Classic February doing its Irish goodbye and prompting me to frantically write a roundup six hours before the month is over.
Here’s what I want to talk about: I travelled outside Europe for the first time in more than four years, which necessitated my flying on a long-haul aircraft. Now, quite aside from the indirect environmental damage I’ve wrought on our wonderful planet (another topic for another day), I’m concerned by the fact that the entertainment rigs on these planes now only seem to show Netflix-friendly movies from the past four or five years. If you’re into superhero movies, Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds or the Fast & Furious franchise, then you’re all set. But dear Christ, when is this dumbing down of mainstream art going to stop for the rest of Western society? I’m beginning to think there’s an insidious plot afoot to delete all movies prior to the year 2000 from our collective memories - perhaps so they can be remade without incurring the inevitable backlash. I remember (oh good, I’m that guy) sitting on a plane to Australia a decade ago and being pleasantly surprised that I could watch stuff like Double Indemnity, The Wild Bunch, The Poseidon Adventure and Full Metal Jacket. Now your choices are Black Adam, Jurassic World: Dominion and Bullet Train. I know that in the grand scheme of things, this gripe may come across as entitled (oh no, you could kill time watching big budget movies while jetting off on holiday, the humanity), but I mean only to point out that this diet of empty-calorie cinema seems like one of those steps en route to us becoming the mindless blob people from Wall-E.
In related news: Old man yells at cloud.
Book of the month: Berlin Game by Len Deighton. A spy novel that is sexist, old-fashioned, glacially paced and obsessed with quotidian details like picking kids up from school after work….and I loved it. This is a book that would never be published if it was written today, and that makes it all the easier to enjoy. Of course, it isn’t without its highlights: Deighton’s encyclopaedic knowledge of 1980s Berlin is guaranteed to excite a long-term fawning resident of the city such as myself, while his prose is unvarnished without being workmanlike. Metal fact: Deighton also wrote the novel that served as the inspiration for Mötörhead’s Bomber. Awesome.
Album of the month: Heavy Heavy by Young Fathers. Those three chaps definitely know what they’re doing when it comes to single-handedly evolving abstract hip hop. They’re the Massive Attack of their day.
Movie of the month: Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi, almost exclusively because it stars Zoe Kravitz, who has the magical power of being able to turn a lame script and soporific direction into a watchable thriller. Seriously, if she wasn’t in it, Kimi would be nothing more than a bad, too-long episode of Black Mirror. But no one can repel charisma of that magnitude. You know who else had that power? Mickey Rourke in the 1980s (with the exception of Year of the Dragon - even he couldn’t save that piece of trash).
Feel-good February:
