Seen in August and September

The Ballad of Wallis Island

Most of this summer has been non-stop packing and planning. Between boxes, hospital visits, financial maneuvers, and getting rid of what we didn't need, this is what we saw.

Murderbot

Murderbot SO1
Apple TV+
What if in the future, a security robot gained self-awareness, hacked its protocols, thus providing it the freedom to think for itself? Also, what if this bot knew it could kill any of its human bosses, but instead, preferred watching stupid melodramatic serial television shows? That's basically the premise of this futuristic sci-fi comedy adventure series, with Alexander Skarsgård as the self-named "Murderbot". It's a nice bit of fun and may make us ask what we expect from our own AI creations, though I doubt it.

The Ballad of Wallis Island
Prime Video
Charles (Tim Key) lives alone on a remote island off the Welsh coast and has seemingly organized a music festival that reunites his favourite folk duo, McGwyer & Mortimer (Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan). It quickly becomes apparent that Charles, a two-time lottery winner, hasn't organized a festival at all but is basically paying the two to reunite to play privately for him. Unknown to him is how the pair split up, and their reunion isn't as simple as hoped. It's a funny, odd little movie that makes you think about your own regrets, nostalgia, and sentiment of your own life, and what brought you to where you are today.

Agatha All Along SO1
Disney+
Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) from the WandaVision series gets her own show, where she wants nothing more than to regain her witchy abilities. She eventually convinces other local witches to join an impromptu coven to join her quest. Like WandaVision, nothing is quite as it appears in this show, and that's the fun of it, I guess. If you enjoyed WandaVision, you'll like this.

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A Safe European Tour

Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali chase each other in the Italian Alps.

It's over, and there's a little hole in my life. The Giro d'Italia, Tour de France and the Tour de France Femmes have ended. I subscribe to a service that provides coverage of the three grand tours, the biggest professional cycling races – the Giro d'Italia, the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España – which are each 21 stages over three weeks and often cover over 3000 KM, and a handful of minor tours, which are usually a week long, such as the Tour de Suisse or the Critérium du Dauphiné, and a smattering of classics and monuments such as Paris-Roubaix or Milan-San Remo, which are gruelling one day races.

I will admit I don't understand why someone would watch golf, but this admission comes with the realization that watching cycling races is very similar. It can be slow without anything much happening except the commentators commentating. They may note the history of a castle, monument, or manor house that has come into view from the aerial camera. They may discuss what's good to eat in this or that part of France. This may lead to a discussion about what the cyclists eat before the stage, during the stage, and after the stage. What is that odd red drink they guzzle after the stage? (Cherry juice, apparently appropriate for race recovery but not after training rides). It takes a complex Jenga stack of technology, including five to seven motorcycles, three helicopters, a small airplane, and at least two satellite dishes to capture and broadcast the race. Over the three weeks in the summer, you can watch the mesmerizing colours of the peloton snake and pulsate through some beautiful European scenery and forget you have a job or anything else worth doing. You don't need a passport or a visa. You don't need local currency or do any conversions or figure out train schedules. You sit and watch while Europe washes over you.

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Seen in July

Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson Jr.

A busy and hot month full of boxing, selling, donating and recycling an old life, led to a shallow watch list. Here's what I saw.

42
Crave
Chadwick Boseman is Jackie Robinson Jr. as the ball player who broke Major League Baseball's colour barrier. It's a fairly typical biopic - good but perhaps not as powerful as a documentary might be. It's strange how you can feel the difference, but this film has that "made for TV" feeling. I'm not sure what makes me say that other than every scene has a certain formulaic economy to it, as though what we are seeing are a first run-through without any rehearsal. Particularly Harrison Ford, who portrays the larger-than-life Brooklyn owner Branch Rickey as a kind of one-note good-natured curmudgeon.

Alan Cumming's Most Luxurious Train Journeys: Scotland
TVO
Well-known actor and Scotsman, Alan Cumming was paid to sleep on a train with a group of older tourists all enjoying an unbelievably fancy sleeper train through some stunning Scottish landscapes. Not everyone can afford such a holiday, but everyone can have a wee holiday from their couch.

Aren (Justice Smith) with his mentor Roger (David Alan Grier).

The American Society of Magical Negroes
Prime Video
It's become a popular trope in many American films of a character, a Black American, who appears to support the protagonist - always white - to reach their full potential, often using a little magic or magic realism to help the character along. The one that comes to mind for me is the Coen Brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy, wherein Tim Robbins' small-town stooge is aided by a custodian who maintains a large clock, which he uses to stop or start time to save Robbins' character from certain death. The conceit in this film is that there is a real society of magical negroes who are trained to help make white people more comfortable and support them in their goals. It's a funny idea, but along the way, you begin to wonder, isn't the love interest in this movie just another kind of "Magic Pixie Dream Girl" stereotype, until the end, when you find this has been intentional all along. Thus, the film deconstructs one stereotype while using another.

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This is the Sea

I'm guessing everyone has at some point in their life looked around themselves and wondered, "How did I get here?" We know David Byrne has, or at least we can assume so based on the 1980 Talking Heads song, Once in a Lifetime.

Sidebar: That song is from 1980? Like, 45-years-ago-1980? Having spent 25 years saying, "The date is twenty-something", now, "1980" sounds more like saying, "1880". Yet, the 1980s are also ever present in my mind, especially with the current wave of conservative governments in the States and Europe. Later in the 80s, as a teen, it was very common to think Mulroney, Reagan and Thatcher were the stuff creepy European folktales were made of. They would seem sweetly naive by today’s conservative standards. Well, maybe not Thatcher (shiver). It is funny to think nostalgically of a time when we wondered if we were running out of tomorrows. These days it’s very common to believe democracy is in its death throes. Some are protesting it, some are trying to ignore it, some are fighting it, but unfortunately, quite a few are profiting from it. Is that how the mind works? Yesterdays are for nostalgia and tomorrows are for hope and fears?

This brings me back to my point (I just knew I’d get there eventually): sometimes you have to look around and wonder “How did I get here?” Sometimes in your life, a change happens and you don’t realize it. Other times a change happens and your world shakes and you know it’s important and even if it took you by surprise it feels inevitable. When Robert Frost wrote The Road Not Taken, was he thinking that his choices made his life, or that we fool ourselves by thinking that our choices make our lives as they turn out to be? Do we even have free will? Does it even matter?

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A Most Useless Rain

When it is boiling hot, you don't really expect steam, until you do. The temperatures in Toronto have been at a steady roast for the last week. My thermometer outside my home office window is in the shade and has been stuck around 33ºC, with humidity at gross percent, the "feels like" numbers are more like 40-42º (around 105ºF). There hadn't been rain in a dog's age, but even a faint possibility was full of promise.

I stepped out onto Bay Street into a haze that had me sweating only seconds after leaving the confines of the atmospherically controlled office tower. I was desperate for a chocolate soft serve (custard cone to Newfoundlanders), which a van parked across the street sold. Side note: how has the cost of a small soft serve cone doubled in four years? Has ice cream pricing started to parallel real estate prices? It had been quietly raining, but the drops seemed to steam off upon touching the radiant asphalt. The streets were wet for perhaps a minute before they simply went dry. It was a bit strange to see wet pavement dry before your eyes, as though the wet was being sucked through the street. In reality, it was floating off, not soaking through. The rain hadn't made a dent in the temperature. If anything, the air felt thicker. In Newfoundland, a warm, but damp day, when it's humid yet foggy, is referred to as "mauzy". I can't say it was something you'd get every year in St. John's. Because everyone seemed to refer to August as the dog days of summer, as a kid, I assumed it had something to do with its closeness, its humidity, like the smell of a warm, wet dog. Humidity always seemed surprising to me in St. John's, as though a place so near the North Atlantic was caught off guard by it. In Toronto, humidity is effectively a default setting. Most of the city feels like a dank basement for weeks at a time. In this current heat wall (a heat wave sounds too pleasant. A heat wall slams you the second you step into it), the rain has no impact on temperature. There is no relief. It's like stepping from a sauna into a hot shower. This combination of heat, humidity and drizzle is the closest I've had to that mauzy feeling half-remembered from summers in my youth.

By the time I had ascended back up the 28 floors to my desk, what was a drizzle had become a squall, with rain streaking sideways and splattering against the windows of the office. Briefly, colours popped back to life. Greens were dark and fresh as produce, while reds shone out and yellows practically glowed. Then the rain stopped. The temperature was unchanged. The humidity had no doubt risen, and the city returned to its sallow grey.

A Lost Landscape

A landscape to explore.

One day I had a terrible headache and back pain. I spent most of the day sleeping with a heating pad across my forehead and ibuprofen in my gut. Finally, by late evening, my headache had subsided and, after another pill, my back was manageable. Now the only problem was that after a day of sleep, I hardly felt the need for it. It’s not uncommon for our cat Nero to bother us at night, either to feed him or just to get our attention. This particular night he was particularly bothersome, as he lurked around the bedroom trying to wake us. I wasn’t asleep, and I felt a kinship then with our nocturnal friend. At some point, Nero sat at the foot of the bed and stared at me. I looked up from my book and thought, “Hey bud, it’s you and me against the night.”

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