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Shot in lavish black-and-white, Embrace of the Serpent drops you immediately into the humid nightmare of colonial devastation. A lone shaman, Karamakate (Nilbio Torres), squats silently on the banks of the Amazon River in the Colombian jungle. A canoe approaches, carrying a Colombian guide, Manduca (Yauenkü Miguee), and Theo (Jan Bijvoet), a German anthropologist dying of an unspecified disease. Continue reading
Mustang opens on the last day of school. A young student cries, hugging her teacher, who gives the girl her address. The girl, Lale (Günes Sensoy), is swept up by four other girls who can only be her sisters; they have endless manes of brown hair, and they show intense comfort with each other as they tumble out of the schoolyard and onto the beach, where they splash into the water, fully clothed. It’s like the beginning of so many school-aged summers: open, beautiful, full of possibility. Continue reading
If this were a movie, it might be a complicated and acrimonious courtroom drama called A Tale of Two Theaters, in which a pair of once-united independent movie houses splits over irreconcilable differences, becoming two separate cinemas run by different ownership. Continue reading
Lush, brooding and contagiously creepy, The Witch is just the sort of spooky gem that fans of horror clamor for but rarely get. The film neither shocks nor bludgeons you. It does not beg indulgence, nor does it paint its grotesqueries in broad strokes. Continue reading
After more than a decade of writing about movies, the Oscars, somehow, still raise a fire in me. I know I will be disappointed. I know there will be one or two wins that seem perfect, one or two speeches that surprise, just like I know that most of the lauded films will be about white men enduring something. I know the Oscars matter, on a business and cultural level, no matter what the Coen brothers — who’ve conveniently already earned a few — say. Winning is power and power is money, and money lets people decide which stories get told. Continue reading
The long-awaited Deadpool movie is a lot of excellent things: Lively! Violent! Cleverish! Ribald! (If you don’t enjoy the occasional — OK, frequent — dick joke, this is probably not the movie for you.) As the title character, Ryan Reynolds is in his element, and he embraces the challenge of being a likable, violent smartass whose face we often can’t even see (it’s a physical role on more than one level). Continue reading
The old adage that “laughter is the best medicine” has been put to the test by a pair of Eugene filmmakers. Produced and directed by James Blame and Ryan Shoop of Magbas Entertainment, Coping with Comedy is a 30-minute documentary that takes a look at the way local comedians use stand-up as a way of dealing with the trauma of various mental health issues. Continue reading
First impressions can be deceptive. Take, for instance, Joel and Ethan Coen, whose movies seem distinctly built to not be watched but re-watched. Usually, for me, the initial pass through a Coen brothers film proves a strangely tepid affair — The Big Lebowski and Brother, Where Art Thou? felt flat and disjointed the first time around — and it’s not until I return for a second and third look that things start to resonate and deepen. Continue reading
From a documentary on the emerging queer hip-hop movement to the avant-garde Blue, the 1993 experimental film from Derek Jarman released just months before his death from AIDS complications, the 24th annual Eugene Queer Film Festival offers an array of films expressing the dynamic and diverse queer experience. The fest, which runs Thursday through Saturday, Feb. 4-6, will screen international submissions, art films and queer classics. Continue reading
My press email about this year’s crop of Oscar shorts notes that all the animated shorts are rated approximately PG, except “Prologue,” which is described as “not suitable for children.” I would go a step further and say it’s not suitable to be a nominee; it’s more of a five-minute demo reel for someone who clearly has talent but little to say. Continue reading