Well, the last debate is finally behind us, and I don't know about you, but I'm pretty worn out at the prospect of hearing more bloviating punditry and stump speeches. Which means its time to sink myself into a theater seat and watch a whole mess of movies until Election Day.

And as a fan of foreign fare, the rest of the month is proving to be one of the more action-packed of the year, with a ridiculous amount of choices to consider.

So, if you share my weariness at the election year hullabaloo going on and my love of films from other shores, let me share with you some options to take your mind off current affairs, if only for a little while.

This coming week, the Hollywood Theatre is showcasing two of the best French films of recent months: Claude Chabrol's latest effort, A Girl Cut In Two, and the heart-pounding thriller Tell No One. In the former, Ludivine Sagnier plays a young woman torn between two men -- one a middle-adged novelist, the other a spoiled rich kid -- in a fascinating study of the effects of class affiliations with one's personal desires. The latter is most definitely one of the best films I've seen all year, with Francois Cluzet starring as a doctor haunted by the death of his wife and who is thrown into a whirlwind of intrigue after some mysterious e-mail messages suggest that his wife might still be alive. It's a beautifully executed potboiler that keeps you guessing from beginning to end.

Speaking of the Hollywood, the good people who are behind the theater, Film Action Oregon, are just one of the sponsors of this year's Portland Latin American Film Festival. Starting TONIGHT at the Whitsell Auditorium with a screening of the Venezuelan film Postcards From Leningrad, this short festival runs through the weekend, showcasing 17 films from nine Latin American countries. The rest of the films will be screened at either the Living Room Theaters or at the Regal Broadway Metroplex. For a full schedule, visit the festival's website.

Later this month, starting on the 24th of October, the NW Film Center will begin a series called "Japanese Currents", which, as the title suggests, is a sampling of recent films from Japan that runs the gamut from explorations of that country's justice system (Masayuki Suo's I Just Didn't Do It) to hilarious satires of popular culture and monster movies (Big Man Japan) to heartfelt family dramas (the blockbuster hit Tokyo Tower: Me, Mom and Sometimes Dad). The full schedule of films can be found on the NW Film Center website.

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When looking at David Lean's long career behind the camera from afar, it is quite often the largest and most epic of his films -- The Bridge on The River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago among them -- that are the only ones visible.

It's for good reason as well; they are big, brash, bold entertainments chock full of rousing acting and scenes and some of the most sumptuous cinematography ever to be committed to celluloid.

Draw your focus in closer, however, and you find out quickly that his early career is well worth your attention and speculation. Through out the '40s and '50s, Lean worked in his native England, producing stirring dramas that echo the themes of his more well-known works: the triumph of the human spirit against impossible odds, being the most prevalent.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, the British Film Institute has restored ten of Lean's greatest early efforts, including three collaborations with his friend Noel Coward, adaptations of two of Dickens' greatest works (Great Expectations and Oliver Twist), and two of his most intimate human dramas, The Passionate Friends and Brief Encounter.

All of these films will be featured at the Northwest Film Center starting this Friday with a one-time screening of In Which We Serve, the stirring WWI drama that takes place on a warship, which Lean co-directed with Coward. The series runs through the month of October.

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This is a tough month for movie obsessives. We have just recovered from the deluge of summer blockbusters and are patiently waiting for the major studios to start cramming prestige films (read: Oscar bait) into our hot little hands.

But, we in Portland are lucky. Lucky that we live in a town as film crazy as we are, our landscape dotted with revival houses and independent theaters and bars willing to show films both old and new, high and low class, blockbuster and B-movie.

If you're a regular reader of my blog here, you know that I tend to aim my gaze at these types of movie houses, so you won't be surprised if the films I suggest this week take you a little ways off the beaten path. But the two films that I'm recommending this time around have a little something extra -- there are decent odds that you won't be able to see either of them on the big screen after this Sunday. That's incentive enough, if you ask me. 

Searchers 2.0
Alex Cox came to the attention of the still-nascent American independent film movement with a series of raw, punk-inspired epics (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy and Straight To Hell, among them) that eschewed traditional narratives and easy to swallow plots, instead stitching his stories together with political insight, a fair amount of anger and a filthy combination of black and absurdist humor. In the ensuing years, Cox fell off the radar of populist critics and film festival acclaim, but continued to make movies on a much smaller scale. They still have the same playful energy of his earlier works, even if the names on the marquee are a lot less recognizable.

His most recent feature is Searchers 2.0, a road movie/comedy about a pair of aging actors who go on a trip to Monument Valley (the place where John Ford filmed many of his greatest epics) to seek revenge on a director who did them wrong back in the day. In both title and execution, the film is an homage to the works of Ford, Howard Hawks and Sergio Leone, but cut through with that ironic, winking humor that Cox does so well.

The film will be having a rare screening at Cinema 21 this Sunday at 3:00pm, with Alex Cox on hand to introduce it and (hopefully) answer some questions about his fascinating career afterwards.

Pig Roast & Tank of Fish
Someday Lounge is celebrating its second birthday this weekend, with a rotating cast of performers and music, and on Sunday at 7:00pm, they will cap it all off with a screening of a new documentary filmed right here in Portland.

This new film is an exploration of what happened to Portland's Chinatown district. Once the second largest in the U.S., our Chinatown has since been shrunken down by everything from homeless shelters to nightclubs and condominiums. Director Ivy Lin took her cameras into this area of NW Portland to get a sense of its glory days, its less triumphant present and the possibilities for the future of the Chinese-American community in our downtown corridor.

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Over the course of three years, Masaki Kobayashi made one of the most searing portraits of World War II-era Japan. Known as The Human Condition, the film is a nine-hour, three part epic following a young pacifist and socialist as he struggles with his spirit, morals and beliefs after he is forced into military service.

It is a trilogy that carried a lot of personal weight for the director, as he pulled a great deal of experiences from his own life to tell this sweeping tale. Kobayashi was drafted into service during WWII, forced to fight on the Manchurian front and captured by the U.S. on the Ryukyu Islands during the last days of the conflict.

The director transfers many of his conflicted ideals about the war and his own pacifism onto the character of Kaji, a young factory supervisor who is labeled as a dissenter after his attempts to improve the conditions of the mine. Kaji is taken into custody and tortured and then pushed into the Japanese army, where he excels in his training despite his moral opposition to it.

The Human Condition is an indelible work from one of the masters of Japanese cinema and is getting a rare screening thanks to the NW Film Center throughout the last few weeks of September. If you consider yourself a film fan, you should make every effort to see at least one part of this epic trilogy. The first part, No Greater Love, shows this weekend at the Whitsell Auditorium (Friday, 9/19 at 7:00pm; Saturday, 9/20 at 2:00pm; and Sunday, 9/21 at 6:00pm).

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Twenty-two years ago, a small film was picked up by a major movie studio, mainly due to the rising temperature surrounding the career of its start, River Phoenix. Based on the director's semi-autobiographical novel, the film, entitled Aren't You Even Gonna KIss Me Goodbye, follows a young man as he struggles to find direction after graduating from high school.

Besides the memorable casting of Phoenix, a young Matthew Perry, Ione Skye and Ann Magnuson, the film also boasted a score by famed composer Elmer Bernstein, a song sung by Johnny Mathis and another written and performed by the film's star.

When the film finally hit theaters two years later, it not only had an entirely new title -- A Night In the Life of Jimmy Reardon -- but all that the writer/director William Richert was holding dear to (the score, the songs and a few salacious scenes and pieces of dialogue) were chopped out. The film was notable flop in 1988, something that the director claims was due to the hack job the studio made of his film.

Twenty years on, Richert has not yet decided to let bygones be bygones, putting together the film as he intended it to be seen and releasing it on a self-produced run of DVDs and streaming it on his website.

Now (just as he threatened on his website and in a letter to film critics in the Chicago area), Richert is bringing his original vision to independent theaters, including a stop at our very own Clinton Street Theater starting this Friday (7:00pm & 9:00pm).

Reviews I've read about this reconfigured film have been decidedly mixed (Noah Mickins of the AV Club calls the film "a nifty little sleeper -- funny, sad, hearfelt and true," while the Chicago Reader's J.R. Jones says that he finds the studio cut is "superior in almost every respect"), but I'm still intrigued enough to want to attend a screening of this film next week. I'll do my best to report back to you on it right here.

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