In January, I read 3 prose books, 1 play, 5 comics, watched 13 movies (including 2 short films), and 2 seasons of television. The dearth of movies and tv are explicable – I have to be out of the house a lot these days, and I refuse to watch anything more involved than a YouTube video essay on my laptop or (god forbid) my phone. I would like to be reading more novels, though, and more difficult ones, if possible.
Books
There Is No Antimemetics Division – qntm: Read this because Dan Watters recommended it on BlueSky – turns out this is an SCP novel! I remember days and nights in my 20s spent bleary-eyed in front of my computer reading SCP entries by the score. This is a pleasant, innovative book based around the high concept that just like a meme is something that is really good at being remembered, an anti-meme is something that is very good at being forgotten, and that there is a division of the SCP Foundation dealing with this – a division that has been forgotten by everyone not belonging to it. There are some very good sf ideas here, but the fact that it was self-published means that it’s a bit ramshackle (which might be a pro rather than a con, depending on where you stand), and the writing aims at and largely hits the transparent efficiency of golden age sf, which this clearly follows from, without so much as a hello in the direction of the New Wave. Which is all fine, honestly. It is as good a book as it needs to be.
Monstrous Regiment – Terry Pratchett (reread): Sometimes you just need a Pratchett novel, you know. I think he functions much the way Wodehouse did for my parents’ generation, though Pratchett wrote far more from within the world than outside of it, and his writing was the better for it. I remembered this book quite fondly, though I didn’t recall much other than the plot twist telegraphed by the title of the book itself. I’d forgotten, for example, that this one features Vimes and the City Watch. In any case, a good one – not quite a late-era masterpiece (that would be Going Postal), but a funny, focused novel that revels in its sense of loss and melancholy.
Travelling to Work (Diaries Vol. 3) – Michael Palin: I’d read the first two volumes of Palin’s diaries when they came out, and hadn’t realised that two more were released since. I decided to make my way through them, and they continue to be great. Palin is a flavourful diarist – there are no big secret revelations here, but the writing is engaging and there are several excellent anecdotes. I plan to write about this separately, but diaries, unlike memoirs, leave no space for retroactive meaning-making, and unlike novels, contain a flavour of life that does not fit the narrative form. On the other hand, Palin is a bona fide celebrity, so his diaries involve going back and forth from the US, travel documentaries, and hanging out with other celebrities – the rest of the Pythons, the living Beatles (particularly George Harrison) and even that cast of You’ve Got Mail. You also get a sense of not being far from history, as I found out via meetings with Nicholas Mosley (son of Oswald Mosley) and Margaret Thatcher. What I particularly admired seeing, though, was a man who had accomplished as much in life as one really needed to, but who remained keen to prove himself, and to keep himself busy with work and creation. The sheer amount of stuff Palin gets done in a decade – a slow one for him, at that – is astounding. I jumped right into Volume 4 when I was done with this, and I’m currently a quarter of the way into it.
Plays
Skylight by David Hare: I read this because National Theatre at Home advertised a clip from their version of it – with Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan – and I figured I’d read it before signing up for NTaH, whereupon I found that it was no longer streaming on that platform. In any case, it is a well-written play, with colourful characters and a well-constructed emotional arc. The prologue, which at first feels irrelevant, provides a lovely grace note by the end. If I must quibble, there are tracts of dialogue in the second half that feel like a bit of a stretch, like Hare wanted to go into the difference between the sexes, but realised that was a bit hackneyed, and instead mined a seam about class differences that doesn’t quite connect to the characters as they exist on the page. But it is still trying something, and I don’t grudge it that.
Comics
Fortune & Glory: The Musical – Brian Michael Bendis, Bill Walko & Wes Dzioba: I really like the first volume of Fortune & Glory, and quite liked the first few chapters when they were serialised on Bendis’s newsletter, so picked up the complete edition. You get the sense that Bendis didn’t feel the story had enough meat on the bone, and decided to pad it out with the story of his entry into comics in the first place. It’s not badly presented at all, but this wasn’t very interesting to me, partly because I’ve already heard most of these stories in Bendis’s own voice in various podcast interviews. The actual story of Bendis being involved in the Spider-Man musical is entertaining, but short. Walko and Dzioba’s art makes for a more polished production than the first volume, but I missed the lo-fi aesthetic of that, which might go to show the very different place in his career Bendis is in right now.
A Walk Through Hell – Garth Ennis, Goran Sudžuka & Ive Svorcina: Ennis does True Detective. And sadly, isn’t much suited for it. The time-skipping works well enough – I think they’re going for a bit of ambiguity every time we go to a different time frame, but it feels unnecessary and could’ve been demarcated better (though it’s obviously a choice not to do so rather than an accident). Technically, at this point, Ennis knows what he’s doing. The issue here is that the story itself isn’t nearly as interesting as, say The Ribbon Queen, and the attempt at a higher Christian theme doesn’t feel like the story warrants the grandiosity.
Batman: Ego – Darwyn Cooke: My third time reading this. I didn’t like this the first two times, but enough people I respect like it that I keep giving it another go. I still don’t like it. It’s well-drawn, but it just doesn’t add up to anything.
The Ones – Brian Michael Bendis, Jacob Edgar & K. J. Díaz: Fun concept, entertainingly written and drawn, but as with nearly every Bendis book I’ve read, I feel the ending doesn’t follow from the rest of the story, and this time, Bendis does a rug-pull that replaces a potentially interesting climax with a less interesting subversion.
The One Hand/The Six Fingers by Ram V, Dan Watters, Lawrence Campbell, Sumit Kumar & Lee Loughridge: Reading this for the first time, really, because when you letter issues out of order (as I did for this one), and are more concerned with the aesthetics of your own department than with the whole, you can’t be said to have “read” the book. But this feels like an even bigger achievement than I anticipated when Ram and Dan originally told me about this idea, back when it was just “Project Gemini”. I haven’t read each series individually – maybe that’ll be the next reread – but over ten chapters, this manages to be both intimate and earth-shaking, entertaining and literary, and gorgeously drawn and produced, all the way to Tom Muller’s language and production design. Very proud to have been part of something like this.
Movies
A Different Man: There seems to be a surge in doppelgänger stories at the moment, and I’m into it, because I’ve always loved the theme. This takes a novel approach, because it doesn’t lean into the uncanny aspects of doppelgänger stories – the double here isn’t the same person, just a similar one, and the protagonist isn’t edged out of his own life but drops out of it voluntarily. I also enjoyed that while we’re presented the usual theme of the double being better at being the protagonist than the protagonist himself, over the course of the film, everyone, including the double, turns out to be a shallow piece of shit, and the protagonist doesn’t look so bad in the bargain. It is also beautifully shot, with great music, and uses its small budget incredibly well. I know The Substance is the flavour-of-the-month in terms of doppelgänger stories at the moment, and it is undoubtedly a whole lot of fun, but if you’re looking for, let’s say, a more high-minded take on similar material, you’d do well with this film.
Wallace & Gromit – Vengeance Most Fowl: As ever with Wallace & Gromit, I only found the story mildly amusing, but it’s a staggering technical achievement.
Flushed Away (rewatch): K and I were chatting about favourite animated films, and since I’d just watched the new Wallace & Gromit, I wanted to show her my favourite Aardman film, which is this one. It was, at the time, overshadowed by Ratatouille, but I retain the belief that this is a far better film. It’s incredibly funny – the jokes are a mile a minute – and better-written. I will give Ratatouille the edge in terms of quality of animation, because this was a claymation film that was pushed into being CGI at the last minute, but the world it builds is richer, fuller, and loonier. If you haven’t watched this, I highly recommend checking it out.
Nosferatu (2024): I have an idea in my head of the perfect Robert Eggers film, and unfortunately, he hasn’t made that one yet. In the meantime, he remains to me one of the most fascinating directors in English-language cinema, specifically for his treatment of historical people. Unlike most mainstream film, which consistently looks at the past with an end-of-history liberal lens, Eggers likes the idea that we had something in common with people from the past while also being alien from them. In Eggers’s films, people really believe in god, and in witches, and in magic, and this changes the world they live in, and this world is what Eggers wishes to present to us, as fully as he can while telling a good story.
Nosferatu continues this trend, but with a bit more winking towards the audience than usual, which was probably necessary for the film being as much of a popular success as it has been. Eggers combines the best bits of the original film and of Dracula, massages the story to retroactively be that of Ellen/Mina Harker, as it always should’ve been, and manages to make it feel both stately and tightly paced.
Regarding the psychosexual nature of the story – the erotic horror of the vampire – Eggers manages to make it fairly straightforward if you want it to be, but layered if you’re willing to push down a little. Textually, it is a story of abuse – marked in particular by Thomas and Ellen’s connection, having both been abused by Orlok – but there is more here, to do with the repression of Victorian modernity, the need to be beastly in order to express any human instinct other than that allowed by high society, and the tendency of eroticism to turn monstrous if not allowed to express itself in healthy ways. Every viewer will get something different out of it, to do with their own relationship with sex and propriety, and this is a function of Eggers’s interest, as stated above, in trying to present his characters on their own terms instead of filtered through an intrusive authorial lens.
Finally, I just want to add to the chorus praising Lily-Rose Depp’s performance – a marvellous sustained performance of pain and its accompanying madness. “In heathen times, you might have been a priestess of Isis.” Indeed.
28 Weeks Later: Kind of sets itself up for failure with the magnificent first sequence, which is never topped in the rest of the film. For a 100-minute film, there are too many slack sequences, though they’re made up for with some genuinely brutal scenes. It does continue the theme from the original that the zombies might be awful, but it’s humans you have to watch out for. Wish it was better, but the first film is quite a hard act to follow, I’ll give them that.
Cuckoo: Takes a fantastic idea for a movie monster and squanders it for a twenty-minute shoot-em-up climax. Schafer and Stevens are both having a ball – I just wish it added up to something over the course of the film.
There are a couple of spooky sequences, and as I said, I have to credit the inventiveness of the monster, but if they’d replaced the final half hour and spread the lore dump over the course of, say, an infiltration sequence instead of a gunfight (I’m trying not to be too specific here), this might’ve been a more unified film.
In any case, needed a couple of more drafts, preferably from a different writer.
Blue Velvet: RIP to the realest.
Satya: My parents took me to the cinema to watch Satya when I was 13, when the film had just come out. The film, unfortunately, was rated A (for Adult), and the ticket checker refused to allow me in, so I had to take a rickshaw back home while the rest of my family happily watched Satya and raved about it when they returned. This “A” thing had bugged me once before, for Agni Sakshi (which I still haven’t watched). A couple of years later, when the same was the case for Kaun, my father snuck me into the theatre, reasoning correctly that any of the horror short stories I’d been writing were more gruesome than whatever Bollywood might conjure.
The result was that I didn’t get to watch Satya. Years later, I experienced the films whose birth Satya had signalled – gritty gangland dramas like Company and Sarkar (both by Ram Gopal Varma, who had directed Satya) leading to the more sophisticated and modern crime dramas like Gangs of Wasseypur (by Anurag Kashyap, who co-wrote Satya) and present-day streaming shows like Sacred Games, Mirzapur, and Paatal Lok.
So was the case, until a couple of friends and I were making plans to meet for drinks, and one of them suggested that we could pre-game and then go watch Satya in the cinema, which I didn’t know was an option.
India doesn’t have a big culture of repertory cinema – the theatres usually play the latest movies and nothing else. Occasionally there’s an official re-release, but that’s about it. But in the last four years, since the COVID pandemic, it seems like Bollywood is … I wouldn’t say dying, exactly, but Going Through a Phase. Ticket sales have been cannibalised by streaming (plus India has always had a thriving piracy culture, leading to our general reluctance to pay for entertainment), and Bollywood movies seem to be torn between the melodramas of old, cool action thrillers and attempts to imitate the more sincere blockbusters of the Telugu industry, attempts that are impeded by the fact that most of our directors and stars are second-generation nepo kids and afflicted with a terminal case of irony, which leads them to think they’re better than the material (they’re not). The result has been that, to stay afloat, a lot of cinemas are re-showing old hit movies, one of which was Satya.
So to my delight, I got to watch the signature movie that led to a maturation of the Indian mainstream medium as it was meant to be watched. Well, sort of. My friend assures me that the sound projection was fucked.
I expected to be able to find a ticket easily, but the theatre was packed to the gills, as I suppose the cinema owners were hoping. I couldn’t sit next to my friends for the first half, and I was surrounded by young men in their 20s, whooping and hollering and repeating signature lines from the film – which was a delight, I assure you.
What I watched, though, was stranger than I’d expected. For one thing, I had thought Satya would be a tight, sleek film far closer to its eventual progeny than to Bollywood. But it is in fact a nearly-three-hour long film that is loud and so terrified of boring you that there’s likely no more than 30 seconds of silence in the entire film. It also has song-and-dance sequences, like the rest of Bollywood at the time, but unlike what we think of as crime dramas now, which are more likely to put songs in the score, on the lines of a Scorsese rather than a Barjatya.
This was a shock, and I had to reorient my expectations, but once I did so, I realised that this was a key transitional species between older, stately generational dramas like Nayakan and Agneepath and more modern films like Johnny Gaddaar, Maqbool, and the aforementioned Gangs of Wasseypur. With my expectations re-tuned, I had an absolute ball.
For one thing, Manoj Bajpayee deserves every accolade he received for this film. His Bhiku Mhatre is haunted, some sort of animal trying to tame himself to civilisation, his eyes hollowed out by his history. The dialogue is stunning, and matches the way the film drags crime down to the mundane – shootouts taking place in middle-class parking lots and children’s playgrounds, on railway station bridges, in construction sites, these men trying to resist the normalcy around them, trying to be larger than life, mostly failing. The Sopranos was some years away, but Varma and co. capture this desire of gangsters to be seen a certain way, their images flecked by film. As Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Ramadhir Singh would say in Gangs of Wasseypur, “Hindustan mein jab tak cinema hai, log chutiye bante rahenge.” (As long as India has movies, people will keep getting suckered.)
After we watched the film, we chatted about counterfactuals – what would be different if the film were made now? For one thing, we wouldn’t have the disclaimer at the end, where RGV essentially says, Please don’t think anything in this movie was cool, I was trying to talk people out of lives of crime, which feels like either a censor board call, or a production decision to play nice with whatever governmental department might have made things difficult for release (this is, after all, a country where films continue to languish for not being cleared by the board). For another, I doubt the romance plot would be done the same way, and it certainly wouldn’t feature an Urmila Matondkar, who looks suspiciously clean and glamorous among the rest of the cast, who look like people I meet at the tea shop down the road. Finally, my friend wondered what a different career Abhishek Bachchan might have had if this had been his film debut, two years before his actual launch with the forgettable Refugee. The title role doesn’t require much acting (the story goes that Bajpayee wanted to play the lead, and RGV tried to assure him that he was getting the meatier role), and Chakravarthy mostly fails at even that, and I’m sure Bachchan would’ve acquitted himself adequately, and we might have been looking at a very different Bollywood landscape right now.
One can also imagine, then, what Bollywood would’ve looked like without Satya. Much poorer, is the obvious conclusion, but I don’t think that would be the case. I feel it was time for a change – I remember being the audience then, and we wanted something different, something better. If not Satya, these same people – RGV, Anurag Kashyap, Sourabh Shukla, or Vishal Bhardwaj, who had already made Maachis and who composed the music for this movie – would’ve made something else. Or maybe a different cadre would’ve made an impression, one that had perhaps grown up on Gulzar and Mani Ratnam’s films. And maybe the next wave would’ve looked different – maybe instead of Vikramaditya Motwane, Vasan Bala, Dibakar Banerjee, Neeraj Ghaywan, you would’ve had other people. But there would’ve been evolution, and the working class would’ve re-infected the body politic of Bollywood, which had alienated itself from the qualities of parallel cinema and needed a jolt. The nature of transitional species is that you can’t trace the timeline that doesn’t include it, such is its domination. But one wonders.
The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry (short): Feels like it would’ve made a far better feature. But the 16mm frames and the colour work are gorgeous. Give this director a feature budget and see him go.
Reality+ (short): More like a rehearsal for The Substance than anything else. But Fargeat is well-suited to the short, punchy half-hour format.
Playtime: I admire the effort – you can’t but. It is undeniably a bit cold. I have a feeling I might enjoy the other Monsieur Hulot film, though from this, the humour might be broader and more Chaplin-esque than I might prefer. I wouldn’t say I loved this, but I respected the hell out of it. There were definitely sequences I loved – like the nightly television watch and early parts of the restaurant sequence. Making a film that feels like a giant Rube Goldberg machine is one of those things that bears thinking about, but whether it should be executed is another matter altogether.
Orlando: Feels like the gorgeous queer love-child of Virginia Woolf, Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway. Unfolds in what feel like temporal tableaus as opposed to scenes. Orlando him/herself is a bit pathetic, not the most interesting character in most rooms, but simply by being themself and enduring when all else dies, becomes fascinating. There are several gorgeous shots that I wish I could frame and put on the wall, and I particularly enjoyed the sex change being treated as something sacred and luminous. I have a feeling I’ll be coming back to this one in the future.
TV
Mad Men Season 1: Finally started watching this. The first season is good, but only provides hints of “one of the best tv shows ever”, though season 2, which I’m halfway through at the moment, has more evidence of something closer to genius. What I like about the first season, in any case, is how slice-of-life it is, as close as one can get to that in prestige tv, I suppose. The Sopranos can also be considered slice-of-life, but it is a kind of life most viewers will not live, while one can see oneself in Mad Men more easily, for all its period trappings. I like how the one element of “plot” – introduced three episodes in, mind you – is largely dispatched by the end of the season. If I had a complaint, it would be that the show seems rather afraid of being subtle – it is too thematically blunt for me, and has remained so in Season 2, and there are times when I wishes more were left to the imagination.
Ripley: Easily my favourite show of 2024. I liked this so much that I watched this weekly rather than my usual one-episode-a-day routine for limited series. And after four episodes, I paused my watch till I knew more about photography, because I felt I was missing things and wanted to appreciate the show more fully.
I don’t know how good an adaptation it is of the novel – Abigail Nussbaum has a great essay on where it fits in among the three existing versions – but it is a really fucking good television show. It’s very well-written, it is incredibly deliberately paced, and it is the best-photographed tv show I’ve seen in a good while. I have heard that the slow pace bothered some people, but for me, it allowed me to be immersed in this beautiful but lonely black-and-white world, populated by few other than our principals (to the point where, when later episodes introduce more characters, it is a relief) and in particular, to stay with Ripley during his murders, which simulate the mundanity such an act would have in real life. This mundanity is carried through the whole show – Steven Zaillian’s Ripley isn’t an interesting man. He’s not a very good conman, he’s not likeable, and he’s generally a bit pathetic. What he is, though, is directed. Whether he is impulsive or methodical is a matter of speculation, but he is very good at committing to his acts, and to lying about them with confidence. For me, this is Andrew Scott’s best performance yet, among those I’ve seen at least. This is a far more nuanced feat than his hammy Moriarty, and it is more contained and quietly virtuosic than his excellent wounded priest in Fleabag. It is wonderful to watch Scott go through expressions in conversation, the specificity of them despite their occasional opacity.
I linked to this video about the photography in Ripley, but I remain in awe of well-shot the show is. Whether thematically apt or otherwise, each composition is careful and considered, using light to paint the scene. Whether it is directly referencing Caravaggio, taking a generalised inspiration of light as used in classical painting, or playing with geometry in the style of American photography, nearly every frame in this show speaks. It helps, of course, that it is shot in black-and-white as opposed to colour. But rarely have I felt as safe with a tv show, assured that this creator knows what they’re doing.
That’s it for January. See you in another month!