We've got issues.
Staff writer for Eugene Weekly, Rick Levin been airing his grievances in newspapers for the better part of two decades.
Of all the literary devices used to grant a physical wallop to a character’s metaphysical situation, I suppose making a pathological narcissist blind isn’t the worst. I mean, it ain’t Ahab’s missing leg or the impotence of Jake Barnes, but what the hell? It works, in a slight to middling way. Continue reading
Ron Howard has said that he hoped to make Eight Days a Week both for dedicated Beatles fans and for a younger generation that has little sense of who The Beatles were. I’m not sure where this leaves me, as I’m neither a millennial nor a Beatles diehard, but a person who appreciates a good music documentary. And Eight Days is fine — a solid mix of archival footage, new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, crowd-sourced footage and reminiscences from musicians or now-famous people who once saw The Beatles. Continue reading
As the riotous ’60s bled into the scabby ’70s, a lot of people in this country found themselves asking what happened to the American Dream, and movies from that era reflected this swooning miasma. In film after great film, directors like Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman, to name just a few, tapped into our growing sense that something had gone seriously, desperately wrong — that the great social experiment of democracy and prosperity had finally begun rotting from the inside out. Continue reading
Standing in a cavernous St. Vincent de Paul warehouse on Chad Drive, executive director Terry McDonald and I survey stacks upon stacks of identical cardboard boxes, each one the size of a watermelon crate. It’s quite a sight. The stacks tower toward the ceiling and stretch horizontally wall to wall, and their Lego-like arrangement creates the shadowy alleys of a deserted city at sundown. All told, the boxes contain more than one million pounds of used books. Continue reading
As owner and operator of Brails Restaurant in south Eugene, Sang Joo (aka Joy) Knudtson provides a big measure of the joint’s appeal. On any given morning you can find her zipping around the linoleum floor of this old-fashioned American diner with the antic patterns of a human hurricane — part field marshal, part peppy maestro, all cult of personality. Continue reading
After the fireworks, there’s still the smoke. The legalization of retail weed in Oregon — a real Fourth of July moment for potheads — has left in its wake an enduring fug of legal, political and commercial questions that can make prohibition look like a cheerful stroll to the neighborhood dealer in comparison. Continue reading
As an accidental theater critic for the past 15 years or so, first in Seattle and now in Eugene, I’ve had the great good fortune to see Shakespeare performed in a variety of ways and in a variety of settings, professional and otherwise. Often upon the stage it’s just a poor player strutting and fretting, signifying very little, yet other times the work is divine beyond all reason. Continue reading
It goes without saying that horror, strictly speaking, is not among cinema’s most expansive genres. Most times, it’s as conservative and formulaic as porn, and its requisite elements are as familiar as a bowl of chicken noodle soup. Continue reading
Central to the comic tension of You Can’t Take It With You is a fairly routine dichotomy that, perhaps by its very nature, remains forever unresolved, and which best might be summed up thus: freedom versus bondage. Of course, freedom and bondage have been at war since before Socrates whispered in Plato’s ear and Jesus put a shellacking on the Pharisees, but in this country we like to imagine capitalism invented the eternal conflict between vile materialism and spiritual liberation — in other words, Wall Street versus Main Street. Continue reading
The passion of a young scholar knows no bounds. In the pursuit of knowledge, the King of Navarre and his best friends swear a sacred vow to renounce sleep, wine and even women for three years as they engage solely in educating themselves. Then the witty Princess of France and her ladies in waiting arrive at the court of Navarre to negotiate a land dispute. Mayhem ensues. Continue reading