Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
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In the end, they pulled it off. The problem with measuring any sequel to Mel Brooks' "History of the World, Part I" against the film that inspired it is that Brooks' original film in 1981 somehow managed to feel like much more than the sum of its somewhat uneven parts. In one sense, Hulu's "History of the World, Part II" streaming miniseries, whose debut ran March 6 to 9, learned the best lesson possible from its predecessor's mistakes, because while it spans eight episodes, each one lasts less...
'Star Trek: Picard' Three episodes into the third and allegedly final season of "Star Trek: Picard," and too much of it has already been wasted on recreating the hide-and-seek fight inside of a nebula from "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," which seems to be the all-too-obvious inspiration for other key aspects of our protagonist's intended character arc this time around. In terms of pacing overall, this season has already introduced two new adult children of core cast members from "Star Trek:...
Last week saw two compelling releases from Netflix, plus a friend's recommendation of a streaming release that premiered last year, in which the ghost story was the most lighthearted and family-friendly. 'The Strays' The racial commentary of "The Strays" is as confrontational as "Get Out," but stripped of Jordan Peele's satirical edge, while also infused with a distinctly British flavor of internalized racism. Ashley Madekwe plays a dual protagonist role that takes cultural code-switching to...
The third and ostensibly final season of "Star Trek: Picard" premiered on Paramount+ on Feb. 16, but with only one episode released as of press time, I'm waiting for another episode or two to drop because the luxury of a streaming series is that you, the home viewer, can catch up on the episodes that already aired, anytime you want. Fortunately, when "Hello Tomorrow!" premiered on Apple TV+ on Feb. 17, it did so with three of its projected 10 half-hour episodes at once, which is a big part of...
There's a good chance you can soon see Allyn photographer Brent McCallister's work displayed on Belfair Self-Storage's art wall. McCallister and Barbara Treick, manager of the self-storage business, were put in touch with each other by a friend of McCallister's who, like many who know him, has more confidence in McCallister's photographic skills than he does. McCallister told the Shelton-Mason County Journal that his self-confidence and his photographic skills are areas he needs to work on....
It took me a while, in the midst of other assignments and recommendations, but I finally finished watching both seasons of "Reservation Dogs" on Hulu, per the suggestion of reader John Skans, and I find myself wishing I'd made more time for this show before. Like "Northern Exposure" did with its fictional small town of Cicely, Alaska, "Reservation Dogs" depicts the amusing and occasionally discouraging idiosyncrasies of everyday life in its isolated rural community, trading traditional sitcom st...
The last week of January and first week of February saw intriguing variations in the formulae of some weekly TV shows I've recommended in this space before, so I thought I'd touch upon each of them briefly. 'The Last of Us,' Sundays on HBO Season 1, Episode 3, "Long, Long Time" on Jan. 29 began with Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) making their way west from Boston, before it detoured into a 20-year-long, nearly episode-length flashback, fully encompassing the relationship of...
Ever since COVID reacquainted me in 2020 with Peter Falk's "Columbo," I've considered how neat it would be to see the murder-mystery genre diversified by creating a female version of the Columbo character. Until recently, one niche of character portrayals where women have been underrepresented, especially outside of relationship-oriented dramedies, is the "clever mess" category. You'd recognize this character as a man, because he's Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House and Peter Falk as LAPD Lt....
I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about a sitcom that has arguably always been designed to be entirely disposable. I was a huge fan of the original "Night Court," which ran for nine seasons from 1984-92 on what became known as NBC's "Must See TV" Thursday night primetime lineup, and I was far from alone. John Larroquette, who played the unrepentantly randy and acerbic prosecutor Dan Fielding, won four consecutive Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series...
Recommended viewing: 'The Last of Us' on HBO I have noted before that I am not an avid video game player, but I have several friends who are, and they all recommended I check out the TV series adaptation of "The Last of Us" on HBO. I'm glad they did, because what the first episode on Jan. 15 delivered was a genuinely novel twist on the zombie apocalypse genre, that managed to be both surprisingly plausible and all too relevant to our modern era of global pandemics and ongoing climate change....
Writer-director Brion Rockwell knows film, and he knows the Northwest, so he's hoping the next year or two will help him launch his latest in-progress feature films, set in the Northwest, to an audience of his fellow residents, and possibly beyond, starting with a select screening at the Roxy Theatre in Bremerton on Jan. 21. Rockwell boasts a bicoastal film and writing education pedigree, with a bachelor's degree in liberal arts from The Evergreen State College in 1990, a Trustee Scholarship...
What occurs to me first, after having watched a sampling of four films by Brion Rockwell, is that some of the best film footage of the Pacific Northwest comes from those who spend just enough time elsewhere to appreciate this region more deeply. David Lynch's childhood began in Missoula, Montana, Sandpoint, Idaho, and Spokane (one of my own early hometowns) before the rest of his youth was spent in the South and Northeast, and he captured this region's flavor flawlessly in "Twin Peaks."...
I'm starting 2023 by recommending a streaming series I was remiss in not reviewing in 2022, even though it was easily one of the best TV shows of last year. "Severance" was the show that persuaded me to subscribe to Apple+, and not only is its first season still available on the streaming service, but it's been confirmed to receive a second season this year. "Severance" is like Patrick McGoohan's "The Prisoner" if it was remade for the post-COVID era. In an unnamed wintery state, the Eagan busin...
What made Rian Johnson's 2019 "Knives Out" so much fun is also present in his 2022 "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery" sequel on Netflix, in that it can be appreciated on more than one level. Both films, whose sole shared character is Daniel Craig's master detective Benoit Blanc, are metafictionally unabashed celebrations of the murder-mystery subgenre within murder-mystery stories. Whereas the petty, feuding family of "Knives Out" was bound together by their common interest in the fortune of...
For chef Sara Harvey, making good meals is more than a profession - it's an ethos, a way to help improve her corner of the world by practicing her values and doing something pleasing for other people. Back after a three-year hiatus, Harvey has worked at Alderbrook Resort & Spa for two years this go-around, starting as the chef and retail manager of the Union City Market, the resort's sister property, before stepping into the Alderbrook's executive chef role, overseeing the menus and food...
How does James Cameron expect this franchise to sustain three more films? When I saw Cameron's first "Avatar" film in 2009, my reaction was similar to most reviewers and moviegoers. Its immersive, richly realized visuals absolutely blew me away, but its story and characters felt like a ham-fisted mashup of "Dances With Wolves" and "FernGully: The Last Rainforest." The plotlines and relationship dynamics of "Avatar: The Way of Water" are more complicated and populous than the original film, but...
"She Said" is a solidly competent, impeccably well-acted true-crime journalistic procedural film, essentially serving as an entirely deserved paean to how the efforts of New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey helped expose the serial sexual predation of film producer Harvey Weinstein, but one might be forgiven for thinking they've seen this film before. The first impulse of a lazy reviewer is to compare such films to 1976's "All the President's Men," but closer comparisons are...
'Wednesday' on Netflix "Wednesday Addams attends Hogwarts" is such a stupidly obvious idea for the next young adult horror dramedy franchise that I'm amazed it wasn't rolled out sooner. Ditto hiring Tim Burton as one of the streaming series' directors and executive producers, especially when you remember that this is Burton's first real involvement with the Addams Family, beyond a planned stop-motion film that was announced in 2010 but never developed. Both 1991's "The Addams Family" and 1993's...
Stallone triumphs on TV with “Tulsa King,” while Netflix takes us for a wild ride with “Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?” ‘Tulsa King’ One of the themes of the later years of Sylvester Stallone’s career has been his ongoing struggle to stay relevant in an ever-changing world, whose changes always seem to be turning away from the sorts of conditions that helped make him a success in the first place. In this sense, “Tulsa King” on Paramount+ seems ideally suited to the big man, casting him as a Mafioso wh...
"Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" is a film tasked with multiple missions. Fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe expect it not only to pay tribute to actor Chadwick Boseman, who died of cancer in 2020, but also to show how the concurrent death of Boseman's King T'Challa would affect his fictional African nation of Wakanda, all while introducing the long-awaited Marvel Comics character of Namor the Sub-Mariner to the MCU. Ryan Coogler co-wrote and directed both "Black Panther" films, and given...
The original "Quantum Leap," which ran for five seasons and 97 episodes from 1989 to 1993 on NBC, is one of the most well-built shows in the history of television. It used its sci-fi premise of Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) time-traveling within the span of his own lifetime, by "leaping" into the lives of other people, to stage a stealth anthology series. Each episode, the time, the place and just about all the characters except for Sam and his holographic best friend, retired Navy Adm. Al...
We're closing out this year's spooky season with two engagingly suspenseful streaming series that premiered during the final full week of October 2022. "Cabinet of Curiosities" on Netflix Part of what makes Guillermo del Toro such an appealing figure is his effusive enthusiasm for the art of onscreen storytelling itself, which manifests not only in the craftsmanship and ideas inherent in his own films, but also in his frequent tributes to the works of other filmmakers. "Guillermo del Toro's Cabi...
"Black Adam" is a dark and explicitly political film with unlikely origins, since the ancient Teth-Adam began as an antagonist to magically empowered child hero Billy Batson in the relatively sunny and inoffensive "Shazam" mythos but evolved over time from a villain into the would-be liberator of the fictional Middle Eastern country of Kahndaq. Dwayne Johnson portrays Teth-Adam as a slave under Kahndaq's original tyrant king, during the dawn of civilization millennia ago, whose wizard-derived...
Two Halloween-appropriate horror films, and two first-season finales of streaming shows: Halloween Ends Watching "Halloween Ends" made me feel like the 2005 viral meme of Tyra Banks (herself a victim of Michael Myers, in 2002's "Halloween: Resurrection") when she screamed, "I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!" I will still defend 2018's "Halloween" as the best film in the franchise since the 1978 original, and its direct sequel, 2021's "Halloween Kills," started out with all the...
