Month: August 2025

Still sticking up for Phil Collins after all these years

Musical tastes change with age, I get it. But no matter how cool you think you get, the stuff you loved when you were 14 years old will always be your secret love.

So it is with me and Phil Collins, whose best work I’ve always got time for, no matter how much other stuff I listen to. 

Phil’s third and best solo album No Jacket Required came out 40 years ago this year, and 1985 really was the peak of Phil-mania or Collins-palooza, whatever you want to call it. The guy was everywhere for a year or so there. And boy, some people hated that. Not me. 

In the summer of 1985, I nerdily rocked out to Genesis’ later albums with Phil and company and the gloriously cheesy video to “Don’t Lose My Number.” There was something about the best of Phil’s songs that excited me – perhaps it was the way Phil’s sincere voice always made everything sound so darned dramatic, or his drummer’s sense of rhythm pushing along the tunes. 

I wouldn’t classify Phil as an innovator, but when it came to pop hooks, the man could cook. That unforgettable drum burst with “In The Air Tonight,” the melodramatic urgency of “Don’t Lose My Number”’s chorus, the soaring keyboard riff that opens the banger Philip Bailey duet “Easy Lover.” Even the annoyingly catchy chorus of “Sussudio,” a song folks love to hate, is a bona fide earworm of amiable gibberish. 

I think what struck me all those years ago on MTV was Collins’ seeming normalcy in the heart of pop stardom. Balding and ordinary, he was the odd man out against flashier, more innovative stars like Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson or Springsteen. He wore Members Only jackets and had a mullet. He’s a history nerd who collected Alamo relics. He felt relatable. I’d never be a George Michael, but maybe I could be a Phil. 

And even though I’m a diehard Peter Gabriel fan until the end, I’ll quietly under my breath admit that when it comes to Genesis, I kind of listen to the radio-friendly Phil years more than I do the proggy Gabriel era. Listening to the vaguely proggy Abacab at a church ski camp felt slightly subversive. And none-more-’80s blockbuster “Invisible Touch” for the win, man. 

Unfortunately there’s a kind of weakness in Collins’ work that only increased with age – his tendency for mawkish ballads. His solo albums tended to be a mix of ballads and rockers – some very good ballads too, like “Against All Odds” or “Take Me Home”, but somewhere around the unfortunately foreshadowing album But Seriously… Phil got more sappy and less sassy, singing about poverty and apartheid instead of Sussudios. 

By 1993’s Both Sides album he slipped mostly into bland soft-rock territory and the hooks of his grand early solo run faded away. He left Genesis and did Disney movie soundtracks and kind of like Billy Joel, he left the work that made him famous for different territories. 

These days he’s basically retired at age 74 – Collins’ health has been notoriously poor the last few years, a lifetime of hardcore drumming catching up with him. Recent reunion tours saw him sitting down the whole show. 

Still, from Face Value through that 40-year-old banger No Jacket Required, Phil Collins was an unlikely arena-filling superstar. And I have to admit a little bit of my love for classic Phil is sticking up for the underdog. Collins became a bit of a piñata for critical beatings over the years, even with “In the Air Tonight” becoming a classic across generations. Even in his breezy autobiography Going Back, you get the sense he sees himself as a little unappreciated. 

Listening to Phil grounds me and reminds me that sometimes it’s just about whether or not the music moves you, not what the in crowd says. Even though I don’t listen to a lot of today’s pop – sorry, I’m still agnostic on the Taylor Swift question – my Phil-fandom means I try not to sneer at anyone else’s tastes too hard. If you like it, you like it. 

Collins’ songs didn’t change the world, but I also can never quite entirely get them out of my head. For a musician, that’s not the worst legacy to leave. I’m too old to care about being cool now, so I’ll listen to Phil Collins sometimes and bang my head to “Easy Lover” like it was 1985 all over again. 

And if you don’t like that, you can Sussudio right off, eh? 

The best image ever taken of Phil Collins in concert, 1981

John Byrne’s Alpha Flight: Anything can happen

In his white-hot comics run through the 1970s into the 1990s, John Byrne was always one of my favourite writer/artists – his bold dynamic style felt to me like the platonic ideal of what good old-fashioned superhero comics could be. And I’ve got a special place in my heart for his run on Alpha Flight, a Canadian superhero team who debuted fighting fellow Canadian Wolverine in an issue of X-Men and were spun off by Canadian-raised Byrne into their own book. 

I loved Byrne’s classic takes on Fantastic Four, Superman, X-Men and the like, but there was a rather raw edge to his Alpha Flight run that holds up well. Byrne fielded an oddball group of Canadian stereotypes, with Captain America fill-in Guardian, hulking Sasquatch, French-Canadian twins Aurora and Northstar, Native American Shaman and wilderness spirit Snowbird, the dwarf Puck and aquatic Marrina. 

Alpha Flight was a curious book about a team that wasn’t really ever a team. Marvel’s The Defenders tagged itself as the “non-team,” but for most of Byrne’s run, the entire team of Alpha Flight was rarely assembled together, and the book focused on a series of solo tales or small pairings of team members. It felt a bit exotic to me with its name-drops for Winnipeg and Quebec and glimpses of a culture alien to this small-town California kid. 

Canada was an unusual setting for superhero stories, and Alpha Flight was a superhero series that seemed unpredictable and energetic. It was no Watchmen or Dark Knight, of course, it didn’t deconstruct the medium – but it stood out on the comic racks to me in 1983 when it premiered. Byrne himself doesn’t think much of his Alpha Flight run and calls the characters two-dimensional, but I think he cuts himself short. 

(SPOILERS for 40-year-old comic books follow)

Because Alpha Flight were hardly top-tier characters, there was a real sense that anything could happen during Byrne’s run. The most notable was the still-shocking death of team leader Guardian in #12, which came as an accidental tragedy – Guardian’s damaged battle suit explodes when he’s distracted at a critical moment by his wife Heather Hudson. It was cruel and sudden, no heroic death but just one of those terrible things that sometimes happen. 

In the pre-internet age where nothing was spoiled, Alpha Flight #12 was stunning, and left teenage comic reader Nik feeling like the world was suddenly a far more shaky place. If you could kill off the leader of a superhero team, was anyone safe?

Byrne’s run constantly rocked the boat on the idea of a “Canadian Avengers” team. In the very first issue the team has been defunded by the Canadian government and broken up, and while they briefly reunite, in the first two dozen or so issues of Alpha Flight there’s only a few times all the members are together at once. In the second issue, the sprite-like aquatic member Marrina turns out to be an alien invader and nearly kills Puck. A few issues later, the sibling team of Northstar and Aurora have a brutal feud and break up. The burly Sasquatch loses control of himself constantly. There’s always a sense in Alpha Flight that everything is about to fall apart. Is there such a concept as an “anti-team” superhero comic? 

John Byrne’s work has often had a bit of a dark side and it is fully unleashed in some storylines that felt very brutal at the time – the villainous Master recounts being tortured and dissected alive by alien machines for thousands of years, the creepy Gilded Lily is basically a dessicated corpse kept alive by machines and sorcery, Sasquatch’s battle with Super-Skrull leaves a group of innocent scientists brutally murdered. Aurora battles a multiple-personality disorder, Puck is wracked with chronic pain and most of the team don’t seem to actually like each other that much. It feels like Alpha Flight rarely save anybody and it’s a real surprise late in Byrne’s run when the team battles a run-of-the-mill hostage-taking supervillain for the first time rather than malicious gods and murderous aliens. 

Byrne has a long history of leaving series abruptly, sometimes in mid-storyline, but his Alpha Flight feels more or less complete. It did end in a cliffhanger handed off to new writer Bill Mantlo after #28, but that was intentional. 

Byrne’s work kind of peaked by the late 1980s and hasn’t really felt as fresh for a long time. Alpha Flight carried on for a good hundred issues after Byrne left and I periodically checked in, but the book was really never very good again. The non-team was quickly turned into yet another standard superhero team, Wolverine kept showing up, and the inspiringly “normal” Heather Hudson immediately became a superhero wearing her dead husband’s costume. (The worst was Bill Mantlo turning Puck from a fascinating dwarf character into the subject of some inane ancient curse that made him a dwarf, although the gay character Northstar’s legendarily ham-fisted coming out story with some of the worst most 1990s comic art ever is a close second.)

They even brought Guardian back to life a couple of times, negating the stunning power of Alpha Flight #12. So it goes. 

I guess Alpha Flight are pretty much C-list Marvel characters these days and I couldn’t even tell you who’s dead or alive or resurrected or whatever. They haven’t shown up in the MCU yet and nobody is rocking Sasquatch T-shirts (although really, they should). But for a couple dozen issues before Byrne wandered off, they felt like one of the more exciting books in Marvel Comics – where anyone could die at any time, and where the bonds of the team itself were constantly breaking apart. In their chaos the comic felt weirdly alive. Not bad for a bunch of Canadians, eh?

Universal Monster endings: The Creature Walks Among Us

I’ve written many a time before about my love of the classic 1930s-1950s Universal Horror monster movies, which almost a century on still cast a spooky spell. And my sentimental favourite has always been Creature From The Black Lagoon, whose 1954 debut came at the end of Universal’s classic run.

Creature is in my mind an almost perfect old-school horror movie – it’s got exploration of the unknown, man meddling where he shouldn’t, a sexy lady in a swimsuit and a monster who is ultimately a tragic figure. In a tidy 79 minutes it tells a classic beauty and the beast story with a kind of haunting elegance (especially those gorgeous underwater scenes) and gives us one of cinema’s most memorable monster designs. I’ve watched it countless times and get a kick out of it every time.

It’s a shame the two sequels never felt very essential, although in one choking last gasp, the franchise finale The Creature Walks Among Us is almost a good movie. 

Universal Horror movies were the best, but they weren’t usually very good at sequels. Other than the original Frankenstein, which boasted great follow-ups in Bride Of and Son Of Frankenstein, most of them fumbled at sequels. They foolishly didn’t bring back the iconic Bela Lugosi for a sequel to 1931’s Dracula until 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which while fun, isn’t exactly top-tier. Lon Chaney Jr’s melancholy Wolf Man ended up as a supporting player against other monsters after the first Wolf Man, Claude Rains’ Invisible Man died and sequels to that were bland bores, while Boris Karloff’s Mummy was reborn again and again without Karloff in a series of increasingly silly riffs. By monster mash House of Frankenstein – where the monster barely does a thing until the final 5 minutes – everything was increasingly played out.

A clutching claw at the heart of civilization! They don’t make tag lines like they used to.

The same problem befell the Creature of the Black Lagoon, who was enough of a hit to come back for two more sequels. The uninspired 1955 quickie Revenge Of The Creature is basically a remake with a Florida aquatic park setting and a brief cameo by Clint Eastwood in his movie debut. 

The last sequel – and the last of Universal’s classic monster era in general – was 1956’s The Creature Walks Among Us, which took an intriguing idea and dropped the ball, but left us just enough hints to imagine a much better movie. 

In this one, the Creature is once again captured by pesky humans – but this time by a fanatical scientist, Dr Barton (Jeff Morrow), who wants to experiment on him, turning him into from an aquatic creature into a more human organism. (The pseudo-science explanation given is this would somehow prepare humans for interstellar travel.) The Creature is captured but badly burned, which gives Barton the excuse to alter his genetics. Of course, being a monster movie, things go badly for everyone in the end.

It’s an interesting idea but the execution is limp – far too much time is spent on irritating scientist Barton’s marriage troubles, and the Creature feels like an afterthought in his own movie. Also, the end game appears to simply be to set the Creature up in a kind of petting zoo enclosure, so not sure what all that science was really for. 

In the encyclopaedic book The Creature Chronicles by Tom Weaver – an insanely comprehensive green-scaled bible that’s a must for any fan of the movies – it’s revealed that earlier drafts had a fair bit more Creature action and debate over what it means to play god with such a being. Little of that shows in the finished movie, which is workmanlike and slow and padded out with dull humans. Only the Creature himself – despite the alterations, still an unforgettable look – is worth paying attention to. The Creature’s sad journey – given short shrift in the film – is the movie that should’ve been made.

There is something haunting about the repeated images of the mutilated monster, who now has very human eyes, reduced from a sleek underwater god to a hulking, out of place figure in a world he doesn’t fit in. Creature Walks is a monster movie with very little monster action – the final minutes kick in with the Creature framed for a murder by nasty Dr Barton – who he then, of course, kills himself. The Creature evades punishment, unusually for a monster movie – he is last seen lonesomely on a beach, advancing towards the ocean, where in his altered form he will surely die. Is this the end of the Creature? It’s a pleasantly open-ended and evocative ending. 

And even though the movie is a pale imitation of the original Creature and much better Universal Monster movies, those final moments feel like they could sum up the appeal of classic monsters in general – a misunderstood creature alone, on a beach, staring at the sea, trying to find a place to belong. 

Why Eddington is the movie America deserves in 2025

Look, the world kind of lost its mind in 2020, didn’t it? And we’re all still dealing with that. 

We’re all very much living in the aftermath of the pandemic, which seemed to break apart the bonds we imagined held the world together. Everyone’s got a relative or friend whose opinions seemed to go down weird rabbit-holes, or topics you just don’t discuss anymore. Covid, culture wars, digital disinformation – a dozen tangled threads all seemed to bloom and spread beginning in 2020. 

But so far, there haven’t been a lot of major motion pictures looking at this age of weirdness. We need satire and storytelling to process the societal earthquakes that hit us. After Watergate in the 1970s we saw a surge in paranoid cinema, while it took America until the 1980s to really unpack its Vietnam traumas with films like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born On The Fourth of July and the like.  There were even a slew of (mostly kind of dire) 9/11 reenactment movies after those 2001 attacks or smarter ones like The Hurt Locker processing how terrorism spreads.

But on Covid, lockdowns and the fractured, polarised world that’s come out of it all, Hollywood’s been pretty silent. Ari Aster’s new film Eddington – a black comedy Western pandemic dystopian frenzy of a film – boasts two Oscar winners and a hot director and seems to be the first major Hollywood take on the year everything went, for lack of a better word, batshit. 

Even now, I don’t like thinking back to the strangled tenseness of the pandemic years, to masks fogging up my glasses, to queues at the supermarket, social distancing and the lurking rise of protest movements galore and the latching on to conspiracies. No matter what your views are on how it’s all turned out, it ain’t a time anyone fondly remembers now. 

The pandemic still feels raw, the culture war battles are still raging strong under Trump 2.0, so is it really time for satire? Yet Eddington feels like the movie America deserves in 2025. It’s shocking and slapstick in equal measures. “More distance will make it easier to laugh,” the LA Times’ Amy Nicholson wrote in her positive review of Eddington, and I can’t disagree.

Joaquin Phoenix stars as New Mexico sheriff Joe Cross, a tense conservative who doesn’t care for masks and social distancing and who despises the town’s charming mayor (Pedro Pascal) and decides to run against him. His wife (Emma Stone) is going down online rabbit holes and Joe feels like everything in his world is changing. Black Lives Matter protests come to town, Covid is here, and big tech is making a play for a giant start-up facility in town. Because this is an Ari Aster movie, and Aster is the patron saint of dread in film right now, everything escalates very quickly into a violent, unpredictable mess. 

Joe posts Facebook campaign videos saying “we need to free each others hearts” but soon starts ranting about sexual predators and driving around in a truck plastered with slogans like “Your (sic) being manipulated.” Pascal’s perky mayor slaps up pandering inclusive videos featuring smiling Black extras in a town with almost no Black population. A lovestruck white teenager who dives into BLM activism to win over a girl ends up bemoaning his white privilege to a crowd, yelling “My job is to sit down and listen! As soon as I finish this speech! Which I have no right to make!” 

Eddington is an equal-opportunity satire that sees the absurd in all viewpoints. It hits all the bases – mask mandates, pedophiles, artificial intelligence, police racism, Bitcoin and Antifa – offending left and right with equal measures. 

But ultimately, Eddington is really about how social media has rotted our brains, turning us all into circus animals hooked on dopamine and conflict. It’s bad here in New Zealand but exponentially feels far worse in the far bigger America, where politicians and celebs now spew conspiracies and hate speech that felt unthinkable 10 years back. 

America doesn’t make much sense to me at the moment, and Eddington is an exhausted grim chuckle at how fractured it’s all gotten. 

“I am a much better human being than you,” Joe sneers at one point to his opponent, and that arrogant phrase seems to capture so much of the vibe of America 2020 and Social Media 2025. 

I wouldn’t argue that Eddington is a masterpiece – it’s too long, a bit scattered and overstuffed, the ending ramps up the violence to a kind of incoherent mess, and Aster’s “everyone’s an idiot” worldview will probably rub some the wrong way … but in its bleakly comic way, it captures the moment in a way that cinema kind of needs to help us process whatever the hell has happened to the world the last few years. And Phoenix, who never feels better on screen than when he’s falling apart, is terrific.

Eddington shows how community and dialogue vanishes as we all get sucked into our little tech bubble windows, how performative our lives have become and how lonely we’re all getting as a result. “All of these people are kind of living on the Internet and they are sort of all seeing the world through these strange, individualized windows,” Aster said in an interview.

Sometimes you just need to see it all splayed out before you under a hot desert sun, and marvel at the endless foibles of humans and how easy it is for the things that hold us together to prove as flimsy as a tumbleweed in the breeze. 

Eddington is not here to make conclusions, other than that perhaps we’re all kind of ridiculous creatures. At the moment, still trying to process the world we all live in now, laughing a little about that feels like enough for me.