The Women Behind the Music
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
Film: Page 46
Johnny Depp, Last of the Comanche
“ … 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
Pacific Pow!
When Pacific Rim’s end credits rolled, a friend turned to me and said, “Now I kind of want to watch that Hugh Jackman ‘rock ’em, sock ’em’ robots movie.” Such is the effectiveness of Guillermo del Toro’s deliciously oversized robots vs. monsters movie: It’ll make you want more fighting robots, even of the sub-par kind. Continue reading
Hannah and Her Critics
Like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt has an all-encompassing biopic title, but focuses on one key moment of its subject’s life. In 1961, the German thinker and writer Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) went to Jerusalem to cover, for The New Yorker, the trial of Adolf Eichmann. It was a chance to get up close to the horrors of her past; as a young woman, she had been held in a camp in France. Continue reading
Storytellers
Rarely has a film begun with a more perfect quote than the one that opens Stories We Tell. Borrowing a line from Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Michael Polley says, “When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion … It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all.” Continue reading
Rumor Has It
For years, Joss Whedon fans have been reading about the writer-director-composer’s Shakespeare brunches — at which cast members from his beloved shows would gather, drink, eat, read the Bard’s plays and generally (we imagine) have about as much fun as nerds can have with their clothes on. With the release of Much Ado About Nothing, we finally get to attend one of these famed brunches, though the mimosas are BYO. Continue reading
Conflicted
Superman, who originally hails from both a different planet and a different era, is often a tough sell with modern audiences who’ve gotten used to conflicted heroes, anti-heroes and intriguing bad guys. Superman — with a smile and a cape, the embodiment of a certain kind of American ideal — is just so good. It turns out he’s a little conflicted after all. Continue reading
Before and After
In 1994’s Before Sunrise, twentysomethings Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) met on a train. After one very talkative, very special night together, they parted ways, agreeing to meet in six months. It was nine years before they met again, in Before Sunset: Jesse wrote a book based on their first meeting, and Celine found him at a Paris reading. Continue reading
Twentysomething
There are 27-year-olds who have their shit together, but I wasn’t one of them. If you were, you may watch Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha as a sort of anthropological study: the still-questing twentysomething, running into pitfalls and learning (the hard way, of course) that expectation goes hand-in-hand with entitlement, and neither are in sync with reality very often. Continue reading
Beyond Cartoons
The popular perspective on animation tends to lie within the realm of Saturday morning cartoons or late-night adult comedy like South Park or Family Guy. But Portland’s Northwest Animation Festival is trying to change these classic conceptions of animation. And this year, the festival is bringing its expansive, carefully curated program down to Eugene. “We’ve put a lot of effort into building our audience in Portland,” says festival director Sven Bonnichsen. “We’re hoping to do the same in Eugene.” Continue reading