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Stand up Comedy Night – Wednesday 2/6
Randy Liedtke hosts the fourth and final installment of this local laugh factory before he moves his funny ass down to Los Angeles - we knew he was too good to last. So show up and send Liedtke off in style as the redheaded funny man plays his weird little keyboard thing and tells jokes about dogs pretending to be cats. 8:30pm. $10. Summit Saloon and Stage, 125 NW Oregon Ave., 749-2440.
Bio-Ware returns to the role-playing format with the excellent “Mass Effect.” When BioWare made "Star Wars: Knights of the Republic" and "Jade" for
the original Xbox system, they made a lot of gamers happy. They put
some time and effort into it, and the result was great RPG storytelling
that made Microsoft a major "player" in the console wars. Now BioWare
is taking its turn on the Xbox 360 with "Mass Effect." The game
publisher is so confident about the game that it plans a trilogy. In
the meantime, it's providing downloads to bridge the gap between game
releases.
As with BioWare's other RPG titles, you have the option of
playing as a man or woman. The decision influences your interaction
with other characters and enables you to customize the character's
appearance. You also have limited control of two other characters that
will help you along.
In September of 2007, Ang Lee (director of Brokeback Mountain,
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and many more) was saddled with the
NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association of America's censors on
his movie, Lust, Caution. The rating is the kiss of death at the
box-office. No matter what reviewers say, the large ticket-buying
population of under-17-year-old viewers have already been axed out of
seeing the film, much less those that equate the NC-17 rating with
porn. Most of the time, there is usually one scene that censors just
can't stomach, so to save their films from bombing at the box office,
directors will go back and cut the scene enough to appease the
thumb-screwing censorship committee, which later gets reinserted and
released on DVD as the "director's cut." Below are some "directors cut"
versions of some originally NC-17 or X-rated films.
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.
Only the Wii can get away with a game about sleeping…Way back in the old days, 1996 to be exact, Sega released a game for the Sega Saturn called "Nights into Dreams." This game was from the same makers of the "Sonic the Hedgehog" series and was a bestseller for the Saturn. Unique in its game play, there was a strong demand for a sequel and at one point there was one on the drawing board for the Sega Dreamcast. Due to Sega's problems developing game systems, a "Nights" sequel was put on hold. After a decade, the game has finally arrived.
"Nights: Journey of Dreams" is a Nintendo Wii exclusive that makes use of the Wii's motion-sensing controller. The story is a lot like the original "Nights" game and takes place in the dream world of Nightopiam, a land under a threat from the nightmare beings of Nightmaren. The game is presented through the dreams of the game's two protagonists, Helen Cartwright and William Taylor. The player becomes Nights, a jester-like character with a child's personality that can morph genders depending on the player's interpretation.
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.
If you saw the preview for Marc Forster's (Monster's Ball) adaptation of The Kite Runner and thought the overblown voiceover and tacky gold title made the movie look like a bit of a chore to watch, you're not alone. Little about the preview looked appealing beyond the dark eyes of Khalid Abdalla, who stars as Amir, a writer living in the Bay Area in 2000. A phone call from an old family friend who speaks meaningfully of "a way to be good again" sends Amir home to Afghanistan, but not before Forster treats us to a lengthy, languid flashback that explains some of the caller's mysterious offer.
Pretty Woman II: Dirty DebutantesEarly in Charlie Wilson's War, a speaker intones that without Charlie Wilson, history "would be largely and sadly different." Whether history would be largely different without Wilson – a U.S. Congressman from Texas for 25 years – is debatable but probably accurate, but the reference to sadness caught my attention. Wilson, a buoyant rascal, elevated revelry to an art form, so whether history would have been gloomier without him is beyond a shadow of a doubt. What makes the story of Charlie Wilson's War so irresistible is how a scoundrel and hard-drinking womanizer like Wilson (Tom Hanks) stumbles into the crossroads of history and, once there, has the good sense to stand his ground. What makes Charlie Wilson's War one of the year's best films is how artfully the screenplay plays Wilson's weaknesses into strengths.
Bark at the MoonHere we go with another Japanese remake to accompany The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water, and Pulse. The original versions have always achieved a creepy ghost story atmosphere, perhaps due to the fact that the Japanese have been telling these "possession" stories for centuries. Now, the tales have become a loose-cannon commodity, as spin-offs run rampant in Japan as well as in the U.S. The only thing the American versions have in common is their ability to botch a potentially cool idea. One Missed Call (a remake of the 2003 Japanese flick Chakushin Ari) is no exception. Although this idea is pretty damn far fetched, even by Japanese horror standards-ghosts in a cell phone? Yeah right, sure.
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