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Erik Henriksen

With honor and distinction, Erik Henriksen served as the executive editor of the Portland Mercury from 2004 to 2020. He can now be found at henriksenactual.com.
Posted inBooks

The Wandering Earth Review: An Okay Chinese Blockbuster, Buoyed by Liu Cixin’s Astonishing Ideas

Avatar photo Erik Henriksen

Unless you just cram The Thee-Body Problem into somebody’s hand and force them to immediately read it, it’s hard to convey just how big Chinese author Liu Cixin’s ideas are. The first in the award-winning “Remembrance of Earth Past” trilogy, Three-Body begins a story that’s about nothing less than the past and future of the […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy Has Ellen Page AND a Talking Monkey and If That’s Not Enough to Make You Watch It Immediately Then You and I Are Very Different People

Avatar photo Erik Henriksen

The Streaming Wars rage on, with old-school movie and TV distributors twitching on the battlefield as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu march on. There’s already one upside: Movies and shows that wouldn’t have been made just a few years ago—because their audiences would be too small, because their budgets would be too big, because their stories […]

Posted inMovies & TV

High Flying Bird Review: Steven Soderbergh’s iPhone-Shot Basketball Movie Is Like a Smarter, Better Ballers

Avatar photo Erik Henriksen

Okay, wait, already, a correction: High Flying Bird isn’t exactly a basketball movie. There’s some basketball in it! But mostly, Steven Soderbergh’s latest is about what one character calls the “game on top of a game”—the intense, complex, and rarely glimpsed machinations that determine how the multi-billion dollar sports industry rewards and exploits both its […]

Posted inMovies & TV

A New Trailer for Laika’s New Movie, Missing Link, About the Soulless Cryptid That Slaughters Its Way Through Oregon’s Blood-Soaked Forests

Avatar photo Erik Henriksen

Laika President Travis Knight (why yes, of the Oregon Knights) took a recent break from the studio to direct the Transformers spinoff Bumblebee, which—along with most other critics—the Mercury‘s Bobby Roberts was quite fond of. But while Knight was off on Cybertron, the Hillsboro-based Laika was keeping busy with their latest film, Missing Link, about […]

Posted inMovies & TV

The Mercury Has Its Own Shelf at Movie Madness! (And You Can Rent Stuff From It)

Avatar photo Erik Henriksen

Starting this month, beloved Portland video store Movie Madness will have a brand-new shelf—one devoted to picks from the Portland Mercury‘s almost-as-beloved team of movie and TV writers! Each month, we’ll select eight titles in our new “Mercury Movie Madness!” column—and then, you’ll be able to head to Movie Madness, find them on the Mercury‘s […]

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