The Oregonian

Comments (0) By Chuck Wilson Wednesday, Jun 6 2012

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The Oregonian
Directed by Calvin Lee Reader
Opens June 8, ReRun Gastropub Theater

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The unnamed Oregonian in question, a young woman (Lindsay Pulsipher) in her twenties, is having a bad day of Lynchian proportions. Bloody and bruised, she awakes behind the wheel of a crashed station wagon. There's a dead man lying near the car. Did she hit him? And could he be the same guy she's seeing in the flashbacks she's having? Writer-director Calvin Lee Reeder, making his feature debut, isn't interested in satisfying the conventional expectations of an audience. Abandoning logic, he sends his heroine stumbling down a mountain road where she encounters a creepy old lady whose menacing stare triggers those flashbacks, a trucker who pours gasoline on his morning pancakes, a man in a furry green frog costume, and a chilled-out dude who offers an explanation, of sorts, for all this weirdness: "These trees—they have a code. It's not for our understanding." Reeder has stated that he intends for The Oregonian to be "an art film" and not the horror movie it appears to be on the surface, but he's not above upping the gross-out factor in the final reel or creating scream-filled aural landscapes so piercing that one's spine ripples. Artfully.