Northwestern exposure

Every year, the Northwest Film Center presents the Northwest Film and Video Festival, designed as both a showcase and reminder of this essential fact: Our rainy region has a pretty damn good filmmaking scene.

This year the festival, which runs for about a week starting tonight, will screen 56 films from an entry pool of more than 300. Most of these are short films, but there’s a fair number of feature-length works. As usual for the fest, there are a lot of documentary films, with topics ranging from pornography to the Nigerian oil industry. Best of all, there’s at least two truly brilliant narrative features showing as part of the festivities.

While it was impossible to view every single piece of work, the overall quality of the shorts was almost universally high. And weird. Northwest peeps make some bizarre things.

Some standout shorts include: 122 Random Seconds, which encapsulates the uncertain charms of waiting for the MAX downtown; Missed Aches, a humorous animated short about spelling foibles; and People Can’t Wait, a quick piece on Portland Commissioner Randy Leonard’s infamous outdoor toilet project.

The worst film in the bunch was Nous Deux Encore, a short film about a French woman in love, talking about her deceased husband. At 14 minutes, it was about 10 minutes too long, dragging its slow still-frame photos and quiet narration into dreadful tedium. Curiously, the festival’s judge, Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan, awarded this short Best in Show. No accounting for taste, I suppose.

The most memorable single image could be found in Don’t Worry, It’s a New Century, when a pudgy, naked man went sprinting down the street with a Super Nintendo in his arms. (Full disclosure: the director of New Century is former Vanguard writer Jeff Guay.)

As mentioned earlier, the best part of the festival will be the screening of two feature films: Humpday and The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle.

Humpday, directed by Seattleite Lynn Shelton, is loosely based around the narrative structure of two straight, male friends trying to make amateur gay porn together. In reality, it’s more about the masculine struggles of our modern creative class, and the weird mid-life crisis that comes early because of it.

It’s funny, true and well acted, and if you haven’t seen Humpday yet (it’s played in Portland before), well, you should be damn sure to see it here in all its shambling, mumbling glory.

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, also by a Seattleite—this time David Russo—is a much harder beast to tame. Imagine the body horror of early David Cronenberg glued to the kinetic energy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with a humor all its own.

The story is about a group of janitors who eat cookies that do something weird to their bodies, but it’s also about a quest for spirituality, the creation of art and gender roles.

Little Dizzle is hilarious and terrifying and has a lot of blue poop involved. It’s honestly a miracle, but Russo manages to keep this strange and quirky film completely grounded. It’s bizarre, yes, but entirely accessible.