Extemporanea

It wasn't long ago that I refreshed on the whole series , and - as it's increasingly foreshadowed as it's gone on - that's j...

The title song's a killer, first up on the album, fizzily euphoric with just an undercurrent of melancholy. There are some other good mo...

Personal Score  feels all of a piece, unified by the way van Neerven writes the connections between Country, their own story and the other t...

The first one was good, this one isn't. Leans too much on the first and its desire to set up for a third. I like how strongly it centre...

Sickbed re-reading. ( previously )

Basically, there's the ones that anthem it up with emo-lite electric guitars and they're mostly my favourites (especially "Heav...

I don't know, should it have been a surprise that the soundtrack and the songs were such a large part of why this was so engaging? James...

A slept-on classic it isn't, but it's winning enough even on a rewatch. ( previously )

Yes it's a bit messy but the core of what Jennifer's Body  has to say about gender and power is clear enough, and the black comedy /...

Remains as tense and gritty as ever, for all its obviously problematic elements.

The funnest part of this is the different historical settings, and it being animated worked well enough. The way it brought them all togethe...

Thoughts while reading this: Hill is strong on not focusing only on 'gendered drivers' (in the language of the National Plan) vs oth...

I liked the more off-the-wall visuals, the little horror elements, and Benedict Cumberbatch but as a movie this is a bit of a mess, and noti...

Want  is a sweetheart of an album, carrying a good part of the charm that made How Many Times  in particular such a winner (especially on ea...

Andor lived up to the reviews - staying focused the whole way through on the perils and costs of resistance in the face of tyranny, spies a...

The John Norman Mann Bequest A bequest directed to contemporary art, with a particular focus on First Nations practices and works by non-Ind...

This really is an unusual, and unusually good, novel. Everyone in it feels like a character in a book - Ludo and Sibylla most of all - but T...

Three installations each by Australia-based artists with Asian cultural heritages who identify as queer.  From "Fairy Tales from the Ce...

This is great! It comes in a package that maybe lends itself to being dismissed - another guy wielding an electric guitar, indie folk rock s...

Mostly breezily indie-sounding pop and crunchy guitars, plus quirks. My favourites - "Rip Off" (Momma), "Cheapskate" (Du...

I suppose by definition any memoir by Rebecca Solnit would be Solnit-esque. What that means in Recollections of My Non-Existence  - which I ...

High quality, with a lot of that due to the songs - music and lyrics - which add depth.

Impressive how much this series is infused with the same mood as the book , while genuinely adapting (not just transposing) it for the tv fo...

 Tight modern Western.

On was the 11th annual Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art; I was pretty piecemeal in how I took it in given this was a bit of a snat...

The concept is fun, the execution solid enough without rising to any great heights.

In a way Yayoi Kusama has crept up on me over the years. I've liked her quite a lot for a long time now, including some memorable encoun...

Been a while since I made it out here and this visit was mostly for the sculpture park. Those that most stood out tended to be the most monu...

At the very least, Babel  is interesting in multiple ways - an undisguised and undisguisedly angry polemic on the harms of colonialism wrapp...

In the shadow of the original, almost by design. 

I've watched all of these before except #3; taken as a whole they sure are entertaining. 

The first one is my favourite of the Disney animations I've seen - relatively unproblematic (a low bar) with an engaging lead character ...

Supposedly Blamire Young is known as the master of Australian watercolour but I didn't get much from him. I could see the technical prof...

1. Rewind - Rosali Bite Down (Merge, 2024) 2. White Lies, White Jesus and You - Katie Pruitt Mantras   (Rounder, 2024) 3. Fish - Angie McMa...

I suppose all novels about the end of the world are also about something else; what makes Station Eleven  different is that, if anything, it...

The other knights came to life for me just as much as Collum despite having much less page time - Bedivere, Dinadan, Palomides, to a lesser ...

There's something convincing about Jennifer Down's writing - across the many of her short stories that I've read (and which mig...

The unquestionable charisma of Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt (the latter a touch dimmed compared to usual) can only take you so far. The Fall...

I'd had the impression this was quite well reviewed, but if that's true, expectations must have been very low. Although, thinking ab...

Holds up over time I reckon. ( previously )

This movie certainly has a vibe.

There was a moment while reading Creation Lake  where I felt that hard-to-describe feeling in my stomach that only comes when reading someth...

Things that this book reminded me about: What makes Australia extraordinary, and not in a good way, isn't the extremely high rate of pub...

I found it a tiny bit annoying at times, but overall I appreciated this book. And I couldn't swear that the moments where I found it gra...

Warmly welcoming, Woodland  is my favourite Gillian Welch album since the flurry of those first four classics Revival , Hell Among the Yearl...

So, so good. All of these stories are interesting and most of them have something more than that - a particular intrigue. Particular stand o...

Dream-like has always been the first way to describe Magritte's work, and maybe it remains the best. He's certainly among the oldest...

It's charming and peppy; kind of silly but not one-dimensional. Honestly, it's mostly Kristen Bell's presence that sold it for m...

Interesting and sympathetic depiction of 'radical' eco-activism, structured as a procedural action-drama.

Still good in all the same ways, and manages to delve into back stories and personal lives in a way that doesn't detract and even adds t...

First few listens, I had Postcards from Texas  clocked as median Miranda Lambert - nice but overly familiar, the sound a return to the polis...

Fine as a diversion.

The director describes this film in terms of Monet meeting Miyazaki and well it's not that. However, it is  well done - the story's ...

For a show with such a distinct vibe, it's surprisingly difficult to pin down exactly what it is about The Great  that makes it so enjoy...

There's a lot of fun to be had across this hugely enjoyable country record, entirely made up of duets (or, in some cases, larger-group c...

This book has been on my bedside table for months - over a year probably - and I've dipped into it regularly, for the bursts of great ar...

Asian, First Nations, women's and queer intersections with and re-visionings of science fiction. (w/ Jade)

Nice enough but kind of bland.

Parasol Against the Axe  is a puzzling, deliberately disjointed book that demands close reading to make sense of it on any level - including...

Pretty nice and in many ways a bit of a throwback to various early 2000s indie-folk/country acts - at different points reminding me of the D...

At this point it feels safe to say that education is an enduring interest. ( previous read )

This show is entirely watchable, and works in a mode of modern fantasy in many ways first defined by the ASOIAF books - political, military ...