Category: Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

I have been watching all the Bond films, in order, with my dad. Every Sunday, with the exception of the chaos that was March, I go round and eat lunch and we sit down for a couple of hours to watch the next thing on the list. We have done all the Connery films. We endured the brief reign of George Lazenby, who would have been an interesting Bond if he could have signed up for a longer period and worked with directors who were not the director of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. A few weeks back, we hit the Moore era. Moore was my Bond. When I was a kid, and the Bond films appeared on TV, he was always the man stuffed inside the tuxedo and ordering a martini. He defined Bond for me: the cheesy puns; the awkwardness that’s presented as charm; the ridiculous gadgets. I worked off the theory that I liked the Moore era.

So a year ago, everyone on the planet was all You HAVE to see Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s brilliant. Over the weekend, I followed their advice. Settled in with a packet of chips and a few hours to kill, watched Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron drive some big-rigs and kill a whole bunch of war boys. And lo, it was… Okay? Good? I am, quite honestly, not entirely sure. I’ve heard the argument that we’re not yet equipped to really assess Fury Road, because it’s so far outside our experience of films thus far. It’s an incredible spectacle and an endless chase sequence and a monumental feat of world-building and the visual language is seriously fucking awesome. It also has the benefit of the most perfectly timed act transitions ever. Every half-hour, on the half-hour. In terms of studying structure, it’s great. But… Well, I spent most of the first act kinda…waiting for the story to start. Watching things in

I went to see Hail, Caesar on Tuesday night and I’ve been thinking on it ever since. It’s a great film that is not, when you get to the end, a great film. A confusing contradiction that makes perfect sense once you’ve seen it, because it does so much right that it’s vaguely disappointing when you get to the end and find yourself asking, “so, that’s it?” It reminded a good deal of seeing Zoolander for the first time back in 2001. A whole lot of people love that film and regard it as a classic, but it drove me crazy. The plot is…slight. An excuse to hold together a whole bunch of comedy set-pieces that are, on their own, funny, but never add up to something bigger. The difference, in this instance, is that I loved Hail, Caesar. It was exactly three scenes into the film before I knew I’d purchase a copy of it when it come out on DVD, because

We’re now four weeks away from Contact 2016 and – if you’re an SF fan in the Brisbane area who is on the fence about going – I’d encourage you to go register sooner rather than later. Why? Well, as a guy who has run a few con-like events and attended many more, let me expound on some of the major reasons. ONE: THE GUESTS ARE PEACHY-KEEN I mean, seriously, peachy-fucking-keen. I mean, you’ve got Ben “Rivers of London” Aaronovitch; you’ve got Jill “ex-editor of the Mary Sue” Pantozzi (and if you’re not hitting The Mary Sue at least once a week, then we probably can’t be friends any more); you’ve got Keri “more novels than you’ve got fingers and toes” Arthur, who is one of those people I leap at the chance to program every GenreCon; you’ve got Maria “Whose Afraid?” Lewis, who has been building some incredible momentum with her debut novel. Getting your guests right is a huge part of putting conventions together. It’s

ONE: TELL ME I’m over on Jennifer Brozek’s blog this morning, taking part in her Tell Me series where writers talk about their books. I’m tackling the secret origins of the Flotsam series, which involves considerably more Don Delillo quotes than you’d expect. And roughly the exact amount of Guns N’ Roses/Supernatural references. Want to know more? The post is over on JenniferBrozek.com. TWO: COUNTING DOWN Four days until I bugger off to Adelaide to spend some quality time with the family. And the fringe festival. And Adelaide Writer’s Week. I’m there until the 4th of March, whereupon I head to Melbourne for a few days of gaming, hanging out with friends, and doing some project planning for 2017. This largely marks the one-year anniversary of being forced to acknowledge that the sleep apnea was a major problem for me, since you can’t share a hotel suite with your family without someone remarking on the fact that you stop breathing a whole

I started watching the new Supergirl series over the weekend and I find myself utterly charmed by the series. Don’t get me wrong: there a definitely better superhero shows on television. Jessica Jones and Daredevil have the kind of production values that are hard to go past, and they have an advantage in that they’re not fighting for space on free-to-air network TV that frees them up to do things that TV narratives aren’t allowed to do. Even in this free-to-air space, Arrow and The Flash are pretty hard to beat. They’re both more technically accomplished that Supergirl, in terms of their special effects, fight choreography, and the performances of the supporting cast. As super-hero shows, they have the advantage of two series in which to build up their shared world and character pool, with their new time-travel show on the horizon. Supergirl doesn’t compete on any of those levels. The scripting is often clumsy and occasionally over-earnest. The FX are…uneven. The

Over the course of the last seven days, I’ve watched a TV show and a movie that occupy the two extremes of representing the creative artist as a narrative achetype – the Amazon Original series Mozart in the Jungle and the Coen Brother’s Inside Llewyn Davis. Mozart in the Jungle is brilliant. It details the lives of the conductor and musicians who make up the New York Orchestra, best summed up as “Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music.” It’s totally not the show you’re expecting when you hear the words classical music, with one exception – Gael Garcia Bernal’s eccentric conductor, Rodrigo, who exemplifies the kind of hyperactive, devoted-to-the-art-of-it madman who finds music in the sounds of a cab crossing a bridge and tortures himself with the demands of his own genius. People bend over backwards to deal with his eccentricities because of that genius. Naturally, within the of the show he’s gifted, brilliant, and fantastically successful in his chosen career. Inside Llewyn Davis is the Coen Brothers at

Peeps, I am currently looking for book and film recommendations within the following parameters: Books: Anything outside of the SF genre. Films: Anything that’s not a SF film, YA movie, or Romantic Comedy No time-limit in terms of the release – I’m currently going back over nearly a decade of recommendations people have made that I never got around to watching, and it covers a lot of ground.The limitations are explicitly there because I want stuff outside of my particular taste and comfort zone, which have grown increasingly calcified in recent years. If you’ve got something you’ve loved, let me know.

I’m planted on the couch, notebook on my lap, listening to the rain. The world is wet and green and exceptionally pleasant, and I will be on this here couch for the remainder of the day. Unless the rain gives up. Then I’ll have to move, as the front room gets too hot for work purposes in Summer. I’ve been reading Peter Temple’s Black Water in the evenings for the last few days and it’s rather glorious. I started the book years ago, then managed to pack it away into a storage box when I moved into a friend’s spare room; I spent three or four years convinced that I’d lost the book, unfinished, until my parents recent move meant that I finally had to unpack everything I’d stored at their place. I was mildly tempted to leave it unfinished when I first unpacked it, since it’s one of the stories that got adapted into the Jack Irish TV series,

It seems that 90% of my social media feeds are all about Star Wars this week. Perfectly understandable, and the reports have been good enough that I’m booked in to see the film with my dad early next year. The thing that I’m raving about this week? NXT Take-Over London. Like many wrestling fans, I subscribe to the WWE network primarily so I’ll have access to the NXT brand. It started out as a small show where the ‘E trained up their newer wrestlers, but it’s evolved into the wrestling show that delivers on the potential of the medium, week after week. It’s grown from a show filmed on a university campus in Florida to a show that attracts a live crowd of 10,000 people in London. It’s good, is what I’m saying. But NXT TakeOver London was fricken’ outstanding. It was the kind of wrestling show where everything was thought out, where every match and every result felt like

Yesterday, one of my non-geek colleagues turned to me and asked, “so, when are you going to see the new Star Wars?” I didn’t know. I still don’t know. I know that I’m excited to see the film and that I’ll definitely see it at some point. I’ll probably even slouch my way into a cinema to experience it on the big screen, but that’s really as far as my plans have gone. And yet, it’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask – I present as one of the crowd who should be there, lining up on the very first night. I have been that guy, in the past. When they re-released the original trilogy into cinemas, way back in the nineties, it’s possible that I watched the movie once and went straight out to buy another ticket. And, lest we write that off as the folly of youth, I’m the guy who mainlined thirteen episodes of Jessica Jones in