A prosaic remake of a successful foreign film, The Upside is unexceptional in every regard apart from the fact it stars Kevin Hart. I can’t think of anything I’d like to do less than rehash the last few weeks of headlines surrounding Hart (including his homophobic “humor,” the 2019 Oscars telecast he’s not hosting, and […]
Ned Lannamann
Ned Lannamann is a writer and editor in Portland, Oregon. He writes about film, music, TV, books, travel, tech, food, drink, outdoors, and other things.
Posted inFood and Drink
Employee at West Coast Grocery Co. Talks About Sexual Harassment from Head Brewer
Beers at West Coast Grocery Co. Elijah Hasan West Coast Grocery, a brewpub that opened last year in the Buckman neighborhood, has been the subject of a social media firestorm in the wake of a sexual misconduct allegation from one of its former employees. [UPDATE: Beervana’s Jeff Alworth briefly wrote about it on a Monday, […]
Posted inTech
Technics Unveils Two New Turntables, Including One Designed for DJs
The SL-1200MK7. Technics This morning during a keynote conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Japanese electronics company Technics announced two new model of turntables: the SL-1200MK7, the first new DJ-oriented turntable the company’s made in nine years, and the SL-1500C, which comes with a built-in phono preamp and seems geared towards vinyl […]
Posted inComedy
Matt Braunger’s New Comedy Special Was Shot at a Portland Porn Theater
Like all good Portlanders, we here at the Mercury love Matt Braunger. The Rose City-born comedian just came through town last month to (visit family, probably, and) do a show at the Aladdin Theater—we even gave away tix for that one, which is why it always pays to follow the Merc on social media. The […]
Posted inMusic
Delving into Brian Eno’s Ambient Work with Four New Reissues
Four of Brian Eno’s influential albums were reissued on vinyl at the tail end of last year, following up an additional four that came out in 2017. Those reissues comprised Eno’s “rock” albums from the 1970s, while this more recent batch collects four of his so-called “ambient” works: 1975’s Discreet Music, 1978’s Ambient 1: Music […]
Posted inMovies & TV
My Favorite Movie of 2018: First Reformed
As we looked back at 2018, each of the Mercury’s movie critics decided to highlight just one of our favorite movies of the year—movies that might not get as many awards or eyes as the most talked-about or financially successful films of the year, but movies that are still very much worth watching and rewatching. […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Vice Review: Because Nothing Screams “Holiday Movie” Like Dick Cheney!
The woke-ening of Adam McKay started in a strange place: the closing credits of his 2010 Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg buddy-cop comedy The Other Guys. As the names of second unit directors and assistant location managers flashed across the screen, so did statistics and figures about government bailouts and hefty CEO bonuses in the wake of […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Welcome to Marwen Review: Creepy Dolls, Icky Sentiment, and, For Some Reason, the DeLorean
Robert Zemeckis has remade the mental-illness documentary Marwencol as a motion-capture nightmare with Steve Carell, Leslie Mann, Janelle Monáe, and, for some reason, the DeLorean from Back to the Future. Something is wrong with Robert Zemeckis. If you thought it was too late for a movie to enter the “Worst of 2018” sweepstakes*, welcome to […]
Posted inBooks
The Public Domain Is About to Start Growing Again
Harold Lloyd’s iconic Safety Last, one of several works from 1923 due to enter the public domain in 2019. Wikimedia Commons At the start of 2019, the United States public domain—which has been frozen in time like Walt Disney’s brain—will begin to include new works again. And by “new,” I mean works first published in […]
Posted inTV
Save Christmas by Disabling Fox News from Your Parents’ TV
#outfoxtheholidays Okay, this is kinda genius. Taking the idea of “parental controls” quite literally, a campaign called #OutFoxtheHolidays advises you to fiddle with your parents’ cable settings so that Fox News is blocked. It’s a simple idea, but an effective one, as the chances are pretty good that if your parents (or grandparents or aunts […]
Posted inMusic
The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet Is Great. The 50th Anniversary Reissue? Not So Much.
It’s been a banner year for memorializing a banner year in music—specifically, 1968: The latter months of this particular year have seen a deluge of anniversary sets repackaging albums originally released 50 years ago. These have mostly been respectful and well-done archival efforts, so it’s a bit of a disappointment that one of that year’s […]