Community seasons 1-3

Ha, very good. Funny and basically sweet-natured, though with lots of sharp edges, and the strongest and most effectively used meta streak of any tv show that I've come across, not least in the way that one of its key strands is the foregrounding of the conflict between the main characters and their group dynamic as the main theme of the show itself - and clearly genuinely in love with culture, meaning pop culture. Plus, its knowingness plays out in a good understanding and use of appealing narrative structures - war analogues (ie conflict) like paintball, the pillow and blanket fort episodes etc, and also scenarios where characters are picked off one by one. Also, I don't know what the personal psychology is, but I always seem to like smarmy lawyer types (at least when they're on tv or in movies); indeed, it does a great job making all of its characters likeable unlikeable. Also also, Abed's a great character and the actor playing him has some chops (as when he plays Abed playing Don Draper, convincingly in all its layers).

Zero Dark Thirty

Before watching Zero Dark Thirty, I wouldn't have thought it'd be possible for a movie that dealt with torture in the 'war on terror' to do so neutrally - in that the very attempt at neutrality would tend to seem at least a tacit endorsement of its use. But actually I think the film more or less does avoid taking any kind of line on the practice - it becomes one link in the film's overall chain of action/dramatic moments, funnelled along with everything else towards the (in the context of the film as a creative construct) greater goal of story. Film itself is quite good, but as often with this kind of film, didn't leave me feeling as I'd got anything in particular out of it beyond a couple of hours of entertainment.

Immortals

Some impressive visuals, especially of portentous skies and cliff-y landscapes - also, some striking god fighting - but too thin in every other respect to amount to anything. You wouldn't think this kind of film would be so hard to do well...but clearly it is.

The Cherry Orchard (MTC)

Tricky, this one. The tone was a bit uneven, or perhaps difficult to consistently discern, not so much slipping between tragedy and comedy as seemingly partaking of both at the same time throughout (also, the set had something of a sense of the hyper-real); relatedly, the emotional register was a bit unclear, making me wonder if there would be a big payoff in the play's second half - but then, there wasn't (not even a firing of the gun). And yet something about it interested me, made me intuit as much as intellectually understand that there was something going on that was worth engaging with - it felt like good theatre. And, of course, I'm inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt given how good The Wild Duck was - another Simon Stone take on a canonical playwright.

(w/ Cass, Erandathie and Andreas)

Escapism

Someone asked me to recommend some appropriate reading material for escapism during hotel downtime in an upcoming work trip; "GoT worked well last time". So voila.

Well how escapist do you want to go? The best epic fantasy series are GoT (or ASOIAF if you will), Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen (only problem is that book 1 is significantly less good than the 8 that come after it) and Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant Chronicles (nb very unlikeable main character and somewhat meta).

Another good one - bit more existential though - is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series.

I assume I've tried to foist China Mieville on you in the past? Steampunky fantasy, v.g. The first one to read is Perdido Street Station.

Also, I haven't read it, but Lev Grossman's The Magicians keeps getting recommended - someone described it to me as a hipster fantasy novel.

In a slightly different vein, I very much enjoyed Justin Cronin's The Passage (post-apocalyptic vampires).

Or different again, for amusingly whimsical literary capers, I can't remember if you've read Jasper Fforde (start with the Thursday Next books and read in order, though again, the first - The Eyre Affair - is significantly less good than the rest).

Kira Henehan - Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles

Such a delightfully elusive thing of a novel, owing much of its enormous charm to the curious, wayward voice of its narrator, the oddly displeasing to the eye and plagued by memory loss Finley, determined to carry out her mysterious Assignment to the best of her abilities in spite of a whole host of more or less wholly inexplicable distractions, many of them entirely internal preoccupations. 'Postmodernist existential detective novel' I said last time, which is right, but even though I have a little generic category for it, it's not much like anything else I've ever read.

Monika Sosnowska - "Regional Modernities" (ACCA)

Four pieces in the show altogether, including "Corridor" and "Facade", the former what it says (narrow, though, and complete with doors and lights), the latter a large, suspended, twisted and bent over upon itself black steel structure. Good.

The Brothers Bloom

Catching up with David last Friday night, couldn't find anything on a big screen that was suitable, got through a few minutes of Wings of Desire before I vetoed it on the basis that I just couldn't do something black and white and subtitled in current frame of mind, ended up rewatching The Brothers Bloom. Still a joy, archly full of meaning.

(first time; second time)

Marisha Pessl - Night Film

I remember liking Special Topics in Calamity Physics quite a bit, and this one was enjoyable too. Possibly I've just been completely primed by the recent thinking about literary construction, but the narrative seemed very episodic, one event or character after another appearing and then being checked off in order to advance the plot, and populated by protagonists who, while interesting enough to spend time with, aren't exactly psychologically fleshed out; having said that, its story of disgraced investigative reporter Scott McGrath's pursuit of the dark mystery at the heart of the life and work of reclusive horror film director Stanislas Cordova and recent death of his strangely compelling daughter Ashley, accompanied by plucky girl chancer Nora and broodingly flaky boy-with-a-past Hopper, rendered in McGrath's hard-boiled voice and interspersed webpages, is entertaining to the max, especially once McGrath begins to feel as if he's losing his grip on reality and the suggestions of black magic and dealings with the devil increasingly loom.

Patty Griffin - Flaming Red

Patty Griffin's amazing - there's no other word for it - and working my way through her discography has brought me to this one, from 1998, her second lp. There's a hell of a lot of craft to it, both in the writing and the performing, and it covers a fair bit of stylistic ground while always anchored in a distinctly southern feel, rootsy folk mid-tempo things, sunny pop-rock, genuine rock and roll, and even a jazzily torchy number ("Go Now") all tackled with equal aplomb; occasionally, there's are production or instrumentation choices that would've dated another record (e.g. the background synth/percussion and throbbing bassline combinations that show up on songs like "Christina" and "Mary" - both of which I already knew from their live appearances on A Kiss In Time and which, in those elements, for me fleetingly call to mind the records that Natalie Imbruglia and Tori Amos were also putting out around this same time) but instead are somehow subsumed into, even add to, the classic air of the thing. So many glorious moments...

Stoker

As elegant and visually striking - indeed, out and out beautiful - as they are to look at, I find Park's movies difficult to grasp. Just like Thirst (which I watched pretty recently), and also Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Stoker is compelling in a way that fuses an air of originality with what are actually some pretty familiar structural moves, albeit telegraphed in a way that leads us to second-guess the destinations to which each of those films (and especially Thirst and Stoker) ultimately takes us. A gothic, disturbed fairytale with heavy lashings of psychosexual (both parts of the compound word being important) melodrama, it's slipperily upfront about what it's doing, even as it leads us round in circles down the garden path along the way, aided immensely not only by the director's facility for suspense and imagery but also by the effective performances given by Wasikowska, Kidman and Matthew Goodman.

(w/ Meribah)

The Thick Of It series 1-4

So clearly Malcolm Tucker is a brilliant tv character, but on top of that, the whole thing's super enjoyable and delightfully, inventively profane and knowing, hitting its stride from the beginning and not faltering throughout. The deleted scenes are a nice bonus, too, just as good as the stuff that made the cut and for the most part basically supplementary to the episodes themselves rather than like for like swaps, so that they come to seem like they're actually further fleshing out what actually happened - a sense heightened by the quick-cutting, documentary style of the shooting.

(In The Loop)

The Bling Ring

Diverting enough, but by a fair way the weakest of Coppola's five films, and indeed feels like a superficial mixtape of the four that have come before it; the problem is that The Bling Ring, while about surface, is itself also all surface, lacking the depth of those others.

(w/ Jade)

Terry Pratchett - A Blink of the Screen

A collection of Discworld and other (mostly other) short stories and bits and pieces; far from hard work to read, but nothing special.

"Salome" (Little Ones Theatre @ Malthouse)

A lurid, enjoyable blast. An adaptation of the Wilde play, Salome essayed by a man and John the Baptist by a woman, and that's the beginning rather than the end of the gender-bending in a production that has more than a hint of the burlesque to it, not to mention 80s music interludes (eg Alice Cooper's "Poison").

(w/ Meribah)