Eugene Weekly

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Let me gush a second: I pretty much loved Star Trek. It did a lot of things right, and it looked gorgeous, especially to eyes disappointed by the terrible effects in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I loved Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy the best of all, but John Cho is a respectable Sulu, Sylar Zachary Quinto a perfect Spock (I really only thought of Sylar once, when he glares at the council) and Zoë Saldana a whip-smart Uhura. The bad guy was a little stock, but the time-split really thing works for me. Continue reading →

In 2006, a little movie called Brick surprised the hell out of me. A high school noir, thick with complicated, stylized detective language, mysterious figures and femme fatales? Skepticism levels were high — and for some people, the conceit didn’t work. Continue reading →

Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart in Adventureland. Immediate thought upon leaving the theater after Adventureland: I want to hug that movie and everyone involved with it. I’d also like to buy them all a beer. Though that would probably be a lot of beer. Continue reading →

Sad news for Bijou fans: Boo, the enormous, ever-present theater cat, died this weekend. “She would have been 23 on the 17th,” says Joe Lewis, whose exact job I am unsure of but who, as far as I can tell, is the Bijou’s general does-everything-what-needs-doing kind of guy (the R-G last referred to him as the “administrative assistant,” but that sounds less fun). Continue reading →

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Ho, hum. I realize it’s a little bit weak to comment when you’ve not yet seen all the films, so I’ll be brief: Even the surprises this year (Melissa Leo, Richard Jenkins) don’t feel like surprises. Slumdog Millionaire ceased being an underdog even before it got here, and while it a perfectly fine film, it is not a Best Picture. Not, not, not. I think I’m attached to exactly one category: Man on Wire had really best win Best Documentary. Continue reading →

One of the quirks of living in Eugene — or any other secondary or tertiary film market — is that one cinematic year is usually not over until about a third of the way through the following year. Continue reading →

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I haven’t been able to get this song out of my head for THREE DAYS. It’s from Hamlet 2, which opens tomorrow and promises to be hilarious, at least for certain folks. (No one else in the theater for Tropic Thunder on Monday laughed during this preview, but then, a considerable portion of that audience though the very funniest thing in Tropic was Jack Black’s elaborate description of the sex act he’d perform for the person who untied him from a tree, so … take that for whatever you think it’s worth.) Continue reading →