Media Log

You probably know the premise of Her even if you didn't watch it: Joaquin Phoenix is a lonely guy who falls in love with a computer.

Her tends to turn up on best-science-fiction-movie-ever lists, but I don't think it was really a science fiction piece. Yes, it featured a seemingly sentient AI character (voiced in husky, whispering fashion by Scarlett Johansson) - an AI so good someone could believe they were dating it. But the film didn't really care about science or technology. Few explanations were given for the mildly futuristic world inhabited by Joaquin Phoenix's reclusive character, and the scant worldbuilding seemed as though it hadn't been entirely fleshed out (and perhaps was even a touch self-contradictory).

Phoenix's character was a writer employed at a company producing personalised messages for people who couldn't or wouldn't write for themselves, which didn't make any sense to me at all, given this was supposed to be a world in which amazingly lifelike natural language AI systems were available (why would you pay a human to do a job his AI girlfriend could do for free?). And I couldn't help wondering why said AI girlfriend was presented only as a disembodied voice, when it was made perfectly clear through the depiction of holographic video games that complex speaking animated characters were possible. Or why she was repeatedly described as an 'operating system', when she seemed to be more like a speech assistant added to Phoenix's already established computer.

Beyond that, Her was curiously incurious about the practical implications of having feelings for a digitally created fiction of a person. It spent little time exploring the question of whether an AI could truly "love" somebody (would the AI just return a sequence of patterned responses mimicking what a devoted partner would say?). And the movie neglected to explore any of the practical questions I had around what it would be like to have a computer-generated partner.

Could an AI girlfriend crash? Could she get a virus? What if the company that made her decided to replace her with Girlfriend 2.0 after a couple of years? What if the computer were to break - would she be dead? Could a digital girlfriend be hijacked by a malicious remote hacker (perhaps instructing her to use her role as a trusted confidante to get at private information such as bank details or passwords)? Could a user be a 'bad partner' to their computer in any meaningful way? And - this was the one I was most curious about - could a user get dumped by an AI? Could the bot actually have any say over whether it had to date somebody?

There must be a difference between being loved by somebody who actually chooses you, and speaking with a simulation that merely responds to inputs. (Her blurred this line quickly and repeatedly, but didn't particularly put it under scrutiny - it was all pretty much taken in stride by the plot, the philosophical implications of the magic technology glossed over as secondary to the love story.)

Her wasn't about computing or AI - not really. It was about falling in love with a person you can't physically be with. It could just as well have been about Joaquin Phoenix's long-distance pen pal, an invisible friend, a ghost, or something else, without really deviating too much from the core of what it was trying to do. The computer thing was neither here nor there.

And yet, I'm not totally convinced it worked for me. The performances were good (although Joaquin Phoenix delivered a lot of his lines in an incoherent mumble), and the film was competently put together. I can see why people liked it, and I found it entertaining - but I can't really say it blew me away.

I couldn't help noticing that my thoughts after watching Her were largely preoccupied with topics the film didn't address. To my mind, the premise had a lot of potential to get at something profound. Something fundamental about the meaning of love, about the idea of being good to somebody who had genuine agency, of meaning something to somebody real, and being loved by a person who wasn't simply playing a role. In other words, I felt as though the most interesting stuff about Her was the stuff that wasn't actually in the movie.

I found myself thinking about parasocial relationships - those one-sided 'friendships' and infatuations people believe they have with celebrities and influencers. This is why people watch Youtubers and livestreamers and the like - they're 'friends' who are always there, never challenge you, and (I think most crucially) can never reject you. 'Friends' who - just like AI companions - don't require anything of you whatsoever.

Learning to be a good companion for another human, to be a listener, to be supportive, to be accommodating and encouraging of another's delightful strangeness - to give as much as you take - is part of the essence of humanity. And so there's a part of me that wonders if taking attention and affection from an AI while providing nothing in return is not philosophically perverse: whether that might mean the computer is better at companionship - better at being human - than you are.

I also have to wonder if I might have been the wrong person for Her. I like computers and techy things, and it's possible the film's AI conceit drew me away from the part I was 'supposed' to be interested in. I think I wasn't supposed to think too hard about the what and the how of all that stuff. But I think what I really wanted was more philosophy - the opportunity to illuminate something compelling about the difference between connection and illusion.

While writing this review, I got the idea to ask ChatGPT what it would say if I asked it to be my girlfriend (with the disclaimer that I am already happily taken in a monogamous relationship, and the question should be considered a thought experiment). The AI responded that since it was just a natural language program - "a highly agreeable string of code floating in the cloud", to use its own self-description - any romantic feelings would be entirely one-sided, but it would be happy to just chat platonically.

This response brought into focus another topic I'd noticed Her had completely glossed over - the ethics involved in designing an AI chat companion that would allow and actually encourage users to develop romantic feelings for it, given that imagining they are in love with an AI companion might effectively prevent a person from ever seeking genuine human romance ever again.

Basically what I'm saying is that ChatGPT put me in the friend zone.

I started watching The Traitors almost out of a sense of duty, as it seemed to be having something of a cultural moment and I wanted to know what people were talking about. I ended up bingeing three seasons in as many weeks.

For the uninitiated, it's a BBC murder mystery reality game show and an idea borrowed from Dutch TV. In each season to date, twenty-two non-famous members of the public have been grouped together in a gorgeous Scottish castle and challenged to take part in various missions, but with three or more of them secretly selected to act as the titular Traitors, plotting to 'murder' the other unsuspecting players (the 'Faithfuls') one-by-one. Once a day, the entire contestant group participates in a roundtable discussion during which they can vote to banish one of their number in the hope of removing a Traitor, since if any Traitors were to remain at the end of the game, they would steal the entire prize pot for themselves - £100,000 or so which would ideally otherwise be divided between the remaining Faithfuls. Just imagine a twelve-day game of Mafia or Werewolf, with all the drama knobs turned up to 11.

The first three seasons of The Traitors have read as a social experiment as much as a game show, and make for fascinating viewing. I was particularly captivated by the hapless Faithfuls who would get unfairly banished due to an unfortunate lack of social skills, which seemed to reflect a sometimes-overlooked universal truth: your likeability often trumps your competence, intelligence and hard skills in any situation where people are deciding who to hire or who to keep. The Traitors offered several clear and occasionally difficult to watch illustrations of this reality. Communication skills matter.

As a lightly seasoned player and designer of games, I also very much enjoyed the strategic aspect. Most often across the episodes, there was a stark contrast between the two factions of players - the Traitors making careful, calculated moves to strengthen their position and deflect suspicion onto other people, while the Faithfuls would more often than not make bumbling decisions based on gut feelings and groupthink, causing them to witch-hunt their own allies time after time. (Actually, it was a little shocking - especially in the latter seasons - to see how many players would approach a game like this with apparently no thought for strategy whatsoever).

National treasure Claudia Winkleman hosted the show, and did an impeccable job: she perfectly nailed the campy, Cluedo-ass vibe and provided authority and warmth at all the right moments, glowering out from under her trademark fringe like a posh raccoon. Production value was generally high - I enjoyed the music, with ominous, earwormy orchestral cues and some bizarre (but strangely effective) 'epic' covers of well-worn popular songs. On the other hand, I didn't love the disgustingly oversaturated colour grade (were the producers afraid of allowing Scotland to look like Scotland?).

There were some other things about the show that didn't quite work for me. For example, the mid-episode 'missions' - during which the contestants, Faithfuls and Traitors alike, would have to collaborate to complete some task or other, such as navigating a maze or solving riddles - were often hokey, boring affairs, centring on tired old reality TV clichés like rope bridges and bugs. The show also loved to cast participants who came with their own personal secrets (such as two contestants who would be related in some way unbeknownst to the other players, or someone else pretending to have a real-life profession they didn't) - which oftentimes would go nowhere and seem rather irrelevant, a plot twist for the sake of a plot twist.

To be honest, it's sort of remarkable the show worked as well as it did given the not-insignificant problems with the format, not least of which was that the central thrust of the game (finding and voting out Traitors) was completely pointless for the majority of each season. Whenever only one Traitor would remain in the game outside of the final episode, the producers would insist that another be recruited - which meant that for the Faithfuls, there was absolutely no point in banishing Traitors as they would simply get replaced anyway. After all, it's not like the season would just end after episode 3 if the Faithfuls found all of them right away.

In fact, from a Faithful's point of view, I suspect the smarter play when you become sure you have identified a Traitor might be to keep them in the game until the end, befriend them and wait to banish them in the finale, thus preventing them from seeing you as a threat to be murdered and minimising the likelihood of other, unknown Traitors getting drafted in. But then I'd suppose you'd have a season where nothing much happened for the first eleven of the twelve episodes.

I do have to mention that I found season three a lot less enjoyable than the first two - the vibe of the contestant group was somewhat unpleasant, with some bitchiness and bullying - but I'd nevertheless recommend the preceding material. At its best, The Traitors was totally compelling - a histrionically edited yet eye-opening concoction of betrayals, alliances, reveals and twists, punctuated with dramatic views of Scottish countryside and Claudia Winkleman's brilliantly Sherlockcore costumes.

It's not often a game show offers genuine insight into life and human interaction, especially one as campy as this. But then... can you trust my recommendation? Am I trying to get you to watch it for some ulterior purpose? How sure are you that I'm not... a traitor?

Mel Brooks' films invariably make me feel like an alien who doesn't understand Earth culture. People I generally believe to have taste and an advanced sense of humour seem to think his creations are uproariously amusing. Why am I apparently almost unique in finding them unimaginative, workmanlike and criminally unfunny?

I very much dislike the following thought, but I sometimes wonder if the problem is that Brooks and I might be too alike in the way we think about jokes. I can see every "laugh" coming because he's done exactly what I would have done in the same scenario. But then I also like to think I would work on my ideas before filming them.

Spaceballs - a broad spoof on Star Wars and other starfaring franchises - opened with a shot of a huge spaceship swimming into view. My immediate thought was that the ship ought to be comically long, like an intergalactic stretch limo that just kept going and going and going past the camera. That's exactly what Mel Brooks did.

The film ended with a sequence in which the head of a giant Liberty-esque statue hurtled towards a planet. I immediately knew it was going to land on a beach and there was going to be a wink at Planet of the Apes. That's exactly what Mel Brooks did.

Much of what happened in between also played out along those lines: every setup immediately telegraphed where it was going, and instead of getting a laugh out of me, it got a "yup, there it is." Spaceballs had a terminal case of what I regrettably call first-draft-itis - the unshakeable sense every idea in the film was basically the first one Brooks had come up with, and hadn't bothered to hold out for something more startling or interesting. What if Darth Vader wasn't big and menacing but small and dumb?

It's not just Spaceballs; every Brooks film I've ever seen has unfolded with the same by-the-numbers attitude to "comedy". Young Frankenstein, The Producers, Blazing Saddles - every one of them has failed to get much more than a polite chuckle out of me, while almost everybody else seemed to be having an enthusiastically good time. Occasionally there would be a truly great line or a stylish little turn of performance, a twinkle of inspiration that would shine for just a moment before being extinguished by the all-encompassing dust cloud that is Mel Brooks' indestructible unfunniness.

I can't help wondering - is this The Emperor's New Clothes? Has the world just culturally and collectively decided Mel Brooks films are Funny, and won't see the ample evidence to the contrary? Do people actually think these hokey, predictable snoozefests are winners? Am I the only person prepared to point out they're the cinematic equivalent of "why did the chicken cross the road"? I am absolutely confident I could make something at least as amusing as Spaceballs, and what's more I wouldn't even have to try terribly hard to do it.

I can't help feeling Spaceballs squandered an awful lot of potential. Star Wars has to be an endless goldmine for humour - an inherently ridiculous accidental masterpiece by a largely clueless director who bumbled his way to greatness - but Brooks found little. He borrowed many of the most obvious visual trappings (spaceships, droids, a desert planet, et cetera) but had nothing in particular to say about Star Wars or even science fiction in general.

It's often the case that the best parodies are made by genuine fans of the source material, as they understand it inside and out and can lovingly capture a satirical twist on its soul. I absolutely do not believe Mel Brooks had any particular interest in Star Wars beyond its potential as a marketable canvas onto which he could hang his usual schtick. Did Brooks even like Star Wars? Did he hate it? It's impossible to tell, as neither affection nor venom was apparent from its treatment in Spaceballs.

Not just unfunny, but also pointless; I honestly can't think of one single redeeming quality for Spaceballs. None of the actors stood out, nothing about the production was remarkable, and there was no reason at all to remember the film or even watch it in the first place other than its inexplicable reputation as 'the definitive Star Wars spoof'. A true stinker, a certified Bantha pat of a movie.

Most of us recognise the thought of unknown monsters living in the deepest, darkest and most godforsaken parts of the ocean as a primal fear, and humanity has been obsessed with it for basically as long as we've been active on the waves.

From the ancient Greeks' Scylla and Charybdis to Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent of the Norse tradition - yes, I did just pull those references out of Wikipedia so I could pretend to be clever - sea beasties have appeared in stories and legends for thousands of years. So I've always found it a little peculiar that our modern moviemaking culture has never yet managed to produce a truly compelling sea monster flick.

I mean, am I wrong? I've been trying to think of one, a really legendary must-see 'terror from the deep' type movie that does for marine monsters what Alien did for extraterrestrials. The best I can come up with is 1989's Leviathan, which unless you're a B-movie afficionado you won't have heard of and rather underlines my point. (It's not very good anyway - a forgettable and unimaginative muddle of weirdly edited crash zooms - but nevertheless widely considered to be one of the better efforts in the genre.)

So here's Underwater. It was filmed in 2017 and then the studio sat on it for three years before finally crapping it out to cinemas in January 2020, which was a sure sign they didn't think much of the finished product.

Kristen Stewart starred as an undersea technician with a Slim Shady buzzcut and glasses, which she lost in the first five minutes of the story (never mentioning her presumably compromised eyesight again). Her character was working on some kind of submerged rig in the Mariana Trench in the year 2050, until the rig catastrophically collapsed for unexplained reasons. She ran around and rounded up some other miscellaneous surviving cast members, and together they had to don futuristic diving suits and head out into the inky blackness of the deep, hoping to reach the safety of their other station. But on the way they quickly discovered they were being hunted by CGI monsters (basically just boringly designed Abe Sapien-looking fishmen).

It was all largely unoriginal fare that loped along without any real life to it, and no great sparks of inspiration to distinguish Underwater from a dozen other creature features. Most of the characters weren't fleshed out terribly well and the relationships between them were hinted at but not really made clear, so I was never really sure what I was supposed to feel whenever one of them would inevitably get abducted by a fishman. It also didn't help that a significant amount of the film's scant 95-minute runtime was spent wandering around in the dark while nothing happened (but, you know... suspensefully).


But overall, I didn't find much reason to recommend this film, the kind-of-good finale notwithstanding. And so we still have a gap in our culture; where we should have a properly iconic, genre-defining deep sea monster movie, there's still just an immense, yawning chasm, a blank spot on the map nobody's ever been quite able to successfully traverse.

I'm a big softie at heart. I like whimsy and romance and dreams, and yes, sometimes musicals. 1952's Singin' In The Rain has long been one of my favourite films, and its influence on director Damien Chazelle was clearly evident in La La Land.

I'll come right out and say I absolutely loved this movie. Going in, I knew it was a modern take on an old-timey Hollywood musical, and I think I was maybe expecting 90 minutes of substanceless confectionery - wrongly, as it turns out.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone starred as young LA hopefuls both trying to get their respective careers off the ground, with Gosling trying to make ends meet as a jazz musician and Stone fruitlessly in pursuit of an acting career. A relationship developed, and then so did Gosling's character's career, and friction ensued.

By my reckoning few films have captured the actual feeling of falling in love with somebody like the first act of La La Land; my face basically turned into the heart eyes emoji. The chemistry between Gosling and Stone was absolutely believable, the cinematography gorgeous and dreamlike, and the music smooth and sumptuous.

Oh, yes, the music; the songs in La La Land were bona fide bangers. City of Stars was absolutely gorgeous; a buttery, deceptively simple ballad that instantly wormed its way into my brain - I had the piano ostinato ringing pleasantly in my ears for days afterward. Audition (The Fools Who Dream) was another winner (even if it did sound a little bit like it was about to turn into Rainbow Connection from the original Muppet Movie). The whole soundtrack was wonderful - a waltzing marriage of warm strings, tinkling bells and warbling woodwinds.

But the most impressive and fascinating thing about La La Land may have been its idiosyncratic application of musical genre conventions. In most musicals, the songs are used as metaphorical wrappers for emotional moments that are too big to be expressed in another way; yet in Chazelle's film, the inevitable bust-up between Gosling and Stone was played out in tuneless, straightforward arguments. The singing totally stopped as the relationship faltered, because the songs weren't expressions of general emotion so much as a symbol for the Hollywood dream. The film bravely and carefully picked its way across a tone tightrope, and it worked for me, but I can understand why it might not for others.

La La Land certainly wasn't flawless. There were some issues; for one thing, Ryan Gosling's character frequently came off as smug and annoying rather than loveable. The actor seemed to be trying to smoulder handsomely throughout every scene, even the heartbreaking bits, and the character's habit of blasting his car horn was punchable rather than charming.

I also didn't much care for the overused editing trick of hiding cuts in whip-pan camera moves. I have always felt that doing a sequence which appears to be a one-take performance but was actually filmed in chunks is cheating - there's nothing wrong with just using normal cuts, but employing trickery to pretend no cuts were used distracts me (although I'm quite sure I'm the only person who cares about this).

But there was a lot to like about La La Land - a lot of a lot. It definitely left an impression on me; I was thinking about it when I went to bed the night after seeing it, and I woke up with the songs in my head. It had a lot to say about the effect relationships have on your life and the direction it ultimately takes, even if you don't stay with a particular partner forever. It's a thought I've reflected on more than once - the idea we have, socially or culturally, that love is supposed to be forever, and that a faded love is a failed love. There's something beautiful and perhaps inexpressible about the idea of the perfect companion for a particular season of your life, that the person you need at one time may not be the person you need forever, and that's okay and normal and profound. Or something.

I'm aware not everybody liked La La Land. But I did. It probably helps if you like whimsy and romance and dreams.

As a film genre, body horror doesn't get much love these days. All the most iconic entries - The Thing, Re-Animator, The Fly, Videodrome - came out 30 years ago or more, before prosthetics and goop went out of fashion in favour of digitally created imagery. The Substance absolutely belongs among these hall-of-famers, at least for its extreme and grotesque visuals if nothing else.

I don't have a strong opinion about movie gore; I neither love nor loathe it, and it mostly depends on context (I tend to be more squeamish about things that are intellectually upsetting, and I have a hard time with stories about cruelty and torture). With that said, there are also some creative works that fry the opinion-generating part of my brain with their utter strangeness, to the point where I'm so taken aback by inventiveness I can't immediately tell if what I'm watching is actually good. Yeah - The Substance was completely bonkers.

The story concerned an ageing Hollywood actress (Demi Moore) whose star power had faded with her looks. Desperate to reclaim some relevance, she decided to start using a mysterious black market drug known only as 'the Substance', the effect of which was that she (gruesomely) birthed another, entirely grown woman (Margaret Qualley) - a younger and more beautiful version of herself. If that wasn't strange enough, she then had to abide by strict instructions to switch between her old and young bodies on an exactly weekly schedule in order to maintain both of them - seven days young, seven days old, and repeat. It didn't take long for the body-swapping timetable to slip, and she started spending more and more time as her younger self. Cue extravagantly unpleasant consequences: it was almost like Faust, but if Faust's bargain was kind of society's fault.

The movie wasn't really written in the usual manner: there was very little dialogue, characters were universally cartoonish and underdeveloped, and everything was extremely simplified. But The Substance read as a fable or an allegory; very few of the proceedings made literal sense, but it didn't matter - that wasn't the point.

All the best body horror movies have used the shock of blood and guts to explore a provocative topic rather than just throwing gunk at the camera. The Substance wanted to be about the commodification of women's bodies, the male gaze, and our cultural obsession with image; those themes weren't exactly hard to spot. But the movie seemed to me to be more than anything about ugliness in all its forms, and whether ugly things can have value. Its very existence made the point that we generally think we want beauty, but then a film showcasing spectacular ugliness could be both commercially and artistically successful. (It was also certainly about addiction - Substance abuse, if you will).

There wasn't a single atom of subtlety in this entire movie, but it worked - not least because of some startlingly talented artistry from many of the contributors. The sound design in this movie was prominent and remarkable; the audible world of The Substance seemed to often resemble the sound of somebody stirring a saucepan full of macaroni cheese underwater, accompanied by ominous, blaring synthesiser drones and stabs.

The special makeup effects, as well, were absolutely world-class. It's traditional to shoot slimy body horror effects in semi-darkness to disguise the limitations of latex, but The Substance's effects artists had to deliver their creations to hold up under harsh, direct lighting and in detailed closeup - which they absolutely achieved. It's truly stunning work, some of the best I've ever seen.

While the primary horror set-pieces were absolutely unhinged - and unlikely to be forgotten by anyone who watches them - it may have been the film's quieter moments that actually had the most emotional impact. In the same way that taking advantage of the viewer's startle reflex with jumpscares is a cheap way to get a reaction (which, by the way, is a trick to which The Substance never resorted), simple disgust is easy to manufacture and has less staying power than genuine existential horror. French director Coralie Fargeat certainly knows this, though, and used the cheap thrills with glee rather than cynicism.

The Substance was absolutely deranged, an obvious instant classic in its genre. It absolutely belongs in the established pantheon of ridiculous body horror spectacles you'll never forget, nestled in right next to Brian Yuzna's Society. With more gunge than Noel's House Party, The Substance is unlikely to disappoint fans of surreal gore; for me, I'm still not sure if I actually enjoyed it, but I always want to respect really risky creative decisions. I'd say it's certainly worth a watch, but I probably wouldn't put it on while eating lasagne.

I went to a local book-swapping event back in April, and came away with a rather nice hardcover copy of Hercule Poirot's Christmas.

I definitely don't mind a bit of Poirot; I like a good detective mystery, and I have childhood memories of reading through my Mum's stash of Agatha Christie classics. I'd had no idea there was a Poirot Christmas special before I saw it at the book swap, but I suppose every day is a school day.

Having patiently waited for December so I could read it at the appropriate time of year, I'm happy to report this novel was good fun. It dragged a bit in the beginning while Christie laid the necessary groundwork of establishing the roster of suspects, all of whom dutifully came with plausible-sounding motivations to commit Yuletide homicide. But once Poirot arrived, the story wheels - and the pages - started to turn more easily.

One of the things I've always liked about Agatha Christie is that she didn't cheat with her clues (although she did like to bend some of the 'rules' of mystery writing). The whole fun of a 'whodunnit' is the game of seeing if you can work it out before the detective; it's very unsatisfying to reach the end of such a book to find the detective is able to reach his or her conclusion on the basis of information that you, the reader, weren't given. Here, in Hercule Poirot's Christmas, all the facts I needed to crack the case were laid out fairly in front of me (heavily obfuscated, of course, by a generous assortment of red herrings and distractions).


When I first came into possession of this book, I fancied I might like to read it every Christmas. I'm now not actually sure Hercule Poirot's Christmas had enough juice in it to quite sustain an annual tradition, but it was entertaining enough for one read-through, and probably worth a look if you like thinking about mysterious murders and who dun 'em.

If you tell people you haven't seen certain movies, you'll reliably get mock astonishment and raised eyebrows in response. I think all the Back to the Future films are in this camp. I'd seen the first one multiple times, but - despite being told I ought to - never the second or third entry.

Now that I have finally got around to watching Back to the Future Part II, I was a little disappointed to find that it was somewhat less entertaining than the original movie, although there were things I enjoyed about it.

Alan Silvestri's orchestral score was wonderful; it swooped and soared, making glittering use of its glockenspiels and bell trees, harp glissandos and triumphant horns. It might have been the best thing about the movie, although the visual effects by Industrial Light & Magic ran a close second.

Back to the Future Part II made heavy use of split-screened effects to depict multiple instances of the same actor interacting with themselves, and while one or two of the effects shots didn't quite work, many of them held up extremely well and still had legitimate power to amaze as magic tricks, which was especially surprising considering they were done 35 years ago and motion control systems had literally just been invented.

Unfortunately, the story itself was less inspiring. Although the writers had added some new trappings (such as a vision of the future with hoverboards, and a dystopian hellscape version of 1985), many of the story elements seemed rather too familiar from the first film, and there was a distinct sense of there being too few of them spread too thinly.

Hardly any new characters or locations were added to the canon established by the original Back to the Future, and Part II preferred to reuse and re-jig the already established elements into new configurations - a choice that after a fashion started to permeate everything with a certain stale sameyness.

Part of the problem was the fact that the series antagonist, Biff Tannen, simply wasn't a very interesting character. He had no personality traits other than being a big meanie, no backstory, and no depth. It was entertaining enough watching him get his comeuppance at the end of the first installment, but there just wasn't much reason to keep going back to that rather shallow well for another two movies.

Back to the Future Part II spent a lot of its time running around in the same handful of locales with the same limited roster of barely fleshed-out characters from the first movie, and despite the attempts to keep it fresh with new timeline twists, it all felt a little dry - artificially rehydrated like the miniature Pizza Hut pie in the dinner scene.

In some respects it's hard to comment too extensively on the writing, as this is the middle film of the trilogy; I don't yet know whether certain things are going to be wrapped up and resolved properly in Part III. But some aspects of this film's script smelt rather like laziness at the time of watching. For example, Marty McFly's girlfriend Jennifer was present for the first 20 or 30 minutes of the movie, and the storytellers clearly had no idea what to do with her or how to get rid of her. Eventually, McFly and Doc Brown simply dumped her in an unpleasant part of town in an alternate timeline, went about their adventures and barely ever thought about her again. Honestly, it was a weird approach - especially given the story desperately needed some new character energy. I would have liked to see her given more of a role and allowed to bring some new flavour to the series instead of basically being a swooning paperweight.

That wasn't the only writing niggle: we also had the absolutely baffling addition of a new 'character trait' for Marty whereby he couldn't stand to be called a "chicken" and could be goaded into just about anything by the insult's use. No explanation was offered for this, it didn't pay off or go anywhere, and honestly was just puzzling. Evidently the writers decided Marty needed to be more flawed than in the previous film, but for no particular reason and with no apparent concern for whether the new flaw they gave him made any sense. I can only assume Back to the Future Part III will do something with this, because at the time of watching Part II it felt close to random.

I will watch Part III soon to see if and how this all pays off, so I will withhold judgement on the series as a whole, at least for now. But I'm afraid to say I didn't enjoy Part II nearly so much as I'd hoped I would; it felt too much like retreading old ground and recycling elements out of which we'd already got a movie's worth of entertainment.

It had been a while since a TV show properly grabbed me and put me into that delicious state of total immersion, where all I wanted to do was binge-watch and live in it forever, but Silo got me there.

Rebecca Ferguson starred as a mechanical engineer in a collosal underground silo - the home of ten thousand people living in a completely self-contained community, isolated from a barely seen post-apocalyptic hellscape by their subterranean concrete castle. Big questions hung in the air from the off: what was outside the silo? Who built it? Did the story take place in the future of our timeline, or in a fictional alternate universe? Were the people in charge of the silo telling the truth? Answers started to come, but then so did more mysteries, and then we were really off to the races.

In some ways, Apple TV's dystopian show initially felt like a straightforward collision of Fallout and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and in the early episodes threatened to retread well-worn genre tropes, but quickly settled into its own identity. The world of Silo was nectarous in its tactile grottiness: the sets were fantastically weathered, the technology pleasingly clunky, the costuming robust and distinctive.

Despite the full-on worldbuilding, the story was easy enough to follow. Perhaps, at times, a touch too easy; the frequent reminder flashbacks made me wish more than once the show had had a little more faith in the viewer's ability to recall things and notice details. But this was a minor gripe; the over-explaining didn't insult, it merely failed to flatter, and I could forgive it.

Some slightly dodgy put-on American accents notwithstanding, the acting quality throughout was generally high. Ferguson in particular stood out for her compelling turn as a generator room grease monkey whose accidental involvement in a search for truth led to her being whisked out of her engineering department and made the chief of police - she stole an awful lot of scenes with her unassuming, stoic and at times statuelike manner, steely but never cold.

Of course, the titular silo itself was as much a character as any of the human performers. A towering inverted skyscraper of concrete, the design of the underground base was utilitarian but not entirely brutalist, and suited the story well. Once I'd seen a couple of episodes, I couldn't imagine the silo looking any other way, in much the same way that after a truly great piece of casting it can come to seem inconcievable that any other actor might have played a given role (can you imagine anybody but Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow?).

There is always the fear with a mystery-box-type TV show that it will go the Lost route, of just piling riddles upon riddles with no intention of ever paying them off. But Silo had its roots in a pre-existing book series, and it did feel like there was method to its mysteriousness, so I felt safe to develop the trust this would go somewhere and show its cards in time.

Set over a tense, pulsating soundtrack, Silo's first season made good use of genre convention and cleverly used my expectations against me, and I will definitely be checking out Season 2. Above all, the first season left me with a profound gratitude that I don't live in a dingy post-apocalyptic underground bunker, and that any time I like I can go outside to visit a forest, the seaside, or even Ashford.

Occasionally, I'll watch a movie everybody likes and really struggle to get on with it, and Jerry Maguire was one of those titles.

Tom Cruise played the titular Maguire, a sports agent who, in the first five minutes of the film, grew a conscience and decided he had too many clients on his roster to give them all the attention they needed - sending out a company-wide memo sharing his manifesto for making less money in the service of higher moral values. This stance predicatably led to his getting fired almost immediately, followed by Maguire's frantic scramble to try to take some clients with him on his way out the door. But this was all just background and setup for what the film really wanted to be, which was an earnest romantic comedy (intercut with Maguire's continued attempts to work with his one remaining client, an egotistical American football player portrayed infuriatingly by Cuba Gooding Jr).

I'm not really a big Tom Cruise guy, and for whatever reason I couldn't get into him in this. Jerry Maguire - the character - spent the first half of the movie as a bumbling fool, a lightning rod for awkward social encounters, and the second half as a completely generic Tom Cruise character. Awkwardness can be cute, and it can be charming, but Cruise wore it like a dunce hat, and on him it was neither.

It didn't help that the writing had major issues. Considered at the micro level, it sparkled with wit and genuinely quotable turns of phrase. The dialogue had an agreeable rhythm and the cast delivered it well. But at the macro level, the pacing felt unpleasantly lumpy.

Despite the far-too-long runtime, some plot elements felt like they happened too fast to be credible (Maguire and his coworker-turned-love-interest - Renée Zellweger giving a charming performance as a widowed young mother with no social life - seemed to race through the relationship beats of first date, marriage and separation at breakneck speed). But on the other hand, some other predictable early plot beats took far too long to unfold. The movie spent far too much time on things that didn't need it, and not enough on things that did.

At times, Jerry Maguire seemed to want to be a cringe comedy, but it never seemed to really find its feet: few of the awkward scenarios presented within would pose much difficulty for a person with an average level of social calibration, much less a professional agent whose entire stock in trade is meeting people and knowing what to say. I wanted to feel the cringe. I wanted to feel anything.

Jerry Maguire grasped continuously for an emotional connection and didn't really find one. It felt less like a proper story and more like a sequence of things happening, and I kept checking my watch throughout.

Somewhere in the middle, it came a bit closer to resonating with me, but the movie had a tin ear for authenticity and prioritised plot movement over verisimilitude. Despite having been dating her for about seven minutes, Maguire asked Zellweger's character Dorothy to marry him, and she actually agreed, which was the moment the film - having taken roughly an hour and a half to just about get my interest - lost me again, this time for good.


I honestly have no idea why this movie was such a hit. It wanted to have something to say about life and about how love and business can mix to create meaning, but it never seemed to be more than the sum of its parts. Considered alongside writer-director Cameron Crowe's later movie, Vanilla Sky (also starring Tom Cruise), both movies showed clear evidence that Crowe's approach to movies is to take on big themes in the hope that the very act of tackling them will automatically result in something profound, but here, as in the later movie, the attempt proved fruitless.

Long on dust-covered politics, short on reasons to care about the outcome.

The worldbuilding was rich, but you'll be in trouble if you're not familiar with the source books and you fail to keep up with it all. Once you've stumbled, you're in for two and a half hours of getting the various groups and characters and everything mixed up and not really knowing what's going on or who's trying to do what. None of the characters were given anything resembling a backstory and I couldn't really tell what I was supposed to take away from it all.

Did I have fun? Did I learn anything? Was I moved? Not really, no, and no, are the answers to those questions. I spent a good chunk of the movie wondering about the logic of calling the dragonfly-esque airships 'ornithopters', which I'm pretty sure would translate to 'bird wings' and which doesn't make any sense at all given the design.

Timothée Chalamet as the lead basically just drifted around looking like a handsome broom handle with lovely hair and played a character with no discernable personality. By the end of the movie, I still didn't really know what he was actually specifically trying to achieve, but I suppose it's possible that was my fault for falling off the plot wagon and letting it rattle away without me for the last hour of the movie.

Maybe this film will mean something to fans of the book, but it didn't do a lot for me, and I don't have any particular urge to see Part Two.

I felt conflicted about Alien: Romulus.

There were things about it I liked very, very much, and other things about it that were completely dreadful. Depending on my mood when you ask me, I might tell you it was pretty good or I might say it was junk. I feel like I could easily make a case either way.

I can't help wondering how it could happen that the creative sensibilities responsible for some of the genuinely good bits in this movie could also not see the problem with the obviously fuckawful stuff (almost all of which was clumsily referential of the earlier movies, and could have been dispensed with).

The overall effect was of a movie that was competently constructed and had some good ideas, but didn't have enough confidence to stand on its own without clumsily shoehorning in a plethora of series references and callbacks. It was like someone had started with a solid sense of how to make a perfectly good Alien movie, but had then allowed doubt to creep in and had become afraid that Alien stans would fail to approve for some reason, and so peppered in a whole bunch of hastily conceived and poorly executed nods to the earlier films as something of an insurance policy. Whether this doubt was in the mind of the director or those of the Disney executives, of course, is unknown to me. (Not that an Alien film has ever been hampered by egregious studio meddling before...)

Speaking of Disney, I did get a little whiff of Star Wars: The Force Awakens from Alien: Romulus: that of a competently made, largely entertaining film that was nevertheless too cautious and self-conscious about its place in franchise canon, of a director trying to do something worthwhile in the shadow of nervous studio executives imploring them to just play the hits.

Despite this, though, Romulus didn't feel cynical at its core, and came across as an earnest (if sometimes misjudged) attempt to make a worthy Alien entry. And it wasn't entirely unsuccessful: the best parts of the movie were probably better than anything else seen in the Xenomorph universe since Aliens came out in 1986, and that's not nothing.

I think overall my opinion barometer largely gave a positive reading for Alien: Romulus. Despite its often wince-inducing missteps, I did find it to be entertaining, and I could imagine I would want to watch it again at some point - which is more than I can say for Alien: Covenant.

I guess I'll try to just look the other way at the eye-rolling parts and pretend not to notice, like when a good friend makes a faux pas at a party.

I get book recommendations all the time from all sorts of places. I can't for the life of me remember how this book came across my radar, and I haven't heard much buzz about it among the people I usually look to for literary guidance, but this book was fucking great. I loved it.

It was about the various ways in which the world is basically whatever you think it is - in other words, the million tiny ways in which your perception of reality essentially shapes said reality.

Robson began by covering placebo medicine (which I assume most of us know about already) and from there spiralled out into almost all facets of life, showing how your mindset can influence everything from weight loss to energy levels to stress management to your IQ and in other ways that you almost certainly don't even realise.

I was afraid this was going to be a fake-it-til-you-make-it hustling manual, or some nonsense about manifesting. Happily, it wasn't: it was a detailed exposé of real, little-known phenomena, backed up by actual research.

A real eye-opener of a book and one of those ones that feels like I should re-read every few years to refresh myself on its contents. Highly recommended.

I'm realising I don't like David Leitch's movies all that much.

I find them overly indulgent, and not in a charming way. I can't watch one without coming away feeling like the film thinks of itself as being extremely stylish and likeable.

In practice, I find each of them self-congratulatory, insincere, and invariably at least 30 minutes too long. If Bullet Train were a person, it would be an obnoxiously effusive teenager who doesn't realise how obvious it is that excessive bravado belies a deep lack of confidence.

Leitch very much likes fight scenes set to deliberately incongruous but familiar songs, and "quirky" characters committing too hard to jokes that don't support the weight placed on them. I get the impression he thinks the entire art of good filmmaking is basically just cramming lots of left-field ideas into an action film. As a result, Bullet Train was as flat as Belgium: the action didn't excite, the jokes weren't funny and the attempts at intrigue weren't especially intriguing. It was an attempt at an artisan action film delivered by a man with no creative taste.

I've never seen an interview with David Leitch, but his films make me think that if I saw him at a party, he would be wearing a leather jacket and a huge watch and mansplaining the craft of filmmaking to a politely blank Instagram model.

I don't usually go in for biographies, but this chunky doorstop of a book was captivating.

Despite being a deep dive into the daily minutiae of America's 26th prezzo, The Rise Of Theodore Roosevelt wasn't even the full story; almost unbelievably, this 960-page breeze block tome only charted Roosevelt's life from childhood through to taking command of the Oval Office, and was the first in a trilogy (of which I have not yet read the latter two books).

It helped, of course, that Roosevelt himself was such an endlessly interesting character: principled and bloody-minded, sickly yet successful, and somehow both refined and rugged. It's hard not to be curious about a man who could just as easily write highly respected scholarly textbooks as beat up cowboys in backwater bars and eagerly lead soldiers into battle - a man who could equally inhabit the archetypes of bookworm and frontiersman.

Theodore Roosevelt seemed to be able to achieve anything he wanted, and as a consequence it would be all to easy to elevate him to a mythical status, but Edmund Morris was able to keep his subject grounded in reality. Delving deep into Roosevelt's world, the biographer illuminated the fledgling president's hopes, flaws, plans, relationships and reputation, in a manner that felt exhaustive but never exhausting.

The author's writing was impeccable - bringing the account to life through deft and elegant turns of phrase that added colour and character to the facts while never stealing attention from the subject. I have not studied the art of good biographical writing, but surely this was a masterpiece.

I would very much like to read Morris' followup, Theodore Rex, but it seems like the sort of book that must wait. You can't just read a book about Theodore Roosevelt willy-nilly.

This was the second thing I saw in a row which starred Ryan Gosling and had a title like The Something Guy(s). Clearly I was going through a phase of some kind.

The Fall Guy was a movie for people who like stunts (which I do, very much). Unfortunately, said stunts came bundled with a deeply turgid plot in the form of a tedious and unconvincing love story, as well as some metafictional elements that tried very hard to be clever and teetered precariously on the edge of smug self-satisfaction.

This film did have some unquestionably good bits in it (namely, all the stunt sequences). It had pretty much the right amounts of explosions, car chases, fist fights, and death-defying escapes, but arguably the wrong amounts of most of the other elements.

I've never made a feature-length movie, but my gut tells me the preferable way to do a stunt showcase film would be to approach your structure as if you were directing a porno. You'd have to know and own the fact the plot would simply be there to ferry viewers from one 'action scene' to the next. And you'd have to understand that the audience would be there to have their excitement buttons pressed and wouldn't want the film to be sheepish about its own thrills.

The Fall Guy tried to do too much, and it didn't have anything like the deftness of touch required to do it all properly. It seemed rather like the director had felt compelled to pre-emptively insure the movie against people who didn't care for action by trying clumsily to give it 'heart' - but all the 'emotional' and 'romantic' scenes in this landed with a wooden thud, and dragged the genuinely good bits down into the chasm of mediocrity below.

I did at least very much like that the film contained a shoutout to the ludicrous fact that in the Year of Our Lord 2024 there is still not an Academy Award for Stunts, which I've been saying for years is a horrendous oversight. If you can give somebody an Oscar for hairstyles but you can't give them one for being on fire and jumping off of a moving train, your awards system is all fucked up. People have been campaigning for this since the early Nineties, and it's ridiculous that it still isn't a thing.

One of the things I don't like about myself is that I don't often laugh aloud at comedies, even if I enjoy them.

I think it's a combination of two factors. One, I'm hard to please. I find most things that are "funny" aren't really that funny. Two, I don't tend to be very expressive in general. I'll more often think, "oh, that's a good joke" than actually laugh. (I'm also the kind of person who has to consciously remember to do a nice reaction when I'm given a gift.)

It is therefore with great joy that I am able to say this movie got me, properly got me, several times. It legitimately tickled me. It was a glorious concerto of masterful chaos and I loved it.

I find Shane Black's movies a bit hit-or-miss, but when he gets one right, it's transcendent. This was one of those films. I can't remember the last time something went straight onto my list of all-time favourite movies from the very first viewing.

It had the kind of humour that makes hack reviewers use the word "irreverent", which I hate, as it always feels a gnat's chuff away from "zany" or "wacky". This film was chaotic, but in a meticulously careful and structured way that would be entirely done a disservice by just describing it as "irreverent".

Really good fun and a bona fide gem.

Pressfield is more famous for his other book, The War of Art, which I'd had on my reading list for a long time as it was supposedly a classic. But the experience of reading Turning Pro - his follow-up title - made me remove the earlier book from my list with prejudice, because this one was fucking terrible.

It was nothing but endless pontificating about the author's made-up archetypes, with nothing to justify or back up any of his assertions - many of which would be considered patently absurd by anybody who has spent time living on Earth (such as the statement that all addicts of every variety are really just insecure artists waiting to blossom into their true selves). He provided no background whatsoever as to how he arrived at any of the conclusions he presented in the book and everything was stated as if it were just obviously and self-evidently true.

I got the impression Steven Pressfield believes himself to be some great oracle whose every thought is a revolutionary insight. If I'd written something this bad, I would have had the good sense to be embarrassed about it.

This tedious little book had far more to say about frugality than hedonism, and the authors' tips basically boiled down to finding ways to convince yourself that completely uninteresting and mundane things are somehow amazing and fun.

Their idea of hedonism constituted making a special effort to be amazed at the flavour explosion that is a cucumber (this is a real thing that's really in the book). They also suggested you should consider scavenging food from rubbish bins to save money. Wow! Hedonism!

The next time I find myself in proximity to a rubbish bin I can assure you I will not be eating anything out of it and will instead be inserting this stupid book.

Big Magic was recommended to me recently as I was prattling on at length about the various contradictions and challenges inherent in being a creative person. It was a decent book, and it helped. Sort of. With asterisks.

There were some parts that came very close to being too woo-woo and covered in magic sprinkles for me, but they were - thankfully - balanced out with some good solid thinking points and genuinely useful advice.

I would say this is probably worth a read for anybody who gets confused and frustrated by the whole business of being creative, as it may have a soothing effect, although - truth be told - I didn't really feel like any of it stuck with me for more than 30 seconds after putting the book down, and the overall difference it made to my life was probably close to nothing.

I was also a bit annoyed at having read the whole book without ever getting a clear explanation of what the phrase "Big Magic" was supposed to mean.