barrymore, his plant caretaker, who also happens to be a (deeply unconvincing) lyricist. For those of you thinking you love Barrymore and Grant, and that this movie should be a double winner starring them both mdash;you are wrong. Very wrong.

PG-13. ELIANNA BAR-EL. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Cinema, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Sandy, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, City Center.

Here's this nice Eddie Murphy movie about a good-natured nebbish looking for love in all the wrong...

Oh SHIT! Why is that hideous gorgon stomping around in a bikini and bellowing catchphrases? Make it go away!

OK. That's better. Now Murphy is wooing Thandie Newton; they're sharing wine coolers and she's.

..Oh god, it's back!

Now it's attacking children and throwing Eddie through a window and roaring more catchphrases and running over a dog with its car! Really, who invited this repellent, godforsaken creature? And why does Eddie Murphy keep letting it ruin his movies?

PG-13. AARON MESH. Lloyd Cinema, Eastport, Division, Cedar Hills, Forest, Wilsonville, Cinema 99.

In life, you have to make choices. If, for example, you are a lady art teacher at a London secondary school, you can either befriend your elderly, cantankerous colleague or you can sleep with your hunkiest student. If you choose both, the old lady is so going to tell.

There's nothing especially innovative about the latest effort of director Richard Eyre (Iris), which boils down to Fatal Attraction with a geriatric villain and a Sapphic subtext. But Eyre has made a wise decision of his own mdash;he's focused his movie on the acidic performance of Dame Judi Dench. Whether she's denigrating her surroundings in voice-over or threatening Cate Blanchett with ruin, Dench tears into her role with dentures bared.

R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower, Roseway, Lake Twin.

Director Joel Schumacher's latest exercise in high camp gets points for novelty: This is certainly the first thriller ever to feature an animal-control officer obsessed with numerology. Jim Carrey breaks out the creepy stares he last used in The Cable Guy, and they get plenty of use once he enters into the pulp novel he's reading and takes on a second role: a heavily tattooed, saxophone-playing private eye whose fate is determined by numerals that you can probably guess. And that's before we meet the omniscient, grave-watching bulldog.

"Ned isn't just a dog," Carrey declares, somehow managing not to laugh. "He's the guardian of the dead!" No problem mdash;Ace Ventura is on the case.

R. AARON MESH. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Cinema, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Sandy, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, City Center.

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY] Syrian filmmaker Amiralay has spent the better part of four decades hosing down the lies of his country's Baath Party. Here's a chance to see four of his incisions. 1973's Everyday Life in a Syrian Village, a revelation of the poverty caused by government corruption, screens Tuesday, while three more indictments mdash;The Chickens, Film-Essai on the Euphrates Dam and A Flood in Baath Country mdash;continue the documentary attack.

New American Art Union, 922 SE Ankeny St., 231-8294. 7:30 pm Tuesday-Wednesday, March 6-7.

$6 suggested donation. There's no mistaking Guillermo del Toro's monsters for those hiding under any other bed. In The Devil's Backbone and Hellboy, the Mexican director honed a distinctive species of wraiths mdash;and in Pan's Labyrinth, his latest, best work, the beasties are clawing out of the woodwork.

Ofelia, the movie's intrepid 12-year-old heroine, is warned that one of the creatures she must confront "is not human." Considering the humans Ofelia has already met in the Spain of 1944, a year when Francisco Franco was squeezing the life out of his people, "not human" is quite the compliment. Del Toro's visual invention mdash;for which the movie was awarded the Art Direction Oscar mdash;is so complete that it's easy to think it has no precursors, but he owes an enormous debt to the 19th-century paintings of Francisco de Goya mdash;images that exemplify the horror of despotism.

More than any other director, del Toro recognizes the brutality and madness lurking within the true believer. R. AARON MESH.

Fox Tower, St. John's Twin Cinema-Pub, Hollywood Theatre, Lloyd Cinema, Eastport, Cinemagic, Bridgeport, City Center. Dame Helen Mirren inhabits the intimidating persona of Queen Elizabeth II in this dramatization of the private lives of Britain's leaders in the days immediately following Princess Diana's 1997 death.

Director Stephen Frears (Mrs. Henderson Presents, High Fidelity, The Grifters) keeps the kid gloves on in his treatment of the royal family and the Blairs, presenting what amounts to an apology for the missteps and insensitivity of the crown in the wake of national mourning for the ill-fated Diana. PG-13.

JAMES WALLING. Fox Tower, Hollywood Theatre, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center. The sheriff's department of Reno, Nev.

mdash;"it's just like Mayberry on TV, except everyone is on crystal meth and prostitution is legal" mdash;has gotten a lot of mileage out of spectacular incompetence. It's taken the deputies all the way to South Beach, where the Comedy Central performers continue their obliviousness on the big screen. There's a flimsy premise involving a bio-terror threat at a police convention, but that's an excuse to move the Cops satire to a new locale without the trouble of inserting any novel jokes.

Certain bits mdash;Paul Rudd as a parody of Pacino in Scarface, and a hotel complex used for intricately choreographed sexual rejection and furtive masturbation mdash;earn chuckles. But too many of Reno 911!'s jokes depend on the repulsiveness of the characters.

Ugly can only be funny for so long. Eventually ugly becomes sad. R.

AARON MESH. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Cinema, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Sandy, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, City Center. Within the first 10 minutes of this epic post-Civil War Western, a burly and bearded Pierce Brosnan is shot in the arm, cascades down a snow bank into treacherous rapids, and survives to solder his wound shut with his own sword.

Turns out Colonel Carter (Liam Neeson) bears a ruthless grudge and is hunting Brosnan's Gideon down with four men he has hired to help finish him off (including one naive cowboy played by John Robinson, a Portland native and the lead in Gus Van Sant's Elephant). But even in the desolate, wintry outback, Gideon is swift on his feet and even swifter with a sword, leading his supposed captors in a skillful and tense wild-goose chase, littered with gutted human flesh and cold-blooded booby traps. Seraphim Falls is not for those without stomach for the sight of blood and bowels, but it is an entertaining chase, if you dig that glorified, manly, action-packed sort of stuff.

Yee-haw. R. ELIANNA BAR-EL.

Fox Tower. [ONE NIGHT ONLY] Director Ivan Dixon's 1973 adaptation of Sam Greenlee's novel remains a highly controversial film, and a personal all-time favorite. Lawrence Cook stars as the first black agent in the CIA mdash;a direct result of affirmative action mdash;who leaves his token position to train ghetto youth in guerilla warfare.

The incendiary, politically charged film culminates in a race war. Essentially banned at the time of its release, this is a rare opportunity to see a brilliant film on the big screen, projected in 35 mm. PG.

DAVID WALKER. Clinton Street Theater. 9:30 pm Friday, March 2.

$6. Filmmaker Kirby Dick sets out to uncover the secrets of the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA, which was started by the major Hollywood studios and began the current rating system in 1968. As Dick compares and contrasts various films, double standards and prejudices begin to rear their ugly heads within an organization that turns a blind eye to violence but punishes overt sexuality, condemns homosexuality and promotes homogenized mediocrity.

The investigation proves as scathing as it is entertaining, and as thought-provoking as it is frustrating. DAVID WALKER. Living Room Theaters.

[SHORT RUN] The 50th anniversary of Kurosawa's Macbeth adaptation is celebrated with a restored, clean print. Out, out, damned spots! Clinton Street Theater.

Friday-Thursday, March 2-8. $6. Three preteens go through tumultuous life transformations after one of their peers is tragically killed.

Hardest hit is introverted Jacob (Conor Donovan), who is consumed with avenging his twin brother's death. The overachieving Malee (Zo e Weizenbaum) channels her blossoming sexuality into the seduction of a much older construction worker (Jeremy Renner). The obese Leonard (Jesse Camacho) becomes determined to lose weight.

The film is not without its charm, and manages to capture the awkwardness of prepubescence. But the interweaving stories don't always balance out as they should, making for an uneven feeling from time to time. R.

DAVID WALKER. Living Room Theaters. Five men wake up in a locked warehouse in various states of disrepair (gunshot wounds, broken noses, etc.

) and sharing a case of amnesia. A paint-by-numbers thriller that comes off badly despite the efforts of a strong cast, including James Caviezel, Greg Kinnear and Joe Pantoliano. Director Simon Brand's freshman effort does not bode well for his future in filmmaking.

JAMES WALLING. Living Room Theaters. [SHORT RUN] The verdict is still out on whether history holds the place of prophet or of pest for Ralph Nader.

But An Unreasonable Man, directed by Steve Skrovan and Henriette Mantel, gives a fair shake to a public figure known more as a scapegoat of Democratic wrath than as an activist who championed causes on which Democrats claim to have built much of their platform. The film chronicles Nader's rise from an obscure public-interest lawyer to one of the most influential players in Washington, fighting for auto safety, clean air, safe medicine and consumers' rights during times when these very concepts seemed irrelevent. While fidelity to his endeavors has been the driving force in his otherwise ascetic life, interviews portray Nader not only as a man who doesn't compromise his ideals, but also one who is utterly unable to compromise, and one who has little sympathy for personal loyalty.

The documentary splices a long interview with Nader with the opinions of supporters, detractors and family members, painting a human picture of a man who demonstrates a suprisingly good sense of humor to match his characteristically bad suits. Oh yeah mdash;about half the movie documents Nader's presidential runs and subsequent backlash. For anyone who claims an opinion of Ralph Nader, An Unreasonable Man is a must-see.

MIKE THELIN. Cinema 21. Friday-Thursday, March 2-8.

Portland lawyer Greg Kafoury, a Nader backer, will introduce the movie at 7 pm showings Friday and Saturday nights. Moms always pick the worst times to visit. Like the day after you've stashed your freshly murdered husband in the icebox.

That's the plight of Raimunda (Pen e lope Cruz), whose daughter (Yohana Cobo) has fatally stabbed dear old pederastic Dad, and whose long-dead mother, Irene (Carmen Maura), has arrived on the scene, apparently unconcerned that she's a poltergeist. It's just another week in La Mancha (where "the wind drives people crazy") and, more broadly, in Almod o varland. The great Spanish director Pedro Almod o var has returned, but with an entry significantly less crazy than much of his canon.

R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower, Hollywood Theatre.

[SHORT RUN] You can come again to the happy highways: Nicolas Roeg's 1971 Outback meditation arrives in a brand-new print. Cinema 21. Wenesday-Thursday only.

Old buddies John Travolta, William H. Macy, Martin Lawrence and Tim Allen abandon their middle-aged, suburban lives to embark on a motorcycle journey across America. Adventure ensues, and along with it jokes about poop, man love and blunt objects to the testes.

All seems to be going reasonably well until Travolta picks a fight with a real motorcycle gang that seeks its revenge in blood. Battle commences, and the story falls together exactly as expected mdash;but elicits a few good laughs along the way. PG-13.

MIKE THELIN. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Cinema, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Sandy, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, City Center. "I am not human," Slavoj Zizek proclaims at the outset of Astra Taylor's 2005 documentary.

"I am a monster." This is the sort of bold, batty thing Zizek is fond of announcing. A Marxist/Lacanian philosopher who once ran for president of Slovenia (and nearly won), he argues that the death of the authoritarian state has left society compulsively filling empty desires.

This sounds dry as dust, but Taylor sexes it up a bit with vivid examples of Western excess. (Consider, if you will, the caffeine-free diet soda.) And it doesn't hurt that Zizek is an arresting figure, a bear of a man who sweats as profusely as he talks.

He may not be a monster, but he is a dying breed: the radical intellectual as a people's prophet of...

well, something terribly important, no doubt. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

Jake Gyllenhaal stars in director David Fincher's latest serial-killer picture. Jake's horoscope says if he finds a box in a field, he shouldn't open it. Look for review on WWire at wweek.

com. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Cinema, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cornelius, Hilltop, Wilsonville, Cinema 99, City Center.

| Will the Leg reform one major piece of campaign finance abuse?

| Two high-level Oregon policy makers war over the state's preparations for a flu pandemic. | Carbon-dioxide levels at East Sylvan Middle School exceed the recommended norm. What now?

Keywords: Room Theaters, Hollywood Theatre, Bar El, David Walker, Night Only, Street Theater, Director Michael, i Am, i m, Dirty War

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Willamette Week Online | Screen Listings for the week of Wednesday February 28th thru Tuesday March 6th

*NEW* Attack of the Wise Women!

NEW Attack of the Wise Women!