Tag: year in review

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. 

Behold, my top 10 pop culture moments of 2024!

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 slapstick Hundreds 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 reinvention James 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 Lois with perhaps the most bittersweet and beautiful ending to a superhero screen adventure yet, the kooky What We Do In The Shadows managing 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 Death New 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 Moore Show 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!

Year in Review: My top 10 pop culture moments of 2023

It’s a new year, a fresh start, a hope this year is maybe a bit less suck than the last one! I’ve complained enough about the year that was, so instead let me dive back to look at ten musical, cinematic or literary experiences that rocked my world in ’23: 

Go back to those Gold Soundz: I didn’t check out a lot of live music last year, but what I did was superb, led by the old guard showing they can still blast with the best of them. Indie icons Pavement put on a superb reunion show that left me humming the chorus to “Gold Soundz” for weeks, while I finally saw punk/post-punk legends The Damned for the first time on the back of their excellent Darkadelic album, and they melted my face. And my ears. I don’t quite know if my hearing has ever been the same.

Tonight, a blind woman and a monster came to town: I’ve been getting fewer ongoing monthly comic series these days, but one that’s on my must list is Ryan North’s brainy, witty take on Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four, which is inventive science-bro action combined with the family heart that is key to the FF. It’s just darned fun, good comics that (so far) don’t have to be part of some sprawling pointless multi-comic company crossover to feel epic. It’s the best the Fantastic Four has been in ages. 

A long long time ago, when I was a little chick: I wrote a whole story recently asking local book lovers for their favourite New Zealand books they read and it reminded me of what an excellent year it was for NZ fiction, led by Eleanor Catton’s wickedly fun satire Birnam Wood and a two-fer by Catherine Chidgey – The Axeman’s Carnival, an amazing novel about a bird who becomes a social media celebrity, and the nearly as good teenage angst thriller Pet. Go team NZ!

You don’t know the first thing about piracy, do you?: There was a lot of great TV in ’23 – Reservation Dogs, that banger final Succession run, Poker Face, and I’m only just now discovering how fantastic The Bear is – but the one that sticks with me the most is Taika Waititi’s unexpected gay pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death, which in its NZ-filmed second season truly transformed into a delightfully sweet romance mixed with swashbuckling pirate fun. A gem. 

And in an instant, I know I’ve made a terrible mistake: Daniel Clowes has been blowing my mind since long ago when I first stumbled on an issue of Eightball. His comics are less prolific than they once were but they’re worth the wait, with this year’s graphic novel Monica (art at top of post) quite possibly his masterpiece. A sweeping story of one woman’s exploration of her own mysterious past, it’s a technically dazzling (those colours!), assured and layered work that you’ll keep churning over in your head for days afterwards. It’s not a speed-read like many modern comics, but an experience that might just leave you feeling like the world is a slightly different place when you’re done. 

All my life I’m looking for the magic: Yeah, I know, physical media is dying, bla bla blah, but while I’m definitely a bit more choosy about what I buy in the age of internet abundance, I can’t pass up a good mix, and UK record label Cherry Red constantly is putting out fantastic CD box sets of eclectic punk rock from 1977-1982, power pop from the UK and US and ’80 synthpop that spans my mid-1970s to late-80s sweet spot. Sure, you can find a Spotify playlist, but I enjoy the curated, elegant physicality of these great boxes and the buried treasure they contain. Each set is hours and hours of gems waiting to be rediscovered and if I close my eyes I can almost pretend it’s coming from a cassette mix tape as I drive my old Volkswagen Rabbit around town. 

That monster … will never forgive us: This was the year comic-book movies stumbled and became just as cliched as the Will Smith and Tom Cruise action movies they replaced. But look across the seas to Japan and some of the year’s best blockbusters came from there, with kaiju instead of capes in the terrifically oddball Shin Ultraman and the bizarre Shin Kamen Rider and best of all, the monumental reimagining of the biggest beast of all with Godzilla: Minus One. There were decent superhero moments this year, but not one of them compared to the kinetic thrill of watching Ultraman or Godzilla stomp on buildings with fresh energy. 

Dear Allen, thanks for your letters. I was glad to hear from you: William S. Burroughs was not a decent man. A drug addict, the accidental murderer of his first wife, homosexual in a repressed era, his twisted, tormented writings are decidedly not for everyone. And yet, and yet. This year I found myself once again reading Burroughs’ books like The Soft Machine and turning to his nonfiction writings, particularly his collected letters, because the nonfiction shows so well what went into his far-out fiction. The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959 fascinated me because it revealed the real person behind the sneering, sinister king of debauchery Burroughs became. It’s extraordinary to read how human and lonely Burroughs is in these letters, wrestling with unrequited love, addiction and ‘normal’ society, and his determination to find new shadowlands behind the world we live in. A stoic mask soon settled over his public face, but here we learn how he got there.

To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn’t just about horses, I lost interest: “Barbenheimer” might have been a marketing technique gone viral, but it was a heck of a lot of fun and rewarding to see two very good movies leading the summer box office and showing up the latest dusty, unnecessary franchise-extender Indiana Jones sequels and the like. Barbie was a huge hit, but it was also just subversive enough to charm all but the most cynical, while Oppenheimer was Christopher Nolan’s best movie yet led by a dazzling Cillian Murphy and sequences on the iMAX screen downtown that melted my face nearly as much as a Damned concert. 

The meat goes into the oven: This one’s a bit self-indulgent, but I had a very good year stretching my feature writing muscles this year in my paying gigs, between several book reviews for the NZ Listener magazine and writing for Radio New Zealand about stuff I love like barbecue restaurants, fans of weird movies, used book fairs, film festivals and more. Turn your passions into words, folks, and let’s all have a fine 2024!

Year In Review: Hunting for those five stars on Letterboxd

So, a couple years back I started using the movie-geek logging app and database Letterboxd to exhaustively keep track of my film-watching habits. Created right here in little old New Zealand, it was bought for a whole lot of money this year.

In an age where most social media has turned into a bilestorm of nastiness, I find it’s generally a fun space to spend a bit of time, with lots of thoughtful film reviews – and lots of incredibly goofy, snotty one-liner reviews as well. It’s a mix of snark and sense. 

I’ve been using Letterboxd for a while but this year for the first time I thought I’d challenge myself by also doing ratings for the movies I logged – you have the option of ranking movies from five stars to no stars. I hadn’t done it before because there’s an easy tendency to let thinking about the ratings overwhelm the film experience itself – you spend too much time obsessing over what you might rate something. There’s an awful lot of Letterboxd cultists out there who seem to spend an awful lot of time obsessing over their “rating curve” for movies or asking everyone on Reddit to rank their rankings, and it can all get a bit performative. 

Eh. I don’t care that my movie curve “leans” toward higher ratings. I mean, life is short and you should generally watch stuff you like or reckon you might like, right? Still, I have tried to be restrained when it comes to awarding five stars. It’s been an interesting experiment this year because it makes you truly think, how has this movie landed with me? What’s the difference between the film as a film and my experience of it? Why do we rate things the way we do, anyway? 

For instance, objectively, it’s insane to rate Tommy Wiseau’s legendarily awful sex thriller/comedy/drama The Room as five stars, isn’t it? But, I saw it at a packed 20th anniversary showing with the whole family featuring co-star Greg Sestero (who wrote The Disaster Artist book about the making of The Room), there were skits, making-of-stories, plastic spoons flying, and honestly, it was one of the most fun times I had at the theatre this year. The right experience can make a bad movie seem good, I reckon. 

In the end, a star is just a designation that might well change based on my mood or the atmosphere or the configuration of the stars in the sky itself. There’s a LOT of movies that I gave 4 1/2 stars to that might on a different day or second viewing rise up, so in the end you have to take any movie ratings with a grain of salt.  

The majority of my “five star” ratings for 2023 were movies that I had, of course, seen before, because honestly, I think you tend to truly love a film more upon repeat exposure. But not always – there was some excellent new to me stuff this year that dazzled from the first few frames. 

I logged a rather solid total of 228 movies seen in 2023 (trust me, I’m apparently a total amateur compared to some Boxd-heads). In the end, I gave 24 films five stars.

The ones I saw for the first time:

The Misfits (1961) – As noted here, this final film from Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable blew me away.

Shock Corridor (1963) – So this is where David Lynch and Martin Scorsese were born. Pulp melodrama at a mental hospital that is absurd from a plot standpoint but hypnotic in style and execution. 

Thief (1981) – James Caan, Michael Mann, neon-lit neo-noir, thieves and cons – inject it right into my veins!

The Hit (1984) – The Limey is one of my all-time favourite crime flicks and this underrated gem starring Terence Stamp and a wonderful John Hurt is like the prequel I never knew I needed. Look, I like movies about hitmen starring great actors, OK?

Aftersun (2022) – So damn sad, so damn good. 

Pearl (2022) – The first great COVID pandemic movie, maybe?

Godzilla Minus One (2023) – After 70 years we might just have the best Godzilla movie yet.

Asteroid City (2023) – Wes Anderson goes full Wes Anderson and either you get it or you don’t. 

Poor Things (2023) – Filthy, funny, fantastic femme fatale Frankenstein.

Oppenheimer (2023) – I mean, duh. 

Repeat viewing offenders – Beloved film friends I watched again this year that were confirmed in my mind as film classics, from Claude Rains spooking everyone with his invisible powers to Ben Kingsley spooking everyone with his cockney gangster accent:

The Invisible Man (1933); Singin’ In The Rain (1952); All That Heaven Allows (1955); 12 Angry Men (1957); Blow-Up (1966); The French Connection (1971); Fist of Fury (1972); Stardust Memories (1980); The Thing (1982); Videodrome (1983); Sexy Beast (2001); The Room (2003); Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011); John Wick (2014); The Sparks Brothers (2021)

The Warmth Of The Sun: Songs To Survive 2023

Look, I’m sorry to harsh the pre-Christmas buzz, but 2023 was pretty lame, right?

My wife went through breast cancer surgery and treatment (she’s doing a lot better, thankfully). Other family members have been battling ill health and the upheaval of change. We lost our family beach house in a cyclone as the climate crisis hit NZ hard. Hell, even our beloved old cat friend Bowie died, and the world seemed to continue its headlong lurch into fascism, internet-fuelled conspiracy-land, ignorance, pointless culture wars and hate. Get in the bin, 2023, I’m done with you.

So, what do you do? For the last several pandemic-tainted years I’ve done up a playlist of songs to survive, because art helps. Music helps, good books help, great movies help. Drawing two issues of my comic book Amoeba Adventures  helped. I don’t think I could survive in a world without some kind of art. 

Back in the days of ornate mixtapes, you could sweat over the proper order of songs for ages, crafting the perfect vibe. This year, I just kind of threw it all in a blender, from Kiwi pop to thrash to old favourites to new artists I literally discovered a week ago. It’s all music. It’s all good, you know? 

Here’s nearly 3 hours, 40+ songs that helped me survive 2023. Shuffle away and listen to it in any order, or let it flow as it is. 

Wherever you are, have an excellent Christmas, and whoever or whatever you believe in, let’s all hope for a little more peace on earth and goodwill to all in the days to come.

Here’s my playlist Songs To Survive 2023:

Year In Review: The best movies, new and old, I saw in 2022

January 15 or so is officially the cut-off point for posting “year in review” stuff, isn’t it? After that, it gets a little embarrassing, I reckon.

So, in just under the wire is a look at my ten favourite movies I’ve seen in 2022 (keeping in mind I haven’t gotten around to some of the big Oscar contenders like Tár, The Woman King and The Fablemans yet), plus, in the spirit of my occasional Movies I Have Never Seen feature, the ten best movies from any time that I finally got around to seeing in 2022. And… action! 

Best 10 Movies of 2022 (alphabetical order)

The Banshees of Inisherin – A friendship breaks down on a small Irish island and Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Kerry Condon deliver astounding performances in a bitterly funny, gorgeously filmed Irish fable of love and grotesque revenge.  

The Batman – Another superhero movie, but the first one that actually makes Batman a detective, with Robert Pattinson’s none-more-goth Bruce Wayne balancing on the knife’s edge between being too much and not enough. I’d love to see one superhero flick that doesn’t end with an explosive CGI orgy, but this one hits the mark far more than it misses. 

Everything Everywhere All At Once – Michelle Yeoh is the Queen in any universe, and we should all bow down before her. 

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery – It’s bigger, broader and less restrained than its predecessor, but Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc remains a joy and Edward Norton as Elon Musk is bloody hilarious.

The Menu – A pitch-black satire about a night in the restaurant from hell, blunt and gaudy and yet right on trend at mocking this weird non-stop viral world we live in. 

Mister Organ – The overwhelming theme of this year’s best films seems to be the abuse of power, but this spiralling rabbit-hole of a documentary by NZ’s David Farrier makes it all feel far more personal, creepy and violating by focusing on one very unpleasant man’s doings.   

Nope – Jordan Peele’s movies are consistently surprising and exquisitely staged, and the simmering unease created by this sort-of alien invasion story sticks with me. Like Get Out and Us, the more you think about it the more you see going on behind the immediate story beats. 

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio – A better fairy tale you won’t see all year, unafraid of exploring loss and death but also hilariously funny, and with stunning old-school stop motion animation. Far better than any of Disney’s rather dire “live action remakes” of their classic cartoons. 

RRR – The best action movie of the year is this frenetic Indian epic, with a sense of joyful fun and dazzling scope and anything-can-happen energy that seems missing from most carefully machined Hollywood product.

Weird: The Weird Al Yankovic Story – I saw UHF in the theatre in 1989 and finally, decades on, we get the next best thing to a sequel, with an uncanny Daniel Radcliffe taking us on a wild ride through Weird Al’s life, perhaps with a few exaggerations. A joyfully silly gift of a film for Weird Al fans and anyone tired of bloated self-serious biopics.

Tied up around #11: Black Panther Wakanda Forever; Clerks III; Decision To Leave; Elvis; The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent; Triangle of Sadness; The Northman; Fire Of Love; Top Gun: Maverick; Prey.

The 10 best movies I finally saw for the first time in 2022 (in chronological order)

Wages of Fear (1953) – An all-time tense thriller about angry, restless men willing to take on an impossible job just to survive. 

Johnny Cool (1963) – I watched this pitch-black slice of noir in memory of the late Henry Silva, and he stars with an all-star oddball cast (Sammy Davis Jr! Jim Backus! Bewitched’s Elizabeth Montgomery!) in a gangster tale that’s far darker and sleazier than its Rat Pack-era trappings would have you believe. 

Playtime (1967) – I’ve been getting into Jacques Tati a lot this year, and his comedy is like an intricate whimsy machine – immaculately staged, formal and gentle, yet always with something unforgettably spot-on to say about us crazy human beings. 

El Topo (1970) – A surrealist western that is a relic of the hippie era but also a passageway into a dreamlike, horrible world of quasi-heroic quests that never truly end. 

Blue Collar (1978) – Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor as down-and-out autoworkers who embark on the most inept robbery ever, and a portrait of a bruised and struggling American dream. 

The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) – Music as madness, music as escape, music as addiction, and one of the best music documentaries I’ve ever seen. 

Smash Palace (1981) – A gripping and raw New Zealand drama starring the late, great Bruno Lawrence as a desperate man making all of the wrong decisions to fix his messed-up life.  

Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) – Objectively, not a good movie, I know, I know. But yet, I finally got around to watching most of the schlocky, silly series last year, and this one – slasher horror polished to a machine-like gleam – is the giddily exploitive and slightly self-mocking peak of the lot. 

Hereditary (2018) – Finally got around to Ari Aster’s terrifying horror movie about family trauma and it’s just as disturbing as I dreaded it might be. I want to watch it again, but I also kind of never want to watch it again. 

The Worst Person in the World (2021) – This Norwegian film starts as a self-aware ironic romantic comedy in the mode of Fleabag and becomes something more powerful and ultimately rather unforgettable.  

Year in Review: The Songs To Survive 2022 mixtape

Are we here again, at the end of another year? I’m not quite sure how this happened. The number “2023” sounds, to me, like some far futuristic utopia or dystopia, rather than the time I’m actually living in. I think I really stopped counting around 2012, anyway.

As I’ve previous said in these last two chaos-filled years, music helps keep me same. Whether it’s 6k walks around the neighbourhood or while I’m beavering away making journalism, there’s often a song nearby.

I have to say, 2022 has been, well, pretty shit in a lot of ways, on a personal level. Too much bad news in my life and the world seems to be getting stupider every day. It’s hard, sometimes, not to become the bitter sort of person you swore you wouldn’t become in your 20s. 

So, music. And new music! I’m trying a little harder, like my mate Bob, not to become one of those old guys who always complains that music was better in the 1990s or whenever. I actively sought out some of the young folk making music this year, as well as my favourite old folks still making music, rather than just listening to the same Ramones and Prince albums over and over.

The Songs That Helped Me Survive 2022 Playlist is almost entirely music that came out this year (there’s a couple of perennial songs I listened to a lot that are a bit older). I listened to groovy young (or younger) folks like Wet Leg (who made the most joyously fun album of the year) and Orville Peck and Tove Lo, to awesome kiwi musicians like Marlon Williams and Troy Kingi and Aldous Harding, to old faves like Freedy Johnston and Midnight Oil and Don McGlashan who put out great new stuff this year. 

And here’s my playlist. So here’s two hours of eclectic alt-rock, jazz, kiwi pop, afro-noise, songwriting genius, angry rants and wistful laments! Once upon a time it might’ve been a mixtape I mailed a dear friend or two from across the country or across the world. These days, it’s a collection of bits and bytes and well, anyone can listen. That’s music for you. It’s what keeps us going, when the going gets tough. Listen up, I made you a mixtape:

More music: Songs To Survive 2020 Playlist

Songs To Survive 2021 Playlist

Year in review: 12 great TV shows you might have missed in 2022

New by me over at Radio New Zealand: 12 TV series you may have missed in the age of peak content, just in time for your post-Christmas lying around groaning with a full stomach and looking for something to watch vibe!

I take a look at a dozen excellent TV shows (do we still call it TV? Stream-TV?) well worth catching up on during the holiday season if you’re so inclined including Sandman, Raised By Refugees, This Is Going To Hurt, The Old Man and much more! (Most excellent graphic above by RNZ’s most excellent graphic artist)

Go read the full article here and happy holidays however you’re celebrating them!

Bonus story: I take a look at how you can become a classic movie expert over the holidays by checking out 10 iconic movies made before 1980 easily available on NZ streaming services: Hoo-ha!

Year in review: My favourite books of 2022

Good god, mid-December! How did this happen? Who’s responsible?

One saving grace of the end of the year is lists! I love lists of people’s favourite movies and music and books and such. For the second year in a row, I was invited to take part in the New Zealand Listener magazine’s Best Books issue, picking a handful of books to go in the big ol’ pile of recommendations they publish.

The Best Books of 2022 issue of Nov. 27 came and went while I was running around in America and getting Covid and such, but if you’re in New Zealand you might still be able to find it in scattered newsstands and libraries, and it’s always worth a read.

For posterity’s sake, here’s the books I sent in as my own picks for the year’s best reading!

FICTION: Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel – The first great COVID-19 novel as well as an unforgettable meditation on life, time and fate. 

Devil House, John Darnielle – A novel that starts as an investigation into occult murders that becomes something deeper and stranger. The movie Zodiac meets Lovecraft. 

Heat 2 – Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner – A written sequel and prequel to a 30-year old crime epic movie shouldn’t work, but this does, exceedingly well. A cracking thriller. 

NONFICTION: Grand, Noelle McCarthy – This comic and pained Irish kiwi’s memoir about battling alcoholism, family demons and moving to the other side of the world feels just right in a time when so many of us are mourning the changes and loss in the last few years. 

The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman – A snarky, critical examination of a decade that you can both agree with and argue about. I’ve actually warmed to this more than my initially ambivalent review may have made it seem, and it’s truly peak Klosterman, witty and amusingly scattered.

Buster Keaton – A Filmmaker’s Life, James Curtis – The greatest of silent film stars gets the epic biography he richly deserves. Thorough, revelatory and a fascinating look at cinema from a century ago.

Plus! Bonus book! A bit too late for me to include on that list is a book I’ve written a review of for this week’s Listener magazine (Dec. 17-23 2022), maritime archaeologist Mensun Bound’s book The Ship Beneath The Ice. It’s the fascinating account of his discovery earlier this year of the wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance deep beneath the Antarctic ice a century after the doomed South Pole expedition. It’s a darn good read and if you’re lucky enough to be in NZ, you can still find the issue my review is in at all the usual places.

Year In Review List Week: 10 Great Books From 2021

…Continuing year in review list week before this newfangled 2022 gets too darned far along for everyone, here’s my favourite books I read in 2021, restricted to just those books published in 2021 (and maybe just one or two that came out at the very end of 2020 but maybe came out in paperback this year).

Once again my reading tends to be heavier on the nonfiction than the fiction, although I’m hoping to be more egalitarian in 2022.

In alphabetical order:

Fiction

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood

Nonfiction

A Swim In A Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give A Master Class on Writing, Reading, And Life, by George Saunders

Boy On Fire: The Young Nick Cave, by Mark Mordue

His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life, by Jonathan Alter

I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, by Carol Leonning and Philip Rucker

Mike Nichols: A Life, by Mark Harris

Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism, by Paul S. Hirsch

Times Like These: On Grief, Hope and Remarkable Love, by Michelle Langstone

Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury, by Evan Osnos

Also in series: My Top Ten Pop Culture Moments of 2021 / My Favourite Movies of 2021