Category: Mixed Media

Films:

• Eddie The Eagle: watched this at Mum & Dad’s when I was with them in September. Really nice, feel good film. (Dexter Fletcher directing again – I loved Sunshine on Leith, too)
• A Walk Among The Tombstones: I hadn’t realized that this was a Matt Scudder film, based on Lawrence Block’s books (which I like). Pretty good downbeat private eye film.
• Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children: Meh. Atmospheric, but lacklustre performances from everyone involved. It felt very long.
• The Secret Life of Pets: The trailer has all the good bits.
• Room: AMAZING
• Dr. Strange: It was fine, I suppose. It’s a door into the magical aspects of the Marvel universe, but I’ve never been very interested in that part. Narratively and thematically, the film offers nothing new. Visually, Christopher Nolan did all of this in Inception already.

Books & comics:

• The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver: Very readable account of forecasting and predictions, and the statistics involved. I feel like I should spend more time getting to grips with Bayesian statistics, because my maths and science background was 95% frequentist.
• Scarlet Witch vol1: Witches’ Road by James Robinson et al. Didn’t really like this. See notes on Dr. Strange above.
• The Sheriff of Babylon vol 1 by Tom King and Mitch Gerads. Was chatting to the staff at Forbidden Planet in Glasgow, and they recommended this to me because I liked the new Vision story (also written by Tom King). The Sheriff of Babylon is a military detective story set in post-war Baghdad. Very intense, very good.
• Mockingbird vol 1 – I Can Explain by Chelsea Cain, Kate Niemczyk et al.: Great. Thrilling and funny non-linear narrative around another great female Marvel hero. She-Hulk, Squirrel Girl, Ms. Marvel, Captain Marvel, Silk, Hellcat, Mockingbird – Marvel has a ton of fabulous books on the go right now with women heroes. I hope the cinematic universe catches up.

A few weeks ago I watched season 6 of The Walking Dead to cheer myself up. It’s been that kind of month. And that was before the US election. Also season 1 of Agent Carter. I wanted to like it more than I actually did.

Music:

I mentioned in a couple of earlier posts that I’ve been listening to quite a bit of The Lumineers and 65daysofstatic. The new album by The Naked And Famous, Simple Forms has also been in heavy rotation. I’ve got a ticket to see them in Utrecht next year. ?? Deacon Blue’s new disc, Believers hasn’t caught fire for me yet. A Tribe Called Quest’s latest (and final) album, We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service​ sounds promising and worth more listening.

Oof, why do I let these things pile up on me.

TV shows are by far the biggest source of media consumption for me right now.

• Before we left for California, I still had a few episodes left to go in the third season of Person of Interest. I finished season 3 on the plane, and then ploughed straight through the last two seasons as well. There are some excellent episodes in there, and I’m happy that they were able to draw the show to a conclusion. I’m impressed by how they managed to stick to the show’s original premise all the way to the end. Even in the midst of a battle between superintelligences where humans are no more than pawns, when the heroes’ world is falling apart around them, the show keeps confronting them with number-of-the-week plots, and they still make time to help those in need.
• Season 3 of Agents of SHIELD had a lot going for it. I had been under the impression that Agent Fitz was going to be written out of the series, but I’m glad he’s still part of it. Sad that Bobbi and Hunter are out instead. Lots of good character development on this show.
• I watched season 1 of Dark Matter while we were in California in August. (It’s not on Netflix in NL yet.) Discount Firefly, following the crew of a starship who all wake up out of statis with their memories wiped. It’s kinda fun, but it takes the show a while to discover that the character they had set up as the lead (“One”, played by Marc Bendavid) is actually the least interesting one to tell stories about. Also: they have a sexbot episode. In 2016. It would have been embarrassing even in the nineties.

• I usually describe Lev Grossman’s The Magicians as Narnia crossed with Harry Potter, but at university, and all the characters are assholes. I loved it, and was excited to see the TV show. It doesn’t disappoint! It does take a lot of liberties with the story, introducing new characters and removing others, but it maintains the central premise, and most importantly the feel of the book(s). (The first season of the show incorporates Julia’s story from the second book, The Magician King. Julia and Penny both benefit from getting a bigger spotlight.) The first season also has a very different ending than the book. Watching the show made me go and re-read the book, and I was impressed at how much the showrunners had made it their own. If you’ve read/watched one, you will still find a lot of surprises in the other.
• Mr. Robot, season 1: Dark, claustrophobic, disorienting. Rami Malek as Eliot is quite brilliant.
• Chef’s Table, seasons 1 & 2: I love how this series focuses on the chef’s story rather than necessarily on their food. Sure, the food is important, but it’s really all about what drives them, and how they got to the point they’re at. A consistent theme is just how crushing the life of a chef, or really anyone in the hospitality industry can be. The hours they have to put in are ridiculous, for a tiny chance of the kind of recognition only a handful of top chefs enjoy. I also found it interesting to watch the management styles of the various chefs — how they treat their staff in the kitchen. Some are brusque; some see them as co-creators of amazing things (Grant Achatz); some take their responsibilities as teachers very seriously (Magnus Nilsson). The show briefly rekindled my love of fine dining, but then I remembered that I’d have to dress up to visit these places, and my wardrobe currently consists entirely of concert T-shirts and corporate merch.
• Stranger Things, season 1. This made me curiously meta-nostalgic for a kind of eighties I never experienced, but saw portrayed in exported films and TV shows that this one echoes. It’s like being melancholy for the 1950’s vision of the future with jetpacks and flying cars. ‘Twas never thus. Taken on its own, the show is great. Predictable, but very satisfying.
• Archer, season 7: inappropriate fun, as ever.

• Luke Cage, season 1: mostly excellent, though I was disappointed by how the final episodes seemed to revert to a very comic-booky hero vs villian storyline, when the rest of the show had set up the characters to inhabit a much more down-to-earth and nuanced world. That’s what I enjoy most about Netflix’s Marvel shows, how they treat comic book characters in a realistic (well, ish) setting. Jessica Jones and Luke Cage don’t wear costumes, and are the better for it. The music of the show is fantastic. I find myself listening to a lot of TV and movie scores while I’m working these days, and the Luke Cage score has a lovely seventies soul vibe to it.
• Agent Carter, season 1: fun, but flat. The setting is post-war New York, but the show felt like it was also trying to mimic the over-acted mannerisms of media from that era. The characters are drawn in bold strokes and vivid colours that make them feel like stereotypes rather than rounded characters. Some of this is deliberate, so that the stories can then play against those stereotypes, and that’s one of the major themese of the show: the awfulness of Peggy Carter having to prove herself all over again in the face of institutional sexism and prejudice. Sometimes it works, sometimes it feels artificial.

Films:

• Suicide Squad: forgettable. Too many characters, not enough interplay. Jared Leto’s Joker is overwrought and awful. Fortunately, his part was cut back to almost nothing.
• Jason Bourne: really forgettable. I saw this with Fiona at the Grand Lake in Oakland in August…or did I?
• Keanu: silly, but I liked it. For a comedy about mistaken identities, it has surprisingly few cringe-inducing moments, and goes for absurd laughs instead.
• Spotlight: fantastically acted and sensitive newsroom drama about a terrible scandal. Just like with Chef’s Table I had an eye on the behaviour of the various management-level characters, and was observing how the editors and team leaders worked to make big things happen.
• Maggie’s Plan: subtle comedy about people in love and trying to deal with the consequences of getting what they want. (I don’t think I would call it a “romantic comedy”, though. Romance plays a part, but it’s not the focus. Nor is the comedy, really. The humour is sly and wry, rather than laugh-out-loud funny.)
• The Constant Gardener: I normally like subtle spy thrillers like this one, but I just found it dull. Maybe I watched it in the wrong frame of mind: in a cramped airline seat on the red-eye back from New York after an exhausting week. Maybe don’t trust my judgement on this one.
• Eye In The Sky: intense drama about a single drone mission over Nairobi, and the life-or-death decisions the military officers and commanders have to make in the course of it, with only limited information. Given the limited number of settings, this almost felt like a theatre play. It’s a good film, but it left me with a creeping revulsion to the modern military technology. Drone strikes may be more precise tools than bombs, but is the ability to kill more precisely and effectively really a step forward for humanity?

Books:

• Geoff Manaugh – A Burglar’s Guide to the City: Geoff Manaugh’s 2010 article Nakatomi Space is about movie characters (taking Die Hard as a specific example) and real-life military operations subverting architecture to achieve their objectives. In it, he says, “What I find so interesting about Die Hard—in addition to unironically enjoying the film—is that it cinematically depicts what it means to bend space to your own particular navigational needs.” This book goes deep on those same ideas. It doesn’t feel like there’s a concrete point to the book, but it’s a neat delve.
• Chuck Wendig – Zeroes: I came back from California convinced that I had read two books, but it took me days to remember what the second one was. This was it. It’s not bad, and as a techno-thriller it moves at a nice pace. I just didn’t love it.

Comics:

• Injection vol 2 is a moody follow-up to the first volume, with a neat detective story at its heart, and truly beautiful colouring.
• The Vision vol 1, “Little Worse Than A Man”: Ooh, dark dark dark. The Vision trying to figure out what it means to be human by literally making a family for himself. Themes of loneliness, isolation, and strangeness pervade the book. Very good.
• Patsy Walker, AKA Hellcat! vol 1 “Hooked on a Feline”: I loved this. I didn’t know anything about Patsy Walker before reading Charles Soule and Javier Pulido’s run of She-Hulk. This book gives her a spin off that follows her after those adventures, as she tries to get herself set up as an independent hero in New York. In terms of style, it’s a cross between Soule and Pulido’s She-Hulk and North and Henderson’s Squirrel Girl. It’s adorable.
• Ms Marvel vol 5 “Super Famous”: keeps on being good and worth buying.
• Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur vol 1 “BFF”: This didn’t really work for me. The prehistoric Killer-Folk just didn’t register as a viable threat, even taking comic book logic into account; and I found Lunella’s constant interior monologue grating. Part of the point of the story is that she doesn’t have anyone she can talk to about her life and problems, but I would have enjoyed it more if she’d had a sidekick. (Devil Dinosaur doesn’t count — yet — unless she emerges from her Terrigen cocoon with the ability to talk to him (her?) directly.)

Music:

• Fiona loves Marianas Trench, and spotted that they were playing in Amsterdam (Tolhuistuin) in October. Of course we got tickets. I started listening to them last month, and OMG! They’re fantastic. I’m super excited about the gig coming up on Tuesday. Power pop to the max!
• I still haven’t watched season 3 of RWBY, but I’ve listened to the soundtrack now. It has some strong tracks, but not nearly as many as on the soundtracks for the first two seasons.
• I pitched in for the kickstarter for De La Soul’s new album, And The Anonymous Nobody, and it’s finally here. It’s okay, but maybe I haven’t given it enough opportunity to grow on me yet. It’s pretty downbeat, and I’ve been mostly in the mood for more shiny and upbeat stuff recently. (See: Marianas Trench above.) (Okay, so maybe Astoria’s lyrics are a bit dark, but the soaring power pop hooks cut right through them.)

I watched The Fall on my flight to Edinburgh this week. It’s a visually stunning film, and I wish I’d watched it on a bigger screen than my iPad Mini. It would have looked amazing on a big TV screen, and even better in the cinema.

At the end of the documentary Daft Punk Unchained on Netflix, I found myself slightly unsettled by the fact that Random Access Memories is three years old. Not so much “huh, I would have guessed it was 2014, not 2013”, but more a case of “huh, 2013 seems like quite a long time ago now.”

Season 1 of Ash vs Evil Dead was fun, but although Bruce Campbell’s character Ash Williams is supposed to be coarse and self-centered, the show doesn’t always stay on the right side of ironic. Horror comedy is hard to pull off well. This mostly succeeds. Not sure if I liked it enough to seek out season 2 when it arrives.

Oh, and I’ve finally got to the point in season 1 of Person of Interest where it has pulled me in. I think it was in episode 15 (“Blue Code”) that I felt the characters — especially Detective Fusco — had reached a critical mass of back story and complexity, and I was starting to care about what happened to them next; and also about what happened to them before. I’m one episode from the season finale now, and there’s a lot of mystery still left to uncover. I can see myself jumping straight into season 2 when I’m done.

I had a ticket to see Twin Atlantic in the Kleine Zaal of Paradiso on Tuesday 28 June, but the band had to cancel the gig because of illness. I hadn’t even heard of them until last month when Scott tipped me off about them, and I noticed they were playing Amsterdam. Since then, I’ve been listening to their album Great Divide a lot, and I had been super excited seeing them in such an intimate venue. Unfortunately, they have rescheduled the gig for Tuesday 19th July, when I’ll be in Scotland. :sadpanda: At least I’ll be seeing Area 11 while I’m over there.

I loved their first album, All The Lights In The Sky, so much that I feared the only was was down. Although there are some parts of Modern Synthesis that haven’t grabbed me yet, there are four splendid rock songs that leaped out at me right from the start: “The Contract”, “Versus”, “Watchmaker”, and “Red Queen”.

Saga continues to be magnificent.

I binged on season 1 of The Expanse this week. (Only 10 episodes in season 1, so a pretty small binge, as these things go.) It’s been a while since I read the books it is based on, and I only had thumbnail sketches of the main characters left in my memory. The cast brought them vividly back to life again. Steven Strait as Jim Holden is too earnest (and keeps reminding me of Kit Harington), but Shohreh Aghdashloo as Chrisjen Avasarala and Thomas Jane as Miller are subtle and excellent. Even though there was a lot of action in these first ten episodes, it felt like a lot of it was setup just to peel back the first layer of the onion. I’m looking forward to season 2.

I also watched The American, which was gently paced, elegant, beautifully filmed, but ultimately dull. That was okay, though. I was feeling tired that evening, and wasn’t looking for anything splashy. I did keep getting distracted by George Clooney’s fabulous sunglasses (the Zegna ones) because they’re gorgeous. The whole film felt like a fashion show, with Clooney modelling one understatedly elegant outfit after another. Also watches.

Paradox is a film I saw a couple of months ago, but forgot about at the time. I did enjoy it, though. The budget is low, and the performances aren’t special, but I’m a sucker for a tightly plotted time travel story, and this is a good one.

Friday was a garbage fire of a day, but it was brightened by the release of DJ Shadow’s new album, The Mountain Will Fall. It starts off with a few strong tracks, but the rest of it might take a while to grow on me.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl continues to be funny and adorable. The last two chapters in this volume are the cross-over with Howard The Duck, which I’d already read in that book’s volume 1, but it was fun to see it again. Chip Zdarsky and Ryan North’s absurdity-loving writing styles are terrific natural partners.

Long time since the last Mixed Media post, so let me start with the easy ones:

The two albums that have been in near constant rotation over the last month or so are Art Angels by Grimes and Geronimo! by Piney Gir. Grimes is the kind of artist I feel I should have been into, but wasn’t until I heard her track “SCREAM” on Zane Lowe’s show on Beats 1 one day. It’s an unusual piece, featuring Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes, but it was my gateway to the rest of the album, which is all kinds of brilliantly manic. “Flesh Without Blood” is on the short list for my favourite song of 2015.

Piney Gir I first saw supporting Gaz Coombes at Tolhuistuin last month. Geronimo! (2011) is a simply delightful album that’s easy and relaxing to listen to. I’ve also dived into Peekahokahoo, and I’ve been enjoying that too. (“La La La” made me do an aural double-take to make sure I hadn’t accidentally tuned in to a new song by The Go! Team.) And a couple of days ago I finally tracked down her new album, mR hYDE’S wILD rIDE on eMusic. (Yes, eMusic still exists.)

My trend of reading mostly comic books instead of novels continues. I got volume 0 of Howard The Duck’s new run by Chip Zdarsky and Joe Quinones for Christmas. It’s absurd and bonkers, and it still manages to capture moments of insight into the alienation that Howard feels, being trapped in this world. It features cameos from lots of Marvel superheroes, each one a caricature for maximum comic effect. The writing is great, the art is spot-on. It fits right in with the new wave of Marvel comics like Ms. Marvel and Squirrel Girl that wrap up-to-date and very relatable themes in quirky and adorable outer shells to break new ground for an audience hungry for superhero stories beyond the conventional.

Speaking of which, G. Willow Wilson’s run of Ms. Marvel is excellent, as is Ryan North’s and Erica Henderson’s lower profile Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. Hawkeye: Rio Bravo finishes Matt Fraction’s run on the comic very nicely, and Saga vol V continues to be beautiful, tender, and shocking.

Unable to wait for the next trade paperback of Sex Criminals, I found myself buying individual issues of the comic. It’s a slippery slope. Pretty soon I found myself drawn to the striking covers of Paper Girls by Brain K. Vaughan (Saga et al.) and Cliff Chiang, and I’ve been reading them as they’ve hit the stands, too. They’re as good as the covers suggest.

In the world of traditional novels, The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers is one of the best SF books I’ve read in the last few years. It reminded me of Firefly and also Bob Shaw’s Ship Of Strangers in a way. You’ve got a quirky ship with a small crew of humans and aliens, all of whom are oddballs and outcasts in their own way, working their way across the galaxy for the hope of reward. But really just because that’s where they want to be, instead of plugging away at a desk job dirtside.

Another Christmas present for me this year was Thomas Levenson’s The Hunt for Vulcan, which isn’t a Star Trek tie-in, but rather a scientific history of the search for the missing planet Vulcan, which Newton’s theory of gravity suggested should be orbiting the sun even closer than Mercury. Einstein’s theory of relativity explained that Vulcan wasn’t there after all, but there was a period in the 19th century where the entire scientific establishment believed the planet should be there, and went on a periodic frenzy to prove by observation that it was there. It’s a fascinating tale. (I wish I could remember who told me about the book, and made me place it on my wish list. Good call, whoever.)

In games, I’ve finished playing through Diablo III (on the XBox One) as Bob the Barbarian. It was a fairly mindless slug-fest. I spent so much time doing all the side-quests that Bob ended up so powerful I pretty much steamrollered every boss battle I encountered. On the other hand, that was exactly what I needed during November and December: a powerful distraction.

Podcasts: I’ve added Eric Molinsky’s Imaginary Worlds to my regular listening after hearing his episode “Fixing The Hobo Suit” on 99% Invisible. I’ve gone back and listened to all of the episodes so far, and they’re well worth the time. I’ve also been tuning in to Hello Internet with Brady Haran and CGP Grey, and Cortex with CGP Grey and Myke Hurley. Limetown’s first season has just ended. I didn’t enjoy the later episodes as much as the first ones. It started feeling over-produced and too much like a radio play than a mock-podcast. It’s a fine line they were trying to walk. I’ll probably come back for season 2 if they make it.

Finally, films. So many that I’m just going with the list format again:

• Contagion Smart, fast-moving, very realistic disaster film. This is what a global outbreak could looks like. Probably not something you want to watch on an airplane sitting next to someone with a sniffle.
• Criminal Dense, low-key con/grifter caper. Don’t be expecting the comedy of Oceans 11. The characters are only barely likeable, and that only some of the time.
• Spectre Third-best Daniel Craig Bond film, after Skyfall and Casino Royale. Good action scenes, but the interpersonal relationships lack depth, and Christophe Waltz is sorely wasted.
• Circle Intense, low-budget, thought-provoking exploration of human nature in winner-takes-all life-or-death circumstances.
• Django Unchained Good, but not essential.
• Sunshine on Leith Funny, tender, uplifting, brilliant.
• Mockingjay part II Wow, that got really dark. I mean, I know the Hunger Games series was dark anyway, but whoa.
• Lockout Guy Pearce is the only good thing in this film, and he is so much better than everyone and everything else in it that, frankly, it’s embarrassing.
• The Man From U.N.C.L.E I’m not generally a Guy Ritchie fan, so this was surprisingly good fun.
• Gravity The special effects are so good that I forgot they were there, and stopped looking for the seams. Intense.
• I Am Legend Somehow I had got the impression that this was a pretty bad film, and had skipped it unti now. Actually pretty good.
• Project Almanac Confusing and messy teen time-travel film; more Primer than Back To The Future. It doesn’t pull it off, but I enjoyed the attempt.
• Out Of The Furnace Beautifully shot, but grim and harrowing slice of small-town decay, violence, duty, and revenge.
• Her Lovely. Sweet performance by Joaquin Phoenix. Interesting counter-point to Ex Machina
• Star Wars (IV, V, VI), the de-specialized editions Some of the special effects Lucas added for the remastered/updated editions improved the originals. But for me, some of the charm of watching the originals lies in knowing how the puppeteers and model-makers brought the old special effects to life in a way that still mostly looks good even 40 years later.
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens Loved it. I keep coming back to how different the character of Poe Dameron was to the disturbed genius Oscar Isaac played in Ex Machina. Makes me want to seek out more of what he’s done. The rest of the film was good, too. The last scene was weird, though – it felt like that should have been the opening of Episode VIII.