What I'm Watching

This is a monthly post that chronicles the movies and TV I’ve watched in the last month and the music I’m listening to. Anything I’ve finished gets a review on my website unless I’ve watched something again. So, for example, we recently watched Bullitt, a film I saw multiple times in my teens but hadn’t watched it in decades. We were supposed to watch it two years ago before we went to San Francisco but we forgot. Anyway, I usually don’t write new reviews for films I’ve seen multiple times.

Movies I’ve Watched:

• Black Narcissus (1947): I can understand why this film impressed people in the late 1940s. As with all Powell-Pressburger films I’ve seen, the colour is vivid, extremely vivid. And audiences unfamiliar with location shooting – or with a preference for matte paintings – probably hadn’t seen anything like this, both with the colour and the implied location. And then there’s the supposedly scandalous subject matter, which I guess was titillating, or the very lease attractively controversial. So I guess I can understand why this film was considered a big deal. But, times have changed and…this movie has dated poorly, to put it mildly.

• For Sama (2019): This is an extremely difficult to watch, an on-the-ground film about a family of three living through the Battle of Aleppo. The father runs a hospital and the mother films. They have a very young child. Though I think many of us have become accustomed to seeing death and destruction online through uncensored clips on social media, this is nearly 100 minutes of it, with only little breaks. You’ve been warned.

• Gamera vs. Gyaos (1967): Basically a family kaiju film. So, um, that’s weird.

• She-Wolves of the Wasteland aka Phoenix the Warrior (1988): Aka Heels in the Desert (I made that one up). This is one of those post-apocalyptic action films where the reason for setting it in a post-apocalyptic wasteland was so that they could try to hide the low budget…um, better. But it didn’t work.

• We Were Children (2012): This is a TVO-quality documentary/reenactment about two indigenous people who were forced, like thousands of others, to attend residential schools in Canada. These two survivors deserve a better movie – documentary or dramatization – as do all the survivors. A film like this is the kind of thing that might work as something available to schools to show kids. It’s not the kind of film that will be watched by the masses because, as a film, it’s not very good.

TV I’m Watching:

• Atlanta: It took me a few years but I finally completed one of the most unique American TV shows ever. The best I can do is that it that it’s a sitcom (ish) that starts doing bottle episodes vaguely like Black Mirror or Inside No. 9 only they’re totally not like either of those. So if, like me, you watched the first season and were not sure if you should proceed, you should probably proceed.

• Basketball: The NBA playoffs are wild this year. The remaining teams are:

  • The Boston Celtics: Last year’s champion are down 3-2 and missing their best player (who should have won Finals MVP last year but whatever). I can’t wait until they are eliminated.

  • The Denver Nuggets: Champions two years ago, they have the best player in the world but also have lost players to attrition. They are currently down 3-2.

  • The Indiana Pacers: Have made the Conference Finals for something like the 10th time since they came over from the ABA but they’ve never won and they’ve only been to the NBA Finals once, 25 years ago. I am on the Pacers bandwagon because of this, because of Pascal Siakam, and because they have a Canadian on their team (who is good).

  • The Minnesota Timberwolves: One of the great sad-sack franchises in the NBA, this is the Timberwolves’ second Western Conference Finals in a row but only third in franchise history. They have yet to make the Finals. I am on their bandwagon because I like rooting for franchises like this.

  • The New York Knicks: The Knicks haven’t been in the Conference Finals in 25 years. They haven’t been in the Finals in 26 years. They haven’t won in 52 years. However, I am not rooting for them, because they are the New York Knicks and I have become a basketball fan under this bizarre consensus that they are one of the great franchises in the sport. They are not. If they win this year, we’re just going to get more of this nonsense so I am actively rooting against it. They are up 3-2 on the Celtics and very likely to win.

  • The Oklahoma City Thunder: The last time the Thunder won the Championship, they were the Supersonics and it was 46 years ago (or something). They made the Finals 29 years ago and again, as the Thunder in OKC, 13 years ago. They haven’t been back since. They are Canada’s Team (without the Raptors in the playoffs), in case you didn’t know. I am rooting for them because they are Canada’s Team. They are up 3-2 on the Nuggets.

• The Diplomat: We watched (the much shorter) season 2. I think I have come to terms with the rules of this show and I think I am okay with it.

• Hockey: We have sort of been watching the Leafs lose, in between basketball games. (We also watched the ends of those great Game 7s in the previous round, which is better than normal for us.)

• Taskmaster: We have started watching the latest season of the original show. Did you hear The Atlantic just discover this exists? I think that’s funny. They’re on season 19 or something.

  • Australia: We are almost done season 3.

Music I’m Listening to:

• Alban Berg: Wozzeck live at the Four Seasons Centre, Saturday May 10, 2025: A remarkably staged version of one of the more famous modernist operas.

• Nick Cave: I started listening to his whole oeuvre before the below show. I started with The Boys Next Door and I just made it to Wild God. I had to skip the live stuff and the soundtracks which I am listening to now. If you want to read my Nick Cave reviews, you can find them here. I hope to have added a bunch in the next few weeks.

  • The Boys Next Door: Door Door (1979): Though considered juvenilia, I think this is actually not bad at all.

  • with The Bad Seeds:

    • Wild God (2024): To me this is like a hybrid of recent music with Bad Seeds circa 2004.

    • Live at Meridian Hall, Wednesday April 23, 2025: I first listened to Nick Cave sometime after the release of Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus. (Or at least that’s what I tell myself as I started listened to Tender Prey around the same time so it’s possible I listened to that album first and then Abattoir/Lyre came out. I’m pretty sure “Where the Wild Roses Grow” was the first song of his I heard, in Australia in 2003.) But I had a peculiar attitude towards live music in my teens and I hadn’t yet gotten over it in my early twenties. It never occurred to me to go see The Bad Seeds at that time. It probably wasn’t until Grinderman until I even thought about it and then…I just didn’t get around to it. And then, once the Seeds shifted their sound in the teens I think I sort of lost interest. But seeing Nick Cave last month, I wonder why it took me twenty years to bother.

• Rhiannon Giddens & the Old-Time Revue live at Koener Hall, Thursday May 15, 2025: Just an excellent, super diverse performance of old songs mixed in with some contemporary folk and blues and, um, “banjo hip hop”?