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Wild Tigers I Have Known intimately explores the turmoil of queer adolescence and feelings of
being "different."
,
Premonition
Sandra Bullock plays a wife and mother who
wakes to a horrible day when her husband dies in
a car crash. But she’s soon caught in a time loop,
where every morning is either a day in the past or
the future. Can she prevent her husband’s death?
Premonition wants to be a “chick flick Memento,”
but its time travel logic is flawed from the start, and
there are many long moments of gloomy boredom.
The cast is good enough to carry attention, but
with every new focus on Bullock waking up, I felt
more and more like taking a nap. C +
—AM
Pride
This inspirational film is based on the tme story
of a former swimmer (Terrence Howard) working as
a janitor who rebuilds a pool in a Philadelphia recre
ation center and starts an all-black team. Although
the underdog sports drama is a predictable cliche,
this story, encouraging minority teens to overcome
odds and become winners, is still timeless. B-
—YPB
The Taste of Tea
Further prœf that the Japanese can hold their
own with America’s best and brightest indie
auteurs in style, hipness and out-there humor.
Unfortunately, The Taste of Tea is about 45 minutes
too long and the forlorn love story at its core
buried beneath so many layers of surreality, non
sequiturs, poop and poetry you might not be able
to find it. “It might be hard for you to understand,
because it’s my world,” a mother muses to her
daughter halfway through the film. “Even 1 don’t
get it.” Opens April 6 at Holly w<xxl Theatre. B-
—TL
Wild Tigers I Have Known
Writer/director Cam Archer’s debut feature,
executive produced by Portland's own homegrown
queer cinéaste, Gus Van Sant, is admirable (not to
mention beautiful) in its aesthetic quest for a ten
der sort of simplicity. Rarely is the turmoil of queer
adolescence explored with so much intimacy and
so little archness.
The film somewhat episodically depicts the
events and accompanying emotions in the junior-
high-bound life of barely pubescent Logan (the
wonderfully vulnerable Malcolm Stumpf), the
foremost of which is an all-consuming crush on
a slightly older boy, Rodeo (Patrick White). Logan
lives with his loving but harried mother (Fairuza
Balk) in what appears to be a minor tourist town on
the California coast. (The film was shot in Santa
Cruz.) The empty rides and boardwalks make for
a lovely and apt background for Logan’s feelings of
being “different”—not part of the usual (hetero
sexual) teenage rituals—and Archer (along with
cinematographer Aaron Platt) creates wonderful
visual compositions that tell whole stories in
themselves.
In fact, most of the information we get about
Logan comes from simply observing his routine,
which, true to many a teen experience, consists
mostly of masturbating and watching TV, along
with his wanderings, either alone or with Rodeo,
on the beach and through the wixxls. All this is
interspersed with Logan’s stream-of-consciousness
thoughts, often addressed to himself and spoken in
voice-over. The only suspense here arises from
Logan’s bold, devious and dcximed scheme to
seduce Rixleo, which comes to a naturalistic,
unresolved end eschewing the false finality of most
dramatic resolutions in the movies.
The film’s primary flaw lies in its lack of
decisiveness about what it wants to be. Much of it
has rhe feel and pace of an “experimental," non
narrative filru to be responded to on a purely visual,
emotional level. But other scenes seem randomly to
go for much more straightforward dramatic story
telling. It’s a mixture that sometimes «forks and
sometimes d<x?sn’t, and when it doesn’t, it can feel
like the narrative/dramatic version of the film vying
with the non-narrative/p<x.‘tic one, each interfering
with and watering down the other.
Wild Tigers is, therefore, not a perfect film. But,
like Miranda July’s You and Me and Everyone We
Know, it’s so delicate and aspires to something so
rarely personal that most viewers will be responsive
to and protective of it (and its characters) regard
less. Both as a first feature by a promising director
and as a seemingly guileless at»mpt to genuinely
acknowledge the awkward, horny outsider many of
us same-sexers were as we came of age, it’s an
important and rewarding effort.
. Screens 7 p m. April 19 and 430 p.m. April 22
at Northwest Film Center. B +
—Christopher McQuain ©
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