Watch Heat again. Not just because Michael Mann crafted one of the best, heaviest action movies ever made, but because of the music. For that matter, Netflix a few of Mann’s other soundtrack-enhanced crime sagas: If you forgive the hammy ending, Collateral is a good bet; if you forgive Colin Farrell’s existence, there are some […]
Erik Henriksen
With honor and distinction, Erik Henriksen served as the executive editor of the Portland Mercury from 2004 to 2020. He can now be found at henriksenactual.com.
Posted inMovies & TV
Extra Credit
Beowulf: Cooler Than 10th Grade English!
Alternately goofy and gorgeous, Beowulf‘s the cinematic adaptation of the roughly 1200-year-old poem that everyone had to read in high school. But be wary, English majors: Hardly the Beowulf that’s in your Norton anthologies, director Robert Zemeckis’ vision of the Old English epic is mostly notable for two things: (A) It’s all CG, and (B), […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Geek Out
Negative Proof
Since its then-kickass debut on the PlayStation in 1999, the Tony Hawk franchise has had a stranglehold on the skateboarding genre. There’ve been like a billion iterations of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater since (okay, more like 11… still, that’s a shit-ton of videogames), and the series’ dominance has largely been unchallenged. Until, that is, this […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Game Over
Hitman: Another Videogame Movie. Sigh.
Videogames and cinema are fundamentally different entertainment experiences. One is based on interactivity, the other on passivity. And whenever Hollywood attempts to cram a videogame into a movie—as they have done with Super Mario Bros., and Street Fighter, and Tomb Raider, and Doom, and now Hitman—it is a colossal fuck-up. It does not matter that […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Dealing Drugs: Fun, Profitable
American Gangster: USA! USA! USA!
In a cool palette of faded grays and blues, director Ridley Scott’s American Gangster tells the story of Frank Lucas, a heroin crime lord in 1970s Harlem, and of Richie Roberts, a cop who aims to take Lucas down. From the get-go, it’s appropriately epic: The first time we see Lucas, he’s lighting a man […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Geek Out
Buttons? We Don’t Need No Buttons!
There’s one thing that Nintendo’s been selling recently, and it isn’t videogames—it’s charm. From the all-inclusive Wii to constant additions to the infinite Pokémon series, Nintendo’s all about… well, the softcore, I guess. Smartly countering the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3’s attempts to net hardcore gamers, the welcoming, non-threatening Nintendo has instead gone after your […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Science Noir
Going Back to the Future with One More Blade Runner
Prophetic and beautiful, Blade Runner was released in June of 1982, and no one cared. Well, more or less: Released two weeks after a little film called E.T., and on the same day as John Carpenter’s The Thing, Blade Runner was one more sci-fi flick in a summer already full of them. And compared to […]
Posted inMovies & TV
I’m Staying Home
Enter the Dragon
As anyone who’s seen it knows, Hard Boiled is a pretty amazing action flick—arguably John Woo’s best, it’s packed with enough blistering explosions and searing bullets to fill 20 less impressive action films. But frustratingly, Hard Boiled has also been hard to find on American DVD shelves. Until Dragon Dynasty. It’s not often that a […]
Posted inBooks
Shortcomings
by Adrian Tomine
Indie comic book creators don’t get much more revered than Adrian Tomine, whose comic, Optic Nerve, has been a staple of the hipster literati for over a decade. Now, three especially emo issues of Optic Nerve have been collected in Shortcomings, a beautifully designed graphic novel about (surprise!) shortcomings. Tomine’s protagonist is Ben Tanaka, a […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Northern Exposure
30 Days of Night: Why I Will Never, Ever Go to Alaska, Ever
“We should have come here ages ago,” one vampire says to another in 30 Days of Night, and he has a point. Apparently, vamps have been too busy swooning around for Anne Rice to, you know, take a sec to really think about things: “Hey, so we’ve got that allergy to the sun, right? So […]
Posted inMovies & TV
I’m Staying Home
So this was the hook, the joke, behind Grindhouse: Two big directors make schlocky throwbacks to the crummy, exploitative B-movies of their youth and cram them together as a double feature—giving multiplex audiences a three-hour-long reminder of what it used to be like to watch movies in grindhouse theaters, with shitty prints and missing reels […]
Posted inMovies & TV
India for Dummies
Wes Anderson Gets Off Track
As with just about everything, it’s the soul of the thing that matters. Watching Wes Anderson’s latest, it’s hard not to consider The Darjeeling Limited to be the slightest of his films. At the very least, it’s the loosest: With a scant wire frame of a plot, writer/director Anderson and his two co-writers, Roman Coppola […]