To Laugh, or Not to Laugh: Hamlet 2 squanders its weight in gold

Posted inCulture

To Laugh, or Not to Laugh: Hamlet 2 squanders its weight in gold

Intern

To laugh or not to laugh. Hamlet 2 is a mixed bag of treats, missed opportunities, inspired comic genius, dull plodding and failed timing. In short, some parts are good, while others…not so much.

The film starts off with a collage of the "work" of actor Dana Marchz (Steve Coogan) including infomercials and roles in Xena, showing real humorous potential. Cut to the present where he is a depressed but optimistic dweeb acting teacher in Tucson. He is on the verge of losing the drama department due to the lack of talent in his plays (stage versions of movies like Erin Brockovich) plus fiscal cutbacks and a really mad, conservative principal (the always underrated Marshall Bell) who hates his guts. He then inadvertently adopts a bunch of inner-city kids into his class and comes up with the idea to do a sequel to Hamlet. Since everyone dies in the first one, as we all know, Marchz (his name is constantly mispronounced) solves that problem with a time machine, Jesus and a lot of gay references.

Steve Coogan is brilliant in the lead role, but perhaps too brilliant - he is given way too much leeway to over act. At first it works, but then it becomes tedious and overkill. Coogan's character drains you of any sympathy and after a while you just want to punch him in the face. As Marchz's wife Brie, Katherine Keener does her smartest and bitchiest person in the room shtick (nothing new there), and drinks a margarita that's the size of a Herculean goblet. Then there's Elizabeth Shue, playing herself, and has given up on acting and become a nurse. This is, thankfully, underplayed.

Posted inFood & Drink

Bang for Your Buck: Pastini Pastaria brings a winning Portland formula to Bend

Intern

Taking a bite out of high priced dining at pastini.Pastini Pastaria, another addition to the burgeoning Old Mill eatery scene, has been anxiously anticipated by all those Bendites familiar with the six Portland area locations. The restaurant’s claim to fame is 36 different pasta dishes at affordable prices. With entrees priced from $5.75, Pastini will be a welcome addition to what many think is a high-priced dining culture.

Before opening to the public, Pastini threw a fundraiser and introduction party to benefit the High Desert Museum. Guests were invited to pay a small fee for a six-month membership to the museum and were treated to an open bar and a meal comprising sample portions of dishes. This was a smart move on the part the management-before trying to turn a buck, they ponied up to provide a venue for a great cause. Although the restaurant is part of a Portland-based chain, it’s already giving back and becoming an active member of the community.

Pasta reigns supreme on the menu with the dishes separated into chicken, meat, vegetable and special pastas. To start the sample meal, we were served the Parmigiana Bread ($3.95), a baguette grilled with Parmesan cheese accompanied by marinara dipping sauce. It was simple and will be a big hit with the kids.

Posted inFood & Drink

Bang for Your Buck: Pastini Pastaria brings a winning Portland formula to Bend

Intern

Taking a bite out of high priced dining at pastini.Pastini Pastaria, another addition to the burgeoning Old Mill eatery scene, has been anxiously anticipated by all those Bendites familiar with the six Portland area locations. The restaurant's claim to fame is 36 different pasta dishes at affordable prices. With entrees priced from $5.75, Pastini will be a welcome addition to what many think is a high-priced dining culture.

Before opening to the public, Pastini threw a fundraiser and introduction party to benefit the High Desert Museum. Guests were invited to pay a small fee for a six-month membership to the museum and were treated to an open bar and a meal comprising sample portions of dishes. This was a smart move on the part the management-before trying to turn a buck, they ponied up to provide a venue for a great cause. Although the restaurant is part of a Portland-based chain, it's already giving back and becoming an active member of the community.

Pasta reigns supreme on the menu with the dishes separated into chicken, meat, vegetable and special pastas. To start the sample meal, we were served the Parmigiana Bread ($3.95), a baguette grilled with Parmesan cheese accompanied by marinara dipping sauce. It was simple and will be a big hit with the kids.

Posted inMusic

Grand (Inter)National: John Butler talks with us about Australia, politics and going dread-less

Intern

Get a good look at those dreads, ’cause you ain’t gonna see ’em again.The Source caught up with Aussie sensation John Butler over the phone last week before he and his band played in Flagstaff, Ariz. Their latest release, Grand National, has gone multi-platinum and enjoyed worldwide success. And it all started in 1998 with Butler busking on the streets of Fremantle, a small port city just south of Perth, on the West Coast of Australia. Which is where we began our line of questioning…

The Source Weekly: What's it like being so huge in Australia and then coming to the US as a lesser known act? Is it strange or do you like being somewhat anonymous?

John Butler: There's a big difference between mainstream popularity and underground popularity, which is what I guess we kind of have over here now after seven or eight years of [touring] America. We kind of just build it up from the ground up [so] by the time you're kind of getting to where your status is in the well-known region, it's solid and it just stays for a long time. That's kind of what's happened in Australia, every step of the way it's grown slowly, it's never been like a huge splash and so by the time we were big, the roots were very deep, it wouldn't really matter what storm came by, what we built wouldn't be knocked over.

Is it nice to go around and not worry about people coming up to you all the time though?

Posted inMusic

Year Around Folk: In its 13th year, Sisters Folk Festival has roots in music and its hometown

Mike Bookey

Mr. Red on Blonde himself, Tim O’Brien finally makes his way to the Sisters Folk Fest this weekend.It's late in the afternoon on a late August Thursday afternoon and that means Brad Tisdel is in his office and working late. It's only eight days before his labor of love, his raison d'etre (for the French speaking, or perhaps the hyperbolic), the Sisters Folk Festival takes flight. There's plenty of "i"s left to dot and "t"s to be crossed before the 13th installment of the roots music celebration, but Tisdel, the local singer-songwriter as well as the festival's artistic director, still makes time to talk about his hometown's cultural engine.

"The idea is to take a three-day music festival and make it have a year-around presence that's educational and also entertaining for the community," Tisdel says of the Sisters Folk Festival's standing in Central Oregon.

For several years now, the festival's presence has been felt on every page of the calendar whether it be through the Americana Project, Tisdel's in-school music education program, or perhaps the winter concert series, which this past year brought another solid lineup of national touring acts to Sisters. And as if the reach of the Sisters Folk Festival influence isn't expansive enough, Tisdel also recently launched Musical Memories, an inarguably innovative program that brings local musicians into senior communities to play tunes from yesteryear.

If you add in the Americana Song Academy, a songwriter’s summer camp of sorts that precedes the festival, it might be easy for some to forget that there are still three days at the beginning of September where the Sisters Folk Festival itself still exists. Starting on Friday and extending through Sunday while overtaking much of Central Oregon's favorite cowboy town, Sisters Folk is boasting a lineup this year that's full of national performers and as strong as any past gathering.

Posted inCulture

Our Picks for the week of 9/5-9/11

Mike Bookey

Person People

friday 5

Person People was originally slated for a Show Us Your Spokes benefit date at Parrilla and more than a few people were bummed to see their name pulled from that bill. BUT, BUT, BUT wouldn't ya know it, Bend's high-profile, high member count hip-hop super group simply moved their appearance back a week to coincide with a fundraiser for the Division Street Skatepark, which you might have read about in the Source a couple weeks ago. So, go get yourself some Person People, because these guys don't play all that often, but when they do, they bring the friggin' heat. 7pm. Parrilla Grill, 635 NW 14th St.

Sisters Folk Festival

friday-sunday 5-7

In its 13th year, the Sisters Folk Fest is as lively as ever and again taking over the quaint cowboy confines of little ol' Sisters with folk music of all shapes and sizes. Turn the page and learn more about this stalwart of Central Oregon's musical summer. Visit sistersfolkfestival.org for tickets, lineup and more valuable information.

Posted inNews

Bucks & Beer: Hops are more expensive, thus so is beer, but you’re still drinking

Mike Bookey

So much fuss over a little leaf. Times are getting tight, at least that's what we keep hearing, especially in this part of the country. People are driving less in an attempt to spend less of their hard-earned cash on gas, they're eating out less as food costs increase, but here in Central Oregon, where we have a brewery for about every 15,000 people, it appears that people are still drinking.

We might be cutting down on our road trips, but we'll be damned if we stop drinking our locally made beer, or so say our local brew smiths. If there were ever a sign that there is confidence in the local beer industry, it is Three Creeks Brewing Co., the new craft brewery that Wade Underwood recently opened in Sisters. Underwood previously lived in Phoenix while operating an Internet-based company that he subsequently sold before settling in Sisters with the intention of opening the city's only craft brew pub.

"We're opening at an interesting time, that's for sure," says a laughing Underwood, a University of Oregon grad whose interest in brewing stems back several years to the early days of McMenamins.

"If you look at all the business models, it would tell you not to build this," Underwood says, citing models that suggest that a community needs at least 150,000 people to support a craft brewery. But he says the Northwest is an exception, and furthermore, Central Oregon is an even more substantial exception, supporting six brewing establishments before Underwood opened the seventh.

Posted inOpinion

The Merkley / Smith Furniture War

Intern

The campaign weapon of choice. Holy credenzas, will the Gordon Smith / Jeff Merkley Furniture War ever end?

It began in mid-July, when Oregon's (and the West Coast's) only Republican senator began running ads accusing the Democrat Merkley, the speaker of the Oregon House, of spending $2 million on new furniture and carpeting for legislative offices.

The ads were a little misleading in a couple of respects. For one thing, Merkley didn't approve the outlay all by himself - it was authorized by a bipartisan legislative panel. And if you weren't paying close attention, the ad could give you the idea that the whole $2 million was spent on Merkley's office.

All the same, the ad appears to have worked.

Before he fired the first shot in the Furniture War, Smith's ads had concentrated on downplaying his Republicanism and playing up his bipartisanship. That strategy wasn't too effective - in fact, a Rasmussen poll in early July actually showed Merkley a little bit ahead of Smith. After the first furniture ad, things turned around.

Posted inOpinion

Going off the Rails: Damage control for the GOP and rescue me

Intern

Now familiar with the whole background check thing. GOP

After the historic DNC Convention in Denver, which saw some 84,000 Obama supporters gather to hear his acceptance speech at Invesco Field, home of the Denver Broncos, Republicans were surely looking to make a huge splash with their convention in St. Paul, Minn. But after a strategic start which saw McCain steal a bit of Obama's thunder by announcing his pick for V.P. the day after the DNC, things have sputtered and then spiraled for the GOP. First Hurricane Gustav rolled up on a beleaguered Gulf Coast as Category 4, stealing the Republicans’ thunder, wind, lightning, fire and a few other yet to be identified elements, and forcing the convention planners to temporarily delay the kick off of the "festivities" in St. Paul, Minn. Instead of getting back on track, though, the McCain train appears to have jumped the rails with revelations that his largely unknown pick for VP was keeping secret that her unmarried 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant - something that is sure to rile the party's deeply conservative Christian base. Sarah Palin, the self-described "hockey mom" and first term governor may have a few more skeletons in the closet. At the very least, the former beauty queen whose most extensive political tenure was on the Wasilla City Council is feeling the burn of the national media spotlight. As of Tuesday morning the web was lighting up with stories that had Palin under investigation for firing her state transportation director, a move that some said came after he refused to fire the ex-husband of Palin's sister. Palin, who made her name, in so far as she has one, as a crusader against oil company corruption in her home state, also risks being pulled into the scandal surrounding Alaska Senior Senator Ted Stevens, for whom she has reportedly done fundraising. But the real barometer for the Palin Pick may be the website intrade.com, which put odds on whether Palin would be pulled from the McCain ticket on its popular betting/forecasting site.

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