The Irishman

Much craft on display in this gangster film that acquires some heft - even beyond the leg-up that a 3 hour plus running time always offers - despite what initially presents as a lack of psychological backstory or insight into the inner life of De Niro's Frank Sheeran but gradually comes to appear more a depiction of a person whose interiority is in fact completely bound up with his external life and actions. Indeed, the narrative - moving back and forth through time - stages a series of decisions that Frank makes, revealing him through his choices, none more so than when things come to a head between his two primaries in Al Pacino's Jimmy Hoffa and Joe Pesci's mob boss Russell Bufalino.

Maria Konnikova - The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

This is just a great read all round. I've liked Konnikova's writing whenever I've encountered it - I like what she writes about (decision-making, cognitive biases, psychology, personality, behaviour and general interestingness) and I like the way she writes about it (clearly and engagingly) - and The Biggest Bluff's premise is a cracking one, namely, Konnikova herself taking up poker from scratch with the aim of playing in the Main Event at the World Series of Poker in one year's time.

Of course, as she lays out along the way, her aims were deeper than just that surface motivation, and so is this book. The 'hook' is how far her background in psychology - when coupled with coaching from a living legend of professional poker, Erik Seidel, together with what's clearly a formidable intellect and capacity for focus and hard work - would take her in a hyper-competitive world dominated by maths-y and aggressively masculine types. But there's an equally compelling narrative line built around the inquiry that her training and experiences with poker enable her to make into the respective limits of luck and control in determining outcomes (in poker and in life), with a third strand comprising the investigations into Konnikova's own insecurities and psyche prompted by her experiences in competition.

She's excellent at opening up each of those through-lines, while at the same time introducing the rules, strategy and culture of high level poker and its attendant circuit and players, and there's also a built in narrative tension associated with her overall improvement arc and performance in individual tournaments along the way. Impressively, the connections she makes to lessons for life never feel forced - taking in both really direct applications of particular disciplines and skills that she hones in poker, and broader mindsets and orientations which can help make sense of life's challenges and how to navigate them.

Noelle Stevenson - Nimona

Quite charming and quite good 'monster girl' graphic novel.

Ted Chiang - Exhalation

More of Chiang's clean-lined and thoroughly thought-through excursions into 'what ifs' that always also illuminate the world we actually inhabit. 

Some of these do feel a bit 'thought exercise'-y, their animating ideas and how those are worked through dominating the story structures housing them. But the best are exceptional, especially the title story, in which a species discovers they're living inside a self-enclosed sphere within which their breathing will eventually create entropy through a complete equalisation of air pressure everyone in their closed universe, and "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom", in which portable divergent-timeline creating devices have been invented, allowing their owners to communicate with their other-timeline self and other counterparts, and one of the ones in which Chiang's moral concerns are at the forefront.

(Stories of Your Life and Others)

The Quick and the Dead

I'm fond of westerns, and The Quick and the Dead might have been the first I ever saw, a long time ago. 

It stands up okay, I guess - it's not difficult to watch anyway, aided by the inherent drama of the gunfight competition that structures it, the range of acting talent of various kinds on display (Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, and a host of fairly memorable others in supporting roles), and the flashes of visual flair in the direction and cinematography.

Tony Kushner - Angels in America

I'd been feeling like revisiting Angels in America, and now that I have, I can speculate about why that was - a feeling of Zeitgeist in the air, the sense that an end of times of sorts is approaching, questions of law and justice and the difference between them unavoidable, a growing urgency in the tension between stasis and progress coupled with increasingly yawning fault-lines in the notion of progress itself, and America at the heart of it.

I encountered the play through the National Theatre 'live' version a couple of years back, and this time I found myself reading the play text and watching the 2003 HBO miniseries with its murderers' row of talent across many of the key roles (notably Al Pacino as Roy Cohn, Meryl Streep as Hannah and Ethel Rosenberg, Emma Thompson as the Angel, Mary-Louise Parker as Harper, Patrick Wilson as Joe, and James Cromwell in the smaller role of Cohn's doctor) in parallel with each other. 

Prior, Louis, Harper, Joe, and the monstrous Cohn are characters who linger in the memory, their personalities and actions reverberating with a force that's individual to them and not just referable to the lofty themes with which they're woven - some of which I mentioned earlier, along with desire, prophecy, theory, history, responsibility and love. It's human at every turn, while convincing in its rendition of angels - and funny, too, while never sentimental. The play is a true modern classic, and the HBO version maybe comes as close to doing it justice as could be imagined.

Birds of Prey

This movie is a colourful. vibrant, violent mess, and all up it's actually pretty good. Margot Robbie is fun, Mary Elizabeth Winstead is funner.

Triple J Like A Version 15

Best:

AURORA, "Across the Universe" - I guessed from the vocal style before looking her up that she was Scandinavian.

Skeggs, "Here Comes Your Man" - apart from a drop-in from the Velvets' "I'm Waiting for the Man" at the start, a basically faithful version that plays up the always at least latent surf-rock elements of the original, and a good excuse to revisit a classic song in fresh clothes.

Cosmo's Midnight, "Sing It Back" - it turns out this is one of those songs that's so good that any fairly recognisable version of it can still be good in much the same way as the original, and also that this (Moloko's) might have been a sleeper classic in its own right.

GRAACE, "Complicated" - which is cool and, with its up and down melody, sorta-mournful piano arrangement, folkish flourishes and emotional vocal, would've fit in seamlessly on folklore, which in itself is a pretty cool realisation in a layers-on-layers sort of way. Also, it seems all-caps artist names became fashionable somewhere in the last few years.

SAFIA, "No One Knows" - successfully preserves the QOTSA drama while stripping the song to bare bones.

Jack River, "Truly Madly Deeply" - as I said above, a good and fairly faithful cover of a great song is an excuse to revel in the greatness of that song. What makes this take even better is that Jack River herself is also clearly revelling in what "Truly Madly Deeply" has to offer, most evidently in the liberal use of saxophone.

YUNGBLUD, "I Will Follow You into the Dark" (Death Cab for Cutie) - this is just an all round sweet song.

Thelma Plum, "Young Dumb & Broke" (Khalid) - a chirpy earworm.

Cub Sport, "When the Party's Over" (Billie Eilish) - this one is just a dark star of a song and it's made me properly a bit interested in Eilish for the first time.

BROCKHAMPTON, "Un-thinkable" (Alicia Keys) - soulful.

Ruby Fields, "The Unguarded Moment" - another of those that strongly summons the joys of the original, and in this case hits its pleasure centres if anything more crisply.

Thandi Phoenix, "Glory Box" - which finds the party in this song while remaining true to its spirit.