Take Groundhog Day, punch up the message to make it more on the nose, add a few scenes of awkward sex, finish with an after-credits sequence that chooses charm over consistency. It’s still a good movie, now oh so very millennial.
I didn’t hate it.
Directed by Max Barbakow, 2020.
Remember that climactic scene in Shaun of the dead where they each take a pool stick and beat the zombie pub owner to his second death to the beat of Queens “Don’t stop me now”? You know, this one? The actual beating doesn’t start until 1:05. Well, Baby Driver is an entire movie made out of that scene — even Queen makes an appearance — only it’s guns instead of sticks and gangsters instead of zombies. Also, Atlanta, Georgia instead of London, England with a baby-faced youth instead of Simon Pegg, so only a third as charming though it’s an Edgar Wright film so still very charming indeed.
Trigger warning: the movie contains Kevin Spacey who first behaves like the rotten bastard we know he is but then goes and (spoiler alert) redeems himself. The movie does kill him off in a rather gruesome manner, if that’s any consolation. Did the writer/director know something we at the time didn’t?
Written and directed by Edgar Wright, 2017.
If there is a theme to this year’s list it is the intentional omission of all things biomedical, which I hope is self-explanatory considering (waves around) all this.
Omnibus, wherein two nerds, one professional the other amateur discuss topics of great interest, including bad architecture, bad cinema, a bad sister, and a very bad husband. It is at once entertaining, educational, and en…titilating?
Lex Fridman Podcast, wherein the said Lex Fridman, an AI researcher from MIT, discusses history with Dan Carlin, programming with Chris Lattner, cryptocurrency with Vitalik Buterin, Joe Rogan with Joe Rogan, et cetera, et cetera. File under “good for exploring the back catalogue, not so much for regular weekly listending”, like so many others.
20 Macs for 2020, which is a weekly-ish countdown of notable Apple computers, with comments from notable Apple aficionados. Listen and appreciate how enthusiastic some people can be about some things.
Dithering, which is a — shock, horror — paid podcast, but one well worth your money and time if you know the two men responsible, Ben Thompson and John Gruber.
People I (mostly) admire, wherein an economist of some fame and with a good sense of humor talks to, well, people he (mostly) admires, including Ken Jennings of the first podcast on this list, and what a nice way to end it.
Previous editions: 2020
The camerawork alone makes it a timeless classic. It doesn’t hurt that the deliberate, slow pace is perfect for my increasingly middle-aged mind. Yes it runs for 3 hours, but I’ll take three hours of this
over two and a half hours of that well-known super hero franchise any time.
Directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1975.
Kelsey Grammer once said that Fraiser — the show, not the character — was so good because the writers and cast never went for the easy laughs, the jokes that came to mind right away. That’s what made it the best sitcom of the 1990s and still eminently watchable1.
TGBBS goes for the easy jokes all the time but that’s OK because we watch it for the emotions it elicits in its competitors, judges, and us viewers, not for the triple-A-rated comedy. And here it does not go for the easy ones, the emotions that will arise any time competing humans are being judged: ridicule, shame, anger, rivalry, envy… You know, the ol' staples of American reality TV. There is lots of sadness and frustration when a baker overproofs their sourdough, sure, but there is also friendship, compassion, empathy, and a kind of gentleness even when a steely-eyed judge ribs your rhubarb pie’s soggy bottom.
I am sure this wasn’t easy, particularly in a season in which early on one baker makes another drop their finished goods on the floor right before judging (anger hidden), a good baker leaves after a week of horrible performances in what was supposed to be their specialty (ridicule averted), and an oversized bakerette who tends to spill everything everywhere whilst making visually mediocre — though no doubt tasty — goods serves up a cake-shaped splodge in one of the last showstoppers (no shaming of any kind and there were plenty of kinds to think of in those moments). It was a trying year and the season could not have been easy to make. Yet, I can happily report that the baking tent and the hyper-green lawn it sits on continue being cynicism-free zones, making better people of its participants and viewers alike.
The absolute best, beating Seinfeld in a photo-finish and Friends by a mile. This is not a matter of opinion but an indisputable fact. ↩︎
A predictable story, beautifully animated. It has the most straightforward plot of the Celtic triology Which is to say The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, Wolfwalkers, and no I don’t think that’s the official title but that’s how I have it filed in my mind. but also the most complex imagery and a soundtrack that equals the two prior films, making it the perfect Oscar contender. And even the simple A to B to C storyline allows for many different interpretations. Is it about man versus nature, town versus country, old versus young, masculine versus feminine, blue eyes versus green? Probably all of the above.
Side note: Wolfwalkers came out on AppleTV+, pretty much sealing its status as the new HBO. Still, it would be nice to see the animation in a theater next year, if any are left.
At a hundred pages, a fifth of which is the preface, this is a slender book that compares the 1950s state of the art computer and neuroscience, but more importantly gives the answer to the burning question in oncology: how much are a few months of overall survival benefit worth? Well, if you are John von Neumann and you have boney metastasis from a cancer of unknown origin eating away first your energy and then your mental capacities while your are writing a series of lectures on how similar and different brains are from “modern-day”1 computers, and you are way ahead of your time in thinking about both, well, the answer to that question is quite a lot. It is in fact an unthinkable loss that he died before he could even finish his writing, let alone hold the lectures.
It was also somewhat eerie to read about the comparison between humans and machines shortly after Apple announced its quite literally game-changing M1 processor. There is fierce competition among the big tech companies to build the Skynet of our universe, and as of last week Apple is winning.
i.e. 1950s, though apparently the architecture hasn’t changed at all, save for the size and number of the components. ↩︎
Netflix has a knack for producing empty calories, and Enola Holmes is not an exception. Pretty visuals, female empowerment, and decent to above-average acting can’t hide the blandness of its storyline nor the absence of any reasoning, deductive or otherwise.
It is, by the way, hard to think of Enola’s character as particularly empowered when the next three women in screen time order are her mother the polymath rebel, her friend the black martial arts teacher, and an aristocratic evil mastermind. Not to mention the brief appearance of a coitery of female anarchist geniuses. In Victorian London!1 A bit too on the nose, maybe? To paraphrase the Incredibles, when everyone’s special, no one is.
What’s worse, there is a story where this particular cast of characters makes perfect sense in this particular setting, one where a downtrodden young woman — think female Oliver Twist — meets them in order to learn what’s possible. But Enola is built up to already be the self-reliant Victorian anti-lady. Running into even more of the same archetype on her way to saving the prince makes for boring and lazy storytelling. ↩︎
It’s full of style, has excellent casting, and pretty good chess1, which is enough to make it into an enjoyable but forgettable miniseries. If only they had put in as much effort and thought into character development as they did in Beth Harmon’s dresses…
I hear, never being much into chess, except that now thanks to the show I’m a paying member at chess.com and am very much looking forward to playing a few games with my own children once they’re old enough not to chew on the figures constantly. But I still think Twilight Struggle is the superior game. ↩︎
As long as I can remember, Which is to say, mid to late 1980s. any protagonist of a movie or a TV show who wasn’t world-weary and cynical was either naïve, stupid, or both. In American popular culture, “good” people are the way they are only because they don’t understand how the world truly works. As side characters they are mostly comic relief. As protagonists they can only succeed through piercing the veil of ignorance — becoming worse people in the process — or by pure dumb luck. Ned Flanders, Forest Gump, Kimmy Schmidt all come to mind.
Not so with Ted Lasso, the only character in recent memory who is well aware that the world is harsh and that there are people out to get him, The show doesn’t hide who this is: all of England, save for two close friends. yet defaults to thinking the best of everyone he meets. He is still capable of mild deception in the service of punishing the wicked, but he can’t even punish someone without an endearing monologue on what he’s all about: being curious and not judgmental.
Being more curious and less judgemental would serve everyone well at any time, but never more so than this year, when everyone suspects the worst of everyone else. The default behavior is mistrust, the default sentiment cynicism. This show starts with plenty of both, yet they melt away under Lasso’s high-power beam of un-ironic and very self-aware goodness. If the 2000s were the decade of The Wire and the 2010s were the decade of the Game of Thrones, I wish, hope, pray that the 2020s turn out to be the decade of Ted Lasso.