Tag: Featured

Border [Fantastic Fest 2018]

Out of all of the movies I saw at Fantastic Fest, Ali Abbasi's Border stands as my personal favorite - One Cut of the Dead and The World Is Yours were more fun, Burning was more cerebral, and Apostle was far more frightening, but out of the dozen+ films I saw, nothing else even came close to Border for sheer cinematic magic. It was one of the ...

Piercing [Fantastic Fest 2018]

Jeeeeeesus. Nicolas Pesce’s new film Piercing accomplishes that rare feat of being a movie I both enjoyed and simultaneously never want to see again. The film is tight, both in terms of runtime and tension, and Pesce steers us through a dreamlike world of New York highrises, hotel rooms and hallucinations towards a finale that ...

The World Is Yours [Fantastic Fest 2018]

Though I was slightly delayed by a round of convention crud, I am back from Fantastic Fest! We saw over a dozen movies over the back half of the convention, and almost all of them were, well...fantastic. I hope to write reviews of everything we saw over the next couple of weeks, with as few ...

Review: Baahubali 1 & 2

While I definitely know what genres of movies I enjoy - fantasy, sci-fi and horror - I make a point to try and watch movies outside of my usual comfort zones, and I make a special point to watch movies from outside the vortex of Hollywood and US culture, so how the hell did I ...

The Mystery of the Green Soup: Caldo Verde

One of my favorite soups for both warm weather and cold is caldo verde - Portuguese for, appropriately enough, "green soup", a name that comes from copious amounts of thinly sliced leafy kale, giving it a deep green color in the bowl. It has a short, inexpensive ingredient list - consisting of olive oil, garlic, kale, potato, ...

Castle Rock is Off to a Great Start

Stephen King has achieved that almighty high that I think a lot of writers (myself definitely included) dream of; his world-building has grown so rich, so densely populated and fully conceived, that the world itself can stand as a complex, compelling character all its own - in this case, the haunted (and haunting) town of ...

A Still from Ghost Stories (2017)

Review: Ghost Stories

Ghost Stories 2017 Dir. Jeremy Dyson, Andy Nyman   Ugh. I am really conflicted about this movie. Ghost Stories does a lot of little things right, and does one very big thing wrong, and that makes it tricky to review. I’m honestly still not sure if I liked it or not. I don’t actually know ...

Review: The Houses October Built 2

Out of either an abundance of free time or just a general dearth of recent horror movies to watch, last night we sat down to watch the sequel to The Houses October Built, the world’s longest way of saying “we really like haunted attractions, you guys”. The first movie wasn’t groundbreaking, but it was a ...

Army Stew, and the Allure of Stone Soups

Korean food was once a rarity in Seattle, but over the past ten-ish years it has spread like wildfire, to my never-ending delight. Tofu soup and tabletop BBQ joints have popped up in neighborhoods all over the city, and with them comes, every so often, my favorite Korean dish: budae jjigae, AKA “Johnson Tang”, AKA ...

A picture of raclette being served.

Raclette is Food Porn for Cheese Fetishists

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” The woman standing in front of me holds up her heavy-bladed scraping knife and raises her eyebrows. Her tone of voice would be appropriate for the attendant at a bungee jump, or a skydiving instructor. I nod and try to hide the excitement in my voice. “I’m ready, ...