THE BIRD AND THE BEAR
Grizzly Bear
Veckatimest
Warp Records
1. The new Grizzly Bear record has generated a grip of hype and press.
Puzzle games are oddballs. They're the only videogames that lack avatars.
An
avatar can be a virtual person (a Mii or Master Chief) or a set of
tools (such as a home in The Sims). In puzzle games, players don't
enter a gameworld, so they don't need avatars. The puzzles exist in the
real world. The falling blocks in Tetris and the colored gems in
Bejeweled are really falling blocks and colored gems (albeit pixelated
ones). Fiddling with them requires no digital intermediary.
This
makes the Nintendo DS the ideal puzzle game machine. With its
touch-sensitive screen, players are in direct contact with the
graphics. In Puchi Puchi Virus, those graphics take the form of
"viruses"-colored hexagons that gradually fill the screen. The player's
job is to touch three viruses of the same color, linking them into a
triangle. Once the viruses are triangulated, the player can pop the
triangle, causing the viruses to disappear.
C.H.U.D. III hits theaters this week. Look, I'm not making any inappropriate allegations. All I'm saying is
that if Tony Scott does have any scandalous photos of Denzel
Washington, that might explain a lot.
Since their first collaboration
on Crimson Tide in 1995, Washington and Scott have teamed up in recent
years for Man on Fire, Dรจjá Vu and now this remake of 1974's The Taking
of Pelham 1 2 3, with yet another film together scheduled for 2011.
Stewart/Hitchcock! DeNiro/Scorsese! Depp/Burton! Washington/Scott! One
of these things is not like the others…
It's not that Washington
suddenly turns into a hack-by-association in his Scott-directed films.
Here he plays Walter Garber, a New York Transit Authority employee who
has the bad luck to be on the other end of a radio dispatch when a
subway train is hijacked. A guy calling himself Ryder (John Travolta),
leading a quartet of gunmen, has given the city one hour to deliver $10
million. While fears of a terrorist attack spread, Garber and Ryder
play the kind of cat-and-mouse game that you get in movies of this kind.
I wanna hold your hand. Todd Phillips, director of the GG Allin documentary Hated, and the
testimony to immature behavior, Old School, now brings us The Hangover,
a journey down a path of tasteless jokes and weird slapstick that will
keep you strangely riveted as you try to find out what's next. This is
Bachelor Party meets Memento.
The gist of the plot is a bachelor
party in Vegas gone askew. Four dudes go to Vegas: There's a dentist,
Stu (Ed Helms), who lies to his wife; Phil (Bradley Cooper), a school
teacher/cool guy happy to get away from the wife and kids; the nice guy
groom, Doug (Justin Bartha), and Doug's brother-in-law, Alan (Zach
Galifianakis), an oddball/weirdo/idiot savant/moronic pest. After a
night offscreen partying they wake up in shambles-the hotel suite is
trashed, a chicken, a tiger and a baby have all appeared out of nowhere
and one of them (Doug) is missing. Neither they nor the audience has a
clue as to what led to the wreckage. Then the race is on to nurse their
hangovers, put some pieces back together, find their friend and get
back to the wedding in time.
Now that’s upward mobility.The United Nations recently hosted a discussion about the television
show Battlestar Galactica. The purpose was to examine how the show can
foster thinking among the international political community regarding
subjects such as terrorism, torture and the role of religion in
government. Yup. Deep, real world stuff inspired by a frakking TV show.
It
can only be a matter of time before the U.N. holds a videogame
conference. On the top of my list of things that governments should
learn from videogames is that a bionic arm is a useful thing to have.
Not only does its extendible/retractable hand make items on high
shelves accessible, but its seamless merging of cybernetics and neural
flesh also allow mental computer hacking.
The arm's
extend-o-reach makes it a convenient source of transportation. By
latching onto streetlamps and overhanging girders, one can swing Spider
Man-style through city streets. Nathan Spencer, the hero of Bionic
Commando-a reboot of the arcade oldie-can even swing using a single
bionic arm while using his standard-issue organic for shooting enemies.
Director Sam Raimi revisits his old haunted stomping grounds and proves
he can still deliver the goods in Drag Me to Hell. A master of schlock
humor and drive-in horror who made the Evil Dead trilogy, Raimi went on
to some cleverly made flops (A Simple Plan, Quick and the Dead), then
ostracized himself from his main audience (including me) by taking the
helm of the mega-hit Spiderman franchise. Now he humbly returns to his
evil deadly roots with a bag of familiar tricks. Drag Me to Hell is an
old school curse movie complete with jolts, scares and gross-out laughs
galore. Beginning with the old style universal logo, Raimi shows
immediately that his heart is in the right place. And all the
over-budget sets, high tech lighting and CGI antics that defined his
recent work take a back seat.
The plot is painstakingly simple.
Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a loan officer vying for the
assistant manger position. She's up against smarmy kiss-ass Stu (Reggie
Lee) and her pansy indecisive boss (David Paymer). Enter one haggard
old gypsy woman (Lorna Raver) with a shattered blue eye and crumbling
dentures. Christine refuses to extend her a third and final loan, thus
evicting her from her home. The gypsy places an evil curse on her and
all hell breaks loose. Desperate, Christine and boyfriend Clay (Justin
Long) turn to a fortune teller (Dileep Rao) to try to save her soul,
while evil forces work against her.
Jesse Belvin
Mr. Easy
Released 1960
The brilliant, yet little known, Mr.
Laurel Brauns and the Sweet Harlots are just one act to catch on your musical stroll through downtown.We've had art walks in this town for a long while now. You know, the
casual strolling of downtown, stopping on street corners to chat it up
with friends in your most stylish duds before plunging into the next
business, one eye on whatever artistic endeavors adorn the walls and
the other searching for the free wine that for some is as much an
attraction as the artwork itself.
The art walks have served as an
easy, one-stop-shopping approach to local art appreciation and social
who's-whoing. For local music, however, it hasn't been so simple to get
such a quick and diverse sampling of the area's talents. But Dillon
Schneider, executive director of the Cascade Community School of Music
had an idea of how to do just that, while also giving a sizeable chunk
of Bend's less-experienced musicians a chance to play in public.
Cate O’Hagan at the former Mirror Pond GalleryWhile giving a tour of what was until recently the Mirror Pond Gallery, Cate O'Hagan moves quickly but thoughtfully. She's a busy woman, to say the least, but she takes time to show off the architecture work of third graders, which although not on par with Frank Lloyd Wright, is nonetheless creative. We breeze by some watercolors on the wall and then we sit down, O'Hagan taking off her stylish square-framed glasses and setting them on a massive square table.
O'Hagan, the executive director of Arts Central, the region's state-designated arts and cultural council, seems to enjoy the chance to sit down, because again, she is a busy woman who's had a busy week.
Calling all introverts.Streaming video. Digital pictures. Audio files. Like the most active
types of media at the beginning of the 21st Century, videogames are
composed of electronic impulses. Any digital work of art is encoded in
countless electrical on/off signals the same way that a symphony is
encoded in sounds and silences. The electronic codes are the binary
beats of the digital age.
But videogames blur the line between
viewer/listener/creator/audience. They make us all players of the work
of art. Some part of every game's design is unbalanced unless a player
makes a decision-Up or down? Yes or no? Blue pill or red pill?-and
shifts the play in that direction. There is always a choice for the
gamer.
But since everything in a videogame is part of a code,
anything can ultimately be manipulated by the person who has access to
it. Normally it's only the creator of a videogame who gets to decide
how strong the monsters are, or what kind of weapons they'll have when
they appear. But Avalon Code is a role-playing game that lets players
determine-using a magical book called the Book of Prophecy-the
qualities of almost anything in the game.
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