Eugene Weekly

Nebraska’s black-and-white cinematography, all wide skies and one-story main streets, is a signpost, an indicator that Alexander Payne wants you to think old. Think old movies; think old men; think old-school values. But start with old men. We meet Woody Grant (Bruce Dern, with a frizz of white hair and a loping stagger of a walk) making his way onto the highway. After the Billings cops pick him up, Woody explains to his son David (Will Forte) that he was en route to Nebraska to claim a million-dollar prize. Continue reading →

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 →

Sam Bond’s Garage bookends Sol Seed’s year quite well, and what a difference a year makes. On Dec. 31, 2012, Sol Seed played its first New Year’s Eve show at Sam Bond’s; the reggae fusion band will be reprising its role of ringing in the New Year with laid-back, back-beat cheer for 2014. Continue reading →

Can we talk about Jared Leto for a while? There’s a reason the internet likes to joke about Generation Catalano, referring to those neither-Gen X-nor-Millenial folks who identify with My So-Called Life, the excellent, short-lived TV show whose stars are now stars again. Claire Danes, now all angles and coolness, is on Homeland, while Leto, who played her crush, Jordan Catalano, is mostly a rock star. Every so often he turns up in a movie. Continue reading →

Stephen Frears’ Philomena hardly marks the first time Steve Coogan has played an ordinary fellow, but it feels like a definitive forward step in a peculiar and interesting career. To some, he’ll never stop being the British TV character Alan Partridge; to me, he’s always the guy from the under-seen Tristram Shandy, who pops up in brilliant cameos in all sorts of places (including Hot Fuzz).  Continue reading →

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 →

For a film based on a graphic novel, it’s fitting that Blue Is the Warmest Color opens with the discussion of another novel, La Vie de Marianne by Pierre de Marivaux. The 18th-century author cleared a path for romanticists like Jane Austen to delve into an examined life that balances reason with emotion, a theme director Abdellatif Kechiche also examines in his fervid, coming-of-age love story. Continue reading →

If Gary Ross’s Hunger Games was a solid piece of entertainment with a sort of finger-wagging moral streak (Look how bad this is! This society is sooooo corrupt!), Francis Lawrence’s Catching Fire is its older sibling, an honest-to-goodness movie (as opposed to just an adaptation) with a nasty dark side and a sullen but fierce heart. Continue reading →