- I published my Jan–Jun ‘26 playlist, BLixTape #8, in a separate post here. Most of my previous ones were stuffed at the bottom of their respective weekly posts, which was the wrong call. Oh well, the second-best time is now.
- My mother-in-law stayed with us for a few days, which meant having to look up films with a minimum of sex and violence that we could watch together. It was through this process that I realized the vast majority of new shows out on Netflix and so on are rated NC16 and above — it seems producers have concluded that the only way to get views is to pack explicit content into everything, whether the stories need it or not. It must be awfully hard for parents of young teens who want to watch new shows that are PG-13 and don’t suck.
- Two movies I had in my library that fit the bill: All Is Lost (2013) and Finding Forrester (2000). The former is a one-man survival adventure starring Robert Redford as a man on a boat which suffers sudden damage in the middle of nowhere, and has to find help. It’s really good, with virtually no dialogue to support its tense and realistic depiction of the challenges that a Robert Redford in his mid-70s powers through.
- Finding Forrester is of course the Sean Connery vehicle that gave birth to that internet-famous line, “You’re the man now, dog!” It’s one of those films with the trope about an elder mentor and their gifted student from the ghetto who could really go to an Ivy League if they wanted, but first they have to overcome prejudice, yadda yada. It’s all good, and possibly even better on a rewatch than I’d remembered from seeing it in theaters when it came out. Beyond the “You’re the man now, dog” line that gave birth to YTMND.com, the other thing I’ve always remembered about this film is Connery’s rant about why socks are badly designed and should be worn inside out: “Dey put da sheams orn da inshide; it hurtch the toesch!”
- On my own, I finished watching Widow’s Bay on Apple TV and loved it. I’m not really into horror, apart from send-ups like the Scary Movie and Final Destination franchises, so I know a little of the vocabulary but I don’t want to practice it conversationally (so to speak). That said, Widow’s Bay is really a comedy show in horror clothing, but it doesn’t go the Scary Movie route either. Fear and suspense are undercut, yes, but it doesn’t disrespect horror so much as try to find the boundaries of where comedy belongs in it. Episode 4, Beach Reads, is one of the best pieces of TV directing work in recent memory. I love it so much. Its director, Samuel Donovan, has also directed two episodes of Severance.
- You know who else was really great in Severance? Britt Lower! So we decided to watch her (and Sam Worthington) in the new Harlan Coben adaptation on Netflix, I Will Find You. Expectations were low, because all the Harlan Coben shows we’ve seen have featured stupid stories built around ludicrous revelations that always always have their roots in some childhood events or other repressed memories. But surely Britt will elevate the material, right? Wrong. She’s dragged down into this swamp so spectacularly it now looks like maybe her Emmy was a fluke? Her agent should never have allowed this kind of reputational damage.
- I try to log every movie I watch on Letterboxd and every TV show on an app called TV Time. Well I just got the news that TV Time is closing down because it wasn’t sustainable as a free service. I’ve decided to move to Trakt instead, which has been around for over a decade and is hopefully more sustainable. The good news for anyone else in this situation is that your data can be transferred over in a couple of minutes. Feel free to follow me.
- My book club decided to read Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, a true SF classic if ever there was one. According to Goodreads, I read it 10 years ago but don’t recall anything. I probably read it once more as a teen. When I say I don’t recall anything, I mean it — I’ve finished the whole book now and nothing about it was familiar at all. That is, if you ignore all the ways in which other stories have borrowed from it over the years. Michael Crichton’s Sphere, for example, also starts with some of the same ideas before going in a different direction.
- On Thursday, I had to go into town to run an errand and thought that I might treat myself to a weekday afternoon screening of the new Supergirl movie starring Milly Alcock. Incidentally, it’s directed by Craig Gillespie, who also did the first two episodes of Apple TV’s Your Friends & Neighbors, which I’ve just started on. In the end, I decided to visit the National Gallery Singapore instead.
- There’s currently a retrospective for the Chinese artist He Xiangning (1878–1972), on loan from China. Really lovely stuff, which reminded me of the time I spent on my own Chinese Era website, discovering classical Chinese art and poetry. Instead of an appropriately Chinese soundtrack though, I viewed all of it while listening to the clubby sounds of FKA twigs’s reissued version of EUSEXUA. Quite the trip.
- After that, I stopped by Maji Curry at Funan — to my tastes, still the best standalone Japanese curry rice in the country. Lately they’ve taken to declaring their curry’s base is chicken broth. Odd. In their Thailand outlets, I believe you have a choice between pork and beef-based curries. Nevertheless, still the best.
- The next night, Kim’s brother inherited a reservation at a small private dining omakase joint run by a single chef in a strange no-nothing mall. We went not knowing what to expect, and got a pretty nice experience with lots of unusual fish directly imported from Japanese markets. Like pomfret, which is normally only eaten here steamed with ginger, or fried. It did, however, cost 10x as much as my Maji Curry meal! The other spendy patrons appeared to be on either side of our decade: in their 30s and 50s, which provided evidence against the prevailing Reddit narrative that everyone out there is struggling and jobless, respectively.
Leave a Reply