A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
As two seasoned space men are out fixing the damage on their lunar-bound rocket, a catastrophic explosion sends one out into oblivion and punctures the others’ suit leaving the rookie Hwang Seon-woo (Kyung-soo Do) to fend for himself in an increasingly dangerous thrill-ride of a mission.
Aliens have made contact. They aren’t the grey, lanky kind so often portrayed, but a flat, squishy rectangle… think pink, fleshy end table with eyestalks. The Vuvv communicate through scratches and scrapes via pads at the end of their front appendages. Neither have they “come in peace” or aggression, they’re here to get access to humanity and our resources using commerce as the common language.
Based on the true story of an eager South Korean diplomat, Min-joon (Ha Jung-woo) who risks his life to save a colleague. Set in the 1980’s at the height of Lebonese warring factions, Min-joon is leaving the Korean Diplomatic office in Seoul for the night and happens to pick up a call containing a coded message. A colleague who’d been given up for dead after being kidnapped in Beirut long ago managed to make contact in hopes of finally being rescued.
Dreamin’ Wild (2022 | USA | 110 min. | Bill Pohlad) Like Bill Pohlad’s Brian Wilson biopic, Love & Mercy, his retelling of what happened when …
What a time for Nineties Kids to be alive with access to massive studio filmmaking budgets! In what’s been a pretty great summer of adult filmmakers playing with (and recontextualizing) their childhood toys on the big screen, comes another strong nostalgia play in the form of TMNT: Mutant Mayhem. Spearheaded by “permanent teenager” Seth Rogen, we get a satisfying reboot of the teen turtles who cowabunga’ed their way into pop culture ubiquity when they made the jump from comics into morning cartoons, film, video games, and action figure adaptations in the late 1980s.
We meet twentysomething friends Leon and Felix, just as their working holiday home gets off to a rough start. Getting away from city life to focus on creative pursuits, their Benz stops firing correctly, breaking down a rustic lane, out of cell service, in the middle of a forest. Felix optimistically runs ahead to find a path, leaving Leon alone in the woods to stew over this inconvenience. It’s a portentous beginning, and a pattern that will repeat itself often in their time by the coast in German director Christian Petzold’s take at a “summer film”.
As long as I’ve been writing about the arts (somewhere near twenty years now), I’ve tried to keep any effusiveness in check, lest I feel like one of those critics whose names appear on movie posters declaring some Hollywood dreck like a Transformers movie life-changing. So when I left the theater after watching Oppenheimer, my emotions were almost foreign. I felt wonder and astonishment and like I had seen one of the best films I’ve seen in my life.
Given the monumental event in summer blockbuster history, Chris and Josh collected ourselves and convened a quick roundtable to chat about our experiences with Christopher Nolan’s atomic age biopic and Greta Gerwig’s big budget fantasia about the original American Icon.
Every time I saw a TV commercial or product tie-in for the new Barbie movie – and there were a lot – I had the same thought: “this movie better be good.” It gives me immense pleasure to report that, for the most part, it is an extremely well-made and enjoyable, often (literally) otherworldly, movie that will delight its audience.
Is there a long-running blockbuster movie franchise that is more dependably good than the Mission Impossible films with Tom Cruise? I don’t think there is.
