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The Oregonian

Double feature with Night of the Living Dead

The Oregonian

In The Oregonian, a woman flees into the Northwest woods, where the horrors grow on trees, and everywhere else. Calvin Lee Reeder laces his fragmentary narrative with symbols, just to make sure you're really confused.

As independents aim for awards and fame and Oprah-funded world-saving, The Oregonian - named for the fleeing woman whose name we never learn - is a film unlikely to break the box office. The niche market for this story written for the actress Lindsay Pulsipher (from HBO 's True Blood) is the festival circuit, plus those who gravitate toward experimental horror, plus fans of Reeder's rock bands, the Popular Shapes and the Intelligence.

A few jolting jump cuts into a drizzly landscape, woman is bleeding and crawling out of a car that she's just crashed. When the camera flashes back joltingly to the house that she fled, we see an abusive boyfriend (Robert Longstreet, who's in four Midnight Movies at Sundance 2011).

Later she's pursued by someone in a giant green frog costume, whose heart is beating visibly for her. She's also driven in a truck by a fat man whose urine comes in several different colors.

In this collaboration between Reader and Pulsipher, the writing relies less on dialogue than on a series of explosive encounters. Flashbacks telegraph cues as to why the woman is where she is, yet it's never clear whether any of the events are not her hallucinations.

Reeder is out to shock, yet he's also determined to make his audience laugh and to draw attention to his tale's artificiality with campy makeup and costumes. Sometimes The Oregonian looks like sophomoric film-school iconoclasm, the equivalent of angry indie-rock lyrics with the amps turned up to 11.

On a closer look, the style achieved with one camera in 16mm and another in Super 16mm is deliberate rather than accidental. The lurching from scene to violent scene of absurd violence that seems oddly logical is reminiscent of the young Jean-Luc Godard. Nicholas Roeg also haunts The Oregonian.

So do the sinister forests of Grimms' Fairy Tales. Nature, which audiences tend to worship and hug at Sundance, isn't The Oregonian's friend here. In Calvin Lee Reeder's unsentimental feature, nature is a place where you get lost, and where there's a threat around every corner. The rainy chilly woods of Oregon and Reeder's own music heighten that foreboding.

Lindsay Pulsipher balances the fear and the camp in her character without sacrificing either element. For the first third of the film, she's walking around with fake blood on her face that looks like ketchup. And she can still make you afraid of what's behind the next tree.

— David D'Arcy, Screen Daily

The Oregonian

Sat October 29, 2011, 9:00 only, Muenzinger Auditorium

USA, 2011, in English, Color, 81 min • official site

recommend

Tickets

10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission. $7 w/UCB student ID, $7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.

Parking

Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.

RTD Bus

Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus

International Film Series

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Established 1941 by James Sandoe.

First Person Cinema

(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.

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(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil Grillo.

Celebrating Stan

Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.

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Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.

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