If you're ever in Hood River, Oregon in October or early November, be sure to visit Rasmussen Farms. Every year the good folks there choose a theme for the Pumpkin Funland dioramas in their spacious greenhouse. A few years ago they chose classic TV shows as the theme, and I snapped this photo of Charlie's Angels in action.

Retro Movie Recommendations

After Hours (1985)

After Raging Bull Martin Scorsese smacked his fans with one-two combo of brilliant pitch black comedies. He followed the masterful The King of Comedy with this underrated gem about a 9 to 5 office slave (Griffin Dunne) who can’t escape SoHo after a late night with Rosanna Arquette goes very very wrong.

The Naked Kiss (1964)

In Samuel Fuller’s kitschy yet hard-hitting pulp classic Constance Towers plays a prostitute who peddles Angel Foam, a libation that “goes down like velvet and comes up like dynamite." She turns her life around by teaching disabled children and marrying a local philanthropist/millionaire only to discover that he’s harboring one hell of a sicko secret. Shot in beautiful black and white by Stanley Cortez (the brilliant DP behind The Magnificent Ambersons and The Night of the Hunter), The Naked Kiss predated David Lynch’s creepy exposes of small town America by twenty years.

Score (1973)

By the early 1970s American director Radley Metzger had already established himself as a major horndog with the skin flicks Camille 2000 and The Lickerish Quartet. He outdid himself with the sensational sexploitation film Score, testing his audience’s tolerance by tossing some totally hot bisexual action into the mix. In a fictional European resort town called Leisure a swinging married couple lure prospective lovers to their home and persuade them to try their hands (and other body parts) at switch-hitting. I’ve only seen the soft-core version available on DVD from First Run Features, but if you search hard enough you might find the 91 minute original version, which contains some hard-core action.

Slut Tag Central

After toying with the idea of getting tattoos for over a decade, my partner Drew and I finally took the Nestea plunge last week and got inked at a Portland parlor called Primitive Urges. Both of our "slut tags" (my friend Liza tells me that this is the popular nomenclature for tattoos in Boston) are healing well, with some nasty oozing and burning action thrown in to discourage us every time we think we've reached the home stretch.

Drew's armband is a work-in-progress. So far he's filled the circles inside the band with some of his favorite symbols, including an owl, a penguin and the Om symbol. If he's up for another round of flesh abuse he may go back to slap on a few more images.

In choosing a design for my tattoo I decided that I wanted something amusing and meaningful, and decided there was no better way to achieve that mix than to fuse two of my favorite fictional inspirations: Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz and Jerri Blank - the 46-year-old boozer/looser/user/high school freshman played by Amy Sedaris on the cult TV show Strangers With Candy.

Lars and the Real Girl
Grade: B+

Director Craig Gillespie (Mr. Woodcock) takes on the formidable task of crafting a psychologically complex slapstick comedy, and he nearly pulls it off. The amazing Ryan Gosling gained 50 pounds to play Lars, a lumpy introvert who comes out of his shell when he starts dating a life-size plastic woman he buys on the Internet. The second half of the film is surprisingly moving and satisfying, but many of the early scenes resemble bad SNL sketches. Patricia Clarkson is wonderful as Lars’s doctor.

Klassicks Korner

The Fox by D.H. Lawrence

The Shadow-Line by Joseph Conrad

After nearly passing into a coma while reading Richard Russo's latest, Bridge of Sighs, I decided to forsake overhyped contemporary fiction for some classics. Aside from some painfully obvious symbolism in both books, D.H. Lawrence's The Fox (1923) and Joseph Conrad's The Shadow-Line (1917) proved to be elegant and provocative diversions.

In college I read some short stories by Lawrence and at some point I made an aborted attempt to read Sons and Lovers. So unless you count watching the soft-core film version of Lady Chatterly's Lover on Cinemax After Dark I'm a novice when it comes to this frequently banned author.

The Fox is a novella, a 60 page study of two spinsters who live on a rural English farm, contending with the fox who invades their property to devour their livestock. Then a soldier on leave arrives on the scene, believing he's visiting a relative (who, we learn, sold the property to one of the women). He schemes to get back the house and land by romancing the mannish woman March and kicking Banford - the other gal - out of the picture. He's a consummate predator just like the fox, and the only major flaw in the storytelling is the heavy-handed way Lawrence drives that metaphor home.

Onto Conrad's The Shadow-Line, which I'd never heard of until I read Philip Roth's latest, Exit Ghost. In that novel Roth's recurring protagonist Zuckerman rereads his favorite literary works before he croaks. He's especially fond of The Shadow-Line.

It turned out that the final stretch of October was a perfect time to read this short novel because it's totally freaking creepy overture to Halloween, detailing the nightmarish voyage of a young captain who nearly succumbs to madness when someone sabotages his quinine supply in the midst of a deadly flu epidemic on board the ship. Heart of Darkness is the only other book by Conrad I've read, and I think The Shadow-Line is a worthy companion to that bleak masterpiece to end all bleak masterpieces. Like The Fox, the main problem is the oft-uttered significance of the title, the "shadow-line" being the line one crosses when she or he passes from wide-eyed youth to world-weary adulthood.

Now I may need a break from classics, but after yesterday's pillage of the Goodwill book department I'm well stocked for future forays into Classicsville. Among other titles I picked up Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native and D.H. Lawrence's interconnected novels The Rainbow and Women in Love.

Revisiting The House of Yes

There’s black comedy, and then there’s pitch-black comedy. Wendy MacLeod’s 1990 play The House of Yes fits squarely in the second category. How many storytellers, after all, would dare make the assassination of JFK the target of dozens of jokes?

At first glance the plot seems benign enough: A young man named Marty brings his fiancé home for Thanksgiving to meet his family. But trouble kicks in soon enough when it turns out that his mother is bitterly aloof and - better yet - his sister is a mentally unstable Jacqueline Kennedy fanatic who dresses in the former First Lady’s signature pink dress and pillbox hat. Did I mention that Jackie-O, the sister, and Marty dabbled in incest as children?

The House of Yes enjoyed a long run when it opened in San Francisco, and in 1997 it made the leap to the big screen with a hilarious and scathing portrayal of Jackie-O by Parker Posey.

If you need a dose of vitriol to counteract all the holiday mirth that’s about to invade our shopping malls, check out a live performance of The House of Yes by the new Portland production company Fall Guy Theatre. Gay actor Joe Bolenbaugh – who recently appeared in Profile Theatre’s production of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles – founded the company with House of Yes director Willie Smith and two other partners. The show’s stage manager, Michael Rutledge, is also gay.

“At first I dreaded having Thanksgiving in the middle of the run,” Bolenbaugh said, “but then I figured the show is set at Thanksgiving and it would be the perfect time for people to see a dysfunctional family in action and realize, ‘Mine not’s so bad!’”

Bolenbaugh is a district aide at Congressman Earl Blumanauer's Portland headquarters. In the show he plays Marty, the brother for whom Jackie-O has the hots. Rather than replicate the campy qualities of the film, he said, “We’re going for a black comedy with a murder mystery feel. The humor comes from the desperation and the sincerity of the characters.”

Later this season Bolenbaugh and the Fall Guy gang will present Big Rock Show! – a spoof of stadium concerts – and Accidental Death of a Anarchist by Nobel Prize-winning Italian playwright Dario Fo.

Fall Guy Theatre presents The House of Yes, November 15 through December 9 (no show on Thanksgiving), 8 p.m.Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, Theater! $20, Theater! Theatre! S.E. 34th and Belmont.

Coming to theatres in mid-November:

No Country for Old Men
Grade: A

This bloody adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel is an instant Coen Brothers classic that invites comparisons to Fargo and Blood Simple. Joel and Ethan are faithful to the source material, but they graciously lighten up the book’s dour tone with dozens of quirky flourishes. The acting is tops, with Javier Bardem as a homicidal maniac with bad hair, Josh Brolin as a dim fellow who runs for his life after stealing a bundle of cash, and Tommy Lee Jones as an honest small town sheriff who tries to make sense of all the murder and mayhem.

Starstruck

En route to Portland Center Stage's production of Cabaret tonight, Drew and I spotted trash cinema guru John Waters entering Powell's City of Books. At first I felt tongue-tied and weak-kneed at the prospect of talking to the gleefully twisted genius behind Pink Flamingos, Hairspray and Serial Mom, but before I knew it I found myself chasing him into the bargain section, calling out "John" as though he were my best friend in the world. His ensemble of grey clothing perfectly matched his greying hair.

In short, I told him that I love his work, and that I named my cats Chicklet and Confetta after two brassy teenage delinquents in his magnum opus Female Trouble (in the film the second gal is actually named Concetta, but I always preferred my variation).

I didn't want to bother him for long, but I did ask what he's doing in Portland, and he replied that he's interviewing someone for a book he's working on. I didn't have the heart to badger him about the details. He clearly had some shopping to do, after all.

Michael Clayton
Grade: A-

Just when it seemed like intelligence and subtlety had been banished from Hollywood films, along comes a gripping and complex legal thriller that delivers plenty of suspense without resorting to hammy courtroom melodrama. George Clooney plays the title character, a recovering gambling addict who does dirty deeds for a major New York City law firm until a colleague’s mental breakdown and a corporation’s foul sportsmanship cause him to question his ethics. Tony Gilroy - who wrote the screenplays for all three Bourne movies - shows great promise in his directorial debut, drawing remarkable performances from Clooney, Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson.

Into the Wild

Grade: B

After everyone went gaga for Into the Wild at the Toronto Film Festival and a friend told me it was his favorite movie of the year so far, I thought a transcendent experience awaited me when I sank into my chair and waited for the lights to go down. Even with all the hoopla I had my reservations. With overwrought films like The Crossing Guard and The Indian Runner to his name, I've never been a big fan of Sean Penn's directing style. I've never read a Jon Krakauer book, so I can't tell you if this is a faithful adaptation of his true account of Christopher McCandless - the Emory University grad who gave all his savings to charity, fled from society and eventually died after accidentally ingesting a poisonous plant in the middle of Nowhere, Alaska.

This is Sean Penn's best outing as a director so far, but it hardly establishes him as a first class director. Cinematographer Eric Gautier fills the frames with lovely shots of seagulls, white water rapids, mountains and other natural wonders. As though channeling the Christopher's spirit of wild abandon, Penn throws in some brave and unconventional visual techniques, like handwritten snippets of Christophers' diary entries sprawled across the screen.

My big question is why Penn didn't take this idea further. With the handwriting and one shot where Emile Hirsch (who plays Christopher) looks directly into the camera with a knowing smile, Penn is playing the risky game that theater folks refer to as "breaking the fourth wall." These techniques are meant to shake viewers out of their laid back passive positions and urge them to take a more active role. But for most of the movie Penn sticks to fairly conventional storytelling techniques, which to my mind results in a half-assed and negligibly daring filmmaking when all is said and done. In short, I wanted to see Penn take more stylistic risks as the story unfolded to show Christopher taking more and more risks with his life.

By the time was over I didn't feel nearly as invested in Christopher's plight as I thought I would. Owing to Penn's technique or perhaps my lukewarm response to Hirsch's acting, I didn't particularly like Christopher, and certainly didn't view his death as a tragedy because - stranded out in the middle of nowhere with limited survival skills to his name - he probably would have died anyway. Penn certainly doesn't paint Christopher as a desperately suicidal figure, but that doesn't mean that his actions aren't suicidal on some level.

There's Oscar buzz about several supporting cast members, including Catherine Keener and Hal Holbrook. They're both engaging, but I didn't find either performance to be remarkable. Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt, both reliable performers in general, turn in painfully forced performances as Christopher's bereft parents, and my guess is that Penn - who can be way too literal and way too solemn - steered them in this shitty direction.

Dead Girls and Dying Authors

Heartsick by Chelsea Cain

St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95

A few years ago Oregonian entertainment columnist Chelsea Cain wrote Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, a hilarious parody of Nancy Drew books. Now she's taking a stab at the serial killer genre with Heartsick, a more ambitious - but ultimately far less satisfying - effort than Confessions.

That said, Heartsick has a lot going for it. In an unconventional narrative maneuver Cain serves up two protagonists, both intriguing in all their virtues and flaws. Archie Sheridan is a pill-popping Portland, Oregon detective who - two years after nearly dying in the torture chamber of notorious serial killer Gretchen Lowell - rejoins to the force to track down a killer who has strangled numerous Portland high school girls and left their bodies to be found on the banks of nearby islands and river walkways. Throughout his search he's shadowed by Susan Ward, a young journalist assigned to write a series of articles on Sheridan and the recent rash of murders.

Sheridan and his investigative team have pegged the current killer to be a man, possibly a teacher or janitor at one of the high schools. Susan stares down her own demons by revisiting her high school stomping grounds to do research, reliving memories of a sexual relationship with one of her teachers. Archie takes an even wilder stroll down memory lane. It turns out that he's developed a variation of Stockholm Syndrome, meaning that he harbors a fierce emotional attachment to Gretchen, the woman who broke his ribs, spoon-fed him Drano, carved a heart on his chest and removed his spleen.

Heartsick is creepy and engaging for about 200 pages, and then Cain loses control of her unusual plot structure, throws her hands in that air and serves up a really stupid and unexciting climax. Even when the story goes off the rails it's hard to put it down - particularly if you're from Portland because Cain does a good job evoking the local color.

Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

Houghton Mifflin Company, $26

Philip Roth - one of America's most decorated writers, with a Pulitzer and two National Book Awards to his name - is perhaps best known for the Zuckerman Books, a series of novels narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a Jewish writer widely considered to be Roth's alter ego. Roth wrote a series of Zuckerman books in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then revived the franchise in the late 1990s with the phenomenal trio American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain.

Now he swears he's finishing Nathan off with the recently published Exit Ghost. Nathan doesn't literally die in the book, but he leaves his 11-year hideaway in the Berkshires only to face bewilderment, humiliation and the constant bothers of impotence and incontinence (caused by his prostate surgery about 10 years ago) in his old haunt, New York City. Now in his early 70s, he pines for a 30-year-old woman and tries to prevent a persistent young writer from writing a tell-all biography about a deceased writer who was Zuckerman's mentor and inspiration in the 1950s.

With themes of death and the irreversible decline of American society, Exit Ghost is hardly a light read. But considering the grim subject matter this is a surprisingly quick and enjoyable read, with zippy pages of theatrical "He Said, She Said" dialogue between Zuckerman and his temptress. Overall this is a memorable, fitting end to a literary saga, though I found the lengthy tribute to sportswriter George Plimpton toward the end to be an unwelcome distraction.

Legends of the Fall

I've had a chance to listen to some of this fall's most anticipated music releases. I haven't spent enough time with them to known which are the all-stars and which will be eternal dust gatherers, but here are my initial impressions.

PJ Harvey scores big points with White Chalk, an album steeped in haunting chamber music stylings instead of the grungier sounds from previous outings like Rid of Me and Uh Huh Her. So far "When Under Ether" is my favorite track.

Annie Lennox definitely means business with Songs of Mass Destruction, possibly the best solo album of her career. Ballads like "Dark Road" and "Fingernail Moon" are exquisite, and it's impossible not to shake your butt cheeks to the infectious pop concoction "Ghosts in My Machine." Madonna provides guest vocals on "Sing."

Talk about unholy alliances! Maybe they've been pals all along and I never knew it, but I was very surprised to hear that Led Zeppelin screamer Robert Plant and demure country/folk artist Alison Krauss teamed up for Raising Sand. They do an awesome cover of Rowland Salley's "Killing the Blues," but a few tracks stray into Bland Land.

I listened to my share of The Boss in the mid-1980s, particularly my cassette of Born in the U.S.A. At some point I concluded that he was too much of a man's man for me, but over the past few years I've come to appreciate his melancholy sensibility and his musical versatility (Nebraska being my favorite Springsteen album). The new CD, Magic, marks his reunion with The E Street Band. "Radio Nowhere," the leading track and the first radio single, is my fave.

Finally we come to Herbie Hancock's tribute to Joni Mitchell. Earlier this year Nonesuch Records released a tribute to Joni with tracks by Sufjan Stevens, Cassandra Wilson and other notables, and Joni herself just released Shine, her first album of new material since 1998. Herbie's entry in the Mitchell sweepstakes is an odd one, with an instrumental track of "Both Sides Now" that bears absolutely no melodic resemblance to the original. "Court and Spark," featuring Norah Jones on vocals, is much more satisfying, and the jewel in the crown is Tina Turner's hot-as-fuck take on "Edith and the Kingpin." I also like Leonard Cohen's beatnik, spoken word recitation of "The Jungle Line, " but found Corinne Bailey Rae's "River" and Luciana Souza's "Amelia" to be total snoozers.

Mala Noche

$29.95 retail or rent it

Before catapulting himself to indie film fame with Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant made his feature film debut with Mala Noche ("Bad Night") in 1985. Until now it has never had a proper home video release - it was only available on bootlegs of indubitably crappy quality.

On October 9 the Criterion Collection DVD edition hits the streets, complete with a storyboard gallery, the original trailer, a laid-back 2007 video interview with Van Sant and a documentary about Walt Curtis, the Oregon beat poet who wrote the source material. The digital transfer is pristine, showcasing the dramatic interplay of light and darkness throughout the film.

Filled with haunting imagery and clever camera work, Mala Noche is a film of undeniable cinematic merit, and several visual motifs (time-lapse transitional shots of moving clouds, for instance) later made their way into signature Van Sant films like My Own Private Idaho. Watch Mala Noche for proof that Gus was a talented stylist from the get-go, but don't expect the expert dialogue and great character development that distinguish many of his later scripts.

Though it's impressive that he took on a gritty aspect of gay culture and didn't pander to mainstream audiences, the story seriously drags in several places, and the mediocre acting doesn't make it any easier to warm up to the material. Based on Walt Curtis's memoir, the plot follows a white male convenience store clerk in his efforts to win the heart (or, if necessary, buy the sexual favors of) an illegal Mexican immigrant. Filmed in the grittiest district in Portland, Oregon, an area which - despite its proximity to some of the city's priciest real estate - is still home to several transient hotels and soup kitchens.

Fright Nightz

I know I may be a little extreme in this matter, but I firmly believe that celebrating the horrifying pagan ecstasies of Halloween should never be limited to the 31st of October. This greatest of holidays calls for a month-long, blood-chilling descent into the realm of all things creepy, crawly, sick and twisted. With that in mind I've assembled a list of some of my favorite scary flicks in the hope that those of you with strong constitutions will join me at horror movie boot camp.

The Brood (David Cronenberg, also check out Rabid and Shivers)

Sisters (Brian DePalma, also check out Carrie and Dressed to Kill)

Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju)

Freaks (Tod Browning)

Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly)

The Most Dangerous Game - this one inspired the Zodiac killer!!! (Irving Pichel & Ernest B. Schoedsack)

Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, also check out The Witches)

The Elephant Man (David Lynch)

The Exorcist (William Friedkin)

Frailty (Bill Paxton)

Suspiria (Dario Argento)

The Honeymoon Killers (Leonard Kastle)

The Host (Joon-ho Bong)

Little Otik (Jan Svankmakjer)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, also check out Red Eye and Cursed)

Night of the Living Dead & Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero)

The Others (Alejandro Amenabar)

Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro)

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tom Tykwer)

Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, also see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre)

Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski)

Shaun of the Dead - this one lands in the "spoofy scary" category (Edgar Wright)

The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme)

Alfred Hitchcock Grab Bag: Take your pick from Shadow of a Doubt, The Birds, Psycho, Frenzy etc.

Sleepy Hollow (Tim Burton, also check out Beetlejuice and Ed Wood)

The Stepford Wives - original 1975 version (Bryan Forbes)

Slither (James Gunn)

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick)

The Stuff (Larry Cohen)

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? & Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich)

Strait-Jacket (William Castle, also check out The House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler)

The Haunting - 1963 version (Robert Wise)

Sweet dreams, everyone!