Author: Rick Levin

Suffer the Children

Film

Recipe for an emotional pummeling: A mother and her 5-year-old son are locked up in a dank shed, held hostage by an evil piece of white shit who makes routine visits for creaky sex acts while the kid counts time, faking sleep in a tiny closet. Mom was abducted seven years ago, which means that the tight walls of “room” are all the child knows, all he comprehends of the world: his universe is a sink, bed, tub, table, television and the shed’s single skylight revealing endless blue nothingness. Continue reading →

Poker For Guns Draws Players, No Protests

Young American’s for Liberty Poker Night a surprisingly tame event

News

After all the anticipatory hubbub over the Young American’s for Liberty Nov. 20 Liberty Poker Night at UO’s Erb Memorial Union — during which the YAL’s local chapter was denied event funding by the UO student government — the tournament itself was a surprisingly tame event. Among the predominantly male crowd, not a single protester appeared. Continue reading →

Bedtime Stories

Art, truth and murder collide in LCC’s production of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman

Theater

On the surface, Irish author Martin McDonagh’s plays are foul, transgressive affairs, full of piss and vinegar and erect middle fingers. In the tradition of his literary forbears Swift, Joyce and Beckett, McDonagh is a relentlessly physical writer given to depicting all manner of human grotesquery — violence, perversion, degradation, deformity and compulsive cussing of the worst kind. Continue reading →

The Spectre of Mediocrity

Film

James Bond is a real son-of-a-bitch. Emotionally withdrawn and given to bouts of depression, the agent known as 007 is a classic anti-hero — sadistic, taciturn and misanthropic, he is an assassin driven by the icy requisites of duty but given to the thrill of stepping outside the lines when he smells a rat within his own intelligence organization. Continue reading →

Let There Be Blood

Film

Dear Guillermo del Toro: Qué pasó? Did someone hijack your latest movie, Crimson Peak, and simply keep your name on the writing and directing credits? I smell a rat. Maybe Tony Scott? No, sorry, he’s dead. Please tell me it wasn’t Michael Bay. Anybody but Michael Bay. Continue reading →

She’s Gone

Film

For the most part, the genre of horror has been a much-maligned cinematic ghetto populated almost exclusively by male directors, and God bless ’em all: They’ve titillated and tantalized and torn us apart to the best of their abilities over the years, some with more sophistication and some with less, mining every sexualized psychosis and reptilian yelp under the blood moon. Continue reading →

I Dream Corvallis

On the romantic illusions of road tripping

Travel

Having lived here going on eight years now, Eugene has become like family for me: I love it, but sometimes I don’t like it very much. For all the ballyhooed benefits of its artsy liberal veneer and outdoorsy appeal, Eugene remains, at its core, a small town steeped in vice, fractured by disarray and floundering in untapped potential — sorta dirty, kinda unpretty and altogether a tad menacing and drug-addled, like a white utopia revved up on the downslide. Continue reading →

Unplanned Parenthood

Film

Among the several pleasures of writer-director Paul Weitz’s new film Grandma is watching Lily Tomlin drop a petulant teenage slacker to the floor with a hockey stick to the nuts. The aggression is not unfounded: Elle (Tomlin) is simply avenging her newly pregnant granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner), who is trying to collect enough money for her abortion appointment, and her baby daddy (Nat Wolff) won’t cough up his share. Continue reading →

A Serious Flight of Fancy

OCT scores another hit with Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird

Theater
Joseph Workman and Roxanne Fox

In theater, the imaginary barrier separating an audience from the action on stage is called the fourth wall — a sort of make-believe TV screen that, by mutual agreement, keeps art on one side and spectators on the other. Artists have been fucking with the fourth wall for decades now, inviting the audience to a naughty peek behind the Oz-like curtain where the dirty secrets of creativity hide. In the wrong hands, the device is cloying and cheap and self-satisfied, like listening to a bong circle of conspiracy theorists. Continue reading →