Culture & More
Movies, TV, music, and what's worth your time
Entertainment coverage skews toward whatever the algorithm wants to surface this week. The shows nobody is watching that turn out to be the year's best television, the album that quietly reset a genre with no press cycle behind it, the film that earned its reputation through word of mouth rather than marketing spend: these are harder to find in a media landscape optimized for volume.
Owl Post reads entertainment with an eye toward what is actually worth your attention rather than what is loudest. That means tracking the streaming landscape critically, including which platforms are producing work that justifies the subscription and which are coasting. It means following music across genres rather than just chart activity. It means covering film with attention to what is in theaters and what is being overlooked. And it means following the business layer of entertainment, including the studio decisions, streaming economics, and industry shifts that determine what gets made and what does not.
The beat spans film (theatrical and streaming), television across all platforms, music across genres, and the cultural conversations that form around all of them. Owl Post reads serious film and television criticism, music journalism with genuine editorial standards, and the entertainment business press that covers the industry economics behind the content.
Your digest adapts to your relationship with entertainment criticism. If you want the opinionated, take-a-position voice that tells you what is good and makes a case for it, that framing is available. If you want the recommendation-first approach that answers what to watch and what to skip without extensive argumentation, that works too.
A daily entertainment digest. What is worth your time, what the industry is doing, and what the culture is talking about.
A new Dracula adaptation is coming to streaming, and it is hitting the platform at the perfect time in this season of horror viewing.
The makers of Coraline return with their distinctive animation style in a magical tale of a secret world of strange beasts, talking animals and evil governesses Here is an engaging family movie from the Portland-based Laika studio that created Coraline. It is a fantasy adventure in Laika’s distinctively crafted stop-motion animation, written by Chris Butler from the bestseller of the same title by Carson Ellis and Colin Meloy, the latter being a band member of The Decemberists, one of whose tour posters we duly glimpse in this film. The director is Laika’s lead animator Travis Knight. It’s a forthright, exuberant, good-natured and old-fashioned children’s tale which CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien might have recognised, a story about the mysterious glory of going on a quest and the terrible fear and wish-fulfilment euphoria of being called upon to confront secret forces that the grownups know nothing about. The setting is modern-day Portland, Oregon, a groovy city whose hipster-ish stores (there’s a coffee shop actually called Dripster) and Woke 1.0 signage are affectionately mocked. But most of all, the film is aware of a huge forest park next to the city, a place here mythologised as the impassable wilderness or “wildwood” where strange creatures, fairytale nobility and wisecracking talking animals reputedly dwell, of which the city-dwelling humans are entirely ignorant. Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is a 12-year-old girl whose parents (voiced by Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine) are a couple of amiable hippies who believe in natural forces and benign magic. They have another child, Prue’s baby brother Mac, who Prue has to look after one day, pushing him in his stroller around the city and having to endure a certain classmate of hers tagging along. This is nerdy Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) who has a crush on her.
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