I’m doing this, as mentioned in the previous post, to wipe the slate clean for next year, and to have an accurate count of how much I read and watched this year.
To that end, some of these capsule reviews will be just a sentence or two, and some will be longer. On occasion, when I had written a longer note on something that I didn’t end up posting, I’ve flagged that.
Nevertheless, this is very long. I wouldn’t blame you for just skipping it. This one’s more for me than for you. Therefore, I won’t be sending this as a newsletter either, but I’ll link to it in the next one.
Non-Fiction
RSS: The Long and Short of It – Devanura Mahadeva: A very short book about the RSS and the Hindutva agenda. I expected a history lesson, but this is a polemic. That’s not such a bad thing, of course, because the author is clear which side he lands on and why, but I didn’t learn anything new.
On Photography – Susan Sontag (reread): Reread this because I just picked up photography, and considering how popular photography is and how unambiguously positively it’s seen in the world, it’s worth rereading the foremost critic of photography’s mere existence. If Neil Postman believes we stopped living in reality with the advent of the telegraph and then the television, and if Guy Debord believes we live in a representation, Sontag draws a line between the two through photography, which serves to decontextualise images from reality while pretending it represents the same. Also, it was nice to have my discomfort with Diane Arbus’s imagery vindicated.
Mahabharata: The Epic and the Nation – G. N. Devy: A short critical essay on the Mahabharata, which I’ve been reading for the last few months, and its role in India. I don’t think I learnt anything new here, but it was an enjoyable enough read. I’ll be rereading Yuganta at some point.
Mumbai Fables – Gyan Prakash: Probably my favourite non-fiction read of the year, this is a history of Mumbai via its literature – newspapers, magazines, novels, travelogues, even comics – from its earliest days to the 21st century. It’s thoroughly well-researched, and entertainingly written, with a plethora of relevant illustrations and photographs. After I finished reading this, I found out that it was “adapted” into the Bollywood film Bombay Velvet, but I’d say vague inspiration is a more accurate way of framing it, though Gyan Prakash did get a writing credit on the film, and good for him. Highly recommended.
Plays/Screenplays
The Sunset Limited – Cormac McCarthy: As with every McCarthy I’ve read so far, there are moments of absolute beauty here, mixed in with the now-usual moments of naïveté that, for me, break the immersion he seems to be going for. I read this because it’s a big inspiration for Ram on The One Hand (out this week, along with The Six Fingers!), and I can see what he got out of it, even if I still wouldn’t call myself a McCarthy fan.
Plays: 1 (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull of Connemara, The Lonesome West) – Martin McDonagh: Very well-written set of rural plays set in Ireland. I read this because my favourite McDonagh film – the recent Banshees of Inisherin – seems like a work in line with his Irish plays. I enjoyed them all, although I had quibbles with a couple of story twists that felt unnecessary. A Skull of Connemara was probably my favourite.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – Martin McDonagh: I haven’t watched this film – people whose opinion I trust have told me I wouldn’t like it – but I thought I’d read the screenplay to see if it sparked something, since I was already on a roll with McDonagh’s plays. It was a decent read for a half hour, but I think my friends were right – I would be a titch annoyed if I were spending two hours with this story. I might still watch it someday if I run out of McDonagh films, but for now, I’m good.
Novels
Annihilation – Jeff Vandermeer: This was my fourth attempt to read this book, and the first successful one. I had a lot of trouble getting into the tone of the writing in the previous reads. In that, it is like those unbearably vague horror stories by Lovecraft and his successors like Ligotti and Brian Evenson – I like several stories by all of them, but there are times when the vagueness loses me. This time I powered through, and actually finished the whole book. It is a worthy read, though I’m not sure I agree with how highly it is rated by some. I’m not sure I enjoyed it all the way, but I did get something out of it. Might give it a year before I read the sequel, though.
The Hidden Hindu – Akshat Gupta: One of the most singularly atrocious books I’ve ever read. I was recommended this by someone I met in the ICU waiting room while my dad was in the hospital, and they assured me that this isn’t veiled Hindu propaganda. I’d agree that it’s not, but that’s because it’s not … anything – I can assure you I wrote better stories than this when I was fifteen years old, and boy, I was bad. I don’t know why I finished it, other than the fact that it was barely 150 pages. Here’s an excerpt from a randomly chosen page:
Dr Srinivasan’s appearance was comical, but his eyes brimmed with discipline. His conduct could command the attention of even the topmost officials. He was a boss by default. He could give everyone a sense of being a subordinate in his presence. He was funny only as long as he was quiet. It could be easily concluded that he was a no-nonsense man and highly dedicated to his work.
Dr Srinivasan was followed by another man, Dr Batra. He introduced Dr Batra to Veerbhadra and vice versa. They shook hands. Dr Batra was Dr Srinivasan’s colleague, or so it seemed to Veerbhadra.
Veerbhadra took him to be a not-so-jovial kind of man. He wore a grumpy look and seemed infuriated. He looked even more educated than Dr Srinivasan. His eyes were those of an intellectual.
For a hundred and fifty bloody pages. I don’t understand why someone published this and why they published two sequels. Just awful.
The Saint of Bright Doors – Vajra Chandrasekera (reread): I had to read this right after the previous book, if only to remind myself that the mythology of this region can still yield interesting modern stories. I wrote about this here when I first read it, but I’ll add that it very much holds up on a second read, even knowing everything that’s coming.
Embassytown – China Miéville (reread): (This was written in July, right after I’d read the book.) Reread this one after about five years. When I first read it, I thoroughly appreciated this as science fiction that was genuinely willing to be extremely strange, and to lean into its nature as prose. I’m sure I registered on some level that it was a satire on the lines of Flatland, particularly given that Flatland is mentioned halfway through the book, but I was too in awe of being within it that I wasn’t able to look at it from the outside.
The second time around, reading this now, it was immediately clear that Embassytown is doing similar things as Flatland, but with language instead of mathematics, and that its other concern is commerce and colonialism. It shifts from one to the other such that you’d be forgiven to think that at one point it stops being about the nature of language and how it relates to reality, and becomes only about its colonial subject (again hinted at when characters watch Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead), but it loops back around by the end.
This was my favourite Miéville then, and that remains true now. It has everything I like about his work – the love of strangeness, the love of monsters, the treatment of characters with a keen eye on their social location – with none of the bloat that typifies other novels.
The book’s concern with language and signification reflects in its writing as well. The writing here is rarely visual. Instead, it continually tries to use language-as-it-is to signify both visuals and things that cannot be looked at. One quickly gets used to the idea that, for example, “dog” here doesn’t necessarily mean what we see as a dog, and the mental image becomes nebulous, pliable, such that the Hosts of the book, the alien creatures known as the Ariekei, are never actually physically described, thereby becoming whatever you think they look like. (In my mind, for example, they look like giant amoebae, but I just did a google search, and most fan renditions are insectile.)
Probably the strangest book Miéville has written, and I mean that in a good way.
Films
(Most of these capsule reviews are copy-pasted from my Letterboxd diary, and the rest have been filled in from memory.)
Attenberg: Given how distinctive Yorgos Lanthimos feels in the current landscape, harkening back to writers like Flann O’Brien or Beckett, it’s interesting to watch this film by his contemporary (and with an appearance by him) for the context he comes from in Greece, and to realise that he is very much from a milieu and a cohort, and just happened to be the one to make it big. Good watch.
A Field in England: An interesting premise, with some striking imagery, but overall a disappointing story that either could’ve been much shorter, or, preferably, could’ve done something else over its runtime. It’s been a while since I watched this, but I remember fidgeting through the last hour of this. I feel like it’s heavily inspired by Onibaba, but can’t hold a candle to that one.
Midsommar: Liked this much more than Hereditary. It’s focused, magnificently paced and utterly experiential as more horror films should be. I’ve heard people quibble that the plot doesn’t hold together or that it’s thematically simplistic, but from the first shot to the last, it’s the experience of the film that counts, of being so situated in your grief, and living life in that interrupted, staccato way that leaves you vulnerable to being preyed on by someone or something temporarily more powerful than you – and being happy about it because it makes you feel cared for.
Memoria: I think this would have rewired my brain if I’d gotten to watch it theatrically. Still got close, since I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
Bramayugam: If it had been twenty minutes shorter, at two hours, it would’ve been a near-perfect mythological horror film. As it is, the first half is marvellously tense, and the second half stumbles and then meanders before settling into a slightly underwhelming ending that would’ve been more effective if it had arrived quicker. However, it remains an admirable effort, and an enjoyably modern twist on Hindu mythology, with a powerhouse central performance by Mammootty.
Cure: My first Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and I’m a fan. The plot is a more-or-less standard apocalyptic horror movie, but the way it’s been shot and constructed shows a master in full command of his creative faculties. Koji Yakusho is magnetic.
Collateral: Makes me want to watch more Michael Mann movies (this is my first). Does not make me want to watch more Stuart Beattie movies. The screenplay, unfortunately, comes out of a textbook – the only surprising moment is when Mark Ruffalo’s character catches it, and even that’s because 2004 wasn’t to know he’d be such a star. And despite many moments of genuinely beautiful filmmaking, it occasionally looks like it was shot for tv, particularly in the final sequence when it feels like they ran out of money. I do however want to see what the guy can do with an actually exciting screenplay.
Zodiac: I loved this, but holy shit there is no way this movie would exist if not for Memories of Murder. If you liked this, go watch that.
All That Breathes: Lovely slow, experiential documentary ostensibly about two brothers living in Delhi who rescue black kites for a living. The best moments of this film are when we linger on the coexistence of wildlife and humanity, animals living invisibly in an urban environment. This film partly inspired this post, along with Cure, which is noted above.
Whores’ Glory: A supposed documentary about the lives of sex workers in three different parts of the world, it started to feel extremely constructed at some point. Usually, a documentary like this would be filmed over months or years, but this almost like a presentation that had been put together much faster. I wanted to stop watching the film entirely, but decided to look it up, and it turns out that it was indeed filmed fast, but with a long preproduction and research time, and – this is key – the production, along with the “characters” in the film, essentially recreated anecdotes that they had narrated during research. Which makes the film a fictional reenactment of supposedly real events, except reenacted by the people the story is about. This might ding the film’s credentials as “non-fiction”, but if I felt that the characters within were being objectified, I have to take into account their own agency in this, since they co-wrote the film. That’s a dissonance I’ve enjoyed sitting with after finishing the film, but I remain uneasy.
Crazy, Stupid Love (rewatch): It’s not the finest romantic comedy out there, but I have very fond memories of this, particularly the astounding chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (which is odd because I did not enjoy La La Land – maybe they should stick to being funny together).
Prometheus: Better than it could’ve been, worse than I’d have hoped for. I really like that, given the opportunity to make a prequel to Alien, Scott decided to instead riff on themes of religion instead. The Noomi Rapace abortion scene is fantastic body horror (in fact, a clip of that on Twitter is why I watched this in the first place). The rest of the film … well, it’s got its ups and downs, but it paves the path to Alien: Covenant (more on that below), and it’s got the fantastic character of David, who is easily the most fascinating character in the franchise so far.
Sidenote: Every time I talk about Prometheus and Alien: Covenant online, someone feels moved to inform me that Ridley Scott “ruined” the original Alien by making this the origin of the Xenomorphs and by “revealing” who the space jockey from the original film actually was. Quite apart from the fact that nerds have informed me that the timeline doesn’t work, this kind of thinking is absolute nonsense.
First of all, Alien was made in 1979, thirty-three years before Prometheus. You can’t honestly believe that these revelations are what Ridley Scott had in mind when he was making that film. And even if they were, they aren’t in the movie. It’s not possible for a later story to ruin a pre-existing one, even if it’s “set” before it. That’s not how stories work. Scott didn’t go back in time and change Alien. Prometheus and Covenant were made in a different time, and are about different things, they just use the iconography of the Alien franchise.
Canon is strange, particularly because of seriously some people treat it. I made this analogy on BlueSky with the two creation myths in Genesis. They “contradict” each other only if you think one happened and then the other happened. Which is, yes, how real life works, but it’s not how stories work. At all. And applying canon to fiction is just as silly as applying it to religious myths. Canon as applied to fiction was originally a game, and that is how one should treat it. If it makes things fun, go for it, but if it “ruins” something for you, then fuck canon.
It’s perfectly fine to tell two stories about the same concept that contradict each other, and yet have them both be true, because they’re fictional. It doesn’t matter whether both “happened”. So, if it helps you to pretend while watching Alien that Prometheus and Covenant happened before it, sure, go for it. If it degrades the experience for you, just stop pretending that. Hope this helps.
Aliens: A great special effects film, and a fun adventure movie, but it’s almost offensive that there are people that think this is better than the sui generis brilliance of the original. That one was a singular sf/cosmic horror/creature feature film, thoughtfully made at every level, this is just a movie. A very enjoyable one, but a movie nonetheless. Even among Cameron’s oeuvre, I prefer both the Terminator_s over this. Hell, I don’t think it’s nearly as good as this, but I’d rewatch _Prometheus over this one, because that is trying to do something and say something, while this is just a fun time at the cinema.
Anyway, I liked Newt, Sigourney Weaver is great, as is her chemistry with Hicks, and the introduction of the queen is absolutely an all-timer scene on par with at least the Noomi Rapace abortion scene in Prometheus, if not the John Hurt scene in the original.
Alien: Covenant: They lied to us about this. Lied, I tell you. Covenant is easily the best Alien movie since the original. Beautifully made, thematically ambitious, combining everything that’s fascinating about what Scott was trying to do with Alien, Blade Runner and Prometheus. On top of which it has the best pure acting of the lot – the central performance by Michael Fassbender – and some of the tensest horror sequences since the original.
From what I can tell, the complaints are that it’s “messy” (i.e. you gotta read between the lines a bit), that it doesn’t foreground the aliens enough (it’s a movie monster, it should be used sparingly), and that you think it’s going to be one story but it’s actually another (I’m aware that a lot of people finding this to be some sort of betrayal in storytelling, but I personally tend to like it – I’ll give you that one, though).
I’m only knocking half a point off because the Necropolis sequence could’ve been a titch tighter, and there are some pacing oddities when the aliens show up there. Otherwise, quite brilliant. I feel a genuine loss that there were supposed to be more films in the David sequence and we’re not going to get them.
(My favourite visual things were the way it treats things suspended in the air – from the pathogen to the glass in the final sequence to the signal transmission carried over from Prometheus, and my other favourite thing was the way the camera moves from side to side in the flute/recorder sequence. Chef’s kiss.)
Finding Vivian Maier: An incredibly story – the discovery of one of the 20th century’s greatest street photographers after her death – but the film itself is pedestrian in its craft and presentation.
Alien (rewatch): Watched this because K hadn’t seen it. Hail the Lord’s perfect creatures.
Rye Lane: Very well-shot and wonderfully designed, but what is that script? The structure is rote, and the most charming character is the dude the main character’s ex cheated on him with. Needed like five more drafts before anyone should’ve touched it.
Twisters: Far better than it needs to be, and a great deal of fun. The script is pretty much exactly what you’d expect, but Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell have good chemistry, and it’s very well-shot.
Oddity: I liked this far less than the Internet seems to have, mainly because I thought the plot was complete nonsense, but it’s got a few good images.
The Crow: Goofy, pulpy but sincere. An enormous amount of fun. I love that there was a time when R-rated movies were made so that 13-year-olds could feel cool and grown-up.
The best thing about this is the lurid left-of-reality comic-book aesthetic, with Michael Wincott’s scenery-chewing a close second. All topped by a banger of a soundtrack, one I’ve loved for ten years before I even felt like watching the film.
Asteroid City (rewatch): As close to perfection as Wes Anderson has gotten yet. I feel like in this one, he gets the blend of whimsy, structure and emotion just right. And I’m not usually a big Wes Anderson fan, but this one just works for me. There are scenes here that are intoxicating in their density and in their exploration of the grief underlying the clean, scrubbed veneer. The Jeffrey Wright scene and the Margot Robbie scenes are particular favourites.
Going Where I’ve Never Been: The Photography of Diane Arbus: Diane Arbus in her own words over some of her best photographs. Worth a watch if you can find it. But I’d recommend, after that, to read what Susan Sontag says about Arbus in On Photography as a curative.
Alien 3: (I watched the Assembly Cut of this, since it’s the best one by consensus.) The first hour or so is amazing. You can see traces of the original monk planet story, but they’ve been processed rather well into this bleak prison planet story, to the point where the alien creature is nearly extraneous.
In fact, that’s where things start going squiffy – when Charles Dance dies and the alien gets loose. There’s still a few good beats – Paul McGann’s Golic worshiping the creature, and Dutton’s chaplain refusing to kill Ripley – but the second half is fairly slack and predictable. It should’ve been structured as a tight act 3.
Still, I love that this huge swing is the third in a blockbuster franchise. I don’t think we get to the big swings of Prometheus and Covenant without this.
The Wanting Mare: Rather beautifully imagined, but far too elliptical for its own good, without enough profundity to match. I’m not complaining, though. The man made it in a warehouse with his friends. This is a labour of love, and it’s wonderful to see works like this out in the wild. Gives one hope.
Longlegs: If your movie is going for a Lynchian “sickly soul of suburbia” theme, it helps if your revelation isn’t a nonsensical twenty-minute plot dump.
Which is a pity, because the first hour and change has a lovely haunted tone, with the heavy lifting admittedly being done by Andres Arochi’s magnificent eye for visual storytelling (there are several frames here that made me go, ooooh) and Elvis Perkins’s fantastic score.
There are some goofs in that first hour, some leaps of logic and unconvincing dialogue and storytelling, but it’s carried by the central mystery, the well-controlled tone and the eeriness of Cage’s performance. But the third act leaps fully into goofy territory, and I kept going, “Why is this happening?” and “Why would anyone do that?”
It turns from cursed to silly and spectacularly shits the bed by the end. But. It only partly ruins a genuinely fun and fast-paced first hour for me. Also, I can’t attest to this personally, but I’m told by several people who find horror movies scary that the first hour had some great scares. So I’ll dock marks for … whatever that was by the end, but if you can ignore that, there is some fun to be had here for about the first 70 minutes.
The Cabin in the Woods (rewatch): Third time watching this, because my partner had never seen it, and each time, I appreciate the clockwork precision of the screenplay more and more. It also helps that this is glorious fun. The core of the idea seems to be “what if you rooted for the teenagers and the movie monster?” and it’s an excellent expansion of that idea.
K didn’t like the ending, and I get it because I was ambiguous about it the first time I watched it, but the second time and this time, it feels entirely thematically consistent with the rest of the film, and a natural denouement of the idea that “they” win if our heroine does what they want her to – for however good a reason. Some people have read the turn as nihilistic, but that would only make sense if we were exploring the consequences beyond the ending, and we’re not, because that’s not what this is about.
Finally, the ending is just about the last minute of the movie, and if you ask me whether I’d prefer a minute that sets things back to the status quo (which has been the antagonistic force in the film) or one that makes an audacious big swing that’s not only thematically appropriate but a giant fuck-you to the idea of propriety in this scenario, I’ll choose the fuck-you every time.
1408 (rewatch): Goofy, trashy fun, held together by John Cusack’s charm. It won’t win any awards, but I’ll rewatch it every few years if it shows up somewhere.
The Fabelmans: Too much to say about this to try and say it in a hurry, but Spielberg captures the dichotomy of observing life while being present in it that forms the core of being an artist without glamourising it – while film can reach for truth and make the ordinary feel significant, it can just as easily be used to mythologise people who don’t deserve it (particularly in a section that I can’t help but see as engaging with Birth of a Nation and Nazi propaganda films).
It is playful, whimsical, larger-than-life and intimate all at once. In other hands, there was a risk of over-self-mythologisation or falling into a “magic of cinema” trap like Scorsese’s Hugo unfortunately did, but Spielberg lands it right.
Tumbbad (rewatch): Got to rewatch this in the theatre. Had been a while since I’d watched it, so I got to see the magic unfold all over again. What a fucking movie. Best Indian horror movie, full stop.
In the Mood for Love (rewatch): What a marvellous film, which such a gorgeous soundtrack – they knew that one tune was a banger and just reused it throughout. You can’t tell watching this film just how chaotic the production apparently was.
It’s What’s Inside: A really fun movie. More comedy than horror, it’s like Bodies Bodies Bodies and Talk to Me put together, but a little bit better than either of those, because you can tell Jardin wanted to make the hell out of it – it has the fingerprints of a maker all over it. Nothing monumental, but a good time. I will add though that horror movie treatments of mental health remain woefully out of date and bereft of nuance.
Look Back: Misses being as good as the manga by a hair, but otherwise a delight. Loved the music, in particular.
Red Rooms: Full marks for being something I’d never seen before. The way the film is shot, and the perspective from which it’s scripted, makes it feel grounded, real and disturbing in a way gore movies tend not to. The first half hour is fully magnificent. The last half hour, on the other hand, doesn’t quite hold together. The movie fails to choose whether it wants to be a piece of character-based horror or plot-based horror. Still, a film I’m very glad to have seen. And I’ll be very interested in what Juliette Gariépy does in the future.
Meet the Robinsons (rewatch): Another film I wanted to show K. My favourite modern Disney animated movie, and one that I far prefer to most Pixar films, which feel far too calculated to me. (It tracks that the other modern Disney animation film I like is Zootopia, which is straight-up a fetish film for furries in the guise of a kids’ film.) I like the central message of this – Keep moving forward – and its emphasis on community over lone heroism. The animation doesn’t hold up as well as I’d like – it feels overlit and too shiny, but that might just be the transfer they use on Disney+. The story and the visual design and storytelling still hold up.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: A beautifully mounted production that can’t help but create a dissonance between the melodrama of theatrical dialogue with the otherwise realistic shot choices.
So many of these scenes would work better if there was a distance, some space for the heightened reality of a play to take up. I can’t help but think this is a fundamental flaw of adaptation – rare is the play that actually works as a film and isn’t somehow reduced by it.
You can tell the play script is brilliant, though, and Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman get to sink their teeth into some meaty roles.
Finally, it is glorious to watch someone who knows how to light Black actors this well. The lighting of this film alone is worth studying, and throws into contrast how badly most films light Black skin.
Television
(Both of these reviews were written in July, right after I watched these shows. I’m posting them here unedited.)
The Bear Season 3: I try not to let the Internet’s opinion colour my enjoyment of a work of art, but on finishing this, I find myself mirroring the Internet’s disappointment in The Bear’s latest season.
It begins strong – the first episode might in fact be one of my very favourite episodes of the entire show – but as the episodes pass, one begins to get the sense that the writer’s room has, this time, forgotten that drama isn’t simply something that happens within people, but something that happens between people.
Thematically, it is appropriate that after the Season 2 finale, our main character Carmy reacts by going within – internalising his conflict, never showing it to other people, not acknowledging the fact that he’s disintegrating. What doesn’t make sense is everyone else acting the same way. Over and over in this season, we see people with internal conflict simply existing alongside one another rather than interacting.
The result is a show which stretches about an episode and a half’s worth of drama over a whole season, and fills out the rest with inane sitcom banter and superfluous celebrity cameos (a tendency, let’s admit, it already showed in Season 2). Even within genuinely dramatic scenes, the dialogue is somehow far more simple – like it could’ve come from any other show. Add to this the fact that the writer’s room seems to entirely lose writerly skill when treating the character of Claire – resorting to simplistic dialogue and faux-meaningful pablum on the level of the average soap opera.
I would say it’s still a well-shot show, but that wouldn’t actually be true. It’s still a pretty show, but in Season 2, every time we spent an episode focusing on a character, the entire mounting of the episode reflected the character, their mood, their internal temperature. This is now gone – the episode focusing on Tina, while one of the better episodes of this season, doesn’t hold a candle to an average episode from Season 1 or 2.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy this season at all – it’s still perfectly watchable television, and I didn’t regret spending the time with it – it’s just that it feels messy and undirected in a way the first seasons rarely did. The last episode, apart from one or two scenes, could’ve been a documentary about chefs rather than an episode in a drama. And unlike some other viewers, I don’t begrudge them digressions, it’s just …
Okay, here’s a theory of storytelling. Think of a story as a rubberband. You begin by stretching the rubberband, and by the end of the story, you let the rubberband snap back in place (or strategically chose to not let it snap back). In the middle, you’re constantly letting the rubberband relax a little and then tighten it up again, back and forth, as you build your story. These variations are the things you choose to do to make your audience ask, what happens next.
So even when you digress from the main story, you choose to do it in a way that retains the tension of the main story – the rubberband held taut. Because tension is what carries a story.
What you never want, though, is for the rubberband to be completely slack. Because then, there is no tension, and nobody is left asking, what happens next.
I’ll still give the show its last season, of course, because they’ve built enough goodwill with me that I allow them that, whether that final season manages to turn things around or if it’s a miss. But this was not it, folks.
Douglas Is Cancelled: Like I was telling a friend, Steven Moffat might have the same opinion about cancel culture and the wokes and so on as any other straight white man his age, but what I can trust him to do is, when he writes a story on the topic, he’s going to bait-and-switch you on this. You’ll think it’s a story about cancel culture, but it’ll turn out to be something else.
That’s why I watched this show, and on the whole, that turned out to be true. Douglas Is Cancelled is not a comedy about cancel culture, instead it’s two episodes of a comedy about cancel culture, followed by two episodes of a drama about a middle-aged white newsman and his much younger co-presenter (Karen Gillan).
In all, I’d say it’s a worthy watch, if only for episode 3, which is as good a dramatic episode as Moffat has ever written. The show is always snappily written, even if the characters don’t always hold together with the integrity of proper dramatic writing. It’s shot well, though functionally, and Alex Kingston gets to flex her chops more than Doctor Who (the only other thing I’ve seen her in) allowed her to. Karen Gillan, the star of the show (though the show hides this well from you for the first two episodes), is great in episode 3, though in episode 4 she resorts to this peculiar deep voice to indicate gravity that she had a tendency to do in her term on Doctor Who as well. A sort of “trust me, this is serious” shorthand that stands in for actual dramatic acting.
There is, though, one choice that the show makes at the very end which, to me, stops it being proper drama. It’s not for me to say whether this move was right or wrong, but I feel it was dramatically unnecessary and inserted mostly to let out all the tension built up in episode 3 and also in episode 4 regarding the events of episode 3. It comes at the very end, and it’s mostly there for an audience air-punch, and to let the audience heave a sigh of relief. But putting it in, I feel, allows the audience to feel that the story is “solved”, and therefore they can stop thinking about it.
And this is why Douglas Is Cancelled remains a perfectly fine comedy-drama, but never rises to proper drama.
Comics
Daredevil: Born Again – Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli: I wrote about this one here.
Batman: Year One – Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli: I remain less impressed by the writing than by the art, but I own four different editions of this book, so you can guess how I feel about it.
Barbalien: Red Planet – Jeff Lemire, Tate Brombal & Gabriel Hernandez Walta: Reread this for the first time since we made it – my first time working with my now-friend Tate, and Walta’s art is of course marvellous. Very happy with this book.
Crocodile Black – Phillip Kennedy Johnson & Som: Pandemic-set horror story. It’s got a great atmosphere, and Som’s art is very strong.
Dark Spaces: Dungeon – Scott Snyder & Hayden Sherman: Snyder and Sherman’s follow-up to Dark Spaces: Wildfire. Sherman’s art is a bit mellower in terms of form, letting the story speak. All in all, a fun read.
Ice Cream Man v01-06 – W. Maxwell Prince & Martín Morazzo: I’d slipped away from this book around issue 20, but it came up in conversation recently, and I thought I’d catch up on the whole thing. My original impression of this was that some issues work better than others, which continues to be true, but it makes for a great read in collected form, since even the issues that “don’t work” contribute to the overall themes and tone of the book. Issue #18 still absolutely breaks me – it was my favourite single comic that year, and the only comic that’s inspired me to write a fan letter to the creator. I wrote an essay about it for PanelxPanel magazine, which I’ll likely repost before the year is out.
Sapphic Pulp – Natasha Alterici et al.: Enjoyable erotic comics. Something I liked here was that Alterici and co. realise that the sex itself is seldom the most interesting bit of an erotic story, so they often end the story right before it happens. Available here.
Tokyo These Days – Taiyo Matsumoto: Delightful, melancholy manga about the manga industry. Matsumoto’s art is of course incredible, but I loved these stories, and saw myself and the comics industry reflected in them. We make comics because we love them, and we can’t escape them, no matter how hard we try.
The Last Delivery – Evan Dahm: Enjoyable surreal graphic novel, set in a world reminiscent of Kafka and Poe but nevertheless its own. More mainstream comics like this would be nice. Available here.
With that (Jesus, more than 6,000 words), we’re all caught up. I want to continue doing capsule reviews in 2025, but sometimes I can’t help myself and they turn into actual long reviews. We shall see.