Zidane Comes to Portland!

I've been dreaming for the great one to journey to my hometown of Portland, Oregon, for many... well, two years now. Not as a member of my club the Timbers, not in the flesh, but in 24-frames per second. Moving pictures... in the hyper-reality of cinema... in the celluloid guise of the brilliant film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. I've written about this film a couple of times before (here and here), and was frustrated that it had never received a proper theatrical release in the States.

Thankfully, mad soccer fan and p.r. man for the Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts Brian Costello felt the same way and has managed to get a print of the film for several screenings at this year's 2008 Time Based Arts Festival. Sadly, I'm not currently living in Portland... so I'll have to wait some more before I can finally see it on the big screen. But lucky Portlanders with a taste for the Beautiful Game and/or great cinema are in for a treat.

The film will play as part of the festival's On the Screen program. Don't miss it!

The details:

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait

2008 Time-Based Art Festival

screenings at Northwest Film Center Whitsell Auditorium at Portland Art Museum

1219 SW Park, Portland, OR

$6 PICA Members / $7 General

Sat . Sept 6 . 9-10:30 pm

Thurs . Sept 11 . 7-8:30 pm

Fri . Sept 12 . 6:30-8 pm

Fri . Sept 12 . 8:30-10 pm

Sun . Sept 14 . 7:30-9 pm

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Spain v Italy

Not even thinking of football, both Spain and Italy have long held dominion over my imagination to varying degrees. It has something to do with cinema. Has there ever been a more potent combination than the seductive synthesis, the cross pollination of aesthetics, than the so-called Spaghetti Westerns? I don't think so. It's a subjective argument, of course. But for me... I know what films would be bursting out of my desert island suitcase. The great Sergio Leone, the Italian master of the European Western and one of the great pop stylists of all time, was probably never better than with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, his 1966 classic with Eastwood, Van Cleef, and Wallach filmed in Almeria, Spain, and set in some weird mythical America that never existed. Brilliant. Leone's fellow countryman and artistic collaborator, composer Ennio Morricone, I don't think ever composed a piece of music as beautiful as the "Ecstasy of Gold" sequence.

This is cinema. This is the Spain and Italy of my dreams....

Let's hope the match, which should beginning in just a few minutes, is something wonderful to behold as well.