It’s a Free World
Grade: A-

Veteran British director Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley) delivers a tense and absorbing drama about immigrant labor in London. Newcomer Kierston Wareing is positively brilliant as a headstrong entrepreneur who compromises her workers, friends and family with her greedy recruitment practices. Frequent Loach collaborator Paul Laverty won top screenplay honors at last year’s Venice Film Festival.

Screens at the Portland International Film Festival in the Portland Art Museum’s Whitsell Auditorium on February 10 at 4:45 p.m. & February 13 at 9 p.m.

Crossing Borders

Growing up in the suburbs of Portland, gay Mexican-American performer Joaquin López did his best to fit in with the mainstream white culture.
“I’m light skinned, which makes it easier to assimilate,” said López. But passing as white puts him in an awkward position from time to time. When López speaks Spanish on the job at the taquería La Bonita in Northeast Portland customers have been known to say, “You say it like you’re one of them.”
“I show them a picture of my family,” he said, “and explain that Spanish is my first language.”
Themes of ancestry, identity and assimilation figure prominently in Cuentos: Searching for My Story, a theater piece produced by the Miracle Theatre Group and the multi-cultural artist ensemble ¡Viva La Cultura! López acts, sings and plays guitar in the production along with Portland performers Rebecca Martínez and Stan Olmsted.
López helped collaborate on the project when Martínez earned a Neighborhood Arts Project Grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council. “We explore our quest for identity in Mexican-American culture in a lighthearted way,” he explained.
The narrative for Cuentos emerged from a series of conversations between the artists. “Rebecca interviewed me about growing up Mexican-American,” López said. “She asked how it felt. What hurt the most.”
Martínez, López and Olmsted drew on their musical backgrounds to select Mexican and Spanish folks songs for the show. In addition López included several songs he learned singing in a Catholic church choir as a child.
Cuentos features two songs by gay Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, though there is no queer content in the story. The show is bilingual with no subtitles, but López assures that all audience members will be able to comprehend the content.
López said he is happily settled in a relationship. When he’s not working at La Bonita he’s very musically inclined. He’s currently writing a rock album, and he’d like to record an album of Spanish folk songs. He also teaches guitar at Sowelu Theater’s summer arts camps.

February 2-23; Saturdays at 3 p.m.; Milagro Theatre, 525 S.E. Stark St.; $5-$10 ($5 for children 12 & under); 503-236-7253.

For the next few weeks I'll be posting reviews of films that will show at the Portland International Film Festival (February 7-23). You can get showtimes by tracking down the festival schedule at www.nwfilm.org. If you don't live in Portland, bear in mind that many of these films will be released theatrically in the coming months and the others will hopefully show up on DVD someday.

The Counterfeiters
Grade: B+

Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky scored a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination with this morally complex true story about a group of Jewish men who secured preferential treatment at a concentration camp by making fake loot for Nazis toward the end of World War II. It’s a technically accomplished effort, with impressive acting, sets and cinematography. But as a drama it’s never completely engaging, owing to a slow beginning, some predictable plot twists and an emotionally flaccid denouement.

Cat Power

Jukebox

My first exposure to Cat Power (a.k.a. Chan Marshall) was unqualifiedly awful. A good friend of mine became an enthusiast in the late 1990s after seeing several charismatic shows in Chicago. But when I showed up for Cat's gig at a small club in Portland she completely unraveled to the point that it was too excruciating to watch. She couldn't make it through any of her songs, despite her fans' efforts to cheer her on.

True to her name Ms. Power appears to be in possession of nine lives, and thankfully her near death experience eight years ago did not prevent her from pouncing out of that soiled litter box and securing a snazzy name in the spotlights. She's released two solid albums since then - You Are Free and The Greatest - and I've heard from friends and critics alike that, against the odds, she's transformed into one of most engaging live performers around.

Currently she's featured on two bestselling hipster soundtracks - I'm Not There and Juno - and this week she released Jukebox, a very enjoyable collection of cover songs (devotees will remember that she released her first covers album, aptly called The Covers Record, in 2000). So far my favorites are "New York" and a soulful take on Joni Mitchell's "Blue" that's backed by an organ accompaniment. It's worth your while to shell out a few extra buckaroos for the deluxe edition, which gets you a second disc with five extra tunes.

Go Sarah Go!

The Oscar nominations came out this morning, and you can read all about 'em at http://www.oscar.com/. A few quibbles aside, I'm very pleased that the Academy recognized such a diverse crop of interesting films. And most of all I love that Away from Her - my favorite film of the year - scored an inevitable Best Actress nod for Julie Christie and a surprise but hugely deserved nod for Sarah Polley's smart and sensitive adaptation of Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." She'll lose to the Coen Brothers, of course. But this is a major career leap for Sarah, who got her start as pesky lil' Ramona Quimby on Canadian public TV and went on to great roles Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, My Life Without Me and other films.

The Orphanage

Grade: B-

Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona makes his feature debut with this creepy but maddeningly convoluted entry in the haunted house genre. The elegant and intense Belen Rueda plays an adoptive mother who purchases the orphanage in which she grew up, only to lose her HIV-infected son to a kidnapper...or meddlesome ghosts...or could it be something even more sinister? Rather than pay brief and clever tributes to classic ghost movies, Bayona borrows heavily and clumsily from films like Poltergeist and The Others. And sometimes he provides so little background info that the scary bits (such as the masked freakazoid pictured above) seem random and yield minimal adrenaline jolts.

There Will Be Blood
Grade: A-

Paul Thomas Anderson's first outing since 2002's brilliant Punch-Drunk Love is both astounding and confounding. Loosely based on Oil! - Upton Sinclair's 1927 muckraking novel - it eschews the source material's playful satiric tone for that of a hellfire and brimstone sermon. The story is set in the early 1900s and Anderson uses the greedy oil baron exploits of one Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis, totally frightening and brilliant) to comment on the ongoing rape of the earth for oil and wealth, regardless of the devastating consequences to the environment and humanity. By staging epic, devastatingly beautiful tableaux of gushing oil and oil derrick conflagrations, Anderson seems to be saying that we're not waiting for the Apocalypse. It already happened in the oil fields of Southern California 100 years ago and we're still paying the price for all that avarice. If my theories are a bit far-reaching this morning it's probably due to my dang head cold. I'm really spaced out.

There Will Be Blood is swimming in strengths, including it's loving homages to master filmmakers Terrence Malick and Orson Welles. The film is so dense that it will certainly require multiple viewings to take everything in, but one viewing was enough for me to know that I'm not wild about Paul Dano's spirited but stilted performance as a fundamentalist preacher. Considering that the film only tackles the first 100 pages or so of Sinclair's lengthy novel, the 2 1/2 hour running time seems indulgent on Anderson's part, and it feels like he's beating his agenda to a pulp by throwing in melodramatic plot twists that are nowhere to be found in the novel.

Oh, and the brooding, Shining-esque score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood is magnificent, even though it's a bit invasive at times.

Wedding Bell Blues: Enrique Andrade Stars in Portland Production of Bodas de Sangre

Enrique Andrade is one busy guy.
By day he’s a court certified Spanish interpreter for the Oregon Judicial Department. He’s also the proud owner of the impossibly suave voice that makes MAX announcements in Spanish.
In the queer community he serves on the Board of Directors for the Metropolitan Community Church of Portland, and he volunteers at the Sexual Minority Youth Resource Center.
His acting experience is limited, a technicality that did not stop him from scoring a major role in Federico García Lorca’s 1932 tragedy Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding), running February 1 through 23 at Miracle Theatre. Andrade plays El Novio, a Spanish farmer who’s too busy fulfilling his mentally ill mother’s expectations to realize that his beautiful bride has the hots for another fellow.
“I’m really angry with my character because he’s such a dumbass,” Andrade said. “He doesn’t realize the bride doesn’t love him, and he’s emotionally inept.”
García Lorca – a homosexual who died in 1936 at the outset of the Spanish Civil War – is best known for his poetry, and for his brutal condemnations of provincial Spanish life in emotionally taxing plays like Bodas de sangre and La casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba).
Milagro Theater mainstay Olga Sanchez directs the production. The opening night performance on Friday, February 1 will be performed in Spanish with no English subtitles. All other performances feature subtitles.
“The tone of the play is so dramatic that you can’t avoid heaviness,” Andrade noted. “But there are some comic elements. I just hope that people will walk away feeling something.”
Andrade isn’t sure how much acting work he wants to tackle after Bodas de Sangre. “I don’t want to overwhelm myself with it,” he said. In 2008 he hopes that romance will take precedence over his professional and creative endeavors. “This might be the year of the partner,” he said in that sexy MAX way of his.

Miracle Theatre, 525 S.E. Stark St., 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; $18-$20, $15 for students and senior; call 503-236-7253 or visit www.milagro.org. ALSO…$12 preview show on Thursday, January 31.

My great uncle Frank, pictured here in October, 2007

in Brattleboro, VT with my cousins Emily & Rei and

my nephew Eli (the guy on Frank's lap)

Frank Janik: 1911-2008

Putting the "Sketch" in Sketchy

Anything goes on season two of The Big Gay Sketch Show on the lesbian and gay TV channel Logo.
Liza Minnelli acquires superpowers by swilling dirty martinis and slurring diva battle cries as she protects queens from homophobic thugs.
In a spoof of the 1980s soap opera Dynasty archenemies Krystle and Alexis make out in an inflatable swimming pool after a knockdown, drag out catfight.
A man in drag plays Maya Angelou, bringing statuesque dignity to narrations of “Men Seeking Men” ads from Craig’s List. At a mail deliver joint gay and straight characters get their rocks off while watching a lusty Latino man process their packages.
Most of these sketches appear in the consistently funny season opener, which airs on February 5. If the second episode (airing February 12) is any indication, viewers are in for a very bumpy ride for the rest of the season.
Executive producer Rosie O’Donnell watches each episode from a balcony, a playful dyke twist on the crotchety critics on The Muppet Show. As the lowbrow fun of episode one gives way to painfully unfunny second installment, you can’t help but deduce that Rosie doesn’t have the world’s greatest eye for investments. First Taboo – the failed stage venture with Boy George – and now an uneven gay knockoff of Saturday Night Live and MAD TV.
The second episode hits its low point with the final sketch, an endless parody of May-December relationships in which David Furnish and Catherine Zeta-Jones vomit excessively when they contemplate the aging body parts of their partners, Elton John and Michael Douglas. Like other sketches in this episode – including a send-up of closeted Republicans – it’s written at a third grade level. It’s too stupid to be insulting and too dull to be a guilty pleasure.
A few of the cast members are terrific, especially Kate McKinnon and Coleman Domingo. But they’ll be looking for work before long unless the show’s creators can figure out how to sustain inspired silliness for more than one episode.

"Tulifly" - the adorable assistant on our trip to the Lamanai ruins

Jungle Palms

View of jungle and river from top of 112-foot Lamanai temple

Belize Foto Finale

Night of the Iguana. One evening we ditched our economy digs at Ruby's and splurged on a resort that harbored these cute lil' fellas.

San Pedro at night, psychedelic style. This is the town that inspired the incomparable songsmanship of Madonna's hit "La Isla Bonita."

After 11 days of perfect weather a shit storm kicked in on January 2nd.

Seeing is Belizing (Part Deux)

San Pedro Town, view from Ruby's Hotel

Groovy sunset action

Crocodile Rock! Seen on river trip to Mayan ruins at Lamani

Drew and me in the shade at Lamanai

I finally found the girl of my dreams!

Seeing Iz Belizing

After 22 hours of flight delays and prolonged, near-death exposure to the horrors of the Houston airport, Drew and I finally got to bed at 3 a.m. last night. There's no getting around the cruel fact that one bad travel day goes a long way to undermine 2 weeks of R&R in the Caribbean, but we're both fairly chipper this morning so I'm hoping our spirits and our "tans" (we used tons of sunblock to avoid Lobster action) will shine through the dreary weather in Portland.