Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
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As we approach the close of 2024, the year in entertainment seems to be a story of emerging media gaining breakout successes, in the midst of existing media either treading water or stalling out, capped off by the loss of far too many familiar faces who'd been stalwart presences in the entertainment industry. Musically, this was another banner year for Taylor Swift. She became the first artist to win album of the year four times from the Grammy awards, before releasing "The Tortured Poets...
When "Pretty Woman" premiered in 1990, I remember certain critics treating it as a subversion of Walt Disney Productions' 1950 animated adaptation of "Cinderella," not in the least because Touchstone Pictures, which produced it, was owned by Disney. But writer-director Sean Baker's "Anora" is a far more transgressive subversion of that romantic fairy tale, enough that it also qualifies as a subversion of the relatively tame "Pretty Woman." In both 2015's "Tangerine" and 2017's "The Florida...
Over the course of seven years of writing film and television reviews for local newspapers, I've recommended several selections for holiday viewing, but what follows is my baker's dozen of personal favorites for the season, listed in the order in which they should be seen this month. 1. "A Christmas Carol" (1984) Alastair Sim is considered by many to be the best onscreen Ebenezer Scrooge, but George C. Scott's fierce TV movie portrayal of Scrooge ranks among the all-too-few adaptations of...
I took in two recently premiered streaming series over the Thanksgiving break, one very compelling indeed, and the other a bit of a disappointment given its pedigree. Recommended: "The Agency" on Paramount+ It's remarkable how relevant the international espionage genre has remained through the 20th and 21st centuries, even decades after the Cold War peak of John le Carre's literary career. "The Agency" is extremely up-to-the-minute, and thanks to the current real-world geopolitical climate, its...
In an era of "forever franchises," Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis" offers audiences the novelty of an actual ending. When I watched "Return of the Jedi" in 1983, "Revenge of the Sith" in 2005 and "The Rise of Skywalker" in 2019, each time, I foolishly thought I was watching the final "Star Wars" film. But Coppola is 85 years old now, and all four movies he's directed during the 21st century have been self-financed, so unless his health and his fortune both undergo virtually impossible...
This review is going to cost me some fans, I suspect. Robert Zemeckis' "Here," based on the 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, succeeds at doing what it seems like Zemeckis wanted to do with this movie adaptation. But that doesn't make "Here" a good movie, even if it is a visually impressive one. It brings me no joy to write this. Once upon a time, Bob Zemeckis was a wide-eyed wunderkind in the mold of his mentor, Steven Spielberg. "Back to the Future" practically imprinted itself on my...
Last year around this time, the U.S. Census Bureau reported a little more than 16 million living military veterans were in the United States. I’m one of them. Like civilian society, what’s made so many of our contributions important is how ordinary they’ve been. It’s tempting to fixate on grand gestures, and make no mistake, plenty of veterans have made significant sacrifices to serve their country, even those who are still with us, but what’s just as essential is all the everyday work that so m...
When Scott Beck and Bryan Woods wrote and directed "Heretic," they really went all-in on combining "Saw" with comparative theology. This is not a film for all audiences, even more than most horror movies. While some families might share an appreciation for psychological thrillers, the title of "Heretic" should be your first clue that it devotes a significant amount of screentime to debating religion. Given the number of impending holiday dinners already haunted by the prospect of post-election p...
I entered "The Apprentice" wary from the failures of Oliver Stone's "W." in 2008 and Adam McKay's "Vice" in 2018, worried that yet another attempted biopic of a right-wing leader would fall short in spite of its acting and directorial talent. What I instead saw was a nonspectacular but nonetheless solidly competent film, directed by Ali Abbasi and written by Gabriel Sherman, that succeeded by focusing less on the mannerisms of its real-life subjects than on examining the consequences of their...
For our Halloween review, I'm going back a couple of months to a streaming series on Amazon Prime Video, that's suitably dark for the holiday, and legitimately clever, even though it contains some nagging flaws. "Batman: Caped Crusader" is 10 half-hour episodes of a Dark Knight who's styled more closely to his original appearances in the comics, albeit with a much broader diversity in the character's supporting cast. Artist Bruce Timm had co-created the original "Batman: The Animated Series"...
Switching things up, we're taking a week to cater to readers who spend more time streaming media than screening films in the theaters, especially because it allows me to squeeze in a couple of Halloween-themed reviews. 'Agatha All Along' The latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been airing new episodes on Disney+ every Wednesday since Sept. 18, and it's scheduled to wrap up its run Oct. 30. As a lifelong Marvel Comics fan, if you'd told me years ago that a nine-episode TV...
Writer-director Chris Sanders' big-screen adaptation of Peter Brown's "The Wild Robot" series of illustrated books for children gains an appeal for parents as much as for their kids by empathizing with the role of mothers. Our "Wild Robot" protagonist is a ROZZUM-model multi-purpose helper robot that eventually adopts the nickname "Roz." Roz was manufactured in the future by the Universal Dynamics company to assist human families, but wound up lost in midtransit on an island inhabited only by...
Editor's note: This is the second of two parts. The first appeared in the Sept. 26 edition of the Journal. As the Journal runs my remaining reviews from this year's Port Townsend Film Festival, I just want to thank my readers for caring about films. We watch movies about everything from the mundane to the fantastical, to question and make sense of ourselves and our existences. Who we see on the screen is who we are, and their stories are our own. Which is why, for yet another year, I spent a wee...
The 25th annual Port Townsend Film Festival's virtual schedule of films became available from Monday through Sunday, but I followed my semiannual tradition of catching as many of those films as I could in the theaters, from the single film that screened immediately after the opening night dinner gala Sept. 19, through the festival's final day of theatrical screenings Sunday. Four days, 12 films and one review to rule them all, with no rest until it's all wrapped up. Total coverage. Maximum...
It's my final weekly review prior to this year's Port Townsend Film Festival, and it's also one of the films set to be showcased during the 25th annual PTFF this coming weekend. Filmmaker Louise Woehrle won the PTFF Best Feature Documentary Audience Award for 2019, and she's returning this year with her latest documentary, "A Binding Truth," which scored a 100% "fresh" rating among film critics on Rotten Tomatoes. While PBS is planning to broadcast a one-hour version of the film in February of...
The Journal of Record is produced using 911 call information Mason County Emergency Communications, the Mason County Sheriff’s Office, the Shelton Police Department and tribal police provide. MACECOM does not provide the Shelton-Mason County Journal with specific details about each call. For more information about MACECOM, call 360-426-4441. SEPT. 8 Assault was reported on West State Route 108 in Shelton. Disorderly conduct was reported on North 3rd Street in Shelton. A DUI was reported on Ellinor Avenue in Shelton. Disorderly conduct was r...
The 25th annual Port Townsend Film Festival runs from Sept. 19 through Sept. 22. Because its lineup includes two films that premiered several years ago, I'm reviewing them beforehand to give readers a taste of what they might expect from this year's lineup, regardless of whether they're able to attend. First-time director Catherine Hardwicke co-wrote the screenplay for what would become 2003's "Thirteen" with Nikki Reed, who was 14 years old, and would make her acting debut as one of the...
Watching "Alien: Romulus" offered me the rare experience of seeing a solidly entertaining, well-executed movie that left me feeling less optimistic about the future of the film franchise it's tied to. The original "Alien" film premiered in 1979, and it officially became a franchise with its first sequel, "Aliens," in 1986. Both movies are regarded as critical and commercial successes, but the track record of the roughly half-dozen feature films that followed has been uneven, to put it mildly....
It's not often I watch a film and am left wondering whether to recommend it, but Yorgos Lanthimos' "Kinds of Kindness" fits that description. I'm writing this review primarily because this film will appear on enough critics' choice lists that I don't want to leave prospective viewers unarmed. Among this film's positives are its innovative format and its casting, but those threaten to be overwhelmed by its gratuitous violence and incoherent ideology. Imagine something akin to a CBS anthology...
Even in the midst of superhero movies going mainstream, for so long, with multiple waves of serious articles written about the supposed onset of "superhero fatigue," I remain amazed that a film like "Deadpool & Wolverine" was able to get made. "Easter egg" references and inside jokes for the most devoted of super-fans have gone from being unexpected treats to being obligatory inclusions in any new superhero movie. Yet, "Deadpool & Wolverine" still stands out by being nothing other than an Easter...
The first third of the sixth and final season of "Cobra Kai" started streaming on Netflix on July 18, and the seams are showing in this latest version of the 40-year-old "Karate Kid" franchise. Considering that this all started with a rousing but unambitious young-adult riff on "Rocky" in 1984, it's amazing "The Karate Kid" sustained five feature films, and an animated series, even before "Cobra Kai" launched, originally on YouTube, in 2018. While "Cobra Kai" hasn't been flawless, it's a...
When a film includes a conspiracy theory about the Apollo 11 moon landing being staged, one wouldn't expect it to get a thumbs-up from NASA, but according to Greg Berlanti, director of "Fly Me to the Moon," NASA shared real-life footage from the Apollo program for the film. This speaks to how gravity-defying "Fly Me to the Moon" is. It entertains a long-held paranoid fantasy about the space program while wholeheartedly honoring the real achievements of the men and women who worked to get us to...
Streaming shows for fans of mature legal thrillers and all-ages superhero adventures are reaching the peaks of their season arcs. "Presumed Innocent" on Apple TV+ When I was in high school, I saw the 1990 big-screen adaptation of Scott Turow's novel, which boasted acting heavyweights Harrison Ford, Brian Dennehy and Raul Julia, so this latest adaptation was up against stiff competition to impress me. Fortunately, legal dramas lend themselves to expanded treatments, as Steven Bochco proved when...
For as much as action thrillers such as "Mission: Impossible" aim to put audiences on the edges of their seats, I have rarely felt secondhand tension as uncomfortable as the opening sequence of "Thelma," in which an elderly widow falls prey to a phone scammer. The scene has a pitch-perfect suspense-building lead-in, as we see 93-year-old Thelma (June Squibb) receiving gentle guidance on navigating the internet from her doting 24-year-old grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger), who's so good to his...
For a concept that was coined by a 1985 New York magazine cover story, the appeal of "The Brat Pack" has proven more enduring than a number of major political movements, and now, nearly 40 years later, "Brat Pack" member Andrew McCarthy has returned to the well, to wonder what it all meant, by directing the documentary "Brats" for Hulu. The good news is that McCarthy, who was notable for his characters' kvetching introspection, weaponizes that contemplative streak really effectively as a...
