#Kermode and May's take

[thatwobblychair]

141 Bear! Edition

Cause what if 141 were bears?

Including bear facts ! Why? Because bears are cute. 💕

Ghost: Spirit Bear "Kermode Bear"

Ursus americanus kermodei

A subspecies of the American Black Bear that lives exclusively on the coastal shores of British Columbia, Canada.

They are not actually albinos, but instead have a recessive gene that causes the white pigmentation to their fur and eyes. For example, two black 'kermode bears' with the recessive gene can produce a white furred bear.

The white fur is thought to be advantageous towards hunting salmon, as it is theorised that the white colour makes it harder for fish to evade them.

Soap: Sun Bear

Helarctos malayanus

An Asiatic bear that stands as the smallest of all bear species, ranging from northeastern India and extending south to Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam to Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

They measure between 4-5 ft from tail to snout and weigh between 55- 145 lbs. It is an excellent climber that is known to be the most arboreal of all bears.

Their name is derived from the orangey- cream colour 'sun' crest on their chest. Another name for them is Honey Bear or beruang madu, in Malay/Indonesian due to their love of feeding on honey combs.

Gaz: Cinnamon Bear

Ursus americanus cinnamomum

Another subspecies and colour morph of the American Black Bear. It is thought to exist and interbreed with the black coloured American Black Bears.

The name is derived from the brown to red-brown fur colour that resembles cinnamon. It's coat colouration is theorised to be a mimic of grizzly bears who may also cohabit the same areas.

Price: Grizzly Bear "North American Brown Bear"

Ursus arctos horribilis

Despite being known as the 'grizzly bear' or 'grizzly', the bear is categorised as a subspecies or pop. of the Brown Bear, a species that originates in Eurasia. It is thought that this subspecies/pop. migrated to North America between 177,000 BP ~ 111,000 BP.

There are other morphological forms of brown bears in North America also termed as 'grizzly' that were once considered subspecies but is now synonmised with Ursus arctos horribilis, such as the "Kodiak Bear and the "Alaska Peninsular Bear". The 'grizzly bear' historical range starts from Alaska to Mexico, taking in consideration of past subspecies that are now extinct, though it's current population is situated mainly in North America.

It's name came from the descriptor 'grisley' which can be read as 'grizzled' - grey haired, or "grisly" -fearsome, inspiring, though it was formally classified as U. horribilis, for it's terrible character in 1815.

+

*all facts taken from wiki. If there are any mistakes let me know!

[bairbrewing]

Brew #1 Kermode

May 4 2024

I decided to take some time to brew a blonde ale. I should have it wrapped up in early June just in time for the heat. Fingers crossed it turns out!

Idea was to have 2 gallons after the boil but ended up with just under 9 quarts. This means my final gravity was lower than I wanted but I get an extra quart of beer so I can deal with that trade off.

Grain bill:

89.6% 1285g Briess 2-Row (1.8° L)

7.5% 107g Briess Caramel Malt (10° L)

2.9% 42g Crisp Amber Malt (27.5° L)

Hops:

4.6g Cascade at 60min

3.5g Kent Goldings at 15.5min

Yeast:

1 pack of Wyeast 1056

Mashed for an hour at 155°F, raised it to 169°F for the mash out, and then boiled for an hour. Added my hops at the times above and then at 10 minutes left in the boil I added 1g Irish Moss and 1/4tsp yeast nutrient. My pre boil gravity was 1.029 and my starting gravity was 1.037 (.004 less than I wanted) so if this ferments down to 1.010 I’ll get a 3.5% abv beer. I really wanted 4% but that’s okay. Smelled and tasted great after the boil and it’s sitting in my fermentation chamber (mini fridge with an Inkbird hooked up) at 62°F. I'm hoping this lower temperature setting will give a more crisp and less ester forward flavor.

May 5th, 2024

Been close to 24 hours and already seeing some activity. Hoping to have the fermentation and cold crash finished at the 2 week mark. Then I’ll do some cold-side finings and bottle condition for a few more weeks! Hoping to crack one open the second week of June!

May 7th, 2024

I noticed a dramatic reduction in activity in my airlock today and decided at the almost 100 hour mark to do a gravity check. Opening the fermenter I was hit at first with fusels but once those reduced the smell of the green beer (post first fermentation) was quite nice and almost reminded me of pale ales I've tried in the past. The color was very light (SRM 2 or 3) which is lighter than I had thought it might be but that might change after it is racked off the lees and bottled. The gravity read 1.011 (maybe 1.012) so I decided to ramp the temperature up to 69°F over the next few days to ensure full attenuation (conversion of sugar to alcohol). After some time I'll check the gravity again and if we are down to 1.010 I will start to cold crash.

May 9th, 2024

Checked the gravity again after 48 hours at 70ish°F. The beer has hit a gravity of 1.010! Going to give it another 24 hours in the Maturation phase (yeast has finished fermenting but not settled to the bottom/flocculated). I've read that your Maturation phase should be about the same length as your High Growth Phase. After that I'm going to slowly crank the AC up and start cold crashing the beer. Hoping to throw the gelatin in on the 14th and bottle on the 15th or 16th. Hoping to crack one open the week of the 9th of June.

Color and smell were pretty much the same. I am interested to see what color the finished product will be after cold-side finings and bottle conditioning.

May 15th, 2024

Just added the gelatin! Planning to bottle tomorrow, giving the gelatin time to get some of the haze out! There is a slight smell of green apple that worries me a bit but it could also be the Kent Goldings' aroma. The color appears darker in the bucket so I'm very interested in what color the final product will be!

May 16th, 2024

Bottling day! Siphoned the beer off of the trub (not well, ended up getting more trub in my bottling bucket than I'd care to mention). Let the beer sit in the bottling bucket with 2.25oz of corn sugar for an hour to let those solids settle a bit and then bottled. Got 14 12oz bottles and whatever the big one ends up being (probably 16oz). 3 weeks of bottle conditioning at 70ºF where whatever solids that are in suspension will settle out of the beer and carbonation will occur. Might try one on the 30th but will definitely have a solid taste on the 6th. Color ended up being around a 3/3.5 SRM.

June 3rd, 2024

Alas we come to the end of the brew. As I mentioned before I really messed up the bottling process and because of that my beer did not carbonate fully. The corn sugar did not mix with the beer and when bottled there was not enough sugar to get to the carbonation level I wanted. The taste and smell were both great and I feel the recipe is a solid solid blonde ale.

[twh-news]

Kermode's and Mayo's Take: The one with Tom Hiddleston, Dr. Strange in Multiverse of Madness and Cabaret

In this first episode of Kermode and Mayo's Take, Mark and Simon are joined by Tom Hiddleston who talks about his role in The Essex Serpent. Mark reviews new Marvel film ‘Dr Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness’, ‘This Much I Know To Be True’ which captures Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' creative relationship as they bring to life the songs from their last two studio albums, ‘Cabaret’ 50th Anniversary, new Netflix series ‘Clark’ - the story of Clark Olofsson, the man behind Stockholm syndrome, Danish film ‘Wild Men’/ ‘Vildmænd’ and also ‘Wake Up Punk’ starring Vivienne Westwood.

[canmom]

T...film Tuesday 28 - Californian Post Apocalypses

Hi everyone, I continue to be in america!

In keeping with the tradition of like, three weeks ago, I want to spotlight the local movie industry of Los Ange- hold on, getting a call - hollywhat? - goddamn that’s a lotta fucking movies

Well, whatever, we can still do ths! We’re not gonna do a full month of californian movies - we might do actual tokusatsu next week, you never know~ - but just for this morning (time zones!!!!!) we’re going to take some movies that aren’t just made but also set in California. Also they’re gonna be old goofy scifi movies because it’s sort of like tokusatsu if you squint. Between them I’m sure we’ll get a very clear picture of what things are like in California...

Anyway, because we need to go to the doctors today, I’m going to have to split tonight’s movies into two parts. To begin with, probably the best known movie on our list is Escape from LA, directed John Carpenter, who seems to have made a life project of direction stupid action scifi-horror movies, from the well-regarded like The Thing to the... less well-regarded, like Ghosts of Mars (which Mogs showed me a few weeks ago on halloween sdfdsf).

Escape from LA (1996) is a sequel to Carpenter’s previous Escape From New York (1981), featuring Kurt Russell as mercenary ‘Snake Plisken’, who is apparently the inspiration for Solid Snake?? It features a complicated scifi premise in which the fascist theocratic government of america (no, even more so than the real one) sends Snake into the now-disconnected-by-earthquake island of LA, where he must rescue the president’s daughter, who has been seduced by a member of the Shining Path who has access to an american superweapon and plans to use it to stage some kind of thirdworldist invasion - ngl I was not expecting gonzaloism rep in one of these movies. anyway Snake has to fight his way through LA. there’s a trans girl in it. it was disliked by people who found it too campy, which makes me wonder what they’re even watching movies for.

Later on, after our return, we have two more movies!

Surf Nazis Must Die is an extremely schlocky b-movie by Troma Entertainment in which, after a major earthquake in LA leads to the rise of a gang of neo-nazis - hold on, didn’t we just do this one?

Yeah so this time around the fascists are surfers, and Gail Neely is a Black mum - sorry, we’re in America, mom - who has to make good on that title all after they kill her son. It was hated by just about every movie critic who saw it except one Jennie Kermode, who wrote:

About as shallow as its title suggests, Surf Nazis Must Die nevertheless has a surreal edge to it which raises it above most of its peers. The thugs may be pretty dull for the moist part, but their leader, Adolf, is stylishly unpleasant. It's never quite clear whether or not he thinks he actually is Hitler; there's a hint of real madness underlining his bravado. But when he and his gang kill one of their rivals, Adolf meets his match in a gun-toting mama determined to get revenge.

Though it doesn't have nearly enough plot for its running time and it drags badly in places, this is a film with some inspired moments, seemingly the product of real lunacy rather than a calculated attempt to shock.

Thanks to her, it gets 20% on Rotten Tomatoes instead of 0. So I can’t say we’re going to have any conventionally impressive effects or anything but Mogs is very enthusiastic and that’s reason enough lol.

Finally we have Cherry 2000 (1987), in which a guy searches the desert for a replacement to his broken sexbot. He’s obviously going to get with the human girl he’s travelling with instead, but in the meantime they have to shoot like 400 things with bazookas, if the trailer is any guide:

This one came up when I asked mogs for ideas for movies tonight; turns out it’s actually set in Nevada, but whatever, that’s close enough. amusingly the combination of elements ‘ruins of Vegas’ and ‘sexbot’ feature prominently in Villeneuve’s Blade Runner sequel - in this instance I imagine they didn’t really have the budget to make good on the rich vein of Fucked Up Imagery associated with the concept of sexbots (leave it to gurochan ig? sdfsf) but I hear it’s Fun, and i’m going to see Vegas sometime during this trip so it will surely be amusing to have seen an 80s vision of ruined Vegas beforehand.

Anyway the first movie is gonna start Right Now bc we don’t have a lot of time, and then I’ll let you know when we’re back for movies 2 and 3!

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Title: The Death of the Author

Author: Frank Kermode

Rating: 1/5 stars

I'm not really sure what all the fuss is about when it comes to this book. I've seen it quoted and parodied and excerpted and criticized many times over the years, and I see it pop up now and then in discussions about contemporary literary theory. But the very idea of reading a book like this has always seemed so bizarre to me that I had to keep it on the shelf, collecting dust.

What exactly is it that makes this a book of theory -- a book that demands to be read rather than merely skimmed -- when all the other texts of this type that have crossed my desk have always been works of literary criticism? What distinguishes this one from all the others that preceded it, and what made it so popular?

The usual answer is, as we can see from its name: it's about "death."

But it's an odd sort of death. For the author isn't actually dead, he's just very old. He's been dead for decades -- long before I was born -- and all he wants is that his book be read. All the critics of this book insist that he's dead, but I think the reader has no choice but to ignore this. It's like a ghost writing this book -- which would, by the way, also be an interesting question, given the presence of Kermode himself, albeit one with an answer: he's still alive, and he was always alive. He's just been in a coma for so long that his corpse has turned to wax. And as the reader reads this book, the dead author himself speaks to us.

You'll notice that I am the only person (that I'm aware of) who's expressed this kind of reaction to the book, and I have read very little of it. It makes sense to me -- I couldn't read it. It was too dry. There were way too many footnotes. Kermode doesn't do anything interesting with his deadness. It's just there. There's no mystery. The dead author speaks to us and to himself. He's always been here. You can take him out of the book, but there's nowhere else to go.

Kermode does some cool and interesting things with the deadness, though, mostly when it comes to books about the dead, books about writers. The Death of the Author is, to Kermode, a book about literature, but a literature whose writers are very dead. He talks about dead authors throughout the book, from Céline to Dante, and he is careful to point out that the dead cannot speak for themselves. This makes him an interesting theorist of literature for someone like myself, who thinks that even modern writers like myself write books that may be "dead" in their content, but that are never "dead" in their form (even though the critics disagree about whether I can be said to be alive at all -- as a matter of fact, if I thought I were dead, I wouldn't be writing, and writing would mean killing me).

He gives two examples in the book to illustrate what he means by this. He quotes a section from Vladimir Nabokov's novel Invitation to a Beheading, a novel about the execution of a monarch and his son. He says,

One can read this with an open mind, or one can read it from a moral or a metaphysical point of view and feel that the author (who is now dead) is right -- but one can't read it without a certain unease.

He goes on to describe this "uneasiness" (in the way you'd probably describe any sort of unease), writing, "To read this [section] as an act of communication, as a kind of address, an invitation to speak to a dead person and ask for news of him, as the great majority of readers have done, is deeply problematic, as in a long, distinguished career of public communication Nabokov and his reader have made a habit of avoiding any reference to their mutual deadness."

To read the novel The Death of the Author as an act of communication with the author, as an act of asking for news of him, is deeply problematic. It's a neat reversal of the usual way of reading such a book. And Kermode seems to feel that this is the only way we should read it. But it's not the only way. I can speak for myself, without speaking to anyone who is dead, and while doing so I can ask if they have anything to say to me. If you're a different kind of writer than I am -- if you make art for art's sake, and you think it is possible to speak to a dead person and ask for news -- then perhaps you'd be interested in the Death of the Author, and its relevance to your own project. You'd be interested in the fact that you can ask for news of your reader too. In fact, if you've written a book that's not really about the author at all -- that isn't about communication in any kind of traditional sense -- then you could certainly ask this question of yourself.

For instance, Nausea is a text about illness -- perhaps of the author -- but not really about illness as such. The text describes the process of illness, in great detail. It describes the writer and the reader and their reactions in detail. It describes the reader's own experiences of illness, or of pain, or of death -- things that seem to me not only not to be addressed in the text, but not even to have been written about. If I'm not sick or in pain and have never been, why should I bother reading this book? What is the author offering that I can't find elsewhere?

I haven't read Nausea since I was 17. I have it in a box in my parents' attic. And when I pull it out to re-read it and find that it hasn't gotten old or lost its ability to upset or even disgust, well, it's certainly a sign that something has been going on in my mind since I was 17. And it's certainly a sign that something has been going on in the minds of many readers, including people who are alive right now. I'm one of them -- a reader of Nausea and of other novels like it.

So maybe the most "dead" writing out there isn't the writing of the dead. It's the writing of those of us who are trying to bring them back to life again and again, with every word we pen. Maybe we, too, have a right to ask, after writing this very first dead person of our own -- the author of Nausea, for instance, who may have nothing to do with either me or my novel -- whether he has anything to say to us about what we are doing.

A lot of literature has been written this way. Maybe the greatest literature of the 20th century -- much of it -- is made by authors who are trying to create the fiction of their lives. How many great writers out there are also writers, and writers about themselves, and writers trying to tell stories about other people, and writers for whom, at their very core, their work is "about something that's not happening right now"? And what would they say about their own fiction, if they were still alive to tell? How would they speak to us?

I hope you can see, at least, that the Dead Author's answer to these questions is not always a satisfying one. And if there's anyone out there who has, at this very moment, the power to re-write this dead, old person who's been dead for over 100 years, well, if the book you've written really has nothing to do with the author himself -- if it's simply a thing you've done -- then you might want to consider how you might want the author to feel about it. I'd say there are at least three possible answers to this question:

(a) "I think I'm dead, and my death has been real, and I want to be remembered. I want people to remember me. So, since you are writing this for you, and not for me -- since I'm sure the author doesn't want this sort of communication from my reader, since I'm dead -- then this is a message for my reader. This is a letter from a dead person that he has no right to send, to my reader, to someone I am not, but to whom I am dead, because my reader and I are in the same, imaginary, state of being dead. So, if you're my reader, then please send this note. Then I'll know that you are my reader."

(b) "I've been dead. This is the story of my death. I'm dead. This book is about the death of the author, of my death. This is the story of how I died, as told by me, the author, as a dead man. This is a book about the deadness of my death, and, in fact, this is the story of my deadness. I'm not dead and you're not dead, but in a sense, we are dead. So, if you want to talk about my death, or you want to speak to me as though I were dead, then this is the book. I'll be

[theatticoneighth]

Watching The Queen’s Gambit; on the Remarkable Unexceptionality of Beth Harmon

‘With some people, chess is a pastime. With others, it is a compulsion, even an addiction. And every now and then, a person comes along for whom it is a birthright. Now and then, a small boy appears and dazzles us with his precocity, at what may be the world’s most difficult game. But what if that boy were a girl? A young, unsmiling girl, with brown eyes, red hair, and a dark blue dress? Into the male-dominated world of the nation’s top chess tournaments, strolls a teenage girl with bright, intense eyes, from Fairfield High School in Lexington, Kentucky. She is quiet, well-mannered, and out for blood.’

The preceding epigraph opens a fictional profile of Beth Harmon featured in the third episode of The Queen’s Gambit (2020), and is written and published after the protagonist — a teenage, rookie chess player, no less — beats a series of ranked pros to win her first of many tournaments. In the same deft manner as it depicts the character’s ascent to her global chess stardom, the piece also sets up the series’s narrative: this is evidence of a great talent, it tells us, a grandmaster in the making. As with most other stories about prodigies, this new entry into a timeworn genre is framed unexceptionally by its subject’s exceptionality.

Yet as far as tales regaled about young chess wunderkinds go, Beth Harmon’s stands out in more ways than one. That she is a girl in a male-dominated world has clearly not gone unremarked by both her diegetic and nondiegetic audiences. That her life has thus far — and despite her circumstances — been relatively uneventful, however, is what makes this show so remarkable. After all, much of our culture has undeniably primed us to expect the consequential from those whom we raise upon the pedestal of genius. As Harmon’s interviewer suggests in her conversation with Harmon for the latter’s profile, “Creativity and psychosis often go hand in hand. Or, for that matter, genius and madness.” So quickly do we attribute extraordinary accomplishments to similarly irregular origins that we presume an inexplicability of our geniuses: their idiosyncrasies are warranted, their bad behaviours are excused, and deep into their biographies we dig to excavate the enigmatic anomalies behind their gifts. Through our myths of exceptionality, we make the slightest aberrations into metonyms for brilliance.

Nonetheless, for all her sullenness, non-conformity, and her plethora of addictions, Beth Harmon seems an uncommonly normal girl. No doubt this may be a contentious view, as evinced perhaps by the chorus of viewers and reviewers alike who have already begun to brand the character a Mary Sue. Writing on the series for the LA Review of Books, for instance, Aaron Bady construes The Queen’s Gambit as “the tragedy of Bobby Fischer [made] into a feminist fantasy, a superhero story.” In the same vein, Jane Hu also laments in her astute critique of the Cold War-era drama its flagrant and saccharine wish-fulfillment tendencies. “The show gets to have it both ways,” she observes, “a beautiful heroine who leans into the edge of near self-destruction, but never entirely, because of all the male friends she makes along the way.” Sexual difference is here reconstituted as the unbridgeable chasm that divides the US from the Soviet Union, whereas the mutual friendliness shared between Harmon and her male chess opponents becomes a utopic revision of history. Should one follow Hu’s evaluation of the series as a period drama, then the retroactive ascription of a recognisably socialist collaborative ethos to Harmon and her compatriots is a contrived one indeed. 

Accordingly, both Hu and Bady conclude that the series grants us depthless emotional satisfaction at the costly expense of realism: its all-too-easy resolutions swiftly sidestep any nascent hint of overwhelming tension; its resulting calm betrays our desire for reprieve. Underlying these arguments is the fundamental assumption that the unembellished truth should also be an inconvenient one, but why must we always demand difficulty from those we deem noteworthy? Summing up the show’s conspicuous penchant for conflict-avoidance, Bady writes that: 

over and over again, the show strongly suggests — through a variety of genre and narrative cues — that something bad is about to happen. And then … it just doesn’t. An orphan is sent to a gothic orphanage and the staff … are benign. She meets a creepy, taciturn old man in the basement … and he teaches her chess and loans her money. She is adopted by a dysfunctional family and the mother … takes care of her. She goes to a chess tournament and midway through a crucial game she gets her first period and … another girl helps her, who she rebuffs, and she is fine anyway. She wins games, defeating older male players, and … they respect and welcome her, selflessly helping her. The foster father comes back and …she has the money to buy him off. She gets entangled in cold war politics and … decides not to be.

In short, everything that could go wrong … simply does not go wrong.

Time and again predicaments arise in Harmon’s narrative, but at each point, she is helped fortuitously by the people around her. In turn, the character is allowed to move through the series with the restrained unflappability of a sleepwalker, as if unaffected by the drama of her life.  Of course, this is not to say that she fails to encounter any obstacle on her way to celebrity and success — for neither her childhood trauma nor her substance-laden adolescence are exactly rosy portraits of idyll — but only that such challenges seem so easily ironed out by that they hardly register as true adversity. In other words, the show takes us repeatedly to the brink of what could become a life-altering crisis but refuses to indulge our taste for the spectacle that follows. Skipping over the Aristotelian climax, it shields us from the height of suspense, and without much struggle or effort on the viewers’ part, hands us our payoff. Consequently lacking the epochal weight of plot, little feels deserved in Harmon’s story.

In his study of eschatological fictions, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode would associate such a predilection for catastrophes with our abiding fear of disorder. Seeing as time, as he argues, is “purely successive [and] disorganised,” we can only reach to the fictive concords of plot to make sense of our experiences. Endings in particular serve as the teleological objective towards which humanity projects our existence, so we hold paradigms of apocalypse closely to ourselves to restore significance to our lives. It probably comes as no surprise then that in a year of chaos and relentless disaster — not to mention the present era of extreme precariousness, doomscrolling, and the 24/7 news cycle, all of which have irrevocably attuned us to the dreadful expectation of “the worst thing to come” — we find ourselves eyeing Harmon’s good fortune with such scepticism. Surely, we imagine, something has to have happened to the character for her in order to justify her immense consequence. But just as children are adopted each day into loving families and chess tournaments play out regularly without much strife, so too can Harmon maintain low-grade dysfunctional relationships with her typically flawed family and friends. 

In any case, although “it seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking about the future that one should assume one's own time to stand in extraordinary relation to it,” not all orphans have to face Dickensian fates and not all geniuses have to be so tortured (Kermode). The fact remains that the vagaries of our existence are beyond perfect reason, and any attempt at thinking otherwise, while vital, may be naive. Contrary to most critics’ contentions, it is hence not The Queen’s Gambit’s subversions of form but its continued reach towards the same that holds up for viewers such a comforting promise of coherence. The show comes closest to disappointing us as a result when it eschews melodrama for the straightforward. Surprised by the ease and randomness of Harmon’s life, it is not difficult for one to wonder, four or five episodes into the show, what it is all for; one could even begin to empathise with Hu’s description of the series as mere “fodder for beauty.” 

Watching over the series now with Bady’s recap of it in mind, however, I am reminded oddly not of the prestige and historical dramas to which the series is frequently compared, but the low-stakes, slice-of-life cartoons that had peppered my childhood. Defined by the prosaicness of its settings, the genre punctuates the life’s mundanity with brief moments of marvel to accentuate the curious in the ordinary. In these shows, kindergarteners fix the troubles of adults with their hilarious playground antics, while time-traveling robot cats and toddler scientists alike are confronted with the woes of chores. Likewise, we find in The Queen’s Gambit a comparable glimpse of the quotidian framed by its protagonist’s quirks. Certainly, little about the Netflix series’ visual and narrative features would identify it as a slice-of-life serial, but there remains some merit, I believe, in watching it as such. For, if there is anything to be gained from plots wherein nothing is introduced that cannot be resolved in an episode or ten, it is not just what Bady calls the “drowsy comfort” of satisfaction — of knowing that things will be alright, or at the very least, that they will not be terrible. Rather, it is the sense that we are not yet so estranged from ourselves, and that both life and familiarity persists even in the most extraordinary of circumstances.

Perhaps some might find such a tendency towards the normal questionable, yet when all the world is on fire and everyone clambers for acclaim, it is ultimately the ongoingness of everyday life for which one yearns. As Harmon’s childhood friend, Jolene, tells her when she is once again about to fall off the wagon, “You’ve been the best at what you do for so long, you don’t even know what it’s like for the rest of us.” For so long, and especially over the past year, we have catastrophized the myriad crises in which we’re living that we often overlook the minor details and habits that nonetheless sustain us. To inhabit the congruence of both the remarkable and its opposite in the singular figure of Beth Harmon is therefore to be reminded of the possibility of being outstanding without being exceptional — that is, to not make an exception of oneself despite one’s situation — and to let oneself be drawn back, however placid or insignificant it may be, into the unassuming hum of dailiness. It is in this way of living that one lives on, minute by minute, day by day, against the looming fear and anxiety that seek to suspend our plodding regular existence. It is also in this way that I will soon be turning the page on the last few months in anticipation of what is to come. 

Born and raised in the perpetually summery tropics — that is, Singapore — Rachel Tay wishes she could say her life was just like a still from Call Me By Your Name: tanned boys, peaches, and all. Unfortunately, the only resemblance that her life bears to the film comes in the form of books, albeit ones read in the comfort of air-conditioned cafés, and not the pool, for the heat is sweltering and the humidity unbearable. A fervent turtleneck-wearer and an unrepentant hot coffee-addict, she is thus the ideal self-parodying Literature student, and the complete anti-thesis to tropical life.

[thelunchclublog]

How Bong Joon Ho presents and explores class in Parasite (In context of his filmography.) (Spoiler Alert)

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the driving theme of Parasite is class, and for those of you unfamiliar with Bong Joon’s filmography, this isn’t out of left field for the Korean director. Although class is a prevailing theme in all his work, watching his films never feels tiresome; largely credited, I believe, to Bongs diverse approach to society and class as a whole, and the way he explores it from different perspectives from film to film. Parasite stood out to me in particular due to his use of the tools at his dispense to craft his commentary on class, namely cinematography, editing and architecture. He uses motifs, like light, and symbols, like the rock, to set up strict class contrasts.

To understand Parasite and how it presents class, it’s helpful to know the context of Bong’s filmography and how he presents this theme in some of his other films. In his 2013 film SnowPiercer, Bong tells the story of a united ‘lower class’ fighting through from the back of a train and towards the front, thus to the ‘upper class’. This film presents the class system as a construct you can climb – a social ladder, whilst also showing the ‘class solidarity’. The characters are all working towards the same goal, and they all have the class consciousness to know they’re at rock bottom, forcing them to become each other’s allies. The opposite can be said for Parasite; there is no class solidarity. And this is how Bong Joon explores the idea of class and comments on the strict structure of it within our society differently throughout his career.

Unlike the characters of SnowPiercer, the Kim family aren’t at rock bottom. They aren’t the lowest of the low, they aren’t on the last rung of the class ladder, they’re somewhere in-between. And this puts them in a position of hope. They’re not at the bottom end of a train, likewise they don’t live in a basement with no windows. They live in a semi-basement with a window looking out onto street level, creating a metaphorical and literal ‘window of opportunity’. They can see the light. It’s a glimpse into the hope that they aren’t so far underground they can’t even see the light. It’s a tease. The Kim’s position in Parasite blurs the lines of class that Bong Joon draws in SnowPiercer. In the second act of the film, the surprise third class is revealed, and the lack of class solidarity is fully realised in this moment in the basement – that notably has no windows, thus no hope. There is a lack of understanding, a fight between the poor and the poorer. Again, this is another recurring theme of Bong Joon’s work; the 2009 film Mother doesn’t have the obvious contrast with the rich and the poor, instead emphasising the fight between the low and the lower. Tragically, the blurred positions provide the Kim’s with false class consciousness that the characters of SnowPiercer don’t have– resulting in their downfall. They believe they are meant to be up there, where the Parks are, and they seek revenge on them as a result. ‘The poor can infiltrate the rich, but they cannot become them’.

Interestingly, in the dialogue – Ki-Jung or ‘Jessica’ is portrayed as being the character that belongs up there, with the Parks, the most. She holds the most potential - forging legal documents and ad-libbing her way into the trust of Yeon-Kyo. She comes too close to belonging, too close to sliding the scale, and her death at the end of the film could be interpreted as Bong Joon’s commentary that the system is fixed. You cannot move up in the system, you stay where you belong. Further emphasising this conclusion, the film ends alluding to Ki-Woos fixed position in this system. It offers an insight into what could be – the hope the light provides – but ultimately, as the lowering camera in the last shot shows, Ki-woo will always be part of the semi-basement, just tantalisingly below and out of reach of the light.

The visual representation of the classes is one of the most interesting parts of this film to me personally. The use of stairs and ascent vs descent is recognisable to viewers almost instantly. The Parks are consistently shown at the top of roads leading up towards them or sloping down and away – showing that they’re higher in class, as well as closer to the sun and therefore the light, where the Kim’s aspire to be. The shots of the Kim’s and their house often show roads leading up and away towards the light – a representation of the hope the Kim’s have. There is a vertical contrast between the two abodes e.g. stairs up to the second floor versus stairs up to the toilet. In the scene where everything collapses around the Kim’s, the distance between the two houses is finally shown. It’s a constant descent, emphasising the literal and metaphorical distance that will always separate the two classes. The Bunker under the Parks house also illustrates an important visual of descent. In addition, a conversation is set up between the two houses, a visual relationship. As pointed out by Thomas Flight, the houses appear to face each other. The two houses – the semi-basement of the Kim’s and mansion of the Parks – both feature prominent windows that serve as ways to convey their positions in society. And the two windows are shot in much the same way a conversation between characters is which enters them into unspoken dialogue, making it feel like the houses are facing each other. The use of visual language of Parasite serves to illustrate the complexities of class.

This film also sets up an interesting narrative with the title ‘parasite’. It conjures up many questions that, at first glance, are easily answered. The parasites are the Kim family. And that, simply said, could be one interpretation of it. The Kim’s do infest the Parks house and freeload off them, taking much of their money for themselves. However, as explored by other people online, it isn’t as black and white as the Kim’s are bad and the Parks are good, or vice versa. It could be interpreted that the Parks are the parasite – the rich are leeching off the poor. Whereas the Kim family are taking what the Parks have in surplus, the Parks are expecting from and taking from the Kim’s what they barely have enough of for themselves. Their dignity, time and more.  The damage they cause to the Kim family could, arguably, be worse than what the Kim family did to the Parks.

Sources: (Plus just some good videos) BBC sounds - Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo

Accented Cinema - Mastering the basics of cinema 

Thomas Flight - The brilliant Cinematography of Parasite

Just Write - How parasite (and every Bong Joon-Ho film) critiques class

Thomas Flight - The visual Architecture of Parasite

Thomas Flight - Parasites Perfect Editing

Empire magazine - Parasite review

Flick Fanatics - Why Parasite Is A Masterpiece

Lessons from the screenplay - The Power Of Symbols

BFI - Parasite Review 

Insider - How ‘Parasite’ delivered One Of The Best Twists In Cinema

Broey Deschanel - Why Parasite Should Terrify Us

[tenitchyfingers]

A couple of anonymous academy members spoke to the New York Post about why they didn't vote for Sandler, Murphy, Lopez, or Awkwafina. - Per a longtime character actor and Academy member: “First of all, ‘Hustlers’ is not an ‘Oscar movie.’ It’s a little too rough around the edges, and I’m assuming some other people in the acting category didn’t see it." - Terry Moore, a 91 year old actress and Academy member, said that she found Jennifer's performance overrated. She also states that she feels that Florence Pugh may have gotten Jennifer's spot because Little Women is seen as a "prestige movie" and Florence is a "bright new star." - The anonymous character actor also went on to say that other actors think of Jennifer as a "a phenomenon more than an actress." They cite that is the same reason why Lady Gaga didn't win last year, other actors do not see them as a "real actor's actor." - The source also said that while Sandler is emerging as a "truly great actor", Hollywood does not take him serious due to his "cheesy Netflix comedies that are really dumb.”

- And some voters did not like Sandler's comments that he made on the Howard Stern show about winning an Oscar and feel that Sandler is arrogant. - The source also admitted that some voters may not have even bothered to watch Hustlers, Uncut Gems, or The Farewell. (x)

Aka the Academy is a bunch of elitist assholes and their judgment has no value. People who judge on a serious, honest basis would not rely on actors’ reputation or behavior off-screen but would exclusively look at their performance in the movie they’re nominated for. Once again they proved they are full of shit and should let actually serious movie critics (aka people like Mark Kermode who actually really does love movies and has real respect for filmmakers) do the judging. 

Someone who says shit like “I’m not nominating them because I think the stuff they did before is beneath me” is not fit to judge movies, or speak about art in general. 

[larkistin]

And also, before I finish the next Doctor Who drawing, I wanna share a progress pic and say Hello to... Mark Kermode. 😜 Can‘t wait to see this done but with all the stress coming up at work and all the other drawings I‘m working on, it may take a while to finish Jason Isaacs drawing Nr. 49.

[seeyuwriting]

Glittering Paradoxes

— The image of Snow in English Modernist Poetry

The idiom ichi-go ichi-e – literally translated as 'one time, one meeting' – describes the treasured Japanese tradition of hosting an unrepeatable gathering of weather, time of day and guests. Collectively reminding all involved parties of life's singularity, it is commonly linked to spontaneous tea ceremonies held until today. The Heian court, whose period spans from the 8th to the 12th century, is known for thereby becoming obsessed with snowy days: it most often chose the most unrecreatable of all moods of nature, and surely also the most visually intriguing one. 

In the presence of falling snow, my spectrum of feelings is incomparably celebratory as well. Collective softness rules every single association, and even though they are multiplying paradoxes – resistance and endurance, newness and familiarity, unification and uniqueness, oppression and reconciliation, rest and change, a purity that is both untouchable and violable, a barrier that can be both fleeting and perennial – there it always appears: a sense of comfort, settling down on my shoulders like the hands of my parents when I think of falling snow.

Its ample potential turned the archetypal image of snow not least into a glittering common thread in the works of many English Modernist poets. In 1922, it was Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot who burned it into the literary mass imagination by most famously telling us how "Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow" in his 434-line poem "The Waste Land". Intriguingly, he contrasted snow with spring, also frequently found in Modernist poetry – encompassing rebirth, resurrection, rejuvenation, the pain of finally being illuminated – which, in this case, is embodied by the month of April: "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain".

This essay will attempt to trace snow's many facets as brilliantly employed in three later Modernist poems by Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and David Gascoyne, offering a glance beneath softness and an argumentation for how snow – just as well as ice, frost and winter – substantially carries the same meaning throughout all of them, although embedded in different sceneries.

I. The Vague Delight of Revolution

Spender – also called "the lyric poet of his generation" by none other than Eliot – let snow strikingly pervade one of his most well-known poems, "After They Have Tired". With its shine, its light and its whiteness outbidding the rest of the imagery, the metaphor gets repositioned among the lines of enthusiastic political upheaval. Spender even turns it into a two-sided device for describing the impacts of both capitalism and the grand rebirth of the proletarian spirit: "After They Have Tired" was written in 1932, when Spender was still a member of the political left, and had been sensing the catastrophes ahead for years.

While there is little commentary on "After They Have Tired" – "perhaps because it seems to be a self-explanatory satire of a generic communist", as literary scholar Richard Danson Brown suggests • – it did, without doubt, play a constitutional role in constructing his reputation as a poet of profound political and social conscience. Scholar and critic Sir Frank Kermode declared that Spender’s writings on politics "and on the relation of artists to politics, remain the most considered and the most serious of any by the young writers of the period".

Spender insisted on poetry's mission to explore political issues, although he also stated that it can only have a real effect on society or its direction in certain situations: yes, poetry could stimulate essential feelings but it was and never will be able to portray certain essential situations that are "quite literally unimaginable" in their horror. 

As the only organized opposition to fascism at that time, the communist party was increasing its membership with its literary scene gathering more closely – also including Christopher Isherwood and Cecil Day-Lewis among others – and eventually beginning to look forward to a new life, a new society, a new England. Spender, on top, had a reputation of being the archetype of the romantic poet. His poem is therefore saturated with hope and fervour, altruism, even love. All its four stanzas argue in favour of a heroic fight, albeit demonstrating another essential Modernist theme first.

The first stanza centres on urban decay, disillusion and alienation, caused by capitalism and the bourgeoisie – "they" who are predicted to slowly tire, who are haunted by "stalking" death – it is always the city that is doomed, the city with its crossing-sweepers and streets built by the rich, the city that has lost all faith. Here, its exploration furthermore spans from the metaphor of "easy chains" – the extensive, imperceptible imprisonment of its inhabitants – to the metaphor of "old cloths" – their pallor and vapidity. It closes with its first of mention of snow which equalizes the capitalists to a perversely repellent and empty mass.

The pains of the working class – depicted as the "pillars of that day's gold roof" in the second stanza, as society’s back-bone – are coldness, grief and hunger, but it ultimately is "hard light", it is light and not darkness that they face now. Light that is naturally destined to become the decisive spark igniting the fire of hope, "a strange language" shared by all the readers of this poem as if an automatism is being at work, the same automatism that leads Spender to speaking of a symphonious "we".

Strengthening its cohesion, the next stanzas continue to depict the revolutionary spirit as vigorously delighted with verses such as "We may strike fire, like fire from flint", preparing for the climax in the fourth: "Watch the admiring dawn explode like a shell / Around us, dazing us with its light like the shine from snow". Notwithstanding, Spender lends depth to the storybook mission shortly before, admitting to the complications ahead that are all seemingly caused by the poor, enemy- ruled past: "Banks", "cathedrals", "the declared insanity of our rulers" are depriving the revolution of its otherwise "Spring-like resources of the tiger / Or of plants who strike out new roots to gushing waters". He reasonably considers a beginning with a completely blank canvas impossible as "old fabric" still constrains sight.

The third and fourth stanza then reintroduce the image of snow, with its hard, white light now equal to that of endless hope: blazing, enlightening, piercing through the veil of the materialistic world ("works, money, interest, building") to reveal nothing but "love for each other", relentless capabilities to make the planet a better place, to mobilize.

Despite the predominating sacrifice of traditional syntax and grammar in Modernist poetry, enabling immediate and vivid thought-representation, "After They Have Tired" reads quite fluidly, openly. Its "strange language" resembles natural rhetorical speech by means of organic stanzaic shape, anaphora (especially the justifying "and"), empowering repetitions ("strength", "love", "failure of banks / failure of cathedrals", direct appeal and recurring variants of the key phrase "clean and equal like the shine from snow".

Spender makes it seem easy for the reader. Seamless. And just too romantic to be true. The imagery’s enormous energy feeds from its simplicity and universality, but it ultimately remains unspecific: Which grief pours over us? Which pain gleams at every street corner? Which strength is embedded in our bones? When he was asked about writing processes, Spender once stated: "My own experience is that a rhythm or something comes into my head, which I feel I must do, I must write it, create it." But which rhythm is it? Which rhythm is it that we must hear, which course is it that we must take in order to admire revolution’s dawn?

While the poem's optimism may seem too vague for the reader, it eventually most definitely seemed too vague for Spender. The publication of his programmatic "Forward from Liberalism" in 1937 led to an offical invitation of the British Communist Party which turned out to be a short-lived association: "I wrote something for The Daily Worker attacking the party and that was the last I heard of my membership", the poet recalled. The Spanish Civil War had shattered his – and many other’s – hopefulness towards communism.

Full text upon request. – Dieu Nguyen. Published 2016.

[twh-news]

Tl;dr: Tom Hiddleston on "Kermode & Mayo's Take" podcast on Friday 6th May

Check your favourite podcast app then!

Kermode & Mayo’s Take makes its debut this Friday, bringing Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s witterings back to our ears after a month (and a bit) away.

It’s been just over a month since Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo were last united in our eardrums. On Friday April 1st, they signed off from their BBC Radio Five Live show of 21 years, Kermode & Mayo’s Film Review (Wittertainment to its mates), and their many fans have been waiting eagerly for their return.

It was quickly announced what that would be: a new podcast called Kermode & Mayo’s Take, with a second called Kermode & Mayo’s Take Two. But still: there’s been a wait of over a month for that to start, in spite of it now being advertised on the side of buses.

Well, we’ve got the start date. The first show was recorded on Bank Holiday Monday, and it’s going to launch at the end of this week: Friday May 6th. Tom Hiddleston is the first guest on the show, and the episode will be available at the usual podcast places on Friday.

That said, the only way might be down! The pair’s sub-two minute teaser for their new show has topped the iTunes movie podcast charts since it was released, and hasn’t budged for weeks. In truth, don’t expect it to move for a while when actually episodes start arriving. Normal service is about to be resumed…

[redsoapbox]

MY TOP TEN CHRISTMAS MOVIES

Now that December is finally here, the McGrath household can upgrade the nightly Christmas movie from Hallmark seasonal romance to accepted Christmas classic. (Although in admitting defeat on winning the girls over on Miracle on 34th Street - either version) - I have to acknowledge that the list of films that we can all agree on as festive classics is a little shorter than I would like.

Here is my list of top ten Christmas movies -

10. The Santa Clause (1994) - John Pasquin

John Pasquin’s cinematic debut, he had previously worked on numerous T.V. shows including Newhart and Thirtysomething, opens with the risky gambit of having Santa fall to his death from the roof of Scott Calvin’s home. Calvin (Tim Allen), believing his home is being burgled, confronts Santa and startles him into plummeting to his doom. Before you know it, and after much urging from his son Charlie (Eric Lloyd), Calvin has donned the big red suit and his transformation into Santa has begun.

The Santa Clause combines rather broad comedy - there is much fun to be had with Calvin’s overnight weight gain and Charlie’s class presentation on how his Dad is actually Santa - with the usual Christmas sentiment. In this particular case, the healing of Scott’s relationship with Charlie and ex-wife Laura (Wendy Crewson).

A pre-Buzz Lightyear Allen gives a virtuoso performance as the would-be St Nick, and that went a long way to making the film a hit at the box office, spawning two sequels The Santa Clause 2 (2002) and The Santa Clause 3 (2006).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpzB4ubEqIE

9. The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) - Bharat Nallur

I reviewed this thought-provoking film on how Charles Dickens’ saved Christmas at the time of it’s release -

https://pardontheglueman.tumblr.com/post/169301253898/the-man-who-invented-christmas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx3ctBjG6yI

8. Get Santa (2014)  - Christopher Smith

When the always over-generous Empire film magazine only gives a movie two stars, then you know that you are going out on a very thin limb indeed. Still, a lot of what I want from a Christmas movie - a story about redemption, likeable characters with likeable lead actors, a splash of humour, a touch of Christmas magic, and, finally, a guaranteed have-to-make-a-quick-exit-to-the-kitchen-to-compose-myself ending - are all present and correct here. And Get Santa really delivers - like a hard-working postman trudging through six feet of snow on Christmas Eve just to make sure that your Auntie Maureen’s card can take its proper place on your mantelpiece.

Get Santa has a best of British cast too; Rafe Spall as ex-con Steve, Jodie Whittaker as his estranged wife and Jim Broadbent as a banged up Santa. Throw in Stephen Graham, Warwick Davis and Joanna Scanlan and you have the second best cast Christmas movie ever (nothing is ever going to beat Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore and Henry Travers in IAWL).

This may be the film on the list that you are most likely to have not seen, so in an effort to shore up support for this selection, I call my star witness - Mark Kermode who had this to say in his three-star Guardian review ‘It’s sweet -natured fare, boosted with spirited comic performances (Broadbent is a particular treat) and served up with plenty of DIY sparkle’.

7. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) - Henry Selick

Tim Burton’s unique vision of Christmas/Halloween is brought to life by Henry Selick, a gifted animator who had worked for Walt Disney Studios and in a freelance capacity before making his name with this masterpiece. I simply didn’t get this on release (my admittedly old-fashioned notion of what constitutes a Christmas movie forming a great big mental road block to a full appreciation of the imagination, visual style, black humour, gothic charm and exquisite pathos on display here), and it was only through a recent viewing with my children as part of our Halloween movie get togethers that I finally saw the light. Jack Skellington (voiced by Chris Sarandon) is a captivating character, brought to life by Danny Elfman’s songs and Selick’s ground breaking animation, and his desperate quest for belonging is one that we can all sympathise with, especially at Christmas. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGiYxCUAhks

6. Remember The Night (1940) - Mitchell Leisen

This is a golden-age of Hollywood classic screwball comedy, starring the legendary Barbara Stanwyck, arguably the greatest comedienne in Hollywood history, Fred MacMurray, arguably the nicest guy in film history (at least until his turn as the murderous Walter Neff in Billy Wilder’s terrific noir Double Indemnity), and penned by arguably the funniest man in film history, Preston Sturges.

James Harvey in his 700-page opus Romantic Comedy in Hollywood (From Lubitsch to Sturges), which is, arguably, the best ever book about Hollywood, reveals that it was the shabby treatment (in Sturges’ not so humble opinion) of his screenplay, and the slow pacing of Leisen’s direction, that drove the screenwriter to extraordinary lengths to gain control of his own movies - basically making a deal with Paramount that he would sell them his next screenplay for a nominal sum of ten dollars as as long as he got to direct the picture. That deal changed movie history, setting the precedent of a writer / director that Orson Welles was soon to follow with Citizen Kane (1941).

The plot is a unique one, not that it truly matters in a Sturges movie, and centres around hardboiled career criminal Lee Leander (Stanwyck) having to choose between spending jail in Christmas or being released into the custody of her prosecuting attorney John Sargant (MacMurray). Hey, I didn’t say it made any sense! Of course, the season works its magic and, hey presto, one reformed criminal later Christmas love is in the air!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKcLcT9dOFk

5. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) - Brian Henson

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is the greatest Christmas story ever written, and arguably the main reason that Christmas in Britain is celebrated in quite the way that it is today (see The Man Who Invented Christmas above). There have been all manner of adaptations down the years, and here it is re-imagined as a vehicle for Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzy and co in a way that works beyond anybody’s wildest expectations.

All the human drama, the pathos, the cry from the heart for social justice that Dickens conveyed in his peerless book survives this, the most unlikely of screen adaptations. Much of the credit must go to Michael Caine, who despite sharing top billing with a bunch of muppets, emerges as a genuine contender for the crown of greatest screen Scrooge. Throw in a script by Jerry Juhl, which has The Great Gonzo as Charles Dickens, narrating his ghostly tale with a straight face, and Paul Williams’ super sing-along songs  “Marley and Marley” “One More Sleep ‘Till Christmas” and “Thankful Heart” , and you have an all time Christmas classic that can be enjoyed by everyone from 1 to 92. Bravo!  

4. ELF -  (2003)  John Favreau

Elf is the Shawshank Redemption of Christmas Movies - no matter who, where  or when you poll an audience, this charmingly comic celebration of Christmas always punches above its weight, getting the better of some very famous films in the process. Elf finished 10th in the IMDB poll for Greatest Christmas Movie and came 2nd in both the Time Out and Radio Times polls. It’s A Wonderful Life always, always comes top, but as someone who is still reeling from Citizen Kane losing first place to Vertigo in Sight and Sound’s celebrated Greatest Movie poll, I can see a time when Elf goes one better too.

Elf has a career-best performance from Will Ferrell, a winningly elfin turn from Zooey Deschanel and a series of fine cameo’s from Bob Newhart, Ed Asner, Faizon Love and Peter Dinklage as “angry” elf Miles Finch to recommend it, but it’s the hard to beat combination of laugh-out-loud set pieces, father and son second chances, and an opposites attract love story to top them all that makes this a genuinely affecting festive treat.

3. A Christmas Carol (1999) - David Jones

Of the umpteen takes on Dickens’ grasping miser, of which Alastair Sim’s turn as Scrooge (1951) is by far the most celebrated, I just prefer Patrick Stewart in this excellent T.V. movie. This may seem a deliberately obscure choice, but that is far from the case. Firstly, there is an A-list cast featuring Richard E Grant, Saskia Reeves, Dominic West and, at the top the bill, Stewart himself. 

As Screen Rant describes it, ‘Stewart plays a far more blunt, bitter and straight forward version of the miser... without feeling maniacal’. In short, he underplays the part, keeping the mugging down to a minimum. The clincher, though, is Stewart’s handling of the scene when he awakes to find it is still Christmas morning and that the spirits have granted him a second chance at life after all. He tries to emit a happy, life-affirming laugh, but is so unused to the sensation that he almost chokes himself. Wonderful stuff! There will be all the usual Scrooges to choose from this Christmas - Sim, George C Scott and Albert Finney amongst them, but the Stewart version will be there somewhere in the middle of the night on ITV3. If you peruse the Radio Times long enough you’ll find it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vviOGFiGrHc

2. Miracle on 34th Street - George Seaton (1947)  &  Les Mayfield (1994)

Okay, a bit of false accounting going on here in grouping the two films together. The original is the better version, but I’ve always loved the re-make too. After all, who can’t bring themselves to believe in Dickie Attenborough as Kris Kringle! Both films are perfectly cast - the romantic leads John Payne and Maureen O’ Hara are convincing enough in the black and white original, but are probably just shaded on the chemistry front by Dylan McDermott and Elizabeth Perkins. The unhappy children are sensationally cast, with Natalie Woods and Mara Wilson coming out even. The unthinkable happens, though, when it comes to the playing of Kris Kringle, because although Dickie scores a fab 9 out of 10 on my Santometer, Edmund Gwenn, who picked up a best supporting actor Oscar for his Kringle, scores a perfect 10.

The Oscar-winning original story, by Valentine Davies, must be known to just about everyone by now - a perfectly nice old man, given to the belief that he is really Kris Kringle, becomes, more by accident than design, Macy’s famous department store Santa. No sooner is he in post, than Kris begins to challenge the corporatisation of Christmas, directing customers to other toy stores all over town, where hard up parents can buy their presents at discount prices. He is about to face the sack, when Macy’s realise that he is a great loss leader for them, prompting arch rivals Gimbles to try and nobble him. Kris is committed to an institution for the insane on cooked up charges, and a battle rages to secure his release by Christmas Eve, so that the children of the world won’t be disappointed on Christmas morning! Each film uses an interesting plot device to allow a judge, desperate not to be seen as the man who gives a court ruling that Santa doesn’t exist, a way out without losing face, and there is a happily romantic final scene to round things off in the accepted festive manner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibDD8Y3IJrg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCNbTAtD-jU

1. It’s a Wonderful Life - Frank Capra (1946)

I reviewed this seasonal great for Wales Arts Review last Christmas -

https://www.walesartsreview.org/rewatching-its-wonderful-life/

The next best Christmas films - The Bishop’s Wife, Arthur Christmas, A Christmas Story, Christmas in Connecticut

Merry Christmas to all.

[wsmith215]

An Argentine journalist’s 13-year quest to do right by tennis legend Guillermo Vilas

In 2007, the WTA announced that upon revisiting the rankings data for 1976, Evonne Goolagong — a multiple Grand Slam singles champion who had never reached the No. 1 ranking — should have been in the top spot ahead of Chris Evert for two weeks in 1976, officially altering the record 31 years later.

That was a life-transforming experience, less so for the Australian champion Goolagong than a 51-year-old journalist halfway around the world in Argentina, Eduardo Puppo.

“I took that [Goolagong decision] as a divine sign,” Puppo, now 62, explained in the course of long email exchanges with ESPN.com. “It was no longer time to sit back, but to take up the search.”

So Puppo set out to earn the same retroactive honor for his compatriot Guillermo Vilas, a Hall of Famer who played in eight Grand Slam finals, earning four titles, over an 18-year, record-shattering career that leaves him, along with Rafael Nadal and Bjorn Borg, among a Holy Trinity of clay-court tennis.

2 Related

In the ensuing 13 years, Puppo and his main ally, Romanian mathematician and computer programmer Marian Ciulpan, amassed a formidable body of evidence (some 1,200 pages of documents, and a review of the 23,000 official matches played by the 1,117 pro players who were active at the time) to bolster their claim that Vilas was erroneously denied the No. 1 ranking on two different occasions.

The ATP investigated Puppo’s exhaustive research in 2015 and ultimately declined to act on the claim, without refuting it.

The Puppo team was as “devastated” as, reportedly, Vilas himself. Now 67 years old and living in Monaco in semi-seclusion due partly to health issues, Vilas in recent years has refused to discuss the issue. But last week, speaking to ESPN.com through Puppo, Vilas said: “I made my claims when appropriate, but no one listened to me. At one point I gave up, and that’s why I never spoke again. But years later, Puppo appeared and gave me hope.”

Vilas’ hopes may have been shattered, but not those of his passionate Argentine advocate. Puppo soldiers on. His team now includes a sports lawyer working on getting the case adjudicated in court. (The Puppo team is not seeking any financial award for Vilas or itself.)

The No. 1 ranking has become an obsession for Puppo, and the quest has exacted a toll.

“I am passionate about research,” Puppo wrote. “I knew that tracking No. 1 was a very complex and unpredictable goal, but I never thought it would take 13 years of my life and my family.”

Puppo has put aside weekend outings, missed vacations and strained his relationship with his family seeking redress for Vilas. Courtesy Eduardo Puppo

Puppo explained that he “put aside weekend outings,” missed annual vacations and “narrowed” his relationship with his wife and three children. His family understood that the quest is part of his job (this is a man who spent 22 years writing a three-volume, 2,800-word history of tennis in Argentina) and accepted that seeking redress for Vilas gradually became an “emotional goal” too important for Puppo to forgo.

According to Argentine journalist Sebastian Fest, it was Vilas himself who first suggested that he had been robbed of his rightful place among former No. 1 players in an interview with Fest at the French Open in 2007.

Puppo, a passionate tennis fan and somewhat accomplished recreational player, first met Vilas as a rookie journalist in 1980 and, over the years, interviewed him many times. He described his relationship with Vilas in those early years as an appropriately formal one. “We were journalist and player, nothing more,” he said, adding that he didn’t even discuss his project with its subject for many years.

Fest, who recently served as the president of the International Tennis Writers’ Association, told ESPN.com that while Vilas is grateful and enthusiastic about Puppo’s efforts, their relationship has largely been professional.

The role of sports heroes like Vilas in Argentina helps explain why Puppo vanished down the rabbit hole. Argentines take fierce pride in their national heroes. It frustrates and stings many that while Vilas never officially held the top ranking, other, perhaps less deserving, men from rival South American nations did: Gustavo Kuerten from Brazil and Chile’s Marcelo Rios. To add insult to injury, Rios reached No. 1 without even having won a single major singles title.

“It is a topic that has the potential to interest the whole country,” Fest said. “If Vilas is given No. 1 in those times in 1975 or 1976, there will be no other topic that day that can match it. Front page of all the newspapers and congratulations from the president.”

Vilas remains an important national figure in Argentina. Nicknamed “Young Bull of the Pampas” for his strength and endurance (Vilas was flattered when he was described as “masochistic”), Vilas is also a poet and brooding, philosophical iconoclast.

In 2012, Puppo hired an artist to create a life-sized iron sculpture of Vilas, pictured, hitting his renowned one-handed topspin backhand. Courtesy Eduardo Puppo

In 2012, five years into his research, Puppo decided to honor Vilas. Puppo, who has also worked in various administrative and promotional capacities in tennis, hired an artist to create a life-sized iron sculpture of Vilas hitting his money shot, the renowned one-handed topspin backhand. The statue was ultimately installed at the entrance to the Mar del Plata Nautical Club in Buenos Aires, where Vilas got his start in tennis.

The following year, Puppo shared the full details of his effort with Vilas, who in 2014 asked Puppo to be his biographer. According to Puppo, the two met at Vilas’ home 96 times to conduct interviews and research a book that is 600 pages long and counting.

“I continue to perfect [it] today,” Puppo said. “It is Guillermo’s story and a summary of all the research into the rankings matter. All this brought Guillermo closer to me.”

To a skeptic, it may sound like Puppo was bewitched by the power of Vilas’ personality and celebrity. But the body of evidence compiled by Puppo’s team is convincing, and Fest confirmed that he is taken seriously and admired by many. “He [Puppo] is not a groupie at all, he’s a professional. He has a passion for tennis and the conviction that when it comes to Vilas, there is a case there.”

Puppo’s argument is a compelling one. He says his research shows Vilas was unjustly denied the opportunity to eclipse No. 1 Jimmy Connors in the rankings in two specific periods (five weeks beginning on Sept. 22, 1975, and the first two weeks of 1976) because the ATP did not publish rankings in the weeks when Vilas was on top, times that Puppo characterizes as “blank weeks.”

During that dawn of the computer era, the ATP published rankings sporadically (just 11 times in 1974 and 13 times in 1975). It was partly because the rankings, based on a player’s average performances, were seen mainly as a guide for entry and seeding in tournaments, and partly because the ATP simply lacked resources.

“People played with the rankings a lot then, because it was based on an average of a player’s performances,” Jose Higueras, a two-time French Open semifinalist and rival of Vilas, told ESPN.com. “Jimmy [Connors] and Bjorn [Borg] knew how to keep their rankings high. If you played smaller events, your ranking could only go down. There were times when I knew I could win a $75,000 tournament and my ranking would go still down, not up.”

In 1977, Vilas won 16 titles, including the French Open, yet he was denied the No. 1 ranking by both the computer and most expert panels. Daniel SIMON/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

The gap between Sept. 16 and Oct. 29 was unusually long, lasting 43 days. That’s the time frame during which, according to Puppo, Vilas would have first been ranked No. 1. But as no rankings were published, Connors retained the honor.

Given the purpose of the rankings, there was really no talk about the top guy until the very end of the year, when a number of experts and panels weighed in with their own, subjectively generated, year-end rankings — much like the NCAA once crowned its No. 1 football team by vote.

An even more striking anomaly occurred later, in 1977, when Vilas put together one of the greatest years ever yet was denied both by the computer and most of the year-end “expert panels.”

In 1977, Vilas won 16 titles (by contrast, Roger Federer won 12 in his most prolific year, 2006) and amassed a record 53-match clay-court winning streak that has since been eclipsed only by Nadal.

Vilas won major titles at the French and US Opens that year, and he was runner-up at the Australian Open. Yet Connors still ended up on top in the final rankings issued by the ATP despite failing at the majors and losing to Vilas both times they played in 1977, including in the US Open final. His record of 69-11 with eight titles pales in comparison to Vilas’, but the ranking system still worked in Connors’ favor.

Puppo’s research uncovered numerous errors and omissions in the official ATP record. Vilas, who had complained bitterly about being denied access to the official ATP records for that year, felt vindicated. Based on Puppo’s investigations, the ATP retroactively gave Vilas credit for three clay-court titles (bringing his career total to 49; only Nadal has won more) that were originally misidentified by surface.

But that was about as far as the ATP was willing to go after a comprehensive 2015 review of Puppo’s research. Chris Kermode, then the ATP’s chief executive, made the call to ignore Puppo’s work, admitting that while mistakes existed in the “official” record, awarding Vilas the top ranking retroactively would be too disruptive. Kermode warned that it would create a chain reaction of claims and challengers to the various records.

“It’s a huge deal for a player, so we haven’t done this or taken this lightly at all,” Kermode, himself a former pro player, told The New York Times after dismissing Puppo’s claims in 2015. “But at some point, that’s the call we have to make. … Rewriting history is impossible.”

Puppo, who said he was “deeply saddened” at the time of the ATP’s decision, still believes its response was “insufficient,” given the scope of his research, and emphasized that the ATP has never been able to refute his work yet does not want to face the truth.

Puppo responded to a conciliatory email from Kermode, writing: “No, we are not rewriting the story, that is impossible. The story is unique. We are writing the missing part of the story. The full story. Otherwise it is better not to tell it, because it is lying to those who starred in it.”

Many still remain uncomfortable with the idea of giving a player something seemingly earned in the past by another player.

Higueras believes Vilas was certainly the top player in 1977 and would like to see that recognized. “But,” he said, “I would never change the rankings, even if the data is incorrect. Then Connors could come back, saying he would have played more if he knew. … It becomes difficult.”

So Puppo’s quest continues. His once dark, long hair has turned into a wild nest of silver and white curls. At times, he sports a beard worthy of a department-store Santa. The rewards for his efforts have been scarce. Leaving for Monaco in 2016, Vilas entrusted all of his sports material for Puppo to curate as he wished.

“I always trusted Puppo and his team; they are professionals and meticulous like me,” Vilas said. “I feel [supported]. Eduardo became a brother to me. My family and I love him and we are grateful for everything he does in a selfless way.”

Puppo is proud that he has earned Vilas’ trust, but it rankles him that he can’t be the warden of an even more valuable possession: the No. 1 ranking that he believes Vilas earned but never really got.

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[culturegazing]

Anthology | Life isn't a Sprint with Everyone, it's a Marathon with Yourself

I know. This is the 86th lockdown tale you’ve read with the words ‘unprecedented times’. Apart from the simultaneous pandemic and economic downturn though, I have experienced staying inside for a long period of time.

I was in a lockdown of my own about a year before the pandemic. A contract ended and I struggled to find new opportunities. I was hustling and volunteering here and there but was unemployed for four months last year. I avoided going out for non-essential activities because that costed money. Public transport costed money. I avoided seeing friends because they all had jobs and could pay to eat out. I looked for anything that allowed me to save on a single cent of my life savings. Majority of the time, I stayed inside.

On my days off, I’d watch four or five films in one day. I was addicted to watching films and did whatever I could to escape reality. No, I'm not proud of voluntarily sliding under a blanket of restlessness and demotivation but I also don’t think it was time wasted. It was not only therapeutic, but also allowed me to discover a number of films that I came to love and share with those around me. 

I made several mistakes of secluding myself from the world and not having more grit than I usually would. I felt lost and didn’t know what to do or where to find what I wanted to do. So, when global lockdown came around this year, I knew not to repeat my mistakes and lose momentum. After getting retrenched in March, I let myself cry my heart out for one night, and after that, it was onto the next.  

What I realised/ was reminded of:

It’s easy to lose self-worth when I feel like I'm not contributing to anything. I think this is because I’m a workaholic who ties a lot of my self-worth to my work which I don't beat myself up for. Work and contribution is what makes me feel something meaningful.

Even if I have the best intentions but the wrong words, I’ll always sound like I have the worst intentions – Communication is key

If you are struggling to find a job in the field of your interest, just take any opportunity – Even if it isn’t what you want to do with your life, you’ll learn more than just staying at home by yourself all day

There is an end but it’s always invisible

There are more opportunities out there that you didn’t even know existed

Life isn’t a sprint with everyone, it’s a marathon with yourself

What I learned from other people:

“Opportunity + Preparation = Luck” – Betty Liu’s mystery teacher

“Just go for it and let the future work itself out” – Betty Liu

[On flow] “Wow, it didn’t feel like two hours – That’s when flow happens. You almost kick into autopilot, everything is working so well you lose track of time” – Betty Liu

“The best type of marketing doesn’t even feel like marketing” – Chad T.

“Pain + Reflection = Progress” – Ray Dalio

“Always overdeliver” – Jack Welch

“Don’t think of your career as a ladder, think of it as a jungle gym” – Mohamed El-Erian

[On happiness] “The more specific you are, the more likely it is to happen” – Jeff Weiner

“You need to optimise for both passion and skill…sometimes people optimise one at the exception of the other, it’s going to make it challenging, but if you know what you really want, if you know what you love, if you know what resonates with you and you have the ability to do that, or at least you’re in a position where you can learn those skills overtime you can make it happen… If you only have one or the other, you’re going to be frustrated” – Jeff Weiner

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results” – Phil Knight

[On making career decisions] “Follow your compass, not your clock” – Andrea Jung

"Your direction is more important than your speed" – We the Urban

Resources

I’ve been using these for the past few months and I hope at least one of them will change you in some way, big or small

Linkedin Learning (30-day free trial, $40/ month, $299.88/ year)

I used my 30-day free trial by the way. 

Betty Liu on Career Success

Guy Kawasaki on Turning Life Wisdom into Business Success

Influencer Interview: Oprah Winfrey (interviewed by Jeff Weiner)

CV Success Masterclass by Careercake

How to Create a Perfect Elevator Pitch by Careercake

Expert Tips for Answering Common Interview Questions by various

Books

Work Smarts by Betty Liu

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Sea of Strangers by Lang Leav (This is an old favourite and something I always come back to during times of adversity)

Podcasts

Self-Development/ Knowledge

Radiate with Betty Liu (I know, I’m obsessed with her)

The Lavendaire Lifestyle

Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People

Girlboss Radio

The Michelle Obama Podcast

The Marie Forleo Podcast

The Unemployed Graduate

News

The Daily by The New York Times

Lifestyle/ Entertainment

Stop Everything!

Staying in with Emily & Kumail

Film

The Film Comment Podcast

Truth & Movies: A Little White Lies Podcast

The Backseat

Kermode & Mayo’s Film Review

Art & Design

Art History For All

Creative Boom

Music

Frank Ocean – Self Control

HAIM – I Know Alone

HAIM – Running if You Call My Name

HANDSOME – Save Some Love

HANDSOME - TV Set

HONNE – 306

The Internet – Wanna Be

Kamasi Washington – Truth

Khalid – Saturday Nights

Iris Temple – Capsize

Milan Ring – Step Back

Murkage Dave – King of First World Problems

Raleigh Ritchie – Time in a Tree

Raleigh Ritchie - Stay Inside

SAFIA – Resolution

SALES – Getting it On

SG Lewis & JP Cooper – Shivers

Soft Powder – Can You Look Inside My Head?

Sylo Nozra – FOMO

Tim Atlas ft. cehryl – Together Lonely

Ultracrush – Swimming

Yumi Zouma – Lonely After

The Weeknd – Scared to Live

Websites

Le Cinema Club

Little White Lies

It’s Nice That

Passerbuys

Ignant

Other

Ecosia (A web browser plants a tree for every search you do, funded by ad revenue.)

We Are One: A Global Film Festival on YouTube (29 May - 7 June)

I will keep adding to this whenever I come across resources I find valuable. 

In the meantime, be empathetic, be compassionate, don't advocate hate - to anyone.

[robdwebster]

Stuff of the year, 2017

Annually, he shits out the thing.

Album of the year:

01. Gorillaz - Humanz 02. Steven Wilson - To the Bone 03. Diablo Swing Orchestra - Pacifisticuffs

Most of my favourite bands seem to have taken this year off completely, and the ones who haven't have released good singles or middling records. All this makes releasing Humanz in 2017 the equivalent of turning up to a knife fight with a nuclear bomb.

What an incredible year to be a Gorillaz fan! A huge, diverse, creatively fertile album, with a bonus disc that's every bit as good, surprise single releases throughout the year, their own festival, loads of pro shot gigs, and next year they're going to do it all over again! To celebrate, please accept this video of Damien Allbran going fucking tonto as he sings Charger.

Other albums I liked: Not this year, friend. Not this year.

TV show of the year:

01. Taskmaster 02. Robot Wars 03. BoJack Horseman

A moment of appreciation for Taskmaster - 18 of its 34 episodes were released this year, and every episode was a goldmine - I can’t remember a comedy show being this funny, this consistent and this prolific since the Simpsons. Series 5 may be my favourite to date; Sally Phillips and Bob Mortimer in the same line-up... we were spoiled!

Robot Wars had a good year, too: two excellent series. My favourite bit was when Apex tried to kill that audience member.

Other shows I liked: Dave Gorman: Modern Life is Good-ish, Doctor Who, Inside No. 9, Rick & Morty, Stranger Things, The Apprentice, The League of Gentlemen, Uncle.

Podcast of the year:

01. All Killa No Filla 02. Reply All 03. FiveThirtyEight Politics

Despite the title, Rachel Fairburn and Kiri Pritchard-McLean's All Killa No Filla is only about 20% serial killers’ life stories. The remaining 80% is frank, scathing anecdotes about the presenters' personal lives as they constantly get distracted by each other's company. At its best, AKNF feels like eavesdropping on a salacious conversation between two oversharing friends who've forgotten they left the mic on. Pray for Rachel's bumhole.

FiveThirtyEight Politics is a public good; a bastion of reason that has kept me clear-headed and well informed throughout the mayhem of Trump’s first year in office. Reply All, meanwhile, is seldom as grisly as the other two podcasts (in their different ways!) but comfortably the most gripping - the producers have a real nose for a premise that’ll hook me from the start. This year they’ve investigated mystery soundscape phone calls, phished their own colleagues, and spent several months calling up the same group of tech support scammers purely for the joy of harassing them. I am addicted.

(Also - it didn’t quite make the top three, but My Dad Wrote a Porno kept me not only calm but laughing like a damned fool on a couple of long haul flights, which usually make me a bit nervous, so I wanted to give it an honorable mention.)

Other podcasts I liked: Hello Internet, Kermode & Mayo’s Film Review, My Dad Wrote a Porno, No Such Thing as a Fish, Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast, S-Town, The Unmade Podcast, Trumpcast.

Film of the year:

01. Get Out 02. It 03. Baby Driver

I usually think of myself as more of a TV fan than a film fan - but good god, 2017! You know it's a good year when Studio Ghibli doesn't stand a chance. Not to mention the film that is literally an oil painting. Christ!

You wouldn’t guess from this year’s list, but I can usually take or leave horror; I certainly don’t seek it out. It happened to pique my interest, then scare me in just the right way. Like Stranger Things, It’s strength was making the fear part of a big adventure.

(Side note: I knew Pennywise was supposed to be “scary,” but walking into the cinema, I didn’t truly believe I was going to be scared by the clown. I also did not know what happened in the first scene with Georgie and the boat. Reader, I was scared by the clown.)

Any one of these three could have been my top pick in another year, but in 2017 it’s hard to compete with Get Out - cutting satire, grim psychological horror and hilarious comedy, united in a film that looked and felt like nothing else I’d ever seen in a cinema. Deservedly number one.

Other films I liked: Blade Runner 2059, Loving Vincent, The Death of Stalin.

Game of the year:

01. Sonic Mania 02. Splatoon 2 03. Super Mario Odyssey

Speaking of amazing years - did you see all the great games we got this year!?

Splatoon 2 was an incredible refinement of the already brilliant Splatoon, and Super Mario Odyssey is the most downright charming video game I've played in years, but heck. I'd been waiting for a game like Sonic Mania for the best part of twenty years, I reckon. When that game arrives, and it's perfect, I don't see that I have much choice but to rank it first.

Other games I liked: Arms, Cuphead, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, Slime Rancher, Steamworld Dig 2, Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Thimbleweed Park, Tumbleseed.

Stuff of yesteryear:

01. Kero Kero Bonito - Bonito Generation (album) 02. Devin Townsend Project - Transcendence (album) 03. Death Note (TV show)

This category’s not as relevant this year as it was in 2016 because I’ve spent too much time working through new stuff to dwell on my back catalogue all that much.

That said, I somehow missed Transcendence and Bonito Generation last year, which is a shame, because they would have easily knocked Dream Theater’s flabby concept album off the third spot.

I also finally watched Death Note this year; it’s a really uneven piece of work that takes itself way too seriously, but a phenomenal central conceit and plenty of really solid twists kept it really engaging despite all the flaws. I very much enjoyed it, it’s something I’d definitely come back to.

Other stuff I enjoyed catching up on: Civilization V (game).

Quickfire round:

Person of the year: 01. Rilakkuma / 02. Jeremy Corbyn / 03. Jodie Whittaker

Jodie Whittaker broke a glass ceiling on Doctor Who. Jeremy Corbyn defied ridiculous odds to make the UK left wing competitive for the first time certainly within my adult life, probably since I was born. Rilakkuma is just an adorable bear character with lots of nice pictures on Twitter - but in a year like 2017 that’s all you need.

Single of the year: 01. Gorillaz - Sleeping Powder / 02. Muse - Dig Down / 03. Gorillaz - We Got the Power

A slightly redundant category, especially since I’ve already said Gorillaz won the year for me, I mostly just wanted to give Dig Down a shout-out. Stripped down, hypnotic, with an infusion of gospel. Low-key batshit. Loved it.

City of the year: 01. Tokyo / 02. Auckland / 03. Bristol

I feel bad putting Auckland in second place given it was my home for most of the year and I loved living there, but Tokyo was properly magical in a way few places truly are. I always wanted to go to Japan as a kid but always kind of suspected I'd never have the chance - turns out growing up has its perks. It’s early days for Bristol, but I’ve had a great time so far. Looking good for 2018!

Footenote - stuff I’ve probably missed:

I mean, I’ve probably missed shitloads of stuff. I’ve made no effort to work through the most popular films or the biggest games or anything like that - these are just my favourites of the things that happened to catch my eye.

That said, there’s stuff I’m gutted I didn’t get round to because I suspect it may have done reasonably well.

On the film side, I wanted to catch Daphne, I Am Not a Witch and The Disaster Artist but I missed the first two in the cinema, and the latter came out a little close to Christmas, so I’ll need to check if it’s still kicking about.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Black Mirror displaces BoJack Horseman in the TV category once I get round to watching it, but it released literally two days shy of the end of the year, and I’m waiting for my girlfriend to get back before I put it on. (Who I haven’t nominated for Person of the Year only because I wanted to keep the category competitive.)

As for video games - I’ve omitted Cuphead from my rankings because I’ve bought it but barely touched it; I suspect it’d make the top ten but probably not the top three. I don’t much fancy Metroid: Samus Returns’ chances of knocking Super Mario Odyssey in fourth, either, but I think I’d be a big fan.

[sortyourlifeoutmate]

Apropros of nothing - well, mostly because I’m watching this rather old video of Mark Kermode going through things people found creepy in films - let me again take this moment to express my extreme dislike of the film Martyrs.

Not because of its grim subject matter, though that is kind of part of I suppose, but rather just because I thought it was naff and yet some people seemed to find it scary.

Everyone involved is either an idiot or an insane idiot with delusions of philosophical eloquence. It really got on my tits.

Although, speaking of the video above, the ending of Borderlands is horribly claustrophobic. The bulk of the film is perfectly adequate found-footage schlock but that very last bit actually got me a little, because it comes out of fucking NOWHERE.

What do I find creepy?

Hum.

Mothman Prophecies was pretty good. Or was it diaries? Think it’s prophecies. Kind of slow paced but had some bits in it that were just unsettling. Like, not out-and-out scary, but just not right. Like the phone. I liked it.

Inland Empire is incomprehensible but that’s probably WHY I find it so uncomfortable. As has been noted it’s probably about as close to an actual nightmare as a film is going to get, because things just HAPPEN and it makes a kind of sense just not any kind of sense you’re allowed to understand.

Oh, and here’s another one.

When I was a much younger man my parents mentioned Don’t Look Now to me. We had a VHS copy. I watched the VHS copy. It was a blurry mess and, since I was a kid, the film was dull and I didn’t really get it.

A few months back the local cinema was, for whatever reason, showing it, so I went with mother to go see.

Watching that film now, with a clear picture, it’s actually something else entirely. It’s still a lot naff in places and kind of plodding but what the film does succeed in doing - and doing very, very well - is inculcating this constant, crushing, overwhelming sense of DREAD.

I am not even shitting you. Just everything about it makes you feel really fucking on edge. Strangers glance at the main characters. Everyone acts like they’re up to something. Curtains twitch and the locals stare from windows. At night, in darkened Venice, you hear footsteps and look and catch a flash of someone having just left.

It’s actually really draining after a while.

Ending is still ridiculous, of course. And while that opening scene may still be a little overwrought it still gets you. Or it got me, at least.

My personal preference for horror films tends to be on IDEAS. I want a neat IDEA and I want that IDEA played around with. The Babadook delivered good, say. Trench 11 had a neat idea that should have been fun but was a steaming hot turd. Swings and roundabouts, see?