A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
Every superhero movie is ridiculous on some level. How ridiculous is the new Suicide Squad movie? There’s a character called Polka-Dot Man, whose superpower is the ability to throw polka-dots, and he’s possibly the fourth most absurd character in this movie.
It almost appears hyperbolic to say Old is M. Night Shyamalan’s best film in decades, but he’s produced more shit over the past twenty years than what can be safely extracted through Jair Bolsonaro’s nose. It’s been a wild fall from grace where the director was telling magazine writers after the success of his breakthrough The Sixth Sense that he figured out the formula for making hit movies, and then he basically turned into Max Bialystock after his follow-up Unbreakable (his best movie, IMO). After a series of box office bombs, people began booing when his name was shown in trailers.
That’s not to say that Old isn’t ridiculous. It very much is. It’s camp, but it leans into it.
No one’s hyper-online bingo card includes a square for “Almost eighty year old economist talks about a Boss Baby movie with smartass podcasters.” Yet, here we are and I eagerly accepted the chance to write about the lessons of late capitalism we can learn from the second Boss Baby movie, Family Business. And there are some!
The new documentary LFG (which every sports fan that’s ever been on Twitter understands to mean “let’s fucking go!”) tells the story of USWNT’s fight for equal pay. It’s a well-made film that gives ample screentime to the remarkable Megan Rapinoe (a huge reason why I had been a season ticket holder for her club team OL Reign for many years). For those that followed USWNT’s fight for equal pay prior to 2019, it’s infuriating. At least it was for me.
The Museum of Pop Culture is becoming the first museum to show the new “Heroes and Villains” exhibit the Walt Disney Archives put together to show off some of their most iconic costumes throughout their history. I have a genuine fondness for a lot of Disney movies, so I thought it was pretty cool.
In their own words, Noveltease says, “Odysseus’s misadventures on his journey home to Ithaca have often been told only through the hero’s perspective. This production weaves together narrative perspectives from Odysseus, Penelope, and the goddess Athena as it adapts from the translation by Emily Wilson — the first woman to translate The Odyssey.” It is almost certainly the sexiest adaptation of The Odyssey in the poem’s 2,800 year history.
Of all of the pop shows I’ve been to, Pink put on the best performance. Easily. It was a high energy experience that was part rock/pop show, and part Cirque du Soleil. None of the other pop stars would attempt the things on stage Pink made look easy.
If I were to be asked for a single word to sum up Taylor Sheridan’s new movie Those Who Wish Me Dead, it would be “competent.” It’s a predictable action/thriller but it has three things going for it: acting, storytelling, and the gorgeous Montana scenery.
The Get Together is from a genre I love but don’t see all that often anymore: interlocking stories with different characters who are brought together only by chance being in the same place at the same time. In this instance, it’s a wild house party in Austin. And it belies a sweet, coming-of-age film along the way.
How hard can it really be to write the script for a big budget action movie? The dialogue doesn’t have to be good and the real magic happens when shit blows up or there’s fighting. It might not be something any idiot could do, but if you got two idiots together, you just might have something.
