Eugene Weekly

2012 is flying by, people. The end is nigh, supposedly, on Dec. 21, and so this month, the University of Oregon Folklore program began a series of film screenings entitled “Apocalypse Now … and Then” that will run weekly through Wednesday, Nov. 21. Take a wild crack at what the films are about — yep, you guessed it: the end of the freaking world. The series includes such films as Children of Men (10-24), The Omega Man (11-7), Night of the Comet (11-21) and other such apocalyptic works. Continue reading →

High expectations sometimes lay you low, and the very word “superhero” spurs one’s anticipation of a movie adaptation to leap tall multiplexes in a single bound and travel faster than a speeding bullet to the box office. It can’t be helped. Walking into the July 20 midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises, my hopes were high. I assumed that this grand finale would be not only a step above all predecessors, but also well worth the particular discomfort of cramming into a packed theater at midnight. Neither of these assumptions panned out. Continue reading →

In the age of the quick fix and pop-up porn, you gotta hand it to E.L. James for hoodwinking the hoi polloi into dicking around with something as atavistic and temperate as on-the-page erotica. Fifty Shades of Grey — the first installment in a trilogy of erotic novels that started online as Twilight fanfiction — sold more than 10 million copies in six weeks in the U.S. alone. This, despite repeated assaults by high-brow literary critics as well as pop sexpert Dr. Continue reading →