Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
Sorted by date Results 176 - 200 of 221
A common criticism of certain films is that they're "formulaic," which I dislike as a criticism, because it's imprecise. A formula, after all, is simply a set of descriptions and measurements of specific ingredients, illustrating how and when to combine them, in order to achieve the results you're looking for. In that sense, a formula is a rudimentary story, and while it's true certain stories can feel hindered, or perhaps even trapped, by their underlying formulas, it's a mark of a versatile...
Quirky comedic New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi has more than earned my love over the years, but after watching "Thor: Love & Thunder," I'm starting to wonder whether someone should be exercising control over his sugar and caffeine intake. Waititi's 2017 "Thor: Ragnarok" elevated the Marvel Cinematic Universe's "Thor" franchise from its competent yet uninspired onscreen origins, in the Norse God of Thunder's previous two MCU films, by abandoning the mock-Shakespearean aspirations for which...
June 30 and July 1 were some rough streaming viewing days for fans as the ninth episodes of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” Season 1 and “Stranger Things” Season 4 bid final farewell to a pair of fan-favorite characters. As much as I miss them both, and as much as I’m trying not to spoil too much of either episode, I feel like other TV shows and movies could glean storytelling lessons from these two characters’ deaths. In two franchises dominated by their fictional histories and recurring c...
After four seasons on Netflix, and six years at the forefront of pop culture consciousness, I'm suddenly hearing a lot of people ask what "Stranger Things" is all about, even though its focus has hardly shifted. "Stranger Things" is set almost entirely during the 1980s, and mostly in the American Midwest, and revolves around a loosely affiliated group of teens and tweens, plus their occasionally present parents. The group members have overcome their adolescent relationship drama to band...
Anyone who swings by the Skyline Drive-In Theater in Shelton tonight (June 9) can catch a two-hour-long screening of 22 short student films from The Evergreen State College Mediaworks department, all for free. Gates to the theater open for “Stars at the Skyline” at 8 p.m., with the screening set to commence around 9 p.m., depending on when it turns sufficiently dark. Mediaworks faculty members Suree Towfighnia and Julia Zay said they’re excited to share the work of their students, inclu...
It's never too late to join a choir or learn an instrument, and the Great Bend Center for Music in Union is an organization that hopes to help kids and adults find their sound. Founder and general director Matthew Melendez described the organization as "an organization that explores the research-based ways that music can be used as a tool for community development." Melendez said he wanted to create the organization as an institute for applied research, figuring out how to "programitize" the...
My review of "Stranger Things" Season 4, Part 1, will be forthcoming next week. I wasn't about to binge seven episodes in a single weekend. Instead, we'll be looking at another recently released tribute to the 1980s. Even speaking as a self-confessed generational chauvinist on behalf of the Eighties, I keep expecting everyone to get sick of that decade, and to move on from reviving its pop culture. Since the start of 2020, "Bill & Ted" and "Ghostbusters" released critically and commercially...
So, after reprioritizing my entertainment expenses, I'm subscribed to Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Netflix, Paramount+ and Peacock. Remember when streaming was supposed to be simpler than cable? I'd been tempted by Apple TV+ before, as it premiered "Ted Lasso" in 2020, followed by series adaptations of "The Mosquito Coast" and "Foundation" in 2021, but it took the hauntingly gothic atmosphere promised by trailers for "The Essex Serpent" to fully sell me on my seventh streaming subscription...
The summer and fall series of art and music fairs at the Rest-A-While RV Park in Hoodsport kicks off from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday. It will include a memorial to recently deceased Journal columnist and writer Mark Woytowich at 2 p.m. “Mark was such a treasure in our community, and is very missed,” said Rest-A-While Operational Manager Elizabeth Bennett, who recalled Woytowich as being warmly received by his fellow vendors and attendees at her seasonal fairs, where he sold his book “Where Waterfalls and Wild Things Are.” “Being the Shelton-M...
I'm trying something different for this week's reviews. Please let me know if it works for you. I often review the start of new shows (or the start of new seasons of returning shows), but unless the entire season dumps at once, rarely do I review the conclusions of those season-long arcs. This matters because most modern television and streaming shows are written as season-long arcs, which was absolutely not the case with TV shows when I was growing up in the 1980s. Eighties TV had notable...
As I'd anticipated, "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" was well exceeded by "Everything Everywhere All at Once" as a free-for-all romp across multiple universes, but what I suspect surprised a lot of moviegoers over the weekend is the "Multiverse of Madness" pales even in comparison to "Spider-Man: No Way Home," which benefited from focusing more on fan service than on fan homework. While I'd still defend the "Doctor Strange" sequel as a solidly entertaining and well-made Marvel...
What's perhaps most notable about "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent," a charmingly affectionate sendup of the iconically bizarre public persona of Nicolas Cage, is that its most compelling performance doesn't come from the actor you'd expect. In both his best and worst work as an actor, Cage has always managed to distinguish himself from his peers, in no small part because he never gives any performance less than his all. To his credit, he commits just as wholeheartedly to this film's...
Tell me a tale of the past, and I'll often spot what you're saying about the present. The first two "Godfather" films ostensibly chronicle the ascendance of the Mafia in American culture in the 20th century, but they're as much about our country questioning its faith in its own institutions in the wake of Watergate. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas created Indiana Jones and "Star Wars" as tributes to the Saturday morning adventure movie serials they grew up with, but they prophesied how their...
Shelton's Museum Contempo has used the social media skills of one local artist to provide all of the gallery's artists with global exposure. Museum Contempo is at 68 SE Lynch Road in Shelton, but Shelton glass blower Ty Nault has also furnished the venue with a virtual display space. Museum Contempo curator Andrea Mastrangelo credited Nault's photography skills and social media savvy with drawing the attention of Google Arts and Culture, and Gluseum, which she thanked for granting the virtual...
"Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" premieres May 6, but in spite of how much I'm a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and of director Sam Raimi in particular, I'm sure that film has already been outshined by A24's "Everything Everywhere All at Once," a multiversal sci-fi action comedy martial-arts slice-of-life indie-film drama co-produced by the same Russo brothers who directed some of the biggest big-screen hits of the MCU, plus some of the funniest episodes of "Community." It's...
Shelton High School graduate Ty Nault went from pushing paper to being inspired by the artwork within walking distance of his office jobs. He followed up on his childhood fascination with stained glass by creating Molten Glass Works. Nault's pre-artisanal career took him through stints in the insurance and medical business. Mailroom duties gave way to being an information technology worker for DaVita HealthCare Partners' Tacoma branch. During lunch breaks with a coworker from 1998 through 2005,...
On March 30, Bruce Willis' family announced his retirement from acting after he was diagnosed with aphasia, which impairs the ability to comprehend language and communicate. The Los Angeles Times reported that speculation about Willis' condition circulated through the film industry for years prior to his family's announcement. Willis' receding hairline and solid jawline lent themselves to the many crimefighters, criminals and military men he played over the decades, while his stare could switch...
I did not attend the premiere of Marvel/Sony's "Morbius," because however long or convoluted my reviews are, I actually don't believe in wasting your time or mine. Check out the other reviews online, and you'll see you're not missing much. "Morbius" is no "Venom." 'MOON KNIGHT' Instead, I took in a mixed bag of streaming selections, starting with the surreal first episode of "Moon Knight" on Disney+. While the Marvel Cinematic Universe owes its existence to the Wesley Snipes "Blade" films,...
Not all nerds are nerds about everything, so while I'm a nerd about a broad spectrum of media, my one big shortfall is that I've never been a nerd about video games. I'm prefacing my review of the "Halo" streaming series on Paramount+ by saying this so you will know I am reviewing this series from the standpoint of someone for whom this is an introduction to the "Halo" mythos. Of course, I was aware of the "Halo" franchise and had even watched my younger cousin Shawn play a few rounds, so I got...
Artist Alice Durrie has embraced an eclectic variety of media in her attempts to capture and convey the beauty she sees in seemingly insignificant and naturally occurring phenomena around her. Belfair Self-Storage manager Barbara Treick said she looks forward to sharing Durrie's visions and handiwork with appreciative audiences in April. Durrie traces the origins of her 25-year professional art career to influences that include her father, an interior decorator whom she watched create domestic...
Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger were able to lean on their movie careers to get elected governor of California, which led Reagan to higher office and Schwarzenegger back to Hollywood. Donald Trump's high profile from his reality TV show was credited with helping him win the presidency, although his social media presence played at least as large a part in that. But none of those three entertainers went directly from playing the president of their country on TV to getting elected...
So much of the 10-episode first season of "Star Trek: Picard" in 2020, on what's now Paramount+, was devoted to cleaning up the collateral damage of 2002's "Star Trek: Nemesis" and J.J. Abrams' 2009 "Star Trek" reboot that it left me wondering what a second season of "Picard" might look like. I shouldn't have been surprised, because even without those loose ends that were demanding to be addressed, the second season of "Picard" (which premiered March 3) is still much like the first. It offers a...
With 2022's "The Batman," writer-director Matt Reeves has achieved something unusual within the broad field of big-screen adaptations of DC Comics' Dark Knight. In a story that spans Oct. 31 through Nov. 6, we're introduced to Bruce Wayne during his early days of leading a dual life, but it's not an origin story. We don't see his parents getting shot, and both the Batcave and Batman's tools have already been built. It's two years into Bruce's crusade, and he's questioning how much good he's...
Ivan Reitman died Feb. 12 at 75 years of age, leaving a half-century legacy of filmmaking that transformed cinema. Reitman logged close to 70 movie and TV credits as a producer, and 17 feature films as a director. He also created four short films, a music video and an unsold pilot that aired as a TV movie. Reitman directed some of cinema's classic comedies, making "Saturday Night Live" alum Bill Murray the comedic lead everyone believed he could be, and musclebound action hero Arnold...
The saga of fake German heiress Anna Delvey (Anna Sorokin), whose larcenous misdeeds were first made famous by articles in Vanity Fair and New York magazines in 2018, seems almost tailor-made for a TV miniseries adaptation, so I couldn't help but check out the nine-part "Inventing Anna" on Netflix. With Shonda Rhimes at the helm as executive producer, it's no surprise that this adaptation of Jessica Pressler's "How Anna Delvey Tricked New York's Party People" for New York is well-cast and...
