Watched a lot of television around the end of the year. Probably because I was pretty burnt out and I didn't want to think about it. Some of it was not great but some of it was pretttty darn goooooooddddd
Mad Men (2007-2015)
Pretty much just as good as I remember it, which is to say: very good. I think they ended it at a good time; I don’t know how much longer they could have strung along the petty dramas that powered the show. Peggy’s character arc is maybe the most satisfying, though Pete Campbell especially in the last two seasons gives her a run for her money. Don basically stays Don throughout, although I like that after he reconnects with Betty he stops being so profligate. There is a lot more humour in the show than I remember! Oh & the dialogue is immaculate.
Rick and Morty s08 (2025)
I didn’t realise that this came out and then I watched it all at once when I was sick. It’s… more of the same. At some point it seems like a whole “adult cartoons” industry pulled itself together and they’re all doing Rick and Morty but with different agendas, and it all feels very slightly slop-adjacent.
Smiling Friends s03 (2025)
…Except for Smiling Friends, this one’s still a good “adult cartoon”. They do more fun stuff with animation, mixing live-action and digital and stop-motion. The humour is quick & clever and there’s a Chris-chan reference in there somewhere. I will never get tired of Michael Cusack’s accent.
The World at War (1973)
Was this Prestige Television 40 years before Prestige Television? The scope of this series is magnificent. The sound editing, Laurence Olivier’s voice, the extensive archival footage. The interviews with firsthand sources! It remains up-to-date, as well: what we’ve decided is important historical WWII context in the last 50 years hasn’t really changed, so The World at War hits pretty much all of the important story beats.
Nuremberg (2025)
A pretty dumb portrayal of — let’s be real — the least interesting part of World War II. Russell Crowe plays Herman Göring (um ok) but does a creditable job of being a weasel with a bad accent; Rami Malek plays an Army psychiatrist but can’t seem to decide how to play it; there are some other big names wandering around in the background. The script is pretty rough; every third line is one of those showstoppers where you expect the YEAHHH from “We Won’t Get Fooled Again” to play. Deeply unserious movie.
80% of the runtime is a Good Movie. It looks really good and is well-acted. Ralph Fiennes looks like my grandpa, which is a bit uncanny.
The sound design is a little weird—there are lots of scenes with gratuitous breathing noises as people stand around wondering what they should do. It also feels like the sound designer unnecessarily muted background noise, so that when characters talk the sound sort of pulses in and out to ensure total silence in between the lines.
There are subplots that are not resolved and never go anywhere—terrorist plots occurring outside, Fiennes’ crisis of faith—and subplots that appear out of nowhere in the final five minutes of the film and also don’t go anywhere.
The whole movie builds and builds and then goes, “Oh no! Anyway,” like Jeremy Clarkson, and then it’s the end.
It’s fall. There’s a light breeze up and the sky is patchy with windswept fluff carried to and fro before the sun, causing the brightness in the window to pulse gently every few minutes. The light has, over the course of a single week, adopted the watery faraway look that it will retain for the next six or seven months. I can see Daylight Saving Time at the end of the street, going door to door with its pamphlets advocating Full British Darkness. Pretty soon it’ll be here. I double-check that the rechargeable batteries for my headlight are charged.
I picked up Ghyll’s poo and mowed the lawn yesterday. Put a load of laundry out but it’s just barely too chilly to dry clothes all the way through. Tidied up the kitchen. Made up a list of chores that I’m not likely to do. I like the orderly feeling of brisk weather.
I knelt down on the ground this morning and discovered that a cable had come undone under the car. I think it probably happened while we were driving through Wark Forest at the weekend. I remember going over a bump and hearing a bit of a bang. The Check Engine light came on a little after that, and the engine started giving off a new grumbling sort of sound. I’ve plugged the cable back in and cleared the engine fault codes. I wonder if it’ll come back. We may be in the market for a new connector. Doesn’t explain the grumbling, though. I’ll get the car up on jacks at some point and see if I’ve knocked a hole in the exhaust. That would be a pain.
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I’ve just recovered from a quick bout of covid. I think about covid probably less than I should. People are still out there getting covid all of the time, and some of them are getting really ill. It knocked me on my bottom pretty good. But a full day’s rest bookended with gratuitous, sweaty fever dreams was enough to break its hold in my case. I’m fascinated by the metrics my watch recorded throughout: elevated heartrate, depressed heart rate variability. My Stress Score was abysmal, and my Body Battery was pretty much empty for three days. Technology can be a marvel. I give covid
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Big man also got a haircut
Sam and I watched a couple of seasons of Clarkson’s Farm recently and now we’re scrolling Zillow listings for smallholdings in the Pennines and the Borders. Twenty acres would do us. Twenty acres for a cow or two, maybe a goat. A shed to keep the car in, maybe some freeweights or a treadmill. Abutting open access land, close proximity to singletrack. I don’t want to be a farmer, but I want to live on a farm.
When we ran out of episodes of Clarkson’s Farm we went back to catch up on The Grand Tour. I can see why Clarkson has elected to stop doing it. It’s clear that the three of them just aren’t into reviewing cars anymore. That’s fair. Cars are pretty much all the same now, with minor variations. You can only say, “Please look at this 700-horsepower supercar with a Mercedes-AMG engine,” so many different ways.
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More tiling this weekend. From here on out I’m going to do my utmost never to tile another surface in my life. I expect this resolution will last maybe 4 months.
for the work,
for the result.
I've been posting a lot of movie reviews lately, and I was going to stop posting movie reviews because I want this to be a Tech Blog and not a Movie Reviews Blog.
But I have to write about Ad Astra. It's a bad movie, and no one else seems to think so. I don't understand it.
First of all, the movie is maybe 70% exposition. And I'm not just talking about exposition by title cards, though the movie has that; and I'm not just talking about exposition by narration, although the movie has that too, in spades. But almost every character, including Brad Pitt, spends the first half of the movie just wandering around saying things like, "My father, he most decorated astronaut in the history of the program. US Air Force Academy, his doctorate at MIT..." To say nothing of the continual psych evals that Brad Pitt has to take, so that he can look into the camera and tell us how he's feeling.
Speaking of the psych evals! The fact that Brad Pitt just moans and moans about how he's feeling fine, and then the robot is like, "Well, you sound totally good, psych eval passed," highlights how blatant the holes are in the reality of this film. And it's not just the psych evals. It's the way that half of our astronauts are all in their 50s and up. It's the way that everyone crucial to finding the Lima Project is also severely emotionally compromised by the Lima Project. It's the way the military rocket decides to stop en route to help a stranded Norwegian science spaceship. Do you think the Navy would put aside their military exercises to help a sinking ship? A little after this, one of the astronauts gets mauled by a crazed ape, and they just bring the astronaut back into their ship. Is this the same space program that stopped Ken Mattingly from riding Apollo 13 because he hadn't had the measles vaccine? Later on in the film, Brad Pitt has a knife fight with a bunch of astronauts during takeoff. They're all weightless for some reason while the rocket is accelerating through the martian atmosphere. One of the guys fires a gun inside the ship and releases some toxic gas, I don't know. I don't get it.
The weirdest part is that someone did clearly put some thought into this film. When Brad Pitt arrives on Mars, you can briefly see a sign in the background trying to warn against suicide--as if someone had gotten so sick of life on Mars that they wanted to end it all by going outside. Someone noticed and put the effort into the details. And then they're like, "Look, we did a news:"
Not enough chyrons on this news.
The characters are, without exception, 1-dimensional. I don't believe in Brad Pitt's character's, like, internal agony. He has no reason to feel the way he does. Or not feel the way he does. We're just told that he doesn't feel. We're told that TLJ has gone crazy. We're told that he has some ambiguous relationship with his father; his father likes musicals or something. That's their relationship. We need some flashbacks here. We need some more Tommy Lee Jones in the movie. He's got two speaking lines and then we meet him and he's loopy and doesn't say much. And then he kills himself for no reason.
This film wants to be Interstellar but it's taking all of its cues from Armageddon. In Armageddon I didn't care that they brough a Glock to space, because the movie wasn't meant to be a space movie: it was a disaster movie, which happened to take place in space. Space was incidental. But then this movie starts bringing up the Drake Equation and they put Brad Pitt in an anechoic chamber and you're like, "Well well well this must be a Science Movie," and then Brad Pitt climbs up the side of a rocket during liftoff and then the crew of that rocket immediately unbuckle and start firing guns.
To say nothing of the multitude of visual homages that director James Gray is trying to pull off here. Off the top of my head: 2001: A Space Odyssey keeps popping up whenever people are moving around in spaceships; Interstellar is referenced in all of the lens flares; Gravity when the two guys are tethered together while flying through space; The Martian when Pitt does some sort of self-surgery on his obliques; Sunshine when they use long red-tinted cuts and then long blue-tinted cuts. All of which just makes you think of the better movies you could be watching than this.
When Brad Pitt finds Tommy Lee Jones, it occurred to me that I don't actually know what either of these characters want. TLJ wants to find aliens, but it sounds like he wants to find little green men with laser guns and flying cars. "No sign of consciousness." I'm not sure what Pitt wants. To bring his father back to earth, I guess? But then what? Pitt clearly finds no fun with anyone on Earth. And it's not like we've had any backstory where he feels like he misses his father, like he wants to see him again. I don't believe in that.
Something else I didn't like but couldn't find a spot for
This movie has a weird prejudice against screens. Every interface is a vocal interface. There's always someone talking in the background, talking through a speaker, speaking some content that belongs in text, on a screen. Things like "Approaching Neptune," or "Please enter your access code." I think if I was trying to be generous, I'd say that maybe they're trying to show us how people are disconnected from each other, that we can only communicate with other people through machines. (Maybe that'd explain why Brad Pitt is so upset throughout the movie.) But comes across as clunky and ham-fisted, since 9 out of 10 times, the content would be served through a screen in regular old 2020. When you turn on your computer, it doesn't say, "Please enter your password." And then you certainly don't have to say your password out loud, so the whole room can hear.
Brad Pitt's story arc
Depressed anhedonic weirdo
Depressed anhedonic space pirate
Find dad
Dad kills self
???
"I am active and engaged. I will live, and love."
The credits
This movie has too many bloody producers.
The reviews
Somehow this movie has top-score reviews from lots of people who seem to know what they're talking about. I don't get it. The film was bereft of scientific accuracy; there was no character to speak of, from any of the people who walked around on screen; the story was patchwork; Pitt and TLJ seemed to be emotionally checked-out. I don't know what to say. I don't know how Richard Roeper can give this film 3.5/4 stars.
Stray observations
Having a special code that opens any spaceship (like the one they used when attending the stranded space monkey ship) seems like a bad idea in a world with space pirates.
These "comfort rooms" appear to be anything but. I like how they put Pitt in time out there when he finally fails a psych eval.
The patch on Brad Pitt's shoulder is so abnormally large.
Before the spaceship takes off from Mars, they say that they're planning a launch at 7:52 UTC. Why the heck are they using UTC on Mars? Use Mars time! Wouldn't 7:52 UTC on Mars be a different time of day, every day?
The way that the lady was like, "Do you want a hot towel? I really appreciate you flying with us, thank you so much for flying with us," really makes me want to fly Virgin Atlantic.
Wait--Virgin Atlantic? Virgin has a spaceship company! Why are they flying Virgin Atlantic.
I see what people mean when they say that this movie is a return to form for Pixar. Pixar does it's best work when it takes abstract concepts and puts life and feelings into them to make them approachable from an everyman's perspective. Now and again you'll see someone repeating the old saw about how each of Pixar's films is just "What if X had feelings?" But I think Pixar takes it a step further that that: they also ask, "...and what does that mean for us, as living, feeling people?"
And this is Pixar at its best. From an aesthetic point of view, I'd say that this one's even better than Toy Story 4. I think that the 'souls' are really interesting to look at in the beginning--the weird focus, the shimmer, the gradient on them like in old film; but they sort of fade into the background after a little while, especially when 'shot' close up. The eyes are traditional plasticky-looking 3D animation, while the body itself is that lightly fuzzy texture we first say in Inside Out. Neither on its own looks bad, but when you put them next to each other it's a little... off. The real world, however, is something else to behold. Easily their most technically astonishing world. It doesn't look real--it looks the way that you wish that real looked.
I think using Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross was also a terrific choice. I could listen to this movie, no visuals at all. The title cards are breathtaking. I don't throw around that word, either. Reznor and Ross are absolutely on form here. The juxtaposition of their unobtrusive ambient soundscapes with the more 'conventional' jazz music works a lot better than you think it would. Especially considering that this is a "children's" film (in the sense that Pixar's films are never just for children).
If I had to pick something I wasn't a huge fan of, maybe I'd say the structure was a little wonky. I liked that we had an opening scene, before our introduction to the soul-world; but once we were in soul-world it sort of felt like we were going to stay there for a while and explore--that these were our characters and we were going to stick with them. Which made it a little jarring when, a third of the way through the movie, we took a right turn back into the real world, and our characters started looking different. It wasn't disorienting per se--it just took a minute to get back into. And but after this the movie caught its stride, and everything fell back into place.
I'm also not sure that I'm coming away with it with that sense of awe, the wake that I've come away with after watching other movies--Pixar or otherwise. Some movies stick with you for a few days, you know? You go back and watch a couple of scenes again and notice things you'd missed. You want to talk about it with someone else. And I don't think I've got that. I don't think this is the film's fault: the message of the film (which only really emerges from about halfway through) is basically the same message as DFW's This is Water, which I've just about been indoctrinated with. So maybe I'm not the ideal audience. Not to say I'm not receptive.
But it makes ranking the film here a bit tough. I'm inclined to give it a 4/5 because I'm not coming away with that wake, like I said; but I'd also have given Toy Story 4 a 4/5, and Soul was better than Toy Story 4; for all that it was a technical achievement, it really was just a thorough nostalgia trip for folks in their late twenties. But this isn't a Toy Story 4 review. So I've pulled a Fantano. Strong 4.
