Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
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For a film franchise that's spanned a quarter-century and six installments, the "Final Destination" series has earned more respect than it's received, including from some of the folks responsible for the films themselves. The original "Final Destination" that premiered in 2000 was delivered by a trio of screenwriters from "The X-Files," after initially being conceived of as a potential episode for that TV show. What made the concept a winner was that it weaponized what too many splatter horror...
While I try to prioritize theatrical releases, I still receive requests for reviews of streaming content, which I began writing about after the pandemic sent us all into lockdown. As horrible as the COVID era was, it did yield some gems of entertainment, and May 8 heralded the long-awaited return of a smart, funny TV series whose first season premiered shortly before the federal public health emergency finally ended two years ago. It's a shame so many Star Wars fans remain sore about "The Last...
Grant Morrison, who's written some of my favorite superhero comics, has frequently advanced the idea of superhero characters, and even entire superhero universes, attaining self-awareness about their status as fictional storytelling constructs. It's an admittedly heady concept, but it's the first thing I thought of while watching the Marvel Cinematic Universe's "Thunderbolts*," because Florence Pugh plays mercenary assassin Yelena Belova - the MCU's surviving Black Widow, in the wake of...
The second season of "Star Wars: Andor" is streaming on Disney+, and I swear series creator Tony Gilroy personally writes the first three episodes of each season purely to subject viewers to the most glacial pacing imaginable just so he can win them back with outstanding season finales. Of course, the rest of "Andor" Season 2 has yet to be released, but the back half of "Andor" Season 1 was some of the finest politics-minded sci-fi ever to reach audiences through such a mainstream media...
Ryan Coogler has always been a solidly dependable filmmaker, but "Sinners" - his fifth and latest feature film, as both writer and director - is more than just a very good film, on the same reliably well-made level as 2015's "Creed," 2018's "Black Panther" and 2022's "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever." "Sinners" is the best film Coogler has made. It's easily the best film of this year to date, and I'd argue it's already earned a place of note among the more significant films of the first quarter...
April 12-13 was a nerd streaming weekend, with the return of sci-fi's longest-running television franchise, and the sophomore season of a critically acclaimed TV adaptation of an equally critically acclaimed video game. 'Doctor Who' on Disney+ The premiere of Ncuti Gatwa's second season as the Fifteenth Doctor is much more effective than his first-season debut at selling the essentials of the "Doctor Who" mythos, to wit: Out in the stars is an alien Bugs Bunny trickster, who travels through...
Val Kilmer died too young at the age of 65 on April Fools' Day, which I suspect would have amused him more than anyone. Kilmer possessed an undeniable quicksilver talent, but it's also a matter of record that he could be deeply difficult to work with, which hindered his career even before throat cancer had all but robbed him of his voice by 2017. Still, Kilmer remained a working actor to the last, even paying tribute to a few of his more notable roles, satirically as "Bluntman" (a nod to his...
One of rock's most influential bands gets an entertaining origin story in "Becoming Led Zeppelin," while medieval fantasy serves as grist for the mill of modern class-conscious satire in "Death of a Unicorn." Becoming Led Zeppelin As much fun as VH1's "Behind the Music" could be, was there anyone besides "The Doors" director Oliver Stone who was really psyched to see those musical artists' inevitable downfalls? "Becoming Led Zeppelin" manages to be a feel-good documentary by focusing on the...
The survivors' guilt of veterans and the duplicity of international espionage make for great viewing in Kyle Hausmann-Stokes' "My Dead Friend Zoe" and Steven Soderbergh's "Black Bag." "My Dead Friend Zoe" takes a wry and occasionally acidic look at how one U.S. Army Afghanistan veteran copes (or, more accurately, doesn't) with the loss of her best friend in uniform, all while she's been tasked with dealing with the decline of her stoic grandfather, whose military service had inspired her to...
Netflix's most-watched recent release leaves a lot to be desired for the fans of its source material, while the Skyline Drive-In Theater in Shelton is starting its next season with some distinctive new films. "The Electric State" started streaming on Netflix on March 14, and is based on the 2018 illustrated novel of the same name by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag. The book and the movie are set in an alternate version of the 1990s in which advanced robotic and virtual reality technology have...
With "Mickey 17," Bong Joon-ho seems to have ascended to his fully actualized Pokémon form as a filmmaker by synthesizing the pitch-black comedy, scathing social commentary and ambitious sci-fi concepts of 2006's "The Host," 2013's "Snowpiercer" and 2019's "Parasite." Surprisingly for a film with such a dark premise, "Mickey 17" might be Bong's most humane and ultimately upbeat narrative, buoyed considerably by the amiably dumb shaggy-dog energy of Robert Pattinson as our title character,...
The third streaming season of "Reacher" is well underway on Amazon Prime Video, and what's made it increasingly refreshing is how much it's heeded the advice of Optimus Prime. In "The Transformers" franchise, voice actor Peter Cullen has played heroic Autobot leader Optimus Prime from the 1980s cartoons on through the 21st century Michael Bay movies. Peter Cullen's brother, Larry Cullen, was a decorated U.S. Marine who'd served in Vietnam, so when Peter told Larry he was auditioning for the...
Writer-director Coralie Fargeat hit the ground running with her 2017 debut feature film "Revenge," which felt as though Meir Zarchi's "I Spit on Your Grave" from 1978 had been filtered through a layer of Zack Snyder's "Sucker Punch" from 2011. Far from suffering a sophomore slump, Fargeat has accelerated with her second feature film, "The Substance," which feels like a Brundlefly telepod fusion accident between Larry Cohen's "The Stuff" from 1985 and Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" from a couple of...
"September 5" withstands scrutiny as a remarkably authentic portrayal of modern world history. While the events it chronicles are more than 50 years old, the issues this film presents remain all too relevant to consumers and producers of news. "September 5" opens with the ABC Sports crew covering the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, in what was then West Germany, on the day when the Palestinian organization Black September took members of the Israeli Olympics team hostage in the Olympic Village....
If you're into brain-bending dystopian mystery series on streaming, not only has Apple TV+ brought back the darkly satiric workplace-based "Severance" for a second season, but Hulu has debuted the political thriller "Paradise." After four episodes of each, I'm hooked. "Severance" delivered a top-flight first season with a crackerjack ensemble cast, and its follow-up thus far has managed to avoid the "sophomore slump" that a number of nonformulaic shows can struggle with. "Paradise," meanwhile,...
Since I first saw him in AMC's "Fear the Walking Dead" in 2015, Colman Domingo has impressed the hell out of me as an actor, making me want to watch everything he was in, even when the material failed to live up to his outstanding talent. I was already sold on seeing his starring role in Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar's "Sing Sing," but what made it even better was that the rest of the movie, including his co-stars, more than matched the superb performance I've come to expect from him. This is...
It perhaps says something about what kind of year we're in for when the first month of 2025's movie releases have skipped straight to the sort of horror movie premises typically reserved for October. In some ways, the two films are a study in contrasts. Steven Soderbergh has never directed a haunted house film, not even an inverted haunting such as screenwriter David Koepp helps him deliver with "Presence," while Leigh Whannell has become experienced at both writing and directing supernatural su...
On Jan. 16, David Lynch died, just four days shy of his 79th birthday, after a nearly 50-year career spent changing the face of film and television. Lynch's output was absolutely not for everyone, and even those of us who regarded ourselves as ardent fans would admit that not all of what he did worked equally well. What made Lynch's works worthwhile was not trying to suss out what they meant, but basking in the experience of how they made us feel, and what they inspired us to dream. Lynch took...
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. JAN. 5 Alarm activity was reported on Northeast State Route 3 in Belfair. Vehicle theft was reported on South 7th Street in Shelton. Trespassing was reported on Turner Avenue in Shelton. Threats were r...
Reviewing a couple of relationship dramas this week, one made by a filmmaker local to this side of the Puget Sound. The Rose Theatre in Port Townsend and the Regal Poulsbo are showing writer-director Halina Reijn's "Babygirl," starring Nicole Kidman and Antonio Banderas, which was inspired by 1992's "Basic Instinct" and 1993's "Indecent Proposal." A challenge in recreating the taboo heat of the erotic thrillers of decades past, such as those made by directors Paul Verhoeven and Adrian Lyne, is...
The winter holidays brought with them two cinematic takes on a couple of classics of 20th century pop culture, Robert Eggers' "Nosferatu" and James Mangold's "A Complete Unknown." I found both to be solidly good, even as they felt tantalizingly close, yet just out of reach, of being truly great. In some ways, it's my fault for not being as thrilled by Eggers' "Nosferatu" as I was by his work on "The Northman" in 2022. I hadn't studied the legend of Amleth, which inspired Shakespeare's "Hamlet,"...
The New Year heralds the arrival of several movies and TV shows I'm looking forward to seeing, a number of which I might be able to review in this space. On the big screen, Steven Soderbergh has apparently reinvented the haunted house subgenre with "Presence," set to release Jan. 24, which is filmed from the perspective of the ghosts. When "Captain America: Brave New World" hits theaters Feb. 14, it will not only continue the story arc of 2021's "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier," but it will...
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...
