Author: Rick Levin

Take Down

Film

A Eugene native and graduate of South Eugene High School, screenwriter E. Max Frye is nominated (along with co-writer Dan Futterman) for an Academy Award for his work on the Foxcatcher screenplay. Directed by Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball), Foxcatcher is based on the true story of John du Pont, an heir to the Du Pont family fortune who, in the 1980s, established Foxcatcher Farm, a wrestling facility on his estate where he worked with sibling gold-medalists Mark and Dave Shultz. Continue reading →

The Art of Recovery

Health

photos by trask bedortha In theater as in life, timing is everything, though just showing up is a good start. And at the Healing Trauma Project on Coburg Road, where performers have been rehearsing in anticipation of its Feb. 7 show at Wildish Theater, the cast of Transformational Personal Theatre has definitely shown up, in itself a small miracle. These are people who, all things being equal, might not have shown up at all. Continue reading →

The Scope of War

Film

I’ve been to hundreds of movies over the years, but I’ve never experienced anything remotely like the solemnity that settled over the audience at the end of Clint Eastwood’s latest film, American Sniper. Absolute quiet. Not a person rose to leave. It wasn’t until the real-life footage of the memorial motorcade for murdered Navy SEAL Chris Kyle bled into a stream of rolling credits that the souls in that movieplex rose, still in silence, and filed out like a funeral procession. Continue reading →

Party Downtown and Belly’s “Oaxaca”

Eugene foodies were out in full force Sunday

Chow

Eugene foodies were out in full force Sunday, Jan. 18, as patrons gathered to enjoy “Oaxaca,” the third collaboration dinner put on by Party Downtown and Belly. Upwards of 80 local folks attended this celebration of Mexican culture and cuisine, the brainchild of two of this town’s finest chefs, Belly’s Brendon Mahaney and Party’s Mark Kosmicki, both of whom put their considerable talents to task decking the tables with a delicious variety of authentic dishes inspired by the southern Mexican state known for, among other things, its mezcal and mole. Continue reading →

Domestic Crimes in Arid Climes

Christmas is fakakta for the family in VLT’s Other Desert Cities

Theater
Brett French, Tracy Ilene Miller, Bill Campbell, Christine Hanks and Pamela Lehan-siegel in VLT’s Other Desert Cities.

No American playwright — and perhaps no playwright ever — was as adept as Tennessee Williams at pulling apart the icky, sticky tangle of hurt that one furiously guarded secret can exact on a family. In the humid atmosphere of a Williams play, a single skeleton in the closet can level an entire clan for generations down the line, by way of recrimination, jealousy, resentment, obsession, addiction and, most of all, fear. Shit gets ugly when we tamp down the truth. Continue reading →

Snow Balls

Film

At the heart of most Hollywood films, from The Wizard of Oz to World War Z, is some perceived threat to the domestic tranquility of the nuclear family. Whether it’s a tsunami, invading aliens or a stampeding horde of zombies, the danger that rattles our cinematic daydreams is the impending chaos of social disintegration, and it typically befalls an unlikely hero (usually dad, sometimes mom) to suddenly acquire a spine and ward off the forces of evil. Continue reading →

The Babadook

Film

Who — or, rather, what — is the Babadook? And why is it that, once you let the Babadook in, you can never get rid of it? First and foremost, The Babadook is an Australian horror film by writer-director Jennifer Kent, a former actor who apprenticed with Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier during the making of his 2003 film Dogville before going on to make her own short film, Monster, upon which The Babadook is based. Continue reading →

A Little Dickens

Theater
Tinamarie Ivey as the Ghost of Christmas Present and Robert Hirsh as Scrooge

It’s a timeless literary trope, from Ecclesiastes to Groundhog Day: A cynical man, mired in despair and the funk of worldly resentments, is confronted with the error of his ways to such an extent that he undergoes an immediate and permanent transformation, emerging from darkness into light. Such victories of the spirit are the epitome of happily ever after, and we never tire of their telling. Continue reading →

Ducks vs. Criminoles

Sports

A good friend of mine in Seattle — an Eritrean immigrant who helped pen that country’s as yet unratified constitution — once pointed out that, should I really want to understand the collision of race and politics in the U.S., read the sports pages. I figured he was being coy, but the more I think about it, the more I comprehend sports as a microcosm of society, where all sorts of racial and social tensions play out, often in the subterranean codes of privilege, ability and competition. Continue reading →