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Omnireviewer (week of Jan. 3, 2016)

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I suppose I should start putting the year in the titles of these things. I guess when I started this I didn’t think I’d still be doing it in 2016. But here we are. My weekly exorcisms continue. So, here’s the first fully 2016 edition of Omnireviewer, with 19 reviews.

Movies

The Hateful Eight — On first viewing, I think this is Tarantino’s second-best movie. I adored this. It’s slow and talky (until it’s not) and made up almost entirely of the sorts of scenes that are my favourites in other Tarantino movies. That scene in Inglorious Basterds in the bar, with the three fingers? That’s this whole movie. Sam Jackson and John Travolta in the diner at the end of Pulp Fiction? This whole movie. It’s worth seeing in 70mm, because it’s just the kind of movie that deserves a lavish presentation, with an intermission and an overture. Speaking of which: apparently Ennio Morricone is still alive and writing brilliant movie music. In terms of satisfying cinemagoing experiences of the last 12 months, this is second only to Fury Road for me.

Literature, etc.

China Miéville: “The Bastard Prompt” — This is certainly one of the more twisted stories in this broadly speaking fairly twisted collection. What’s best about it is that it’s the story of something that happened to someone close to the narrator, but not to the narrator himself. All the same, the narrator has his own interests that don’t directly involve the story at hand, but do influence his telling of it. This is the sort of thing that’s just par for the course for Miéville, I’m learning. Even if you don’t respond to his stories, you can’t help but be dazzled by his technical capacity.

China Miéville: “Rules” — Another tiny story, and a very enigmatic one. You can read it in two minutes, and you should, if you happen to see Three Moments of an Explosion on a shelf in a store. If you like it, you’ll like all of these stories and should definitely buy the book to read larger more wonderful stories like “The Bastard Prompt” and “The Dusty Hat.”

David Day: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded — I always like to have something in the vein of cultural criticism on the go, and now that Good Night and Good Riddance is done, this seems like just the thing. It’s a large, handsome hardcover volume that I got for a good price at the Indigo hardcover sale (Jesus Christ, I’m out of control). Each page contains a segment from Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic (one of my favourites as a kid, and still), and the text is surrounded by David Day’s entertaining analysis. His argument is that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is essentially a full classical education delivered in code. Aside from being a marvellous read, so far, this is such a beautifully designed book. It’s filled with paintings and photographs referenced in the text. I feel like this is one of those rare books that I probably won’t be constantly putting down to Google stuff, because it’s basically the internet in paper form.

China Miéville: “Estate” — This is one of those stories I feel like there’s a definitive “point” to, but I missed it.

China Miéville: “Keep” — Another fabulously counterintuitive premise from Miéville. This is a story about people with a disease that causes trenches to form in the ground around them when they stand still for too long. This guy writes amazing stories out of the sorts of random thoughts that I discard three or four times a day. Would that we all followed through like he does.

Games

Kentucky Route Zero: Act 2 — Even better than the first act. I still don’t know what this game’s on about, but I’m becoming increasingly invested in the story, which is basically just some guy’s quest to get a shipment of antiques to an address that isn’t real. I feel like there was a lot more to see in this act than I actually saw, which is not something I can usually say. I’m one of those slow, deliberate gamers. It often takes me twice as long as average to make it through a game. But with this, I felt an urgency to the story that compelled me to keep going. I’ll probably play all three available acts again before Act 4 comes out, though, so I’m not worried about missing anything. As with the first act, this is full of wonderful strange details My special favourite is an office building that has an entire floor occupied by impassive bears.

Papa Sangre — I don’t think I’ll be finishing this. I bought it weeks ago, played it for about twenty minutes, and another twenty just now, and it really doesn’t seem like it’ll ever be anything other than a game of hide-and-go-seek-in-the-dark. Which is a shame, because the possibility for storytelling and world-building in a game that’s all sound, no visuals is immense. I got this for cheap with two other games from the same developer, so I suppose we’ll see if those are any good, then possibly wash our hands of the whole thing.

Kentucky Route Zero: Act 3 — This remains mysterious and obscure, but in this act it always feels like it’s about to tip its hand. An offhand reference to mold and transistors back in the first act now feels like it might be the key to the whole thing. Meta-references to digital narratives abound. (One scene may simply be an extended riff on Adventure and/or Zork or it may be something more. An elegy to the limitless vistas of parser-based interactive fiction? Hard to say. There might even be one character who’s meant to stand in for the guy who wrote Adventure. There’s a resemblance.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge is important, somehow. There are frequent allusions to the effects of the 2008 economic crisis: homes being reclaimed, people not buying consumer goods anymore, that sort of thing. As fantastical as this is, there remains some thread of connection to the real Kentucky. So, much like Lost or The Shining (or, I suppose, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), this game actively encourages not just close readings but paranoid readings: where every detail, however minute, seems like it could be significant. This isn’t just rote surrealism. Whatever’s going on here, it’s not nothing, and better yet it’s not one specific thing. Apparently Act 4 is nearly done. It had damn well better be. Pick of the week.

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The wonderful bleakness of Kentucky Route Zero.

SOMA — My computer can pretty much run this, when I turn the graphics options down to the lowest settings the game has. So, yay! Anyhow, I’ve written before about my ambiguous thoughts on horror. I think that, in the same way that comedy succeeds if it makes you laugh, horror succeeds if it actually scares you. I think both of those standards are perfectly acceptable for those genres. There’s plenty of comedy and horror that has other goals as well (more “literary” goals, we might say), and that’s great and I personally tend to like that stuff best, but it’s not fair or right to critique horror or comedy on the grounds that it’s merely funny or merely scary. If it’s that, then it’s fine. But the trouble with horror movies that aim primarily to frighten you in the moment is that they don’t work on me. I just don’t get scared watching movies. But I do love being scared. And that is why I like horror games. Because, for whatever reason, horror games scare the living crap out of me. I guess it’s just that in games, you have to actually respond to a threat. So, you can’t just passively accept an outcome and move on like you have to do in a movie. Horror games leave you scrambling to come up with a solution to a problem under pressure. They engage you in a way that almost no other medium does. But then, the issue with horror games is that they have all of the problems associated with games more broadly: most notably, the caliber of writing and voice acting in games is just lower than it is in movies. That’s not to say that there isn’t any top-shelf writing in games, just look at Kentucky Route Zero, for Chrissakes. Also Sunless Sea, 80 Days, The Stanley Parable, anything made by Simogo, tons of Twine stories and parser games and probably a bunch of more conventional stuff that I’m overlooking. Likewise for acting: The Walking Dead game has better acting than the show. But you can’t play an acclaimed game and have the same level of assurance that the writing and acting will be good as you can when you see an acclaimed film. The art form hasn’t gotten there yet, and don’t let any videogame boosterists try to convince you otherwise. It’s a bit too early to judge SOMA on these criteria, but the few bits of sustained story I’ve seen so far have been pretty solid. The voice acting for the player character is excellent, which is a great mercy. Nothing worse than being trapped inside a crap actor’s head. A promising start, and already pretty spooky.

Television

QI: “Messing with your Mind” — This Tommy Tiernan fellow, I dunno.

The Daily Show With Trevor Noah: “Wednesday, January 6, 2016” — I meant to check out Noah’s Daily Show long before this, but this episode seemed essential. And it was good. Not outstanding, but good. There are moments in this where you kind of go “that’s a joke.” And Noah’s monologue about Obama’s gun control executive order finishes with an inadequate kicker. But it’s definitely, on balance, good. Which is nice, because towards the end of Jon Stewart’s tenure, that’s pretty much what you could say about his Daily Show as well. (On the other hand, the correspondent piece about the Nike resale market is insane.)

Mildred Pierce: “Part One” — So far, Kate Winslet makes this. It’s a gorgeous-looking series, as you’d expect from Todd Haynes, but the drama isn’t taking off yet. Every scene with Melissa Leo is gold, though. Almost makes up for the children in this, who are difficult to take. Actually, if the whole series were just Kate Winslet and Melissa Leo talking to each other, that’d be fine.

Podcasts

All Songs Considered: “Viking’s Choice 2015: The Year In The Loud And The Weird” — This is what I’m talking about. I’d heard none of this music beforehand, and I think the only artist featured that I’d heard of was Iron Maiden. I suspect it would be the same for most people. Which is a shame, because people need more weirdness and extremity in their lives. I sure do.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Melancholidays, Sisters and 2015 Highlights” — Not much to say except that it’s always nice to see an indication that there are others equally obsessed with Hamilton as I am.

Radiolab: “Year-End Special #1” — The opening of this show reminded me that there really were some spectacular episodes of Radiolab this year. I’m thinking specifically of “The Rhino Hunter.” But the rest of it — which consists of Radiolab’s top three most downloaded segments ever, all from the last two years —  reminded me how much I miss the version of Radiolab that did shows like this.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Ciao 2015, Hello 2016!” — Everybody who loves pop culture should listen to this if only to hear a recap of Linda Holmes’ predictions for 2015, which are a fabulous indictment of the entire culture industry. She literally just wrote a huge rant and read it into a microphone and it’s entrancing and forceful and fantastic. I should really read her blog more.

Fresh Air: “In ‘Carol,’ 2 Women Leap Into An Unlikely Love Affair” — Terry Gross’s interview with Todd Haynes and Phyllis Nagy is a quiet thing of spectacular virtuosity. I came for Haynes, but it’s Nagy that Gross gets the most interesting stories out of. Nagy wrote the screenplay for Carol, which I loved, based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt. Nagy and Highsmith knew each other well, and Nagy is keen to portray her late friend as the real-life Therese Belivet, Rooney Mara’s character in the movie. But, without ever becoming indelicate, Gross prompts responses from Nagy that imply there may have been a certain amount of Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) in her as well — though Nagy is careful to clarify that she herself was never Therese to Highsmith’s Carol. I have never heard Terry Gross more artful than this. Also, there was unexpectedly a snippet of Gross’s 2005 interview with the recently deceased composer/conductor Pierre Boulez, who’s always been an interesting figure to me, and made some of my very favourite recordings. I never anticipated he’d be so charming. So that’s a bonus. Imagine: Todd Haynes being the least interesting part of a podcast. Pick of the week.

WTF With Marc Maron: “Todd Haynes/Sarah Silverman” — Thank God this exists, then. Maron is nearly as much of a cinephile as Haynes is, so this pretty much turns into two film geeks babbling. In the process, they appear to confirm everything I assumed about Haynes in my review of Carol a couple weeks back. Haynes explicitly talks about how this movie is concerned with which character is looking through the camera at any given point (especially pointed since Therese is a photographer), which I’m taking as total validation of my interpretation of Carol as a vast, all-encompassing metafiction. Say what you like about Maron, but he’s not afraid to go deep with his interview subjects. 

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.