Tag Archives: Love and Radio

Omnireviewer (week of Jan. 31, 2016)

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First off, I forgot something crucial last week:

Live events

Roomful of Teeth: live at the Fox Cabaret — There aren’t a lot of opportunities to hear operatic vocals, jazz singing, tuvan throat singing, yodelling and oktavism on the same program. This was one of the most incredible displays of virtuosity I’ve seen in concert. I knew it would be impressive, having heard their CDs, but what I hadn’t anticipated was how loose and comfortable it would feel. A lot of times, when ensembles perform music that’s this hard, it comes off sounding metronomic, like they’re struggling with all their might to keep together. But Roomful of Teeth owns this music completely. Caroline Shaw’s Partita was the obvious highlight, and totally lived up to the recording I’ve come to know so well. My only complaint is that, at 90 minutes and no encore, the performance was too short. Honourary pick of last week.

Now, on to this week’s reviews proper — just eight of them:

Movies

Spotlight — I don’t have much to say about this that I didn’t already say in my best of 2015 post. Suffice it to say that I’m still preoccupied with it a week later.

Room — This would have probably made the list if I’d seen it earlier. Very few movies have induced such anxiety in me, and not just in the sequences where you might think. There’s a scene near the start of the movie where Brie Larson’s character has to tell her son, who has lived for five years in a garden shed that he’s never been outside, that there is such a thing as outside. Watching her struggle to explain the concept of an entire world outside the realm of her son’s experience made me want to tear my beard out. The really great thing about this is how well it grapples with the way a child might respond to that revelation. It works similarly to some hard SF: it asks “what if…” and the story is the answer to that question. Unlike most hard SF, though, it’s got gut-wrenching amounts of emotional honesty. Pick of the week.

Literature, etc.

Alejandro Jodorowsky/Moebius: The Incal — This is proving to be more entertaining than it is good. Considering the extent to which Brian Michael Bendis says this changed his life in the intro, the writing here is soooper dodgy. The characters speak as if somebody’s summarizing what they said after the fact: “I don’t want to suffer! I don’t want to die!” Or, “Wait. There’s a thought coming to my mind… ‘The Black Incal!’” Also, there are these “tell, don’t show” moments where a caption explains what’s happening in the art, which is odd. There are elements of this that are a bit boneheaded. The climax is clichéd, hippy-dippy “union of opposites” nonsense. But Moebius’s art is stunning, and the universe where this takes place is convincing and fun. I’m enjoying this. Also, since I’ve seen Jodorowsky’s Dune, I can’t help but hear all of the dialogue in Jodorowsky’s voice.

Games

Journey — It’s nice to have friends with gaming consoles. Journey is a really successful example of non-verbal storytelling. Not a word is seen or spoken, yet it makes sense in an open-ended sort of way. But the real pleasure of this game is similar to the pleasures of a game like Super Mario 64, a longtime favourite of mine: moving your character around just feels good. Jumping, sliding, and running just works. I’d like to play it again, now that I know the controls a bit better.

Podcasts

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Making a Murderer, True Crime, and Remembering Alan Rickman” — Look, I love Alan Rickman, but why in god’s name does everybody love Die Hard?

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Fred Armisen and Welcome to Night Vale” — Armisen’s a bit of a bore, but Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor are, predictably, great fun in conversation. Linda Holmes is, as ever, a person I would like to hear do more interviews.

Love and Radio: “The Fix” — An older episode, with the characteristically overbearing audio production of Love and Radio’s earlier episodes. That’s not a dig. This era of this show is one of the most aesthetically distinctive bodies of work in radio. And the story uses Nick van der Kolk’s cleverest device, where it starts in one place, then zooms back to another, and the suspense comes from the fact that it seems totally implausible for the two points to ever meet. So clever. I love this show. Pick of the week.

Serial: “Meanwhile, in Tampa” — There’s some really good writing in this, but this story is getting to the point where it requires more attention than I can offer a lot of the time. I have no idea what I’ll feel like when this season of Serial ends.

Things I loved in 2015: Nos. 25-21

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Being that this is the second time I’ve done this, I suppose we can call my year-end list an annual tradition. A key part of this year-end tradition is that it always happens well after the year has ended. Whatever. Timeliness isn’t everything.

I’m doing things a bit differently this year. First off, I’ve decided to rank the entries. This is, of course, foolish. It’s not so much that it’s like comparing apples to oranges; it’s more that it’s like comparing apples to oranges to kiwis to ribeyes to Chanel No. 5 to Chevrolets to ravens to clouds. But that is exactly the fun. Throughout this list, you’ll find things that have absolutely nothing in common, except that I enjoyed them. Their ranking is nothing more than an index of my goodwill towards them in the weeks immediately preceding this one.

And speaking of weeks, I’m ramping up the suspense by breaking my top 25 down into five separate posts: one per day until Friday. In practice, this is because I’m never going to have time to write the whole thing at once. But it may also be fun for the six of you who’ll read this.

Speaking of you six loyal Omnireviwer readers (bless you), you’ll have gotten to know my tastes by now. Specifically, you’ll know that they are capricious and semi-arbitrary, and that my experience of the year’s media, while extensive by normal person standards, is far from complete. This list is compromised and imperfect, but hopefully idiosyncratic enough to make for decent reading and introduce a few things you might have missed. 2015 was a good year, much like all the rest of them.

Today, we’ve got an album, two movies, a TV show and a podcast. Let’s begin:

No. 25 — CHVRCHES: Every Open Eye

This is the album that I was most disappointed to see overlooked on so many major year-end lists. I loved CHVRCHES’ debut album, as did everybody, but Every Open Eye is self-evidently a more assured and consistent record. I periodically go back to the singles on the debut, but I tend not to want to listen to the whole album. Whereas, Every Open Eye is a unified 42-minute catharsis. And Lauren Mayberry’s voice sounds even better this time around.

There are albums that I’m leaving off this list that I think are possibly more accomplished than this one, and certainly more important. But this is an album that I lived with, this past year. Don’t deny yourself joy. Go listen to CHVRCHES.

No. 24 — The Revenant

It’s big and ambitious and prestigious and self-serious and Oscary, and I loved it so much.

Common wisdom around The Revenant seems to be that it’s bleak and difficult — a movie you “should” go see, rather than one you “have to!” go see. And it is bleak, and it is graphic and visceral and painful at times. It’s Alejandro Iñárritu. But it is also a hell of an experience. I’d gladly see it a second time.

A lot of that is down to Emmanuel Lubezki, the most distinctive cinematographer alive, and the man who will once again prevent Roger Deakins from winning his Oscar this year. Lubezki’s immaculately choreographed long takes remove all of the artifice from the movie’s action scenes — that bear fight, and especially the battle at the start of the movie, which is one of the best battle scenes ever. His approach puts you right there. Plus, he has an unparalleled eye for a staggering vista.

Lubezki’s photography and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s beautiful score tone down the terrors of the story and Leonardo DiCaprio’s impressively committed performance. The Revenant is horrifying, yes. But it isn’t unrelenting. It’s watchable. Beautiful, even. If it won Best Picture, I wouldn’t be especially disappointed.

No. 23 — Doctor Who

The latest season of Doctor Who divides conveniently into its first half, an extended failure to ignite, and its second half, which blazes magnificently. If we were to separate those two halves, the first wouldn’t place on this list and the second would probably be a lot higher. In that latter string of excellence, head writer Steven Moffat, returning favourite Peter Harness and newcomer Sarah Dollard all offer top-flight Doctor Who scripts, and even the series’ longest-dangling dead weight, Mark Gatiss rises to the occasion.

Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman both give their best performances of the series in Harness’s Zygon two-parter, and they (especially Capaldi) keep it up through Moffat’s two-part season finale. And what a finale. First, in “Heaven Sent,” Moffat offers one of his signature high-concept scripts like “Blink” or “Listen,” which is a sort of drama that no other show can do. Then, in “Hell Bent,” he gives us the best episode of Doctor Who in giant, explosive, plot-heavy mode since “A Good Man Goes To War.”

Altogether, series nine is a lesser season than its predecessor, Capaldi’s debut series. But, there are at least five hours of the best Doctor Who since 2005 in here somewhere. It’s a shame that Moffat’s tenure has to come to an end, and a bigger shame that it’s not Harness replacing him. But Doctor Who has had 53 years to prove that it can weather pretty much any change in the long term. And there’s still one more series that’s bound to be a corker.

No. 22 — Spotlight

There’s no way to prepare yourself for how good Spotlight is. That trailer sure as hell doesn’t suggest it. No matter how many people tell you this movie is great, and no matter how many positive reviews you read, Spotlight still seems like it’s going to be a well-made, soft-spoken, mid-budget movie for grown-ups. It looks boring. Pedestrian. Sophisticated. But actually, I don’t think I’ve been so consistently excited by a movie that’s almost entirely talking since The Social Network.

The screenplay hits a perfect balance where it lets you be thrilled by the twists and turns of its journalism procedural storyline while also never forgetting that it’s a movie about child molestation. It’s sensitive to the details of the story that the journalists are telling, while also realizing that it’s own story is not that story — it’s the meta story: the story of the story.

The really great thing about this movie is that while it celebrates the extraordinary work these journalists did, it doesn’t shy away from also implicating the entire institution of journalism for letting the abuse in the Catholic Church go unexamined for so long. As much as anything, Spotlight is a movie about how systems turn a blind eye to themselves.

In that sense, it reminds me of The Wire. What more can I say?

No. 21 — Love and Radio

This podcast feels like a different show every episode, which makes each episode essential almost by default. The producers of Love and Radio episodes find people with stories and perspectives that fall outside most people’s experience and then say, “we’re just going to listen to this person for a while.” Host Nick van der Kolk and his team are generally present, but off-mic. It’s like every month, Love and Radio has a different host. It empowers voices that would otherwise never have that kind of power.

This totally changes the power dynamic of the radio interview — for better and worse. Sometimes, people say horrifying things on this podcast, which can be troubling given that the interviewer’s voice is made subordinate to the guest’s. (See this year’s fabulous and infuriating A Red Dot.) But, the underlying philosophy is that it’s better to listen to people than not to, and I agree.

The episode I’ve embedded above is certainly in my top three podcast episodes of the year. Hit play, and feel every feel you possess.

The countdown will pick up with no. 20 tomorrow. There’ll be two more shows, a movie, an album you might have missed and our first comic. 

Omnireviewer (week of Nov. 15)

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Only 23 reviews, this week. Dear me, what could I have been up to? No, I’m seriously asking. I don’t remember anything I did in the past seven days that I didn’t write down.

Games

It’ll surely be a rare week that I write about four games. But hey, I had a free Sunday.

Stasis — Finished, at long last. This was not at all worth the time or money. It’s laden down with bad writing, bad acting, one-dimensional characters, a hackneyed “science gone wrong” plot, needless brutality, an uninteresting atmosphere, and the most predictable last-minute twist imaginable. The bulk of the story is told through diaries lying scattered haphazardly around the ship, each of them containing secrets that these characters would never have dared to write down, let alone just leave out in the open for anybody to find. I would have been willing to suspend my disbelief in this, if only the story told by the diaries were compelling, the characters were believable, or — at the very least — the prose were written competently. Maybe it’s petty to pick on an indie title that was apparently made by, like fifteen people. But that’s exactly the kind of game out of which I would expect something unique. Instead, this is a stew of familiar genre tropes out of which nothing new or interesting emerges. The fact that this is accruing significant acclaim demonstrates the extent to which I don’t understand video games. Fine. I’m happy to remain a dilettante in this particular field.

Sunless Sea — Oh, but then there’s this. I’ve been playing Sunless Sea on and off for the better part of a year. It’s the sort of game where you can do that, because it’s not linear; it’s a giant web of stories that you can explore as you like. And it is so vast and fascinating and nuanced and beautifully written that I never tire of it and it makes me thankful to live in a time when things like this can exist. If you somehow don’t know about this, read up on it, play its free cousin Fallen London, and then if you’re still not convinced, just buy it anyway because it’s that good. A lovely palate cleanser after a sub-par gaming experience.

SPL-T — This is the sort of thing I normally wouldn’t even bother reviewing. It’s not a game like the above-listed entries here are games. It’s a game like Angry Birds is a game. Or, more relevantly, Tetris. It’s not a discrete unit of cultural experience. It’s a pastime. Which is just fine, but that makes it the sort of thing I’m not usually into. But, the reason I’m interested is that it was made by the Swedish game developers Simogo. And, since we’re in a games-heavy week, I may as well take this opportunity to nail my colours to the mast — Simogo are the best game developers in the world. They do interesting, outside-the-box things with mobile devices, such that three of my favourite mobile games ever (favourite games, period, really) are made by Simogo: Year Walk, The Sailor’s Dream, and especially Device 6. SPL-T has nothing to do with any of those narrative-rich, immersive experiences. It has more in common with their early, casual games like Bumpy Road, except that it’s far more minimalistic. Like, Space Invaders minimalistic. It’s fun. But I’m not sure what they’re driving at here. I used to think that Device 6 was Simogo’s Sgt. Pepper, and The Sailor’s Dream was their White Album. But maybe this is their White Album. Maybe this is the inscrutable piece of concept art that will keep people talking about Simogo for decades to come. Or maybe I’m overthinking this, as ever, and it’s just a fun, retro little puzzle game. Either way, lovely.

Papa Sangre — What with me being a radio geek who sometimes plays games, I was inevitably going to play Papa Sangre at some point. This is a game with no graphics — only sound. Given what I like sound to do, I would certainly prefer there to be more story in this. But I must say, that game where you try to find something while blindfolded as somebody says “warmer… colder” is a lot more tense when there’s a carnivorous hog sleeping fitfully in the room. And that is unlikely to happen in real life.

Television

Last Week Tonight: November 8 and 15 — The thing that stands out most to me in either of these episodes (aside from John Oliver’s bizarrely cathartic profanity-laden response to the Paris attacks) is Mike Birbiglia playing a guy who’s strangely proud of having lost all his money playing fantasy football.

Doctor Who: “Face the Raven” — Oh, god, I just. Okay. Let’s just make a simple comment, because if I talk about my feelings I’ll make an ass of myself. Over the course of the past two seasons, Steven Moffat has brought in two writers that I wouldn’t mind seeing as showrunner when he departs: Peter Harness (still my frontrunner) and now Sarah Dollard. This is outstanding. Pick of the week.

Music

Musically, it was a week of work-related classical listening. So, I’m either not reviewing those or will subsequently be writing them up elsewhere. Here is what remains:

Kid Koala: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: Kid Koala is astonishing. Listening to this, I can hardly quite understand how it was made. He’s a virtuoso turntablist, no doubt. But I still feel an echo of an old complaint: this feels like “a very attractive coat that nobody’s wearing.”

NoMeansNo: Wrong — Another revisitation of a Two Matts assignment. This is one of those albums where my favourite songs keep changing. That’s a good sign. At first, I liked “The End of All Things” and “It’s Catching Up” best. These days, I seem to prefer “Rags and Bones” and “All Lies.” It occurred to me listening to this recently that the verse in “All Lies” is nearly an Indian classical pastiche — minus the obligatory sitar and tablas. There’s a clever juxtaposition: a key trope of Flower Power music — which even today is conceived as a plausible moment zero for “pop as art” — keeps getting interrupted by Rob Wright shouting “all lies!”

The Smiths: The Smiths — I love The Queen is Dead so much that I can’t believe I’ve never heard any other Smiths albums. It was time that changed. This isn’t as good as that that album, but it’s only a hair’s breadth behind it. I do wish Morrissey would just never ever sing in falsetto, though. Not a good look on him.

The Smiths: The Queen is Dead — This was bound to happen. When I hear a new thing by an artist I like, I always end up going back to the old favourites. There are very few albums I’ve discovered in the years since, oh, let’s say my 22nd birthday, that really matter to me. This is one.

The Smiths: Meat is Murder — Okay, if we’re going to do this, let’s do this. Can’t say this one quite works for me as well as the debut or The Queen is Dead, but the Smiths are a band that I can listen to almost regardless of what songs they’re playing because I just love the noise they make. Though I do prefer Morrissey once he’s learned to sing more-or-less in tune. He’s getting there on this, but there’s a ways to go. We will continue our survey of the discography (including relevant ephemera) in the coming week.

Comedy

John Mulaney: The Comeback Kid — It’s amazing that anybody could still have funny things to say about marriage. Or kids. Or pets. Or minivans. Or Bill Clinton. But this made me laugh out loud about all of those topics. I never laugh out loud watching stand-up. This is really, really funny.

Literature, etc.

Jonas Tarestad/Simon Flesser: Year Walk: Bedtime Stories for Awful Children — The other thing I love about Simogo is that they have versatile enough talents at their disposal to just take a break from video games and put out an illustrated e-book instead. Or a podcast the caliber of professional radio drama. Or whatever The Sensational December Machine is. And it all turns out good. I’m sure this was basically intended as an ad for the new(ish) Wii version of Year Walk. But, a collection of horrifying Swedish folktales told similarly to the Grimm fairy tales constitutes a pretty fantastic ad. The last one in particular is spectacularly, arbitrarily brutal.

David Cavanagh: Good Night and Good Riddance — Apparently the Smiths owe their early success to Peel and his producer John Walters. Imagine. Also, there’s so much music covered in this book that sounds interesting, and I don’t have remotely enough time to investigate all of it. One day, I’ll just skim through the chapters covering the years after 1977 and listen to as much of what Peel played as I can.

Kelly Sue DeConnick/Valentine De Landro: Bitch Planet, Volume 1 “Extraordinary Machine” — This is mighty powerful stuff that I would force everybody in my life to read if I could. It’s a rare and wonderful thing when fiction has the power to incite righteous anger even in people who aren’t specifically afflicted by the injustices it illustrates. This might have been pick of the week, but it was last week’s, so Doctor Who takes it.

Podcasts

I rolled my ankle a while back and haven’t been running much, lately. That’s put me behind on my podcasts, of which there are only eight this week. Shocking, I know. How will I ever catch up?

Love and Radio: “Points Unknown” — The approach of this podcast makes each episode essential almost by default. Love and Radio finds people with stories and perspectives that fall outside most people’s experience and then says, “we’re just going to listen to this person for a while.” The interviewers are present, but off-mic, which gives the impression that every time out, the show belongs to a different person — a monthly guest host. It totally changes the power dynamic of the radio interview. Sometimes, people say horrifying things on this podcast, which can be troubling given that atypical power dynamic, where the interviewer’s voice is secondary. But the underlying philosophy is that it’s better to listen to people than not to, and I agree. There’s nothing objectionable in this episode, but there’s plenty that’s shocking. It isn’t a standout episode of Love and Radio, but it’s still outstanding.

The Moth: “Wedding Dress, Prison Choir, and a Hotdog” — The first story is by a producer on Amy Schumer’s show and is predictably hilarious. It dives from there. The second story in particular is rough listening, and not in the good way that The Moth sometimes is. It’s trite. There are clichés o’plenty. And maybe I just wasn’t in the mood, but I didn’t find the show ever recovered after that.

99% Invisible: “The Landlord’s Game” — The board game Monopoly originated as an interactive parable on the ills of capitalism. I will be bringing this up in conversation at my own earliest convenience.

The Truth: “Where Have You Been?” — I love the sound of this podcast, every time. But there’s often something in the writing that doesn’t click for me. Sometimes it’s jokes that fall flat. But usually, it’s a sort of furrowed brow seriousness that’s just totally unrelenting. It can get a bit like that scene in Life’s Too Short where Liam Neeson is just too serious to function. Except not played for laughs. This story is clever and well acted, but there’s a bit of brow-furrowiness in there. The Song Exploder episode tacked onto this is great, though. It breaks apart the Radiotopia station ID, which was made by the producer of The Truth. It’s amazing how much can go into a couple seconds of audio.

The Allusionist: “Toki Pona” — Okay, this justified all of the cross promotion. Nate DiMeo and Helen Zaltzman learn the smallest language in the world. It’s wonderful, and at some point Zaltzman expresses perfectly what I fear and despise about learning new languages: “I’m just going to be a nothing in other languages. Everything that I consider to be myself will just be nullified by my inability to speak properly.”

All Songs Considered: “Music for Healing” — An elegiac instalment of All Songs, with the Paris attacks in mind. Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton’s choices of “comfort music” are heavy on spare, drifting post-Eno instrumental music, with a bit of pensive indie rock thrown in as colour. Actually, it’s a spectacular playlist for any day — not just the day after an international tragedy. I’ll be checking out more music from Nils Frahm and Goldmund, for sure. Pick of the week.

The Memory Palace: “Shore Leave” — An average episode of The Memory Palace, which still makes it one of the best podcasts of the week. It uses music more playfully than usual, which is nice. I’m almost glad that this show is on hiatus until January, because it’ll give me time to listen through the entire list of back episodes. There must be about 60 that I haven’t heard.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Master of None and Neal Shusterman’s Challenger Deep” — If this podcast has a weakness, it’s that there’s seldom very much dissent among the ranks. This time around, Glen Weldon disagrees with the rest of the panel on Master of None, which is refreshing. Having not seen the show, it doesn’t seem like his critique is especially worthwhile — it seems like just another instance of Weldon being allergic to anything that vaguely flirts with earnestness. But it’s nice to hear the others debate him.