ZERO MOTIVATION Good times in the Middle East!
  • ZERO MOTIVATION Good times in the Middle East!

FIRST, here's a big deal: It's been announced that tomorrow night at the Hollywood, Simpsons, Futurama, and Life in Hell creator Matt Groening will be in attendance for a retrospective screening of his father's films. As we wrote in the Mercury's print edition:

Selected Short Films by Homer Groening
Animator Bill Plympton introduces a series of short films from Portland filmmaker Homer Groening. Lisa Groening will moderate a discussion panel on his life and work after the screening. Hollywood Theatre.

This event was probably going to be well-attended anyway, but now that Matt Groening will be there—and, according to the Hollywood, participating in the panel with Plympton, "Homer Groening’s professional colleague Tom Shrader, and film critic and Groening friend Ted Mahar"—well, you should probably get tickets soon.

ONWARD, to this week's movie reviews:

AMERICAN SNIPER—Steve really didn't like Clint Eastwood's latest. Really didn't like it. "American Sniper," he writes, "is basically The Hurt Locker rewritten for love-it-or-leave-it-style Americans who hate war movies that depict our enemies as actual people, rather than evil, swarthy stereotypes."

ZERO MOTIVATION—"Zero Motivation isn't Broad City funny," Elinor writes, "but it's a lot funnier than one would expect of a film that takes place in a Middle Eastern desert army base." SOLD.

BLACKHAT—Michael Mann's one of my favorite directors (not for nothing does this hang over my Mercury desk), which is why it pains me to say that Blackhat is... not great. Okay, it's pretty bad. It's gorgeous to look at, there's some fantastic action, Viola Davis is great, and there's even more good stuff scattered throughout—but as a whole, it's kind of a mess, and it feels about four hours long. Watch a Mann movie this weekend, but not this one. (See below video for some ideas.)

ALTMAN—Alison feels about Altman the way I feel about Mann, and while she was disappointed in this "tidy and conventional" documentary about him, she does encourage you to see the two films that're actually directed by Altman that the NW Film Center is screening this weekend: 3 Women and The Long Goodbye. Yes. Alison is correct. You should go see these.

UNKNOWN PASSAGE—"Dead Moon," Ned writes, "is one of the greatest bands of all time. Period. That's it." This is a documentary about them, and it'll be followed by a live performance from Fred and Toody Cole.

THE WEDDING RINGER—"I kept track throughout the film of what group could be most offended," Elinor writes. "The gays beat out the fats, with Latinos, Asians, the disabled, and stutterers not trailing too far behind, but women were definitely the greatest targets of scorn."

As ever, we have even more reviews in Film Shorts, and here are your Movie Times. Choose wisely. In the meantime, here, this is interesting: