The second volume of music from Bob’s Burgers is another massive collection of original songs interspersed with some deliberately bad covers. Like the first volume it is full of catchy stuff performed extremely campily. It’s more evidence that this show has about the best use of music of any similar “sitcom” since The Simpsons. There …
Category: 2021
Free Guy (2021, Shawn Levy)
This is an intermittently amusing and clever film about an NPC that becomes sentient. I have to say, I had no idea what it was about from the title, though the trailer clarified that for me. On the whole, given the cast and the conceit, it’s a film that should work more often than it …
Untold: Malice at the Palace (2021, Floyd Russ)
This is a roughly hour-long episode from a new Netflix documentary series about the infamous “Malice at the Palace.” I was just getting into basketball then – I think Pistons/Lakers may have been the first NBA finals I really watched – but I did not watch this game live as far as I know. But …
Scottie Barnes and Uncertainty
During the 2021 NBA Draft, the Raptors drafted Scottie Barnes 4th overall, their first draft pick this high since Andrea Bargnani in 2006. Raptors Twitter reacted like it was the end of the world.
Bo Burnham: Inside (2021, Bo Burnham)
Yeah, it took me a little long to get to this, given how buzzed it was, and given that we have Netflix. But let me say that the hype is mostly right: this has got to be one of the best pieces of art about the pandemic – at least as it applied to people …
Your 2020-21 Toronto Raptors
To tell you the truth, I’m still basking in the glow of NBA Champion Toronto Raptors. I don’t care if it’s been nearly two years. I didn’t think they would ever win the championship. The day before the Kawhi trade, I would have bet you money they never would have in my lifetime. Its’ still …
A Toronto Maple Leaf Has Won a Major NHL Award
Auston Matthews has won the Rocket Richard Trophy. It is the first time since the trophy’s creation that a Leaf has won the Richard Trophy. It is the first time since 1947 that a Maple Leaf has led the NHL in goal scoring. That is 74 years. Nearly a three quarters of a century. Matthews …
Set! (2021, Scott Gawlik)
This documentary feels like it should be a Christopher Guest film, given both its focus – competitive table setting – and its kooky cast of characters. But it’s all too real as competitive table setting is a thing at county fairs in California, apparently.
Taming the Garden (2021, Salomé Jashi)
You know that scene in Fitzcarraldo when Herzog drags a boat over a mountain the rainforest to show the hubris and folly of man? Well, combine that theme with Mega Movers and a really great eye and you have some idea of this amazing documentary about a man buying up the great trees of Georgia …
Dirty Tricks (2021, Daniel Sivan)
This is an entertaining and fairly even-handed documentary about a bridge cheating scandal back in 2015. It’s a fascinating story reminiscent of that recent poker scandal where the player claimed to be using his intuition and those who accused him claimed he couldn’t be so lucky.
El Silencio del Topo (2021, Anaïs Taracena)
This is an artfully made documentary about a journalist-turned-government-press-secretary, which reveals a lot of about a terrible time in Guatemala’s history that I just knew nothing about. It’s a little short on context despite the fact that it clearly assumes a lack of knowledge about Guatemalan history, but it is still a fascinating attempt to …
Dead Man’s Switch: a crypto mystery (2021, Sheona McDonald)
This is a hyper-stylized documentary about Quadriga, at one point Canada’s most popular cryptocurrency exchange. Somehow I completely missed this story as it happened, which is a little weird because I do pay some attention to tech stories and especially scams.
Arbete åt alla! [Jobs for All] (2021, Axel Danielson, Maximilien Van Aertryck)
This is a short film which is basically a satire of the idea of “full employment” as a solution to our problems, as opposed to UBI or welfare. It’s not actually a documentary, as it is very much a satire and an advocacy film.
Zip.ca: In Remembrance
I don’t have any idea if I was one of the first Zip.ca customers, but I was certainly an early one. The company was founded in 2004 and I was renting movies from them the autumn of that same year, which happened to be when I started my Master’s degree. If you’re unfamiliar with Zip.ca, …
It’s Status, Stupid
Note: I wrote this in January and then it set in my Drafts. So I’m publishing it now, with very few edits, in the hopes that it still makes some sense. When I was in undergrad and grad school, studying political philosophy, I was extremely skeptical of explanations of human behaviour based in class. Especially …
G_d’s Pee at STATE’s END! (2021) by Godspeed You! Black Emperor
From the first moments of Lift Your Skinny Fists, I was in love. I was at the height of my prog rock phase and I had no idea post rock existed. I had no idea Canadians were making ambitious music vaguely in the prog rock tradition at the very time that I was alive and …
Tonic Immobility (2021) by Tomahawk
I possibly anticipated this record too much, despite being sort of underwhelmed initially by Oddfellows. (And I’d say I’ve come to like it more than I did on my first listens, but I haven’t listened to it in forever.) There are things about this record that just aren’t completely working for me right now – …
Murder Among the Mormons (2021)
We watch Forensic Files. A lot of Forensic Files. (We’ve seen most of the original series, I would guess. At least a majority.) And they all sort of blend in together after a while. It often takes us a few minutes to realize we’ve seen an episode. Well, it took me well into the second episode of …