What I'm Watching

Movies I’ve Watched:

• Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters (2020): A documentary about a work of modern dance I’ve never heard of.

• Chuck Chuck Baby (2023): This is, like, a karaoke musical. Not a jukebox musical, a karaoke musical. They sing along to hit songs. It’s weird in part because it’s otherwise seemingly a realist portrait of working class Wales but then there’s these weird fantasy musical sequences.

• Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008): So yes, this is an extremely sad movie. And it’s a tragedy. (I would avoid looking it up if you want to watch this very sad film.) But it also made me mad. And not mad at the Newfoundland courts so much as at the crusade that started as a result. Fortunately, we in Canada are a little more moderate than Americans.

• Fury (1936): This is a highly regarded Hollywood film about lynching that I just…didn’t particularly like. Despite liking lots of Lang’s films, I found this one kind of bizarre and hilariously unrealistic.

• King: A Filmed Record…From Montgomery to Memphis (1969): Mandatory viewing for Americans. I do wonder, if this film was actually mandatory viewing in, like, history of civics, in every American high school for the last 50 years, if we would have as much support for the “anti-DEI” stuff in the US right now.

• Maboroshi no hikari (1995): Pretty to look at and nowhere near as sad as you might think a film about two widowed people might be. The male lead was in Shogun.

• The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival (2007): What it says. Worth it if you want to see Dylanmania or the infamous 1965 electric performance.

• The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy (1958): You might be aware that the Aztecs didn’t have mummys.

• Rosemary’s Baby (1968): I hadn’t watched this in probably close to 30 years but watched it again for some reason. Top 5 American horror film of all time?

• Le scaphandre et le papillon (2007): A fantastic film about what it’s like to have a stroke. It shouldn’t have taken me nearly 20 years to watch it but that’s what happens when you have a list as big as mine.

TV I’m Watching:

• Basketball:

  • March Madness: The first round felt like the least exciting first round I’d ever seen and then the stats confirmed it: through the early rounds this was the least competitive tournament since it expanded to 64 teams 40 years ago. The good news is that there were some good games in the final rounds, which is often not the case.

  • NBA: The worst month in the NBA season is over and the play-in has begun. Unfortunately the first game of the play-in is a dud.

• Atlanta: Two episodes left! Just two!

• Black Mirror: I watched the seventh season, like everyone else. This is the sole “event” TV thing that I’m ever on top of.

• Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 (2023): Despite watching F1 for a decade now, I was completely unfamiliar with this wild story.

• Dimension 20: This has a 9.3 on IMDB and because it doesn’t have a lot of critic reviews (because it’s basically a web series) it had no ratings on Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, so that took it to the very top of my list. (It’s very hard to average a 93/100 over five sets of crowd-sourced ratings. Basically impossible.) It’s on Dropout but when we saw the monthly cost we figured “What the hell?” and signed up. Then we saw the first episode of the first season was 90 minutes long. So instead we watched Game Changer (see below). Before we cancelled Dropout I gave the first episode of season 1 a try and…I’m not sure what to say. This is what happens when there is too much content and niche content for every um, niche. This is just comedians playing a weird version of D&D (meant for laughs). It feels like it is only appealing to people who play(ed) D&D or who really like the College Humor stable. (Dropout is what happened to College Humor.) I can’t believe there are 25 seasons of this show. And, if I didn’t know the kinds of people who rate stuff on IMDB, I wouldn’t believe the 9.3 either.

• The Diplomat: Partway through season two.

• Game Changer: We watched 3 episodes of this, I believe. It’s a game show where the contestants don’t know the rules and the rules are totally different each episode. At least one of the episodes was really, really funny. But I guess we just didn’t like it enough to keep going. Certainly not enough to keep paying for Dropout. (Taskmaster is much more to our tastes.)

• Taskmaster Australia: Working our way through their 4th (?) season.

What I’m Listening to:

• Bach: “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme” BWV 140 (1731): A major cantata, one of numerous ones he wrote.

• Beethoven: Missa Solemnis: Beethoven’s second Mass.

• David Bowie: Cover Me did a list of the best David Bowie covers recently. (I wrote three of the blurbs.) This made me realize I hadn’t listened to Bowie in a while and so I did. All of his studio albums. In order. For some reason I’ve never finished writing reviews for all of them, but if you want to read my David Bowie album reviews, you can find them here. Also, I listened to Iggy Pop’s first two solo albums because, if you don’t know, Bowie wrote the music to the first one, co-produced it and played many of the instruments, and then co-wrote most of the music on the second one and co-produced and played in the band.

• Nick Cave: I’m going to see Cave for the first (and probably last) time next week. No idea why I waited until he was in his late 60s. Anyway, I figured it would take me a while to listen to his ouevre so I started this week. Began with The Boys Next Door. If you want to read my Nick Dave reviews, you can find them here.

• Chick Corea: Return to Forever (1972): The solo album that gave the band its name.

• Johnny Dodds: Blues Clarinet Stomp: Complete Sessions 1928-1929 (1994): Much of Dodds’ music is a little too low tempo for me.

• Little Walter (Jacobs): His Best (1997): A major blues harmonica player’s Chess sides.

• Franz Liszt: “Bagatelle sans tonalité” (1885): Missing from the Liszt “late pieces” compilation I listened to.

• Modest Mussorgsky: Complete Songs (1958): I much prefer Mussorgsky’s non-vocal music (which is true of many composers) but I do understand how very “Russian” these are.

• Otu: Moonic of a Down (2022): A Finnish metal band pretends their System of a Down but they play covers of pop songs. Delightful.

• Charlie Parker: The Complete Savoy and Dial Studio Recordings 1944-1948 (2000): Bird’s recordings which helped define bop.

• Steve Reich: Different Trains (1988): Minimalist music that sounds like trains combined with repetitive vocal samples.

• Franz Schubert: “Erlkönig” (1815): You’ve heard this a bunch of times, actually.justin

• Richard Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra (1896): Everyone knows the opening very well. I know the Portsmouth Sinfonia version of that so well that even listening to serious versions of the opening makes me laugh now.

• Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake (1877): I have actually never listened to this.