Month: September 2024

Posters on the wall, the ultimate status update

Actual photo from actual college apartment circa 1991. Note awesome Elvis Costello poster and Blue Velvet poster, as well as rarely-used bicycles, mandatory beanbag, pile of Rolling Stone magazines.

Once you hit (cough cough) a certain age, you start to wonder about the things you’ve carried around with you for years.

This old mailing tube of posters has somehow made it from Mississippi to California to Oregon to New Zealand in the past 25+ years or so, carrying with it a rolled-up album of things I used to stick on my walls.

Once upon a time, I wallpapered my rooms with posters, a bright-eyed college student out on his own and determined to announce his personal style to the world, or at least anyone who visited his apartment or dorm. Status update: Look at my cool tastes, man!

But you do reach a point in life where you probably aren’t hanging posters quite so much, where thumbtacked personal statements on the wall seem a little gauche. 

Yet I still have my tube of posters, tucked away in a corner of a closet. I can’t bring myself to get rid of it, even as the cardboard tube turns slowly grey with age. 

Posters were a cheap way to advertise yourself. I still remember many of the ones I no longer own – a gigantic poster of The Beatles in their super-groovy late hippie splendour circa 1969 that hung in my high school bedroom; an extremely creepy poster advertising The Cure’s “Love Cats” single; an amazing, huge poster advertising Elvis Costello’s album Trust that I wish I still owned. 

The tube still holds some posters dating back more than 30 years now. A shiny poster advertising Peter Gabriel’s “So” as I dove deep into my Gabriel fandom for the first time.  I’ve got a Salvador Dali print that I bought my freshman year in college, consumed with how cool and ecclectic I was going to be. It hung around for years in a cheap plastic frame and somehow still endures, a bit tatty, in a corner of my office. 

Movie posters of Blue Velvet and Fear In Loathing In Las Vegas that probably date back to my late 1990s time working in a video store (remember those?). Museum exhibition posters from Melbourne and Oregon. A concert poster from Guided By Voices’ not-so “final” tour in 2004 in Portland. Battered prints from an artist friend in Mississippi, perpetually curved from years in that cardboard tube. Most of these haven’t hung on a wall for years, but I still keep them around. 

There’s a poster of Monty Python’s John Cleese as the Minister of Silly Walks that hung around my first apartment  in Oxford, Mississippi, and one day ended up on my university-age son’s own bedroom walls in New Zealand. After 30+ years it’s bent, torn and tattered and probably near retiring to a recycling bin, but somehow I just can’t let old Minister Cleese go yet. 

Long before Instagram profiles and TikToks, a cheap poster was a way to broadcast who you are, or who you wanted to be, as you assembled the pieces of your future self. These are the movies I like, these are the musicians I listen to. Appreciate me! 

I’m not a college student any more but I figure I can still give one or two of these posters a chance to air out in an inconspicuous spot in the house now and again. I’m sure I can find a corner of my office for that Blue Velvet poster, I reckon. 

The Penguin review – Batman’s goofiest villain is no longer a joke

For a bloke who turns 85 years old this year, Batman is holding up pretty well.

The caped crusader has been reinvented countless times since his 1939 debut, and that’s the secret of his longevity.

You want a friendly Batman? Adam West’s day-glo 1960s TV series fits the bill. Bold and epic? There’s plenty of animated series to choose from. Dark and gritty? Pick up Frank Miller’s classic Dark Knight Returns graphic novel. Somewhere in the middle, with lots of Gothic architecture? Tim Burton’s unique 1989 Batman still holds up very well.

Those Bat-villains just keep on going, too. Batman probably has the best rogues’ gallery in comic books – a twisted collection of eccentric obsessives strongly defined enough to take the spotlight in many of their own solo comics and movies. Stars who have played the Joker have now won two Academy Awards for Best Actor. For many, battling the Bat as the Riddler, Catwoman or Clayface is still a feather in the cap.

The world of Batman has proved itself ripe for interpretation, whether it’s Robert Pattinson’s brooding emo turn in 2022’s The Batman or villainous Harley Quinn starring in her own filthily funny and irreverent animated series.

But a new HBO spin-off of that 2022 Batman movie serves up one of the darkest takes yet on Batman’s Gotham City, starring Colin Farrell reprising his role as the scheming gangster Penguin.

The Penguin has always kind of been the also-ran of Bat-villains, despite hanging about for decades. A pudgy, monocle-wearing bird-obsessed weirdo with trick umbrellas, he was memorably brought to life by a cacklingly campy Burgess Meredith in the 1960s TV series, while Danny DeVito in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns was a waterlogged, creepy outcast.

Wipe all that out of the memory with Farrell’s sinister “Oz” – who loathes the nickname Penguin – a scarred and crippled mobster who nearly stole the show in The Batman. There are no trick umbrellas here.

An unrecognisable Farrell, looking like an overweight Robert DeNiro run through a smudgy photocopier, played Penguin in The Batman film as a seedy Goodfellas-style criminal.

It was a magnetic performance with its visceral sleaze, and over the new eight-part miniseries Farrell’s snarling take on this most ridiculous of Bat-villains makes a good case for why you should never overlook a penguin.

In The Penguin, which picks right up after the near-destruction of Gotham City in The Batman’s climax, Farrell gets a showcase a world away from big budget MCU-style comic adventures.

Farrell feels consistently underrated as an actor, despite some excellent performances in films like After Yang or In Bruges and an Oscar nomination for The Banshees of Inisherin. He gives the oily Penguin a sense of wounded soul despite working under piles of makeup and padding to create the character’s waddling presence.

This isn’t your childhood Batman and definitely isn’t for kids – while the Bat himself is only referred to in passing, The Penguin is a deliciously nasty slice of noir, filled with F-bombs and shockingly violent deaths, far more The Sopranos than Batman Forever.

The Penguin is scrambling to take advantage of the chaos in Gotham’s criminal underworld after the events of The Batman. He’s nowhere near a “supervillain” yet, but he’s got big dreams, and ropes into his labyrinthine plans a conflicted teenager (Rhenzy Feliz) and the disturbed daughter of deceased crimelord Carmine Falcone, Sofia (Cristin Milioti).

The Penguin works best when it focuses on Farrell, but Milioti (Palm Springs, Black Mirror) is also striking channeling that good old Gotham City criminal intensity into an unpredictable performance. A rogue’s gallery of prominent actors like Mark Strong, Shohreh Aghdashloo and House of Cards’ Michael Kelly fill out the cast.

Over The Penguin’s eight episodes (the first five were viewed for review), a tangled web of double-crosses and violent heists unfolds, with Oz the Penguin scrambling over dead bodies as he hopes to make his mark on the world. While it may help set the stage for the 2026 sequel to The Batman, it also very much stands on its own even if you’re not a Bat-fan.

There’s no Batman, no Robin in sight, but you honestly don’t miss the Dark Knight too much with bad guys this watchable.

This review also published over at RNZ!

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet in Election 2024….

…Yeah, yeah, I’ve been writing about US politics again. Here’s a few links of recent work by me elsewhere on the internet:

For Radio New Zealand:

For The New Zealand Listener, an election-adjacent book review:

More non-election content soon!

Walter Matthau, the forgotten great 1970s action hero

There’s just something about Walter Matthau that gives a movie a little kick to me. 

Matthau had a face like an unmade bed, and his jowly face was called “hangdog” more times than you can count. But he was also a surprisingly malleable actor, a top-notch character actor who slowly worked his way into leading man roles. 

Matthau’s reputation settled in as the cranky curmudgeon often paired with his pal Jack Lemmon in movies like The Odd Couple and Grumpy Old Men (still one of my favourite ‘comfort viewing’ flicks), but for a while there in the ‘60s and ‘70s he tried being a rumpled action hero of sorts, playing both cops and crooks in a series of gritty classics. 

The 1970s saw the grand blossoming of leading men who didn’t all look like Robert Redford and Warren Beatty – Dustin Hoffman’s twitchy angst, Al Pacino’s angry passion, Gene Hackman’s everyman intensity. Matthau, who remained seen as a primarily comic actor, never quite comfortably rose into those ranks, but he could have. 

Before he pivoted more to comedy in his final years before his death in 2000, Matthau gave a witty spark of realism to movies like The Taking Of Pelham 123, Charley Varrick, The Laughing Policeman and Hopscotch, all fun spins on traditional crime tales. 

Matthau could be very menacing and played the villain a fair bit, in earlier gems like the Hitchockian Cary Grant starring Charade or the apocalyptic Fail-Safe. Hell, he even got into a fistfight with Elvis Presley in King Creole! 

His brief turn as a kind of action hero, though, often makes me wonder what if he’d stuck to that genre. The 1974 Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 remains a great, tense ride, as gunmen take a New York subway train hostage and Matthau, an unimposing traffic cop, ends up caught in the middle. Like an early run at Die Hard, it’s one of the great “unexpected hero” hostage dramas. 

The Laughing Policeman from 1973 is one of those wonderfully sleazy downbeat San Francisco crime movies of the era, opening with a still-shocking massacre on a bus. Like its thematic cousin Dirty Harry, it’s filled with grim period detail, although IMHO it loses its way a bit with a sluggish and kind of problematic final act wrap for its central mystery.

In 1973’s Charley Varrick and 1980’s Hopscotch, Matthau leans on his comic scoundrel side to winning effect. His Varrick is a smartly confident bank robber in a zesty neo-noir, while in the underrated satire Hopscotch he’s a former CIA agent who goes rogue and basically devotes himself to trolling his former bosses in a globe-trotting hoot. 

But unlike Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, Matthau is never a swaggering alpha male, although he can be grumblingly sexist and arrogant like many a ‘70s male movie lead.

In his brief run at action hero stardom, the 50-something Matthau of the 1970s still feels oddly fresh and novel. It was an era where many of the staid conventions of American films were being shaken up, and having a guy who looked kind of like a worn-out off-duty office manager playing thieves, cops and con men just worked. 

There’s still something soothing for me about watching Matthau’s unpolished nonchalance amble about in a movie, and I like to think in a parallel universe, Matthau-starring versions of gritty flicks like The French Connection and Chinatown would’ve blown my mind.