Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
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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...
This past week on streaming offered a quartet of spooky and suspenseful films to get folks into the Halloween spirit. Mr. Harrigan's Phone "Mr. Harrigan's Phone," released Oct. 5 on Netflix, has the ominous buildup of a monkey's paw undead revenge thriller, but ultimately resolves itself into a compelling, nuanced character study, told from the perspective of small-town New England adolescence. Yes, it's based on the Stephen King novella of the same name, and it even stars Jaeden Martell from...
Bewitching ladies in blasts from the past dominated this past week's streaming releases, targeted toward different ages of audiences, and to wildly varying degrees of success. Blonde Christopher Lee said actors occasionally can't avoid appearing in bad films, "but the trick is to never be bad in them." Ana de Armas has made a career out of abiding by that advice, with breakout roles in quality films, including 2017's "Blade Runner 2049" and 2019's "Knives Out." When I saw that Netflix's...
Belfair Self-Storage's artist of the month for October is visual artist Sharon Taylor, for whom business manager Barbara Treick will display a sampling of her pieces this coming month on the self-storage offices' art wall. "Describing the type of art that I create is somewhat difficult, because I don't have one particular type," Taylor said. "I love all art. I see art in just about everything. It really comes from my heart. I love to paint with acrylics and watercolor. I love using various...
I attended the Port Townsend Film Festival from 2016 to 2019, and wrote reviews of its films that were published in The Port Townsend Leader from 2017-19. After 2 years of COVID-prompted cancellations, followed by virtual screenings, the Port Townsend Film Festival has returned, under new management, to offer both virtual and in-person screenings for 2022. So, from Sept. 22 through Sept. 25, I planned to screen 12 feature-length films - eight documentaries and four narratives - plus two short...
From the first impeccably staged fight scene of "The Woman King," it's impossible not to hear its implicit sales pitch in your head: Hey, kids, do you like the Dora Milaje of Wakanda, from the Marvel Cinema Universe's "Black Panther?" Because these African warrior women were the Dora Milaje in real life. During the 19th century, the West African kingdom of Dahomey did indeed maintain an all-female fighting force known as the Agojie, which was one of the only standing armies (and one of the only...
After a three-year hiatus due to the COVID pandemic, the Mason County Concert Association kicks off its 2022-2023 season with The Everly Set performing a tribute to the Everly Brothers at 7 p.m. Sept. 25 at the Shelton High School Performing Arts Center. The series continues with Seraph Brass at 7 p.m. Oct. 24, the four-piece rock band Vinyl Radio at 7 p.m. Jan. 25, and the Sultans of String International String Trio at 7 p.m. March 17. All the shows are in the PAC at 3737 N. Shelton Springs...
As fond as I remain of the original "Karate Kid" films, Parts I through III never quite hung together well as a trilogy, even before they attempted to resurrect the franchise on the big screen - twice, with Hilary Swank and Jackie Chan (and we won't even get into the cartoon). Which makes it all the more impressive that the "Cobra Kai" streaming series, whose fifth season debuted on Netflix on Sept. 9, has not only managed to retroactively recast those disparate films as chapters of a...
Harlequin Productions in Olympia marks the changing of its seasons with its September stagings of the play “This Flat Earth,” followed by its annual gala and the season announcement for 2023. “This Flat Earth,” a 2018 play by Lindsey Ferrentino, depicts students and parents navigating the aftermath of a fictional middle school shooting in a seaside town. Admission to the play, which runs today through Saturday and starts at 7:30 p.m., is $35 for general audiences, $32 for seniors and militar...
I entered into the first two episodes of Amazon Prime Video's "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" with considerably mixed feelings, and in spite of finding myself impressed by a lot of what I saw, I'm approaching the rest of the season with mixed feelings still. Thanks to the subsequent significant stumbles of the "Star Wars" film series, Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy seems even more flawless now than when it was first released, but Jackson's "Hobbit" trilogy was an...
'Emily the Criminal' I went to see "Emily the Criminal" expecting a brisk, taut crime caper that would afford one of my favorite comedic actresses a well-deserved showcase to stretch her dramatic muscles, but what I also got was a political Rorschach test whose concerns seem especially relevant in light of debates about student loan debt forgiveness. It's easy to dismiss Aubrey Plaza's Emily as an adult child of squandered opportunities, who dropped out of college after racking up a felony...
This week's reviews are densely packed, including two well-received streaming shows and ... a book of poems? 'She-Hulk' Disney+ continues to expand the Marvel Cinematic Universe through surprisingly societally conscious streaming series. And now that Bruce Banner's cousin, up-and-coming career lawyer Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany from "Orphan Black"), has acquired Hulk powers of her own from accidental exposure to Bruce's gamma-irradiated blood, I look forward to the office sitcom promised...
