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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (April 27, 2017)
MOVIES BY RICK LEVIN MONSTERS FAR AWAY AND CLOSE TO HOME Though missing the mark, Colossal remains an intriguing failure of a film A carousing alcoholic with a tendency toward blackout, Gloria (the excellent Anne Hathaway) saunters home at sunrise one morning to find that her boyfriend, Tim (Dan Stevens), has packed her bags. Game over: It’s time for this girl — and her lies, lame excuses and generally bad behavior — to go. Goodbye New York, farewell failed writing career and hello Midwest hometown, where Gloria, tail between her legs, shacks up in a vacant rental owned by her conspicu- ously absent parents. Serendipitously (perhaps), Gloria runs into Oscar (Ja- son Sudeikis, also excellent), her friend from elementary school who now owns the revamped tavern he inherited from his father. Oscar gives Gloria a job, and the two spend late nights drinking. Romantic tensions ensue, fueled by loneliness, desperation and a hazy nostalgia for the past. Meanwhile, in the South Korean capital of Seoul, a gi- ant reptile — a gargantuan Godzilla-like beast with a tape- wormy head — has been appearing, wreaking havoc and then disappearing at irregular intervals. Gloria, shaking VISUAL ARTS off a hangover, realizes that the random appearances and quirky movements of the monster are tied, like some su- pernatural marionette, to her walks through the same play- ground she frequented as a kid. She is the monster, literally and figuratively. Written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo, Colossal is a well-made, well-acted film that so nearly hits its mark you can almost forgive the failure of its flat final act. The prem- ise is sheer genius — so rich in potential that the first half of the movie is carried along on a fizzy, giddy wave of in- tellectual suspense. Who has not wondered at the rippling, unanticipated hurt our bad acts cause to vibrate outward through space and time? The metaphors here abound and, for a while, Vigalondo teases them out with thrilling tact: Is Gloria’s vicarious be- hemoth a tragicomic comment on the untold destruction left in the wake of alcoholism? Or perhaps a nifty analogy about the ways our personal privilege is complicit in the purgatory created across the globe — a kind of geopolitical Butterfly Effect that personalizes the apocalyptic guilt of all those Godzilla movies from the nuclear ’50s? It could be argued that digging out the metaphors that do or do not fuel a movie is simply an act of subjective mastur- bation — an analytical eye-of-the-beholder type thing — but in the case of Colossal, such things matter, and they matter implicitly. The epic threat and dark mystery that are kicked into motion by the appearance of the colossus is, in the final act, slammed shut in the most pedestrian way with a con- cluding battle royal that, ironically, is so predictable and so narcissistically meepy that it actually beggars belief. It is impossible to believe that a person who, upon learn- ing that her walks through a playground unleash monstrous death and destruction on the other side of the world, would not (one) consider suicide or (two) simply stop walking through said playground. That this film, otherwise so ex- quisitely made, fails to take these existential questions into account is exactly what leads it, with queasy inevitability, to the false catharsis of its ending — a bit of bad faith that undermines everything by revealing the molehill that made the mountain. So the question remains: Is Colossal worth seeing? Ab- solutely, yes. My disappointment in the film is precisely proportional to the originality of its conceit and the way it soars forth with so much early promise. That the movie eventually crashes, and in such a piddling Hollywood way, is part and parcel of the riskiness of art, which fails far more often than it succeeds. The failure here is one of nerve: The film’s vision of guilt and violence comes back and bites it in the ass, like a playground dispute that sacrifices an entire city in an empty gesture of revenge. (Broadway Metro) ■ BY ESTER BARKAI ‘WEST SIDE OF FERN RIDGE’ A GRAY DAY IS BEAUTIFUL, TOO White Lotus offers new paintings by Margaret Prentice S ome people look forward to retirement. They plan for the time when they can stop working and do nothing but take it easy and relax. Artists aren’t usually among those people. Take Picasso, for example: He lived to 91 and famous- ly worked through his later years. Or consider Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived to be almost 100 years old. When her eyesight failed, she switched from painting to sculpture so she could keep working. Artists want to keep on making art. This holds true for Margaret Prentice. Not only is she still making art after having retired from her job as art pro- fessor at the University of Oregon, she is doing something new. Prentice was a printmaker during her days as an art professor. She worked in an abstract style and from her imagination. It wasn’t until after she retired that she began 22 A pril 27, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com to paint what she saw in life. At first she worked small, painting still lifes just to amuse herself. It was when she switched to a larger format that she got serious about painting. Prentice’s landscape oil paintings, which you can see in a new exhibit at White Lotus Gallery downtown, are inspired by the outdoors, but she prefers to work inside. Plein air artists traditionally work small so they might have time to finish an entire painting in one day while working outside. Prentice, whose paintings in this show are larger, compares plein air painting to a sport where timing is crucial — as are making quick decisions and moving to the right spot. She doesn’t want to make snap decisions. Prentice says she likes to take her time walking through a place she’s vis- ited in nature, keeping a lookout for compositions, taking photographs and then going back to her studio to decide which view she wants to paint, and how. Because her landscape paintings feature water as a sub- ject, you may be tempted to compare them to the work of the late 19th- and early 20th-century Impressionists. Pren- tice does lay down some of her subject with identifiable brushstrokes, as did the Impressionists, but she doesn’t want to distract the viewer with paint so thick it would re- mind us that we are looking at a painting. As often as not, she blends her strokes. Her goal is to create the atmosphere of a place and to draw you in. Composition plays an important part in that effort. For example, her painting West Side of Fern Ridge is a land- scape composed of triangles vertically stacked. The tri- angular design takes you into the space and moves you through grass, water, field, trees and the sky. Winters in Eugene aren’t brutal — not the way they are back east or in other parts of the country. But in my experi- ence, it does rain nearly every day here during winter. So as it gets closer to spring, and the breaks in weather become more frequent, you see people hurry out to garden or golf, walk or run (well, rain doesn’t always stop most from run- ning in Eugene). There’s a certain excitement in the air that accompanies a change in weather. It’s that excitement which Prentice aims to convey with her landscape paintings. She’d like us to feel the change in atmosphere that comes with different seasons. She started painting the majority of the work that’s up at White Lotus Gallery this past summer. Walking around the gallery looking at the different landscapes, moving through the seasons, you may recognize some of the places repre- sented. They are mostly paintings of wetland areas in and around Eugene: Delta Ponds, in town; the Finley National Wildlife Refuge, near Corvallis; and the Fern Ridge Wild- life Area, just west of Eugene. Would Prentice want every day in Eugene to be sunny? Not really, she says. She enjoys painting stormy days in winter as well as summer days with blue skies. “There are beautiful things about a gray day, too,” Pren- tice says. ■ Margaret Prentice’s Wetlands exhibit is showing at White Lotus Gallery, 767 Willamette Street, through May 20.
