This is certainly one of the most intriguing Augusts in recent movie-watching history. Granted, a lot of that is due to the fact almost every theater around is still closed because there's still a pandemic going on outside, but even if you set that aside, there's a lot of really interesting stuff to watch, be it a massive blockbuster double feature at the drive-in Remind Like List , a fleet-footed Netflix original Like List and HBO Max getting a little pickled Like List , a pair of peanuts new to streaming, and dinosaurs Like List . Whatever you choose from below, there's a plethora of Things to Watch this weekend!
Jump to: Drive-Ins | Supporting Local Theaters | New on Blu-Ray | Streaming This Weekend
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DRIVE-INS
Cinema Unbound: John Lewis: Good Trouble and
Past Event
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Moonlight
Past Event
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Northwest Film Center and Portland Art Museum are transforming Zidell Yards into a drive-in theater (building it from scratch, in fact) dedicated to showing how freeing good film can be by screening classics, new releases, and little-seen gems on as big a screen as they can. Each movie will be preceded by a regional short to help spotlight even more unique and necessary voices in cinema.
99w Drive-In Double Feature: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and The Empire Strikes Back
Remind
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Drive-ins are probably the only way to get any sort of big-screen action back in your life without, you know, trapping yourself inside a dark box with other people while no vaccine exists and air conditioning is just circulating everyone's coughs, sneezes, and spittle into as many rooms as possible. Instead, you can pull up in your car, turn up your speakers, and let 99w fill your windshield their latest throwback double-feature, which is going about as big as the '80s ever got, starting with the most sweetly-manipulative children's story Steven Spielberg ever made, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and following with what everyone still recognizes as "the best one" of the Star Wars saga, The Empire Strikes Back. The one thing that's for sure: If you've got good speakers in your car, they're going to be filled with some of the best film music ever composed.
Movies Under the Stars: The Princess Bride
Past Event
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The Rose City Rollers are getting in on all the drive-in fun happening this summer in the hopes it'll help raise funds for the organization, and so: Drive out to Oaks Park, park in front of the beloved Hangar, and watch as The Princess Bride plays out under the stars in all its charming, left-handed glory.
Drive-In Saturday: Back to the Future
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The Bijou Theatre, Lincoln City Cultural Center, and the City of Lincoln City are bringing movies back to the big screen. Specifically, the big screen on the outside of the Lincoln City Cultural Center, where they'll be showing some of Hollywood's biggest crowd-pleasers all August long. This weekend's choice? A charming story set once upon the 1980s, when a young Republican in a life-vest, with the help of his science friend, traveled back in time to prevent his own mother’s sexual advances and instead steered her toward Crispin Glover’s dick. He succeeded, but accidentally transformed the future into Planet Las Vegas, which sounds cool, but was actually kinda shitty. So he went all the way back to the Wild West, where Mary Steenburgen lives, and managed to set the timeline back on track and everyone learned that it’s never really a good idea to steal plutonium from angry Libyans. Costarring Huey Lewis and Flea.
SUPPORTING LOCAL THEATERS
You Never Had It: An Evening with Bukowski
Past Event
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A special screening of this short documentary that does exactly what it says it does: Puts you in Charles Bukowski's living room for a night as the famously grumpy poet and writer smokes about five million cigarettes, drinks, and opines on whatever the hell crosses his frontal lobe at the time.
Clinton Street Theater
Gremlins: A Puppet Story
Past Event
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Legendary effects specialist (or special effects legend? Either/or) Chris Walas leads this behind-the-scenes journey made especially for Hollywood Theatre viewers, walking the audience through how Gremlins got made, and featuring very rare photos and video from his own personal archive.
Hollywood Theatre
Lucky Grandma
Past Event
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In this crime caper set in New York's Chinatown, a recently widowed 80-year-old woman follows a fortune teller's advice and heads to the nearest casino to win some big bucks. But things don't go so great, as they often don't at casinos. When two gambling gangsters show up at her door and start demanding money, she and her newly acquired bodyguard do what must be done: kick ass for the duration of the film.
Clinton Street Theater
Creem: America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine
Past Event
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There was once a time when magazines were healthy and thriving, and the words on their glossy pages could shift culture and make stars out of many a stringy, floppy-haired, fleet-fingered would-be guitar-god. Creem was one of the most influential of such magazines, and this documentary charts the mag's beginnings as an underground zine, basically, to becoming a publishing powerhouse and a must-read thanks to people like publisher Barry Kramer and its most famous columnist, Lester Bangs.
Hollywood Theatre
The Virtual Portland German Film Festival
Past Event
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The Clinton Street's annual celebration of German film moves online for 2020, but you can still support the theater (and the filmmakers) by checking out a lineup of compelling films across a wide range of genres, All films in German with English subtitles.
Clinton Street Theater
NEW ON BLU-RAY
Swallow
One of the most unnerving and quietly freaky new horror films to come out in the last five years (which is saying quite a bit considering that includes stuff like Mandy and Midsommar), Swallow tells the story of a young housewife (Haley Bennett, that one actor you keep thinking is Jennifer Lawrence but can't be her because this Haley woman can really fucking act) whose life and marriage slowly deteriorates in highly disturbing fashion thanks to developing an emotional coping mechanism that involves consuming completely inedible objects.
Shanghai Triad
Zhang Yimou is mostly known in America for his massive historical epics, movies like House of Flying Daggers, Hero, and most recently, Shadow. But some students of the man's filmography might say that Shanghai Triad, a gangster drama from 1995 is the man's real masterpiece. Based on a novel by Li Xiao, Triad is about a country rube of a 13-year-old boy thrown into the world of organized crime and forced to be the manservant a mob boss' mistress (Gong Li). Does he fall under her spell? Does she have her own schemes in mind? Is this a coming-of-age crime-drama that seems like the perfect blend of Scorsese's Goodfellas and The Age of Innocence? Yes, yes, and yes.
House of Hummingbird
Fourteen-year-old Eunhee has little comfort in life, whether at middle school (actual teacher quote: “We die every day”), with her tense family, or among fickle friends and crushes. She finds unexpected solace when she gets a new Chinese tutor: Youngji, a gentle, independent woman who recognizes Eunhee’s acute loneliness and confusion. Bora Kim’s debut film, set in the outskirts of 1990s Seoul, explores the teenager’s relationships rather than following a single narrative. Though we focus on Eunhee, played by an incredibly natural Ji-hu Park, every character seems to be hiding an inner universe, and we’re soon invested in the friendships, loves, and heartbreaks of this parochial world.
STREAMING THIS WEEKEND
The Tax Collector
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People think "auteur theory" is for fancy-schmancy serious artistes like Stanley Kubrick or Francois Truffaut, but the theory applies just as strongly to people like Michael Bay and David Ayer. And Ayer's latest, The Tax Collector, just solidifies the man's "auteurship." You got yourself the requisite heavily tattooed, angry men with shaved heads, deep into some serious criminal activity, and toting large guns with loud, fiery barrels to go along with dialog that seems to be made of nothing more than profanity, nails, and childhood trauma. Oh yeah, and one of those angry men? Shia LaBeouf. It's auteurs all over this thing, baby!
VOD
The Peanut Butter Falcon
Hey, speaking of Shia: With a cast like Dakota Johnson, John Hawkes, and LaBeouf himself, you might think The Peanut Butter Falcon is another gritty indie drama. But instead, it's a family-focused adventure film about a young man with Down syndrome who runs away from his nursing home to learn at the feet of the Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church) and become a famous professional wrestler. It may not have all the guns and tats of that other Shia flick above, but it's definitely going to be a lot more heartwarming.
Hulu, Amazon Prime Video
An American Pickle
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The first HBO Max original is a sweet-yet-salty riff on Rip Van Winkle, about a Jewish man who falls into a pickle brine and wakes up a century later, perfectly preserved and struggling to understand the ways of 2020 New York City with the help of his computer-programmer grandson. Both men are played by Seth Rogen, so we hope you enjoy that man's scratchy giggle because there's almost zero chance you're not going to hear it with two of him in the same movie.
HBO Max
Work It
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Alicia Keys produced this throwback to the early 2000s (Christ, that's about 20 years ago, ugh) when dance flicks had a minor resurgence and had a whole bunch of people who couldn't reliably count to four trying to "serve" folks in their high school cafeteria. Work It has a paper-thin story about a girl who really wants to get into college and needs to perform well at a dance competition, but paper-thin is all the story you need when everything about your movie lives and dies on a) personality and b) choreography. Tune in to see if this can join the pantheon of classics like Save the Last Dance and Step Up.
Netflix
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Of the multiple miracles of modern filmmaking that occur throughout the runtime of Eternal Sunshine—including such feats as “Jim Carrey underplays things,” “Kirsten Dunst isn’t annoying,” and “Michel Gondry doesn’t twee his movie to death”—the most notable? This sci-fi tragedy about a broken relationship is maybe the most poignantly romantic film of the last 25 years.
Netflix
Time Bandits
Probably the most subversive kids' film ever made, sending the following messages simultaneously: Stealing is awesome, adults are stupid, your parents are useless, God is a musty dipshit, and there's no adventure like the kind you get into with a band of marauding, time-traveling steampunk dwarfs. If you couldn't suss it out by the description alone, this is definitely a Terry Gilliam joint.
HBO Max
Waiting for the Barbarians
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Director Ciro Guerra's latest film is a pretty straightforward, on-the-nose condemnation of colonization and the generational cruelty it never fails to breed, but it's the way the condemnation is made that's notable. It's essentially a stage play, albeit one set in an amazing desert set, and starring a fairly heavy-duty cast, including Oscar-winner Mark Rylance, future-Batman Robert Pattinson, and 21 Jump Street alumnus Johnny Depp.
VOD
Nailed It!
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Netflix is getting scary good at the whole reality show thing, and that's probably not a good thing overall, considering how the apex of the previous reality show era led to (waves frustratedly at current White House occupant), but the good news is that Netflix's best original reality show is still Nailed It!, a charming, fizzy, lighthearted cooking competition hosted by Nicole Byer and focused on baking tragedies perpetrated by well-meaning amateur cooks. Season two of their excursion into Mexico with hosts Omar Chaparro and Anna Ruiz premieres this weekend.
Netflix
The Peanuts Movie
Many people didn't really give this film a shot when it came out for a couple reasons: Firstly, Peanuts is considered pretty boring and trite now (despite the fact the comics themselves are frequently kinda dark and packed with neurotic ennui), and secondly, nobody thought the squiggly, simple art-style of Charles Schulz could translate to 3D. But now that it's on Disney+, more people might discover that not only is it very faithful to those comics, it's somehow also faithful to that lo-fi, folksy feel so many people remember from those old Charlie Brown cartoons. There are a couple odd intrusions of modern-day pop-culture elbowing in, but those blips of annoyingness aside, this is probably one of the best animated Peanuts adventures ever made.
Disney+
The Secret Garden
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Yet another live-action crack at the classic children's fantasy tale by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It's probably not going to be bad, because considering Burnett's source material, you'd have to be Uwe Boll to screw up the story. But it is being adapted by Jack Thorne, a guy whose biggest claim to fame is writing the fascinating-and-often-baffling Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stage play. If he took Harry Potter and turned it into that, the curiosity level for what he might do to The Secret Garden is pretty high up there.
VOD
Hellraiser
The man with pins in his face is the leader of an extradimensional S&M club, essentially. There are several other details about the film, but that's the pivot point. Stephen King famously called its director, Clive Barker, "the future of horror."
Hulu
The Jurassic Park Trilogy
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Before you can even get that "But you forgot abou—" off your fingertips and into a comment box somewhere: There are only three Jurassic Park movies. And those three movies are now available for you to binge back-to-back-to-back, at which point you might realize the conventional wisdom about the third one is pretty broken, and it's in fact the second-best movie in the series because it's nothing more than a quick, clean, and efficient monster movie. It knows exactly what it wants to do, and then it goes out and does it. The same can't be said for The Lost World, which is a mostly-dour, confused mash of crowd-pleasing intent and annoying, unsatisfying execution. The first is a goddamned classic, of course, and being able to call up the T-Rex scene at will is one of the blessings of the modern age.
Netflix
And if you're not feeling any of the above options (crazy!) don't forget to check out our guide to 2020's most Emmy nominated shows, and maybe binge a couple highly-acclaimed series this weekend!
