Culture
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Air-Power to the People: Pirate Radio USA gives media to the masses

Mike Bookey

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.

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Video Game Flashback: ColecoVision and the Adam computer

Shawn Wallbaum

They just don't make video games like this anymore…thankfully.Back in the early 1980s after the Atari 2600 system was released, other
companies wanted to cash in on the video game craze and one such
company was Coleco. Considered a second-generation game system, the
ColecoVision was released at the end of 1982 with 12 arcade-quality
titles. The system was sold with a licensed version of Nintendo's
"Donkey Kong," and helped beat its main rival, the Atari 5200, which
also provided more advanced, arcade-quality games, but was ultimately
less successful than the ColecoVision. The system sold more than a
million units in its first year and more than seven million during its
lifetime. 

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A Tortured Soul: The Films of Heath Ledger

Mike Bookey

Last week Heath Ledger was found dead in his Manhattan apartment. At
28, he had created a career based on risky roles and shunned the
heartthrob characters he could have played. In his last film, The Dark
Knight, a sequel to Batman Begins, Ledger plays the deranged villain,
The Joker. It is due out in July of this year. Below are the best films
available on DVD of his short, but notable career.
Candy
Ledger
and Abby Cornish are stellar in this bleak tale about two artistic
souls tumbling down the road of self-destruction from heroin use.
Tragic and sad, these characters are the poster children for staying
far away from recreational drug use.
Brokeback Mountain
There's
no discussing Ledger without mentioning Brokeback Mountain. By far his
most challenging role was his heartbreaking performance of Ennis Del
Mar, the sexually conflicted cowboy never able to allow himself the
freedom to be happy. Accolades were mounded on Ledger as well as the
rest of the cast and the film as a whole. This is where Ledger met
Michelle Williams, who later became his romantic partner and the mother
of his child. Ledger had recently separated from Williams.
 

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Fourth Blood: Stallone kills, kills, kills in another over-the-hill sequel

Mike Bookey

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.

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Walls Bring Us Together: CTC goes musical with “The Fantasticks”

Mike Bookey

The Fantasticks: Waving jazz hands for 40-plus years.Luisa is 16, "pretty for the first time," and quite insane. Matt is 20,
nerdy, and wondering what's beyond that road. Oh, and they're in love
and as close together as the wall their parents have literally built
between them allows. This isn't another Romeo and Juliet or Pyramus and
Thisbe, but The Fantasticks - the longest-running off-Broadway musical
(some 17,162 performances spanning 42 years), loosely based on Edmond
Rostand's Les Romanesques, and now available to hum along with at the
Cascades Theatrical Company.

Marking the middle of the CTC's 29th
season, The Fantasticks is a stage standard; dripping with nostalgia,
audiences lap up the escapism and the cast ever-cognizant that they are
part of history. Yet the CTC has again offered a twist: Director
Kymberli Colbourne has dared to alter the time-tested formula of The
Fantasticks by replacing the two meddling fathers (who built the wall
to manipulate their children) with two equally errant mothers. Bellomy
(Kimberlee Lear) and Hucklebee (Mandy Rockwell) bring new life to the
sometimes quaint script, while Jimena Romero as Luisa and Scott Carroll
as Matt never take themselves too seriously - which is most welcome
when watching a play nearly a half-century old.

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Our Picks for the week of 1/31 – 2/6

Mike Bookey

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.

Posted inCulture

Something for the Masses: BioWare’s new offering pushes the RPG envelope with “Mass Effect”

Shawn Wallbaum

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.

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Overrated: Films that the MPAA doesn’t want you to see

Mike Bookey

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.

Posted inCulture

The Late Ones: Two siblings care for the father who never did

Jason Blair

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.

Posted inCulture

A Case of the Shakes: Cloverfield offers a refreshingly fresh take on monster genre

Robert Grimm

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.

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