Eugene Weekly

Maybe the most bittersweetly delightful thing about James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now is the way it captures the feeling of a drawn-out ending. For Aimee (Shailene Woodley), Sutter (Miles Teller) and their classmates, it’s the end of high school, a time when everything is bitingly vital and yet nothing matters much, since it’s all going to change in a few weeks anyway. What happens next is of the utmost importance, but no one really knows what that next thing will be, least of all Sutter, who has yet to get around to applying to college. Continue reading →

If we’re going to invent new sub-genres for Edgar Wright movies, a la the rom-zom-com (Shaun of the Dead), we need one for Lake Bell’s directorial debut, which is a … well … it’s a fem-fam-film-rom-geek-com? That needs some work. (Maybe Bell, a sharp and nuanced writer, can come up with something clever.) In a World… is a movie built for film geeks, trailer junkies and, well, anyone who’s ever noticed Hollywood’s sexist side. Which I like to think is, by now, all of us. Continue reading →

It’s been six long years since the last Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg collaboration, the gets-better-with-age Hot Fuzz. Wright and Pegg have kept plenty busy: Wright directed Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, my favorite comic book movie that comes off like a video game movie, and Pegg, of course, is Scotty in the new Star Trek franchise. Pegg and the third member of this trio, Nick Frost, spent some time on the disappointing Paul, while Frost memorably appeared in the entirely excellent Attack the Block (which Wright executive produced).  Continue reading →

Against my strongest instincts, I will resist saying too much, or anything too fancy, about Fruitvale Station, the excellent new movie based on the 2009 New Year’s shooting of a young black man by a security guard on San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit line. When a critic encounters anything of this rarefied quality, it’s best just to get out of the way. The film is that good. It is art of the highest caliber. It speaks for itself. It has the power to break your heart. Continue reading →

Science fiction, contrary to what its frequently fluffy appearances at the multiplex might lead you to believe, is a brilliant medium for ideas. You can invent anything: a starfleet based on equality, a future destroyed by robots, a world of passively invading alien parasites. You can dream up new versions of the future, or meld past and present; you can envision impossible technology. Science fiction is built to tell us who we are by imagining where we might be going.  Continue reading →

Perhaps, like Bauhaus furniture or the beauty of shallow people, Stanley Kubrick’s movies are meant to be admired but not loved. Kubrick, who died in 1999 at the age of 70, was a master stylist, a director whose films are as quickly identifiable as those of Alfred Hitchcock or Michael Mann. Steely, distanced, full of hard angles and wide vistas, a Kubrick movie is a study in formal technique, like looking upon a painting that magically, and rather sinisterly, animates itself. Continue reading →

Broken begins with loosely shuffled snippets of character and drama. When the film snaps into narrative focus, it’s with a sudden act of violence: On a quiet cul-de-sac, a young man washes his car. A passing neighbor girl says hello. The boy appears not quite all there: He has a hard time putting words in order, but he seems kind. As the girl departs, another neighbor appears, pulling his shirt off before knocking the young man halfway across the car. Continue reading →

It’s possible — though maybe not common — to go through your entire life not realizing that the line Merry Clayton sings in the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” begins, “Rape, murder!”  Continue reading →

“ … The motion picture community has been as responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing his as savage, hostile and evil. It’s hard enough for children to grow up in this world. When Indian children watch television, and they watch films, and when they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know.” — Marlon Brando, Oscar speech, 1973   Continue reading →