As the sun’s been well and truly out here in New Zealand this summer, I thought I’d spin a summery gem. After last year’s summer floods and cyclones – leading to deaths, and fortunately for me, only a cancelled Elton John concert (an adventure and a half!) – this summer has been such a joy. Ah, this is why I moved over here.
I like LADIES OF THE CANYON, but it’s not BLUE, is it? In fact, one of the songs I like the most on this album – the second track, For Free – I like so much because it sounds like the type of material she’d nail down completely on BLUE. In fact, there are so many moments on here, particularly the piano-driven songs, where you can almost feel BLUE just around the corner.
I only have a few of her records, but I think because I heard BLUE first, the only other ones I have – this and THE HISSING OF SUMMER LAWNS – pale so much in comparison (despite being mini-classics themselves), they’ve prevented me from picking anything else up. I’m sure she has great albums in there, but I’ve been spoiled from being exposed to the really good stuff first.
The only album I’ve bought of hers recently is a cheap copy of CHALK MARK IN A RAIN STORM at a record fair, which was interesting enough to hear a late-era record.
But what am I missing? What are the albums that need to be in my collection? Suggestions welcome…
Despite giving this a spin for the first time, I feel like I already know GOOD FEELING, seeing the band play live so many times in support of its follow-up THE MAN WHO, when they were still playing many of these songs. When I first saw them, at Glastonbury 1999, six of their set of sixteen songs were from this debut album.
I’ve written before about how I think Travis missed the boat somewhat, having been around a couple of years before Coldplay turned that type of acoustic guitar-driven rock into something that filled stadiums. This album seems to suggest a different, rockier route the band could have gone down. It’s produced by famed U2 producer Steve Lillywhite, which hints at the type of direction they might be aiming for, but the songwriting isn’t quite as strong as on THE MAN WHO.
Opening track All I Want To Do Is Rock, a centrepiece of that Glastonbury ’99 set, is a strong start – both gritty and anthemic in a way that a U2 might have been had they come from Glasgow – but I think too many of the songs are missing the poppier hooks that the follow-up album would have.
Five singles were lifted from the album, including the suspiciously titled U16 Girls, which they also played at Glastonbury. The lyrics might be innocent enough – hooking up with a girl he later finds out to be underage, in much the same way that Renton meets Diane in TRAINSPOTTING – but I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea to write and record a song about it, let alone release said song as a single and play it at large festivals.
More Than Us, lifted at the fifth and final single – and rounded out as an EP of eight tracks over two CDs, including a cover of John Lennon’s Gimme Some Truth – is perhaps the best signifier of the band’s flirtation with the mainstream over the next couple of years. It’s tender yet catchy, as is the following song Falling Down, a delicate ballad which belies the band’s average age of 27, while album-closer Funny Thing almost sounds like something that could have been left off Radiohead’s OK COMPUTER.
I always thought the stories of Travis starting out were quite romantic and captivating. They moved down to London, rented a house, and all got jobs except for frontman Fran Healy who they supported while he stayed home and wrote songs. These songs, I’m guessing…
Another nice pick-up in the Newbury Comics sale just before Christmas.
This isn’t anywhere near as bad as I was fearing, possibly thanks to its all-star roster of guest vocalists – the Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson, Extreme’s Gary Cherone, the almost-in-Led-Zeppelin Terry Reid, Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander and the New York Dolls’ David Johansen – and appearances from Stone Temple Pilots’ Robert DeLeo on bass, and Zak Starkey on drums. I’ve always found Perry’s post-Aerosmith comeback solo albums to be a bit sludgy and tuneless, but this definitely has a better feel to it, despite the odd track descending into that grungy sludge from time to time – a production quirk more than anything else.
Originally intended to be released as a deluxe version of his terribly titled 2018 SWEETZERLAND MANIFESTO studio album, instead this turns out to be a different beast, almost a standalone record. Four of the tracks are different mixes or alternate vocal takes from that earlier album, with the remaining six tracks being completely new songs.
I’m not quite sure why it’s been released like this – surely, a better idea would be to forget the redone songs, record a couple more new ones and put it out as a brand new studio album on its own, but what do I know? It definitely doesn’t sound like there’s any barrel-scraping going on with the new songs, and I’m not sure how different the redone songs are from the original recordings. The cover art is also exactly the same, except for the addition of ‘MKII’ in the title. It’s just odd.
Lead track Fortunate One, featuring Chris Robinson and Robert DeLeo and released in advance of the album, is clearly the standout song, but I really dig Perry’s arrangement of Elmer Bernstein’s Man With The Golden Arm theme. Perry has history when it comes to doing instrumental tracks for Aerosmith, and this one didn’t disappoint.
A nice pick-up in the Newbury Comics sale just before Christmas.
Another great addition to my Fleetwood Mac (and adjacent) collection, and more fuel to the fire that Fleetwood Mac should really have been my number one band growing up, and maybe they were, in a parallel universe.
This is a compilation of remixed McVie solo cuts, lifted off her self-titled 1984 album, her 2004 IN THE MEANTIME album, and some previously unreleased tracks from all points in between. Of course, it all sounds like Fleetwood Mac, which is superb, and the blazing opening track Friend could have come from any Buckingham/Nicks era album.
In the end, it’s a beautiful thing that the event that ended Fleetwood Mac wasn’t the departure of Lindsey Buckingham, or anything to do with Stevie Nicks, it was the death of McVie at the end of 2022. Even though she always felt very much at home during those post-1975 arena-filling years, she’s the songwriter in the band that bridges the gap between the blues years – after she joined the band full-time in 1970 as Christine Perfect (following a stint with them as a session player from 1968) – and the commercial years where she more than held her own with two other prominent songwriters in Buckingham and Nicks.
She also, from my perspective, kept the British end up, in a band that seemed to turn more and more American, in both sound and vision, after the two yanks joined in 1975. Of course, the two mainstays who give the band their name, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, are as British as anything, but I definitely think the band was, for a time, in danger of becoming an American thing. And that just won’t do.
Her lovely Lancashire accent is always a wonderful thing to hear when she’s introducing songs on stage, or in interviews, and her songwriting style somehow compliments Buckingham and Nicks perfectly – falling somewhere between the the driving immediacy of Buckingham and the witchy etherealness of Nicks.
The liner notes on this album – an interview with McVie by BBC Radio 2 host Johnnie Walker – is a really good idea, and gives the album a voice without it feeling too promotional. They talk through the album track by track, and explain how Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood ended up on a couple of tracks lifted from the 1984 album.
I’m not sure if she knew she was sick when putting this compilation together. She had been suffering from a metastasised cancer, and eventually died of a stroke in November 2022, but the announcement from her family says she died after a short illness. Perhaps this project was designed as something else, a bookend of sorts, bridging a gap into another phase of her solo career?
Just rewatched Nolan’s latest, OPPENHEIMER, my first time since seeing it on IMAX back in July. With some distance now from its Barbenheimer hashtag, it was interesting to revisit it, although if anything the film has grown in stature ever since – the most successful biopic of all time, the third highest grossing film of the year (after BARBIE and THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE), and an outright awards contender.
I’m still quite lukewarm on the film though, just as much as I was back when it was first released. Dialogue-wise, it reminds me of Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE, with swirling, overlapping lines recited by the stellar ensemble cast, which is fine once you finally tune your ears to it all. The way Nolan was putting across information during that first hour felt like a trailer – with lines of dialogue flying in all over the place. There’s nothing close to what we would identify as a real life conversation in all of this, just characters pushing statements and information out of their mouths.
A great example is when Kitty, in a fit of what we’d refer to now as post-natal depression, turns her back on their infant son, Peter. This leads Oppenheimer to take him to the house of friend and colleague Chevalier. In a very short interchange, Chevalier says ‘Robert, you see beyond the world we live in. There’s a price to be paid for that. Of course we’ll help.’ Now, of course we should applaud Nolan as screenwriter for being economical with his screenplay; for managing to put across a key piece of characterisation – “Robert, you see beyond the world we live in” – in the middle of a ‘conversation’ around domestic arrangements, but it also highlights Nolan’s age-old coldness and lack of humanity or soul in his dialogue (coincidentally, this time in a film where the lead character is wrestling with his humanity).
Watching the film a second time, I’m still highly relieved when Matt Damon’s Army General turns up to give the narrative a bit of structure. I really enjoyed the middle hour, as they built and tested the bomb, but then as soon as all that was over – and Matt Damon’s presence got further and further away – it just becomes a patchwork quilt of dialogue again, only not as interesting as that first hour which was at least heading towards something.
I understand the context-setting of the first hour, and enjoyed the actual ‘doing something’ of the second hour, but I’m very cold on that third hour. I’m usually a fan of courtroom dramas, but here there’s just too many names flying around and a lack of general clarity on what everybody’s motives are. I’m terrible with names at the best of times, but even more so when there’s so many names to remember. Somebody should manufacture a little ‘Oppenheimer For Dummies’ guidebook, that has everybody’s name – and their motives – listed next to their name.
I do wonder, given the film’s wild success, how many people were introduced to Nolan though this. I’m sure many younger viewers, attracted by the Barbenheimer hype, might have been unfamiliar with him, but I’d expect some older viewers, perhaps uninterested in his earlier superhero and sci-fi work, would have been new to him too. Imagine not being familiar with Nolan’s style, and being presented with this as your first experience of him – and then having things like INCEPTION, INTERSTELLAR, THE PRESTIGE and THE DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY to go and digest.
My favourite tweet about the film last year simply read “What the fuck did you say to Einstein? His hat blew off his head!”
And speaking of hats, a contributor to one of my favourite film podcasts, KERMODE & MAYO’S TAKE, highlighted a strange thing that’s happening with the wearing of hats in the film. If you consider that the film is mainly set from the late 1930s, through to the 1950s, a period of time when all men wore hats, it’s almost unbelievable that nobody wears one except Oppenheimer and Einstein. Remember also that a large portion of this films takes place in Los Alamos, where they’re walking around in the desert in broad daylight, a prime opportunity to wear a hat. And Einstein’s hat gets blown off (thanks to the piece of fishing wire attached to it you can spot in behind the scenes photographs), so there’s definitely something happening, some metaphor that isn’t – again – quite as clear as perhaps it should be. Is it only the geniuses that wear hats?
OPPENHEIMER’s also a film that seems to have tangibly existed for me longer than most people. After the initial announcement, when social media declared it the whitest cast ever assembled, and we went into the usual period of radio-silence when they’re making the film before the marketing for the release starts up, I was getting on-location updates from a friend who works at the Institute Of Advanced Study. This is still a functioning institute and so it’s great that they were able to film there. My updates would consist of photographs of yellow taxicabs from the 1940s, long-distance videos of Robert Downey Jr. walking across the grounds (who looks more like THE GODFATHER-era Al Pacino to me), and another clip of him dancing around out of boredom under an umbrella while he – presumably – waits for the rain to clear before filming the scene of him walking out to meet Oppenheimer and Einstein.
The embarrassing things about this whole batch of messages is that when she sent the first video, my friend captioned it ‘This is Robert D’, and with only having had a cursory glance at the ensemble cast, I took this to mean Robert De Niro. We had a very confusing conversation before she put me right.
I still love the soundtrack score by Ludwig Göransson – possibly my favourite aspect of the film – and while it’s superb, with just the right balance of nuance and bombast, I can’t help but imagine what a Hans Zimmer score would have been like. There’s something almost indefinable in Zimmer’s scores for Nolan – on INCEPTION and INTERSTELLAR in particular – which may have produced more gold here.
In terms of casting, it has to be the best ensemble cast of the year, even beating out Wes Anderson’s ASTEROID CITY, which was similarly star-studded. I specifically enjoyed a couple of casting choices l hadn’t been aware of going in to the film, namely Macon Blair, Casey Affleck and Jason Clarke.
Everybody was just superb though. In particular, it was nice to see: Alden Ehrenreich, the senate aide who delivers the final ‘Fuck you’ to Robert Downey Jr.’s character (the last time I saw Ehrenreich was as Han Solo in the 2018 SOLO film); Alex Wolff as the physicist Alvarez (who I last saw as the son ascending the treehouse in HEREDITARY); Tom Conte as Einstein (a prior Nolan alumni having played one of Bruce Wayne’s fellow prisoners in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, and the father of one of my favourite comedians, ventriloquist Nina Conte); and Benny Safdie as the physicist Teller, who, after this and his performance in the Safdie Brothers’ film GOOD TIME, puts him towards the top of my list of favourite actors (and acting looks like something he might get to do more of as the brothers have just resolved their working relationship).
And it’s still such a delight to see so much of Florence Pugh (👀) on such a large screen, even though my 65” TV is no match for an IMAX screen. After seeing Emma Stone in the buff for so much of Yorgos Lanthimos’ POOR THINGS, I hope this is a return to A-list actors having a more liberal approach to nudity. This isn’t completely out of being a dirty old pervert – although there’s that too – but it felt like more of an accepted thing in films from the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Another long-awaited reissue. TUESDAY NIGHT MUSIC CLUB was never pressed on vinyl back in 1993, unless you lived in Ecuador, and never really hit the format properly until a reissue in 2018. I had one of those reissues in my hand at the time but didn’t buy it for some reason. That’s the risk of record collecting; whenever you see something in a record shop, you’re never really sure if it’s forever going to be in print from that day forward, or if it’s going to be a limited run, never to be seen again.
Five years later, and it’s finally here again. And seemingly in larger numbers. Released so soon before Christmas, I too the risk of waiting until a chain store here ran one of their regular 20%-off sales. A huge risk, as I could have been waiting another five years to see it reissued again if I missed out. Thankfully, waiting a couple of weeks paid off and I’ve finally got it in my hands.
Aside from being a well-recorded, well-produced, catchy bunch of songs – including All I Wanna Do, which I’ve always loved – I’m just as interested in the story behind this record. The title comes from the loose collective of players that convened every Tuesday to write and record the album, but as soon as it was released, the arguments started about who wrote what. There’s a biography of Crow by Richard Buskin which goes into the recording of the album in great detail which I wouldn’t mind reading.
Crow was pushed by the others to co-write the whole album, as the publishing royalties she was set to receive was the only way she could pay off the debts of her unreleasable first album proper. Hmm, very interesting. Produced by Hugh Padgham, Crow describes it as being too slick and produced.
Of course, we should never forget that Crow was one of Michael Jackson’s backing vocalists on the BAD tour – often dueting with him on I Just Can’t Stop Loving You. From memory, she can be spotted in the live performance sequences of 1988’s MOONWALKER.
It’s finally 2024, and awards season lies ahead of us, full of glitter. 2023 seems to be one of those years where a lot of the big hitters have already played in cinemas in the latter half of 2023. It’s difficult to not see Nolan’s OPPENHEIMER and Scorsese’s KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON divide the awards between them. There’s even Gerwig’s BARBIE (please no), Cooper’s MAESTRO, Mann’s FERRARI and many more to throw into the mix.
But this post is about the last six months of 2023, and in particular what I watched movie-wise (for my look back at the first half of 2023, see here).
July started with two summer tentpole movies that were so similar, but couldn’t have been further apart. On my birthday (the 7th of July, thanks for asking), I had a date night with the wife (with babysitting duties courtesy of my Mum and Dad who recently turned up unannounced from the UK, no really) to see INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY. So far, so disappointing. I’ve been wondering why this sequel has been in the works over the past couple of years. Surely it’s the sequel nobody – except the CEO of Disney – asked for. Even Spielberg and Lucas had the good grace to stay away from it – and that’s saying something, particularly in the case of Lucas who’s never been one to shy away from making disappointing sequels.
I’m reminded of the refrain in Pink Floyd’s THE WALL, where Roger Waters cries ‘Did it have to be so tall?’ Well, did THE DIAL OF DESTINY have to be so dull? I understand James Mangold has tried to make a film in the style of the original Indiana Jones trilogy, but he’s sadly overlooked the humour that was ingrained in those films. While there were a couple of moments of fun, it was just a dreary slog through what felt like an Indiana Jones spin-off. More than anything, it feels similar to TOY STORY 4, a sequel that nobody asked for and shouldn’t need to exist.
That said, DIAL OF DESTINY wasn’t half as bad as I was expecting it to be. The cast was good – with Mads Mikkelsen doing a lot of the heavy lifting despite being a majorly underwritten part. In fact, I’d say many of the roles weren’t as fleshed out as they could be – Helena’s sidekick Teddy being the biggest problem. In other casting, Tony Jones was great, but Antonio Banderas’ appearance was confusingly minor.
Although she walked a fine line, Phoebe Waller-Bridge wasn’t as annoying as she usually is, and with a nose like hers, we can all be thankful the film wasn’t a 3-D release. I can just imagine audiences screaming in terror as her conk swept through cinemas all over the globe. Without giving anything away, I had heard that people had been a bit sniffy about certain far-fetched elements of the plot, but I thought it was all handled relatively well – and there’s always been a bit of magical, mystical stuff in Indy, starting off with biblical ghosts melting the faces off of Nazis in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.
The next night in the same cinema we saw MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE DEAD RECKONING – PART ONE, and suddenly my faith in summer blockbusters was restored. Where DIAL OF DESTINY was slow and lumbering, DEAD RECKONING was light and airy, full of fun. It’s quite telling that this is 9 minutes longer than DIAL OF DESTINY but manages to feel about half an hour shorter. It’s time to start talking about Christopher McQuarrie being one of the greatest action writer-directors around; even the (many) exposition scenes were forward facing and kinetic.
It’s crazy that there were so many similarities with DIAL OF DESTINY – specifically the train sequence and the MacGuffin being an item consisting of two parts that needed to be brought together.
And, not to sound like a male chauvinist, but good lord, the ladies in DEAD RECKONING! Hayley Atwell, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby and Pom Klementieff. It feels like such a departure – even though we’re twenty-odd years into the 21st century – to completely cast a film with what might be called in the north of England ‘thinking man’s crumpet’. Cor blimey.
Around this time, I started a movie-season at home, something I’d had ready to go for a while but couldn’t mange to get around to it. The first film in the season was JOURNEY OF HOPE (1990), the winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (now the Best International Feature) at the 1991 awards. My intention was to watch all of the winners of this particular award from 1990 onwards (I’d already seen CINEMA PARADISO, which was the first actual winner of the decade, but was released in 1989).
It took me nearly four months to get through them all, watching one or two a week, but I made it with Sebastián Lelio’s A FANTASTIC WOMAN (2017) in late October. I didn’t bother with the last 5 or 6 years worth of winners as they all felt so fresh in the mind.
They didn’t all float my boat, and many of them were rewatches – films I was very happy to revisit like LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1997), THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006), THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (2009), A SEPARATION (2011), and SON OF SAUL (2015) – but some of my first-time watches of this bunch were incredible. I’d never heard of MEDITERRANEO (1991) before, but fell in love with the lackadaisical anti-war comedy about a group of Italian soldiers who invade a small Greek island during World War II, finding it deserted, and get stranded there, effectively sitting out the war.
Another impressive first watch was NO MAN’S LAND (2001) another anti-war comedy about two soldiers from opposing sides of the Bosnia war getting stuck with each other in a trench in the middle of – you guessed it – no man’s land.
A third new favourite would be IDA (2013). Man, I thought Paweł Pawlikowski’s COLD WAR (2018) looked beautiful, but IDA, two films prior, looks amazing. Every shot looks like a painting. It’s also linked to the World War II setting of COLD WAR, here looking back at those events twenty years later.
Agata Trzebuchowska – a non-actor they found in a cafe, and who hasn’t acted since – plays the titular character, a novice nun, when she is told to go and find her remaining living relative, an aunt. This leads to a discovery about her past and how she arrived at the convent where she’s lived most of her life. It’s a beautiful film, and like a lot of World War II related pictures, one which finds a country examining its past.
Late July marked the arrival of the New Zealand International Film Festival (NZIFF), its first full programme since before the COVID pandemic. Life and other priorities meant that I couldn’t attend as many as I’ve seen in prior years – particularly those first couple of years I was in New Zealand at the end of the 2000s – but I still made it to ten films.
In order or watching them I saw: MY NAME IS ALFRED HITCHCOCK (2022), LOOP TRACK (2023), ASTEROID CITY (2023), ANATOMY OF A FALL (2023), THE PARAGON (2023), HELLO DANKNESS (2022), SQUARING THE CIRCLE: THE STORY OF HIPGNOSIS (2022), LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL (2023), HOLY SPIDER (2022), and FALLEN LEAVES (2023).
I loved all ten of these films, but my favourites were: (i) HOLY SPIDER, a ZODIAC-esque serial-killer thriller that was so far up my street, I couldn’t see it on the horizon anymore; (ii) HELLO DANKNESS, a pirate mixtape of cut-up scenes from major Hollywood movies to create a hilarious satire about the 2016 Trump Vs. Clinton presidential election, and the resulting culture wars that period in history gave birth to (and due to its highly illegal nature, this is something I might never see again, at least in an official screening); and (iii) MY NAME IS ALFRED HITCHCOCK, Mark Cousins’ documentary love-letter to Hitchcock, with a freakishly accurate narration by the great man himself (via impressionist Alistair McGowan) talking from beyond the grave and making reference to 21st century things like smartphones, and featuring clips from his films (especially PSYCHO) that I’d never seen look better on the big screen thanks to the beautiful new projector at the Hollywood Avondale.
After such a rich run of films at NZIFF, I took it easy in early August with a mini-season of all the PSYCHO sequels, a batch of films I hadn’t seen since the mid-‘90s. Ever-decreasing circles of course, but PSYCHO II might just be one of the greatest genre sequels ever made, PSYCHO III is still very good, and only PSYCHO IV: THE BEGINNING starts to go off the boil. I also made time for BATES MOTEL, the 1987 TV movie that was release between the third and fourth films, and designed as a pilot for an intended TV show.
It’s all going in one direction, as Alex (HAROLD AND MAUDE’s Bud Cort) renovates the motel and reopens it, against the backdrop of some spooky things going on…until very suddenly it turns into a segment towards the end where they’ve obviously trying to show the kind of standalone thing the hoped-for TV show will do every week. The left turn into this was so jarring, I almost got whiplash, as a motel guest, there to commit suicide, encounters a bunch of ghosts in some weird 1950s-revival dance sequence (featuring a boyish Jason Bateman). It’s almost like the folks at Universal thought that the ‘50s nostalgia thing was a good idea to lift from BACK TO THE FUTURE, and plonked it in the film without any set-up. Absolutely crazy, and well worth watching to see just how outlandish this all feels
In early September, I did a long-awaited rewatch of an old favourite, Gareth Edwards’ MONSTERS (2010) in preparation for talking about the film on the PODZILLA podcast – an absolute joy to record with fellow film fans Jasher and Mykah Drake up in their hometown of Whangarei (on the same day that I hosted the brothers on my own podcast, MY MOVIE DNA).
Mid-October brought the 24th annual 24-hour Movie Marathon at the glorious Hollywood Avondale, an event I was interviewed for by Radio New Zealand in the run-up to the big day. Despite having only attended the 24HRMM for three years, this was clearly my favourite of the three. Marathon rules forbid sharing the details of the fourteen movies we watched (almost) back to back, but suffice to say I found a couple of new favourites. I’d only seen two of the fourteen before, so 12 first watches and thankfully far fewer trashy films than I’d experienced there before.
Just a couple of weeks later, I took part in another movie marathon – my third of the year overall – at the Academy. This was another mystery movie marathon, titled INTO THE VAMPIRE LAIR and took place the Saturday before Halloween. Nine vampire movies, of which only the Hammer-produced DRACULA (1958) I might have seen before. My favourite on the day was Roman Polanski’s THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE HUNTERS (1967), a film I was so happy to experience for the first time on the big screen as I had recently read Sam Wasson’s THE BIG GOODBYE. A potted biography of Polanski, Jack Nicholson and Robert Towne as their stars aligned to make CHINATOWN, the book covers THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE HUNTERS a great deal as it’s the film where Polanski met Sharon Tate – a grisly fact that somehow makes the film even creepier than it is.
My other favourite film from the INTO THE VAMPIRE LAIR marathon was Ken Russell’s THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1988), a British horror starring Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi. It had heaps and heaps of charm, and I loved it. While I did notice that the film credited Ken Russell as the director in the opening credits, I thought after 15 or 20 minutes that I might show this to my daughters (8, 10 and 11). It just seemed like a family friendly, spooky monster movie. Then somebody had a dream sequence where a load of nuns at the Crucifixion got gang-raped by Roman Soldiers. Erm, maybe not then…
In terms of classic and retro screenings I saw over these six months, there’s far too many to mention here, but this Letterboxd list captures everything I saw over the whole year. A couple of highlights were finally catching ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (1969)on the big screen (one of only four Bond films I’m yet to see projected), ingesting Talking Heads’ STOP MAKING SENSE (1984) on IMAX, and seeing THE ROOM (2003) with Greg Sestero in attendance for a Q&A (he signed by hardback copy of THE DISASTER ARTIST).
It was also great to finally see HOT POTATO: THE STORY OF THE WIGGLES (2023) after recording a podcast with its associate director Fraser Grut back in July. Easily one of my favourite documentaries of the year, there’s so much emotion packed into HOT POTATO, I teared up at least three times – and this is coming from somebody who didn’t have The Wiggles in their life until adulthood. I can’t imagine what sort of emotions the film would provoke if you grew up with them on TV. Speaking of Fraser, I was honoured to contribute one of my dreams to his 1,000 DREAMS project when we spoke back in July.
In terms of director seasons, I really only completed one in the latter half of 2023, but it was a big one. I managed to finally watch all my gaps in Martin Scorsese’s filmography – completing all 48 features, shorts and documentaries. While some of those first watches I was quite happy to have avoided back in the day – NEW YORK, NEW YORK (1977), THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993), HUGO (2011) – I was happy to see some new favourites: THE AUDITION (2015) – a very funny short despite it being a glorified commercial for a casino, NO DIRECTION HOME: BOB DYLAN (2005) – which I thought I had seen before, but I must have been getting it mixed up with the Maysles Brothers’ film, A LETTER TO ELIA (2010) – his documentary on the namer of names, director Elia Kazan, and FEEL LIKE GOING HOME (2003), his opening film from the MARTIN SCORSESE PRESENTS THE BLUES series of films.
I’ve been slowly working on completing Woody Allen’s filmography, something that seems more and more out of reach every time I look, but I’m slowly making my way through them. And currently, in this break over Christmas and New Years, I’ve been churning through all of the Best Picture winners I’m yet to see. This, once completed, will give me 100% on another Letterboxd list, adding to the AFI 100 YEARS 100 MOVIES and BOX OFFICE MOJO ALL TIME 100 lists I ticked off earlier in the year.
I watched 658 films over year, a slight increase of 2022’s total of 650, which I was aiming for but slightly overshot. Stats-wise, I did well to keep to my target of no more than 25% rewatches (ending the year at 25.4%).
Due to chasing that BOX OFFICE MOJO ALL TIME 100 list earlier in the year, I managed to end up with half the cast of the TWILIGHT films as my most-watched actors of the year, but thankfully they dissipated by the end of the year. I ended up with a top 5 of Robert De Niro (7 films), Leslie Nielsen (8), Robert Englund (8) Harvey Keitel (7) and Gene Hackman (7). For directors, I ended the year with a top 5 of Martin Scorsese (32 films), William Friedkin (12), Terry Gilliam (7), Kenneth Anger (7) and Woody Allen (6).
Finally, late in November, I was asked to be a guest DJ on Phil Taylor’s SHE’LL BE RIGHT show on East FM. This was a great afternoon – four hours of playing soundtrack selections, some good chats and the opportunity to strangle a few cats by way of the guitar (I put this show out as two bonus podcasts here and here).
Discogs opened up a wonderful world for record collectors. All of a sudden you no longer had to hunt for records – whether it be in person, or online on eBay or a record store’s online store – you could now type in the record you wanted on Discogs, even the specific pressing, and you could find a seller willing to sell it to you. Easy, right? The one downside is that as an online sales platform, it’s easy for sellers to gauge what the going rate is for a specific pressing of a certain title. That means that unlike eBay, it’s very rare to get something at a ‘good price’ on there. You’re usually paying whatever the market has decided is the value of that item.
I’ve bought so many records from Discogs. I found it insanely handy when, with just a few James Bond soundtracks to find, I could pick up all the missing titles in one fell swoop. And obviously, there’s those rare titles which never pop up in the wild, so you log onto Discogs and order it.
Lately, in the last 5 or 6 years, I’ve been buying fewer and fewer records off Discogs, just because the New Zealand government imposed laws for overseas sellers (who sell over a certain amount to New Zealanders per annum) to collect GST on their behalf. Fuck that.
I’ve been after this record, Stewart Copeland’s fifth studio album, THE EQUALIZER & OTHER CLIFF HANGERS, for a good 15 or 20 years, since before I’d even found Discogs. I could never find it in person, and while I wasn’t actively looking for it all the time, I never saw it listed on eBay. By the time Discogs rolled around, I added it to my wantlist, just in case.
It’s not a rare record by any means – in fact, I’ve had it on my Discogs wantlist for so long, I end up seeing the album’s cover art in thumbnail form a couple of times a week when Discogs send me their personalised email of items that are available to buy. It became one of those records I had looked for so long in person, I stubbornly didn’t want to just admit defeat and buy it online, I wanted to find it myself in the wild.
And so for the last 10 years or so, it’s been one of those albums I always look for in every second-hand record shop. There are a couple of albums like that, either albums I’m looking for to complete a band’s run of albums, or something I possibly missed when it was released/reissued and looking to pick up second-hand. Some things take longer than others to find, but this one always evaded me.
And so, a couple of weeks ago, in Auckland’s Real Groovy to buy some Christmas presents (they stock a great range of fun stocking fillers and counterculture gifts), I did my usual sweep of albums I was looking out for. There’s a specific Beatles pressing I’ve been looking for for about 4 or 5 years – no joy – and I always look in the Aerosmith section just in case they have any weird and wonderful promo or bootleg releases. Nothing. Over to the Fleetwood Mac section, as there’s just a couple of studio albums from them that I’m looking to pick up to complete the set. They had one that I was looking for, but the price weans’t as good as I was hoping. So, another scratch.
Over to the Police’s section, as there’s that Stewart Copeland record I’ve been looking for since time began. As usual, they had each of the Police’s five studio albums, in multiple pressings, plus a few of Sting’s solo work, and even Copeland’s recent-ish 2023 album POLICE DERANGED FOR ORCHESTRA, but nothing earlier from him.
One last check before I head over to the gift section for the real reason I’m here, and I thought I’d just check the C-section, not for caesareans, but for Copeland. And there it was – EUREKA! – in all its glory.
An album cover image I’d only ever seen as a jpeg thumbnail was now staring back at me as a 12” record sleeve. I had to pinch myself. I was so excited, I don’t think I ever actually looked at the condition of the disc, something I always do when buying second-hand. I was just so happy, walking on air (or on the moon?), at finding something that had proved so elusive for so long.
Yes, I could have bought the album online at any point over the last 15 or 20 years, but what would have been the fun in that?
My self-imposed rule of putting any records that I get in December under the tree to open on Christmas Day meant that I had to wait a couple of weeks to get around to playing it, but it’s spinning now and it’s more than worth the wait.
I just realised that in recounting this low-stakes (to you, maybe) anecdote, I failed to mention why I was coveting this record in the first place. Why would a Stewart Copeland studio album cause so much excitement? Well, it’s because this album, a collection of instrumentals mostly finding Copeland noodling around on a Fairlight, contains the extended mix of his theme to THE EQUALIZER, one of my favourite television theme tunes of all time.
First airing in 1985, the show starred British actor Edward Woodward as Robert McCall, a former intelligence agent who helps innocent people who find themselves in dangerous circumstances. I’ve not seen the show since, but I always remember it being like a more adult version of THE A TEAM, with a Robin Hood character exacting justice on some bad dudes in New York City.
It always seemed to be on quite late at night too – although I’m not exactly sure about that – and so it always felt a little illicit for my young eyes to be watching it. The opening credits added to that feeling too, with Copeland’s doom-laden score over a nightmarish montage of Manhattan: a man running through a city street at night, a woman cautiously opening a door on the chain, a woman alone in a lift with a dodgy-looking guy and blinking fluorescent lights, a man frantically trying to get out of an illuminated payphone at night, a man following a woman down a corridor, a shot of a hand weighing some scales – clearly a metaphor for justice, and a woman missing her subway train to be left alone on the platform with a strange man.
But we catch our first glimpse of McCall! He’s shown briefly in shadow, holding a gun (a stainless steel version of James Bond’s Walther PPK), as we see one last disturbing image – a woman being followed by a man down a dark city street. We then see McCall’s shadow approaching his car, before Copeland amps up the hero element to the theme and the show’s title rears up – THE EQUALIZER – over a shot of McCall’s backlit silhouette, sitting on the front of his car, as his face gradually comes into the light to match his credit – ‘Starring Edward Woodward’.
It’s such a great montage of sound and vision, and while the second half of the credits – McCall running around doing random heroic acts – isn’t as exciting, that first 57-seconds is just so thrilling to me.
McCall always found his clients through an ad he’d put in the classifieds: ”Got a problem? Odds against you? Call the Equalizer: 212 555 4200.” Maybe I should have called that number years ago and asked him to hunt down a copy of Stewart Copeland’s THE EQUALIZER & OTHER CLIFF HANGERS for me…
I may not have been an early adopter of the Smashing Pumpkins – GISH passed me by, and I was only really aware of the big singles off SIAMESE DREAMat the time – but I like to think I was an early adopter of MELLON COLLIE. I remember buying it on CD on mail order, from some place like Sister Ray in London, out of an advert in the back of Metal Hammer or Kerrang or something like that. I even remember the wonder it elicited when I showed it around the common room at Sixth Form when it finally arrived.
A stonking album, it’s classified as a double album although its two-hour running time puts it more in line with a quadruple album when you compare it to the usual 45-minute running time of a standard LP. What other band releases two hours of music as their third studio album?
I played that CD to death when it first came out, and saw the band in Manchester touring the album in May 1996, the only time I’ve ever seen them. A weird memory of that show is that it was probably the first concert where I realised I needed glasses, as I was struggling to make out the band on stage from out seats. Thankfully, the friend I was with – Paul Roberts – wore glasses so I was able to borrow them a couple of times to see clearly!
Since switching to vinyl in the late ‘90s, the vinyl version of the album has been completely out of grasp. Original 1996 pressings go for silly money on the aftermarket, and while there’s been unofficial pressings of it, the official reissues of it – most notably one in 2012 – haven’t been pressed in nearly enough quantities to cater for demand.
But here we are, almost thirty years later – ouch – and it’s finally been made available in decent numbers. This 2022 reissue is pressed on 4 x LPs, compared to the 3 x LP original pressing, and comes with two lavish booklets, a lovingly put-together lyric booklet that’s pressed on the most beautiful card stock, and a glossy booklet of liner notes written by Billy Corgan going through the making of the album, song by song.
Vinyl Stylus 