Author: Rick Levin

A Hairy Landscape

One reviewer, two plays: Hair and Landscape of the Body

Theater
Rebecca Lee and Anne Lupin in Landscape of the Body

Some things never change, especially in Eugene, where great pockets of time stop and drop into a sinkhole of self-fertilization. Look at our eternal perpetuation of hippie nostalgia, which has become a cottage industry in itself, for better and worse. Marx noted that all great historical moments — like the long-gone Age of Aquarius, for instance — occur twice, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce, and for those among us who forget that Easy Rider did not have a happy ending, a pair of plays currently in production carry a strong corrective message. Continue reading →

Capitalism bares its teeth

Film

From his early career until now, director Martin Scorsese has been documenting the dark and devious side of The American Dream, where success achieved in bad faith leads to spectacular crashes and spiritual bankruptcy. Scorsese is obsessed with the Cinderella story in reverse, where the magic slipper shatters into killing shards of glass. Continue reading →

Alone Out There

Mental illness on our streets

News

Few things are as starkly inconvenient to our collective perception of well-being than the ongoing existence of homelessness and mental illness. They baffle our understanding. And so, when these two uncomfortable facts collide in a very public way — say, in the form of a ragged man screaming at ghosts in Kesey Square — we reach a level of collective dismay that approaches hysteria. Hysteria, which is just fear, drives us to extremes: anger, pity, denial, paralysis. Continue reading →

Do the Hustle

Film

David O. Russell’s new film, American Hustle, is a shaggy, shambolic love story masquerading as a period crime drama. Loosely based on the ABSCAM operation of the late 1970s, the movie follows the exploits of a pair of charming con artists, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who end up getting popped by an ambitious FBI agent, Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), and thereby enlisted in a sting that seeks to bring down, among others, Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), the mayor of Camden, N.J. Continue reading →

A Blank Screen

Film

Tom Blank is on a mission.   A Navy veteran and retired director who served his career in television, Blank and his wife moved in 2005 from Hollywood to Eugene, where he immediately took up the cause of advocating for movies as cultural and spiritual artifacts.   Continue reading →

Young Love

Film

Genre breeds familiarity, and then formula, and then contempt. This is especially true when it comes to romantic comedies, which seemed to suffocate on their own fey cuteness with the disappearance of such seminal directors as Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks. Continue reading →