Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
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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...
Amazon Prime and Netflix recently released two eight-part direct-to-streaming miniseries whose respective target audiences are far apart, but whose commitment to their genre formulas of storytelling are equally impeccable. 'Reacher' on Amazon If you've ever read one of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels, you're old enough to remember when airplane trips didn't include the luxury of entertaining yourself with portable electronic devices during flight. For you youngsters out there, a subspecies of...
A few days remain before Valentine’s Day, so since we gave you six films last week, here are eight more, so you can enjoy 14 offbeat romantic movies through Feb. 14. ‘Pump Up the Volume’ Christian Slater is an anonymous, foul-mouthed pirate radio DJ who can’t work up the nerve to speak out as provocatively in his daily life as a high school student and new kid in town, until he connects with an inquisitive and insightful classmate, played by Samantha Mathis, who’s written him filthy letters a...
Maybe it's Valentine's Day and you're looking to get into the spirit of the occasion. Maybe it's date night, whether it's with someone new, with whom you're looking to take things further, or with a longtime love with whom you're looking to keep that romantic spark going. The problem is, so many of us have seen so many of the same familiar favorites, from more modern popcorn crowd-pleasers like "Love Actually," "When Harry Met Sally" and "Say Anything" to cinema classics like "West Side Story,"...
Belfair Self-Storage doesn’t have shows scheduled for February, but manager Barbara Treick hopes area artists will think ahead to her March fundraiser for “Keep Music in Schools” month. She wants artists to create and display their works at her business’ art space for the occasion. “I’d like to get the word out for this as soon as possible so artists can start working on their pieces during February,” Treick said. “Especially since the subject for all the pieces — artists’ interpretations of...
You can tell a lot about someone by who their favorite "Saturday Night Live" performers are. Folks who still swear by the original "Not Ready For Prime Time Players" are staunchly loyal traditionalists. Those who favor Phil Hartman (RIP), Bill Hader or Kenan Thompson appreciate performers who are solidly dependable, if not as showy. If you love Adam Sandler, you either just turned 13 or have remained 13 for too many years. And the Joe Piscopo fan club consists solely of Joe Piscopo. If you...
I've spoken before about what a gravity-defying franchise "The Karate Kid" films already were, even before they became the foundation for the ongoing "Cobra Kai" Netflix series, and that's never been more true than now, in the wake of the show's fourth season. "Cobra Kai" continues to thread the needle between empathetically reflecting the minefields of modern adolescence and sharing the Marvel Cinematic Universe's ability to whistle past what would happen if certain events occurred in the real...
Area art exhibitors offered their outlook on what lies ahead this year in their world of art. When asked what she looks forward to in 2022, Belfair Self-Storage owner and manager Barbara Treick expressed hopes of generating a good turnout for the “Keep Music In School” show she has planned for March. “I am working on a prospectus for a call to artists to celebrate MIOSM (Music In Our Schools Month) by creating art that shows their favorite song or musical instrument,” Treick said. “My art wall...
Is it possible to evolve (or retain) a social conscience while remaining an unrepentant criminal? Gangster fables have contemplated that question for generations, with "The Godfather," "Pulp Fiction," "The Sopranos" and "Breaking Bad" serving as some of the more notable examples. And while the answer has been "no" in all the aforementioned examples, none of those tales have been set in a world as lawless as Tatooine, where there aren't even any cops to bribe. It's no exaggeration to describe...
I've seen a few folks review writer-director-producer Adam McKay's "Don't Look Up" under the assumption it was intended as a response to COVID-19, even though enough of its pre-production was finished COVID and its principal photography was originally slated to start in April 2020. More than a dozen years ago, I was rewatching an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" with one of my housemates at the time, in which Picard was captured and tortured by alien interrogators (Trek fans will...
The new year is almost upon us, and you are pretty much done with holiday spirit. You need a palate cleanser to wash the taste of holly-jolly cheer out of your mouth. Just as "Die Hard" is the seasonal 1980s action film that actually embodies the spirit of Christmas, "Less Than Zero" is the '80s drama that's also set during Christmas but runs absolutely counter to the spirit of the holiday. The 1987 film is based on Bret Easton Ellis' 1985 debut novel of the same name. It is practically the...
Exhibitors of area artists offered their thoughts on what the past year has meant for the local art scene and what the year ahead could bring. Elizabeth Bennett, operational manager of the Rest-A-While RV Park, saw her annual art and music fair expand into an entire series of one-weekend-per-month events, running from spring through fall, with a growth in the number and diversity of vendors. “It’s been a really special year, with a lot of new vendors,” Bennett said. “And the people who are alr...
Although 2020 was the year COVID first struck, 2021 has been more of a year of transition for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as Disney+ shows like "WandaVision" and "Loki" took established characters on arcs that redefined who they were and could be, while "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" and "Eternals" introduced new players to the MCU. What "Black Widow" attempted to do in theaters is what "Hawkeye" so far seems to be doing more successfully on Disney+ by portraying a torch-passing...
The last time we got an attempted big-screen resurrection of the "Ghostbusters" franchise, back in 2016, online trolls started review-bombing it for sexist reasons before the film even premiered in theaters, because director Paul Feig had the temerity to cast all four members of the team as women. This was unfair and unhelpful, because while the film did not deserve such abuse, neither was it actually any good, but the online trolls undermined their own cause by ensuring any substantive...
