Tag: movies

Why I kind of want to live in a western movie town

I’ve been on a Sergio Leone kick lately, watching Clint Eastwood and Henry Fonda stalk impassively through vast open landscapes and ramshackle settlements. Sure, the action is great, the iconic soundtracks slap and even in this highly dubious time in American history, the mythic weight of the western is still strong.

…But half the time I watch westerns, I keep looking at the houses and what it’d be like to live in those sun-bleached outposts, 150 or so years ago now. I study the clattery wooden sidewalks, the creaky balconies dotting the streets (the better for a guy to be shot and fall out of, of course), the home-spun yet vaguely desperate vibe of those infinite saloons poised for violence. 

It’s an odd fixation to have, but as I’ve written before, I grew up in a once-upon-a-time western Gold Rush town, after all, and I think perhaps some part of me is tinged with vague nostalgia for the imagined west I never really saw.

I watch Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef face off in a battle of flinty egos but I also think, gosh, I like the way the grain of the wood sticks out on that old blacksmith in the background, I wonder who’s living behind the faint lights in the windows, I admire the lonely architecture of all those balconies and horse railings, the forlorn ‘Hotel’ sign swinging in the western skies.

Heck, I know half these movies weren’t even made in America or were filmed on studio lots, but it’s the idea that counts.

Of course there’s all the cultural and colonial baggage of America’s settlement to reckon with, and I’d say at least 75 percent of movie westerns are just vaguely one-dimensional frothy cowboys ’n’ indians soap operas. But the ones that aren’t – the Leone, The Searchers or The Wild Bunch or Tombstone or Unforgiven or McCabe and Mrs Miller – they get at the contradictory and violent bloody heart of a nation. The best westerns tell us what America really is, not what it pretends to be. And those long lonesome dirt road main drags lined with hotels and bars and barbers and perhaps a jail or two always evoke a weird yearning in me. 

During my years in America I have been to many famed western towns and they of course are never quite like you’d imagine – there’s no high noon showdowns except for tourists and the quaint shops are all filled with garbage keychains and fart-joke keepsakes now – but if you squint, you can still see a hint of the old dusty ways in places like Tombstone, Arizona, Deadwood, South Dakota or Virginia City, Nevada, I think. You can strain to feel the wind roaring over the plains and deserts and sometimes it feels like a memory. 

You visit an actual abandoned western ghost town like the crepuscular remains of Bodie, California, high up in the mountain plains, and it’s not quite like anything else. 

Bodie, California, sometime in the early 2000s

It’s probably just me, but when I watch those westerns, there’s the story unfolding in front of us, and the second story of the silently evocative imagined past spread out all around the background on every scene.

Would I want to actually live there, 150 years before wi-fi and refrigerators and comfortable tennis shoes? Probably not, but I still fall a little in love with every knot and whorl in those claptrap movie towns, where it’s always high noon somewhere. 

Val Kilmer’s very human Batman

Val Kilmer was a complicated guy, but he left behind a lot of indelible movie performances. Nobody would ever call Batman Forever a good movie, really, but despite all the missteps and terribly 1990s trappings of it all, there are moments when I do think Kilmer’s Batman is one of my favourite takes on the caped crusader.

Kilmer, I think, was the funniest Batman other than ’60s icon Adam West. That’s not exactly something that fans of none-more-dark Dark Knight takes might appreciate.

As a Bat-fan, I’ve always liked the Batman who was a little more human, the one we’d see running around in Brave and Bold comics in the 1970s tossing quips about with Green Arrow and Kamandi. A Batman who is so utterly bleak gets a bit old. 

Director Joel Schumacher took all the gothic weirdness and carnival humour of Tim Burton’s first two Bat-movies and exploded it into full-on camp and neon garishness. Batman Forever, turning 30 in 2025, was a huge hit, lest we forget, the #1 movie of the year. But it all came crashing down with 1997’s flop Batman and Robin, this time starring a far too-glib George Clooney as Bats and ramping up the colourful kitsch about 500% more. Few people look back at Schumacher’s Batman as a peak for the character now. 

And Batman Forever is a mess, don’t get me wrong. It might just boast the two most annoying comic book movie villains of all time in Jim Carrey’s insufferably twitchy Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones’ frantic and undignified Two-Face, who spends most of the movie cackling, grunting and wahoo-ing. The movie shoehorns in an origin for Chris O’Donnell‘s totally ’90s Robin, an incredibly sexed-up Nicole Kidman as a love interest and a kind of incoherent plot about brain-stealing technology.  Whenever I watch it I have to fight the urge to slap Carrey so I can focus on the bits that do work. 

It starts off clearly stating it isn’t going to be Keaton/Burton’s Batman, with fetishistic shots of Kilmer donning the Bat-gear and the first lines of dialogue being a lame joke about Batman getting drive-through for dinner. (Cue that McDonald’s ad, of course.) 

And yet, I like Kilmer as a blonde Bruce Wayne/Batman. There is a sly wit to Kilmer’s performance, which gives us a Batman with a sense of humour without being quite as lightweight as Clooney ended up. Little tics linger like his Bruce Wayne constantly fooling about with glasses (does Batman wear contacts?). His Batman smiles broadly in one memorable scene, which could be cheesy but Kilmer makes it a little, well, charming and sincere. Why can’t Batman smile, occasionally? It ain’t always dark.

His Bruce Wayne is courageous and not just a playboy – brawling with villains without a costume in several scenes, focused with a whiff of arrogance, and smart but also a little scared. 

Michael Keaton was a tense and wiry surprise as Batman (it’s easy now to forget his casting was hated by pre-internet fandom once upon a time) and Bale, Pattinson and Affleck have all given us variations on a very serious, stern Bruce Wayne/Batman. But I still think Kilmer’s Batman is the only one who seems kind of like a Batman you’d want to hang out with, really. 

Kilmer navigates Batman’s dual nature fairly well in Batman Forever – haunted by his past, but wanting to have a life of his own outside Batman. The rickety script doesn’t really serve him well – at one point Batman quits, only to unquit about 30 seconds later – but Kilmer sells story beats like his mentorship of the angry young Robin and his attraction to Kidman’s ridiculously horny psychologist character.

He cracks a few jokes, but he never makes Batman the joke. Kilmer’s movies like Tombstone and Top Secret and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang were great, but his underrated Batman manages the trick of making a mediocre movie almost worth liking. 

My favourite Roger Corman – X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes

“Soon, I’ll be able to see what no man has ever seen.” – Dr James Xavier 

When the great movie producer and director Roger Corman died last year at 98, he left one hell of a legacy for film lovers, schlock fans, drive-in movie buffs and anyone who enjoyed the dirt-cheap, hugely entertaining corn he specialised in.

Everyone has their favourite Corman – my first was the Star Wars/Seven Samurai ripoff Battle Beyond The Stars, which was repeated endlessly on cable TV when I was a kid. There’s the colourfully gory adaptations of Poe tales starring Vincent Price. His producing the first films by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. The sexy trashy Big Bad Mama starring Angie Dickinson. The Ramones trashing the joint in Rock ’n’ Roll High School. Peter Bogdanovich’s startlingly still relevant Targets with Boris Karloff. The utterly insane Judge Dredd meets Mad Max dystopia of Death Race 2000. So much more, much of it sexploitation and exploitation and just general titillation.

But my favourite film Corman directed has always been the more restrained and oddly haunting X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes from 1963, starring one-time Oscar winner Ray Milland as a scientist determined to break through the barriers of dull ordinary human vision and see… well, everything. 

It’s got a big fan in none other than Stephen King, who wrote about it in his book Danse Macabre as “one of the most interesting and offbeat little horror movies ever made.”

X is typical Corman with a low budget and ultra-basic stripped-down production values, but there’s something about it that grabs me. It’s got your typical scientist who is determined to explore the unknown whatever the cost, with Milland as Dr James Xavier, whose research into unknown spectrums of vision (“I’m blind to all but a tenth of the universe!”) has him experimenting on himself with dangerous eye drops.

At first, Xavier gets X-ray vision just like in the comics (yep, there’s a goofily fun nude scene, one of the movie’s few lighter moments), but then things get … darker. It involves accidental murder, a sequence as a carny attraction (featuring a rare early serious supporting role by Don Rickles, of all people) and Xavier’s vision gradually changing, with sunglasses and freaky contact lenses giving us a hint of what must be going on behind those eyelids. 

The “special effects” that allow us to see the world through Xavier’s eyes are mostly dime-store gimmicks and blurry psychedelic colours, and yet, their vagueness allows us to imagine what Xavier is actually seeing out there. 

Milland, always a sturdy authoritative presence in movies, gives X a helping of emotional depth as the movie explores questions of morality, religion and hope in its brisk 79 minutes. While Corman’s movies are often a lot of fun, this is the one that always leaves me thinking a bit. What would it be like to see truly everything out there? How much of the world do we miss on a daily basis? And is there some things man is not meant to see? 

Spoiler alert: X ends on a famously bleak note with Xavier, unable to control his increasingly chaotic visions, tearing out his own eyeballs in a shock-cut freeze frame. The story jerks to a halt, the screen frozen in a moment of utter infinite horror. 

King in Danse Macabre went on to claim there was a great lost coda to that scene: “I have heard rumours – they may or may not be true – that the final line of dialogue from the film was cut as too horrifying. …. According to the rumour, Milland screams: I can still see!” 

Now that’s terrifying. Although, nobody has ever really confirmed it existed. Corman himself on the DVD commentary thinks he might have shot that ending, but then again he might not. It’s a cool idea, but even without that lost final twist of the knife, X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes is worth seeing. There’s been talk over the 60 years or so since it came out of a remake, but the creepy and sparse tone of the original is hard to imagine beating. Even the cheapness of the special effects adds something to it all. 

It’s that whiff of cosmic, unknowable horror that makes X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes linger in my mind, I guess. There is no true villain here and there is no hero. Only a strangely pitiable mad scientist, determined to broaden his horizons until he realises much too late there is no end to these horizons. 

“I’ve come to tell you what I see. There are great darknesses. Farther than time itself. And beyond the darkness… a light that glows, changes… and in the center of the universe… the eye that sees us all.” – Dr James Xavier 

Ten great underrated Gene Hackman movies 

If I had a nickel for every time I saw Gene Hackman called an “everyman” in the past week or so, I’d be rich. But Hackman – easily one of my top half-dozen or so favourite actors – was no everyman, really. He was less instantly dazzling than a golden god like Robert Redford or Warren Beatty perhaps, but he was magnetic nevertheless. He packed a quiet authority into every performance while keeping his characters relatable and real. He could play thieves, cops, cowboys and con men, and the only thing ‘everyman’ to me about his acting was his sheer versatility. 

It’s sad that the dramatic circumstances of his and his wife’s deaths kicked off the kind of tabloid frenzy that you know Hackman would’ve hated. Gene Hackman is gone at 95. It’s the work that remains, and endures. 

Obituaries were quick to mention all the unmistakable masterpieces he was involved with – The French Connection, Bonnie and Clyde, The Conversation, Unforgiven, The Royal Tenenbaums. But Hackman’s long career is full of gems.

He was the kind of actor who kicked even the most mediocre of movies up a notch through his presence. Since the news of his death broke, rather than wallowing in morbid details of his death, I’ve been celebrating Hackman’s life on screen. Here’s 10 of my favourite somewhat underrated Gene Hackman films well worth seeking out: 

I Never Sang For My Father (1970) – Hackman received an Oscar nomination for this melodrama about a troubled son trying to connect to his difficult father, and it’s one of his finest roles, but nearly forgotten today (I blame the kind of terrible title). This one digs into complicated relationships with aging parents with a kind of brutal honesty that’s still pretty stunning today. Playing a repressed and conflicted ordinary joe, Hackman shows how much he can do with just his eyes and furrowed brow. 

Prime Cut (1972) – This bitterly black and mean piece of farm noir stars Lee Marvin as a grim mob fixer and Hackman as a sleazy Kansas cattle rancher who also dabbles in sex slavery and gruesome murders. Despite his kind of limited screen time, Hackman’s grinningly amoral slimeball is a nasty delight – “Cow flesh, girl flesh … all the same to me.” 

The Poseidon Adventure (1972) – Titanic without all the sappy romance nonsense, this rip-roaring disaster epic was a huge hit back in the day, and a big part of that is thanks to Hackman in a firm leading man action hero role – as an iconoclastic free-thinking priest, of all things. It doesn’t get mentioned in the same league as grittier stuff like The French Connection, but it’s anchored by Hickman’s charisma and prickly guts. Big and bold fun, it’s corny and yet riveting 50-plus years later, and it’s impossible not to cheer for Hackman as he single-handedly tries to save the survivors on a quickly sinking cruise ship. 

Scarecrow (1973) – The only movie that paired acting legends Al Pacino and Hackman, as two wandering vagabonds making their way from California to the East Coast. Hackman’s gruff and sullen character pairs well with Pacino’s fidgety, chatty loser, as what starts off as an odd couple buddy comedy turns into a heartbreaking little gem about failure and optimism. 

The French Connection II (1975) – Somewhat overshadowed by its Oscar-winning predecessor, this sequel takes Hackman’s brute cop Popeye Doyle down into the abyss. It picks right up from the first movie with an obsessed Doyle travelling to France to track down the drug dealer who got away. Cannily undermining sequel expectations, it features a long, riveting sequence where Doyle is captured and addicted to heroin. Like the first, it’s a kind of anti-cop story that lingers in the brain. 

Night Moves (1975) – I love me some “sweaty noir,” and this steamy Florida mystery delivers sex, death and malice in equal measures. Hackman is a hapless private detective who gets wrapped up in a missing persons case that slowly submerges his entire life. A movie that’s soaked with a sense of anxiety and despair all the way through, somewhat forgotten but now getting its due. 

Superman II (1980) – I’m pretty sure the first time I ever saw Gene Hackman on screen was his oily, confident turn as Lex Luthor. He’s great in the first movie, too, but for me, Superman II will always be my favourite, as Luthor sidles on in about halfway through and tries to play both sides in Superman’s battle against Zod. The scene where Luthor swaggers on into the Daily Planet and attempts to charm three insanely powerful alien psychopaths through sheer force of will is peak Hackman to me. “Kill me? Lex Luthor? Extinguish the greatest criminal flame of our age?” It’s easy to dismiss his Luthor as a work-for-hire gig (especially when you look at the woeful Superman IV) but there’s frequently a sparkle in Hackman’s eye that shows how much fun he was having. 

BAT-21 (1988): Hackman, a former Marine himself, played lots of military men. He shines here as a cerebral Air Force navigator shot down in Vietnam and trying to stay alive. This one got kind of lost in the flood of Vietnam movies of the late ’80s like Platoon, but is worth revisiting. His hero is no Rambo – he’s a desk jockey trying to stay alive who’s never actually experienced war up close – and Hackman’s thoughtful, restrained performance gives it more depth than your usual gung-ho war picture. 

The Quick And The Dead (1995): Sam Raimi’s delightfully campy western boasts a murderer’s row of talent – Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Sharon Stone – but Hackman’s smiling psychopath John Herod is a scenery-chewing delight, a brasher and wilder take on his Oscar-winning Unforgiven killer. 

Heist (2001): Hackman was surely made to rattle off David Mamet’s whip-smart dialogue, and in one of his last films before retiring, he’s perfect as an ageing thief looking to make one last score. While its tangled heist plot is an echo of many other movies, it’s just a pleasure to watch Hackman and a motley crew of great actors doing crimes and cracking wise. 

Thanks for the movies, Gene. You were no everyman to me.

Hello, I wrote a book, and it’s only taken me 30 years

Greetings! I wrote a book. Well, I’ve actually been writing it for about 30 years, believe it or not. Introducing Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024, a hefty compendium of my columns, essays, feature profiles and much more over the course of my so-called career!

I’ve written an awful lot of words over the years, but I wanted to put together something that was a little more permanent than a bunch of yellowing newspapers and broken website links. Clippings is, much like many journalism careers, an eclectic mix, from long features to blog posts to deeply personal essays to in-depth pop culture criticism, spanning from Mississippi to California to New York City to New Zealand. 

From interviewing governors and rock stars to climbing active volcanos and adjusting to life on the other side of the world, this book is me saying, “Hey, I was here, and this is some of what I did along the way.” Doesn’t everyone want to say that at some point about their life’s work, whatever it is? Throw it all together, and it’s probably as close to a sort of autobiography as I’ll ever get.

It’s got many of my works from long-ago newspapers and magazines, websites and even some fine pieces from this very website in a handsome curated form sure to be adored by your family for generations.

I hope you’ll consider grabbing a copy, now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99! 

Get it here: Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024 by Nik Dirga 

So, I’ve been reading a lot of Captain America comics lately

When I was a kid I always thought Captain America was a bit dorky. Batman and Spider-Man and Wolverine were hip, man. 

It took me a long while to discover the uncomplicated charms of Cap. He’s a good man in a world full of troubles, which for some peculiar reason I can’t quite put my finger on, seems really appropriate as a role model in this battered year of 2025. 

Captain America has been slinging his shield since 1939 in comics, and was probably punching Nazis before your grandparents were even born. Brought back in the 1960s as a keystone for the Avengers, he’s been the moral centre of the Marvel comics universe for decades. 

Yet I really didn’t read an awful lot of Captain America solo comics until the last few years – I never disliked the character, who soared in a lot of great Avengers comics, but he just seemed rather, well, white bread. 

But as usual, I was wrong, and slowly working my way through lots of great Cap stories from the 1960s to 2020s has shown me that you can still make a patriotic American superhero interesting. Like any character, there’s ups and downs to be had, but creators like Lee and Kirby, Steve Englehart, Ed Brubaker, the late Mark Gruenwald and Roger Stern have all done terrific stories over the years. 

The challenge for writers has been in making Cap a believer in a higher cause without being a mindless follower to it. An element of doubt is key to making Captain America great. 

Evil Captain America has been done far too many times and isn’t that interesting, but Doubtful Captain America is a constant of the character, a man who believes in his country but is fairly often willing to question it, up to engaging in a civil war over his beliefs or even quitting the job several times.

As an example of bad Captain America, Mark Millar’s post-9/11 edgelord Captain America in The Ultimates hasn’t aged well at all, channeling Bush-era belligerence and arrogance into a character who’s the opposite of what Cap should be. And being good isn’t being weak.

There’s a fine line between making Cap frequently question his patriotism and making him a whining bore, of course. Yet I admire the writers who’ve made us realise that uncertainty and kindness isn’t a bad thing, all while telling us stories of a man dressed up in red, white and blue.

There’s nothing worse than a fanatic who thinks he can do no wrong. For some reason I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

The marvellous performance by Chris Evans as Steve Rogers in the MCU helped seal my Cap fondness, making square-jawed decency seem kinda hot. And of course, there can be more than one Captain America – Anthony Mackie is stepping up as the main man’s successor in a new movie being released this week. Whether or not the movie itself is great, Mackie has done a fine job in his MCU appearances tapping into that fundamental charm and battered optimism Cap needs. 

I imagine if Cap was real these days he’d be aghast at a lot of what’s going on under the colours of his flag, but then again he’d probably find it pretty familiar. He punched Hitler, after all. 

Again, maybe it’s the tenor of the times. There ain’t a lot of heroes in the real world at the moment. I’ll just keep reading my Captain America comics and hoping for better days ahead. 

Bob Dylan is a complete unknown, and that’s the point

One of the secrets of Bob Dylan’s success is his enduring mystery. Dylan has forged a 60-year career out of being opaque, inscrutable…. a “complete unknown,” if you will.

I’ll admit, I’m kind of a sucker for rock star musical biopics, even when they’re terrible. I watched Elvis and Walk The Line and Bohemian Rhapsody and I embrace the cheesy “rags to riches to overdose” narrative of such films, even when my head admits they’re not always great movies.

A Complete Unknown is a deep dive into Bob Dylan’s early years that does its share of romanticising and mythologising… but then again, hasn’t Dylan himself been doing that since he was a kid? For me, it hit the spot by embracing the many mysteries of Bob, revelling in music biopic cliches while being just prickly enough to feel real.

Timothée Chalamet is really far too pretty to be young Bob, who had a reedy, squinty babyface, but he nicely summons up the keen intelligence, peculiar charisma and somewhat mercenary ethics of young Bobby. Dylan rode into New York from rural Minnesota pretending to be everything from a hobo to a carnival worker. He threw aside his birth name of Zimmerman and became a kind of perpetual musical sponge, absorbing everything and synthesising it into something kind of new. 

A Complete Unknown is about the birth of an artist who’s also a magpie, a wry cynic and also kind of a genius who’s not really a very nice guy. Dylan is called an “asshole” a couple of times in the film, which thankfully doesn’t try to show him as some kind of saintly hero. We avoid some big teary monologue where Bob Dylan reveals all the dark secrets that motivate him.

This exchange is as close as A Complete Unknown gets to peeking behind the mask: “Everyone asks where these songs come from, Sylvie. But then you watch their faces, and they’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why the songs didn’t come to them.“

Chalamet’s natural teen idol charm is cleverly subverted just enough to make his Dylan feel like an echo of the thin wild mercury sound of the man himself. (And while he doesn’t sound exactly like Dylan singing, he sounds close enough to make it work, and lipsynching Dylan would’ve been even weirder.)

A Complete Unknown takes the great Bob Dylan creation myth and hits all the beats – his turn from folk music to electric, his wry confidence, his thorny romance with Joan Baez, his worship of Woody Guthrie. The movie follows Dylan from his arrival in New York as an eager kid up through his explosion into stardom in the mid ‘60s, and its big emotional turn is in Dylan’s moving from stark and preachy folk into raw and raucous rock, culminating in his famously defiant “electric” performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

A Complete Unknown wrings Dylan’s transformation for a lot of drama that might seem a bit hokey from 2025 eyes – so he’s playing an electric guitar now, so what? – but it’s worth remembering that Dylan’s “betrayal” of folk was a big deal back in the day. (Ed Norton‘s marvellous supporting turn as folkie Pete Seeger really captures the man’s uniquely kind heart and endearing dorkiness.)

As anyone who’s dipped their toes into the vast waters of Dylanology knows, there’s an infinite number of Bobs in the Dylanverse. (At least 80, as I painstakingly rambled on about a few years ago!) There’s no way A Complete Unknown, which follows a fairly basic biopic blueprint, could satisfy everyone, and we’ve certainly got cinema bizarro like Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There or Bob-starring oddities like Masked And Anonymous to fill any taste. 

Watching Martin Scorcese’s superb documentary No Direction Home again recently, which follows Dylan’s 1966 tour of Britain in some dazzlingly vibrant footage, I was struck by how angry many of the British fans interviewed at the time were with Dylan’s new style. “I think he’s prostituting himself,” one barks. Yet to my eyes now, the hyper electric Dylan of 1966 is quite possibly his finest era. God only knows what would’ve happened if social media existed at the time.

Unknown works for me because it never quite pretends to be definitive, and knows there’s many more alternate Bob stories to be told. But hey, it’s turning new audiences on to Dylan music, got a bunch of Oscar nods, and is a reminder that after nearly 84 years walking this Earth, there’s still nobody quite like him. 

Is it 100% true? It’s pretty and darned entertaining, but perhaps its biggest success is in carefully keeping Bob Dylan’s true motivations a complete unknown. 

Who is the greatest actor of our time and why is it Willem Dafoe?

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.

There is always a hint of tensely restrained violence to Dafoe, which contrasts with his generally genial offscreen character.

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. 

“Now it’s dark” – All our heroes go away eventually

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; President Jimmy 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.

In dreams I walk with you

In dreams I talk to you

Aw, man… It’s my biggest pop culture disappointments of 2024!

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.