Film

Bike Chariot wars: Coming soon to Drake Park…please.Bicycling. It seems simple enough - two wheels, gears, cables, and of course someone to ride it. But anyone even remotely connected to cycling, especially in this part of the country, knows that it's not that straightforward. In fact, past Webcyclery movie nights at McMenamins have always looked into a specific aspect of the bicycle world. But this time around, the chosen film is one called Veer, and it attempts to tackle cycling culture in one fell swoop by taking a wide-angle look at Portland's culture more or less as a whole.
The film, directed by Greg Fredette, introduces us to a range of characters including the Zoobombers, an increasingly well-known group of cyclists that bombs down Portland hillsides on children's bikes as well as a cycling advocate battling to pass bills on the floor of the state legislature. There's also a group of bike dancers, cycling non-profits and stories of cyclists who've been killed in traffic. All in all, it's a look at Portland's urban cycling culture from a variety of angles. But there's very little by way of facts or statistics to discuss or explain the cycling boom, it's not that kind of documentary. Rather, the film is strictly observational in its approach.

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, Dèjá 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.

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.

It’s actually a baseball movie…Sugar, the new film by the directors of Half Nelson, begins and ends
with our hero atop a pitcher's mound. Tucked in between is a minor
league season, one that elapses with all the boredom and fury you'd
expect from a modern baseball drama. But baseball is a side attraction
in Sugar, as mature and empathetic as any sports flick in recent
memory. In the era of Eastbound and Down – HBO's terrific spoof of a
clueless ex-pro baseballer – we can expect a glut of baseball satire,
given what the game has done to itself. Meanwhile, Sugar has other
scores to settle. It's about how easily undone are the dreams of being
among the best at something, and how in order to be the best, it can be
necessary to leave those we love behind. Sugar works as an immigrant
saga, a coming-of-age story and a coming-down-to-earth cautionary tale.
In short, Sugar is pure and honest, which is more than we can say for
baseball itself.

You’re lucky you’re not a stage hand, my friend…Terminator Salvation could very well be the best action blockbuster of
the summer and by far the best of 2009. This flick excels in delivering
non-stop and well-timed action scenes without skimping on plot. As a
great, high energy battle-for-survival adventure, Terminator
Salvation's level of intensity never stops.

The prequel to the first
Terminator takes place in 2018 wherein John Connor (Christian Bale) has
to find and save young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin of Charlie Bartlett
fame) from the artificial intelligence military organization Skynet
(based in a dilapidated San Francisco) and their robot machines. Connor
has to make sure Reese stays alive so he can eventually be sent to the
past to have sex with his mother so he (Connor) can be born. Got it?
Connor must then battle the terminator army and move mountains
(sometimes literally) to convince the underground resistance to help
save mankind from an evil transport machine while they attempt to
overthrow the machine-protected government. Introduced to move the plot
along, a new character, Marcus (Sam Worthington) helps to reveal the
underlying motives and prejudices of both sides. To the plot's credit,
it stands alone as an action flick, but also works well as the
beginning to the Terminator series, incorporating all the things any
loyal fan would pick up on (the photo of Sarah Connor from the
original, her recorded instructions to Connor). What works so well with
this flick is that it follows a bunch of distinct sub plots, from
Marcus' origin to Reese's underground resistance and capture to
Connor's quest and blatant disregard for authority against all odds.
Connor's motivational radio messages come across like a good version of
Mata Hari.

The Banana and the Monkey Man – seen around town.Solidifying our place as Bicycle Town U.S.A. has taken some work. We
have miles and miles of trails, locally grown road-riding talent of the
highest order as well as a massive number of bike commuters and cycling
shops. But now we can add another notch in our bicycling belt in the
birth of the Bend Bicycle Film Festival.

Similar in format to the
always popular Powderhound Review, the event is a catch all of sorts
for all films relating to bicycling. Given our community's penchant for
two wheelers, there was hardly a shortage of submissions. One of the
festival's organizers, Bill Warburton, says that they received 24
submissions and hope to get somewhere between 15 and 20 of those films
into the hour and a half slated for local programming.
A
fundraiser for the Central Oregon Trail Alliance and the Bend Cycling
Club, the Bend Bicycle Film Festival covers the wide variety of cycling
mediums, including a piece on unicycling as well as footage from last
year's Cyclocross championships.

I told you pesky kids to stay off my porch.Early in Up-the tenth feature from the cinematic quality machine called
Pixar-there's a sequence that distills all of the best that the
animation powerhouse brings to filmmaking. After a brief prologue
introducing us to a pair of simpatico kids named Carl and Ellie in the
1930s, we watch without a word of dialogue as the childhood friends
become sweethearts, then follow them through 50 years of married life.

As
Up moves into its primary storyline, that's the challenge
co-writer/director Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.) faces. In the present
day, Carl (Edward Asner) is now a curmudgeonly septuagenarian, living
alone in his house while high-rise development goes on around him.
Facing the prospect of life in a retirement home, Carl instead sends a
massive cascade of balloons through his chimney, launching the house
into the air with a plan to head to a remote South American jungle
There's also an unexpected hitchhiker: Russell (Jordan Nagai), a young
Wilderness Explorer who didn't take the hint that Carl didn't want to
be helped across the street.

Filmmaker and yoga enthusiast Kate Churchill had a goal for her
documentary: find a novice yoga student and give him six months to
transform physically and spiritually through yoga. She picks Nick
Rosen, a rock climber/journalist whose father is a corporate lawyer and
mother is a shaman healer. She introduces Nick to many of the American
"Baskin Robbins choices" of yoga, and then takes him to India to learn
directly from the great masters.

Enlighten Up! skims the surface of
every encounter, not to mention yoga in general. And the by-the-numbers
documentary has its moments, but not enough of them. Beginning with
talking head testimonials from internationally known yoga instructors
who explain that there are exceptions and contradictions to all rules,
it briefly cuts back and forth with mixed messages and innuendoes
instead of information. It's easy to tell from the first five minutes
that Nick isn't going to get it. Even as every single spiritual guru
tells him that "the brain is not the boss," "don't dwell on thoughts,"
"keep practicing yoga and let it happen," Nick constantly resists and
stonewalls.
While the focus is on Nick the skeptic, the
narration amateurishly switches between Nick and Kate, with both
figures having dramatic moments. Thanks to Kate's off-camera remarks
and input, it's obvious she is being affected by the events in the
film. But behind the scenes, she proves to be more distracting than
beneficial.