Honestly, in my mind, a good character actor beats the heck out of a box office superstar every day. Rising stars like Timothée Chalamet or Glen Powell, sure, they do fine stuff, but give me a good turn by a supporting scene-stealer like John Turturro, Michael Stuhlbarg, Stephen McKinley Henderson, the late great Lance Reddick, Walter Goggins or the inevitable Stephen Root, and I’m in heaven.
And the king of the character actors these days has to be Willem Dafoe, surely the only man who can claim to have played Jesus Christ, the vampire Nosferatu and the Green Goblin.
Dafoe is a character actor who’s worked his way up to the A-list. Anytime Dafoe is on screen, his wired presence takes over – in the space of a few days, I watched him as a hilarious bad actor-turned-ghost cop in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and then as a dogged eccentric vampire slayer in the superb new Nosferatu by Robert Eggers. (Because he’s Willem Dafoe, he of course also played that titular vampire himself in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, and got an Oscar nomination for it!)
As he ages, Dafoe has honed his intense charm to a fine tone, able to play creeps and heroes equally well. He turns 70 this year but seems as full of curiosity and a willingness to experiment as a teenager.
He’s been doing this for more than 40 years now and while, regrettably, he’s never won an Oscar, he’s been a key player in acclaimed movies like Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July and The English Patient. He’s worked with the finest directors of our time like Wes Anderson, David Lynch, Werner Herzog, David Cronenberg and Yorgos Lanthimos.
When he’s bad, he’s unforgettable. His lounge lizard killer (and hideous rotting teeth) in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart still haunts me, as do his blunt brutal hitman in The Grand Budapest Hotel or his layered Norman Osborn in the 2002 Spider-Man movie, which was so good he was brought back to reprise the role nearly 20 years later in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
But it’s the tenderness he can also summon up that hits the hardest, whether his remarkable Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s underrated Last Temptation of Christ, the mutilated Dr Frankenstein avatar in Poor Things, Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate or his Oscar-nominated turn in the heartbreaking The Florida Project.
A lot of actors have a type, which they cash in on and play until the money stops rolling in (Chris Pratt, I’m looking at you). But Dafoe seems happy to try to be anybody, like a good character actor should.
Dafoe’s not afraid to go hard in all-out weird cinema like The Lighthouse or Antichrist, then turn around and appear in the latest MCU blockbuster too.
An incredibly prolific actor, he’s not always utilised to his full potential – I’m still struggling to figure out why the heck he was in Aquaman, really – but he pretty much always makes the movies he’s in a better place.
Stars come and go, but character actors – man, they just burn hard the whole way through.
It’s inescapable that older one gets the more people you lose, whether it’s family or the creators and icons you look up to. I could turn this into a full-time obituary blog these days if I wanted to, I reckon, but one also has to grasp for the light sometimes. All our heroes go away eventually.
And honestly, any celebrity death, no matter who, is probably never going to strike me quite like the big loss that blots out the sky for me, my father’s passing last May. That’s the kind of shattering experience you somehow get through, but you’re never really the same, are you? Life is marked in before and after now.
The last celebrity death I think I really cried over was David Bowie, because it just seemed so utterly shocking at the time – the man just put out a new album, he wasn’t even 70, and everyone knows you don’t up and die during an album release window. That one hurt, in the sort of unsettling way that maybe leaves a person thinking you’ll never quite let yourself be that vulnerable again to a celebrity death. And so, Prince, just two months later, was awful as well, but it didn’t hit me as a hammerblow to the brain.
We’ve lost two of my favourites in just a week – film genius David Lynch, who left us at 78, and the legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer, whose death today at 95 was just announced. Two very different men but two whose work really shaped me and how I look at the world.
There’s been a lot said about David Lynch this week and I don’t know much more I can add to the discourse other than to say, the man rewired your brains. I remember scrambling to watch Twin Peaks my freshman year in college, where I didn’t even own a TV, having to borrow a tiny portable model from someone in the dorm. I’d never seen anything quite like this combination of American mystery and menace. A couple years later a friend and I watched a VHS of Eraserhead and at the end sat stunned, gasping, muttering “What? What?!?” over and over again. Lynch did that for you.
The night he died I watched Blue Velvet again for the nth time, and like any masterpiece, every time I see it, it unfolds slightly differently to me. The unmistakable brilliance of the opening credits, American beauty crashing up against the rot underneath – this week, this month, this deranged moment in American history, we all need to pay more attention to the bugs beneath the earth, chittering away. Kyle Maclachlan’s jaunty student discovering the evil underneath, and the unanswerable question – how do we get past the bad things?
Jules Feiffer was a little more underground, perhaps, but his fingerprints were surely on something you watched or read – besides his long-running cartoon in the Village Voice, he was quite possibly the last living link to the Golden Age of comic books, blustering his way into a job with the legendary Will Eisner at just 16 or so and then ending up working on the iconic Spirit. He wrote books of comic history that broke new ground, he drew The Phantom Tollboth classic children’s book, he wrote scrappy novels, he wrote the screenplays for both Carnal Knowledge and Robert Altman’s Popeye and two more different movies you could scarcely imagine. He was drawing right up until the end at age 95.
Feiffer was never a classically great artist, but that was the point – his scribbled, sketchy lines danced with expression, his bitter wit on everything from romance to Richard Nixon stung in a way most young political cartoonists would dream of. When I was a kid, my parents had Feiffer’s Marriage Manual on a shelf in their bedroom, where the kind of adult books were kept. I snuck a look at it and his wiry, intense takes on love and romance turned out not to be full of nekkid ladies, but instead a kind of naked, barbed genius that hooked me instantly. Cartoons could be about life! Whether it was books, comics, movies, plays, Feiffer was the kind of renaissance man creator that quietly helped shape the 20th century. He sure shaped me.
“Now it’s dark,” the vile Frank Booth whispers in Blue Velvet shortly before unspeakable acts.
I’ve accepted we will see more and more go like they did in 2024 – author Paul Auster, whose tense and vibrant books never stopped wondering at life’s mysteries; The Chills’ Martin Phillipps, whose music summed up New Zealand to me; perpetually surly character actor Dabney Coleman, whose Slap Maxwell Story is still one of the best cranky journalists performances I’ve seen; CAN’s unmistakable voice Damo Suzuki and the MC5’s scorching guitarist Wayne Kramer; Gena Rowlands, whose naked honesty scorched the silver screen; the tragic Ed Piskor, prolific, detailed and often-dazzling cartoonist gone too soon to suicide; Donald Sutherland, who said more with a raised eyebrow than many do their whole career; smiling Carl Weathers, who seemed poured out of liquid muscles in the Rocky movies that I watched endlessly; John Cassady, whose ripplingly beautiful art in Planetary, X-Men and others seemed too good to be true;Paul Fry, one of my journalism mentors and a hell of a guy; the small press comics creator Larry Blake, whose precise art deserved a wider audience; PresidentJimmy Carter, perhaps the last good man. And so many more. That’s just the tip of those who left in the past year or so.
It’s a lot. No matter what we do, they all keep going, and one day we’ll go, too. But they leave the shapes behind.
But maybe it’s Dad’s death, maybe it’s just that we live in a world of constant troubles and you can’t live with hate and regrets in your heart the whole time, but I’ve been trying to accept the dark and admire the light a little more this past 8 months or so.
It all gets muddled together, the losses we face in this life.
I hate that it does get dark, that David Lynch will make no more films and Jules Feiffer will draw no more cartoons, but they left us so much. I will pull out my Feiffer paperbacks and smile and I will head down to the marvellous local revival cinema and see some of David Lynch’s movies on the big screen next month.
I keep dreaming about my Dad a lot lately, the brain puttering away while I sleep, doing the strange work of processing life. I don’t mind that. He’s still here, really. They all are.
I published a lengthy piece back in September just before Carter turned 100, by far the longest lived US President in history. (Funnily, I actually first wrote it back in 2023 sometime, thinking it would be as a nice obituary tribute to run somewhere, but old Jimmy just kept on going!)
Anyway, it says all the things I feel about Carter, who was perhaps not the best of presidents if you measure his term, but, as his long life and endless service shows, he was one of the best of men. It’s a kind of life that seems very, very far away at the dawn of this next presidency, but it’s one that I keep hoping that someday perhaps will influence a braver, smarter generation.
To quote that great Blue Mountain song, which I sure hope an awful lot of people will get to hear in the coming days,
“Well he said I’d never lie to you, and what’s more he never did. Though the times grew mighty tough, he never flipped his lid. So shake the hand of the man, with a hand full of love. The one and only Jimmy Carter.”
Let’s get negative! There is, admittedly, far too much complaining on the internet, but sometimes you gotta vent. Following up my 10 favourite pop culture moments, here’s a handful of things that I found most disappointing about the year almost gone:
Maybe that Rocky XXXVIII was a bad idea after all: The top 10 movies at the US box office of 2024 were all sequels (or prequels). That doesn’t necessarily mean they all sucked – I enjoyed Beetlejuice Beetlejuice a lot and Dune: Part Two was great, but while last year had a brief blip of creative hope when movies like Oppenheimer broke records, this year it just feels like we’re wringing the intellectual property towels out until they are stone dry. When you have sequels that nobody demanded revisiting flicks like 1996’s Twister or 2000’s Gladiator or yet another Alien movie, or when you put out another ‘meh’ Ghostbusters sequel that’s almost immediately forgotten – it’s a sign you’re running out of properties to revive again and again. Remembering how chaotic and alive Bill Murray seemed 40 years ago in Ghostbusters, seeing him drag it all out again for a few scenes in 2024 for a fifth instalment in a franchise just felt… tired.
The Bear spins its wheels: I’ll admit it. I haven’t finished The Bear Season 3 yet. The tale of a talented but troubled Chicago restaurant chef and his crew has been gripping, but it’s sliding quickly over into prestige fatigue. I quite liked Season 1 and 2 even when the show pushed the limits of how tense and angry you could make things, but the first half of Season 3 is repetitive and dull. It’s a very bad sign when the first episode of Season 3 is a largely wordless, drifting swamp of self-indulgence that felt like a never-ending 30 minutes opening credits sequence. It sets up a season which barely advances the overall plot so far and which seems high on its own supply, hitting the same beats – yelling, repetitive flashbacks, emotional breakdowns, kitchen disasters – we’ve already seen. The Bear has been as much drama as comedy but this season the balance tipped. There are good moments, and I’m sure I’ll finish it… eventually … but what a comedown from the first two binge-worthy seasons for me.
MaXXXine doesn’t mark the spot: Speaking of sequels, I really enjoyed director Ti West’s creepy, generational horror mood pieces with Mia Goth, X and Pearl. But the trilogy “capper” MaXXXine, featuring Goth’s hopeful movie star Maxine trying to make her way in Hollywood after the violent events of X, was a big confused miss. Set in the day-glo ‘80s, a distracting cast of “spot that star” cameos like Kevin Bacon and a bizarre plot twist that made the first two movies seem sane left this sequel feeling like a tired cash-in, the exact sort of movie I think it was trying to make fun of. Even Goth, so good in the first two, seemed bored by it all.
The “return” of EC Comics. EC Comics dazzled and shocked the industry with top-notch art and edgy storytelling back in the 1950s. Periodically, someone tries to bring the IP back, and so it is with this year’s Oni Press revival. Technically, they’re not horrible comics – just highly mediocre product. They look great – boasting a cool retro design with some of the best covers out there. But where they really fell down is the dull and cliche-ridden writing, which felt like ham-handed cosplay of the original EC. The stories either have facile modern-day attempts at limp satire, dumb gory twists or uninspired morality tales. Yeah, the original EC had a lot of that too, but somehow it’s not the same in 2024, and the talents here are no Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman or Will Elder. The art is often good but lacks that cohesive feeling the EC Comics “house style” had. I get what they were trying for here, but maybe you can’t go home again.
The rise of AI slop: I work in media, and am probably more worried about the future of this industry than I’ve ever been. The endless plague of misinformation is bad, but the AI “slop” – never has a phrase been more apt – starting to seep in on every corner of the internet feels like it’s just getting started, whether it’s shit fake trailers for movies or “pink slime” viral crap or sleazy grifters out to make a viral buck. This year saw it being shoved at us all over the show without any chance to opt out – Google front-loading AI-juiced searches at us, Facebook saying I can “imagine” a new profile photo, the Washington Post giving us “AI generated highlights” or LinkedIn telling me, a writer for 30+ years, that I can use AI to write an amazing post – it’s all crap to me, and I don’t care if that makes me a gosh-danged Luddite. We all feel like much of the internet has turned into garbage the last few years. The slop is speeding up the techpocalypse. Every word of this website was actually written by me, a human. I wish that didn’t have to be said.
So I’ll join the chorus – 2024 really did kind of suck, eh? For me, by far, the biggest blow was the death of my father in May, and I guess nothing has truly felt the same since. There’s been a lot of lousy things happening in the wider world as well, of course, and the general sense that everything is just careening out of control in the cosmos.
Pop culture – be it book, comics, movies or music – is one of the few saving graces we’re left with when nothing else makes sense. Thus, in a burst of optimism, here’s my 10 favourite culture moments of the year:
Now is now – Perfect Days by Wim Wenders: An awful lot of the ‘best movies of 2024’ haven’t screened in New Zealand yet, and a lot of the 2024 movies I have seen have been hit or miss. But of the new-ish films I saw this year, the beautiful tone poem Perfect Days by Wim Wenders about a humble Japanese toilet cleaner lingers the most. It’s a movie about taking the pauses, about accepting what happens and enjoying every sandwich. And it felt like the most human thing I saw on a screen this year. (Runner-up nods for movies seen in 2024: the supremely creepy Longlegs which was right in my wheelhouse, heartfelt and hilarious The Holdovers [technically a 2023 holdover itself], the utterly unclassifiable no-budget slapstickHundreds of Beavers, and Furiosa, which confirms George Miller’s Mad Max is the only extended cinematic universe which really matters.)
Absolute ultimate totally comics, dude: I’m on the record that I’m not generally a fan of the endless reinventions and multiversal takes on superheroes that are a sign of comics eating themselves. Ohhh, a dark alternate Superman? How daring! Yet… I’ve been generally rather enjoying DC’s latest “Absolute” line of comics starring the hyperbolic Absolute Batman, Absolute Superman and Absolute Wonder Woman. Yes, yes, it’s yet another reimagining but the actual comics have been pretty … good? Absolute Wonder Woman is the gem so far with stunning art and myth-inspired epic storytelling, and Absolute Batman not far behind with its mysterious ultra-jacked Bruce Wayne stripped of money and privilege. I don’t know how long I’ll stick with them – these “new universe” stories far too often end up tangled in the continuity of existing comics and giant crossovers and the like, but so far, it’s a pretty electric and novel take on some very well known heroes.
You’re never too old to make rock music: I’m old and getting older, but a lot of the guys I grew up listening to are somehow even older. Massive applause, then, for near-geezers like Nick Cave and Robert Smith staying true to themselves – The Cure’s comeback Songs From The Lost World is just as moody and epic as any classic Cure album, touched even more by the unsparing grip of mortality. At 65 (!!) Smith still sounds exactly like he always has, and that’s a wonderful thing. Meanwhile, Nick Cave’s slow turn into a kind of confessional high priest continued with the excellent Bad Seeds album Wild God. At 67, Cave has suffered unbearable loss in his life and will always seem heroic for unsparingly turning it into such cathartic art. In contrast, The White Stripes’ Jack White is a mere child at age 49, but he blew me away just a few weeks ago in Auckland and his No Name feels like the rock album of the year to me. Not bad for a bunch of old guys who are all getting older.
Just asking questions – the books of Percival Everett: Percival Everett is one of those cult authors one keeps hearing about and meaning to read, but his astonishing Huckleberry Finn reinventionJames truly broke him through into the mainstream this year. Every Everett book I’ve read this year is quite different and excellent in its own way – the existential spy satire Doctor No, the haunting Mississippi lynching black comedy of The Trees, the wry literary racial spoof Erasure (which was also turned into an excellent movie, American Fiction). Everett doesn’t fit any easy box but I’ve been so impressed by his eclectic invention that I’ll be happily catching up on his prolific bibliography well into 2025.
Sticking the landing on the small screen: I can’t keep up with all the streaming things these days, but bidding farewell to a few longtime favourites reminded me of how tricky it is to end things on the perfect note, and how good it feels when it does. These favourites of mine all said goodbye in a pretty perfect fashion – Superman and Loiswith perhaps the most bittersweet and beautiful ending to a superhero screen adventure yet, the kooky What We Do In The Shadowsmanaging to make its insane vampire spin-off parody far funnier and longer lasting than seemed possible saying goodbye after 6 seasons, Larry David at long last ending Curb Your Enthusiasm after 20+ years with a perfectly wonderful lack of remorse. (Bonus point to the much-missed Our Flag Means DeathNew Zealand-filmed gay pirate comedy, which ended its second season in ’23 but we didn’t know for sure it was gone for good until this year.)
Charles Burns still haunts us all: Charles Burns is the patron saint comics artist of Gen-X, and his stark tales of teenage alienation have been blowing me away since his Curse of the Molemen days in the 1980s. As he ages, Burns has constantly kept to the same tight themes he always has – teenage alienation, romantic yearning and spooky surreal horror – but gosh, does he do them well. This year’s Final Cut is one of his finest works, ostensibly about a group of teenagers shooting a no-budget movie, but it’s also about love, choice and regret and told with his unforgettable intense style.
The films of Samuel Fuller: Like I said, I’m behind on the newer films of 2024. But film history stretches back over a century now, and there’s always time to fill in the gaps. A big hole in my cinema knowledge was the pulpy movies of Samuel Fuller. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen fierce noir gems like Pickup On South Street, Naked Kiss, Shock Corridor and Park Row until the past year, and I keep discovering new Fuller to catch up on. His bold movies bucked convention and still feel starkly modern decades on. Bonus point: His memoir, A Third Face, is an absolutely great chronicle of Fuller’s days as a spunky young New York journalist, harrowing World War II heroics and his dive into Hollywood.
Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee: There’s precious little mystery in pop culture these days, so every little bit of it counts. Cindy Lee is a cross-dressing Canadian musician named Patrick Flegel whose drifting, sultry songs have really gotten into my brain. Not on Spotify, not on Tidal, the sprawling double album Diamond Jubilee is only available as a single file on YouTube and soon, a physical release. Anointed by the hipsters, it’s got the gorgeous low-fi wistfulness of early Guided By Voices meets Roy Orbison, like the soundtrack to the most lonesome-hearted David Lynch movie that never was. It’s two hours of mysterious bliss and while its stealth release style might be a bit of a marketing technique there’s enough talent in Diamond Jubilee to make it feel like far more than a stunt. Diamond Lee feels like 2024 in musical form to me.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, because love is really all around: Yes, I’m the guy who’s picking a 50-year-old sitcom as one of his favourite pop culture moments of 2024. But I picked up a cheap DVD of the complete series on a trip to Reno earlier this year, and it reminded me exactly why I love this classic sitcom so much. It’s got Moore at her loveable screwball peak, Ed Asner is one of the best editors of all time, Ted Knight’s pompous doofus act which never gets old, in a seven-season run of absurdity, crack timing, sitcom pratfalls and journalistic dilemmas that still stands up with the best of ‘peak TV’. Sometimes all you want out of life is a 20-minute playlet of banter and Lou Grant and Ted Baxter, and in this weird, wicked year, bingeing The Mary Tyler MooreShow made me feel like we might just make it after all.
Selfishly, the Year of the Amoeba: Yeah, I’m putting myself on the list – not because I think I’m the best small press comics geek out there by any means but because I ended up putting out a heck of a lot of Amoeba Adventures stuff this year and it gave me a peculiar kind of inner satisfaction that nothing else really matches. I published two ‘regular’ issues of Amoeba Adventures this year, getting up to #35 of the series I somehow started way the hell back in 1990 (!!!), and I finally decided to embrace Amazon’s print on demand as a cost-effective way to bring my comics back to a wider world (yeah, I know, evil empire, etc, but this KDP stuff has been very good for my needs). A big old 350-page collection of The Best Of Amoeba Adventures that I started over the last holidays came out in February and presents my favourites of my 1990s work, while the smaller Amoeba Adventures: The Warmth Of The Sun book presents the first six of the “new” Amoeba Adventures stories I started telling in 2020. I’m not going to get rich doing this stuff, I accepted long ago, but I’m really grateful to get this stuff out in the world and out of the dusty small press past, and hey, if you like it, I’m just grateful I got the chance to tell you a story.
Next: My top pop culture disappointments of the year!
Hello and happy holidays to all! My Christmas gift to the people of Earth is the latest issue of my quixotic small press comic, Amoeba Adventures #35, available now as a FREE download to the technological addiction of your choice!
It’s the newest instalment in the story I’ve somehow been telling on and off since 1986 or so and while it may be nearly Christmas, it’s no carefree romp for Prometheusthe Protoplasm and company in this first part of a brand new multi-part story I’m calling “The Crane Flies High!”
You can download it completely free right here at the link below!
You can get a sneak preview of the first page right here – and if you’ve been following the series, you’ll want to read this issue, which starts off a story that is going to change everything for Prometheus, Dawn and the gang!
Want the limited print edition? If you’re down, order one up for a mere US$7.50 to ship anywhere in the world from groovy New Zealand by sending cash to me via PayPal at dirgas@gmail.com. They’ll be sent out after Christmas! Also, if you missed anything, print copies of Amoeba Adventures #31-34 and the special anniversary reprint of 1998’s #27 are a mere $2.50 US each!
THE AMOEBA ADVENTURES LIBRARY! OWN IT TODAY!
But wait! Didn’t I say this was the Year of the Amoeba? There’s been a lot of downs and ups in 2024 but one thing I’m really happy about is putting out not one but TWO paperback collections of my Amoeba stories this year, now available over on Amazon! They’re chock full of special features and essays and available worldwide! If you rush, they make the ideal Christmas gift for anyone who loves life itself.
If you’ve missed my incessant hustling, here’s the scoop:
THE BEST OF AMOEBA ADVENTURES gathers up the best of long out-of-print 1990s Amoeba stories by me with additional art by Max Ink are collected along with bonus rarities and more, including guest pin-ups by Dave Sim, Sergio Aragones, Matt Feazell and Stan Sakai! Dive on into the story of Prometheus the Protoplasm, Rambunny, Spif, Ninja Ant and Karate Kactus, and meet some of the strangest heroes and villains of all time as they battle toxic mushrooms, gorilla gangsters, time travel to the dinosaur age and even appear on David Letterman! Collecting material from Amoeba Adventures #1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11-13, 16, 17, 21, 22, 27, Prometheus The Protoplasm #4, Prometheus: Silent Storm; Prometheus Saves The Earth and Amoeba Adventures Fifth Anniversary Special, in a hefty 350-page book available in paperback or hardcover!
“This is one of the best things ever to come out of small press!” – Tim Corrigan, Small Press Comics Explosion.
AMOEBA ADVENTURES: THE WARMTH OF THE SUNgathers up the first six all-new issues of Amoeba Adventures beginning in 2020! We pick up Prometheus and friends in their first new tales in years to find them dealing with detective mysteries, deadly former foes, impending parenthood and occasional nights at the disco. Oh, and coffee. There’s always coffee. Collecting Amoeba Adventures #28-33.
“It’s imaginative, funny, heartfelt and smart. And it evolves, just like Prometheus, the protoplasmic protagonist himself” – Jason DeGroot, Small Press Heroes.com.
People have been saying rock and roll is dead or dying for decades, but in a whirlwind blast through Auckland this week, guitar hero Jack White was determined to prove them all wrong.
After my friend Chris said they blew the roof off the intimate Powerstation Monday night, White and band put on their final show of the year at a filled-to-capacity Auckland Town Hall Tuesday night, pounding through a frenzy of his solo work and hits with the White Stripes.
Somehow, it’s been 25 years this year since that first White Stripes album came out and helped launch the brief garage rock revival of the early 2000s, but White still looks lanky and youthful even as he’s, shockingly, about to hit 50 next year.
His career has gone through all the configurations – scrappy indie stardom with drummer (and ex-wife) Meg White as the Stripes, top ten records and breaking up the band at the height of success, followed by a series of solo albums that range from rowdy to wildly eccentric, all culminating in this year’s stellar No Name.
No Name has reminded fans that while White isn’t quite the omnipresent music hitmaker he was a few years back, he’s still one of the best guitar slingers out there and keeping that rock and roll flame burning high.
Auckland Town Hall’s crowd knew they were in for something special when White kicked off not with one of his standards, but a roaring, simmering take on the Stooges’ underground touchstone “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” For nearly two hours, White and band spun out a stew of garage rock nuggets that dipped into punk, blues and country with ease.
Genial but focused, White stood tall at the town hall, ripping through the music with a few friendly smiles, a little polite banter and a whole lot of windmilling guitar solos (I lost track on how many different guitars he rotated through, but it was at least half a dozen).
He played several jaunty White Stripes tunes like “My Doorbell” and “Hotel Yorba,” but the band also stretched out for ecstatic takes on bluesy gems like “The Hardest Button to Button” and “Catch Hell Blues.” There were also deep cuts from his other bands The Dead Weather and The Raconteurs, including a fierce take on the latter’s “Steady As She Goes” just before the encore.
“The new stuff” doesn’t always go down well at big shows but ripping and propulsive No Name songs like “That’s How I’m Feeling” and “What’s The Rumpus?” were strong highlights, and the terrific insistent quirky preacher’s rant “Archbishop Harold Holmes” particularly stood out from the encore.
Jack White, at 49, knows who he is and plays with the confidence that decades surviving in the music biz brings. Famously, he’s in love with the retro aesthetic and been known to ban or discourage cellphones from his shows. Fortunately the town hall crowd seemed on the same page and a little less clogged up with the endless glowing screens than some gigs are these days. Sure, you could try to capture the whole thing for your TikTok or you could just put the phone away and bask in the ringing chords.
Of course, the show had to end with perhaps the White Stripes’ biggest hit, the clap-and-stomp along anthem “Seven Nation Army.” To see the jam-packed Auckland Town Hall floor filled with hundreds of fans waving and singing along, the crowd rippling to the music, it felt like rock and roll was not only not about to die, but it might just take over the pop culture world again at any second.
White’s probably played “Seven Nation Army” thousands of times by now, but the wide grin on his face as the crowd pulsed along made you see this was a man who loves his job. “Merry Christmas,” he shouted during the standing ovation at the end – and to all a good rockin’ night.
I haven’t written much of anything about the re-election of You Know Who You Know Where, because, frankly, like an awful lot of people, I’m just (A. exhausted and (B. apathetic about the whole damned thing these days. I’ve said enough about it all the last 8-9 years or so. You do you, Yanks.
I do know one thing for the strange brave new world of 2025, though – I’m gonna keep listening to a lot of punk.
Loud music makes sense when the rest of the world doesn’t and while I’m an increasingly old geezer who doesn’t quite get what the youths are listening to these days, I’ve always got time for something with an echo of that Ramones/Sex Pistols/Bikini Kill vibe of reverb, snarl and rage. Nothing blocks out the crazy like a blast of guitar.
We went and saw Hüsker Dü’s legendary frontman Bob Mould perform a solo show in Auckland the other weekend, and it was a fantastic hurricane of sound – Mould, 64, put to shame kids half his age with his chaotic energy as he ripped apart Dü and his solo songs and put them back together in feedback-drenched blasts. He made a punk band’s worth of noise all by himself.
And meanwhile, I bought a ticket for an up and coming band who weren’t even born when Bob Mould put on a guitar strap, Melbourne’s terrific fun and filthy Amyl & The Sniffers. I know they’ll tear up the joint when they play Auckland in February and while I’m at least 20 years too old for the mosh pit I’ll try to get a good spot to watch the ecstatic release as they blast through their fiercely progressive, f- the Nazis and trolls tunes. Gacked on anger? Baby, we’re all gacked these days:
Punk is old and punk is young and everywhere in between, nearly 50 years after punk broke through.
What even is punk? Back in high school friends of mine wore mohawks and we chanted the chorus of Suicidal Tendencies “Institutionalized” at each other and that was already a good 10 years after punk’s first flames. These days who cares about genre taboos and what’s “proper” and what isn’t, really? “Selling out” is a gone concept in the viral age and if you like the music, good on ya. Sid Vicious is long dead and Johnny Rotten isn’t looking too hot himself. If it feels punk to you, it’s punk.
So for me listening to the Stooges over and over is punk, but hell, so is Nine Inch Nails banging on that downward spiral. Listen to Joy Division live and they were pretty punk even if they were post-punk. I can’t say I think Taylor Swift is punk, but Chappell Roan with her give-no-fucks attitude is definitely a little bit punk.
But that’s just me.
Everyone used to go on and on about the dangers of rock music and punk and metal and Satanists hiding in your backyard back in the day, but it turns out the ones to REALLY be afraid of are the dead-eyed compulsive liars, fascists and grifters and hustlers and un-Christian fundamentalists who just keep on coming back over and over again.
To quote someone most people don’t think of as punk, but whose whole career has been pretty punk as hell, Bob Dylan said it best: “I used to care, but things have changed.”
Stepping back from the situation for a while isn’t giving up forever. There’s still an awful lot of beauty out there away from the doomscrolling and outrage machine, no matter how bad it gets. It’s a pretty frustrating world, but god damn it, we’ll always have music.
The best superhero on screens lately hasn’t been anywhere near movie theatres – for me, it’s been Tyler Hoechlin’s firmly joyful, human portrayal of Clark Kent in Superman and Lois, which ended its four-season run this week. (Some mild spoilers ahead!)
I’ve been a big fan of this series since it kicked off and if anything, in its final days it got even better. Unlike the cluttered, overstuffed recent Marvel Cinematic Universe productions, where everything has to lead to the next thing, Superman and Lois has kept its focus relatively intimate, leveraging a smaller budget as best it could to deliver superhero action with a lot of heart. Unlike The Boys or other edgy shows, it’s not about taking apart the superhero idea – it’s about revelling in its simple possibilities.
The show has been deliberately small in scale, with the Man of Steel and his family moving back to his childhood home of Smallville in order to give his sons a normal life. Previous Superman TV series like the very ’80s Lois and Clark and Smallville never quite worked for me – they were either cheesy or overly padded. Superman and Lois has combined life’s brutal truths with heartfelt optimism, and while your mileage may vary, for me it’s one of the most emotional Superman stories yet.
This final, fourth season has delivered the one thing earlier seasons lacked – a stunning villain in Michael Cudlitz’s psychotic, jacked-up Lex Luthor, who’s been released from prison after years and consumed with vengeance. For the final 10 episodes, Superman and Lois stuck to the tightening Luthor-Superman feud as it built up, right on up to doing a pretty decent (if slightly too speedy) take on the famous “Death of Superman” comics run.
Lex Luthor is the yin to Superman’s yang, the over-achieving human who is filled with greedy contempt and the powerful alien who lives his life with humility.
A real strength of Superman and Lois is it feels like the story has moved forward, rather than circling around and around the same tired plot beats. It’s given us things we’ve never seen in a Superman live action project before – a married Superman with children with their own powers, a Superman whose identity is eventually revealed to the world, a Lex Luthor wearing that groovy ‘80s battle armor and actually throwing down in a fistfight with Superman … and most importantly, it’s given us an ending.
Superhero stories rarely ever really end, but in its masterful final episode, Superman and Lois firmly draws an ending to this particular story of Superman. Maybe it’s just because 2024 has been kind of a shit year, but it got me all weepy-eyed like a superhero film/TV show hasn’t in a long while.
I’m quite looking forward to James Gunn’s own Superman movie next year, which promises to also capture some of the hope and awe vibe sorely missing from Zach Snyder’s Superman, but it’s a bit of a shame that Hoechlin’s TV portrayal has never quite broken through to the mainstream. He’s the best Superman in my mind since Christopher Reeve – powerful yet fair, caring yet resolved.
The moment in one of the final episodes where Superman is forced to reveal his identity in public after years of denial is pitch-perfect, and sums up the quiet power that the best episodes of the show have managed:
Now, it hasn’t all been perfect – a little too much soap opera with the teenagers, a little too much emphasis on the dull as dishwater Lana Lang’s family – but whenever Hoechlin and Tulloch were on screen, the show felt refreshingly sincere. This Superman radiates hope, no matter the odds.
It’s easy for something to get lost in the avalanche of superhero content these days but Superman and Lois was a quiet gem of inspiration reminding us why we like superheroes in the first place.
At its heart, Clark and Lois are decent people trying to live decent lives. Some may call that corny. To me, that’s not the worst thing to look up to, these days.
Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder are one of the great comic movie duos.
But the strange thing is, as much affection as I have for the Wilder/Pryor team, they never truly made a great movie together – instead, they typically livened up fair to mediocre material with their unmistakable chemistry.
It’s a funny thing – other comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy or Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau paired for piles of movies, many of them classics, but Wilder and Pryor’s legacy is a paltry four films together – with, really, about 1.75 good movies among those.
Yet a lot of us comedy fans love them – Indicator has just put out a great lavish new box set of three of the Pryor-Wilder movies with the full boutique blu-ray treatment, usually reserved for cinematic masterpieces. Long after both men have died, the Pryor/Wilder team have a reputation that outshines their actual accomplishments on screen.
Maybe it’s because their pairings always felt sincere – they weren’t doing Abbott and Costello or Martin and Lewis-style “bits,” but Wilder and Pryor took their existing quirks and crashed them together, which at its best created something that felt intimate instead of staged. They were better than their material, and maybe that charm is why we still remember them even when few are calling their movies masterpieces.
1976’s Silver Streak is a movie I fell in love with after its countless TV screenings back in the day. A feisty homage to Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, it’s amusing fluff which abruptly changes gears more than halfway through its runtime when Richard Pryor pops up in the back seat of a cop car and quickly becomes a sidekick to Wilder’s mild-mannered writer caught up in a vast criminal plot.
Sometimes movies don’t go how you would expect, and Pryor and Wilder had a seamless energy that immediately pushed all the plots of Silver Streak to one side. I dig Silver Streak in the way you still love any movie you adored as a kid, but it’s a bolted-together contraption that isn’t sure whether it’s a romance, comedy, action movie or a disaster movie with its blow-up-the-train climax.
Pryor loved to improvise and Wilder, to his credit, just went along with it, which gives their interactions a refreshingly candid feel. The rather dated scene where an on-the-lam Wilder goes full blackface with shoe polish to hide from police was tremendously improved by Pryor’s wry asides and Wilder’s child-like innocence. It’s a dumb scene, sure, but 10-year-old me thought it was hilarious and I still see it as making fun of white folks’ preconceptions as much as it relies on Black stereotypes. That one sequence launched the Pryor/Wilder career, and it came out of Pryor deciding to make the rather racist scene his own. Pryor adds an unpredictable feeling to his every scene in Silver Streak that knocks it out of its comedy thriller cliches.
Gene Wilder’s schtick was often men who appear soft-spoken and shy but who snap, hilariously, when the pressure comes on. Wilder could be unsettlingly calm and slightly menacing – see his terrific underplaying in Blazing Saddles, his unmistakable Willy Wonka – but in movies with Pryor he plays the gentle man with a manic side.
Their best film together is 1980’s Stir Crazy, where Wilder’s wide-eyed optimist and Pryor’s weary worrier end up wrongfully sent to prison. Like all their films, Stir Crazy is patchy – there’s wayyyyy too much prison rodeo subplot – but when Wilder and Pryor just riff off each other behind bars, it’s comedy heaven.
Pryor’s characters toyed with racial stereotypes – he’s usually a hustler or a con man, a cynic without any of Wilder’s naive optimism – but the Pryor/Wilder movies only occasionally made race their main focus. In Stir Crazy, the fact a black guy and a white guy are good pals isn’t anything special – it’s just the way it is.
I loved Silver Streak and Stir Crazy and watched them constantly as a kid, without ever really realising both Pryor and Wilder had already forged legendary careers of their own. Maybe that’s part of why their team still is so adored today despite a thin legacy together – nobody really thinks about Bud Abbott’s career before he met Costello, but Pryor and Wilder were already groundbreaking on their own before they paired up.
Still, their final two films were both box office misses and didn’t offer much new. 1989’s See No Evil, Hear No Evil has a dated concept that probably wouldn’t fly today – Pryor is a blind man, Wilder is a deaf man, with lots of wacky misunderstandings, and they get embroiled in a comic murder plot. While it’s a steep step down from Stir Crazy it’s absurdly funny at several points, until it meanders off into the dull murder storyline too much.
While their first three movies are flawed, 1991’s slapdash Another You is just generally a fiasco, with a nonsensical plot and both men showing their age. Poor Richard Pryor – barely 50 years old at the time – was thin and frail, showing the effects of his onset of multiple sclerosis, and while Wilder still summons up that great manic energy, he also feels a bit past his use-by date. You know your movie’s bad when it relies on a yodelling scene for laughs. The highlight is a candid little “farewell” moment by the two men at the movie’s end.
It’s kind of easy to look at Pryor/Wilder movies and lament their missed potential – poor scripts, needlessly complicated stories, too much of their work coming at the raggedy end of their careers. What could’ve been if instead of jamming them into belabored crime and action movie plots, they just riffed on their two very different characters? Imagine what they could’ve done with their versions of The Odd Couple or Planes, Trains and Automobiles, for instance.
Pryor would die at 65 in 2005, after spending his last several years as an invalid, while Wilder lived until 2016, but Another You was the final movie either men starred in, and a bit of a downer ending to their remarkable screen careers.
Pryor and Wilder weren’t particularly close in real life, which makes their unforced charm together on screen even more remarkable. Sometimes, a spark just happens. Comedy fans recognise the peculiar magic of the Pryor-Wilder combo and even if they didn’t leave the loftiest cinematic legacy behind, what they did leave behind in laughs is pure gold.
Nik Dirga 