That old election thing is finally over and suddenly the future seems brighter. Easily the most satisfying and pleasing result I have witnessed in my life. It felt like the power was finally shifting generations. The schadenfreude of watching grubby seat-warmers fall one by one. The fremdschämen of watching legacy media collectively lose their minds, unable to comprehend what was happening (obvious to anyone who had paid attention).
Anyway, here’s the music! A couple of old classics – opening with the rising sun and closing with it fading into winter. Kikagaku Moyo has been such a delightfully bizarre find. Their album Kumoyo Island is well worth a listen. Chem Bath is a bit of Unknown Mortal Orchestra-meets-MGMT, and I love it. Egyptian Cadilliac will stick in your head, as will the relentless drums in Welcome To Hell. Crank it up loud, Australia.
Severance This is just awesome. Every element of this show has been carefully crafted down to the last detail. The cast are fantastic, the set pieces and cinematography terrific, and the tone is perfectly creepy and mysterious.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia (Season 15) It is unbelievable how a show fifteen seasons deep can be this good. The break certainly did a lot of good. The last four or five seasons, while still enjoyable, saw the gang become caricatures of themselves. This season not only fixed that, but added whole new layers of social commentary delivered with such subtlety that it wasn’t until the closing credits of the final episode that I realised the entirety of what they were getting at. No other show can be this hilariously dumb and intelligent simultaneously, and the cast are better than ever. I can not wait for more.
Kaitlin Olson is Always Sunny’s MVP
How To With John Wilson (Season 2) HTWJW is brilliant. You have never seen anything like it before. Season one was fantastic, and the second run doesn’t let up. I want more. The less you know about it going in, the better.
Ozark (Season 4 Part 1) This show has been quite the adventure. The first season was great, but felt a lot like “what if Breaking Bad, but in Missouri”, and when that season ended with its cliff-hanger my eyes rolled back like the cherries on an Ozark poker machine. But I pressed on, and it soon became more than that and carved out a place of its own. Solidly engaging and shocking (Wyatt!).
On Cinema Oscer Special 2022 Somehow, Tim and Gregg continue to lift these specials to even greater heights of absurdity. This year’s instalment might be in my top three (Gregg’s carbon monoxide Joker finale is still top of the pile).
Euphoria (Season 2) Season one of this had me hooked. The cinematography was phenomenal, and the plotlines shocking, but used in service of the plot. Season two just went right off the rails. There was no cohesive story, plenty of dead end plot lines and no clear season arc. The whole thing was a mess. Lexi’s play was hilarious in it’s ridiculousness (also, she’s the only likeable character in the entire show so it was good to see more of her), but otherwise the season was pretty empty. Not sure I’ll press on from this point.
The Book of Boba Fett Four really bad episodes of a Boba Fett show, two great Mandalorian episodes, and one final episode blending a bunch of fan service together like a Star Wars smoothie. Temuera is stiff, the story is all over the place, the new characters don’t seem to fit (spy kids?). Mando was the best thing to come from the Star Wars brand in a very long time. This was a reminder that most of the time, it’s rubbish.
MacGruber (Series) Loved it. Puerile and dumb, just as expected. Forte, Wiig and Phillippe are fantastic as ever. And Laurence Fishburne turned down another Matrix for this – proving that he’s far smarter than the rest of the Matrix cast.
Yellowjackets File this one under “shows I wouldn’t have watched if Omicron hadn’t kept me inside”. That said, it was an enjoyable surprise carried mostly by the cast and a nineties soundtrack rather than the story. Christina Ricci is great.
Murderville Simple concept, executed successfully for the most part. A couple of guests don’t hit the mark but the rest brought back memories of the brilliant Thank God You’re Here.
The Afterparty Clever idea from Lord and Miller. Essentially, an evening’s events are recounted by a different character each episode in an attempt to solve a murder. In a similar vein, the visual style changes – which is really clever – but also got frustrating at times as it meant the tone of the show was also all over the place.
Absolutely brilliant
Movies
The Humans Unsettling, creepy, great cast. A little arty. The less you know going in, the better.
Don’t Look Up Ugh. If you’re after a movie that thinks it’s far smarter than it actually is, this one’s for you. There is absolutely no subtlety to any of it and so the gags just don’t land. It’s as though the cast are constantly winking at camera saying “GET IT? GET IT?” and it’s incredibly tiresome, and the ending is obvious before the first act is over. The all-star cast only make things worse. Leo and J Law are poorly cast. They only demonstrate that their acting chops fall apart when a comedic performance is required and their presence feeds into the condescending, holier-than-thou tone of the entire movie. Blanchett (being unrecognisable) and Jonah Hill (a comedic performer) are the exceptions, and deliver the most memorable moments. It’s unfortunate, because the underlying message is important and the skeleton of the concept is clever. There’s just no meat on the bones. Satire is best when the point is realised in the viewers’ head, not yelled at them through a megaphone. Don’t Look Up? More like Don’t Bother. Watch Idiocracy again instead.
Spider-Man: No Way Home A big fun spectacle. If someone had pitched this idea six years ago they’d have been ridiculed, but somehow it works. Mind you, I think it’s the kind of thing which can only work once. Spider-Man is possibly the only Marvel fare I have time and patience for, given the tone is right (light, breezy, a bit silly but not overly so). But I’m not sure I have reason to continue beyond this. It wrapped up twenty years of the franchise all too well.
Finch A pleasant surprise. Hanks is Hanks. The robot’s character is surprisingly well written. Some really nice visuals. Just pleasant.
The Power of the Dog A well-paced western with an ending that hits you out of nowhere. This looked fantastic, and Cumberbatch didn’t piss me off – which is quite an achievement.
No Time to Die I’m not much a fan of Bond. I find them incredibly dated and corny. That said, Spectre was a fantastic movie (mostly because it was the least Bond-like instalment I’ve seen). I gave up on the penultimate instalment after twenty minutes, but decided to watch NTTD given it was Craig’s last performance in the role. The ending was great, the action sequences were clever and tight. Ana de Armas was a great addition, but featured way too briefly. But in true Bond style, the bad guys were cartoonish and a lot of dialogue was corny. Rami Malek is poorly cast. For the big bad dude of the movie, he had absolutely zero presence.
The Matrix Resurrections Holy shit. I thought the second and third instalments were bad, but this lured me in with rumours that they’d gone all meta with the plot. I was intrigued, but unfortunately it was done so poorly that it took me five sessions to get through. Terrible. Just terrible.
A Quiet Place Part II Solid sequel. Nothing to get excited over but some decent thrills.
I’ve been a member of the Australian Republic Movement for some time now. My support of the idea has never wavered, but my belief in the prospect of getting it done has. So, it’s good to finally see some movement to the Movement.
The ARM has announced their new proposed model. It’s good to finally see it released. I’ve contributed thoughts, time, and support to the development of this proposal over the last two years. I’m delighted to see that a lot of my opinions have been accommodated here. In particular:
The word “President” has been removed from all of the material, with a title yet to be determined. For many people with a limited understanding of the system, the word President will trigger images of a US system. Even though this couldn’t be further from the truth, language is an important shorthand to get messages across. I’m still hoping for a unique Australian title, perhaps derived from a First Nations language.
The new Head of State would not be allowed to circumvent legislation (which the royal family are currently allowed to do). Just because they don’t, doesn’t mean they won’t. Convention is becoming less conventional.
The PM (a position not currently mentioned in the constitution) would no longer be able to unilaterally sack the Head of State, as they can currently do to the Governor-General. The parliament would be empowered to do so in extreme circumstances.
Given the above, it improves the current system in practical ways, not just symbolic.
I’m well aware this topic is not top of mind for most people right now who are battling the clusterfuck of piss-poor lazy government – struggling to get food, RATs, vaccines. But the Queen, who is 95, will not be around much longer, and soon enough her son will take over. The idea of continuing with this foreign unaccountable celebrity family at the top of the chain is ludicrous. The system is broken.
A year characterised by a lot of walking loops around the neighbourhood
2020 was a real shit of a year. Dealing with Covid, lockdowns, and the immense stress of trying to move back home. The fear of disease, and the fear of being locked out of my home country left me with some form of mild PTSD in the early stages of this year. But even amongst all that bullshit, I achieved the monumental task of getting home, and I squeezed in a couple of epic road trips in Alberta and Western Australia along the way.
2021 was a year of nothing. It was a whole lot less stressful, but also a lot emptier. Bereft of achievement, life progress having been kneecapped by the same culprit time and time again.
It was a year of being paralysed. Half of the year was consumed by official lockdowns, the other half by a self-imposed semi-lockdown. Two years into this, I’m now having to choose between a social life or a family life. The fear remains that you can’t take up new hobbies, meet new people, go for a beer or go to the gym without killing your parents weeks later.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom. I finally got back into making tunes again. I hope to have something original to share in 2022, but until it’s a little more polished here’s a cover I punched out when I was learning
Until two weeks ago, I hadn’t actually known anyone who’d gotten Covid personally. I now know one, and I suspect that will increase rapidly in the weeks ahead. Best case scenario, this is the “ripping the band-aid off” of the pandemic and this time next year it’s behind us (as is this government and the corrupt lazy fuck at the top). Fingers crossed!
I did purchase a vacuum cleaner for the first time this year. I think that just about sums it up.
Top music and shows for the year below…
Music
My year end playlist, comprised of songs which all landed in my top fifty plays, and which were released after December 2020 – chosen for play count, as well as thematic content and musical range.
Most played song was Alien Crime Lord, by a long way. Awaiting a new album from The Voidz, I also gave their back-catalogue a lot of attention.
Streams
I didn’t catch a lot of movies this year, but Dune wins regardless. My first (and only) trip to a theatre in two years was worth the wait.
The White Lotus was my favourite series for the year.
I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (Season 2) kept me laughing, as did It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia (Season 15) – which was also far more brilliant than a show should be fifteen seasons into its life.
Succession (Season 3) This show just gets better and better. It is now up there with Better Call Saul as the only series to which I salivate as I await new episodes (I’m not the only one). The cast is just phenomenal, as is the writing. And I have no idea where it will go next.
Squid Game This was terrific. Mind you, the style and themes do all the heavy lifting. Without the distinctive visuals, intense subject matter and class war themes, you might be left thinking more about that dead end plot line with the cop (whose phone battery seems to last days), an organ harvesting storyline which went nowhere, and the overly drawn out nature of the story (that last episode in particular was a drag). Still, a highlight of the year despite these pet peeves.
Dexter: New Blood The original run of this show had the worst final season and final episode of any show, ever. Somehow, I was still up for more eight years later. Thankfully, it’s a return to form (thus far anyway. At time of writing there’s still four episodes remaining). Worth a look for fans of the series before it turned bad.
Ted Lasso What a great first season of a show, followed by a clusterfuck of a second to undo all the good vibes of the first. Season one is a great mix of drama, comedy and warmth. Season two was hot garbage. Much like Mythic Quest it doesn’t seem to understand what was appealing about the show in the first place (keep it light for a start), and overestimates my interest in the “world” of the show. I give zero fucks about B-characters. I don’t need to know more about them, or watch them go on LENGTHY side quests to find themselves. I sure as shit don’t need to know about the issues they had or continue to have with their father. It’s a simple light breezy show and the tone was set in season one. Keep it there. Suffice to say I won’t find out if they get back on track for season three because hit the ejection button on this rickety plane before I got to the end.
Foundation Well this sure was pretty. Some incredible and unique sci-fi visuals. Unfortunately that was about all it had for me. Perhaps my hopes were too high, but this was a chore to get through.
Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 11) This season had a few weak moments, but Larry still makes me laugh. Will I continue to watch? Sure. Would I be sad if they stopped making it? Nope. Always Sunny on the other hand keeps me wanting more.
You (Season 3) Yes I watched this. Yes it is trash. Yes I knew it was trash going in.
Movies
Dune I’ve been waiting many many years for this one. When I heard Villeneuve was attached to direct, my anticipation only increased – and it did not disappoint. My first visit to the cinema in two years and it was well and truly worthy of the big screen.
The Father One of the best of the year. Very cleverly structured and perfectly executed. The less you know before hitting play, the better.
Free Guy Enjoyable enough but wouldn’t recommend. Plot wise, a bit like The Lego Movie meets The Truman Show with Ryan Reynolds doing his usual thing (which while fun, is really getting a little tired). Taika’s character shat me off too. But what really got to me was the godawful ending. The female lead is sold as a highly intelligent girl, yet somehow she is completely oblivious to her male friend overtly crushing on her for years. So, she’s not interested right? Or she became interested because he grew and changed? Nope. He does fuck all, goes to get a coffee and she suddenly notices all the creepy messages he left in the game for her. So when he returns with his coffee she’s *all over him*. What a steaming pile of Hollywood horse shit.
Jungle Cruise Does what it says on the label. Entertaining fun in the vein of Indiana Jones and The (Brendan Fraser) Mummy.
Nitram Fantastic performances and overall a very chilling film. My only gripe is that by the end I wasn’t entirely sure of the point of it all. Perhaps that it was all preventable? I guess that sense of unease might be the whole idea.
Docos
Woodstock 99 Where the 90s died. Pretty alarming to watch now but they make the argument that a lot of what grunge and rap seeded in the early 90s mutated into an angry white male beast by the name of nu-metal. Somehow the messages within the lyrics were lost on a lot of people. I guess that same angry crowd is storming the US Capitol these days.
Watch The Sound This made for an interesting dive into different technologies, effects and concepts of music production within the last 40 years. Especially interesting given I was diving into some of these effects myself during lockdown.
Shirkers Really quirky and fascinating doco. I went in blind, which is best. You never quite know where it’s headed or what the point is, but come out of it feeling as though you’ve watched something unique.
Inside Central Station I love this stuff. In another lifetime I could see myself involved in infrastructure somehow. It was pretty eye-opening to see the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to keep Sydney moving.
New York Super Airport Similar to above, a doco about infrastructure and engineering, and I lapped it up. It covers the impressive reconstruction of New York’s LaGuardia airport, completed whilst the airport remained functional.
Q: Into The Storm I’ve stayed out of the loop with the ins and outs of this cesspool. This HBO doco was pretty thorough and engaging. Really makes one reflect on where the balance sits between pros and cons of the internet.
Games
Walking a dystopian version of Vancouver in Backbone
Backbone I fired this up knowing little about it and found myself on the streets of a dystopian version of Vancouver (albeit not named as such – but the inspiration is clearly there right from the game map to the scenery). Beautiful artwork, engaging story. Good to see a story-driven adventure work so well on a console.
Mini Motorways Well this just consumed a lot of lockdown time. Addictive, fun, and frustrating. Sim-City meets Oilswell.
Nevermind turned thirty in the last week. I was eight years old when it was released, and so can’t claim to have been all over it at the time. I do distinctly remember a school dance in Year 7 when Smells Like Teen Spirit played and clearly that stuck with me for a reason, but largely I didn’t really appreciate Nirvana until ten years after their day.
I recently watched Woodstock 99, a HBO documentary exploring the disastrous music festival, where the 1990s died at the hands of Fred Durst, a lot of angry young men, and corporate exploitation.
The 90s started off with a cultural bang of creative energy and by the time the decade ended it felt like everyone had played a game of telephone and spat out an entirely different violent and misogynistic message at the end. I’ve added In Bloom to this month’s playlist, since it basically predicted this very situation.
But aside from all of the above, I was reminded of how bizarrely walled off and tribal Gen-X music goers were from one another – attaching a fierce cultural identity to their taste in music. The attitude of “if you listen to something from the sixties, you suck” or “if you like a top forty artist, then I hate you as I hate them” and the passive-aggressive “I like music which uses real instruments”. It’s a curious attitude which still seems to persist to this day in many of the generation above me.
I can’t help but wonder if these same types have now attached a political cultural identity along the same lines.
Lockdown is over in just a few days. Here’s some tunes!
Well, I’m now single-jabbed, and by the end of this month I’ll be double Pfizzed, which brings a huge sense of euphoria. In the nineteen months of this pandemic, I’ve spent around eight months in isolation (lockdown / quarantine), eight months out and about but “on edge” and only three where I felt completely comfortable. I’m very keen to move to the next phase and start making up for lost time.
As for the month in music, I’ve been revisiting a lot of old classics. I’ve also been enjoying most of the new Jungle album (save for the few tracks with super seventies-style vocals which I can’t stand). Men I Trust dropped The Untourable Album which takes on a bit of a nineties flavour and is already one of my top albums of the year. The best music out of Canada right now.
Alone in a cave, to stay dry from all the rain Sat by a tree, all my friends are in my dreams
Week eight of my third round of isolation. The first isolation experience in Vancouver sucked massively – partly due to the unknown nature of it all, but mostly due to the endless grey weather which gave my small apartment in the sky a real prison vibe. As bad as things have gotten here, at least there’s some recognition that it is bad. Vancouver when I left was punching numbers similar to what we have in Sydney now and nobody gave a fuck.
So it’s much easier to do in Sydney where the sun is shining and warm, and I have more room to move. I can go for a walk for an hour at lunch and not have to dodge people since there’s hardly anyone out (in Clovelly and Bronte at least, I saw four people total on Friday).
The last two weeks have also been vastly improved by the Olympics. I lapped up the swimming, I took great delight in the Matildas smashing Britain, and I loved watching the Aussie girls almost claim a volleyball gold. I was left in fury at the Kookaburras’ frustrating loss, and absolute delight at the Boomers bronze win right at the end (Patty Mills is a legend). BMX and skateboarding were terrific additions. It seems odd they weren’t a part of the games sooner – they make far more sense than Golf. Seriously, golf can bugger off.
As for the tunes – I really enjoyed a lot of music this month. There’s Wavves and Inner Wave. There’s Seaquest and Swimming. There’s even Pfizer! Can’t get it in your arms, may as well get it in your ears.
I’ve also added yet another Lazy Eyes track. I was keen to check out this Sydney band next month after being impressed with every release thus far. This latest song has a little bit of an Innerspeaker vibe to sections of it, but still distinctly them (that outro thumps).
I wanna be free Free my fam’ and my mind Cause we’re locked up inside
Here we are, back in lockdown again. Stuck in a situation which could have been avoided had we not been burdened with the laziest leader in this country’s history. Had they been competent enough to procure enough vaccine supply for the start of the year, and understood the imperative of achieving the rollout as quickly as possible, we wouldn’t have to say goodbye to July and August.
Had they built suitable quarantine facilities a year ago, we could be increasing the intake of Aussies instead of cutting it and forcing people to pay exorbitant fares for the privilege of returning to their home country.
Some words that have travelled past my eyes lately…
This Time | Benjamin T Jones
A republic has been on the national to-do list for over 160 years. Questions about it 'being the right time' are predictable but deceptively partisan: when places in a historical context, they are exposed as a delaying tactic. The republican moment will not fall into the lap of a nation that has nothing better to do that day. It must be seized.
This was a really easy read covering a brief (and under-appreciated) history of republicanism in Australia, from the goldfields of Eureka to the push leading up to the centenary of Federation in 2001, and beyond. Many great Australians fought peacefully to achieve their goal of making this country fully independent, all the while being overlooked for English elites. Why is the Queen still on our coins? Why do we still name streets after these people? Why do we reserve the highest position on our flag for the flag of a country which invaded our own and slaughtered our first inhabitants?
Jones gives his thoughts on the symbols and structures which could replace and build on what we have now. I was particularly fond of his proposed title for a head of state – Beanna Elder – which draws from Australia’s oldest culture.
I was sadly not old enough to vote at the 1999 referendum. There really is no argument for keeping a foreign hereditary head of state (even though some creepy royal sycophants still try their best). Australia is a country which values egalitarianism, meritocracy and community (more apparent to me after spending time overseas). The crown has been out place in our unique culture for some time now and I look forward to having a chance to rectify it, hopefully within the next ten decade.
The Big Picture | Ben Fritz
Are they still movies, though, if more than 99 percent of the people who watch them don't do so in a movie theatre? Who cares. Take out the commercial breaks and "previously on"s, and Breaking Bad is a forty-five-hour movie that's better than anything most movie studios have made this century. And no matter how many billions they earn at the box office, no one can convince me that the third Avengers offering and the fourth Captain America film aren't super-expensive episodes in the most successful television series of our era.
The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies was a great read. Fritz tracks the trends and events within the film and television world over the last twenty years. He uses information found in leaked emails from the Sony hack of 2014 as the bones of his book, which is fitting for the time period covered. Twenty years ago, Sony ruled the box office and Disney was languishing. In a very short time they switched places. One of these players saw the future and made it happen. Like many other products, movies became brands. An actor no longer gets bums on seats. A franchise does. A character does.
Why doesn’t Hollywood offer anything original any more? Simple – people just don’t pay to see original movies at the theatre like the once did. In the meantime the quality of television has increased exponentially. In many ways the two have switched places.
The lines have blurred between what defines a movie and what defines a television episode. This will blur further in the years to come. An episode of a series was once determined by the half-hour slots offered by a broadcast station, a movie limited by a film reel (and bladder capacity). There really isn’t a need for this any more, as is already being witnessed in a show like The Mandalorian, where an episode is “as long as it needs to be”. It’s no longer television or movies, but “content”.
Film content is also being driven by the money of an increasingly international market. Comedy doesn’t cross-cultures, so it doesn’t happen. There’s no Chinese money in American humour. On the flip side, services like Prime and Apple are emerging where profit is not a concern, so creativity can flourish with little concern to whether it finds an audience. The primary goal is to give users content to keep them within the larger tech ecosystem.
This book was only published in 2018, yet already feels out of date, such is the speed at which the movie world is changing. The pandemic has only exacerbated this. Some movies are being released to stream the same day at their theatrical release, and even the ones that aren’t are having their theatrical window shortened. It’s changing so quickly that the landscape will be unrecognisable in another few years.
