Stuff i’ve {watched, listened to, read, played} recently
This log of my recently enjoyed media uses a zero-to-eleven rating scheme, as outlined in the linked page. In short: Anything 6 or above is good, anything 8 or above is really good, and i invented the 11 because i didn’t like being picky with my 9s and 10s. Enjoy!
11
📚️ Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992)
I think this book may have completely rewritten my brain chemistry.
Look — I’ll level with you. The covid pandemic nuked my attention span as a teen, and this is one of, like, four books i’ve actually managed to finish since then. So you shouldn’t trust my ratings here too much. But man, is this a right page-turner. The narration moves along at such a clip, and you get such a good vision of the nightmare future year of 2010-ish that i found myself not wanting to leave when i got to the end. (I don’t know why, but the description of Alameda Street as ”a gout of radioactive urine ejected south from the dead center of L.A.” particularly stuck with me.)
It would be faster to list the ways in which this novel wasn’t extremely prescient. So i will.
- A hundred thousand bytes isn’t really that much
- A trillion dollars is still really that much
That’s it. It’s one of those works where, as you make your way through it, you begin to realise just how influential it was on everything you’ve seen since it came out. Without Hiro Protagonist, there would be no VRChat, certainly no Google Earth, and, hell, maybe not even the McDonald’s app:
In order to get the free cruise to Sicily, Jason has to accumulate 10,000 Goombata Points.
He begins this quest in a favorable position. By opening up his own Nova Sicilia franchise, he started out with an automatic 3,333 points in the Goombata Point bank. Add to that a one-time-only Citizenship Bonus of 500 points and the balance is starting to look pretty good. The number is stored in the big computer in Brooklyn.
Neal Stephenson’s brain seems to run on the logic of “what would be the coolest thing in the universe to a teenage boy in 1992?”, so there are too many glorious one-scene wonders to note, but i would like to give a special shoutout to Ng, the quadruple-amputee arms manufacturer who lives in an armoured tank that feeds him nutritious paste and works in his recreated office in the Metaverse from there. No notes.
9
🎞️ The Matrix (1999)
I’ve always wanted to watch this one on the big screen, so i jumped at the chance when i was idly scrolling my local cinema times and noticed Cineworld had a showing on last night. Nearly a full house, too — not bad for a repertory screening on a Wednesday! I wound up at the edge of row B and only got to move to a decent seat because the couple to the right of me were no-shows.
People tend to think of The Matrix as a VFX movie, and it is, but something about watching it in the cinema really made me appreciate all the practical stunts, choreography, and wirework that went into it.
Joey Pants is great. Such a slippery little bugger — an eminently hateable performance, even if i do find myself increasingly Cypher-pilled on the subject of AI-generated media these days. (“I know this cat picture doesn’t exist…”)
(Also, i know the computing meaning came first, but in hindsight, could we maybe have picked a better name than “AI agents”? I’m never not going to see Agent Smith now whenever Claude’s off doing some boring shit for me…)
11
🎞️ Before Sunrise (1995)
Before Sunrise is one of the most beautiful films i’ve ever seen — and Ethan Hawke is one of the most beautiful people i’ve ever seen.
Is this, really, an 11? I don’t know. Maybe i’ll give it some thought, and in time i’ll revise it down to a “mere” 10. I was a little trepidatious at first. But by the end, i was reduced to a complete blubbering mess.
I love how real and subtle every part of their relationship comes across. It’s the way you wish you could feel forever. In our minds, we’ve all been in that listening booth, smiling, chuckling, trying to suss out the right moment for a kiss but never wanting to make the first move.
I was tempted to turn it into a double feature with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but i think that might have actually destroyed me for the coming week.
…Also, if this film was an op to get me to consider visiting Vienna, it succeeded with flying colours.
7½
🎞️ Resident Evil (2026)
I went into this having never even so much as watched a let’s-play of the games, but i really enjoyed this! I liked that it had kind of a video-game-y structure to it without being too overbearing. (Was the secret to making good video-game movies really just waiting for the generation who grew up playing them to reach directing age?)
Beautifully shot, too; any time you see the crashed cop car in the snow in the first act it's like something you'd have as a desktop background.
10
🎞️ Akira (1988) [rewatch]
Still great. Still cool as hell. Still don’t understand the ending. I love how much of this is just the animators showing off — i’m constantly thinking, god, how did they do that with just cels and physical pigments?
5
📺️ Léon: The Professional (1994)
Pretty good, if you ignore all the parts that were guest-directed by Jeffrey Epstein!
7
📺️ House (2004–12)
I’ve mostly just been putting episodes on to watch in the background, but it’s bloody good telly, isn’t it?
8
🎞️ Coyote vs. Acme (2026)
Absolutely hysterical! It’s early on, but i think my favourite gag has to be the Coyote holding up a sign explaining that “it’s a limited number of signs”.
Not sure how i feel about the decision to use cel-shaded 3D models rather than traditional animation (excepting Bugs Bunny). The animation isn’t bad — the models are good and expressive, especially for the adorable main characters — but something about rendering the Looney Tunes in CGI feels faintly sacrilegious.
Also: I can absolutely see why Warner Bros. dropped this like a hot potato. I have no idea how you would even begin to market this absent the controversy.
5
🎞️ 300 (2026)
A very silly film that really wants you to not think it’s as silly as it is. There’s Persian ninjas, for god’s sake!
There are some shots that look pretty good, and then others where you think, wow, that probably looked a lot better in the original comic book.
7
🎞️ The End of Oak Street (2026)
Really enjoyed this! A fun throwback to those Amblin family-adventure films of the eighties — probably a better Spielberg film than the actual Spielberg film we got this year. (Lots of Gremlins DNA, too.) Some slightly wooden scriptwriting at the start, but i didn’t really mind.
The filmmakers seem to have figured out the exact line at which a PG-13/12A turns into an R/15, because there are some pretty gnarly dino kills in this. (There’s a moment early on where you can tell they cut a few seconds out to avoid showing too much blood — i guess that must have been it!)
P.S. My next Valentine’s Day card is absolutely going to be “will you be the shagging sauropod to my other shagging sauropod?”
8
🎞️ The Drama (2026)
Robert fucking Pattinson, man. What a year he’s having! There’s nobody out there better at playing weird little freaks right now. (And re: that trailer for Primetime — if there were ever an actor to make the Mark Hamill jump into voice acting…)
An absolute rectum-clencher of a film. I didn’t know whether to laugh or curl up into a ball and die of second-hand embarrassment for the entire third act.
8
🎞️ Cape Fear (1991)
Robert fucking De Niro, man.
9
🎞️ Pain and Gain (2013)
I don’t know why — i think i might have filed it in the same drawer as The Smashing Machine in my head — but going in, i was expecting more of a mild dramedy-thriller, rather than the insane, riotous, gut-busting action-comedy this actually is. Sure, it doesn’t reach the same heights of ridiculousness as Crank, but what does?
Anthony Mackie talking The Rock’s head off about breast milk at the club had me rolling on the floor. It’s amazing seeing Dwayne Johnson play someone other than himself for once.
(P.S. Noughties beauty standards were weeeiiiird.)
8½
🎞️ The Odyssey (2026) in Imax
Well, obviously it’s brilliant, but you don’t need me to tell you that. Christopher Nolan knows how to deliver a good old-fashioned cinematic spectacle. The Troy flashbacks are going to get all the praise, but μὰ τὴν Εὐτέρπην, the audio mixing for the Cyclops! The Imax screen genuinely turned into a cave. I heard sounds previously unknown to human hearing.
I like how everyone these days seems to agree that Hell just looks… a bit like Iceland.
That Circe scene is absolutely going to give a new generation of confused teens transformation fetishes.
I liked how they integrated the Bronze Age Collapse as a running theme — though i’m not sure i love the trend of seemingly every film these days being about a bygone age being over and how we now live in a forsaken world, or whatever.
9
🎞️ Fight Club (1999)
Yep… still great.
8
🎤️ Wolf Alice live at Exhibition Park
At one point Ellie Rowsell pulled out a megaphone out of nowhere and started singing through it. The encore was all covers and the crowd went absolutely feral for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. I completely fucked my voice for the night singing along to that and “Don’t Delete the Kisses“. Absolute cinema.
7
📺️ Death by Lightning (2025)
Good stuff! I’ve heard some people were put off by the characters talking all modern-like, but i thought it was fun. Helped you put yourself in their shoes.
The Republican National Convention scenes are just Conclave for straight people.
6
🎞️ Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)
Mostly enjoyed this — Sam Rockwell is the glue that holds it all together — even if it’s a bit disjointed and doesn’t have as much to say about technology as it thinks it does.
3½
🎞️ Disclosure Day (2026)
Oh, dear. Oh, dear.
I wanted to like this film, and in parts i sort of did. (The scene where Michael Sheen is telepathically interrogating our female protagonist to try and narrow down where she is? Actually really good!) But any authorial stamp Spielberg may have imbued it with is overwhelmed by the mediocre shitshow that is everything else.
This film has two modes: Explaining everything and explaining nothing. I hate them both. The characters (to the extent that they can be called such) are underwritten, and largely just talk in grandiose platitudes about how everything’s about to change and the government can’t keep covering up the existence of… uh… mm… supreme extradimensional lifeforms? (This alien movie is too afraid of seeming silly to actually say the word “alien”, but not too afraid to have a bunch of little green men running about.)
The pacing is a nightmare, too. Disclosure Day judders along in sudden starts and sudden stops as our male lead tries and largely succeeds in evading a corporate paramilitary by being the worst hide-and-seek player in recorded history. No wonder the aliens have to teach people empathy — in this universe Homo sapiens doesn’t even have peripheral vision!
All in all it’s just quite poor, and shows very little interest in the titular “disclosure”, which is relegated to a TV-news clip show that takes up the film’s last ten minutes. A surefire shoo-in for the Pebbledash Dildo at this year’s Horny Awards.
7
🎞️ Backrooms (2026)
I’m annoyed that this is as good as it is, frankly. It’s a film adaptation of a Youtube series based on a 4chan creepypasta. And yet, here we are. A moopie about Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve scrambling around an endless yellow Ikea showroom contains some of the tensest, most heart-pounding horror moments of the year. (And a great score from director Kane Parsons, too!)
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