Film

Cooler than you.There's no doubt Joe Strummer was a cool guy. I wouldn't have wanted to be in The Clash with him, but I would've definitely enjoyed sitting around the campfire telling stories with him, which is exactly how this outstanding documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, is woven together.
I was shocked and saddened when I heard he died. I thought he was on the comeback trail but sadly, he succumbed quickly and without warning to a cognitive heart condition and was-poof!-gone.

can’t you hear me knockin’?It was a year of exceptional films and acting performances in 2007,
possibly the most competitive Oscar field ever. Three Best Picture
nominees are based on major novels. Cinematography and special effects
soar to new levels. Both veteran and novice actors roll out an uncanny
breadth of talent and emotion. So, at the end of Sunday night's 2008
Academy Awards, who will be left clutching those coveted gold
figurines? Here's my roundup of the Best Picture nominees, as well as
some biased predictions of who will win other awards.

I told you we’d be able to find something worthless on the bottom of the ocean.All that glitters may not be gold, but if you're willing to check your
brain at the door, you’ll find a brief respite from winter in the new
romantic/action comedy, Fool's Gold. Director Andy Tenant (Sweet Home
Alabama) leads us on a treasure hunt set in the Florida Keys. (It was
actually filmed in the Bahamas and Australia's Great Barrier Reef.) The
result is a watery plot embedded in warmth-inducing scenery.

Hell hath no furry like a New York City bicycle messenger.Although snow is still on the ground and most folks have their bikes
tucked neatly away in the storage shed for another month or two,
cycling is never quite on the backburner in this two-wheel obsessed
town. Riders who can't actually get out on the road or trail burn away
the cabin fever by talking about cycling, reading about cycling, and
perhaps most entertainingly, watching movies about cycling - which is
where WebCyclery comes in.

BendFilm and the Tower kick off the Series with the Breast Cancer DiariesFor a few days in October, the Tower Theatre becomes home to the
BendFilm festival, packing the historic venue with diehard film buffs,
as well as locals who just like to get a taste of independent cinema
without leaving town. But when the festival closes down, documentaries
and out-of-the-mainstream feature films, although not completely vacant
from our cultural landscape, are much tougher to find.

While some
might think of BendFilm as an entity existing only during that long
weekend in October, the organization has teamed with the Tower Theater
to present a bi-monthly series of independent films from the festival's
library and beyond. Kicking off Indie Reels is The Breast Cancer
Diaries, a film documenting a woman's battle with the disease.

These pirates don’t have scurvy.This is one of those highly entertaining, insightful, humorous,
fact-filled documentaries that can be enjoyed by those on both sides of
the political fence, despite its clear agenda.
I saw this movie
at the BendFilm Festival and was glad to see our local community radio
station KPOV 106.7 FM bringing the documentary to McMenamins on
Wednesday. As a DJ on KPOV, I confess that I'm somewhat biased -
sharing an affinity for the free-speech rights of local broadcasters
over large media conglomerates, having volunteered at the station for
more than three years.

How many 60-year-olds can kill like this?Let's get this straight right off the bat, something I'm sure we ALL
know … DO NOT MESS WITH RAMBO. This movie sledgehammers that fact home
by combining preachy stereotypes and super-gore. And you know what?
Parts of it are actually all right.
Rambo opens with grisly authentic
stock footage of the atrocities in Burma (oddly never referred to by
the nation's present-day name of Myanmar). Stallone said he wants this
movie to carry a "real" message, so people will become aware of the
genocide that plagues Burma, but then he chucks himself into a fake-ass
drama smack-dab in the middle of it, allowing him to come across as a
hero, "find" himself and kill tons - and I mean tons - of people in the
meantime.

Nothing like a good ol’ fashioned awkward moment…The Savages, the title of which refers to the characters' names as well
as their predicament, is not, as luck would have it, another bleak film
about people behaving badly. It can't avoid being a grim picture in
places, what with its subject matter – the death of a parent by
dementia – likely to provoke nearly universal feelings of dread. But
writer/director Tamara Jenkins (Slums of Beverly Hills) presents The
Savages as a tale of survival, one in which Wendy (Laura Linney) and
her brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) reshuffle their lives when the
father who abandoned them can no longer care for himself. It's a savage
undertaking, to be sure, but Jenkins isn't interested in death as much
as how death reorganizes the lives it doesn't take.

Just one of the dizzying moments in Cloverfield.After many months of prerelease hype and viral marketing, audiences are
finally getting a look at Cloverfield - a scary, very shaky
(physically, not technically) disaster movie whose effect is often
distressingly real. So real, that some folks I saw it with seemed ready
to vomit.
The premise is that a tape has been found in Central Park
after an unexplained disaster, and our task is to sit back and watch
it. It begins with playful couple Rob and Lily (Michael Stahl-David and
Jessica Lucas) as they speak to one another after a night of apparent
unabashed sexuality.

Welcome to CGI hell. Save yourself the pain, go rent Excalibur.Good lord. The Transporter goes medieval…kinda. This movie is such a pile of horse manure I hardly know where to start. I thought I could give it a semi-pass because kids would like it, but I think kids will feel ripped off. They're too smart for this junk, being exposed to the high-tech CGI world of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. This film is based on a video game of the same name, but it's so defiantly low-budget it falls somewhere below a Robin Hood after-school TV special.

The nutshell description involves Farmer (Jason Statham), a simple man whose wife (Claire Forlani) is kidnapped by ravaging and pillaging "Krugs" (ultra-crummy Lord of the Rings monsters) and his quest to retrieve her. There's an evil Sorcerer, Gallian (Ray Liotta), who commands the army of Krugs, an aging king (Burt Reynolds) whose wisdom is beyond comparison, a wimpy-spoiled-brat heir to the throne (Matthew Lillard) with a traitorous agenda, a good sorcerer (John-Rhys Davies) who wants to make things right, and his daughter (Leelee Sobieski) who stares blankly at any and everything.