Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS: Sophomore Slump or Smash?
By Lennox Reeder GUTS, the sophomore album from pop’s hottest rising star, is Olivia Rodrigo’s greatest chance yet to snatch Taylor Swift’s queen of pop crown. The purple cover evokes Rodrigo’s first album, Sour, perhaps indicating that the two are from a similar artistic period. In interviews, Olivia Rodrigo has intimated that GUTS is something…
Bottoms is Nothing Short of Top-Tier
By Schwa Yeleti Pining for someone unattainable in high school is a near-universal experience. Bottoms is a movie about what happens when two friends start a fight club to do something about it. Emma Seligman’s sophomore film, Bottoms, plays on the almost hackneyed premise of “One final hurrah before college!”, but her take on it…
Review of Typhoon’s Offerings, an Existential Narrative by a Portland Band
By Owen Fidler My relationship with music has always been place-based: I associate artists with the landmarks, roads, and environments I see around me when I listen to them. So naturally, before coming to Portland, I wanted to familiarize myself with the music of the area, to gain a better understanding of the music scene…
Silo Review: The Flamekeepers
In a particularly haunting scene of the Apple TV+ series Silo, a military interrogator makes his prisoner an offer. If she fails to cooperate, he’ll lock her in a windowless concrete cell several miles beneath the Earth’s surface, never to see the sun again. If she gives up the names of her allies, he’ll do…
Review: Tommy Wiseau’s Big Shark
Wiseau’s First Film in 20 Years Is Caught In The Wake Of The Room On April 2, I took a break from Qualing to attend the world (pre) premier of Tommy Wiseau’s Big Shark at Portland’s Cinema 21. Apologies to the English department, but I had no choice. Big Shark is the first film Wiseau…
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a Surprisingly Charming Tale of Found Family
The new movie is a crowd-pleaser sure to delight old fans and newcomers alike I walked into the Cinemagic on Hawthorne prepared to hate Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Excited to hate it, in fact. As an avid fan of the game and longtime Dungeon Master for my high school friend group, D&D was…
Movie Review: The Men in Black Trilogy
If you’re like me, you probably spent your high school years watching everything even remotely appealing on Netflix. As far as classic 90s sci-fi went, I thought I’d pretty well traversed the genre. But late last week, a friend of mine (Quest editor Declan Bradley) brought up a trilogy of movies that I had overlooked.…
The Journey to the West: Familiarity in Foreign Lands
The Journey to the West (henceforth abbreviated JW) is among the most well-known works of Chinese literature. It is also roughly a thousand pages, most of which resemble one another to such an extent that reading it had me doubting my sanity, unable to tell if I had already read a particular passage or if…
Rice Boy Is Very Cool And Weird And You Should Probably Read It
The realm of indie comics is a strange one, and one that brings forth all manner of odd creations. The once-serial-webcomic-now-graphic-novel Rice Boy, by Evan Dahm, is definitely on the odder side of such works. Rice Boy, which one could describe as a surrealist fantasy-adenture story, follows the journeys of, well, Rice Boy. Rice Boy…
The Old Guard is Absolutely Ridiculous, and I Love It Anyway
To be clear, Netflix original The Old Guard is a ridiculous movie that has no reason to exist, but I love it anyway. Charlize Theron plays Andromache of Scythia, leader of a small band of immortal warriors with the ability to heal from any injury, no matter how fatal. Theron, admirably stubborn in her refusal…
In Season 2, Slow Horses Goes Full Bond — For Better and Worse
As clandestine meeting places go, a laundromat was an unexpected choice. Yet that’s exactly where the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses, an adaptation of the Mick Herron novel by the same name, decides to take the action by the end of its second episode. It’s a move characteristic of the eccentric but charming series, which…
A Review of RF Kuang’s “Babel”
This week on the entertainment column I thought I’d take a moment to review RF Kuang’s Babel — a tour de force release from the early fall that I sadly didn’t have a chance to write about at the time. Kuang has had a seat reserved on my personal pantheon of all time favorite authors…
Amazon’s Peripheral Fills the Altered Carbon Shaped Hole in My Heart
When I first heard that Mark Zuckerberg planned to throw his company headlong into building the metaverse, I was in disbelief. It was a wild escapist fantasy, a dream that a decade’s, nay, a lifetime’s worth of problems could be solved by running away to another world. But then again, that’s exactly what the metaverse…
THE SHLONG WEANER INTERVIEW
Folksy outlaws. Transgressive Punks. Eclectic satanists. Words fail to capture the composition of one of the most interesting bands at Reed College in decades. Its members claim to have materialized from the steam of an overheated spigot in the Woodbridge boiler room; you, dear reader, are unlikely to challenge this assertion. Intrepid and curious, Shlong…
Nona the Ninth is the Book of the Year
“Let’s listen to the magical inside-out animal-shield man. He obviously has some good ideas.” It’s been a good year for speculative fiction. Even as early as May 2022 we had Seanan McGuire’s Seasonal Fears, the highly anticipated and wildly original followup to her stunning 2019 novel Middlegame. Then there was Locklands, Robert Jackson Bennett’s stunning…
Suicide Squad is the Worst Movie of All Time. And I Love it.
With a 26% score on Rotten Tomatoes, the 2016 film, Suicide Squad is infamously so bad that its sequel is embarrassed to be associated with it. Suicide Squad is without a doubt a perfect Friday night flick if you hate yourself or the people around you and have a little over two hours to kill.…
Harrison Ford Was Set On Fire In Eliot 210 And I’m Not Joking
Everything You Didn’t Know You Needed To Know About The Possessed (1977) First of all: spoilers for all the things about The Possessed that anyone should actually care about spoiling. Normally I think spoiler warnings are kind of bogus, but introducing people to The Possessed blind is one of the few things that brings joy…
Review: What’s Wrong With “Don’t Worry Darling”
After witnessing the discourse surrounding, as some call it, one of 2022’s most debated films, I decided that it was finally time for me to see Olivia Wilde’s newest movie, Don’t Worry Darling. I wasn’t expecting much; I did not have high hopes for Harry Styles’s acting, nor Wilde’s directing (sorry!), but went into my…
Everything Actually Cool At New York Comic Con
It’s early October, and that means one thing: Comic-Con. In particular, New York Comic-Con, a weekend-long caffeine-fueled hype fest filled to the brim with cosplay, Q&A, and lots and lots of trailers. As someone who has spent perhaps a tad too much time viewing said trailers over the last few days, and as such has…
Cameron Frye’s Day Off
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is one of the quintessential 80’s coming of age films. John Hughes’ lovable hooligan and titular character, Ferris Bueller, is a fun-loving young buck who skips school one day with his best friend and his girlfriend to have a Chi-town adventure, and make memories that will last a lifetime. By all…
With Andor, Star Wars is Exciting Again
The new show, streaming Wednesdays, understands that heroes can be flawed — and that’s a good thing. I’ll start with a confession: I didn’t watch The Mandalorian, or The Book of Boba Fett, or Obi-Wan Kenobi, or any of the other Star Wars content that Disney has been cranking out by the barrel ever since…
The Next Game of Thrones? I Suggest For All Mankind
Enough pessimistic fantasy — Apple TV’s ambitious alternate history drama is the best show you’ve never heard of, and it deserves to win the streaming wars. It’s been a good few weeks for fans of epic fantasy. At the end of August HBO Max released House of the Dragon, the streaming service’s blockbuster follow-up to…
The Sandman is a Dream Come True
The new Netflix series, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s “unfilmable” comic by the same name, is 30 years in the making — and well worth the wait. An ocean poured from pure sleep. A living nightmare with teeth for eyes conspiring with WWI mages to imprison Death herself. A baby gargoyle named Goldie and a…
Bane of My Existence, Not the Object of All My Desires: A Review of Bridgerton Season 2
Bridgerton season two was perhaps not what most viewers expected after the magical re-imagined world of Regency England that so many fell in love with back in season one. Of course, season one was not without controversy, but many became obsessed with the show because of its colorful aesthetics, whimsical garden parties, and a set…
I DIDN’T LIKE THE NEW MATRIX VERY MUCH
Like just about every other girl with a natural estrogen deficiency and a complicated relationship with her parents, I went into The Matrix: Resurrections with a ton of anticipation and a whole truckload of expectations. It’s been over two decades since the Wachowski sisters first redefined action cinema with their 1999 techno-gnostic wuxia epic —…
