Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat is a six part survey of instant messaging, from Whatsapp parents groups to Telegram. The snippets of the worst mistakes people have made in chat are worth it alone, as is the somewhat haphazard invention of xxx is typing.
TV
3 Body Problem
After some terrible adaptations of cherished books I was pretty worried about this one. I think they nailed it. Trisolarians are now San-Ti, it's set in London and there are plenty of character and plot changes. But it's a compelling narrative that so far captures the spirit of the books without their somewhat clinical style. And I didn't see a single out of place Starbucks cup. Can't wait for the next installment.
Tokyo Vice Season 2
Season 1 was great, if based on a maybe exaggerated book. Season 2 starts off a little slow and had the feel of a writers room that ran out of source material. Then they bring back Tozawa who is on the cusp of subverting the entire nation and order needs to be restored. From that point this is as compelling and unputdownable as the first installment.
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Scot Harvath has little trouble killing some Wagner mercenaries in Ukraine. Throw the man some setbacks once in a while! Feels a little too soon as well to use this war as a backdrop. I'm a sucker for a series though and I will keep reading them.
System Collapse
Murderbot is [redacted]. This is book 7 and the concept of the reluctant hero SecUnit is not getting old yet. Continued breath of SciFi fresh air.
Movie
Expired
I can't believe it's not Blade Runner, but OK nonetheless.
Movies
Dream Scenario
Everyone starts dreaming about Nicolas Cage. Michael Cera and his agency are very funny and it's an interesting concept, but it runs out of steam and limps to a dark conclusion.
ISS
This was OK. Nuclear war breaks out on Earth, and this leads to the US and Russian crew of the ISS being ordered to kill each other and take over the station. There is some rationale for this later but it doesn't make much sense. Also, they seem pretty confused about what's going on given the obvious nuclear war. Also, the ISS isn't high enough for the view they get of the obvious war. Also, the Russians seem to be nuking Bakersfield for some reason. It's like their objective is disrupting our plans for high speed rail as if we can't do that by ourselves. Ignoring all that, it's entertaining enough.
Lift
Heist on a plane. Not very good.
Society of the Snow
It's that Uruguayan rugby team who crashed in the Andes and then ate each other. Great film to watch on a plane, which I did, awkwardly.
The Abyss
No, not that classic at the bottom of the ocean with early CGI living water. This abyss is a Swedish disaster movie where the disaster is the budget as most of the action is not falling into a hole inside a nondescript building. I think. I don't remember much.
Werewolves Within
This is exactly what you'd expect, it's funny and perfectly executed. Thank you.
TV
Beacon 23
I had high hopes for this Hugh Howey adaptation but they were brutally dashed by leaden dialog and a lackluster story. The most interesting thing about it is that it was made by Boat Rocker Media and man, did they make sure that their boats were not disturbed in any way.
Expats
My advice here would be to just watch the incredible feature length episode 5 and skip the rest of it. It's all nicely made although I was a little surprised at the contemporary setting instead of pre-handover glory days
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Not since the Kenneth Branagh version of Wallander has a TV series put me so comprehensively to sleep. I love Scandi Noir, I love Kenneth Branagh and yet through four seasons I didn't finish a single episode. A Spy Among Friends is an espionage 'thriller' with a fantastic cast set around the penetration and defection scandal of Kim Philby. It should be a compelling story but I can't say for sure because it was like a rohypnol in a double Long Island Iced Tea. YMMV.
Bodies
Bodies starts with the same dead person in several different periods and pretty soon four detectives are investigating four strangely similar cases. It's the most BBC thing I've watched in years, I really enjoyed it.
Reacher Season 2
Season 2 takes on Bad Luck and Trouble. I wonder what they're going to do when they run out of books where Reacher has collaborators. His inner monologue is pretty hard to translate to TV. The first season went for a comedy sidekick cop to add in the humor and it worked pretty well. Season 2 is a lot darker and a lot less Reacher as a result. Hopefully they tack back and find a better tone for Season 3.
The Crown Season 6
The Crown putters to a quiet end. It was quite compelling to start with and got less so the closer it gets to the modern era. I think probably because it starts to overlap with events I remember quite vividly, and can't really compete with those memories. In the last episode we jump back to WWII era Elizabeth and I wish they'd done a whole series just on that. Maybe that will be a spinoff. While an interesting historical drama, the fantasy ending I'm looking for is more like this.
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This movie hangs on the fact that dealing with the owners of your Airbnb showing up and needing to stay there is way harder to deal with than the actual end of the world. This is totally true and pulled off in a masterful and cringeworthy way. I loved Sam Esmail's Mr Robot and there are similar vibes and shots at work while leaving the world behind. I think it's supposed to be more explicitly about race, but nearly every line would work without that dynamic. The social awkwardness here is universal. The ending is great as well. Highly recommended.
Level 16
Level 16 is about a residential school for girls who will get adopted soon. Of course something darker is going on and it's pretty dark. It's super derivative but nicely done and worth a watch.
Rebel Moon – Part One
Rebel Moon has an incredible visual style, a disturbing bad guy and some off-brand lightsabers. The dialog is clunky and I have already forgotten the plot. I'm sure I'll watch the second part and maybe it ends up going somewhere but this installment is just pulling the gang together in the style of the first few minutes of an A-Team episode with a decent SFX budget.
Music
Lazy
I love a lot of Baby Queen. This one is an anthem for my current Saturday morning.
TV
Doctor Who 2023 Specials
I drifted out of watching Doctor Who at the start of the Jodie Whittaker / Chris Chibnall era. It has always been an uneven program with some silly concepts occasionally punctuated by enough sci-fi genius to make it all worthwhile. With Chibnall that equation changed for me and it just seemed boring. I was pretty excited to see that Russell T Davies was back at the helm and the four specials were pretty good, an unexpected encore for David Tennant and Catherine Tate and a brief introduction for Ncuti Gatwa. I'll be tuning in next year to see how Davies and Gatwa do once out of the confines of Christmas Special land. I couldn't be happier that the TARDIS is recognizably the machine from my youth even if it is filled with questionable ramps. What was great about the 80's TARDIS is that it was bigger on the inside but only a little bit. You have complete control over time and space and you just move the walls over a foot to fit in a hatstand (I know, there was more behind another door, but that rarely came into play). I really hated the steampunk control room and I hope it never comes back. My fondest wish for the program is that the Doctor drops his sonic screwdriver down a wormhole and has to start relying on his wits a bit more. An occasional plot device has become almost the only plot device and he's a Time Lord not a superhero Anyway, fingers crossed for the next series.
For All Mankind Season 4
For All Mankind is getting into middle age, but it's still a great series. This installment is all about an uneasy Mars base and the future of space exploration. Also some moonshine.
Slow Horses Season 3
Slow Horses just keeps getting better. A must watch series.
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The Killer on Netflix looks like a lazy retread of any recent Liam Neeson movie or John Wick with an editor. But it's more than that for two reasons. The soundtrack is incredible, and the writing and tight editing do not allow the tension to slip for a minute. Although the plot is an assassin taking revenge on his employers it could have been an average Tuesday for a loss adjuster with nearly as much impact. Watch it.
Podcast
Death of a Codebreaker
This was a really strange story - a spy, dead in a bag. Putin? Sex Game? Who knew? This podcast does a deep dive and doesn't come up with much. It's worth it for the guy who spent months trying to lock himself in a bag and the person that pointed out you could pull the zip apart.
Podcasts
Marianna in Conspiracyland
Examining the conspiracy minded in the UK. Worth a terrifying listen.
TV
Lessons In Chemistry
I haven't read the book yet, which is supposed to be pretty good, but I found the Apple TV adaptation to be a bit of a slog. Rainn Wilson is great as the cynical TV station manager and the TV series segments are the highlight. Apple's general model seems to be to buy up the rights to beloved books and then committee them into a slow painful death. Foundation was very much this way too. Slow Horses seems to be the brilliant exception.
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The Secret is Jack (None) Reacher installment #28. It's one of the handful that flashback to Reacher's MP days which are usually high value. It's a little thin - goes through all the right motions but there isn't that much to it. If you're a Reacher fan you're going to read it. If you're not then it's a bad place to start.
Music
Go Your Own Way
This Cranberries cover of Go Your Own Way is pure joy.
Podcasts
Shiny Bob
Scottish legal scandal around an alleged cabal of gay judges.
The Bugle
The Bugle is a news comedy show, a more discursive and less organized but often very funny version of the News Quiz which Andy Zoltzman has also started hosting.
TV
Still Up
Still Up, is a romedy about two insomniacs, one also agoraphobic. At moments it's very funny, and snort your drink out your nose funny not funny because it's so naff. That's worth watching for. It sometimes goes too long between nose cleaning but given the dearth of good sitcoms at the moment that's pretty easy to forgive.
The Lincoln Lawyer Season 2
More Lincoln Lawyer. It's about the same as the first season, worth watching and a little more comfortable in its skin but also very conventional.
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Spanish movie where the nowhere in question is a shipping container bobbing around in the ocean after falling in during a storm. That would be fine except there is a pregnant woman on board who promptly gives birth and now has two problems. It's OK.
Reptile
It's a cop movie. Probably the best scene is when all the cops bet on who the killer is, just like the audience at home. Adds nothing to the genre, but it looks great and goes down easy.
The Foreigner
Jackie Chan goes all Liam Neeson and kills the IRA terrorists responsible for his daughter's death. Pierce Brosnan is absolutely not Gerry Adams, any similarity must be due to coincidence.
The Last Man on Earth
Spanish movie with the premise that hot women should sleep with ugly men, even if the world hasn't quite ended yet. Compelling. I prefer The Quiet Earth in the everyone else has gone genre, the sex is better here though.
The Out-Laws
Downloaded for a flight. About as funny as an average SNL sketch only movie length.
Podcasts
Intrigue Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel
I have now worked my way back all the way to the first story in the series, murder in a hotel in China. This was pretty good.
Intrigue The Immortals
Fantastic series on the billionaire trend towards spending all of your money on life extension and ultimately the geek rapture. Hopefully some of the technology trickles down. I'm not holding my breath - this seems to be the realm of anecdote over data and even some of the proponents admit that it's more religion than science.
TV
The Lincoln Lawyer
From the Bosche Cinematic Universe. The Lincoln Lawyer is unconventional but his heart is in the right place. He has a teenage daughter to look after part-time. He even seems to live in the house next to Bosche (he certainly has the same view). I never watched the movie and I haven't read the books. This adaptation is a David E. Kelley creation - good, but just a little too whimsical.
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Very nearly skipped this as the Crystal Skull installment was atrocious. The dial is the Antikythera mechanism which is cool, although it's a toddler proofed version with a very different function than the original. The film's heart is in the right place and it's much closer to the originals, but the CGI young Indie kind of sinks it. Harrison Ford is showing his age but better than any plausible replacement (definite Joe Biden vibes) and I wish they'd stuck with that. Instead there is a lot of flashback to fake young Indie which would make for an impressive demo but doesn't work in a major movie. Maybe the technology will get there one day, or maybe we should hand the baton on to a new generation of heros (again with Joe Biden parallels).
Operation Napoleon
Fun Icelandic thriller about a Nazi plane that crashed with a mysterious cargo.
Music
America
Haunting music and video by London Grammar. Keeps growing on me.
Podcasts
FiveThirtyEight Politics
In the run up to Trump's first election I started listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. It was hard to keep up, and the opening with the hour and minute where the content would still be relevant was on the nose. It's since got tired, and they unfortunately switched to a daily update which doesn't have much depth. Safe to say if I'm listening to a politics podcast I know the headlines already. Luckily I also started listening to FiveThirtyEight Politics. Nate Silver might be gone, but it's still great, diving into nerdy detail on the tiniest little thing. This goes to the top of my queue each time it's published, mostly twice a week at the moment.
Intrigue Burning Sun
Disturbing reporting on K-Pop, rape and the Koran legal system.
Intrigue Mayday
A dead British soldier, the White Helmets and fake chemical attacks in Syria.
Intrigue Tunnel 29
Yes I will be listening to the entire back catalogue of Intrigue this month. Tunnel 29 is the story of a tunnel under the Berlin wall. It's the best from Intrigue so far.
TV
Good Omens Season 2
The archangel Gabriel shows up naked at Aziraphale's bookshop, hijinks ensue. Great sequel.
Kaleidoscope
In principle Kaleidoscope is very clever because you can watch most of the episodes in any order, and Netflix says that everyone gets a random shuffle. In practice though it's a heist and so you already know every detail, only the specific macguffins and flourishes need to be added. I enjoyed it.
Special Ops Lioness Season 1
A little soapy. I'd rather watch Jack Ryan and Grey's Anatomy separately rather than mashed up together like an experimental ice cream flavor. Has its moments though.
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Both a sensitive movie about coming to terms with the transition from war to peace at the end of WWII (as well as foreshadowing some other transitions) and a really average seance horror movie. Overall I don't regret watching it but this didn't need the hokey special effects (down to an actual shot of a photo with its eyes moving a little bit).
Heart of Stone
80% Mission Impossible, 20% Minority Report. Nothing new to see here, but it's a fun enough ride.
Luther The Fallen Sun
Luther hits the big screen. Really not the same without Ruth Wilson. It's fun and over the top but more silly than dark.
Paradise
Scientists figure out how to transplant literal years of life from the poor to the rich. What could go wrong? Lots of twists and turns, this was pretty good.
The Pope's Exorcist
Russel Crowe shows off his Italian, retcons the Spanish Inquisition and shows the devil the door. It's OK.
Music
Where is my mind
Amazing performance of an incredible song.
Podcasts
Search Engine
PJ Vogt's something turns out to be Search Engine, which so far has consisted of idiosyncratic deep dives that remind me of another podcast that died too soon...
TV
Hijack
Two hours of thrills unfortunately packed into a 7 episode show. A couple of episodes in I was rooting for the Hijackers. By the fourth, I just wanted the plane to be shot down. They spend three episodes figuring out the guns are loaded with blanks, although to start with they insist the guns are fakes which is a different proposition entirely and then it turns out that they also have real bullets. That's about 3 hours of plot. Feels like it was written in one sitting and then never checked for continuity or tension or interest. When Generative AI is making TV shows on demand this is what I imagine they'll be like.
Jack Ryan Season 4
I've got some good news and some bad news.
The good news is that you get to make one more season of Jack Ryan.
The bad news is that we really had to scrape the barrel to fund it. Your primary sponsor is the State Tourist Board of Myanmar. Their goal is to keep people away so you only get to include shots that look like the suburbs of LA and the plot can't do anything to upset the Junta. Other than that you have complete creative freedom. Although Jeff insists that one scene can be summed up as "No, Mr. Ryan, I expect you get to wrapped up like a cucumber".
We also got a few bucks from JLR so every third shot has to be a Range Rover looking awesome. Have fun!
Silo Season 1
Foundation was a big disappointment to me, de-Azimov'd generic SciFi, so I was pretty nervous about Silo. It's an adaptation of the first few installments of Hugh Howey's epic Wool series. The TV version doesn't dare to be quite as good as Wool, but it's pretty decent with a great cast and spot on production design. Looking forward to the next series already. If you haven't read the books then you're missing out.
The Outlaws Season 2
At this point it's Breaking Bristol. It's rare to get dramedy right, this is great.
The Witcher Blood Origin
Ever wonder where Witchers came from? Me either, but they're going to tell you anyway. This has an awesome cast - Michelle Yeoh with Lenny Henry! And the special effects and production values are similar to the main series. It's not that good though. Four episodes is a really awkward canvas. It might have been a tight film or an entertaining series but it's both not enough and too much for the space available.
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Losely a sequel to Zeroes (same universe, different lead character), Invasive is a thriller about saving the world from genetically modified killer ants. It's a very competent beach read kind of book, keeps the pace moving along briskly and gets the job done. His Miriam Black series is much better (and darker) and I am on the cusp of dipping into Wayward, the sequel to the rather good Wanderers.
Killing Moon
I thought I was done with Harry Hole at the end of Book 12, but he's surprisingly back and with an ending that strongly hints at more. This time Harry is forced to solve a crime outside the Norwegian police by some hand waving circumstances in Los Angeles. The main plot is another very nasty killer with many red herrings along the way. This series is my favorite Scandinavian Noir and it's a very solid installment but start at the beginning if you're new to it. There is a lot of history with many of these characters.
The Starless Crown
I really struggled to finish this book, to the point it backed up my reading and had me turning to Netflix for several months. It's a pity because the concept is great, a fantasy quest in a distinctly Sci Fi milieu, and many of the scenes are phenomenal. Maybe it will make a great movie or TV series one day. But the actual mechanics of the prose are leaden and tropey. Not a series that I'm planning to continue.
Movies
Blackberry
I watched Blackberry expecting to find out something interesting about the history of the famous business accessory, or maybe the phone version of the outstanding Halt and Catch Fire. Nope. Apparently they built it with swearing and then once people fell in love with the iPhone the company died. Nothing to add here.
Discontinued
Funny movie about our particular version of reality getting shut down. I like that the reason for the simulation is inconsequential, see this.
Fast X
This is one of those irritating moves that doesn't really end and just sets up the next chapter. It's also an exercise in too much CGI, some of it unforgivably bad. Beyond that I don't remember much, and I don't know much about cars so the fact he's in a Spaghetti Chiron Ghia means nothing to me. Some of the earlier installments were OK. I've watched between 3 and 12 of them.
To Catch a Killer
To Catch a Killer is a competent, adult police thriller set in Baltimore. It doesn't have any particular angle or seeming reason to exist in today's cinematic landscape. It's just a well made gift that arrived for no reason. Lucky rent.
Music
Don't Delete the Kisses
Low key but can't stop going back to this by Wolf Alice.
TV
The Days
The Days tells the story of the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. A nuclear catastrophe is always pretty gripping and I was pretty gripped. They clearly didn't have the budget to compete with HBO's Chernobyl though, and seem to have gone for a daytime Emmy instead. The special effects were not that great, and some of the acting was more horrific than the meltdown. There is one nuclear advisor who emotes surprise like a Tasered fish and you wonder if AI actors might be a blessing in some cases.
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