Eugene Weekly

Moonrise Kingdom is so charming, so quaintly and perfectly designed, like a pretty diorama in which Wes Anderson carefully places his actor-dolls, that it feels curmudgeonly to dislike it. And I don’t dislike it, exactly; I’m just not sure I feel much of anything about it. Everything is in its right place; the shots are beautiful, the sets just so. Two kids set out separately across a New England island, toting impossibly stylish bags, outfitted in dashing Khaki Scout uniforms and white socks. Continue reading →

Tony Gilroy directed Michael Clayton. Think about that, while you watch The Bourne Legacy, and ponder how it is that the writer-director of such a taut, effective film created something as skittish and incomplete as Bourne, which is about 45 percent prologue, and almost entirely unsatisfying.  Continue reading →

The easy joke about Len Wiseman’s Total Recall is that it gives you so little to remember. You might recall the Blade Runner-esque neon-and-concrete vision of its future, or the look on Kate Beckinsale’s face as she tries to squeeze the life out of Colin Farrell’s Douglas Quaid. But Wiseman, who cut his teeth as a director on two Underworld flicks, has plenty of experience directing Beckinsale at ass-kicking. Two hours of her and Jessica Biel fighting in an inexplicably complex bank of elevators would be considerably more memorable. Continue reading →

Six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Willis) lives with her father, Wink (Dwight Henry), in the Bathtub, a damp, wild, insular place at what feels like the edge of the world (but is more likely the edge of New Orleans). She tends to their chickens and pigs, goes fishing with her father, and draws creatures on cardboard boxes in her house — her own scrappy house, standing on crooked stilts like something out of a dark fairytale. Continue reading →

High expectations sometimes lay you low, and the very word “superhero” spurs one’s anticipation of a movie adaptation to leap tall multiplexes in a single bound and travel faster than a speeding bullet to the box office. It can’t be helped. Walking into the July 20 midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises, my hopes were high. I assumed that this grand finale would be not only a step above all predecessors, but also well worth the particular discomfort of cramming into a packed theater at midnight. Neither of these assumptions panned out. Continue reading →

I would like to see Bill Nighy be a nice guy in more movies. He’s so effective as a ragged, aging musician (Love Actually) or as, say, a creepy ancient vampire (the Underworld series) that I forget what a wonderful actor he is in ordinary roles. Continue reading →

Woody Allen is a great American filmmaker, though I’m not sure if I should place that somewhat queasy statement in quotation marks or simply note that, as an assertion, it drags the luggage of several qualifiers. Continue reading →

In the age of the quick fix and pop-up porn, you gotta hand it to E.L. James for hoodwinking the hoi polloi into dicking around with something as atavistic and temperate as on-the-page erotica. Fifty Shades of Grey — the first installment in a trilogy of erotic novels that started online as Twilight fanfiction — sold more than 10 million copies in six weeks in the U.S. alone. This, despite repeated assaults by high-brow literary critics as well as pop sexpert Dr. Continue reading →