Wow, have I been watching a lot of movies recently! Here are some brief thoughts!

Even after all these years, I am a sucker for found footage horror. I think it’s because it accounts for the presence of the camera, so you don’t have to suspend your disbelief quite as much as you do with a regular movie, where you know there’s a crew and a director and everybody right there because it’s a movie, but you make yourself forget it while you’re watching.

Your mileage may vary. I know a lot of people are fed up with found footage, and I have some thoughts on why that might be in my review of

I love a mystery show, and I especially love a mystery show about rich people being terrible. And it seems like American producers are finally learning from British mystery shows and casting good actors in every role. And yet, ultimately, I didn’t love it.

Some friends invited me to a movie club— like a book club, but with a movie— and this month’s movie was American Fiction, which I hadn’t seen previously. I was excited for a satire of racism in publishing, but the movie is at least half family drama. Which, by the way, is very good. Fantastic performances by Jeffrey Wright, Leslie Uggams, Sterling K. Brown, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Erika Alexander. Actually all the performances in this movie are excellent, so let’s add Keith David, John Ortiz, Issa Rae, and Myra Lucretia Taylor, whose role was puzzling to me but whose performance was excellent.

Kind of a twist on the found footage genre, since it’s ostensibly a “lost” tape of the last broadcast (see what I did there?) of a national late night TV show.

I was looking over my recent Bandcamp purchases and noticed that most of them happen to be bands with women singers. I didn’t set out to do this as some kind of project—it just so happened that these were the bands I was most interested in supporting. Maybe because women have been historically represented not only in the genres I like most (punk, power pop, garage rock, metal) but also in my own music collection? In any case, it makes a nice theme to tie together a post about some great music I’ve bought on Bandcamp! Buy tomorrow, May 3, and the artists will get an even bigger cut of the purchase price!

Whilst I was sick, I decided I would watch an anthology horror movie because if I fell asleep partway through it would be easy to pick up later. So I started Satanic Hispanics prepared to nod off (especially since it’s 2 hours long, which feels like a lot when you’re exhausted from being sick) and wound up watching the whole thing!

Watched this 3-season Spanish series on Amazon Prime, and I am baffled as to why this hasn’t become a bigger deal. I suppose it’s down to the fact that it’s subtitled, but this show has it all: Atmosphere! Sex! Violence! Betrayal! More Betrayal! Catacombs! More heel turns and face turns than a season of pro wrestling! In the name of God, what do you want from television if this isn’t it?

I’m home sick (pro tip—if anyone ever offers you norovirus, say no), and I needed something that would be easy to watch. So I put on The Greatest Night in Pop, the documentary about the making of We Are the World.

I went to my first metal show last night! Well, I guess it was the second if you count that year that Ozzfest was free.

I grew up listening to punk, which is sort of metal-adjacent, but the mainstream conquered punk in 1991, whereas the more extreme versions of metal remain pretty stubbornly un-commercial. I mean, I assume some of these bands make a living making their art, but nobody’s getting rich making black metal.

I’m drawn to art that gathers in misfits, as punk did when I was a kid, and so I have been slowly working my way into metal. I like the theatricality and the musicianship, but I’d still consider myself an outsider to the scene. (I mean, also I’m old as fuck, so). So this is pretty much going to be an outsider’s view of a metal show. Which means I don’t know all the proper names of the sub-sub-sub genres, for one thing, so don’t yell at me about that. Okay, off we go!