Summer repertory screenings often turn toward nostalgic, well-trod territory. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you’ll probably notice that this month’s movies take a weirder (and often more interesting) route. Angels drift over a divided Berlin and lovers wander around Argentina. PAM CUT’s new David Hockney-inspired series screens what is basically a moving painting. Aaaand, Hollywood Theatre’s weeklong festival of cinematic misery invites us to spend the longest days of the year staring into the void. So. Shall we?
Pretty, Witty, and Gay
For fans of Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), yearning, the paint swatch section at Home Depot.
PAM CUT’s Pretty, Witty, and Gay series curates films in conversation with Portland Art Museum’s sprawling David Hockney exhibition. Much like his most famous compositions, the lineup of films screening on weekends at the Whitsell trends colorful, queer, and suffused with solitude beneath palm trees and sunshine. This makes Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), screening June 27, a bit of an outlier—set in Texas at the turn of the century and centering a heterosexual love triangle, it lacks an obvious Hockney aesthetic.
Yet the film shares Hockney’s understanding of landscape as emotional terrain. Sunlight dapples across wheat fields, evoking all of the loneliness and simmering longing of old, weird Americana. Every frame is painterly. Cinematographer Néstor Almendros shot most of the film in the brief golden glows of dawn and dusk; Hockney would probably approve.
Screening on June 14, A Bigger Splash (1973)—Jack Hazan’s documentary film with fictional elements, following Hockney and his friends—is well worth catching, too. The Pretty, Witty, and Gay series continues next month with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Todd Haynes’ Safe; expect the details on those picks in the July edition of Second Run. (Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park, various times through August 1, $15/screening, $10 for members, more info)
Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair
For fans of Joel Coen’s Fargo (1996), bad decisions, staring into the middle distance.
Co-presented by Los Angeles’ American Cinematheque, Hollywood Theatre’s Bleak Week invites you to spend seven days watching some of cinema’s most devastating films. Why? Because deep feeling through endurance tests is fun, sometimes.
That said, I’d skip the selections that’re chasing after a shock factor (Cannibal Holocaust, Irreversible) in favor of more nuanced forms of despair. Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) and Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan (1998), screening on June 20 and June 25 respectively, are solid examples. They both chart the collapse of ordinary people living ordinary lives. The Deer Hunter explores the layered fallout of Vietnam War violence, and features deeply affecting performances by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep, while A Simple Plan is deceptively cutting—it starts as an almost light-hearted small town thriller, then evolves in a much more miserable direction. Not a totally surprising move from the guy who directed The Evil Dead. (Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy, various times June 19-25, $10-$12, more info)
Wings of Desire
For fans of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998), Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), eavesdropping on strangers.
New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders, who directed the sweet and spare Perfect Days (2023) and the neon-washed American landscapes of Paris, Texas (1984), is a master of aesthetic reinvention. His ’87 masterpiece Wings of Desire is among his most ambitious films. If you were moved by Perfect Days’ toilet scrubbing philosopher Hirayama and his rituals of cassette tapes and photos of trees, Wings will feel far more experimental by comparison. Yet it’s still in the spirit of Wenders’ oozy slow cinema and emphasis on careful observation.
Shot primarily in black and white just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the film follows two angels who soar over the city, listening to human chatter until one falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist. Nick Cave appears, as does this eerily fabulous, circus-y composition. (Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st, Sat June 27, 11 am, $9, more info, PG-13)
Happy Together
For fans of dating apps while traveling and getting back together when you absolutely shouldn’t.
Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997) follows two Hong Kong lovers adrift in Argentina, where they’re trapped in an addictive and sometimes violent cycle of separations and reconciliations they describe as “start-overs.” Wong’s approach abandons conventions of romance for something lonelier, full of vast roads, dead-end jobs, and dreams of waterfalls.
Shifting between black-and-white scenes and heavily saturated color, Happy Together feels like a sketchbook of tonal and visual fragments that Wong would later refine in In the Mood for Love. This precursor is well worth seeing. (Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton, Tues June 30, 7 pm, $10, more info, not rated)
Also worth it:
Desert Hearts
Donna Deitch’s landmark 1985 film is known for being the first feature film to present a lesbian romance in a positive light. Set in 1959, the sapphic cult classic follows the story of Vivian, an English professor who stays on a ghost ranch in Reno in order to establish residency and expedite a divorce from her husband. She soon becomes enchanted by the free-spirited Cay, a younger, tomboyish lesbian sculptor in cowboy boots. The two fall in love, but struggle to imagine a future together due to Vivian’s hangups about being with a woman. The movie is astonishingly gorgeous and intimate. When I first watched it last spring, I was left nearly speechless and prompted to write a four-word Letterboxd review: “I am very gay.” (Clinton Street Theater, Sun June 14, more info) JULIANNE BELL
