With all due respect to Greta Thunberg and Billie Eilish, nobody had a better 2019 than Baby Yoda. The real star of the Disney+ flagship Star Wars series The Mandalorian, the little green puppeteering/CGI marvel (aka "the Child") might be the most adorable creature ever created.…

Uncut Gems is one of those "his own worst enemy" capers. You know, the kind of movie where you sit there for two hours watching some doofus constantly trip over his own laces — usually figuratively, sometimes literally — on the way to a personal epiphany about how all his bad choices and lack of useful self-awareness have led him to whatever unpleasant place they lead him to.…

[IMAGE-1] I honestly don't know how people like Bryan Stevenson keep up the fight. Just Mercy is the true origin story of a literal social justice warrior, a Harvard-educated lawyer who, in the late 1980s, launched the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, to take on the neediest, most desperate cases.…

[IMAGE-1] First of all: No. Why would a suddenly single dad to traumatized young children leave said shocked and distressed kids with his new fiancée, who is also the sole survivor of her own massive childhood trauma?…

[IMAGE-1] Harrison Ford has gone full Grizzly Adams and Buck the canine hero is fully CGI, 100-percent digital, not a scrap of real fur or dog farts about him. There is so much about this new umpteenth film version of Jack London's classic novel The Call of the Wild that is ready-made for meme-iriffic snarking.…

What am I supposed to say here?…

Ever since Ghostbusters, the go-to tactic for supernatural comedy is to show characters experiencing remarkable, seemingly impossible things and yet reacting with the kind of mild bemusement you get watching someone successfully parallel park.…

This is hardly the first time the Catholic Church has to deal with a plague. Spokane Bishop Thomas Daly knows that well.…

PROPHET OF DOOM…

As COVID-19 fears grew, public officials and sports execs contemplated health risks — and debated a PR message — but let 33,000 fans into a Seattle Sounders soccer match, emails show. By Ken Armstrong, ProPublica, and David Gutman and Lewis Kamb, The Seattle Times On March 6, at 2:43 p.m., the health officer for Public Health — Seattle & King County, the hardest-hit region in the first state to be slammed by COVID-19, sent an email to a half-dozen colleagues, saying, “I want to cancel large group gatherings now.”…

March is obviously going to be the busiest month for any purveyor of traditional Irish music, and with St. Patrick's Day right around the corner, Spokane's Floating Crowbar has multiple gigs crowding the week's calendar.…

On any other week, you can rely on the Inlander for information on live shows happening in Spokane and North Idaho, and to read about the artists and music festivals that we think are worth your time.…

Jenny Don't and the Spurs were right in the middle of recording their third full-length album when a vocal polyp put a halt to the process.…

You'll be forgiven if, during the daily deluge of COVID-19-related updates, you didn't notice that some seriously great musicians recently booked shows in and around Spokane for later in the year.…

Celebrities: They're just like us! Along with everyone else, famous people are self-isolating at home, and some of them have taken to social media to alleviate the stress of the outside world. We don't need to tell you that events everywhere are canceled, so a few big-time musicians are putting on personal concerts for their fans and followers, and a lot of them — save for that cringe-inducing, star-studded cover of "Imagine" that was going around yesterday — are actually pretty good.…

Welcome to the quarantine.…

Calling all fearless freaks! Mark your calendars: The Flaming Lips have rescheduled their now-canceled April gig at the Fox Theater for March 19, 2021.…

Tours are on hold.…

While not every musician has taken to the internet to perform live shows during the (almost) nationwide lockdown, it sure seems that way. At least, it does according to my social media feeds, which lean heavily on bands and solo artists.…

Ask any working musician why they play live, why they lug their equipment to and from bars and restaurants and wine-tasting rooms week after week, and they'll point to the same nebulous thing: It's the connection with an audience.…

When he was putting together the latest compilation CD for his label CorpoRAT Records, Kris Martin had intended to hand out promotional discs at Boise's Treefort Music Festival, where several artists from the Spokane label were scheduled to perform, and then officially release the album in April for Record Store Day.…

Put pictures of 1975-era Aerosmith and 1995-era Guided By Voices next to each other and you probably wouldn’t think the bands have anything in common.…

This is normally the time of year when we're up to our eyeballs in concert announcements, but in these topsy-turvy times, we're instead having to write about all the concerts being canceled due to COVID-19. It's a real bummer.…

And summer takes another hit. Strolling Spokane's Coeur d'Alene Park in Browne's Addition for the Northwest Museum of Art & Culture's annual ArtFest is one of the pleasures of early summer, typically.…

The Buzz Bin HERE'S THE BEEF…

…

The Spokane Comedy Club might be quiet right now, but there are still laughs to be had on Zoom, and not just from watching your co-workers try to navigate the online meeting platform. Saturday night, and again next Saturday, the comedy club is hosting Comedians Doing Comedy: A Virtual Comedy Show.…

We've known that Hamilton was going to be part of the 2020-21 STCU Best of Broadway season for a while, but now we finally know the exact dates, as well as the rest of the featured shows for the season. Granted, the whole world has changed since WestCoast Entertainment announced Hamilton was coming to town back when they announced their 2019-20 season — a season that's been roiled, along with the rest of our lives, by the coronavirus pandemic.…

Gonzaga Athletic Director Mike Roth took to the Zoom online meeting app Wednesday for a lengthy chat with members of the school community, fans and media to answer questions about college sports in the era of COVID-19. Like so many things regarding the coronavirus, there are a lot of hopes for a rapid return to normalcy — all of them couched in the reality that none of us really know how the pandemic is going to affect our lives three months from now, or six months down the line.…

Here are a few ways to keep yourself entertained, and maybe even educate yourself a bit, while you're stuck at home:…

Forty years ago, Mount St. Helens in southwestern Washington was just days away from a devastating eruption. When the mountain finally did blow, after weeks of frequent quakes and ash belching, on the morning of May 18, 1980, it caused the deadliest and most economically destructive volcanic event in U.S. history.…

THE SHOW WILL GO ON…

Another First Friday is here, and you can correctly assume that it will be all online once again. The May 1 Virtual First Friday is from 10 am to midnight.…

Northern Quest Resort & Casino is set to reopen Tuesday, albeit with strict social-distancing and other safety protocols in place, becoming the second regional casino to reopen after closures caused by the coronavirus. Resort officials expect a crowd due to pent-up interest in the community for getting out of the house (not to mention Cinco de Mayo).…

ON INLANDER.COM NATION: Even as U.S. President Donald Trump urges states to reopen their economies, his own administration projects that the death toll from COVID-19 will spike to 3,000 people per day.…

By Johnny Diaz The New York Times Company…

ON INLANDER.COM NATION: As meatpacking plants nationwide shutdown due to COVID-19 outbreaks, certain meat products are becoming harder to find at grocery stores and fast-food drive-thrus.…

The latest issue of the Inlander is hitting newsstands today. Find it at your local grocery store and hundreds of other locations; use this map to find a pickup point near you.…

Two more residents who were staying at the Spokane Veterans Home have died of complications related to COVID-19, according to the Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs. There have now been five residents of the home who have died following their diagnosis of COVID-19.…

This is what it feels like to live during an historic event.…

Cops are hackers now, too.…

In times of trouble, escaping into the art that calms you is key to keeping your sanity.…

The Buzz Bin VAMPY VIBES…

Drink Local For the majority of regional craft breweries, most revenue comes from two avenues: direct-to-consumer sales out of a tasting room and selling beer to local bars and restaurants.…

The chafing.…

At every level of America's food system, mandated closures and outbreaks of COVID-19 have interrupted the finely tuned network that normally gets food from farmers and food processors to restaurants, grocery stores and food banks.…

By Patricia Cohen and Tiffany Hsu The New York Times Company…

At this point in our locked-down lives, it’s entirely possible many of us have exhausted our Netflix queue, completed every puzzle in our houses and perfected our sourdough loaves. OK, probably not.…

While events around the country have been put on hold, Coeur d’Alene’s Summer Theatre is still slated for a show at the end of the month. But it won’t be in the usual format.…

Every spring, audiences in Moscow are typically congregating for the Kino Short Film Festival, an evening of shorts made by the University of Idaho's senior film students. Things being as they are, the Kenworthy Theater won't be open for this year's event, but the U of I will be streaming a virtual version this Friday, May 8, at 6 pm.…