BendFilm Festival
thursday-sunday 9-12
Movies, movies, movies. Documentary movies, feature-length movies, short movies, tall movies, round movies, square movies.
Somewhere in the slipstream, between nostalgia and morality, resides the American western. It's proved to be a worthy packhorse for values clarification and sagas about justice for generations.
Blindness is a strange movie. It's like a diary of someone paralyzed by fear, a metaphor for socio-politico human tendencies, plus a vision of personal chaos and mass insanity.
“A woman needs a man,” by Kristin ProvostLenora James was in a pickle. This last May, the Bend woman forgot to
send a birthday gift to a friend celebrating her "Happy Boobday."
James, inspired by the breast theme, applied paint to her breasts and
imprinted them on a blank canvas
She soon realized this was a
perfect fund-raising project to fight breast cancer. Members of James'
family had struggled with the disease, and she had just helped a close
friend cope with the Easter Sunday death of her mother. James soon
contacted the Sara Fisher Project (the breast cancer education and
assistance powerhouse based in Bend) and the Joyful Bosom Affair was
born.
The original goal of the Affair was simple: get women to
paint their breasts, press them onto a canvas and incorporate the
imprints into a painting. The paintings would then be displayed and
sold at the First Friday Art Walk on October 3 as well as the Bend Fall
Festival with the proceeds going to the Sara Fisher project.
Is that a head you got there?You gotta hand it to Spike Lee. He's willing to take risks. With
Miracle at St Anna, the risk is a larger-than-life mainstream war movie
that tries to hold onto his visionary/radical/art-house/civil rights
themes
From the first scene of an ex-Buffalo soldier watching The
Longest Day with John Wayne on TV, to a final scene of extremely
questionable merit, this is an epic saga of redemption cloaked in a war
story mystery. While working at the post office, Hector Negron (Laz
Alonso) shoots a man he recognizes from his past. Subsequently, the
head of an extremely rare statue is found in his closet. His story is
then told in flashback form, following the trials of the Buffalo
soldiers' of the 92nd Infantry Division. A big oafish soldier, Train
(Omar Benson Miller), carries around (for good luck) the aforementioned
statue head he found in some ruins. The soldiers, under the command of
Staff Sergeant Stamps (Derek Luke), travel out of radio contact to an
Italian village and hole up with an Italian family. The impending
arrival of German troops adds tension and the plot gets almost too big
to handle, but even when it meandered I liked it. The use of clips that
could've easily hit the editing floor captures the kind of idiotic
small talk that might prevail when doom waits around every corner.
Run shia, run.Even if you normally pick up a double Americano on the way to the
movies, I would advise against it if your destination is Eagle Eye. You
may find yourself on your back with electric paddles on your chest and
a medic screaming, "Clear!" This movie is one all-out-Space
Mountain-on-acid-thrill ride where you won't need any supplements to
boost your heart rate.
Even veteran high octane cinema junkies may be
surprised at Director D.J. Caruso's ability to bury your head against
the headrest and put a cinematic G force on you that may cause your
date to scream.
After US forces bomb a Middle Eastern terrorist
target - despite computer warnings there is barely 50% probability we
have the correct target - we jump to Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) - a card
shark and copy shop employee whose prospects are dim. After an earlier
collaboration with Caruso in Disturbia and a major role in the last
Indiana Jones movie, LaBeouf moves into the action hero mold alongside
actors like Matt Damon and Daniel Craig. And LaBeouf handles the role
with both believability and style.
It's only the second performance by the cast of Driving Miss Daisy, but
it seems like the 100th. Cast members Michael Learned, Willis Burks II
and Dirk Blocker are seasoned acting veterans and it shows. As the show
ends and the lights on the stage go out, the nearly full theater for
Sunday's matinee performance is immediately on its feet and the
applause echoes off the walls of the Tower Theatre. The three actors
take their bows and exit stage left. With several local theater
companies in Bend putting out quality productions on a regular basis,
the cast of Driving Miss Daisy had some high standards to live up to.
After all, this wasn't a community theater performance where you expect
a few mistakes here and there. These were professional actors and the
audience wanted a production akin to those in New York, Los Angeles or,
at the very least, Portland and Seattle. Thankfully, this play lived up
to all the expectations.
I’ve listened to preachers, I’ve listened to fools. Opening with an intriguing and deftly shot scene, Transsiberian
promises a film that will look good, even if it goes sour. And sadly,
sour it goes. Nevertheless, there's something compelling about this
snow-driven trek
A do-gooder American couple (not without their
own problems), Roy and Jessie (Woody Harrelson/Emily Mortimer), depart
for a charity trip, traveling from China to Russia via the historic
Trans-Siberian train. They meet up with a suspicious couple, Carlos and
Abby (Eduardo Noriega/Kate Mara) whose motives immediately become
questionable. After a few misguided episodes, Russian narcotics officer
Grinko (Ben Kingsley) joins in the dreary ride.
What was really
lacking as the movie progressed was a sense of urgency. The time it
took setting up the characters could have been well spent giving us
more clues, or deception around the characters’ real agendas. The
tables get turned a couple of times, but nothing that psychologically
intimidates or fools us. On the whole, the train stops in loophole city
way too often.
Shakespeare in love. Clark Gregg did it. I wouldn't recommend trying, but he did it. This is Chuck Palahniuk we're talking about, after all.
The creator of Fight Club.
The nihilist.
The gross-out artist.
The
guy who famously or infamously or anecdotally inspired multiple people
to drop over in a dead faint at readings of a story about heinous
masturbation-inspired mishaps.
That grotesque, pathetic, twisted guy.
But
Clark Gregg did it. He took Palahniuk's Choke as screenwriter and
director and found another vein. Buried beneath the blasphemy and the
bodily fluids and the self-loathing was a story about redemption.
About recovery.
About love.
Clark
Gregg turned Chuck Palahniuk into a romantic. Or maybe he just pulled
back the covers to expose the romantic that was already there. It's
certainly not easy to see at first in the tale of Victor Mancini (Sam
Rockwell), who's messed up in so many ways that it's hard to know where
to begin. He attends 12-step meetings for sex addiction with his best
friend and compulsive masturbator Denny (Brad William Henke), but
pretty much only so he can pick up women. He visits with his ailing
mother Ida (Anjelica Huston), but her dementia has reached the point
where she doesn't even recognize him. And while he has a job at a
colonial theme park, he supplements his income by shoving food down his
throat at restaurants, finding someone to save his life, and becoming
the beneficiary of his newfound saviors' sense of connection.
Last Sunday afternoon, a group of 27 artists, art aficionados and
curious bystanders crowded into the parking lot of Atelier 6000 - a
small art studio/workshop in the Old Mill District whose name was
derived from the French word for "workshop"-to watch an enormous
steamroller run over wooden plates that the artists spent as many as
four weeks working on. With the very real chance that the steamroller
would crush the plates and leave nothing but a mess of paint, wood
splinters and carpet padding, the crowd anxiously waited for the
steamroller to back away from the printing surface. Owner Pat Clark
along with Bruce Emerson and artist Dawn Emerson approached the area,
pulled back the padding and lifted the large white sheets of paper from
the plate. Emerson's design, a horse, survived the steamroller's
crushing weight and the resulting print drew applause and "oohs" and
"aahs" from the crowd.
Clark, an emeritus professor from the
California State system on a "failed retirement" says she wanted to do
an event like this because it gave artists an opportunity to create
prints on a larger scale and showed the community another side of print
making.
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