Ori and the Will of the Wisps Wow. This occupied my Christmas break. As rain came down and Covid threatened yet again, I wore my thumbs numb playing this highly addictive platformer. When the batteries on my controller ran dry I ran through torrential Sydney rain for fresh ones. The gameplay is fun, the scenery is beautiful and the soundtrack incredible. That fucking spider boss though. And her babies. They can get fucked. I’m sure my new neighbours thought I had Tourette’s.
The Medium I loved this. I didn’t care a great deal for the plot but the format is almost exactly what I’ve long had in mind for how I would make my own adventure game (albeit with more structured camera angles & less camera changes and a less hand-holding in the gameplay). The spirit world split was also a very clever game device.
Series
How To With John Wilson Oh, how I’ve missed Nathan For You. I wasn’t sure about How To after seeing the first episode. It felt like a poor attempt at Nathan Fielder’s style, but as each episode progressed I realised John Wilson was truly doing his own thing. His style and approach is unique and subtly hilarious. Structurally it’s just as impressive as it manages to wrap the entire set of episodes up in a way you don’t expect. It’s a very visual show – if you play on your phone you’ll miss 90% of the jokes. Notable mentions: the foreskin guy (what!) and the absurdity of the art commissions.
Friday Night Dinner (Season 1-2) Another Robert Popper classic. Somehow this passed me by when it first aired but the advantage is I now have some comedy to watch – which I’ve been needing. The father is a classic, as is Jim (in smaller doses). Can’t stand the blonde son though – he reminds me too much of the kind of aloof motherfuckers I can’t stand in real life.
Your Honour This was a like a quality streaming show written by a broadcast television writing team. I enjoyed it, but there were a lot of moments of the story which were a bit too convenient. The cast carried it.
The Undoing I got right into this, and enjoyed the ride – but I’m not quite sure I liked how it landed. You’re led to assume that the most obvious ending can’t be what happens – and somehow the twist is that there is no twist.
The Mandalorian (Season 2) Even better than last season, each episode better than the last. It looks and sounds fantastic and not a moment is wasted. No other show makes me feel like a kid again better than this.
WandaVision I only really caught this because I have free Disney+ now. I enjoyed all the sitcom references, hated the pseudoscience and was lost by the references that went way over my head since I don’t have a PhD in Marvel.
Movies
Nomadland McDormand was great, cinematography and scenery is stunning (set in a region of the world that really represents a happy place for me). Script and plot are minimal, yet the themes of personal loss and the larger economic and societal issues still come through. Most of the characters in the film are real people – not actors – and at times it almost feels like a documentary. I really enjoyed it.
Mank Love Fincher, but I was far too distracted by the visual quality of this to enjoy the story. I’m guessing the idea was to pull the audience into the world, but it did the exact opposite for me. Plenty of beautifully framed shots regardless, as you’d expect. The Lighthouse used a visual style to great effect. This felt like a gimmick.
Before Sunrise Great script which plunges you right into a chance encounter between two travellers on a night in Europe. Enjoyed this a lot more than I anticipated. Soz for the blue balls Hawkie.
Soul I don’t tend to watch a lot of animated features these days. They generally bore me. I gave this a go when I heard a lot of hype surrounding it. The hype was unjustified. The story was boring, the visual quality was more “cinematic” than Pixar’s usual fare but generally bland. The one positive was the “Soul-world” where they tried something new for a change, but overall even that wasn’t worth it.
Docos
Some Kind of Heaven
Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult This was fascinating and shocking. Organised religion IS abuse, there really isn’t any other way to cut it. What’s particularly bizarre about NXIVM is the players in the game. Keith Raniere, the self-proclaimed “third best problem solver in the world” (lol) would have to be the most bland, uncharismatic cult leader to have ever existed. He’s the annoying guy in a group who you let come along cause you feel bad for him, not the guy you follow.
The Vow This doco covers the same content as the aforementioned Seduced, just a hell of a lot more bloated. The “bloated doco series” has been a plague since Making a Murderer – find yourselves an editor and get some perspective as to how much meat your subject matter has on its bones. This only had to be 5 episodes at MOST.
Some Kind of Heaven This was fascinating, sad, heart-warming and bizarre. It follows some of the people at Florida’s famous The Villages retirement village as they live out their twilight years. The Villages is a carefully constructed world designed to resemble the lives they might have had in their twenties. It’s beautifully shot and it’s nice to see these people having fun, but incredibly sad to watch some of them still dealing with the kind of relationship stress and jealousy they had in their hey day. It made me reflect on my own life a little too much. Van life handy-man is a real piece of work.
A Glitch in the Matrix Rodney Ascher of Room 237 fame directs this feature length doco about simulation theory and, indirectly, the future of gaming and entertainment to come. He builds most of it around a 1977 Philip K Dick lecture where he emphatically suggests the likelihood of such a reality existing. This was really cool, and cleverly constructed. I particularly liked the use of avatars for interviewees. It doesn’t seek to convince you that we live in a simulation (would it even matter if we did?) but the ideas and people make for fascinating discussion, including some really disturbing takes. Long story short, I’m surrounded by NPCs.
Alien Worlds I loved this. I thought it was a great concept, well considered and executed. It mixes information from life on Earth and hypothesises how potential alien life may exist. Shout out to the guy getting excited watching beetles have sex.
Framing Britney Spears Had to jump on this bandwagon. Spears was my top celebrity crush when I was 18, and Toxic is still one of the greatest songs of all time, so I didn’t exactly approach it kicking and screaming. The main thing that struck me was just how different things were in the 90s. It’s easy to forget even though I lived through it, but some questions from journalists and jokes from late night hosts are just shocking and cringey when heard with modern ears.
Pods
Smartless Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes chatting with random celebrities, and paying each other out. Yeah, it’s in the celebrity-interviewing-celebrity circle jerk genre, but the dynamic between these guys really works and often hilarious. I powered through all of them in two weeks.
Every moment’s built to last When you’re living without a past
My list of key albums continues with the (still) incredible double album Blinking Lights and Other Revelations by Eels. It seems 2005 was a critical year for my tastes in music. My sixth entry in this list is the third album from this year.
I was 22, doing my Master of Animation degree, but still working the checkout at Coles and making websites on the side. I was out seeing live music every other week and spent most of the rest of my free time coding and designing my own websites and crafting 3D short films.
Most crucially as far as this album is concerned, I was feeling a little lost with life. I knew I enjoyed 3D, computer games, and movies, and was doing very well at Uni – but I wasn’t sure yet if there was a future for me in it professionally. I’d lost my last remaining grandparent. I couldn’t talk to girls, let alone get one to go on a date – and as a friend at the time frequently added, I looked like a “foetus”, so I’m sure that didn’t help.
The last year-and-a-bit, the pandemic, the isolation, the loss of people from life, has brought up a lot of similar feelings to when I was 22 and I recently rediscovered Blinking Lights as a result. It’s just as soothing as back in 2005.
Nothing hurts Like someone who knows Everything about you Leaving you behind
And it’s a hard time Trying to get through All the days that drag on Thinking about you
Last Time We Spoke
Melancholy is effectively the happiness of being sad. It’s also the word which captures Blinking Lights perfectly. Dark, sombre lyrics, dashed with just a sprinkling of hope and humour are layered over a bright and pretty sonic landscape. The album is paced beautifully and provides several (sometimes peculiar) instrumental moments where the listener has breathing room to ponder their own world.
Themes of death, loss, rejection, regret, and heartbreak are paired with admiration for the beauty of the world, be it the kindness of a pretty girl or the twinkle of car tail lights as they pass on the highway. Each song is either told with a smile and a hint of regret; or in sadness with a dash of optimism. That’s the trouble with reflection – happy memories can often bring a sense of sadness that those times have passed, while sad memories bring regret that they happened. Thinking about the past is lose-lose in this context.
Mark Oliver Everett puts it much better:
It’s also about hanging on to my remaining shreds of sanity and the blue sky that comes the day after a terrible storm, and it’s a love letter to life itself, in all its beautiful, horrible glory.
The tour which followed the album, Eels With Strings, is one of my favourite gigs of all time. It was raw, punchy, and at times hilarious (Everett is as good as any comedian between songs). It gave new life to the songs without losing their structure. The string arrangements added new life to the older songs, while unconventional percussion instruments (a suitcase kickdrum!) kept it down to earth, fresh and unique.
That breakdown at 2:35 is begging to be sampled
Prior to Blinking Lights, I was only really familiar with Eels’ Daisies of the Galaxy, a bright and sweet album which I had enjoyed but never loved. Following Blinking Lights I went on to explore the rest of his discography in depth. I became a huge fan of his entire body of work prior. There wasn’t a song I didn’t know. Unfortunately though, Blinking was so good it became hard to top, and my interest waned with subsequent albums.
But my love of Eels lives on in other artists such as Kishi Bashi and Big Thief – and Blinking Lights and Other Revelations will always bring a tear, and a smile, to my face.
My key albums list seeks to identify albums which I loved from beginning to end, which made an impact on me musically, lyrically and thematically, and sometimes even opened my ears to new sounds and new artists. Often they were paired with a highly memorable live show. It’s not necessarily representative of what I might consider my favourites in a traditional sense, although that is possible.
Well I’ve made another lap around the sun and can no longer pass for mid thirties any more. But hey, late thirties is still not the big four-zero I suppose.
Somehow I find myself with PTSD related to my journey home from Canada. The stresses and anxieties of getting back here linger, triggered by a covid scare and cloudy weather at Christmas – and despite the glorious weather and improved opportunities and environment with which I am surrounded since. Four hours of sleep last night suggests my head doesn’t care about that.
I feel for everyone still stuck inside in other parts of the world, and for those still trying to get back to Australia. It’s shameful that so little has been done to assist them.
We’re chimpanzees with brains the size of planets. The logical, rational brain is in a fight with its chemical, emotional side. It’s little wonder the two often struggle to coexist.
Anyway, here’s some tunes! I’m pretty happy with this one…
