Blog Food Hey PDX January 9, 2025 0 Comments

In This Year: Going to the Movies

You’re reading a past edition of our weekly Things to Do column, about the concerts, art shows, comedy sets, movies, readings, and plays we’re attending each week. Read the current installment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.

Have you had any clumsy portmanteaus thrown at you recently? “Glicked”? “Babyferatu”? Since the fleeting, monocultural moment the tandem releases of Barbie and Oppenheimer delivered in summer 2023, both movie studios and “the culture” have desperately chased that dragon of a society-unifying pairing. I’m not one for soft-focus nostalgia, lusting for the days when the hoi polloi cued up for the silver screen instead of Netflix—but I’m all for going to the movies.

And what better time to go to the theater? Studios release their biggest projects in December to take advantage of this strangely liminal, busy-but-not-busy moment around the winter holidays. In Portland, those glittery movies filter through a tangle of beautiful landmark theaters. On your way to watching Lily-Rose Depp in that new vampire flick, ogle the Hollywood’s gorgeous façade or the McMenamins St. Johns Theater’s vaulted church dome. Or immerse yourself in 110 years of local history at the Clinton Street or celebrate a century of Cinema 21.

Sometimes, like the holiday itself, Christmastime releases flop. But this year Hollywood delivered, big time. In no particular order, here are three of the season’s blockbusters to check out. There’s no need to watch them back-to-back, or awkwardly squish their names together.

Nosferatu Resurrecting (literally) the 1922 German Expressionist film, director Robert Eggers’s erotically charged horror movie stars Lily-Rose Depp as an 1800s German woman porcelain-perfect enough to attract Death himself.
Babygirl This sophomore feature from Dutch actor-turned-director Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) stars Nicole Kidman in a take on the age-gap office affair that flips the genre’s presumed gender roles. (See this weird video of Andrew Garfield praising Kidman’s costar Harris Dickinson.)
The Brutalist Adrien Brody stars in this nearly four-hour epic as a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor who studied architecture at the Bauhaus. Addiction, American ambition, and a roller-coaster life ensue. I’ve heard it called Tár “for men.”

More Things to Do This Week

Music Black Belt Eagle Scout

7pm Jan 8 | The Reser, $28

Portlander Katherine Paul’s 2023 album, The Land, The Water, The Sky, marked a homecoming. During the COVID pandemic, she took a trip to her ancestral Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, on the Skagit River in northwest Washington, and made songs about the experience, mixing in her riot grrrl–influenced sound. Part of the Reser’s American Strings series, this show will start with Paul in conversation with ethnomusicologist and public historian Kelly Bosworth.

visual art Jia Jia and Melanie Tsang

Reception 5–8pm Sat, Jan 4 | Well Well Projects, FREE

Two Chinese-born artists reflect the relentless forces of immigration in this compelling show of installation and sculptural works, Echoes of Passage. Jia Jia’s organ-like ceramics erupt, with pages of the Oxford English Dictionary, from neatly sewn leather sculptures, evoking the contortions of assimilation as well as the contrast of Western and Eastern approaches to bodily healing: interventional cutting and sewing versus passive, holistic methods of Chinese medicine. Reproducing her own immigration documents on transparent paper and submerging them in water on surgical trays, Melanie Tsang similarly depicts immigration with coarse surgical metaphors.

Bull Riding Pendleton Whisky Velocity Tour

8pm Fri & 7pm Sat, Jan 3 & 4 | Moda Center, $20+

While the Moda Center will have the chaps, dirt, and Stetsons of a rodeo stadium this weekend, calling it such wouldn’t be entirely accurate. In the early ’90s, a group of bull riders separated what they saw as the rodeo’s most electric event and created the Professional Bull Riders league (PBR), added some pyrotechnics, lighting effects, and jumbotrons, and sought a mainstream audience. Essentially, this is the NBA, NFL, MLB…of bull riding.