Nik Dirga

Ten things I now know about Tasmania

…And so I was off in Tasmania, perched at the hinterlands of Australia, an inverted triangle hanging over the far-flung reaches of Antarctica thousands of kilometres south. If New Zealand feels near the end of the world – and it does, often – Tasmania is the creaking doorway, left ajar in a howling southerly wind.

In my epic quest to one day say I’ve “done” Australia, our southwestern island neighbour was the next step. I am always intrigued by the places on the edge, and hey, there’s a direct flight from Auckland to Hobart three days a week – let’s go, mate! So here’s 10 things I learned about Tasmania:

1. It really is the edge of Australia. Lest we forget, Australia is bloody HUGE, mate – almost as big as the entire continental United States – and Tasmania is about the size of Ireland all by itself. Its geographical isolation across the Bass Strait has led Tasmania to develop its own evolutionary spins on life and a culture that stands out from the rest of Australia. We took a leisurely 10 days or so and still only scratched the surface of what you can see there. Things like…

2. It’s got animals you’ll see hardly anywhere else. You’ll easily run across wallabies and the smaller pademelons, fluttering kookaburras and cockatoos, perhaps a most excellent quoll, but unless you’re patient you may not see rarer things like wombats, platypuses and echidna in the wild – but they are there. And of course, the Tasmanian devil is one of nature’s greatest curiosities – a pudgy dog/pig-looking fella that has one of the powerful bites in the entire mammal kingdom, lives only a few years and yes, just like the cartoon character, they’ll eat about anything to power their speedy metabolism. They’re amazing little buggers and they’re also highly endangered, which leads us to …

3. Unfortunately, you’ll see an awful lot of dead animals. I’ve seen kangaroo roadkill elsewhere in Australia but I’ve never seen quite as much marsupial carnage as I did on the roads of Tasmania – deceased possums, wallabies, wombats and ‘roos dot the highways like road markers, hundreds of them. At night time the roads become an animal highway, and vehicles become murder machines. And then there’s the sad familiar story of the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, a fascinating carnivorous marsupial the size of a Labrador that roamed these hills for millennia – until 1936, when the very last one died in a Hobart zoo. You can see its skin in a bittersweet room devoted entirely to the thylacine at the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart, with specimens, rare images and even a few brief snippets of film. What a gorgeous creature it was, until we humans came along.

4. They made their buildings to last, here. Auckland’s got a bad habit of knocking down its historic buildings and so it was a pleasure to see so many sturdy stone buildings all around Tasmania, from downtown Hobart to wee towns in the middle of nowhere. Even a mid-size town like Launceston boasts at least a half-dozen amazing ornate stone churches more than a century old.

5. They do darned good bookstores. I brought home a tidy pile of Tasmanian and Australian history books to add to my library, and for a wee island Tasmanian nonfiction and literature are pretty booming genres. Particular shout-outs to the awesomely named Cracked And Spineless and Fullers in Hobart, Petrarch’s Bookshop in Launceston and my favourite, The Book Cellar in the historic Midlands village Campbell Town, built in the historic convict cellars of an 1830s inn. It’s like a dungeon but full of books!

6. Tasmania was a place of racial genocide, and it knows that. The dire fate of the Aboriginal Tasmanian nations is a black mark on history, and to its credit, Tasmania acknowledges that early settlers basically set out to exterminate them by suppression, relocation and flat-out massacres. Truganini, for years called the “last” Tasmanian (she was a full-blooded Tasmanian and quite possibly the last of that time), has a moving memorial on her native Bruny Island that looks out over the sea. Today’s descendants of the original Aborigines are working hard to keep the culture alive, but for many years, the native people were treated as little more than pests to be wiped out. The highly recommended Truganini: Journey Through The Apocalypse by Cassandra Pybus digs deep into this dark time, and while it’s not exactly comforting reading, it’s history that must be remembered.

7. Tasmania doesn’t shy away from that bleak history. For much of its recent history, this gorgeous island was a place of pain – the fate of the indigenous as mentioned above, and its claim to fame as one of the main dumping points of convict transportation, where British criminals – even children – were shipped around the world to exile in Hobart and the rest of Australia. In Tasmania, one of the bleakest spots you could be sent was to Macquarie Harbour on the far west coast – the arse end of the arse end of the world in those days – while a bit later on Port Arthur was turned into a virtual convict city. The ruins of Port Arthur stand today and are a haunting kind of convict theme park – drawing tourists from all over the world, and the silent bricks and ruins feel like they pulse with the despair of the past. Australia’s worst gun massacre also happened in Port Arthur in 1996. There’s no whitewashing of all the bad things that have happened in Tasmania in the museums and sites we visited, and at a time when objective truth feels slippery, there is some cold comfort in that.

8. It was where the explorers came to find the end of the world. One single spot, Adventure Bay, boasted visits from Abel Tasman, Captain Cook, William Bligh, Bruni D’Entrecasteaux and more during the 1600s and 1700s. A lot of bad stuff happened as a result of the exploration days, yes, but I still remain fascinated by the voyages they took, centuries ago.

9. There’s a world of landscapes in Tasmania. We only got to some of the island – much of the west and north will have to wait for the next trip – but it’s as rich a landscape as the South Island of New Zealand, with sweeping farmland, dense rain forest, gorgeous beaches and rocky monoliths all tossed together. Nothing quite captures the contrasts like Hobart’s Mount Wellington or kunanyi, which rises a sharp 1200+m above sea level to tower over the harbour town – a pretty quick drive up it takes you into pure alpine country, capped off by a huge plateau summit with dolerite columns swelling up everywhere like some Martian landscape.

10. Big trees, big dreams. I love a big tree. Towering stands of eucalyptus up to 90m (300+ feet) tall can easily be found, and hidden in the bush is Australia’s tallest tree, Centurion, 100 metres tall. You can’t go wrong with a big tree, no matter how weird the rest of the world might seem these days.

Somehow, Prometheus the Protoplasm turns 40 years old today

From the very first Prometheus strip, March 11, 1986

“People have been so busy relating to how I look, it’s a miracle I didn’t become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm.” – Robert Redford

I’m not entirely sure about when the very first time I drew Prometheus the Protoplasm was, but the first proper cartoon I signed and dated was on March 11, 1986. Somehow, that’s 40 years ago today, and I’m still telling his stories in Amoeba Adventures well into the 21st century. Weird, eh?

I’m kind of big on anniversaries, maybe because they feel like a concrete way to mark the inexorable, annoyingly quick passage of time.

The first very silly Prometheus the Protoplasm cartoon was a weird parody stew of anti-communism propaganda that was heavily influenced by newspaper strips like Bloom County, Doonesbury and Dan O’Neill’s Odd Bodkins in its attempts by a pimple-plagued 14-year-old to appear edgy. I drew it in a science class – and many of the earliest Prometheus comics were done like that, in the margins of classes I should’ve been paying attention to.

But comics were my school, too, and so I drew things like the first few very rough Prometheus comic strips and full comic stories (published for the first and only time in the digital Amoeba Adventures Archive back in 2020 if you’re keen to look it up), scribbled mildly PG-13 comics in notes to my friends, experimenting by jamming on weird diversions like a Prometheus-meets-Snoopy comic, Prometheus meeting the Beatles and a never-finished horror tale called “A Protoplasm on Elm Street.”

Eventually, though, an actual character and stories started to take shape with this oddball Prometheus – who basically, with his fluid shape and bobbing eyeballs, was the only thing I could easily draw at the time. Prometheus became a bit of an alter-ego for me, insecure, lacking confidence, but hoping he could be better. Other characters started to pop up, too, all fragments of who I wanted to be – swaggering Rambunny, brainy Spif, hilarious Ninja Ant and wise Karate Kactus.

From late 1986 to 1989 I whacked out six issues of a Prometheus comic that nobody other than me and a couple other people ever really read, a rambling narrative that began with unbearably primitive art and ended with slightly less primitive art that ripped off a lot from the Marvel and DC comics of the mid-1980s. But I kept wanting to do more, to do “real comic books” somehow with my limited talents.

Prometheus became more than a diversion between classes when I entered college and I started drawing a new comic called Amoeba Adventures, putting out the first issue around November 1990. I was a freshman in Mississippi on the other side of the country from my friends and used my comic as a kind of pen-pal bait to fervently keep in touch with the past.

I soon discovered the great bustling small press fanzine scene of the 1990s and somehow, people actually wanted to read my weird comics. Amoeba Adventures and Prometheus became something far more than just a series of doodles – sure, small fish indeed in the wider comics world, but to me, it was a revelation to actually have fans and readers following Prometheus as his world gradually became more and more complex.

The great artist Max Ink joined me for a dozen or so issues of Amoeba Adventures and made it all look better than I could ever imagine. Twenty-seven issues of Amoeba Adventures and another dozen or so spin-offs and side tales all came out by 1998. Prometheus comics won acclaim and awards on the small press scene, “big” comic creators like the legendary Will Eisner, Dave Sim and Sergio Aragones read them and offered a little uplifting praise, and it was a remarkable time.

The rest is painfully ordinary, probably – by 1998, burned out and getting busier in the so-called “real world” with my journalism day job, leaving my twenties behind and starting a family and all that jazz, I put my pens down and Prometheus went dormant for more than 20 years, until the gaping void and uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic made me pick it all up again in 2020, republishing all the old stuff online, putting out a couple of actual real-life book collections over on Amazon and putting out 11 issues now of “new” Prometheus adventures.

A part of me is still that 14-year-old kid, scratching away on his notebook paper when he probably should’ve been paying attention to other things. I still marvel, sometimes, that all the great experiences I’ve had because of Prometheus – friends I’ve made, stories I’ve gotten to tell – stemmed from those first comics, 40 years ago now.

It was strangely easy, it turned out, to return to Prometheus as a middle-aged dude. The same uncertain, hopeful amoeba I drew all those years ago was there, like me, a bit more battered and slightly wiser from everything that happens in a lifetime. I’ve loved drawing a more “mature” Prometheus and his cast of friends, his unlikely love affair with the human superhero Dawn and his changing voice in a changing world. My art skills will never be magnificent but at least I’m better able to capture the stories in my head than 14-year-old me once did.

In recent years it feels like I’m finally finishing the story I began as a gawky teen, all those years ago. I sure appreciate everyone who’s ever read one of my silly Prometheus comics, and had a few words to say about them. You never know when a doodle might change the course of your life, a little bit.

From the upcoming Amoeba Adventures #38, here before you know it!

The Bride and why I love all the Frankenstein’s monsters

Frankenstein’s Monster is dead, but he’ll also really never die.

I love it when a character hits the cultural level of a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, and can be endlessly reinvented for new eras.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride is the latest reimagining of the bones of Mary Shelley’s tale, a wild, anarchic creation myth and love story. It’s as loose and freaky as major Hollywood productions ever get these days, and while it’s sure to be divisive, I kind of loved it.

Very loosely retelling the events of Bride of Frankenstein in the 1930s, Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley gives a delightfully unhinged performance as a new “Bride” to Christian Bale’s wounded and lonesome Frankenstein’s monster. The Bride at times feels as rough and patched together as the monster himself, but that’s what charmed me – it tells something new by stitching together ghostly possession, a screwball musical, a blood-spattered romance and a Bonnie and Clyde-style violent lovers on the run arc.

The monster and his bride tear through polite society, and while the plot is sprawling and doesn’t always add up, terrific turns by Bale, Buckley and Annette Bening as this movie’s “mad doctor” work well. A truly insane homage dance number to Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is the most audaciously strange scene I’ve seen so far this year. This one’s for the sickos, and I’m proud to be among them.

I’m here for all the Frankensteins, to be honest, right on down to campy ‘60s kaiju romp Frankenstein Conquers The World and the ultra-sleazy Frankenhooker.

There remains endless potential in the story of man creating life, and how it (usually) all goes horribly wrong.

We’re only a few months from the last great Frankenstein movie, Guillermo Del Toro’s Gothic Oscar-nominated epic of an adaptation of Shelley’s novel with a committed and curiously sexy performance by Jacob Elordi as the monster. That one is as overwrought and passionate as The Bride, but in a completely different way. Those great lonesome Arctic chase sequences – always my favourite part of the original novel – sparkle on the big screen.

A rough Google estimate tells me there’s been close to 500 spins on the Frankenstein story. Boris Karloff set the standard, of course, and his performance, closing in on a century ago now, remains the template for investing the monster with both humanity and menace. Christopher Lee played the creature as a hurt, abused animal, with melting-egg makeup that seemed startlingly grotesque in 1957’s Hammer production The Curse of Frankenstein – then followed by a half-dozen more Hammer movies that totally reimagined the creature’s story each time, even as a woman and once as a New Zealand wrestler with the world’s worst makeup job.

Every era has its Frankenstein – splattery gore from Andy Warhol in the ‘70s, kid-friendly spoofs like The Monster Squad in the 1980s, bombastic excess like Kenneth Branagh’s 1990s take. I like the weirder angles, like Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Bound from 1990 that throws time travel and metafiction into the mix.

I’m even fascinated by the schlocky look of 1910’s Frankenstein by Edison Studios, the first adaptation of the creature’s story done in a mere 16-minute silent film, with Charles Stanton Ogle as a shaggy, deformed monster that’s memorably bizarre. A mere 116 years old now, it’s more of a curio than a successful film, but it sets the template for many a Frankenstein story in the century-plus since.

And that doesn’t even get into the non-film realms, like DC Comics turning Frankenstein’s monster into a kind of immortal holy warrior, queer fiction imaginings like Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein and the novel and movie of Gods And Monsters, or modern-day parables like Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad.

The Bride builds on all these flocks of Frankensteins, and Gyllenhaal’s weird delight of a film embraces the shimmering fluid identities of the monsters – her romantic duo are alternately enraged and peaceful, needy and fiercely independent. I expect The Bride is the kind of movie a lot of people will hate, and it’s certainly not flawless, but it’s brave in its own weird way.

For a book that came out 208 years ago, Shelley’s Frankenstein is still remarkably futile ground for birthing all kinds of stories about mankind’s hopes and dreams, and nightmares.

That time the Ramones became unlikely teen movie sex symbols

You know, I love the Ramones a little more every day, and their molten-punk purity of just bashing out pop tunes as fast they could. They weren’t fancy – they were anything but – but they hit on some elemental force that they turned into a 20-plus year career.

Back in 1979, legendary producer Roger Corman and director Allan Arkush somehow thought the Ramones would be the perfect band to anchor a classic teenage rebellion musical with a warped underground edge. Rock ’n’ Roll High School is a campy screwball delight even now, a time capsule of leotards and neon fashion in that cusp of an era where disco, punk and new wave all scrambled for cultural relevance.

PJ Soles is Riff Randell, a perky punk fan with a heart of gold who’s the Ramones’ biggest fan, while her best friend Kate is a nerdy good girl with a crush on football player Tom. When the no-nonsense new Principal Togar (the wonderful Mary Woronov, veteran of Andy Warhol movies and much more) comes into town, it all sets up your classic clash between teens and authority.

It’s a wonderfully sincere little punk rock movie, with Soles’ chipper enthusiasm jostling with Woronov’s sexy dominatrix vibe. It lacks the meanness of a lot of teen movies (for comparison, I watched 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds for the first time in decades the other day, and hoo boy that hasn’t aged well). Even the handsome football jock in this movie is kind of a decent guy, despite being an utter horndog. The kids in this movie mostly look like real kids rather than 30-year-old cosplayers, and it’s filled with great character actors like Clint Howard and Paul Bartel’s stiff music teacher who, of course, loosens up and gets down with the punkers.

And when the Ramones rock into town, they’re like a blast of sleazy adult energy that still manages to feel cartoony.

One of the beauties of Rock ’N’ Roll High School is just how weird the Ramones are on screen. They don’t appear until around halfway into the movie, riding down the street in a groovy Ramones-mobile and looking like they just fell out of a comic book, a leather-clad blast of menacing charm.

The Ramones seem rather uncomfortable shoehorned into this teen comedy, and yet, it all works – they’re an intrusion from another world, and you can’t take your eyes off them. Joey, in particular, was all awkward angles and bulbous features covered by a mane of hair and those ever-present dark glasses, and he looked a bit like a scribbled rough draft of a rock star come to life.

The movie’s best scene is a barely-disguised masturbatory fantasy by PJ Soles of the Ramones playing in her bedroom, capped with Dee Dee revealed to be playing in her shower! I love the darned Ramones, but picturing them as Elvis-type sex symbols feels like a stretch. Did they ever even take off those leather jackets, anyway?

The Ramones couldn’t really act worth a lick – most of them barely have lines in the movie, and when they do they sound like the raw amateurs they were at doing anything other than punk rock. A highlight of the film is simply watching them in concert blasting through numbers like “Blitzkreig Bop,” “Teenage Lobotomy” and “Pinhead” and the title song.

In real life, they were troubled, of course – only one of the band made it past his early 50s, and Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy are all long gone now. The Ramones blazed through the culture like one of their songs, and I’ll always regret that I never saw them live.

By the time the Ramones show up at the high school and tear it all up in a furnace of punk petulance and a literal explosion, it’s cathartic as hell, even if you didn’t mind high school all that much. Take that, Principal Togar and all the jerky fascist authority figures in this world who think they know what’s better for everybody else. (Um, I might just be projecting about life in the year 2026, a little…)

Amusingly, the behind-the-scenes on the blu-ray talks about how the movie almost came to star other bands – such as Van Halen or Devo (can you imagine?).

Yet it’s the Ramones, who got so much out of a handful of chords and lyrics about freaks and fumbling love and sniffing glue, who were the perfect fit for this subversive take on teen musicals. Their presence captures the alchemic power a great rock song can have in your life, the way it feels like it blows down the doors of your boring reality and hurls open the doors of infinite potential. Yeah, even if they’re just singing about how Sheena is a punk rocker.

As both a time capsule and a kind of warped Bizarro version of so many other far worse rock ’n’ roll teen movies, Rock ’N’ Roll High School has strangely endured, closing in on 50 years now. It’s a blast of pure weird joy that makes the world feel a little bit better every time I watch it. Gabba gabba hey!

King Hell Heroica: Rick Veitch’s insane psychedelic superhero epic

One of the wildest superhero narratives in comics is nearing its final act, after 36 years.

Comics legend Rick Veitch has been slowly unfolding his grand statement “The King Hell Heroica” in staggered instalments since 1990, starting with the dark satire Bratpack. The big overall story came to a halt back in the mid-1990s with only part of it done, but for the last few years Veitch has been picking it up and telling it exactly the way he’s always wanted to. There’s nothing else quite like it out there in superhero-land.

I’ve been a fan of Veitch’s work since his collaborations with Alan Moore and solo work on Swamp Thing (now also getting a well-earned revival of sorts). Veitch’s background was in underground comics and his demented, expressive cartooning always carried a rough-hewn, tactile presence.

His filthy and funny Cold War superhero apocalypse The One for Marvel’s Epic Comics line blew my fragile little mind when it hit stands back in 1985. The One was a warm-up of sorts for the King Hell Heroica, which kicked off when Veitch’s still-boundary pushing miniseries Bratpack emerged in 1990. Bratpack didn’t hold back in its dark portrait of abused, wasted superhero sidekicks, and superheroes who were drug addicts, pedophiles and neo-Nazis. It’s a fantastic read that gets far sleazier and stranger than books like The Dark Knight Returns ever did.

Fittingly, for this eccentric saga, it all started off with Bratpack actually being Volume 4 of 5 (shades of George Lucas!). Veitch first returned to the King Hell Heroica with 1992’s The Maximortal miniseries (which turned out to be Volume 1!), which dove into the Superman-esque mystery hero True-Man whose presence haunted Bratpack. For the first time we really started to see Veitch was doing something bigger than just naughty dark parodies of superheroes.

Unfortunately, The Maximortal miniseries then ended the story for years; even though Veitch laid out a complex 5-book plan, it seemed it would never be finished. But he brought it all back starting in 2017 or so, and it’s been remarkable watching this old narrative turn into something that’s still very relevant in our conspiracy-addled weird modern world.

I can get behind the idea of returning to a comics narrative after a decade-long break myself, and Veitch has been hitting it out the park. He has been releasing chapters from Volumes 2 and 3 in nifty little 100-page annual print-on-demand editions, and is now just one book away from finishing them. Then there’s just the final volume of this long-gestating saga, Volume 5: Death of the Maximortal. In keeping with the timey-wimey weirdness of this tangled project, the first two chapters of Volume 5 were actually released as single comic issues as Bratpack/Maximortal Super Special way back in 1996 – BEFORE books 2 and 3 but after books 1 and 4. Lost yet?

Yeah, it’s confusing, but the cool thing is, as Veitch fills in the gaps of his magnum opus, it’s all starting to make sense – in a wonderfully shaggy-dog fashion, that is.

Veitch gladly embraces his underground roots with a bawdy, sometimes X-rated story that outdoes genre touchstones like Watchmen and The Boys in its sheer mad invention – there’s acrobatic sex with supermen, mass-murdering children and a big plotline involving mind-controlling fecal matter (!).

The “new” chapters Veitch has been unfolding have a different feel than Bratpack, with his art – mostly done digitally now – smoother and more polished, and the rawer, more energetic style of his earlier comics is missed a little bit. But the story has also broadened out to include dozens of cameos by actual historical and fictional figures – hello, Mad Men’s Don Draper! – and become a surreal, sustained comic romp.

It’s become a tangled secret history conspiracy story of America’s hidden superhero cold war, and Veitch wraps in everyone from Jack Kirby to Jack Kennedy to Robert Oppenheimer to Muhammad Ali and underground comics legend S. Clay Wilson in his narrative. I’m a sucker for alternative histories and love how he’s tied all kinds of flashpoints in American history to the influence of True-Man.

Despite hundreds of pages about him in the nearly completed first four books of the Heroica, True-Man himself remains an alien enigma – a blank slate template manipulated by us messy humans. While the King Hell Heroica narrative is full of ultraviolence and corrupt heroics, Veitch is also striving to say something profound about the spiritual nature of what a superhero might really represent for humanity.

The King Hell Heroica has been an incomplete puzzle for decades now, and I’m sure it’s changed some from what it was originally going to be way back in 1990 – Bratpack was somewhat rewritten and the ending changed after the original comics came out, for instance. “What’s great about print on demand is that it allows me to pursue my muse without having to think about any market at all,” Veitch said in an interview.

There is a risk it may all come apart in the last few hundred pages, of course – we’re just starting to see the seeds of the Bratpack cast of utterly debauched “superheroes” and their sidekicks enter the story, and the mystery of what exactly the aliens that kicked off the whole shebang are remains pretty opaque. It’s likely to get very meta, and very weird, knowing Veitch.

But to be honest, cold hard sense isn’t necessarily what I’m here for with King Hell Heroica. It’s a vibe that marries the irreverent curiosity of underground psychedelia with a thought-provoking exploration into the very idea of what superheroes mean.

Veitch is still an underground cartoonist at heart. Without a big publisher backing him or restricting him and banging away on his life’s work well into his 70s, Veitch is creating something not quite like anything else in the crowded world of edgy superhero deconstructionism.

I hope when it’s all completed and can be read straight through – maybe in the next year or two – comics critics will look back at what Rick Veitch has been trying to say these last 35+ years and give the King Hell Heroica the attention it deserves. It’s a wild, wild ride.

Shrinking: Harrison Ford is no longer bored

Like every ‘80s and ‘90s kid, I grew up with Harrison Ford as the chief avatar of cool manhood. Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Blade Runner, Witness, Air Force One, et cetera.

But admittedly, it’s been a little bittersweet watching Harrison grow old, like we’ve all got to in the end. He kept on as an action hero as long as he could, but the somewhat desultory return of a tragedy-wracked Han Solo in Star Wars sequels and a final Indiana Jones movie (which I admit I pretty much forgot about as soon as I saw it) were pretty faint flickers of that whip-cracking adventurer we all remember. By the time Ford was turning red and hulking up in a Marvel movie, I felt like it might be time for him to quietly turn down the action hero roles. He often seemed bored in these later movies.

But now at 83 years old, Harrison Ford has surprised me with his fantastic turn as part of a sitcom ensemble of all things, in the warm ’n’ witty Apple TV series Shrinking, which has just kicked off season 3. Ford costars with the show’s co-creator Jason Segel as his therapist mentor Paul, and he’s a cranky delight. A cozy comedy/drama set in a therapists’ office, Shrinking, co-created by Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence, is one of those shows that embraces humour and sadness, often in the same scene.

Ford’s Paul is the mentor to Segel’s fumbling younger therapist Jimmy, but he’s also battling recently diagnosed Parkinson’s disease, and entering into a late-in-life love affair with his former neurologist. Ford is braver and funnier in Shrinking than he’s been in ages, and got a well-deserved Emmy nomination for his work (he should’ve won).

A little bit of vulnerability has always been a key part of the Ford charm – the way his Indiana Jones would wince when he got bruised and battered, the haunted charisma he brought to The Fugitive. With Shrinking, Ford is embracing his early 80s and showing us a man painfully facing his own mortality, as his body breaks down on him slowly. Dwarfed by the 6’ 4” Segel in many scenes, a smaller, wiry Ford looks his age, but if anything Shrinking has given his acting more power than it’s had in years.

Shrinking is a show blessed with a top quality ensemble and snappy, sharp and quippy writing, from the enjoyable gawky Segel to reliable sitcom stars like Scrubs’ Christa Miller as a pushy neighbour and the great Ted McGinley, who’s been in everything from Happy Days to Married With Children and is doing his own best work in years as chill retiree dad Derek. The Daily Show’s Jessica Williams is a snarky delight as well.

Yet it’s Ford, with such a rich and storied screen history behind him, who stands out the most on Shrinking. Harrison Ford gets underrated as an actor – his sole Oscar nod was for Witness, although frankly The Fugitive, Mosquito Coast, and his still somehow underrated performance in Raiders Of The Lost Ark should’ve gotten him nominations as well.

It’s a show that’s happy to get sappy – the main characters are all processing their own various traumas along the way – but I find its view ultimately kind of optimistic about how we can all get better, and that’s comfort food in this dark timeline the world seems to be in.

Ford, as always, underplays with tremendous effect, knowing how to use a tiny gesture or raised eyebrow – his Parkinson’s tremors, his frustration with having to curtail his therapy career, his joy at finding a new wife and his fears over how long it will all last. It’s a tricky line to play such a character and not make it a mawkish bid for sympathy – and Shrinking sometimes does get a little too sentimental for its own good. But Ford makes Paul human – short-tempered and irritable, yet still finding acceptance with his makeshift family. And there’s no star ego here – he seamlessly meshes into the Shrinking ensemble and is a generous scene partner – his scenes with Segel’s teenage daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) are always strong.

At 83, you wouldn’t fault Harrison Ford if he just retired to his ranch in Montana or something. Instead, this consummate professional is giving us the gift of an action hero growing old gracefully, facing whatever comes next with honesty and humour — and in the process maybe showing us his most heroic portrayal of all.

Breaking: The never-ending battle against fake AI news

In my day job, a project I’ve been working on for the last couple weeks across both Radio New Zealand and the Australian Associated Press is debunking a slew of “fake” NZ news sites on Facebook. Many of them specialise in taking legitimate work by NZ reporters and running it through AI, stealing other reporters’ work, adding fake AI-generated images or misleading video as they go. One such post included grotesquely using AI to animate a still photo of a dead teenage Mt Maunganui landslide victim.

This slop is everywhere on social media now – literally any time a news event happens, a horde of pages will serve up AI-generated garbage about it instantly, from Australian shark attacks to the arrest of Venezuelan leader Maduro to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Now, smaller pages are spoofing nearly every car crash and weather event that makes the news in New Zealand with AI content.

I was pleased to see my reporting got a lot of attention this week and made appearances on RNZ’s Afternoons and Mediawatch programmes to talk about it some as well in my very un-Kiwi accent.

Here’s some of what I’ve been working on:

How fake NZ news pages are swamping Facebook with AI slop (RNZ)

RNZ Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan interview with yours truly (RNZ)

Mediawatch: AI feeds fake news flood (the segment starts about 23min, 30sec in)

Fake NZ news page flooding Facebook with AI images (AAP)

NZ ‘media outlet’ misrepresents news with AI images and video (AAP)

Facebook pages peddle AI images of NZ landslide disaster (AAP)

It is depressing – like a lot of people, I think, I’m recoiling more and more from social media and what once seemed to be “fun” diversions, as FB becomes overwhelmed by slop and algorithmic nonsense and loses all its usefulness, X, which I quit long ago, became a Nazi bar, and most other sites are either annoying or infuriating. I even got to say the word “enshittification” on national radio this past week, a phrase which really does seem to sum up the vibe in the room on the internet these days.

My advice is – don’t trust anything you see on social media without verifying it first, and legitimate journalists are still the best source of information out there, not your mates on Facebook. I don’t know if there’s an end in sight to this flood of misinformation that’s reached tsunami heights in the past six years or so, but the most important tool you have to fight against it is your own brain and credulity.

I finally went to Woodstock, 57 years later

It’s been a rather busy month full of concerts for me, and so I decided to sit for a couple nights and regroup by finally watching the Oscar-winning documentary Woodstock, the nearly four-hour (!) 1970 picture about the grandaddy of all rock festivals.

The daunting length of Woodstock – 224 minutes in the directors’ cut! – put me off watching it for far too long, but once you sink into its patchouli-scented vibes, director Michael Wadleigh’s uncanny eye for capturing those three days in 1969 (with help from a variety of editors including Martin Scorsese!) sucks you in.

Woodstock pivots between candid moments of the heaving 400,000+ crowd and intimate, close-up concert footage, swinging between the near and the far in a way that really evokes the scope of the event. Even now, viewing this swelling mass of humanity on Max Yasgur’s farm is startling. These bands were playing on a pretty humble stage and sound set – with no giant screens for the crowd – and yet still managed to hold attention. It all seems so low-fi and ramshackle from our hi-tech world of 2026, but also deeply moving.

At times it’s almost comical, like watching a grasshopper try to entertain a stadium, like when laidback folk singer John Sebastian alone with his guitar tries to gently lecture a wall of humanity, but then someone like Richie Havens takes the stage and holds the crowd in the palm of his hand with a few strums and footstomps, and it’s magic.

Everyone remembers Jimi Hendrix’s barn-burning closing performance – which teeters right on the edge of self-indulgence – but how about Ten Years After’s searingly loud take on “I’m Going Home”? Or The Who lurking out of the darkness like rock ’n’ roll spectres? Or Sha Na Na‘s frankly bonkers appearance?

Wadleigh’s eye for both the masses and the music separates Woodstock from many other concert films, and the still-innovative split screen approach gives it an immersive feel not quite like anything else. It’s the small moments that stick with you – the beaming smile on a blonde woman’s face lost in the music during Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice”, or the poignant little interview with the guy cleaning out all the disgusting porta-potties, a hardworking average American joe who says he’s got a kid at the festival – and another fighting away in Vietnam. I wonder how that family came out of all those crazy times (of course, it turns out the toilet guy later sued over being in the movie, so it goes).

Still, seeing all these hopeful, hairy faces slogging through the mud in Woodstock in 1969, you wonder how and who they are today. The commercialised repackaged idealism of the ‘60s is beyond parody now, but there is a distinct vibe to these times that an awful lot of people have been trying to capture ever since. The occasional sneering angry conservative local and the kindness seen in counterpoint by other locals about Woodstock disrupting their lives seems to evoke so much of the culture wars still splitting America today. It’s not so different, then and now.

I quickly decompressed from all the hippie peace and love by watching Woodstock 1970’s evil mirror image, the Netflix documentary series Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, the biggest (and last) attempt to pimp hard for that ‘60s nostalgia vibe with a musical journey that went horribly, depressingly wrong. Then again, when you book headliners like Limp Biskit, Kid Rock and Korn, you’re probably not really capturing the vintage Woodstock feeling. Toxic masculinity seems to be the order of the day, with a nihilistic mob of teens lashing out and calling it a “party.”

Trainwreck was a cold splash of water after Woodstock’s idealism, with an endless army of shirtless frat boys screaming incoherently. Free food and camping turned into price-gouging capitalism run amok. The purpose of Woodstock ’99 was to “get fucking wild” and “party”, and needless to say it all kind of collapsed into a full-on riot of violence, vandalism and fires by the end, which Trainwreck forensically dissects. The desperate need to “repeat” Woodstock ’69 or live up to the impossible nostalgia were the seeds of the festival’s destruction. A sad attempt to do yet another Woodstock reboot in 2019 for the 50th anniversary never even got off the ground.

Of course, both festivals were flawed, could never live up to expectations and yet probably had their moments, too – Woodstock 1970 glosses over lightly the issue of overcrowding, feeding the hordes and any violence at the scene, while Trainwreck focuses so heavily on the bad vibes and sense of disaster it kind of skims over that there were dozens of non-bro rock artists also playing and that despite everything, some people even apparently enjoyed it all.

The original Woodstock becoming a proxy for the fanciful mythical never-land of hippie dreams was kind of a happy accident, which defies attempts to do it all over again. I don’t think I would’ve liked to be there, and I know I wouldn’t have wanted to be at ’99, but more than 50 years on the documentary is a powerful piece of cultural history, with some fantastic performances along the way. We put our dreams into music festivals, but in the end, sometimes you just have to go where the day takes you.

Laneway Festival Auckland 2026 Review: Chappell Roan, Wet Leg and the kids are all right

I finally got around to quitting Spotify at the end of last year, but not before their silly-ass “Wrapped” feature told me that my musical age was about 77 years old. A bit rude, I thought.

I admit my musical tastes run old-school – I did just review concerts by 78-year-old Iggy Pop and 73-year-old David Byrne after all – but like a lot of middle-aged dudes, I’m trying to be hip and keep up, and this year’s Laneway Festival featured a great line-up of acts with a median age of under 30 – Geese, Wet Leg, Wolf Alice, Pink Pantheress, Benee, and the hottest act of the moment Chappell Roan. Auckland felt like a cultural capital again for a minute – Geese just played Saturday Night Live and Chappell Roan was very much in the news this week for her wardrobe choices at the Grammys.

It was a fantastic, life-affirming if exhausting day in the hot February sun at Western Springs, with somewhere around 40,000 people, most in their 20s, having the time of their lives. As an old dude in his mid-50s (I can’t even say EARLY 50s now) and the first proper festival I’ve been to in eight years, I was worried I couldn’t hack it. I’m sore as heck and blast furnace tanned and had a weird cramp in my leg at 4am, but I had an absolute groove.

I caught up with old mate writer Chris Schulz (who has his own great thoughts on the day) and then I kicked off with the poppy indie rock of Alex G, who put on a fine short set – their bouncy “Runner” is one of my favourite singles of the decade – although they might’ve been suited to a more chill indoor venue rather than the 25C afternoon sun. I was disappointed to only catch half of the set by Geese, whose crunchy, woozy rock is the acquired taste of the moment. Their songs always sound like they’re about to fall apart and serve up some serious Pixies/Modest Mouse vibes, and what I heard was very cool – but thanks to festival scheduling I had to zip over to see one of my absolute faves and missed the last half.

And that fave was Wet Leg, who put out quite possibly my favourite album of 2025, moisturizer, and their fist-pumpingly cool rock is full of earworms I can’t shake. Rhian Teasdale has turned into one of the sexiest, most confident frontwomen in rock, dancing around the stage with sweaty glee, and they put on a hell of a great show. I was also blown away by Wolf Alice, a band I was only partially familiar with (their single “Bloom Baby Bloom” is dynamite), but their frontwoman Ellie Rowsell may well have been the best singer of the day – powerfully versatile and able to wail and croon through a great set – it’s always awesome to really discover a band at a festival and Wolf Alice are high on my list to hear more from.

But honestly, I’d say a huge chunk of the 40,000 or so people jamming the field and stands were there to see the bombastic, hugely entertaining set by Chappell Roan, her first ever concert in New Zealand. I really don’t tend to see the truly big pop star concerts and it’s a whole different level to be surrounded by 20-something women loudly singing every word. Roan is an absolute star power, taking the stage on a bloody impressive huge fairy tale castle set and emerging with one of her trademark elaborate costumes looking like a Heavy Metal magazine cover come to life. But Roan’s got the chops to deliver on her showmanship – I’ve been listening to songs like “Good Luck Babe,” “Pink Pony Club” and “HOT TO GO!” and getting hooked on her yearning, empowering songwriting. Proudly queer, like many of the acts at Laneway, Roan cheered on NZ Pride Month and reminded us that even a small town girl from Missouri like her can become an inspiring global superstar no matter how screwed up America is at the moment.

Sure, my back hurt a bit and I was very aware I was older than most of the Laneway crowd, but it was a festival of optimism and the power of music in a kind of dark time in history for a lot of good people. Maybe I was lucky, but I didn’t see any ugly drunken “bro” behaviour or angry moshing, just a whole heap of young New Zealand folks out to dance the world away and as Chappell Roan sings, “Not overdramatic, I know what I want.”

I thought of a lyric by another band from the old days who t-t-t-talked about their generation once, and I left with a crowd of thousands of people of all genders, dress codes and amazing futures, and even to a mildly ancient dude like me it felt like the kids are all right.

Take a deep dive with me into My Movie DNA

Hey, you dig reading me ramble on about movies on this here website? Well, now you can listen to me do the same thing, as I made a guest appearance on the new episode of Brit-turned-Kiwi Johnny Andrews’ highly entertaining My Movie DNA podcast!

24-Hour Movie Marathon veteran Johnny has been doing this for a few years now and had guests including Wellington Paranormal star Karen O’Leary, Lord of the Rings Oscar-winning production designer Grant Major and a whole heap of prominent NZ movie creatives and fans, so it was an honour to be asked to pontificate on my movie hot takes for 90 minutes or so.

Johnny and I talk about everything from Charlie Chaplin’s masterpieces to Point Break to my glimpse of the filming of One Battle After Another to David Cronenberg to the late great Catherine O’Hara, how Sinners tackles America’s history, the wacky, erratic films of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor and so much more.

Have a listen at the links below and please enjoy my goofy responses to Johnny’s most excellent questions!

You can check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and much more through the links here!