I sometimes watch English language teachers doing their thing on youtube for the purpose of asking myself if their yammering actually helps anyone gain a better understanding of a complicated language, or rather, as I find is usually the case, these channels are little more than panhandling with a posh accent. There is a carny …
Author Archives: Conrad Spectacle
Stranger Things and the Cul de Sac of Nostalgia
In his review of Super Dark Times, Kim Newman, the greatest critic of genre cinema remarked, “This bleak coming-of-age movie – set in the mid-90s – has little of the nostalgia of Stand By Me, and trades instead in a kind of numbed, frozen, adolescent angst which evokes River’s Edge or Over the Edge – …
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Widow’s Peak by Ian Rankin
Prologue The man from Stirling was rapidly losing patience with his companion, the Fifer. They’d been at this for 2 hours now, and the night air was “colder than a witch’s tit” as the Fifer had put it, more than once. For a corpse there was no doubting her beauty, mused the man from Sterling …
The Wretched State of The Guardian
The Guardian continues its descent into obsessive madness with this piece about Donald Trump’s presence at the last UFC show in NYC: Obscene? I had until now thought the Guardian was tolerant of words like “motherfucker”, but apparently the style guide has been updated after the latest presidential outrage and we are now in an …
Liberty Through Inarticulation
“I’m glad you asked me twice. You see I’m a bilingual. A bilingual illiterate – I can’t read in two languages.” You’d think, wouldn’t you, that watching a foreign film without subtitles to guide you would be a frustrating, confounding experience. Not so. For film is a visual medium and the script is really just …
Breaking Bad
Reviewers still have a role to play, they are not redundant yet in this era of infinite instant choice. A good reviewer can illuminate parts of the art that the viewer wouldn’t have otherwise considered. Right, fine. However, some are going a bit nuts with the whole “being woke” thing and it’s adversely affecting the …
Joke’s on You Part 2
I do wonder if there would have been all this wailing and gnashing of teeth if Arthur Fleck had been black. Now that would have been a provocative move by the filmmakers. Would a black, or, for ultimate on-pointetness, a transgendered Hispanic protagonist be seen as triumphing Ali-like over an unfair system on a dog …
Joke’s on You
When a bubblegum genre film attracted the sort of lofty critical praise and concomitant pro-lash that Joker received before its official unfurling it piqued my curiosity as one who normally shuns the endless barrage of cape flicks. A Scorsesian triumph cried some. An irresponsible clarion call to wingnuts and incels howled others. So this particular …
Indonesian Parents
Cinemas in Jakarta are done rather well. While the kleptotheocracy running the show deem it an affront for the hoi polloi to glimpse a female nipple on screen lest it give them funny ideas about increasing the population of 260 million (a figure that suggests no encouragement is needed), gruesome violence is free from circumcision, …
Joe and Dough
Eating out in Jakarta is often cheaper than eating in, but it’s fraught with tension. Will they actually have what’s promised on the menu? Will the staff be zen-like in their ability to ignore an aloft waggling palm followed by screaming “Mbak! Mbak!” like a worried sheep, or will they hover mosquito-like and demonstrate a …
The Bottle Dungeon 