Screw LeVar Burton. We don’t need that proto-Urkel anymore. We’ve got Wordstock now. Now in its second year, the first-class lit fest has slimmed down to a svelte three days of writerly awesomeness. This year’s event has more authors than we could possibly list here (for instance: Charles D’Ambrosio, Christopher Moore, Donald Hall, Ariel Gore, […]
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
American Dreamzzzzz
A Movie About a Show About Real Life Which is About Nothing
“She’s been wanting to do this since she was six months old,” Martha Kendoo (Jennifer Coolidge) tells the camera for American Dreamz, an American Idol-esque TV show. Martha’s talking about her daughter, Amercian Dreamz contestant and Britney Spears wannabe Sally Kendoo (played by Britney Spears wannabe Mandy Moore), who sings her corn-fed heart out in […]
Posted inMusic
Writer’s Block
Awaiting the Muses with Blackalicious and Fatlip
IN AN INTERVIEW last November on popmatters.com, Chief Xcel—one part of Blackalicious, the other half being Gift of Gab—remembered a thought kept in mind while creating the duo’s latest album. “I was talking to Marsha [Ambrosius] from Floetry, and she said, ‘Trying to force a song when you have writer’s block is the equivalent of […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Geek Out
Rising from the Tomb
Tomb Raider: Legend Developed by Crystal Dynamics Available for PC, PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360 For most, it started with ye olde Nintendo—the first games that sucked kids in were those starring Mario, those Contra dudes, or that dickhead dog from Duck Hunt. For me, though—due to my mother’s distaste for all things Simpsons, videogames, and […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Sex Addicts Have All the Fun
But This One’s Kind of a Dick
Something pretty amazing can happen when a filmmaker treats the camera like a shrink, the movie theater like a confessional, the audience like a support group. When that tactic works, it’s telling and insightful and a little bit discomfiting. When it doesn’t, you end up with something like the autobiography/dramedy I Am a Sex Addict, […]
Posted inMovies & TV
How to Disappear Completely
Fact and Fiction in Unknown White Male
On July 3, 2003, Doug Bruce, age 35, woke up on a New York subway train and realized he had no idea whom he was or how he got there. Unknown White Male—a documentary directed by Bruce’s friend, Rupert Murray, and made up of footage shot by both Murray and Bruce in the days, weeks, […]
Posted inMovies & TV
More Bark than Bite
Thank You for Smoking‘s Scattershot Satire
All right, can we just agree that at this point, everyone knows what cigarettes do? We’ve seen the tarred-up lungs and heard the wheezing coughs—but the sanctimonious anti-smoking crew keeps yammering away, endlessly repeating scary statistics as they push through anti-smoking laws. They’re enough to make even a non-smoker like myself start thinking in a […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Geek Out!
Living in Oblivion
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Developed by Bethesda Available for Xbox 360 and PC All right, I’m not going to waste any pretense: I’m a Level Seven Night Elf. I’m working on getting this magic amulet, but I’ve also got no problem hacking away at dungeon-dwelling goblins, or sneaking into temples and lifting Elven artifacts, […]
Posted inMovies & TV
The Great Bank Robbery
Spike Lee’s Solid Thriller, Inside Man
In the first shot of Spike Lee’s latest, Inside Man, Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) stares straight into the camera and tells us how it’s going to be: “Recently,” he says, calmly and forcefully, “I planned and set in motion events to execute the perfect bank robbery.” If the very first scene in a film implies […]
Posted inMovies & TV
The Virtues of Terrorism
Politics, Explosives, and Comic Books: V for Vendetta
Not to get whiny, but I’m sick of comic books not getting their due. Oh, they’ve been successful—with blockbuster movie adaptations like Spider-Man and X-Men and Batman, the action-packed appeal of comics has been embraced by the mainstream. That said, superheroes aren’t all there is to comics—fragile magazines whose thin, cheap pages are crammed with […]
Posted inMovies & TV
I’m Staying Home
MIYAZAKI ON DVD
Thanks, in no small part, to the success of Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 film Spirited Away, Disney’s been putting out the Japanese animator’s films on DVD—and doing a pretty decent job to boot, with two-disc sets, solid extra features, and the films’ original Japanese audio. The latest batch of DVDs from Miyazaki and his production house, […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Geek Out!
License to Drill
Drill Dozer Developed by Game Freak Available for Game Boy Advance Goddamn, I am broke. As much as I love videogames, it’s an expensive hobby—maybe, like, yachting, or renovating homes in the Hamptons is more expensive, but not by much. Especially now, as the next-generation consoles start showing up: The Xbox has been usurped by […]