Seen / read / heard 2022
— January
— February
— March
— April
— May
— June
— July
— August
— September
— October
— November
— December
— All caps, bold: MOVIE
— All caps, bold, asterisk: SHORT* or ONLINE VIDEO* or TV*
— All caps, Italics: ART / LIVE EVENT / THEATRE
— Italics, bold: Book or Short Story
— Quotation marks: “Audio”
— Italics: Article ^^
December 2022 #
( < 29/12) — “Good Pop Bad Pop” by Jarvis Cocker 🎧
25/12 — LAST LOOKS ✈️
24/12 — NOPE ✈️
“And this is a Black person making a movie about a character named OJ, where OJ is essentially riding a horse. Putting OJ near horses that may or may not be broncos is provocative. It’s also provocative just to be in a world that knows what it means for a Black person to be named that.” — “Alien Superstar”
22/12 — GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO
15/12 — STUTZ*
11/12 — WHITE LOTUS* ( < 30/10)
November 2022 #
23/11 — ANDOR* ( < 22/10)
( < 20/11) — THE OLD MAN*
19/11 — Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant: The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon by Alex Pappademas ( < 05/11)
15/11 — IS THAT BLACK ENOUGH FOR YOU?!?
13/11 — KNOCK KNOCK
13/11 — ALWAYS BE MY MAYBE
10/11 — SUPER PUMPED* ( < 07/11)
07/11 — SPEED
04/11 — THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT
October 2022 #
30/10 — THE BEAR*
30/10 — RED ROCKET
29/10 — LOVE ACTUALLY
I Rewatched Love Actually and Am Here to Ruin It for All of You
( < 28/10) — BAD SISTERS*
21/10 — THE ZEN DIARIES OF GARRY SHANDLING*
22/10 — Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
20/10 — ZOLA
19/10 — STARSHIP TROOPERS
12/10 — Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
15/10 — BULLET TRAIN
03/10 — TRAINING DAY
02/10 — MIDSOMMAR
01/10 — AMBULANCE
September 2022 #
23/09 — LIQUORICE PIZZA
16/09 — EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
15/09 — COP LAND
12/09 — Kingdom Cons by Yuri Herrera ( < 10/09)
06/09 — UNTOLD: THE RACE OF THE CENTURY*
August 2022 #
( < 31/08) — YELLOWSTONE*
25/08 — TOP GUN: MAVERICK
18/08 — C'MON C'MON
13/08 — THE SANDMAN* ( < 06/08)
09/09 — TRAINWRECK: WOODSTOCK ‘99* ( < 07/08)
06/08 — THE GRAY MAN
July 2022 #
- 20/07 — ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN
June 2022 #
21/06 — THE MARTHA MITCHELL EFFECT*
14/06 — GASLIT* ( < 23/05)
13/06 — JITNEY
12/06 — HACKS* (season 2)
( < 08/06) — WE OWN THIS CITY*
03/06 — The bleak spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial
Who won the Depp-Heard trial? Content creators that went all-in.
( < 02/06) — OBI-WAN KENOBI*
02/06 — LAST BREATH
May 2022 #
20/05 — REBEL DREAD
18/05 — FLOODLIGHTS*
16/05 — DRIVE MY CAR
15/05 — Maus by Art Spiegelman
Samuel Beckett once said: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” –Yes. –On the other hand, he SAID it. ( < 01/05)
14/05 — TRAINSPOTTING
13/05 — LAST NIGHT IN SOHO
( < 11/05) — UNDONE*
11/05 — GAZZA* ( < 29/04)
“As reports of intimate conversations with his family and loved ones appeared, like clockwork, in the press every day, Gazza became increasingly paranoid that the people closest to him were betraying him to sell his stories. As a court case would prove years later, he wasn’t paranoid at all: the papers were literally dangling recording devices from trees and hacking his voicemails.”
10/05 — Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals by Oliver Bullough
10/05 — CHIVALRY* ( < 21/04)
05/05 — “Sex, Death and Bunnies”
“Michael Douglas can’t open his umbrella, OK? He’s shown that he can’t get his own cab. He can’t say, check, please, in an audible tone. Right? So all over the place, we’re seeing him deliberately, and in a way that’s very self — it exculpates him as, I don’t even know. I just stumbled into this. I’m just this little lamb. And it’s really between my wife, this powerful mother figure, and this virago. And I’m just caught in between. How convenient. How cozy for him.”
01/05 — OZARK* ( < 24/01 )
01/05 — “Dead Eyes” ( < 17/03)
April 2022 #
( < 27/04) — BARRY*
25/04 — THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND THE CANOE* ( < 17/04)
25/04 — JEREMY KYLE SHOW: DEATH ON DAYTIME* ( < 17/03)
23/04 — “Do You Skip Intro?”
22/04 — WE CRASHED* ( < 20/03)
( < 19/04) — BETTER CALL SAUL* (s6)
19/04 — HACKS* ( < 18/04)
18/04 — WHO KILLED THE KLF?
( < 08/04) — Harlem Shuffle by
Colson Whitehead06/04 — JIMMY SAVILE: A BRITISH HORROR STORY*
04/04 — STATION ELEVEN* ( < 05/03)
03/04 — THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS
03/04 — How TikTok heartthrob William White’s thirsty fandom turned toxic
March 2022 #
30/03 — Comedy, Comedy, Comedy, Drama by Bob Odenkirk ( < 20/03)
( < 27/03) — CHEWING GUM*
26/03 — THE HARDER THEY FALL
( < 24/03) — “Crypto Island”
23/03 — BOILING POINT
22/03 — SUSPICION* ( < 04/02)
21/03 — “Let’s Get Small” - Steve Martin
20/03 — VAL
20/03 — THE GREEN KNIGHT
18/03 — AN EVENING WITH BOB ODENKIRK
( < 16/03) — BAD VEGAN*
16/03 — Jordan Peterson - Maintenance Phase. “Part 1: The Carnivore Diet” and “Part 2: The Moscow Diaries” ( < 02/03)
16/03 — American Kingpin: Catching the Billion-Dollar Baron of the Dark Web by Nick Bilton ( < 26/02)
13/03 — TURNING RED
12/03 — GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
( < 11/03) — Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain by John Grindrod
“Oligarch mansions, the green belt, and Iconicon with John Grindrod”
10/03 — NEVER, RARELY, SOMETIMES, ALWAYS
09/03 — BAD EDUCATION
08/03 — THE 25 BEST FILMS OF 2021: A VIDEO COUNTDOWN*
25— Zola24— The Card Counter23— The Tragedy of Macbeth 22— The Worst Person in the World 21— West Side Story20— The Green Knight19— Undine 18— All Light, Everywhere 17— Flee 16— Titane15— The Matrix Resurrections14— Procession 13— The World to Come 12— In the Heights11— The Lost Daughter10— Red Rocket9— Saint Maud8— Licorice Pizza7— Pig6— Petite Maman5— Drive My Car4— memoria 3— The Souvenir Part II2— Bergman Island1— The Power of the DogThe leftovers 2020:
2— Minari, 3— World of Tomorrow episode 3,
4— Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always, 6— Bacurau, 8— David Byrne’s American Utopia,9— Bad Education, 10— Swallow, 12— Babyteeth, 15— Shirley, 16— Vitalina Varella, 17— Ema, 19— Ms. Americana, 20— Beanpole, 22— Wolfwalkers, 23— First Cow, 24— Many, 25— EmmaThe leftovers 2019:
8— Synonyms,
14— Midsommar, 16— Varda par Agnès, 17— Diamantino, 18— Transit, 19— Atlantics, 21— I Lost My Body, 23— The Hottest August,06/03 — THE GAP BY IRA GLASS*
06/03 — PIG
They’re not real. You get that, right? None of it is real. The critics aren’t real, the customers aren’t real because this isn’t real. You aren’t real. Derek, why do you care about this people? They don’t care about you, none of them. They don’t even know you because you haven’t shown them. Every day you wake up and there’ll be less of you. You live your life for them and they don’t even see you. You don’t even see yourself. We don’t get a lot of things to really care about.
Derek, who has my pig?
( < 04/03) — THE DROPOUT*
03/03
This is it guys. The pinnacle of the internet. We’ve done it! Pack it up, it’s over. pic.twitter.com/EkqHgag0vO
— I’m Jeff 🍻 (@fyvie2) March 2, 2022
February 2022 #
- 28/02 — A NUMBER at The Old Vic
( < 23/02) — The Awkward Black Man by Walter Mosley
( < 21/02) — STARSTRUCK*
21/02 — LOUIS THEROUX’S FORBIDDEN AMERICA (episode 1) *
20/02 — CHEATERS*
20/02 — RIDERS OF JUSTICE
“There is an old Ukrainian legend about coincidences.
It is about Liubava Vasilkovna from Vitebsk…a beautiful princess who was hunting a bear the morning after the first full moon of the spring. A huge bear attacks her and bites her finger off with her beloved diamond ring on it. Very sad for her.
But then exactly ten years later the morning after the first full moon of the spring in the same dense forest, in the same place she goes hunting again. And now she shoots a big, old bear. And when they open the bear’s stomach, there was no ring inside. Nothing.”
“Okay. Well… Now it’ll be really exciting to see if the water starts boiling soon.”
20/02 — ANOTHER ROUND
“We also wanted to make a movie about thinking on life, not just being alive but living,” says Vinterberg. “I hope it has become a celebration of life. I lost my daughter while making this film [19-year-old Ida died in a car accident in Belgium during the first week of the shoot]. It was nightmarish, it will always be.
19/02 — KIMI
13/02 — CARD COUNTER
Covering the “ex-military interrogator/Las Vegas gambler” genre in way only Paul Schrader can
13/02 — THE FEAR INDEX* ( < 12/02)
In retrospect, we should have read the Wikipedia synopsis first. Totally non-sensical & bonkers storyline. Not sure where it started or ended.
13/02 — “SmartLess - 'Ricky Gervais’”
( < 05/02) — THE RESPONDER*
( < 05/02) — AMERICAN PLAYBOY: THE HUGH HEFNER STORY
05/02 — *TINDER SWINDLER*
05/02 — MURDERVILLE*
04/02 — Real Me and Fake Me - Joe Dunthorne
Real me and fake me seemed to have an instant sexual chemistry.
There was a long moment when neither of us said anything on account of not looking or sounding like the people we were pretending to be. The impersonator had a view of my bathroom’s recessed downlight and swirls of condensation, could hear a toddler bashing a toy duck against the tiles. I watched the blank screen and listened to the faint sound of someone exhaling. We were strangers in the dark, breathing on each other. Then, once fake me had established that I was probably not who I said I was, he hung up and blocked me.
( < 04/02) — The Trojan Horse Affair
January 2022 #
29/01 — Derren Brown’s Boot Camp for the Brain
28/01 — LINE GOES UP – THE PROBLEM WITH NFTS*
PARIS HILTON SURPRISES TONIGHT SHOW AUDIENCE MEMBERS BY GIVING THEM THEIR OWN NFTS*
26/01 — This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth ( < 28/12)
Accidents and malfunctions were more common than one would think. One Sandia study found that between 1950 and 1968, at least twelve hundred nuclear weapons had been involved in “significant” accidents. Even bombs that would live in infamy didn’t quite work as intended. Little Boy—the very first nuclear weapon America dropped in war—killed eighty thousand people on Hiroshima. But the destruction could have been much worse—only 1.38 percent of its nuclear core fissioned. Three days later, when Americans dropped their second bomb—codename “Fat Man”—on Nagasaki, it accidentally detonated one mile off target, though it still managed to kill forty thousand. A 1954 test of a hydrogen bomb in the Bikini atoll produced a yield of fifteen megatons—triple the amount America’s nuclear scientists anticipated—blanketing hundreds of square miles in the Pacific—and, as a result, America’s own weapons observers—with lethal radioactive fallout.
Also A Tiny Sun
Nuclear weapons haven’t been used in war since 1945, but there have been many close calls. In 1956, a B-47 bomber disappeared over the Mediterranean with two nuclear weapons on board. It was never found. In 1960, US nuclear early warning systems were accidentally triggered by the moon. The same happened with flocks of migrating geese. In 1966, a B-52 crashed mid-air and dropped three thermonuclear bombs on a Spanish village (the cores didn’t detonate). These are the accidents.
In 1960, the generals completed a comprehensive plan for a first-strike attack, the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP-62. In the case of non-nuclear conflict with the Soviet bloc, the US would drop 3423 nuclear bombs on Soviet territory, Eastern Europe and China (the RAF was supposed to participate). Every city in the Soviet Union and China was to be destroyed. The power of the nuclear weapons to be used on Moscow alone was four thousand times that of the bomb used on Hiroshima. Military analysts predicted that around 600 million people would be killed, including 100 million in Western Europe and 100 million in neutral countries adjacent to the Sino-Soviet bloc such as Afghanistan, India and Japan. It would be hard to argue that any document in history contains greater evil; there is nothing in the Nazi archives that approaches it.
( < 24/01) — When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
24/01 — Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel ( < 15/01)
23/01 — STAY CLOSE* ( < 14/01)
23/01 — Luster by Raven Leilani ( < 09/01)
Brilliant opening chapter
The first time we have sex, we are both fully clothed, at our desks during working hours, bathed in blue computer light. He is uptown processing a new bundle of microfiche and I am downtown handling corrections for a new Labrador detective manuscript. He tells me what he ate for lunch and asks if I can manage to take off my underwear in my cubicle without anyone noticing. His messages come with impeccable punctuation.
10/01 — THE LOST DAUGHTER
08/01 — The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris ( < 26/12)
01/01 — THE MASK