Culture

…without a paddle.Sin Nombre (which translates to "Without a Name") is one of those films that will stay with you for days. This brilliantly directed, acted and photographed visual masterpiece is a chase-thriller/road-movie/coming of age/love story. The film examines the power and influence of Mexican gangs in small towns that offer little beyond the lure of crossing the border. It's a simple tale bound together with complex emotional themes, and produced by two actors who have established themselves in American movies, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna (Y Tu Mamá También).
The film features two main storylines that intersect during a train ride moving immigrants north. El Casper (Edgar Flores) is disillusioned with gang life and seeks an escape; Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) is going to cross the Mexican border from Honduras with her estranged father. Casper is running from his past with gang members in chase. Sayra is smitten with him, a combination of infatuation, necessity and the white knight syndrome-even if the knight wields a machete. The saga of twelve-year old Smiley (Kristyan Ferrer) is the movie's pivotal and most powerful secondary storyline, chronicling his gang indoctrination and efforts to legitimize himself. Immigration, while a powerful undercurrent, plays a back seat to the depiction of desperate acts to escape intolerable circumstances.

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.