The Reaping has 96 minutes to cycle through all 10 Old Testament plagues, roughly breaking down to a plague hitting every 9.6 minutes—which seems about right for that many locusts, boils, and gallons of blood. Still, you’ll just be left wondering how something so inherently timeless as biblical plagues could feel so dreadfully long and […]
Courtney Ferguson
Mercury copy chief and appreciator of the most sophisticated form of comedy: PUNS!
Posted inMovies & TV
What a Nightmare!
Even Sandy Can’t Save Premonition
Despite the fact that it stars cute-as-a-button romcom star Sandra Bullock, Premonition so, so wants to be a thriller. You can practically see it straining, with its affected suspension, cheesy musical swells, and an inexplicably complex (yet mind-numbingly dull) plot. And not even the (still) cute Bullock can save it. Bullock plays Linda, a tidy […]
Posted inNews
Portland’s Sexiest Places!
We really went and shot ourselves in the foot when we asked Mercury readers to dish on the best places to have sex in Portland—turns out your favorite places are our favorite places, too! Now we all have to find new places, unless we want to be running into each other in compromising positions. Which, […]
Posted inBooks
Un Lun Dun
by China Miéville
When you’re a kid, it’s almost effortless to transport yourself to magical places like Narnia and Oz. These are places that most kids can travel to without the help of a book—places full of fantastic creations and heart-aching beauty. However, there gets to be a mundane point in your life when these worlds are harder […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Blood and Chocolate Don’t Mix
An American Werewolf in Bucharest
The title of this werewolf love story sends horrific shivers up and down my spine… Blood and Chocolate. Yeesh, it sounds like an ode to PMS. Repulsive name aside, this isn’t such a bad take on the classic werewolf story—if you like an Anne Rice-esque version filled with gothic romance and exotic settings. Oh, and […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Desert Ryder
A Needless, Cheesy Remake of The Hitcher
The remake of 1986’s The Hitcher starts off with a CG jack rabbit making all cute and twitchy before it hippity hops across a desert highway. Then splat—it’s smashed flatter than a flapjack by a speeding car. No less than eight minutes later, the same thing happens to a dragonfly (a CG dragonfly, natch) on […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Welcome to Lynchvania
Ask for Seconds of Inland Empire
WOW. I MEAN, REALLY. This is going to be hard. It’s not wise to open your mouth about a David Lynch film until you’ve seen it at least twice, but here I am, gabbing away after only one viewing of Inland Empire. Lynch’s films, from Mulholland Drive to Eraserhead, get richer and more nuanced the […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Fur-Flying Twister
Great Acting Makes for a Great Scandal
LOOKING AS FINE as I’ve ever seen her, Cate Blanchett nearly steals the show in Notes on a Scandal—a psycho-drama about naïve pottery teacher Sheba Hart (Blanchett) who enters into a teacher-student affair at a working-class London high school. Said affair sure pisses off her newfound friend and coworker, old battleaxe history teacher Barbara Covett […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Slapping Cameron
Staying Home from a Half-Assed Holiday
THE HOLIDAY has good intentions of invoking the fun and quirkiness of ’40s Hollywood romantic comedies—but it just goes to show that the Golden Age was long, long ago. With two disparate storylines butting heads in this film about love lost and love found, the film ends up being a half-assed, cavity-inducing mess. And while […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Organ Grinder
Turistas: More Blood! Stat!
So my best friend’s cousin went to South America on spring break? And boy, did she get drunk at some club one night! She woke up the next day in a seedy motel covered in ice in a bathtub, only to look down and see that someone had stolen her kidney. It’s totally true. My […]
Posted inBooks
Housekeeping vs. The Dirt
by Nick Hornby
If you’re looking for a football-lovin’, music geekout “Nick Hornby book,” just keep walking, ’cause this isn’t the next Fever Pitch or High Fidelity. Housekeeping vs. The Dirt is a collection of 14 essays from Hornby’s literary criticism column in the Believer. And while reading about an author reading and then writing about books you […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Pretty Lame Fiction
Will You Laugh? Cry? How About Neither?
It’s so confusing when a movie doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going, sad or funny, life affirming or death embracing. You know the ones—when you’re supposed to be laughing at the hero’s antics, but there’s maudlin music playing in the background? That sums up Will Ferrell’s latest vehicle, Stranger Than Fiction—I just kept staring […]