The GardenDespatches from The Satyrs’ Forest

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Postcards from kinda the area around Beamish, but not, like, Beamish itself, you kn

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A tree which has fallen onto the autumn forest floor, taking not only the trunk but the roots with it, still covered in dirt
A reindeer stocking covered in dirt languishes inside a hole in the wall
I have to assume this has been here since at least last Christmas.
Peeking over the wall to reveal scaffolding for the façade of an old west town
I think this used to be(?) a centre for birds of prey. Not sure why it was done up like an old west town, if that’s the case…
I started hearing old-timey fairground music in the distance and it took me far, far too long to realise that it was coming from the old-timey fairground Beamish has. For fifteen minutes i was the most confused i had ever been in my whole life.

Stuff i watched recently, October ’24

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Posters for the undermentioned films

Big Fish (2003)

Tim Burton, you bastard, you’ve done it again. Hit a remarkable 0.7 Titanics on the cry-o-meter and made me want to call my papa. (8/10)

Alien: Romulus (2024)

I reviewed this one in full back in August, so go check that out if you want more detail. A stylish sequel (sevenquel?) that makes the world of Alien more believable than ever and introduces some great new talent. (7/10)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Seeing Christopher Lloyd in this was like seeing Jeff Goldblum in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Like, hey, you’re not meant to be famous yet!

It’s one of those films that’s been talked about so much that i have very little new to add, but i will say that i wasn’t expecting this to be as funny as it was.1 (7/10)

Sexy Beast (2000)

Ugh. Once the plot gets moving two thirds of the way through it’s pretty good, but that first hour is æsthetically revolting in the most perplexing way. The Spanish countryside has never looked so grimy and clammy. I hate all of these people. (3½/10)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

I didn’t know Steven Spielberg had the capacity to be so… cryptic? I love how the film builds up the mystery of what’s going on, with an ending that leaves you wondering in both senses of the word. Contact’s better, yeah, but Contact wouldn’t exist without Close Encounters as a base to work off. (9/10)

Silent Running (1972)

Douglas Trumbull, 2001’s special-effects man, gets into directing with this sickeningly seventies environmentalist sci-fi fable. There’s a lot to like here, but i can’t help the feeling that this would have worked a lot better if you’d cut it up into five twenty-minute TV episodes and had Tom Baker show up midway through. (5/10)

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Went to the cinema for this, for… some reason? Tim Burton is back, baby, having finally freed himself from Disney’s offputting computer-generated tendrils, and while Beetlejuice²: Beetlejuice Harder is ultimately inessential, it’s a fun legasequel that’s better than anyone was reasonably expecting, keeping up the same manic energy as the original. Michael Keaton, Catherine O’Hara, and Winona Ryder haven’t missed a step since 1988. Willem Dafoe is great too, though like most of the new cast, his character doesn’t have much to do in the story, which struggles to commit to any of its three plot threads.

Also, the lead girl falls in love with a socially awkward zoomer who listens to Sigur Rós, which means there’s still a chance for me. So that’s… that’s good. That’s reassuring. (6/10)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Once you’ve seen one Woody Allen film, you’ve seen them all, and boy did i wish i was seeing Annie Hall instead. (5/10)

Casablanca (1942)

Come on. It’s Casablanca. What do you want me to say? Every five minutes there’s a line that made me point at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio. “We’ll always have Paris.” (10/10)

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Unnerving to see Dev Patel before his ongoing “sexiest man alive” era, but you can never go wrong with Danny Boyle, whose kinetic, saturated style elevates a simple feel-good rags-to-riches story. (6/10)

The Substance (2024)

I cannot fucking believe i roped my mum into coming to the cinema with me.2 Greatest decision of my life. Her fucking face!

The Substance is the goopiest [sic] movie i’ve ever seen, and that’s ignoring all the body horror. Demi Moore digs through wet rubbish to pick up a sticky USB drive and splatters eggs everywhere. Dennis Quaid eats a bowl of shrimp that makes the world’s most viscerally disgusting noise. Margaret Qualley’s teeth fall out.3

My one complaint is i wish it had gone further. Everyone on the internet thinks it went too far. No. They are fools. That blood-sprayed audience should have started melting into The Thing, and we all know that deep inside our hearts. (9½/10)

Videodrome (1983)

Long live the new flesh! A film starring a Betamaxussy and a man who exists exclusively through semi-sentient VHS tapes. So many ideas, so little time (the Cronenberg special). Watching this is like trying to remember a nightmare you just woke up from.

I’m filing this in the same folder as Rear Window, a film with a surprising amount to say about an internet that it couldn’t have reasonably foreseen. What are we if not, like Brian O’Blivion4, ghosts of all our past transmissions? Is the online avatar not the new flesh? Existenz tackles the internet more head-on, but suffers from the fact that David Cronenberg doesn’t know what a video game is. Videodrome is unburdened by the future facts, and so can say whatever it wants. (10/10)

Hundreds of Beavers (2024)

A double feature with Videodrome. Sure. Why not. Let’s go.

This tickled the Gremlins 2 area of my brain in delightful Looney Tunes-esque fashion. What a silly little flick. (9½/10)

The A-Team (2010)

Stepdad’s pick for movie night. My review: “Stepdad’s pick for movie night”. (3/10)

Megalopolis (2024)

Francis Ford Coppola’s final fart is why Hollywood can’t have nice things, an incomprehensible schmaltzy mess about how Adam Driver is a Very Special Boy who is always right. I don’t know where the money went — everything looks like Spy Kids. What an embarrassing way to go out. (2/10)

Francis Ford Coppola shoots for the moon and misses with Megalopolis, his long-gestating passion project that shows why studio interference isn’t always the worst thing. Sometimes you need someone in the room to say “no”. Every creative decision made here is baffling: Adam Driver’s character can stop time, and this never comes up. Our main character can stop time, and this does not play a role in the film’s story! His political rival leaks a video of him having sex with an underage pop star, and within about five minutes, it turns out it was fake and she was 23 anyway, so that plotline’s resolved and never comes back up. Every conflict is like this. I don’t know what’s going on. (4/10)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable defies your puny human notions of “good” or “bad” in an ambitious sci-fi drama that’s like if Hillary Clinton wrote a Neil Breen film.5 You can neatly split the cast into “knew what kind of movie they were in” and “didn’t”. Shia LeBeouf knew — he chews the scenery with every line as if the sets were made of cotton candy. Aubrey Plaza knew, because there’s no way not to know what kind of movie you’re in when your character is called “Wow Platinum” and makes Mr LeBeouf give her head. Adam Driver probably knew? He can get pretty hammy, but he’s kind of trying to keep a straight face. Nathalie Emmanuel didn’t know — she’s the female lead, but her performance is so wooden i was genuinely shocked to find out she wasn’t a nepotism hire. Giancarlo Esposito is insulated enough from the properly weird stuff that i don’t think he knew. (6/10)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable is so sincere i can’t help but love it. It’s a man who built his fame on films about the criminal underworld and the hell of war going: “I refuse to let this be my legacy”. Megalopolis is about a man with a vision for a better future and the power to make it happen. (His vision for a better future mostly involves those moving walkways they have at airports. I never said it was perfect.) And, yeah, it’s a little undercooked. Yeah, it’s as subtle as a brick.6 But it’s the film the man wanted to make, and it’s a film that proudly stands against the cynical doom and gloom that has infested popular culture since the nineties. I can’t help but respect that. (8/10)

“Whaddaya think of this boner i got?” —Jon Voight, 2024 (10/10)

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXXVIII

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A death on the internet

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A video popped up in my Youtube recommendations recently that gave me pause. I didn’t recognise the name of the channel, or the man on the thumbnail, sat unbothered atop a log in a distinct yellow hunting jacket. Beside that image were two short words: “I’m Dead”.

It’s an omnipresent trope of fiction, and it’s a strange feeling seeing it cross into the real world. “As i’m recording this today, it is 20 December, 2023, and i’m recording this and giving Brad instructions to publish it upon my death. So if you’re watching me: i’m dead.” I never met the uploader, Paul Harrell. I never watched anything he made. I’d never even heard his name. But watching his last message a tear crossed my cheek nevertheless, an experience, judging by the video’s comments, that isn’t uncommon among people who happened to stumble upon it.

What makes it stranger is that, while, yes, a recording of a man speaking from the grave, “I’m Dead” is also a Youtube video, with all the trappings of the format. Mr Harrell makes note two minutes in that other creators have made claims of him with which he strongly disagrees, and bemoans (tongue planted in cheek) that he won’t be around to respond anymore. In a twist on the formula, he thanks the viewers for all the likes, comments, and subscriptions over the years — no point in beseeching for more, after all. I don’t point these quirks out to denigrate the man; by all accounts he seems to have been an upstanding chap with a passion for weaponry. But… I don’t know. It’s hard to put into words the cocktail of emotions that arises when someone jumps from talking about his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer to going “thanks for the likes”, all in the typical jolly cadence of online video.

Time comes for us all. Two of my most valiantly followed blogs are run by authors of fifty-nine and seventy-three; barring a rapid scientific breakthrough, i am near certain to outlive them. Videomakers trend younger; still, in just the past year, a cancer diagnosis and a stroke have passed my subscription feed. I don’t get torn up when a musician i love passes, but in this postmodern age, the internet begets a one-sided connection that feels a damned lot more like friendship than a vinyl record ever could. One by one, the first generation of internet creatives is dying — and, unless we remember them, their spirit will too.

The Almighty Algorithm™ recommended me this song yesterday and i can’t turn it off. This is so precisely My Kind of Shit that it’d be criminal not to post it, so… now listening:

In case it’s 2137 and this link is broken: the song is “2007”, by You Love Her Coz She’s Dead

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXXVII

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A WIP map of the world in 2099
I feel a little bad for posting so many link roundups effectively in a row, so here’s a preview of things to come…

List of actors to have played Doctor Who

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Author’s note: I first wrote up this wee bit of allohistorical silliness in March of this year, posting it a few places online, but never actually bothered on my own website until now. Enjoy.

  • Doctor Who?, on CBS
    • 1963–1966: Vincent Price (Doctor Who)
      First episode: “The Girl from Another World”
      Last episode: “Planet of the Daleks”
    • 1966–1967: Jack Nicholson (Doctor Who, Theta Sigma)
      First episode: “Planet of the Daleks”
  • Doctor Who and the Daleks, on CBS
    • 1967–1972: Jack Nicholson (Doctor Who, Theta Sigma)
      Last episode: “The Paradox Web”
  • Doctor Who: Alien Agent, on CBS
    • 1973–1975: David McCallum (Agent John Smith / Doctor Who, Theta Tau)
      First episode: “The Mannequin Men”
      Last episode: “Doctor Who’s Mind”
  • Doctor Who and the Cyber-Man, produced by New World Pictures
    • 1980: Clu Gulager (Doctor Who / “That existed?”)
  • Doctor Who, on UPN
    • 1986–1989: Kyle MacLachlan (The Doctor)
      First episode: “Pilot”
      Last episode: “The Deadly Assassin (Part 1)”
    • 1990–1993: Bruce Campbell (The Second Doctor)
      First episode: “The Deadly Assassin (Part 2)”
      Last episode: “The Edge of Time”
    • 1994–1998: John Rhys-Davies (The Third Doctor / The Professor)
      First episode: “For Want of a Nail”
      Last episode: “Seta (Part 2)”
    • 1999–2002: Kate Mulgrew (The Fourth Doctor)
      First episode: “Changes”
      Last episode: “Hourglass”
  • Doctor Who, on NBC
    • 2005–2011: Neil Patrick Harris (The Fifth Doctor)
      First episode: “The Interstellar Interruption”
      Last episode: “Paradise Lost”
    • 2012–2013: Donald Glover (The Sixth Doctor)
      First episode: “…We Have a Problem”
  • Doctor Who, on Blockbuster
    • 2014–2015: Donald Glover (The Sixth Doctor)
      Last episode: “The Three Doctors”
    • 2015–2019: Nathan Fillion (The Seventh Doctor)
      First episode: “The Three Doctors”
      Last episode: “World Enough and Time (Part 5)”
    • 2019–2023: Daniel Dae Kim (The Eighth Doctor)
      First episode: “Grandfather Clock”
      Last episode: “1963”

Season 26 of Doctor Who is slated for a release in the late summer of 2024, starring Matt Smith of TCM’s A Song of Ice and Fire.

Actors who played the Master include…

  • James Shigeta as “the Celestial Master”, a one-shot villain from the Price era who would reoccur as a trickster figure in army fatigues in Doctor Who and the Daleks
  • Robert Z’Dar as “the Master of Time”, a larger-than-life egomaniac who forced MacLachlan’s Doctor’s regeneration and would regularly clash with him in the “actionised” Campbell years
  • John Anderson as “Mr. Seta”, a master (heh) of disguise who was written as a throwback to the Alien Agent era
  • Christopher Walken as “Professor Tannhauser”, who, in the far future, devises an equation proving humanity can escape the end of the universe — a plan that NPH’s Fifth Doctor gladly assists in, until one of them realises just who the other is…
  • Lady Gaga as “Claire Oswald”, a companion throughout the first season of the Fillion era who always seems to know a bit more than she lets on

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXXVI

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Alien: Romulus is awesome

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A young white woman fires a gun in a retrofuturistic space station, a young black man cowering behind her
Super props to the trailer people, honestly — if it wasn’t for seeing that chilling first trailer in cinemas, i’d never have even considered watching the seventh film in a franchise i didn’t particularly care for.

I watched Fede Álvarez’s turn at the Alien franchise’s helm with, i sense, the ideal amount of knowledge. Online reviews are split — and the more Alien films the reviewer’s seen, the less they like it. Me? I’d sat down for the first and second, once, a while ago, and that was it. No slogging through assembly cuts or failed comebacks or stealth prequels or anything of the sort. Where they saw the gasping regurgitations of a dying and overexerted setting, i saw a darn good film.

The opening credits start rolling and we’re immediately in the future. Yesterday’s future. Everything’s clicks and clacks and yellowing walls, just as James Cameron left it when he turned off the lights. What they’ve done is turn what could be an embarrassing anachronism — haha, look at what those quaint twentieth-century fools thought today would look like — into a believable path that, with a nudge and a push, technology might have otherwise taken. Certainly, the bulky CRTs and Vectrex video games aren’t better than the technology of even ten years ago IRL… but they’re cheaper, exactly the sort of thing a fledgling colony would use to save money, and one gets the sense that the predilection for tactile tools and fuzzy screens is the result of æsthetics cycling back to where they were a hundred years ago, not everyone collectively forgetting how to make a liquid-crystal display.

Two sci-fi pet peeves of mine are nicely resolved, too. In the role of the astronomer-aggravating “““asteroid field””” we instead have the ring of an icy planet; the ship’s artificial gravity system is no mere cost-saving cop-out, but a structual Jenga block in the film’s action scenes, which mine the flip between 0 and 1 g for all it’s worth. Objectively speaking, Alien: Romulus just wouldn’t work on a hard sci-fi rotating spaceship, which is a rare thing!

Seven films into a franchise, it would be easy to bog oneself down in continuity and lock out any viewers who haven’t melted into their couch for a twelve-hour marathon. (This is the predicament which Marvel films have found themselves in as of late.) Equally, it would be easy to go too far in the quest to “breathe new life”™ into the world and leave us wondering why they put the Alien name on it at all. Romulus finds a sensible middle path. Its connection with the Alien brand is chiefly a matter of economy. We know, for example, that xenomorphs are bad, that they have acid blood, and that they get you boypreggers. We know Weyland-Yutani is an unscrupulous corporation in the business of space colonisation that wants to use xenomorph DNA for its own gain. We know that androids are made of milk for some reason. And so Mr Álvarez needn’t waste any time explaining that to us. Equally, nobody ever says the name “Ellen Ripley”. There’s no mention of the ancient progenitors of mankind or whatever those prequel films were about. Our story is set in the world of Alien, not the wiki.* (Please ignore that Asterisk of Doom. I’m sure it’s fine.)

*The Asterisk of Doom, or, the dead CG elephant in the room

This was an exceedingly minor thing to my overall enjoyment and i didn’t want to give it more space than it deserved, so i’m shunting it down here where noöne will see it. So. That, uh… that Ian Holm deepfake, huh?

There has always been spirited debate over the ethical quandaries of reviving old actors with effects, even before the current wave of machine learning — Crispin Glover sued Universal for flipping his character upside down in Back to the Future: Part II, remember! I actually don’t mind it, particularly when the character themself, like Ian Holm’s Ash/Rook, is meant to be artificial. (And as before, the same way we already know xenomorphs are bad news, we already know Mr Holm’s face won’t belong to someone with our crew’s best interests at heart.)

My annoyance is strictly technical. To understand the problem, let’s flash back fourteen years to Tron: Legacy, the first blockbuster to bring back an old face with the power of the computer:

© Disney, 2010. I’m using this clip for the purpose of criticism, as is my right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Bastids.

Here Joseph Kosinski’s legasequel flashes back to the original film’s time period, so faces the task of bringing back Jeff Bridges as he looked in 1982. It starts with just his voice. Perfect: faces and bodies change drastically in one’s life, but at worst, a voice will get a little huskier.

Then, as we pan into his son’s room, we see him first from the back, then a side profile, in the dark. Again, perfect. Hiding shoddy CGI in the dark has been a go-to in the filmmaker’s bag of tricks since Spielberg did it in Jurassic Park. This is going great. We have a believable fake Jeff Bridges. We’re hitting our audience right in the nostalgia zone, which, as we all know, is the most profitable zone of the body. And then… oh. Ohhh no. Ohhh no no no.

Mr Bridges’s doppelganger turns around directly into the bright light and opens his mouth. Every weakness in early-tens computer graphics comes out at once. The plastic skin. The dead eyes. The mouth that never moves the same way as the rest of the face. This is not Jeff Bridges. This is a changeling who has stolen his name and skydived into the uncanny valley. The illusion is shattered, because the filmmakers couldn’t help themselves from giving the game away.

I bring this example up because Alien: Romulus has the exact opposite problem. The crew, exploring a dank, dark ship, finds Rook face down on the messy ground, having barely survived a close encounter of the third kind. They plug him in, and… a heretofore unknown bright light turns to shine directly onto his face, on which not a jot of blood or waste is to be found. (It’s harder to deepfake someone if there’s muck in the facial area, you understand.) This is everything you’re not meant to do, and though technology has advanced tremendously in the fourteen years since Rubbery Bridges Syndrome, a cluster of neurons in the back of your head knows that something is deeply wrong. There is no light in his eyes. I kept looking at his eyebrows, wondering if the problem was there, but no. Every bit of his face looks perfect — but all put together in motion… one shudders at the sight.

But the further the film goes on, the smarter it gets. After our scavengers leave the lab where they found him, they interact with him chiefly through fuzzy CRT screens, smoothing out the imperfections. Unable to move, assorted gunk and alien goo piles up on his increasingly ravaged face, and when we do properly cut back to him, he’s shot in a side profile with chiaroscuro alarm lights. I kept thinking: why the fuck are you only doing this now‽ You don’t put the bad effects first, for Gods’ sakes!

Anyway, the rubbery robot face didn’t actually bother me that much — we’ve come to the point where we’re closer to the top of the uncanny valley than the bottom. I just needed some time to explain.

Particularly i’d like to single out the cast, none of whom i had heard of before barring a passing recollection of the name Cailee Spaeny, but all of whom do great jobs. Mr Álvarez has aged down the cast from the series’ usual monster fodder, not burnt-out truckers but wide-eyed twentysomething pirates looking to steal some cryo pods to blast off after a better life. (Outside the lead two they’re pretty thin, but hey, it’s a monster movie.) Our lead is the orphaned Rain Carradine, a serviceable Sigourneyalike played by Ms Spaeny, who reluctantly goes with the scavengers after she finds out she’s been assigned another six years on a black-skied mining colony… and because they require the services of her android guardian Andy (heh), the only one who can interface with the systems on the derelict space station they have their eyes on. David Jonsson, who plays Andy, would deserve an “and introducing” had he not been in Rye Lane just last year, but this alone already proves he’s going on to do even greater things. He’s given the task, without spoilers, of playing what amounts to two different (but similar!) characters in the same body, and shows off his naturalistic chops in every little micro-movement.

A certain scene with his character early on will be etched in my brain forever. It’s the big reveal of the Alien™, facehuggers jumping out from every corner in a room flooded by molten ice and red lights… and he stands there, rebooting, the same pose he was two minutes ago, his arms wide, as if nothing happens. Two seconds later, he takes total command of the situation, going from timid to Terminator in five seconds flat. If anything from this film is passed into the annals of pop culture (other than the Asterisk) it’ll either be that scene or the insane body-horror third act that i daren’t even mention for fear of ruining the experience. (Annihilation would be proud.)

I’ll be straight with you: it’s not as good as Alien. It’s not as good as Aliens. But nothing ever will be. Don’t go in with sky-high expectations — go in for a rollicking sci-fi-action-horror, xenomorph or no xenomorph, and you’ll have a great time.

Stuff i watched recently, August ’24

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A montage of the undermentioned works
  • First up is Enemy (2013), a movie somebody peed on. Summarising the plot it sounds a bit thin — Jake Gyllenhaal meets his evil twin Jake Evyllenhaal and not much else happens — but Denis Villeneuve does a fantastic job of building up tension and dread around a slow-burning premise which, in itself, isn’t necessarily the scariest thing. 6/10.
  • Took a trip to the cinema to see Longlegs (2024), starring the greatest living actor himself, Nic Cage. I say “starring”; he’s not in it so much, as it’s more about the internal tensions of our mildly psychic, mildly autistic Clarice Starling stand-in, played wonderfully by Maika Monroe. Again, the plot’s a bit thin, falling apart with a whimper in the third act, but the style and execution more than makes up for it. There are so many looming shots of doors and windows just at the edge of frame, snippets of interspersed terror, ominous rumbling soundscapes… pretty good! 7/10.
  • Green Room (2015) is a solid little low-budget thriller where a punk band get trapped in a nazi bar. Not much to say other than 6/10.
  • Watched Schindler’s List (1993) for the first time. Cue several hours of inelegant blubbering from me. (“I could have got more…”) I would like to apologise for calling John Williams a hack. I was not familiar with your game, sir. 10/10, but it feels wrong to give it a numbered score in the first place.
  • In Bruges (2008)! The online hype for this is ravenous and i’m not quite sure it lives up, but i was suitably entertained. Colin Farrell has very kind eyes. 6½/10.
  • The Olympics were as uplifting as always. A Discord friend of mine put it best: “The Olympics makes me feel patriotic for the human race”. For a few glorious weeks, it doesn’t matter that the IOC is the third most corrupt organisation on the planet behind Fifa and the Mafia. It doesn’t matter that there are wars raging across the old world. All that matters is that the most fit people on the planet have come to show what the human body can really do when pushed to its limits.
  • After years of putting it off, i finally got around to The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), all 3½ hours of it. It’s hard to review just the first part of the trilogy, but if the rest is as good as this, it’s on track for an easy 9.
  • I’ve been getting into the Eighth Doctor audio dramas recently and “The Chimes of Midnight” might be among the best things to come out of Doctor Who. Very dark. Very weird. It builds up this offputting atmosphere perfectly, Paul McGann and India Fisher making you wish they’d gotten a proper series, with the traditional timey-wimey twist. 9/10.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXXV

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A map of the Near East and Balkans with a focus on travel destinations and such
Š Zhaoxu Sui