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.