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There are no other vampire stories like this. In a strange, dark town — one with few residents but with a bustling drug trade, with rich young women and clever street urchins — a young man named Arash (Arash Marandi) lives with his junkie father and a cat he picks up in the film’s opening scenes. Arash is done up to recall James Dean; he’s a classic, as is the beautiful car he drives. Continue reading
Would you like to watch a movie about a woman? Or a movie not full of white faces? Maybe later. That’s the theme of this year’s Academy Awards Best Picture nominations, which are almost entirely about Great White Men doing Great White Men Things. Continue reading
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
If you know anything about Alan Turing — anything at all, including, say, what you might have gleaned from reading Neal Stephenson’s excellent doorstop of a novel Cryptonomicon — The Imitation Game is unlikely to surprise you. As a tidy, glossy, good-for-you awards-season film about important Brits, it’s entirely watchable, and not much more. Continue reading
The enormous diversity gap the Oscars tends to leave in its wake can make you want to give up on film altogether. Luckily, here in Eugene, there’s a place less mainstream films can thrive. Currently in its 23rd year, the Queer Film Festival, presented by the UO’s Cultural Forum, will screen 21 LGBTQ-focused films at the Bijou Metro Feb. 6-8. This year, filmmakers Christina Hurtado-Pierson (Transmilitary) and Liliya Anisimova (Love Is The Highest Law) will travel from New York to host discussions and Q&A sessions 7 pm Feb. 6 and 7. Continue reading
The Oscar-nominated short films are always something of a mixed bag, but this year gives us a particularly strange crop. While there’s always at least one sentimental entry among the live-action films, the most recent nominees are notably melancholy — excepting Butter Lamp, a French and Chinese co-production set in Tibet. The camera in this poignant but funny short never moves. A photographer takes pictures of families, groups of children, a couple; he has props and backgrounds, and encounters minor officials and mischievous kids. Continue reading
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
Not to mince words, but Evynne and Peter Hollens are kind of a big deal. Evynne Hollens is a singer and performer who directs and teaches. Peter Hollens is a singer-songwriter, producer and entrepreneur. Together, they’ve built a life in music and, from their cozy base in Eugene, shared it with the world. Continue reading
Ava DuVernay’s Selma starts off so calmly that, despite what history promises, it’s a shock when the first moment of violence arrives. Four little girls walk down the stairs of a church. You know what this means. But what happens next occurs in a flash, a moment never explained. What’s to explain? They’re there, and then they’re gone. It’s like the bottom drops out of the world. At that point, a man in my theater began to cry and I’m not sure he stopped. Continue reading