Mixed media, Sunday 8 June 2025

Books

⭐ Anthony Horowitz – The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, A Line to Kill, The Twist of a Knife, Close To Death || I read these in the wrong order. After thoroughly enjoying his book Moonflower Murders last year, I wanted to read some more Anthony Horowitz. I picked up Close To Death when I was in Scotland in October, not realizing that it was part of a series. Because of the book’s structure – it starts with a lengthy flashback – I was hooked even before the detective comes in, and with him, Anthony Horowitz’s own fictional persona. The idea behind all of these books is that Anthony Horowitz (the writer) was approached by a former police detective (Daniel Hawthorne), who wants him to write about his cases, and these books are his Dr Watson-like fictional account of their fractious relationship and the mysteries they end up solving together. They’re delightful. Twisty plots, rich characters, and a splash of self-deprecating humour as the fictional Horowitz perennially ends up stabbed or in jail as a result of thinking that he can figure things out before Hawthorne does.
⭐ Anthony Horowitz – Moonflower Murders || The second book in the Susan Ryland mystery series is equally enjoyable. After playing around with story-within-a-story crossover in Magpie Murders (which the TV show version takes a step further, to excellent effect) Moonflower Murders literally contains an entire second book inside it, the full text of: Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. The (fictional) author Alan Conway had done his usual trick of turning people and events he found in real life into twisted versions in his books, and this book contains clues to solving a crime that is entangled with it. I’m looking forward to the next one, Marble Hall Murders.
Curtis C. Chen – True Blue Kangaroo || I loved the first two books in this series, Waypoint Kangaroo, and Kangaroo Too. They’re wise-cracking science-fiction spy adventure stories, right up my alley. This one continues in the same vein, but it gets a bit too caught up in being a homage to the TV show The Prisoner. In the early books of his Laundry series, Charlie Stross picks a piece of classic spy fiction to riff on in each novel – Bond, Len Deighton, Modesty Blaise, etc – but it’s subtle. If you don’t know it’s there, no matter. In True Blue Kangaroo it’s more than just riffing and references – if you’re unfamiliar with The Prisoner, you may find yourself desperately confused about what’s going on. This is a pity, because it seems so unnecessary: the “escape from a top floating prison on Venus” plot would work perfectly well on its own.
Tess Gerritsen – The Spy Coast || This ends up a bit Thursday Murder Club, but higher stakes and more serious and way more stressed-out characters. I liked it.
Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, Ryan Ottley et al. – Invincible compendiums 1, 2, 3 || I was enjoying the TV series, and I wanted to read the original material. The TV adaptation is really very faithful. There are some character changes, but thematically and structurally, and even right down to the art style, it’s very close. Reading fifteen years of a very dense comic story over the course of about two months is quite an experience. Emotional arcs that at the time of publication played out over years hit differently when you read them over the space of a few hours or days. Some of the themes also appear more clearly when you digest the entire series as a single whole. In particular, although there a lot of women appear as important, powerful, and interesting characters throughout the story, they are always there in opposition to, or as a foil for one of the male characters. It’s not subtle, and it doesn’t get any better over the course of the whole series. I enjoyed reading it nonetheless, but I felt exhausted when I closed the final book.
⭐ Edward Ashton – Mickey 7, Antimatter Blues || The trailer for the movie Mickey 17 looked fun and interesting, and knowing that it was based on a book I picked it up to read before seeing it at the cinema. The book is better. Even though Mickey is only on his 7th body in the book, the book allows us to spend much more time on the specifics of each incarnation, and adds more weight to each death he experiences. Although the novel is funny, it’s quite toned down and dry, while the film is often flippant and over-the-top. The reason for Mickey being on the colony ship is also worked out far better, as is the reason for humans’ mistrust of clones and especially doubles. Antimatter Blues is a good direct sequel, to the book. I can’t see it forming a sequel to the film, though.

Episodic Video (“TV”)

⭐ Slow Horses (season 4) || Continues to be good.
⭐ Only Murders in the Building (season 4) || Continues to be goofy and good.
⭐ Yakuza: Like a Dragon (season 1) || I don’t think I would have watched this if Alex hadn’t been a massive fan of the game series. We watched it together, with Alex giving me commentary on how it all fits together, and where it deviates from the games. It’s a solid Japanese gangster crime story or family and betrayal and revenge.
Echo (season 1) || I enjoyed this as a spin-off from the relatively down-to-earth Marvel Hawkeye series, and the Daredevil-ish universe with Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin. It mostly stays down-to-earth itself, but it brings in supernatural elements towards the end, which I thought were unnecessary – the story would have been perfectly fine without them. But it’s a Marvel show, so there’s got to be some kind of magical/mystical/superpower thing to them.
Agatha All Along (season 1) || I do quite like these one-off shows that Marvel spins off. I enjoy ongoing shows as well – but sometimes it’s nice to have something with a solid beginning, middle, and end. There were a couple of episodes in the middle that felt like dramatized Escape Rooms, but overall it was solid.
⭐ Bad Monkey (season 1) || Vince Vaughn does a good sardonic wisecracking protagonist. He’s not exactly playing against type here. I binged all the episodes over the course of a couple of days. I liked it, but that world-weary wisecracking got a bit grating at times, and overall I felt it the whole story could have been wrapped up in 8 episodes rather than 11.
⭐ The Tourist (seasons 1 & 2) || There’s still life in the “guy wakes up in a hospital with no memory of how he got there” trope. The first episodes of season 1 are brilliant and completely bananas, with every episode ending on a revelation that throws all the previous events into a completely new light. Season 2 not quite as inspired, but still massively fun, with terrifically engaging performance from the lead actors.
⭐ ⭐ Arcane (seasons 1 & 2) || OMG wow. Watched this with Fiona. The animation is just astonishing, and the voice acting as fabulous. I came to this having no knowledge about the setting of the League of Legends game the show is based on, but that wasn’t a problem. At the end of the show (season 2 brings the story to a close) it had left enough of an impression on me that I wanted to give the game a try, but Fiona and Alex talked me out of it.
The Diplomat (season 1) || Did not finish. In the current timeline I couldn’t take the portrayals of well-intentioned US government officials seriously. Maybe as peripheral characters in a different show, but not as protagonists.
⭐⭐ Star Trek: Lower Decks (season 5) || All the world building that has gone into Star Trek over the decades acts as an anchor weighting down new live action series, but when you take it into an animated comedy, it provides a rich spring of ideas to explore from a completely different angle. It’s glorious.
⭐ What We Do in the Shadows (season 6) || A nice wrap up of the show.
💩 What If…? (season 3) || A pointless wrap up of the show.
Silo (season 2) || Having read the books it’s based on, there are elements I was looking forward to see, and I kept wanting the show to just get on with it. It’s good, but like many Apple TV shows, it really does take its time.
⭐ The Day of the Jackal (season 1) || Ooh, this is fantastic. Globe-trotting assassin/secret agent cat-and mouse game. Runs a little out of steam in the last few episodes, but mostly incredibly tense throughout.
Invincible (season 3) || I saved watching this season until after I’d read the books (see above). It’s good, but I think maybe I should have waited a little longer before watching it. I felt a little over-Invincibled.
⭐ The Penguin (season 1) || I still find it hard to believe that it’s Colin Farrell under a ton of make-up effects doing all this. His performance is incredibly nuanced and physical at the same time. This is not a superhero show – it’s an organized crime thriller that just happens to have characters from the Batman universe. It’s also a detailed portrayal of a sociopath. Not in the shorthand sense, of using the term to lazily wave away a character’s motivations just to keep the plot going. The show carefully builds up the viewer’s sympathy with Oz, and then rips it all away to show the emptiness underneath. It’s quite something.
Daredevil: Born Again (season 1) || Given how Trump is acting to destroy all democratic institutions and how easily he seems to be able to install an authoritarian regime in the US, I found this show…quite hard to watch in places. Kingpin is Trump. This season of the show focuses on his rise to power as a populist mayor of New York, and how he immediately uses that power to destroy any constraints on him using it, and to crush his enemies. Spoiler: there’s no come-uppance in this season. It’s pretty bleak. But I’m glad to see Marvel investing in the old shows from the Netflix era. I enjoy the more grounded take on superheroes.
⭐ ⭐ Andor (season 2) || Just as Star Trek: Lower Decks is the best Star Trek property, Andor is easily the best Star Wars show, and I’d rank it higher than everything apart from Empire and A New Hope in the whole Star Wars canon. It’s an unashamedly non-family-friendly, anti-fascist rallying cry. (How the heck did this come out of Disney? Consider this the antidote to Daredevil: Born Again, if you felt depressed after watching that.) The show also does an incredibly good job of joining up the edges with the Rogue One movie. I re-watched it immediately after finishing Andor, which may have been a mistake. The tonal shift is jarring. Andor’s score is dark and moody, while Rogue One has a jaunty, heroic soundtrack. After having followed Andor as a protagonist for so long, seeing him play second fiddle to Jyn Erso, who doesn’t benefit from a similarly intimate backstory, felt like a disappointing end to his arc. Apparently there’s a fan edit of Rogue One circulating, which replaces its score with music from Andor, and re-cuts it to make it more tonally consistent. I might seek it out…
⭐ The Last of Us (season 2) || After finishing the game The Last of Us, part 2, I remember thinking: “That was amazing. There’s no way I’m never going to replay it.” It was a great game, but it was harrowing. Fiona and I approached season 2 of the TV show with some trepidation, because we knew what was (probably) going to come. It did come. It was intense. And…they cut it in half at the end of seven episodes. The game does this thing part-way where it switches the main character, and you get to revisit the plot from a different angle. There will be a season 3 of the show, and I’m annoyed that we’re going to have to wait for it. (See: Trung Phan’s “The Case Against Streaming TV Shows“)

Games

I haven’t been consistent about tracking games in these Mixed Media posts, so there’s probably stuff I’ve missed. Bear in mind that these all get a ⭐, because I’m pretty selective about what I spend my time playing.

⭐ Hi-Fi Rush || Fun game, fun plot. I enjoyed the rhythm action elements of it, but I found it really hard to keep the beat. I thought I was pressing the buttons to the beat of the music, but the game disagreed with me. I spent a lot of time tweaking my TV and PS settings to see if there was some kind of synchronization lag. I think I got a bit closer, but I never felt like I really got it. As someone who used to play the drums, this felt incredibly frustrating. It’s also possible that I just suck at games.
Stellar Blade || Abi got a free download code for this last year; I had a lot of free time; and I went “sure, why not”. The game’s environments are gorgeous, and the action is good, once I got better at timing my attacks. (Although just as with Hi-Fi Rush, I never felt like I was completely in the groove.) The story is just…bad, and the dialogue and the voice acting are — somehow — even worse.
⭐ Astrobot || Utterly charming, fun, and with enough challenge to keep some of the tricky levels interesting. Fantastic varied level design. Just a joy to play.
⭐ Lego Horizon Adventures || Fun and charming. It’s lightweight compared to the main games, but it’s a Lego game – that’s the whole point. I love that they kept the same voice cast as the main games, and let the actors play them in a whole new way.
⭐ God of War (2017) and God of War Ragnarok || I hadn’t played the original PS2 God of War series. When I started playing this God of War, I initially felt disappointed because it isn’t an open-world game. Coming from games like Horizon, I expected that any game so visually detailed would allow you to wander off through the woods, and climb every boulder you pass by. But no. The explorable area is heavily bounded, and the game leads you through it very linearly at first. I did get the hang of it eventually. There’a s bit of story, you go to a different area, you fight the next iteration of enemy and learn their unique attack patterns, and you solve an environmental puzzle to move on to the next area. The game does open up once you get far enough in, and there’s a satisfying amount of side quests and collectibles. But ultimately what kept me engaged throughout the first game for about 100 hours, and made me go out and get the second game and spend another 100 hours in it as well, was the character development throughout the story. The writing is very good, the voice acting is excellent, and the whole Norse gods family drama is fresh and engrossing. Loved both.
The Witcher 3 || Did not finish. After finishing God of War, I thought I’d give this a try, but the game engine felt incredibly primitive and out of date in comparison. I’ve heard many good things about this game (and I enjoyed the TV show), but it didn’t grab me quickly enough, and it wasn’t pretty enough to make me want to persist.

Films

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) || Spends far too much time on the setup, and hardly any time at all on the climax.
⭐ The Wild Robot (2024) || Gorgeous animation. I didn’t know the original book series, so I didn’t have any nostalgia heart strings to pluck, but the movie was enough. (Also: Matt Berry should provide voices for all the things.)
Killer Heat (2024) || Noir-ish mystery with washed-up detective Nick Bali (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) being hired to solve (or not solve) a murder in Crete. Made me want to watch Brick again.
💩 Man of Tai Chi (2013) || Why did I watch this. Only interesting because Keanu Reeves plays a bad guy.
💩 The Killer’s Game (2024) || Hitman diagnosed with terminal illness, takes out a contract on himself, but then discovers he was misdiagnosed and has everything to live for. But he can’t cancel the contract, whoopsie! Fun premise, and I like watching Dave Bautista, but this was straight trash.
⭐ La Jetée (1962) || Finally got around to watching this seminal film, after seeing the Nerdwriter’s Youtube video essay “The Time Travel Movie That Doesn’t Move”. Both the film and the essay are very good.
⭐ Anthropoid (2016) || The title sounds like a sci-fi horror film, but it’s actually a WW2 film about Operation Anthropoid, the (true, historical) plot to kill a high-ranking SS officer in Czechoslovakia in 1941. I watched this shortly after watching The Tourist (see above), because it has Jamie Dornan in it. Worthwhile.
Force of Nature – The Dry 2 (2024) || There are only so many times you can make a movie about the main character revisiting past trauma while he’s investigating a parallel murder or disappearance in the present day. In this case, that number of times was “one”, and this second movie feels like a pale echo.
Sonic 3 (2024) || Not as fresh as 1 & 2, but still fun.
⭐ Nosferatu (2024) || I haven’t seen the original film, but I understand this this follows it fairly closely. I found it tense, engaging, and well directed. I enjoyed the long lingering takes where the actors really had a lot of room to, you know, act.
Alien: Romulus (2024) || Eh, it’s fine. It does a lot better at recapturing the claustrophobic horror of the original movie, and at least it’s not a pointless sprawling retconning exercise. Still not great.
💩 Venom 3: The Last Dance (2024) || Well, that didn’t make any damn sense. Kudos to the editor who was able to salvage even that much.
Captain America: Brave New World (2025) || Hmm. I like Sam Wilson as the new Captain America, and I appreciate how they tried to recapture some of the feeling cold war paranoia from The Winter Soldier, but Harrison Ford felt horribly misplaced here. Swing and a miss.
⭐ Mickey 17 (2025) || See notes on the book, above. Some of the visuals are amazing – the scene where the creepers deploy their whirling mounds of decoys to confuse the colonists wasn’t in the book, and was a fantastic addition. But the colony leader is turned into a larger-than-life caricature, when in the book he is a more measured foe. I understand why they made that change: the film has a certain tone, and the pastiche fits this tone. Film adaptations are their own thing; they don’t have to be a faithful retelling of the original. And that’s fine. This is well-done and amusing sci-fi film in its own right.
⭐ American Fiction (2023) || I should watch more movies that aren’t action blockbusters or sci-fi spectaculars. This is a tight little drama about a writer who decides to parody a particular style, and finds that the parody is miles more successful than his original work. Jeffrey Wright is always intensely watchable.
⭐⭐ Sinners (2025) || Okay, so I’m back in the blockbusters again, I guess. I saw this in the cinema, and wow, am I glad I did. This is a fabulously inventive vampire flick that is deftly weaves harsh real world themes, wooden stake action, and a soundtrack to die for. The Switched On Pop podcast called it a vampire musical, and they’re not wrong. This really feels like a classic for the ages.
💩💩 Kraven The Hunter (2024) || From the sublime to the ridiculous. Sony’s track record for their Marvel movies is really shockingly bad, and this is right on track. On the other hand, any version of Kraven that isn’t from Ryan North’s run on Squirrel Girl is never going to match up.
⭐ Freaky Tales (2024) || From a recommendation by jwz, this is fantastic! Punks vs nazis! Rappers vs sexism! Mystical basketball samurai! It’s much weirder than you might think from the trailer, and the trailer looks plenty weird already. I first visited Oakland in 1992, a few years after the 1987 setting of the film, but there were many touches that I recognized and enjoyed. I would love to have a Colonial Donuts T-shirt like the one Tom Hanks was wearing…
⭐ Thunderbolts* (2025) || After a string of recent Marvel disappointments, this feels like a solid return to form. Despite being filled with a large cast of characters, it doesn’t feel bloated trying to give everyone equal screen time. This is Florence Pugh’s show, and her performance gives a rock solid foundation for the whole thing to build upon. Her sense of loneliness and looking for purpose is in perfect sync with the plot and the foe’s arc. The balance of action and comedy is perfectly judged. Not sure if this it’s enough to build a whole new Avengers arc upon, but I’ll quite happily take this as a standalone.
⭐ Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025) || The film was long enough that my local cinema decided to splat an intermission right in the middle. (Get stuffed, Pathé Zaandam.) Some of that length comes from the fact that it tries to tie up threads from earlier films in the series (not just Dead Reckoning), and so it spends a lot of time explaining things. It felt like the first twenty or so were solid exposition, and then there were more recaps dotted throughout. The plot is quite complicated, and as the final confrontation approached I lost track of who was doing what to whom, and why. (Personally, I thought the option of destroying all of cyberspace and the internet sounded just fine.) But the stunts and set pieces were, as promised, incredible, tense, and thrilling. The film was preceded by a weird short introduction by Tom Cruise, thanking us for showing up in the cinema in person. He was clearly reading from an autocue, and looking slightly off to the side of the camera…it felt oddly like a hostage video. I hope he’s OK.