When i was eleven, my dad told me to come downstairs. (I was on holiday at the time, you see, on my
semiannual Divorce Custody TripÂŽ back to the fatherland, where i could gorge myself on as many
sweets and spit out as many cuss words as i wanted.) He had something to show me on his home cinema
setup.
Normally it would be some documentary about watchmaking or nuclear waste storage or any number of
things that took his fleeting fancy. Neither of us were much for fiction, and my young self
especially wasnât much of a cinephile. I donât think my taste in movies had updated much since i
watched Finding Nemo on a loop at age three.
Two and a half hours later, there i was, on his lily-white fake-leather sofa, my jaw agape, needing
a lie down to take it all in. That was the day i met my first favourite film: Interstellar.
Christopher Nolan has a reputation for mind-bending bombast, but his directing is actually quite
plain when you get down to it. His palette of colours would be more at home in a hardware store than
an art department.a He has little time for the fancy camera trickery so
beloved by his fellow mass-market auteurs like Spielberg and Zemeckis. He shoots his pictures as
they are, not as a painter might like them to be.
It works to his detriment as often as in his favour. The Dark Knight trilogyâs dedication
to surgically removing every ounce of colour and whimsy from its inherently campy source sucks it
dry of life and fun. (Whenever Heath Ledger isnât on screen, all the other characters should be asking, âwhereâs the
Joker?â) But in the intervening years, it seems that Mr Nolan figured out how to use his un-style to his
advantage.
On Earth, he shoots everything like, well, a Christopher Nolan film â a look that perfectly suits
such a drab, dying world of omnipresent dust storms and weltering crops. When the plot shoots past
the stratosphere and into the stars, he anchors his fantastic alien worlds and black holes of
tantalising beauty against that same pedestrian style; devoid of his peersâ tricks and flourishes,
you get the sense that if his gargantuan star-eaters and tome-tiled tesseracts were real,
this is exactly what they would look like.
Much has been made of Interstellarâs Achillesâ heel: lurve. I'd like to offer a
lukewarm defence. Many take Anne Hathawayâs speech about love as a force âtranscending dimensions of
time and spaceâ as exposition, seeing her character, Amelia Brand, as a simple mouthpiece for the
Messrs Nolanâs hamfisted platitudes. I would call this a severely mistaken interpretation.
Dr Brandâs lines come at the lowest point in her life. She has spent years â decades, from Earthâs
view â floating alone in space; now, the crew have to decide how to use their one remaining shot to
save all mankind. She isnât making any profound statements or logical arguments. She is desperately
trying to explain to the two men beside her why she thinks, right or wrong, that they should take
the risk and visit her former loverâs last known location rather than the closer world the other two
prefer. Itâs clunky and melodramatic, but thatâs the point: sheâs grasping at straws, willing to do
anything to see her love again. Her speech gives balance against her comradesâ assumption that cold,
hard logic is all that matters, throwing gut feeling and emotion out the airlock.
When Cooper falls into that black hole and finds himself wall to wall with a myriad versions of his
daughter, it isnât some literal fundamental force of âloveâ that brings him there. It is his
acceptance of Dr Brandâs romanticism over Mannâs enlightenment. Cold calculations have brought him
nought but ruin, forcing him to watch his daughter grow up in front of his eyes and nearly killing
both him and the whole human race; so, he lays down his mask, dives into what science tells him is
certain doom, and lets the man who wept at those 20 years of messages take control.
Iâm not sure that it all comes together in the end. Matthew McConaughey is a fine performer, but the
role of Cooper deserves someone who can give it the gravitas (heh) and sensitivity his trauma
deserves â not just screaming âMurph!!!â over and over. Mr Nolanâs script is utilitarian as ever;
misunderstood as it may be, Dr Brandâs tangent fits into the rest of the film about as well as a cat
fits into a baseball glove.
That slack-jawed night on the sofa would begin a new tradition. Every time i shuttle back and forth
between England and Holland, i queue up Hans Zimmerâs score on my earbuds, and try to time it
juuuuust right, such that the second the jet takes off, âMountainsâ comes to its peak or
âNo Time for Cautionââs organs begin to blare. Thereâs a lot of flicks i like better these days â
Interstellar would probably barely scrape the top ten â but thereâll always be a warm place
in my heart for my first love.
Welcome, one and all, to the 2798th annual Horny Awards! Every year since humans figured
out how to count them, the Satyrsâ Forest has presented hand-made, custom trophies to the best works
of the year that was. Itâs an astoundingly long-lasting tradition, and definitely not something i
made up just now.
2022 was one of the years ever. Things, iâm told, occurred. People were born; people were taxed;
people died. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard released several albums. It will go down in the
history books as âthe year between 2021 and 2023â. On with our show.
Film
The Laurel Wreath Award for Annual Achievement in Film
Our first category marks all the wonderful movies that were made in this past year â which is quite
a lot, so my apologies to all those films who i either didnât mention or didnât have time to see!
There can only be one winner, but iâll start off with a lightning round of honourable mentions. Baz
Luhrmannâs
Elvis
was like being locked inside a room with an insane person for two and a half hours, and i loved
every ridiculous, extravagant, kinetic minute of it. Tom Georgeâs
See How They Run
and Rian Johnsonâs
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
were brilliant and funny throwback mysteries which really needed more time and appreciation in the
cinema. And i dearly hope David Letichâs
Bullet Train
becomes the new Fast and Furious â 2Bullet2Train!
Bullet Train 3: This Time itâs a Plane! Bullet ISS! The possibilities are endless.
An especially honourable mention goes to Luca Guadagninoâs Bones and All, a tender horror romance which almost made it to the main list before i realised that i hadnât
actually all that much to say on it. Itâs a metaphor for something, i tell ya hwatâŚ
It could have done with less of the hot-dog fingers, but anyone who would leave our first âofficialâ
runner-up off of their year-end list is a heartless bastard. On paper,
Everything Everywhere All at Once
is a recipe for everything everywhere to go totally wrong: a riff on The Matrix with a
tenth of the budget, directors whose last work was a movie where Daniel Radcliffe farts a lot, and a
sense of humour firmly dated to Reddit circa 2012. Yet it pulls it off.
This is a movie where people beat each other up with dildos, where a hallway of people literally
explodes into colour and light, and where the equivalent of the Death Star is an everything bagel.
It is also one of the only movies to have made me bawl like a baby in the cinema.
Everything Everywhere is an anti-cynical, anti-nihilistic manifesto for our time. Yes,
nothing matters! and yes, you might not write the next great American novel or paint a masterpiece!
but the world has so much joy and beauty, so many minuscule details that you pass by every day, so
for goodnessâ sake, even if youâre
just doing laundry and taxes, take your
time to enjoy the little things in life.
I need to go hug my mum.
Blockbusters arenât what they used to be, are they? Ever since Endgame, Marvel have been
running on autopilot, releasing a steady stream of snarky CGI sludge
made more out of obligation than passion. They donât even work as escapism anymore â the fantastical
isnât fantastic when every billion-dollar release is set in a world of superheroes and sci-fi.
Like Everything Everywhere, our other runner-up is a prime example of a movie that just
shouldnât work. Itâs a sequel to a 40-year-old film so mediocre i turned it off halfway through,
made as a cynical cash-grab recruitment ad for the navy, with a topic and plot designed to appeal
exclusively to Your Dad.1 Yet, through sheer dumb luck, Paramount hit the
jackpot on
Top Gun: Maverick.
Obviously, Tom Cruise is an absolute charisma magnet and the best part of every movie heâs ever been
in. But that seductive Scientologist smile only goes so far
(just look at The Mummy), and thatâs where
our director comes in. Joseph Kosinski doesnât have a particularly long track record; it would be
easy to mistake him for a typical director-for-hire. His dialogue scenes donât stand out from the
pack, and heâs not particularly creative with the camera, but that doesnât matter. What he excels at
is spectacle.
2010âs Tron: Legacy is a profoundly middling film in terms of its plot and characters, but
it gained a cult following thanks to the delicious combination of Daft Punkâs killer score with Mr
Kosinskiâs brilliant visuals and action. He took that computerised world of bits and bytes and gave
it stakes, weight, and a sense of scale, where a Marvel hack would have told the
VFX guy to just press render and go with whatever comes out.
So you take a director whose most known work is a spectacular
CG effects-fest and a lead actor famous for his insistence on doing all
of his own stunts, and what do you get? The best blockbuster film of the decade, thatâs what. The
original Top Gunâs plane scenes drag and drag with no real purpose; in Maverick,
every flight has something at stake, with non-stop action â but the film still knows when to pull
back and take a breather to give its characters heart. My icy, cynical heart knew that i
was being manipulated every step of the way, knew that every pull of the strings was
planned out in advance, knew that this film was made for money and nothing else⌠but iâll
be damned if i didnât start crying at that Val Kilmer cameo.
Go and see Top Gun: Maverick on the biggest screen you can, whether thatâs a 1080p computer
monitor or an Imax cinema. You wonât regret it.
Our two runners-up were films that i would recommend to anyone, anywhere, of any age, and at any
time. They have something for everyone. First place, on the other handâŚ
If you believe the lame-stream media, our winning film was the result of arthouse horror hero Robert
Eggers being given a blank check by Universal to make a big period action movie. This is false. It
was created by scientists in a lab in Durham to appeal to me and me specifically. (You can tell
because i was the only person who actually went out and watched it.)
Based on the Norse legend behind Shakespeareâs Hamlet,
The Northman is an epic following Large Scandinavian Man as the viking
Amleth, son of a deposed king, on his journey to avenge his father with the power of
Odin and testosterone2 on his side.
When i call Amleth a viking, i do not mean that all-too-common sanitised Hollywood depiction of a
20th-century Christian in pagan clothing. No; his society and its ways are portrayed as they were,
warts and all, regardless of what the audience might feel about it. The vikings of this film keep
slaves, burn down houses, consult witches (memorably played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe, and
BjĂśrk, in decreasing order of screentime), mock Jesus, and pray to Gods as a fact of life. (The film
never particularly demeans them for the latter three, which i found a welcome reprieve from
paganismâs usual relegation to the villains of horror schlock.) The only concession to modern mores
is
the absence of polygamy, because splashing people with period blood and cutting off heads is okay but good heavens a
second wife?????
Mr Eggers and his crew schlepped all the way to Iceland for filming and made good bloody use of it.
Whether its long shots are focused on natureâs rolling fields and bursting volcanoes or humanityâs
flame-lit funerals and grimy oarsmen, the result is consistently one of the most beautiful things of
the year.
Itâs not for everyone. Itâs long, and those just there for the action will find themselves asking
when theyâre going to get to the fireworks factory. Itâs gory. Itâs grim. But itâs definitely for
me.
The Zoetrope Award for Classic Cinema
Hey, did you like the Matrix sequels? Do you want to watch a three-hour-long film where
every character is played by the same six actors? No? Well, too bad, because the best film i watched
in 2022 that wasnât released that year was the Wachowski sistersâ3Cloud Atlas.4
There was a point, about 60% of the way through this three-hour-long movie, where i started to
wonder if it was all worth it. Iâd seen Tom Hanks attempting a Cockney accent, Hugo Weaving in
unconvincing Asian prosthetics, and a lot of people saying âtru-truâ a lot of times. Surely it was
impossible to tie this all together into a satisfying conclusion.
I started having flashbacks to The Matrix Resurrections, an endlessly creative film plagued
by its own self-obsessions and Lana Wachowskiâs inability to not put the first thing that
came into her head into the script. Was this going to be the same? Are the sisters trapped in an
endless cycle of almost-but-not-quite?
And then there was a point, about 90% of the way through, where i started crying. Theyâd squared the
circle, tied all six stories up into a neat bow; an epic told on the scale of centuries, where
actors cross boundaries of time, nationality, race, and gender; a film that would be their
magnum opus were it not for the long shadow of The Matrix. I donât know how they
did it, but they did â and thus nudged their record of hits against misses slightly to the positive
side.
The Pebbledash Dildo Award for Cinematic Disappointment
2022 was a good year for bad movies. Moonfall was the peak of so-bad-itâs-good Emmerichian
excess. Morbius morbed all across the internet. And the usual Marvel schlock was even
shlockier than usual. But nobody thought those films would be any good anyway â itâs hard to be
disappointed when you donât have any expectations in the first place.
So, by God, was i disappointed in Nope. From Jordan Peele, criticsâ favourite rising star, this sci-fi Hollywood horror brims with so
many creative ideas and metaphors that they all boil over and donât go anywhere. I can only imagine
that a quarter of the script got sucked up into a UFO and they decided
to just keep shooting. There are so many great ideas in this film, and itâs a darned shame they
wound up such an anticlimax.
The Comfy Sofa Award for Peak Television
I donât actually watch much television; iâve always found it hard to get invested for the âlong
haulâ. Ben Stillerâs Severance, made for Appleâs floundering streaming service, is a slow
burner, the sort of thing i despise â but its slowness is methodical, carefully drip-feeding you
bits of information whilst never wasting its time on fluff and filler.
Itâs strange. Itâs puzzling. Itâs brilliant. And the final episode is some of the best
TV iâve ever seen. If i could, iâd sever myself â just to watch it all
over again.
Music
The Golden Lyre Award for Excellence in New Music
Itâs The 1975.
Well, no point in dragging that out. They may not be the best band in the world, but they are my
favourite band in the world; their eclectic pop-rock sensibilities are what got me into
music, and iâll always appreciate them for that.
This isnât just a sentimental pick.
Being Funny in a Foreign Language
sees the band trim away the fat and bloat of their previous works and hold back on the eclectic
experimentation of the Music for Cars era, settling on a distilled, refined version of the
sound that defined their first record. There are no bloated instrumentals, no experimental
noodlings; just, as their international tour proudly suggests, The 1975 At Their Very Best.
No album came close to blowing them out of the water â because iâm a soppish fanboy â but to whet
your appetite, here are some more of my favourite songs of 2022. (In no particular order.)
The Hurdy-Gurdy Award for Enduring Musical Resonance
It was with some trepidation that i typed the word âPaganâ into RateYourMusicâs charts function,
knowing the reputation that explicitly religious music has. The words âChristian rockâ have always
been accented with a sneer, and the most well-known Pagan musician of the modern age is an
unrepentant church-burning neo-nazi.
Right at the top, after iâd filtered out all of the metal (apologies, metalheads; it just isnât my
bag), sat XTCâs
Apple Venus Volume One. You wonât find it on streaming â frontman Andy Partridge has few kind words for the likes of
Spotify â but i made do with a pirate Youtube playlist until i tracked down a physical copy at the
shops.
Apple Venus is the groupâs penultimate album, and even knowing nothing about them, I could
tell. It drips with aching sincerity, the kind that dips into corny pastiche, in that particular way
that only happens when a band who have spent their whole career dripping with snark and cynicism
realise that theyâre getting too old for this shit.
And thatâs all i wrote.
Some other favourite old songs i discovered this year:
The Sad Trombone Award for Most Disappointing Music
Iâve been getting into post-rock recently, and there are a few albums which seem to be near and dear
to fansâ hearts. Sigur RĂłsâ ĂgĂŚtis byrjun, a surprisingly accessible masterclass.
Godspeed You Blank Emperorâs Lift Your Skinny Fists, the best soundtrack for a movie that
never existed. Talk Talkâs Spirit of Eden, a bit too jazzy for my tastes. A few more that
iâve yet to listen to.
Then thereâs The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place.
Explosions in the Skyâs third album is widely beloved. It tops lists with the big guns. It often
shows up on genre âstarter packâ lists. There is a teensy, tiny problem with this: itâs shite.
Well, alright, i thought, two tracks in. Maybe it picks up by the end? Everyone is raving about that
closing track, âYour Hand in Mineâ â and then that was shite too!
This is music for a car commercial. It is
the Imagine Dragons of post-rock. Itâs the sort of music a TV network
might play as inspirational backing for their Paralympic coverage. It is sappy, insipid, and
uninspired dross of the purest and vilest sort, and it boggles the mind to think how it ever got the
reputation it now has. See me after class.
The electronic arts
The Kingâs Dice Award for Interactive Entertainment
Just one game found its home amongst my digital shelves this years, and i have yet to find the
opportunity to complete it. Lucas Popeâs Return of the Obra Dinn wins by acclimation â so
far itâs stylish, intriguing, and fun to solve, but again, iâve not finished it! Weâll see if it
sticks the landing.
The Broken Link Award for Best Use of Hypertext
Homestuck isnât very good. It has an undeniably appealing cast of characters and charmingly
naĂŻve art â you donât get millions of fans without doing something right â that are sadly
weighed down by its authorâs baffling decision, faced with all the sprawling multi-media
possibilities of the web, to tell its story entirely in walls of unreadable monospaced text.
Wired Sound for Wired People isnât my thing. It
has undeniably mastered a medium: its flickering pink pixels and eerie soundscapes build an
unmistakable mix of intrigue and unease, beckoning you to follow it down the rabbit hole. But it
lacks a message to go with it â thereâs no story to speak of, just a collage of strange and trippy
scenes.
So what if someone were to combine the best bits of both, and undo their shortcomings?
Idiosyncratic, eerie audiovisuals, with relatable dramatis personĂŚ, and a
compelling story which uses the power of hypertext to its fullest?
Enter
Corru.observer. Linked to me by someone whose homepage iâd complimented â with no other comment than that it was
a friendâs âpersonal siteâ â Corru puts you in the seat of an archĂŚologist(?) some
decades(?) in the future(?), trying to piece together the memories of an alie⌠iâll let you find out
the rest. Thereâs only an âepisodeâ and a half out right now, and i canât wait to see where it goes.
The Fred Figglehorn Memorial Award for Online Video
But in the age of Tiktok and Vine, it pays to be succinct. Our winner by no means reaches the
six-second nirvana of those two platforms, but at 25 minutes, it would fit comfortably into a
half-hour broadcast slot on telly â not bad on a site increasingly dominated by 7-hour videos about
people watching sitcoms for children.
That winner is Michael Stevensâs video on
the origin of selfies. In it brief
runtime, it answers every question i never knew i had about the selfie, while spinning in a number
of fascinating tangents and eyebrow-raising questions (in the typical Vsauce house style). It even
got me to renovate the gallery just to add that photo by Anastasia. Cheese!
The real world
The Spruce Panflute Award for Outdoor Splendour
I perused many places during my walks out and about this year, but none so consistently provided me
with so many new sights as the Ouseburn, a small but mighty stream which winds its
way in the east of Newcastle from suburbs to leafy woods to industry to hipster vegan cafĂŠs. Every
time i thought iâd seen it all, the Ouseburn revealed a new cranny, some quirky establishment or
warp in the cityâs fabric, something different to explore.
This is what we in the industry refer to as âthe money shotâ.
The Crackling Heath Award for Indoor Wonder
Affleckâs Palace is the beating heart of Mancunian counterculture; a labyrinthine
maze of shops which across their three floors sell everything from rose ice cream to bath bombs to
incense to Hatsune Mikuâthemed fizzy drinks⌠and i canât tell you any more than that, because i
havenât finished my post about it yet!
Really, though â Affleckâs has it all and more, and iâll be sure to stop by next time i go down
south.
The Hubert J. Farnsworth Award for Good News, Everyone!
Day in, day out, we are flooded with the latest news of disasters and terrors from around the globe.
It gets the views, it gets the hits, and it gets the clicks; itâs no wonder journos love to
accentuate the negative.
The Hubert J. Farnsworth Award is an antidote to doom and gloom, honouring the best thing
that happened in 2022. It was a late entry, but it could hardly be anything other thanâŚ
âŚThe National Ignition Facility, the U.S. government lab who reported that, for the
first time,
theyâd gotten more energy out than they put in via fusion power. There are hiccups, of course; the facilityâs magnets guzzled dozens of times more power than the
reactor itself. But every stepping stone has its imperfections, and this is the first great step to
a truly prosperous future â where energy is too cheap to meter, where power is so abundant that
there will be hardly a grain of economic sense in the idea of tapping any more of
GĂŚaâs precious little black gold.
Happy belated new year, everyone. And as always â may it be better than the last!
The blue people from Avatar are hot, and iâm tired of pretending theyâre not.
Editorâs Note: Xanthe has not yet seen either Avatar film.
I was bored the other day, so i thought iâd go see a film. The problem, my dear readers, is that i
have this terribly unlucky habit: 70% of the time, when i go see a film at the cinema, itâs not very
good â and i can confirm that Donât Worry Darling is, indeed, not very good.
If youâve heard anything about Donât Worry Darling, itâll be about the juicy, juicy
behind-the-scenes drama, involving saucy affairs between director Olivia Wilde and the filmâs
leading male star, an exasperated Chris Pine, and Shia LaBeouf. But weâre not going to be talking
about any of that â instead, weâll be talking about the topic everyone is desperately avoiding: the
movie itself. Oh dear.
Š Universal or whoever distributed it i donât really care.
The film boils down to a thin Truman Show pastiche following a troubled couple in an
idyllic American suburb, wherein a 1950s housewife, imaginatively named Alice Warren, questions what
her controlling husband, the inexplicably British Jack Chambers, actually does at his mysterious
government job. The wonderful Florence Pugh, hot off of 2019âs Midsommar, gives her all with the
script sheâs given as Alice, and is easily one of the standout parts of the film. Jack, on the other
hand⌠Jack is played by Harry Styles, a man who should not act. (Every pop star nowadays seems to
think they can walk the tightrope between music and cinema as easily as Lady Gaga does, and it never
quite seems to work out for them.)
So, letâs put ourselves in Ms Wildeâs shoes. You have one common plot structure, one brilliant lead
actress, and one so-so lead actor. How do you make this movie⌠good?
Well, first you load up the secondary cast with talented people. KiKi Lane and Chris Pine both
absolutely kill it in their respective roles â Margaret, a troubled neighbour to Alice, and Frank,
Jackâs hammy villainous boss â but neither character feels fully fleshed out; Mr Pine in particular
finds himself with not much to do despite ostensibly being the driving force behind the plot.
You can also pour piles upon piles of money into your filmâs technical aspects. The quaint suburb in
which Jack and Alice live is designed to within an inch of its life, and every shot is clear, crisp,
and packed with colour while not being too overbearing â like a James Bond film or, if youâre being
unkind, a perfume commercial.
Alright. Youâve got your cast, youâve got your style, now you just need to⌠ah, god, what was it?
You look down at the smudged writing on your hand â ah, yes, the script! You have to write a script,
with, like, a plot and stuff.
You wake up from a terrible dream. You are no longer Olivia Wilde. You are once again the handsome
reader of the blog of an even handsomer webmixter, who politely informs you that the filmâs
one-block-wide Jenga tower of a storyline, while it seemed to be setting up for an interesting
conclusion, falls apart completely in the third act. The filmâs writers pull out every clichĂŠ in the
book â âit was all in VR!â âour protagonistâs best friend was in on it!â
âif you die in the game you die in real life!â â in the space of about ten minutes, with barely any
of it given room to breathe. (In fact, that third revelation comes after a pivotal death
scene.) Just as the audience wonders what impact this will have on the plot going forward, the film
just⌠ends, with a distinctly unsatisfying resolution to our heroâs story, and an air of âwell why
did they even bother?â about the villainous plot.
All in all, i really canât recommend watching Donât Worry Darling â perhaps catch it on
streaming when it comes out if it piques your interest, but donât spend your heard-earned Lizzies on
going to the cinema to watch Harry Styles gaslight his wife for an hour and a half. (5/10)
Pass notes: some other films of note
See How They Run is a fun, Wes Andersonâlite romp of a mystery story that
gets in and out and does what it needs without making too much of a fuss about itself. Saoirse Ronan
and Sam Rockwell drive around in a tiny blue â50s police car; what more could you possibly want?
(7½/10)
The Woman King is a fine enough (alternate-)historical epic carried on the
backs of some terrific performances by Thuso Mbedu and Viola Davis. (6/10)
I wasnât expecting to be so spellbound by a seventy-year-old drama film of a bunch of people talking
in a room, but i absolutely could not take my eyes off of 12 Angry Men, which you should really just go watch right now. (9/10)
I think Morbius might legitimately be the worst film iâve ever seen on the big screen. The
basic idea has potential, and for the first 15 minutes or so, i was cautiously optimistic â but then
it all gets smothered by a mountain of pure gobshite and some of the worst dialogue ever put to
screen.i
I recently had some downtime and, since âtis the season, watched Censor, a small British
horror film about a film censor during the âvideo nastyâ panic who investigates a strangely familiar
scene.
Itâs tense, stylish, and scary â all the more impressive coming from its first-time director, Prano
Bailey-Bond â becoming more and more surreal the further it progresses. Give it a watch, why donât
you?
