After being joined by director Judd Apatow for a cover of Blood, Sweat & Tears’ ‘Spinning Wheel’, Dave Grohl and Greg Kurstin teamed up with Pink for a rendition of her 2001 hit ‘Get the Party Started’ for the second night of Hanukkah Sessions. Check it out below.
“One of the music world’s biggest and brightest stars of David, P!nk shows a couple of schmendricks how it’s done by joining us for her very own Bat Mitzvah staple Get The Party Started!'” the video’s official description reads.
The performance was recorded as part of an in-person event that took place earlier thiis month and also featured Beck, Tenacious D, Karen O, Pink, Inara George, and Grohl’s daughter Violet. Grohl and Kurstin started the series in 2020, rolling out covers of songs by Jewish artists throughout the eight nights of the holiday.
Terry Hall, lead voalist of the legendary British ska band the Specials, has died at the age of 63. The band confirmed Hall’s passing on social media, writing, “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing, following a brief illness, of Terry, our beautiful friend, brother, and one of the most brilliant singers, songwriters and lyricists this country has ever produced.”
“Terry was a wonderful husband and father and one of the kindest, funniest, and most genuine of souls. His music and his performances encapsulated the very essence of life… the joy, the pain, the humour, the fight for justice, but mostly the love,” the Specials continued. “He will be deeply missed by all who knew and loved him and leaves behind the gift of his remarkable music and profound humanity. Terry often left the stage at the end of The Specials’ life-affirming shows with three words…‘Love Love Love.’ We would ask that everyone respect the family’s privacy at this very sad time.”
Terry Hall was born and raised in the West Midlands city of Coventry. In 2019, he told the comedian Richard Herring that he was abducted by a paedophile ring in France at age 12, an experience he addressed in Fun Boy Three’s 1983 single ‘Well Fancy That!’. He lived with depression and manic depression and was medicated throughout his teenage years, later claiming that he took Valium when he was 13. After dropping out of school at 14, he worked menial jobs before joining his first band, the local punk outfit Squad.
In 1977, Hall became the frontman of the Automatics, a pioneering 2 Tone band that became known as the Specials, replacing original singer Tim Strickland. The group was introduced to a wider audience after Joe Strummer invited them to support the Clash live, releasing their debut single ‘Gangsters’, a rendition of Prince Buster’s 1964 Jamaican ska classic ‘Al Capone’, in 1979. It reached No. 6 in the UK singles chart, becoming the first in a series of top-10 hits. Elvis Costello produced the band’s 1979 self-titled debut, which was followed by their 1980 sophomore album More Specials. They scored their biggest hit with the 1981 smash ‘Ghost Town’, a song written by the band’s main songwriter about urban decay in England.
Hall went on to leave the Specials to form Fun Boy Three along with his bandmates Lynval Golding and Neville Staple. The trio released two albums, their 1982 self-titled record and 1983’s Waiting, before disbanding. Hall then started another new wave band called the Colourfield, which put out two LPs: Virgins and Philistines in 1985 and Deception in 1987. He also co-wrote ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’ with The Go-Go’s Jane Wiedlin, collaborated with Tricky, Damon Albarn, and Sinead O’Connor, and issued a few solo albums. The Specials’ most recent album, Protest Songs 1924–2012, came out last year.
“I was deeply saddened to hear about Terry Hall’s passing on Sunday,” Neville Staple wrote. “@SugaryStaple was called as we arrived in Egypt. We knew Terry had been unwell but didn’t realise how serious until recently. We had only just confirmed some 2023 joint music agreements together. This has hit me hard and must be extremely difficult for Terry’s wife and family. Sugary and I, extend our heartfelt condolences to them all at this extremely difficult time. In the music World, people have many ups and downs, but I will hang onto the great memories of Terry and I, making history fronting The Specials and Fun Boy three together. Rest easy Terry Hall.”
If you were into indie music in the 2010s, The Arena of the Unwell will feel familiar. Even if you weren’t, after reading this book you’ll feel like you were there. Following twenty-two-year-old Noah as he bounces between gigs and his job at a record store, The Arena is an innovative and timely exploration of the intersections of mental health, queerness, and coming-of-age, viewed through the lens of the indie music scene.
Noah is closely following the revival of his favourite band, Smiling Politely. After a comeback concert turns violent, he runs into barman Dylan, who he has been crushing on from afar, and photographer Fraser, who comes with Dylan everywhere. As his mental health spirals Noah is drawn closer to Dylan and Fraser’s complex relationship, and drifts further from his own best friends — Mairead and Jenny. All the while, his NHS therapy hours are dwindling, and his job is becoming increasingly precarious.
Konemann is a music journalist, and his ability to write so vividly about music elevates The Arena, creating a powerful sense of the London indie music scene in this era. “It was just such a rich environment for stories and for interpersonal relationships because it is quite charged a lot of the time,” he explained to Lighthouse Books. Konemann captures that intensity brilliantly; at times I felt like I was still peeling the grime of last night’s gig off my skin. Importantly, Konemann refuses to depict the scene as solely one thing or another. The Arena highlights the toxicity of some parts of the indie scene, shedding light on substance abuse and artist mental health issues, while still evoking the close community some people find in music scenes. The novel reminds us of the sense of renewal in hearing songs that resonate and the thrill of live music. For Noah, the songs of Smiling Politely feel like they were written for him, as do songs by the few indie singers who are queer.
The Arena confronts challenging themes around mental health, following in the footsteps of authors like Candice Carty-Williams who have been placing mental health centre-stage in their work. Konemann highlights both that Noah deserves better and faces vast – but usual – barriers to getting into a better place, while still emphasising that he is not a perfect person. In the indie music scene, this mental health theme interlinks with that of drug and alcohol abuse, which is a key part of how Noah sometimes deals with his problems.
Noah sometimes attends NHS therapy and struggles to navigate the system, particularly as a queer person. Although the expense of private therapy and the intensity of demand for NHS services does colour the backdrop of the book, Konemann could afford to push further here; the passages about therapy feel faint in contrast to his descriptions of live gigs. Nonetheless, he deserves credit for probing sensitively into such a complex subject.
All this makes The Arena sound quite dark, but, despite some of the subject matter, it is often very funny. Konemann deftly balances serious engagement with difficult subjects with self-aware humour, creating a narrative voice that will be very recognizable to many members of Gen Z. He is unafraid to write those things that lots of us think but might not often admit to aloud.
Konemann is part of a generation of writers exploring queer experiences from new angles, such as Sarah Thankam Matthews and David Santos Donaldson. As much as anything else, The Arena is a coming-of-age story, as we watch Noah try to support himself and figure out how he wants his relationships to be. Arena is highly successful as a queer version of this trajectory, attentive to the intricacies of Noah’s particular relationship to his own queerness without conforming to the demand that all queer stories be about coming out. It does not set Noah within an entirely queer world, noting his sense that he does not want this but also highlighting that sometimes he feels “not gay enough”. While stories that depict the more specifically queer spaces of London are also important, Arena is valuable as a queer story that defies the demand to exist wholly inside or outside of this space. It acknowledges some of the complexities of queerness through this. And nor it is all about romantic relationships; it also celebrates queer friendships and community through the role of Mairead, Noah’s best friend, and her girlfriend Jenny. This feels especially stark in contrast to the toxicity Noah’s relationships with Fraser and Dylan.
At times, though, some of the other characters feel thinly-sketched. It still works, because Noah is so vivid and on one level, Noah’s difficulties make him self-absorbed. The comparative faintness of other characters we get a sense of the narrowing of Noah’s world. But I would have loved to know more about Mairead and Jenny, partly because I’m sure that Konemann would have had interesting things to write about them. Nonetheless, The Arena is an assured, unique debut, and Konemann will certainly be one to watch.
Moving to a new city can be tough. Being surrounded by people and an environment that one is completely unfamiliar with is undoubtedly challenging. Social animals need to have interaction with others to survive and thrive. And this is why the ShareSpace App was invented.
“A lot of my friends and I struggled with finding our ideal homes, ideal roommates especially because you can always find apartments on lease online but when you don’t know anyone from the city, it’s almost impossible to find a reliable roommate. Obviously, no one wants to live with complete strangers,” says Erica Gao, the inventor of the Share Space App.
(The ShareSpace App)
ShareSpace is an all-in-one search and chat platform that matches users with potential roommates based on common interests and habits. Starting with a preliminary screening during onboarding, the app can record users’ interests and habits and show the matched results. And users can communicate and look at the apartments together within the app.
Gao did several rounds of interviews and research, the results showed that people prefer to live with someone that they share the same hobbies and habits with, and that they wish to be able to communicate with each other, which might take long in the early stage, but they don’t have an appropriate platform to do that.
(Interview results collected by Erica Gao)
Even the competitors such as Apartment List, Zumper and Spare Room don’t offer automatic roommate matching. Nor do they provide an online chat function. Gao strategically extracted the features that were proven effective from these apps and incorporated them with the ideas that she sketched herself to articulate possible solutions for user tests and summarized the ones that actually worked.
“Firstly, the app allows users to upload their expectations of their future roommates. And then the system would automatically produce a list of some potential options, including their profile pages that contain information like reviews and links to their social media profiles,” Gao explains, “most importantly, users can directly reach out to each other within this app for communication.”
(Adjustments made to the profile page by Erica Gao)
However, the process was not always that smooth for Gao. For example, she learned from the user interviews that people don’t feel comfortable directly asking for others’ vaccination status in regard to Covid-19. So, Gao then added vaccination proof upload to the onboarding questionnaire and a filter function which can be selected to only show vaccinated results on homepage.
The whole project took about one month for Gao to complete, from early research and testing to optimization based on user feedback. She also partnered with the product team at Wish, the e-commerce startup, to design from a business and product strategy perspective, making the product beneficial for both parties. For Gao, Product strategy and business constraints are what she kept in mind to choose the best one moving forward when building her design.
Throughout the week, we update our Best New Songs playlist with the new releases that caught our attention the most, be it a single leading up to the release of an album or a newly unveiled deep cut. And each Monday, we round up the best new songs released over the past week (the eligibility period begins on Monday and ends Sunday night) in this best new music segment.
On this week’s list, we have ‘Haffmilch Holiday’, the robotic yet eerily comforting debut single from Angel Deradoorian and Kate NV’s collaborative project Decisive Pink, which was inspired by the daily ritual of ordering haffmilch cappuccinos while working on their album in Köln; ‘Gorilla’, a highlight off Little Simz’s new record NO THANK YOU in which she sounds both remarkably loose and assertive; ‘Plagiazer’, a heartfelt lo-fi track from Rachel Brown’s new thanks for coming compilation You Haven’t Missed Much; and Crosslegged’s plunky and entrancing ‘Only in The’, the latest preview of Keba Robinson’s forthcoming LP Another Blue.
Lizzo was the musical guest on last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, where she performed ‘Break Up Twice’ as well as her Amazon Music Original cover of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Someday at Christmas’. Check it out below.
‘Break Up Twice’ appears on Lizzo’s latest album, Special, which arrived in July.
This one’s for all our friends in New Zealand who simply won’t settle for any casino. With so many casinos to choose from, it might be quite a task to take your pick. A casino’s reputation and their level of security and fair play are telling indicators of whether to choose them or not.
We also believe that you need to be clear about what you want. Will you be playing mostly on your mobile? Will you be looking at whether the casino supports cryptocurrency? Or are you mostly after bonuses and rewards? Well, if you’re looking for the best NZ no deposit bonuses around, then you’ve come to the right place! Read on to find out our top 5 picks, and why we think they’re ones you should at least try once!
#1. Wolf Winner Casino
This casino offers a rich and varied collection of games, with thousands of titles to choose from, including video slots, classic slots, virtual sports, jackpots and live dealer games.
Juicy Perks
Welcome bonus
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Top-notch loyalty rewards program
Their website ranks well in terms of user-friendliness, particularly with its flawless mobile experience. It makes for a speedy and easy-to-navigate interface, complemented by its a straightforward registration process.
What’s more, since their site uses HTML5 and other technologies enabling mobile adaptability, playing on the go is easy! There’s no need to download the app to play on your mobile device, to you can enjoy your favourite game, whenever, wherever!
A Safe & Fair Platform
Although quite the newcomer in the casino world, with a minimal track record to judge by, their domain is protected with a secure HTTPs protocol and a valid SSL certificate. And, like any provider worth its salt, it also uses RNG which further ensures fair gaming.
Efficient & Secure Play
Claiming bonuses is very easy; you needn’t have an alpha numeric code to claim one because bonuses are issued automatically. Their banking is speedy and secure, plus there’s also support for avid gamblers who are crypto users. EcoPayz is one of the various options they offer for deposits and withdrawals.
Downside: Minimal track record to judge by.
#2. Jackpot City Casino
Having been operating for over two decades, this operator is quite the veteran! With multiple games to choose from, this provider boasts of an entire 400 games, with 300 of them being in the slots category. And, if that wasn’t tempting enough, it also offers live gaming and million-dollar jackpots to boot.
Juicy Perks
Their pay-out percentage stands at 97.25%
All games are certified, carrying the eCogra seal of approval
Confidentiality of personal details is ensured, as protected by the casino’s privacy policy
Fair play guaranteed
Regular players are rewarded with their loyalty through a VIP club membership
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Games are easy to navigate on your mobile device
Same for functions such as banking and anything else you carry out on your desktop
Downside: Does not support cryptocurrency.
#3. Casino Extreme
Powered by Real Time Gaming, Casino Extreme offers its players a healthy selection of 300 games to choose from, which include slots, table games, video poker and of course jackpot games!
Juicy Perks
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200% bonus with your first cryptocurrency bonus
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678% boost on one of your deposits once a week
User-friendly
Supporting cryptocurrency, this provider understands that not all players like using fiat currency. Additionally, quick pay-outs and instant withdrawals means players can reap the benefits of their wins. And, if players choose Casino Extreme, the sign-up process is quick and easy, so there’s no need to worry about a longwinded series of steps before playing your favourite game!
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Protected through SSL encryption, safety and security is certainly one of the top priorities of this casino. To further guarantee this, its server is protected with the latest firewall technology. Games are audited regularly by Gaming Laboratories International for fairness and randomness
Downside: No specific support page.
#4. King Billy Casino
Offering games from leading software providers which are all tested for fairness before release, it’s a no brainer why King Billy Casino is included in this list! Just like the previously-mentioned operators,
King Billy is fully licensed and regulated, ensuring players’ interests are protected on all fronts. Thanks to its implementation of the latest security encryption protocols, fund transfers are fully-protected. The fact that this operator advocates responsible gambling through its deposit limits and self-exclusion option is what makes it a cut above the rest.
Juicy Perks
Unending stream of rewards with free spins and cashbacks
Exciting prize pool tournaments
User-Friendly & Client-Centred
The website is available in multiple languages
It is also very informative
24/7 live support available
You can access the casino from your smart phone or tablet; no app is needed.
Downside: fewer payment methods compared to other casinos
#5. Bizzo Casino
While quite humble in its game selection (offering players just over 100 titles to choose from), Bizzo does offer a variety of live dealers to its customers. And, you’ll quickly see that what it lacks in game selection, it makes up for in other promotions.
Juicy Perks
Thursday Reload Bonus
Monday Free Spins
Tournaments with potential prizes worth thousands of euros
VIP Scheme: which includes free spins and cashbacks
Easy-to-use Interface
Players’ gaming experience is made simple thanks to the casino’s HTML5 designed site. And the added plus? No application is necessary on your mobile: simply log on through your device’s web browser and voila! You can enjoy playing your favourite titles.
Safe & Fair
The casino is licensed and regulated, is efficient, safe and fair and, most importantly is RNG-certified for fair play. There are clear and transparent Privacy Policy and T&Cs available for customers to read through prior to committing to registration and, it’s SSL encryption is supported
Downside: Limited responsible gaming tools
Don’t Forget to Play Smart!
Once you’ve made your pick from the above-listed casinos, it’s important to remember to play smart and responsibly. If you catch yourself overplaying your hand, help is out there, especially with the New Zealand government investing heavily to minimise potential gambling harm. We encourage responsible gambling, where players have fun while gambling within their means.
It is safe to say that many people love spending their free time playing video games. And why not? Games are a great way to relax, have fun, and even relieve stress. But with so many different types of games out there, it can be hard to know which ones are worth your time. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. In this blog post, we will introduce you to different and interesting games that you will want to play every day.
Discover a world of interesting games you’ll want to play every day with the help of a random wheel where you can discover fun and engaging games at the click of a button.
Board Games
There are a variety of board games that can be enjoyed by people of all ages. Some of the most popular board games include chess, checkers, and Go. These games are not only entertaining, but they can also help to improve your cognitive skills. Other popular board games include Monopoly, Scrabble, and Risk. These games are also great for helping you to improve your critical thinking skills. In addition, these games can be very enjoyable for family game nights.
So, if you are looking for some interesting and fun games to play, be sure to check out some of the best board games available. You will surely find something that everyone in the family will enjoy playing. Keep in mind that some of these games may require more than one person to play.
Casino Games
There are many casino games that you can play. Some of the most popular include slots, blackjack, roulette, baccarat, and craps. Each game has its own set of rules and odds, so it is important to learn how to play each one before betting any money. For example, when looking for a Progressive Jackpot slot online, you have to make sure that the game you are playing will give you a chance to win the maximum possible payout. Progressive Jackpot slots are usually found in large casinos and they offer the highest payouts of any slot machine.
Slots are perhaps the easiest game to play at a casino. All you need to do is put in your money and spin the reels. There are many different types of slot machines, so you can choose one that suits your style of play. Blackjack is another popular game that is easy to learn. The objective is to get as close to 21 as possible without going over. Roulette is a classic casino game that involves betting on where a ball will land on a spinning wheel. Baccarat is another popular table game that is easy to learn and offers good odds for players who know what they are doing. Craps is a dice game that can be intimidating for new players, but it is actually quite simple once you understand the basics.
Thinking Games
There are all sorts of thinking games you can play to help keep your mind sharp. Games like Sudoku and crossword puzzles are popular choices, but there are many others that can be just as much fun and challenging. Here are a few examples:
-Set a timer and see how many words you can make out of a given word or phrase.
-Create a list of items and see how many different categories you can come up with for them. For example, things that are red, things that are round, things that start with the letter A, etc.
-Think of as many words as possible that relate to a given topic. For example, animals, countries, fruits, vegetables, colors, etc.
-See how quickly you can solve a jigsaw puzzle or Sudoku grid.
-Try to remember as many details from a story or article as you can after reading it once.
The popularity of social games
In recent years, social games have become increasingly popular, with people of all ages playing them on a variety of platforms. Social games are designed to be played with friends and family, and many of them are free to play.
There are a number of reasons why social games are so popular. They’re usually easy to pick up and play with, and they can be a great way to stay connected with friends and family who live far away. Social games can also be very addictive, and many of them are designed to be played over long periods of time.
Keep in mind that not all social games are created equal. Some of them are more addictive than others, and some of them may be more appropriate for certain age groups than others. As with any type of game, it’s important to choose social games that are right for you and your family.
What makes a game interesting?
There are a variety of things that can make a game interesting. It may be the graphics, the gameplay, the storyline, or even just the pure fun factor. Whatever it is that makes a game interesting, it is sure to keep players coming back for more. Furthermore, interesting games are usually the ones that are most successful and popular. For example, some of the most popular games of all time are also some of the most interesting. Games like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid are all interesting games that have stood the test of time.
Additionally, games that are interesting tend to be more challenging and thus more rewarding. Players who are able to overcome the challenges posed by an interesting game are typically rewarded with a sense of satisfaction. This is one of the main reasons why people continue to play video games; they offer players a sense of accomplishment that can be hard to come by in other aspects of life.
We hope you enjoyed our roundup of interesting games that you’ll want to play every day. While some of these Games may require a little bit of effort to get into, we think they’re all worth it in the end. The bottom line is that playing video games can be a great way to relax, have fun, and even relieve stress. So, if you’re looking for something to do in your free time, be sure to check out some of the games on this list. You’re sure to find something that you’ll enjoy playing.
Over the summer, I compiled a list of halfway highlights. Many titles repeat onto this year-end version. 2022 witnessed achievements across the filmmaking sphere: many fascinating late-style works from arthouse auteur staples, a few examples of innovative large-scale studio filmmaking, and some bold statements from first-time filmmakers. As a note on methodology, this list was compiled from the year’s theatrical releases. Movies with festival premieres but no theatrical distribution yet don’t qualify.
Ten is a strict number. Lots of great movies fall wayside when you restrict yourself. I’d be remiss not to mention James Gray’s Armaggedon Time, an anti-Fabelmans, unsentimental slice of autofiction. Gray’s movie follows a microcosmic, middle-class New York Jewish family torn between a history of repression and desire for assimilation. It’s an elegy composed in clenched-fists about how capitalism and privatization undo the seeds of solidarity. Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il Buco is a slow cinema descent into a 683-metre Calabrian cave, fostering an intoxicating ambiance between torchlight and shadow. The cave becomes a space resilient to the spread of modernity: a souvenir of slowness in an accelerating world. Charlotte Wells’ first feature Aftersun broke my heart. It’s a small movie about reinterpreting gestures and memories from your childhood and finding new meanings from them in your adult years. It’s also about recognizing the silent suffering behind those memories and connecting to absent figures through them. Paul Mescal as the slowly-drowning, trying-to-be-present paternal figure is as good a performance as anyone gave this year. RRR is lesser S.S. Rajamouli, but still packs some of the year’s most imaginative action setpieces. Then there’s Tár, a ghostly, slow-burn melodrama about a world-renowned conductor and her cult of personality crumbling. The film takes pleasure orchestrating its protagonist’s undoing. Her meticulously ordered world falls apart, and Cate Blanchett—better than she’s ever been—embodies the flailing chaos of a slowly defeated empress.
That’s not even to mention Bertrand Bonello’s eclectic puzzlebox Coma, Park Chan-wook’s immaculately wound noir Decision to Leave, Laura Poitras’ tearjerking Nan Goldin portrait All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, the go-for-broke nightmarescapes of Phil Tippett’s Mad God, or the giddy, rocket-paced delights of Wai Ka-fai’s Detectives vs Sleuths. While I limited myself to one Hong Sang-soo movie for the top ten, In Front of Your Face is also a melancholic and patient exploration of its protagonist’s interiority. As always with Hong, it’s a lovely movie.
As a final thought: there are no good or bad years for movies. Every year offers tremendous rewards if you’re willing to look for them. Here are some this year’s greatest rewards:
Saint Omer
Saint Omer, the first narrative feature from documentarian Alice Diop, is based not only on Fabienne Kabou’s trial for murdering her fifteen-month-year-old, but specifically Alice Diop’s position spectating that case. Cameras weren’t allowed in the courtroom. And so, Saint Omer became a fictional account of Diop’s experience. Nonetheless, the film’s minimalist rendition of the courtroom unfolds with the unvarnished realism of non-fiction storytelling. Diop creates a courtroom without sensation. Similarly, central performances from Kayije Kagame and Guslagie Malanga reveal no glimmer of artificiality: unstrained, matter-of-fact, yet haunting. But this isn’t buttoned-up austerity. Outside the courtroom, the images flow differently. There are dream sequences and even an interpolated passage from Pasolini’s Medea. Diop’s toolbox includes a variety of devices that slowly reveal tremendous pain lurking beneath the film’s surface. Saint Omer becomes an indictment of how Western systems (legal, aesthetic, theoretical) prove inadequate in addressing the subjectivities of the colonized.
A Night of Knowing Nothing
What is the role of cinema in political revolt? Payal Kapadia’s first feature A Night of Knowing Nothing follows a tradition of past revolutionary cinemas (references include Ritwik Ghatak and Jean-Luc Godard), questioning how aesthetics can combat fascistic campaigns. The film’s both an epistolary romance and an essayistic documentary on film school protests against the violence of the Narendra Modi government. It weaves testimonials and news footage into a non-linear, ghostly trance. The personal and political entangle into an eclectic assembly of cryptic images. Yet none of its mystery undoes its anger or its urgency. Kapadia’s form pays homage to a lineage of fellow radical filmmakers, all the while establishing its own position in a revolutionary canon.
EO
À la Paul Schrader, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO uses a Bressonian skeleton (in this case, Au Hasard Balthazar) as gateway into a modern political context. Unlike Schrader’s gradual shift into minimalism, Skolimowski envisions a world of animal subjectivizes, bathed in crimson and swiveling quasi-black metal aesthetics. Skolimowski’s hero: a wordless donkey (actually played by six), passed from person to person across rural Poland and Italy. The donkey’s gaze captures a crumbling economic system and the violent eruptions that accompany it. Skolimowski is eighty-four, yet he’s still burning with youthful innovation, conjuring a nightmarish magic show for the ages. EO is a masterwork of posthuman cinema, where the camera stands in for the gaze of lives trampled by our ways of living.
The Fabelmans
With The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg sews a tapestry of the autobiographical memories his career’s repurposed into blockbusters. The movie reveals how personal his seemingly impersonal spectacles have been and how they’re deeply rooted in the small-scale, intimate drama of his lifetime. It’s invaluable as a supplement to Spielberg’s career (and everything his body of work encapsulates), yet also a delightful melodrama on its own. Spielberg is probably Hollywood’s biggest sweetheart since Frank Capra, yet he still stares unflinching into his family’s internal pain. It’s self-indulgent, maybe. Yet when the details of Spielberg’s own childhood are so linked to the images beamed into our own consciousnesses for decades, it feels justified. This is the movie Spielberg’s been gesturing at his entire career, lodging fragments under the obscuring cloak of Hollywood bombast. This isn’t to diss Spielberg’s spectacles. He’s a master in that arena. But it’s incredibly rewarding to see him this vulnerable with, finally, nothing to hide.
Ambulance
Michael Bay’s penchant for all-American bombast has scarcely felt as finely-tuned as Ambulance: a pulpy heist-turned-getaway actioner told with disorienting glee. In kaleidoscopic excess, Bay’s camera rockets between perspectives. Fast-gliding drone shots align us with the POVs of frantic vehicles, both aerial and automobile. Bay’s camerawork is hyper-active and clearly assembled from endless hours’ worth of footage shot as coverage. In the tradition of Tony Scott and Michael Mann, Ambulance is a triumph of digital action filmmaking, where the camera is an active participant in the action, rather than a mere documenter of individual bodies’ motions. With Ambulance, Michael Bay achieves his destiny, crafting a divine B-movie drenched in gallons of blood, sweat, and gasoline.
Nope
If Get Out established Jordan Peele as an accomplished ironist, and Us marked the blossoming of his visual storytelling, then Nope is a marriage and expansion of both. It’s the type of grand, idiosyncratic blockbuster largely extinct in today’s production market. Peele leans into digressions, packing a tangent-friendly narrative with expansive setpieces. Unfolding against sprawling Californian backdrops (often shot, confoundingly, day-for-night), Peele mixes pastiches into a horror-western cocktail. Yet in a movie about a quasi-suicidal compulsion to make everything visible, Peele leans into restraint. He masters visual synecdoche, dwelling on haunting details and avoiding the big picture of cataclysmic events. The images are unforgettable: a bloodied key lodged in a horse’s body, screeching faces slithered through the claustrophobic tunnels of an alien digestive system, an inflated mascot drifting through the clouds next to an unraveling, amorphous extraterrestrial, etc. If these weren’t enough, the movie climaxes as a bombastic Moby-Dick riff featuring a hand-cranked IMAX camera. It’s a dense and uncompromising crowd-pleaser from a filmmaker who keeps pushing himself further.
The Novelist’s Film
Ungenerous critics often describe Hong Sang-soo’s filmography as ceaseless rehashes of the same movie: laidback and static, soju-drenched dialogues performed by a regular troop of actors. This isn’t entirely false, but it is reductive. While there are no complete stylistic overhauls between movies, Hong’s filmography is fascinating for its quiet ruptures of his familiar form. In The Novelist’s Film (one of Hong’s three(!) movies this year), an aging writer (Lee Hye-young) arbitrarily decides to make a movie. She flirts with reinvention deep into her career. The story builds towards a finale which reveals the realization of her project. Hong films her movie as a kinetic and orchestral passage, totally incongruous with his signature aesthetics. Like his protagonist, Hong embraces something new. This moment feels so revelatory because it stems from such an aesthetically consistent artist. The Novelist’s Film is an oddly hopeful detour from Hong, whose work once seemed fundamentally cynical and curmudgeonly. Here, he embraces a need for openness (open to art, open to other people). It’s a movie about approaching change with open arms.
Stars at Noon
Stars at Noon, Claire Denis’ second American film, is her variation of an espionage thriller. Though not without suspense, traditional genre beats aren’t the focal point here. Denis’ more concerned with her characters’ wandering aimlessness, the suffocating hopelessness which overcomes their lives, and the sweat-stained hotel rooms that house their sexual refuge from impending doom. The movie eerily transposes Denis Johnson’s novel (set in Nicaragua circa 1984) onto the country’s COVID-era landscape, leaving almost every detail otherwise unchanged. The timelessness of the adaptation captures a circular chaos, with the role of American imperialism unchanging.
The story centers on the futile romance of two pitiful lovers going nowhere fast. In a great and insufferable performance, Margaret Qualley stars as a perpetually “swacked” American expatriate, parading through the streets, at one point spitefully screaming at Nicaraguan locals about how US tanks are going to come and crush their country. Her perfect match? Joe Alwyn plays opposite her as a British oil company contractor wanted by American and Costa Rican agents alike. Their affair is like two flies trapped in a spider’s web, writhing and screwing to their dying breaths. It’s equal parts slimy and sexy: impossible to avert your eyes.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a coming-of-age drama unfolding in the lonesome caverns of the internet. Still, Schoenbrun isn’t just grafting coming-of-age conventions onto a new platform. World’s Fair structures around the fleeting encounters and unanswerable mysteries that backbone internet sociality. Schoenbrun’s representation of online space is perhaps the most accomplished of any filmmaker to date. A majority of the film unfolds from the perspective of computer screens. Video streaming autoplays enact an associative flow of images. We come to learn about characters not just through their words and actions, but also how the algorithm interprets their psyches from their internet footprints. The subconscious becomes intwined with technology. Schoenbrun’s storytelling excels through the originality of its visual language, deeply attuned to the melancholia and alienation of a life lived online.
Crimes of the Future
After eight years, David Cronenberg re-emerges with an aggressively late-style tango between his lifelong obsessions of technology and human evolution. This one’s got underground organ-growing performance art and cults of plastic-eaters though. Equal parts jargon and camp, Crimes of the Future boasts a perfectly-calibrated, tongue-in-cheek ensemble lead by Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart. The film unleashes a claustrophobic world of fleshy mise-en-scène and goofy eroticism, lensed hauntingly by first-time Cronenberg DP Douglas Koch.
In his twilight years, Cronenberg’s typical bodily ruminations infuse with the elegiac reflexivity of an older man and the immediacy of a dystopian era. Nonetheless, his transhumanist musings have scarcely been as hopeful as the film’s toxic-waste chomping finale. In the end, Crimes of the Future’s corporeal mutations are many things. They’re comic, tragic, romantic, and even erotic (was there a more sensual gesture this year than Seydoux eating out Mortensen’s abdominal zipper incision?). Still, the crown prince of body horror himself omits any actual horror from the film’s fleshy intrigue. It’s the product of a filmmaker in full of acceptance of the organism’s infinite expansion. Cronenberg’s always been curious about human civilization’s next chapters. But this time, he approaches it without fear, totally at peace with the body’s anarchy.
Hey, ily released have shared two new songs: ‘Friend Group From Hell’ and ‘3,2,1 Starve! (Why Do I Still Look The Same?)’. Take a listen below.
“This song is the first time all five of us have sat down and truly collaborated on a song together,” the band’s Caleb Haynes told The Alternative, speaking about ‘Friend Group From Hell’. “That’s probably why we think it perfectly encapsulates what a Hey, ily! song should be: noisy, chaotic, catchy, and genre-bending. It probably also ends up being our angriest song yet. Lyrically, the song is about being forced to be around people who are slowly partying themselves out of any aspirations and nutric personality, forcing you to witness, and in turn, be affected by their descent into toxicity.”
Of ‘3,2,1 Starve! (Why Do I Still Look The Same?)’, Haynes added:
When we get bored of writing power-pop flavored emo tunes, we try to experiment and write a song in a genre we haven’t before. That’s where this song came into play. Inspired by bands like Cerce, Foxtails, and Leer, we wanted to write a kind of throwback screamo song. Whether or not we accomplished that is still up to debate. This song definitely took us the longest to write so far, for a while we couldn’t figure out where we wanted to take the song. At one point it even had a djent breakdown, but we decided to ixnay that. Lyrically, the song is an internal struggle, wanting to advocate for body positivity and self-acceptance but still trying your best to change your own physique, wrongfully thinking it’ll increase your self worth. It can really make you feel hypocritical. I was just sick of being in that mindset, and writing an angry hardcore-inspired song was my best way out.
