Moonalicefriday 21See this week's preview for more on this all-star rocking tribe of jammers and their fearless Chubby Wombat leader. $10.
After some 36 hours encamped on a stretch of dusty Central Washington farmland dotted by Honey Buckets, make-shift Bloody Mary bars, rented RVs and taking in about 40 songs from one of rock music's most storied live bands, here is how I'll remember the Phish shows at the Gorge Amphitheater last weekend…
Winding through the gleeful horde at the allegedly sold-out second show on Saturday night is a man seemingly in his 40s with an at-least-12-foot fishing pole protruding from a complex and clearly self-made, harness-like apparatus around his chest. Dangling from about six feet of fishing line at the end of the pole is a Homer Simpson doll adorned somehow with flashing lights and as he walks, fans both viciously and joyfully bat the doll around. Now, the doll itself isn't that strange. What's intriguing is the fact that someone would A) go through the effort of creating this thing B) somehow get it though the ostensibly rigid security at the gate and C) willfully wear this intentionally annoying and spatially impractical apparatus around for four hours.
The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember…
…Where you've nothing else, construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.
– Cormac McCarthy, The Road
This whole rhapsody, better go capture this moment
And hope it don't collapse on him…
– Eminem, “Lose Yourself”
I'm walking away from my credit union toward Fred Meyer. I have just failed to be able to use one of my new credit cards to get a cash advance so I can deposit it in my son's California bank account so he can pay his rent. He can't pay his rent because he is a writer living in Los Angeles who works every day for chump change, and in America, 2009, “Writer who works every day for chump change” is a redundancy. My mind is nothing but run-on sentences, bad practice for a writer.
Amelia Gray's AM/PM
Amelia Gray's AM/PM (Featherproof Books, $12.95) consists of 120 impeccably compact stories of love, discomfort and concert souvenirs. The single-page stories were written, one in the morning and one in the evening, over the course of two months. This timeline, and their brevity, may make it sound like this is a simple little book, but it's not; like the best tiny tales and single lines, Gray's snapshot stories are treacherous and sly, capable of changing the cadence of your thoughts and tinting the way you look at the ordinary things around you.
Monsters have overrun the Snowy Mountains. Herbivorous Popo lumber across windswept ridges, defended by dense coats and scimitars of antlers.
A wise woman once told me that the older she got the more she tried to see the good in things rather than the easier route of criticizing everything. I have thought of that comment virtually every day since she said those words, but never more than while watching GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
The problem for me with this movie is not that it brings to life the Hasbro action figures first introduced in 1964 – that's kind of cool – but it does so with none of the freshness or originality of other similar efforts like Sin City or the humor and self-deprecation of the Superman franchise, or the passion of Iron Man. The creators bumbled a golden opportunity here to laugh at the effort itself, you know, the tongue-in-cheek stuff. There is nothing interesting about this effort and no humor to buoy the comic book dialogue. See the good.
The frequently used term “nail-biting” has never been more appropriate than to describe The Hurt Locker. Focused on a bomb squad assigned to dismantle IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in Baghdad circa 2004, the gritty realism and sheer tension of this movie sucks you in, hooks you and keeps you dangling the entire time.
Based on the true experiences of journalist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with such a unit (Explosive Ordinance Disposal or EOD), Hurt Locker is not an Iraq war statement but rather an in-depth character study of addiction to risk and danger. It's also a classic study of men in combat and under stress that could have taken place anywhere, detailing strong characters thrown together in the harshest of times, forced to deal with each other's psychotic idiosyncrasies and insecurities.
Nershi-Law Duo
friday 14
Bill Nershi and Scott Law must love Bend, but really, who doesn't? Friday marks each of their second passes through Bend this year and we're not complaining. Nershi, of String Cheese Incident fame, teams up with Law for an intimate yet totally rocking night of flat-picking at Silver Moon. 9pm, Silver Moon Brewing Co., 24 NW Greenwood Ave., $10.
After handing over $10 and collecting his free t-shirt at the sign-up for the BendFilm 72 Hour Shoot Out, my boyfriend Guy wanted to go swimming. At the panel discussion the week before, we'd been warned that making a short film over one intense weekend warranted a case of Red Bull and a gang of helpers. Other filmmakers hustled away like they hadn't a minute to spare. But Guy had made well over 200 short movies before, and even some feature-lengths, in well under 72 hours (see youtube.com/guyjjackson). That was his method; putting his energy into writing rather than elaborate production, rarely using more than one actor and never a crew, wielding the camera like that cartoon Tasmanian Devil, and being happily surprised when he created entirely different movies at the editing stage than were originally conceived.
Here we have proof that no matter how cool a movie looks, how dazzling the photography, how mesmerizing the score, how nail biting the suspense, there is no masking a stupid story. The Collector is one of those movies, and here's why…
Arkin (Josh Stewart) has problems. His wife owes a vague yet sufficiently large amount of cash to loan sharks, and his handyman job doesn't pay enough to help. It does get him into homes, however, and being an ex-con in cahoots with a robbery ring, he decides to steal a huge gem from the house he's been casing. All looks well and good, but as soon as he breaks into the home he finds that someone has beaten him to it. A masked creep has been torturing the family, and has booby trapped the house to the hilt. The burglar is faced with the moral dilemma of stealing, fleeing or saving the family. Escape is not going to be fun.
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