Reviews ICE AGE: CONTINENTAL DRIFT. You might as well take the kids to see the fourth installment of the Ice Age series because they’re not going to stop making them. And why should they? These folks have the family movie thing down cold. The films look great, they have some heart, they’re witty and […]
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill is the managing editor of the North Coast Journal. She won the Association of Alternative Newsmedia’s 2020 Best Food Writing Award and the 2019 California News Publisher's Association award for Best Writing.
Posted inArts + Scene
Black ‘n’ Sassy
MEN IN BLACK III. Ever since Independence Day (1996), Will Smith has been the go-to sci-fi guy, and the Men in Black franchise has been a nice breather from watching him and everyone else in the genre frown through bleak, post-apocalyptic wastelands or high-tech moral dilemmas. MIB movies are slick, wholesome odes to B-movies and […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Tao of Jeff
Reviews JEFF, WHO LIVES AT HOME. The good comedies are always harder to find. Movies like Bridesmaids or The Hangover, with their incessant advertising, are impossible to avoid. Whatever entertainment value they might hold is lost before we enter the theater; they can’t live up to the hype. Jeff, Who Lives at Home had no […]
Posted inNews
The Death of Redevelopment
On Jan. 10 in a dark City Hall conference room, Director of Eureka Redevelopment Cindy Trobitz-Thomas clicks through a slideshow of renovated Victorians and storefronts. Her hair is piled in a loose bun on the top of her head. On the screen, a scrubby lot in front of some dilapidated brick buildings transforms into the […]
Posted inArts + Scene
It’s the Little Things
NEW: Humboldt Movie Times and Openings THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY. This adaptation of Mary Norton’s 1952 book The Borrowers comes from Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a protégé of Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Ponyo). It tells the tale of young Arrietty (voiced by Bridgit Mendler) and her parents, Lilliputian scavengers who live under a […]
Posted inNews
On the Waterfront
On a strangely warm, cloudless January morning, a handful of people stroll along the boardwalk, stopping to point across the water at the crowd of boats docked at the Woodley Island Marina. Behind them, where the boardwalk ends at the foot of C Street, stands the newly opened Fisherman’s Terminal with its sea-green roof. The […]
Posted inArts + Scene
To the Letter
An antique iron press with an enormous black wheel anchors the back room of artist Elaine Benjamin’s Blue Chair Press studio, formerly home to the Blue Lake Advocate. The place also came with the oak counter where she greets me, wearing a pair of round tortoise glasses. Obsolete objects are all around, including a row […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Dead Celebrity Cookbook
Let’s get this straight — anytime somebody puts together a collection of recipes from dead celebrities, I’m in. The trifecta of food, gossip and pop culture nostalgia is too much for me to resist. Daily Show film critic Frank DeCaro shares the spoils of his extensive research — through what must have been an Alexandrian […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Film Festivus
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. Journalist Mikael Blomqvist (Daniel Craig) is enlisted to investigate the long-ago disappearance of Henrik Vanger’s (Christopher Plummer) niece. Suspects abound — there are Nazis, drunks and abusers in every branch of the family tree. The heroine, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a punk hacker/researcher, is also among villains, and neither […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Owning It
Suk Choo Kim smiles like a happy baby. At 62, his hair is wispy and silver, but his broad face is still smooth and rosy like the persimmons heaped on the granite counter at which we sit. I open one of his folios, a black 8 x 10 archival paper envelope with a dozen or […]
Posted inMusic
Zombie Throw Down
Rome had bread and circuses. Arcata has stuffing and zombie wrestling. Scores were settled in gravy this past Saturday night at the Arcata Playhouse during the second annual Zombie Throw Down. Billed as a way to manage the local zombie problem, the show featured plenty of ghoulish makeup and audience participation. It was my […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Miso: Japanese Comfort Food
As soon as the mornings turned chilly enough to see your breath, my grandfather, who normally never lifted a chopstick in the kitchen, would commandeer the stove and scowl over a pot to make miso soup for our breakfast. This was not the pale little bowl of cloudy broth and delicate cubes of tofu you […]