Fuck this year

Patrick Stewart, Star Trek actor and acclaimed thespian, dies aged 86

Patrick Stewart, the acclaimed British stage and screen actor renowned for both Shakespeare and sci-fi, has died. He was 86.
The Star Trek: the Next Generation and X-Men star died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles after “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia”, said Kelly Bush Novak, his longtime spokesperson, to the Hollywood Reporter.
“He has been held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all,” she wrote. “We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace.”
With his authoritative baritone voice and commanding visage, Stewart was already a staple of the British stage by the late 1980s when, at 47, he was cast as a graying Capt Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: the Next Generation, the first live-action spin-off of the groundbreaking 1960s TV series. Over seven seasons onboard the Starship Enterprise, Stewart’s even-keeled performance and steely directives – “engage!” and “make it so” – turned him into a global star.
Stewart reprised his role in four feature film spin-offs – Star Trek Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) – as well as the TV series Star Trek: Picard, which ran from 2020 until 2023.
His longtime friend, fellow Shakespearean actor and X-Men co-star Ian McKellen called him “the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic”.
“Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end,” he wrote on social media. “You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.”

Just a few days after we also lost Walter Koenig, too, and on top of all the other good and useful people we’ve lost this year. Honestly, I was over 2026 a long time ago, but now I’m done with it.

The Changeling

I read on Wednesday night that Peter Medak had died, and since I was already thinking of watching his 1980 film The Changeling for my October viewing anyway, that news kind of settled what I’d be watching tonight. As I’ve said, I’ve been limiting myself this month to first-time watches, and trying to finally see some films I really should’ve seen years ago. This was one of those films; I REALLY should’ve seen this long before now. The Changeling tells the story of composer John Russell, who’s just lost his wife and child in an appalling accident, and he finds himself somewhere else to live. Unfortunately for him, one of the previous residents of the house hasn’t quite left it… or at least they didn’t leave it under normal circumstances. If the film has one major problem, it’s the music; not that it’s bad or anything (a lot of it is very good), it’s just that I felt the film leaned a little too heavily on it to announce “this is some spooky shit, folks”, as if it didn’t quite trust the audience to get it. Pacing could maybe have been tighter too, though it gets better in the second half and builds to a really great conclusion. But The Changeling is very much carried by George C. Scott in the lead role; it’s the sort of film that needs a really good main performance, and Scott delivers, alongside Trish Van Devere as the female co-lead, who was his wife at that time (so you’d hope there would be something between the two). Peter Medak’s career had almost been destroyed a few years earlier by Peter Sellers when the latter worked with him and Spike Milligan on a production that became a nightmare; I’m pleased that he eventually overcame that debacle to produce this very fine bit of work.

The Snow Woman

Another one from the Daiei Gothic collection. This story had recently been adapted by Masaki Kobayashi as an episode of his Kwaidan anthology four years earlier, but Daiei felt good to go with making its own standalone film of it, and I think they were right… One thing this has that Kwaidan doesn’t is a much stronger sense of naturalism (even though I don’t know how many of the exterior scenes were actual exteriors); the other film is more notable for its brazen stylisation and artifice. Our hero, Yosaku, is a sculptor’s apprentice, who is with him when the old man finds the tree he needs to carve into a statue of the goddess Kannon, and when the titular yokai finds them; she lets him live on condition that he never tell anyone what happened, but that just leaves him having to finish the old man’s work and deal with the odious local lord. What’s going to wind up being his biggest problem? The Snow Woman has a strong sense of sadness and tragedy to it, especially as the film goes on; Yosaku and his wife Yuki make appealing leads against the villainy of Lord Jito and his men, and things do not exactly end well for them, cos, well, Yuki’s true identity is not exactly hard to guess (nor concealed for long, admittedly). It’s all a bit slowly paced, and very much in the folk horror vein, so you’re not really going to get buckets of gore. But you are going to get a surprising amount of charm, and I’m satisfied with that.

Whew

Tesla cancels Cybertruck in Australia and NZ after 7 years of deposits

Tesla has officially cancelled the Cybertruck for Australia and New Zealand. Reservation holders are getting emails today telling them their orders are void and their deposits will be refunded.
Australians started putting down A$150 to reserve the electric pickup in November 2019. That’s almost seven years of waiting for a truck Tesla now says it won’t build for them. […]
Australia wasn’t a small market on paper. A crowdsourced survey of reservations from 2020 put it third behind the US and Canada, with about 3% of all Cybertruck reservations. Tesla never confirmed regional numbers, but by 2023, crowdsourced tracking put total Cybertruck reservations at around 2 million.Tesla quietly closed the Australian reservation page in May 2022 and replaced it with a “Get updates” button. It didn’t refund anyone at the time. People who had already reserved just kept waiting.
Then in 2024, Tesla shipped a Cybertruck down under for a display tour, and Elon Musk told shareholders that year: “We might be able to certify it for other markets sometime next year.” Next year came and went, and the truck never got a right-hand-drive version.
That’s the core problem. The Cybertruck is built only in left-hand drive. Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Japan all need right-hand drive, and Australia also requires certification under its own design rules. That’s a big bill for a truck with a truck that is already having demand issues in North America.

Not bad news, to be honest. I’m unlikely to ever encounter one if it did go on sale here, given how rarely I go anywhere, but I know what the roads in Sydney—which are bad enough as they are—would be like with them taking up even more space…

An unexpected sequel

The whale story from a few days ago continues!

A whale carcass that washed up on Sydney’s eastern shore last week has re-emerged at Malabar, prompting Randwick Council to close the beach.
At least two large pieces of the decomposing whale were floating against the shore this morning, having been fenced off by the council late yesterday.
Randwick Council moved the carcass higher up on the beach out of the water and was arranging with contractors to properly dispose of the whale remains. […]
The young whale washed up at Lurline Bay just north of Maroubra Beach on Thursday last week. Council closed both Maroubra and Coogee beaches as a precaution on Thursday.
Council and the Indigenous ranger group Gamay Rangers responded to the carcass.
Senior ranger Rob Cooley said on Thursday their preference was to let nature take its course as the carcass was too hard to reach with machinery and was in an advanced state of decomposition.

Given that this whale was apparently first spotted at Manly before it ended up here, I’m feeling like nature’s in no hurry to deal with it. A couple more days and it’ll probably be in bits in Botany Bay and washing up at Kurnell…

Meanwhile in Brazil and Serbia

This is quite major news. For reasons I frankly don’t understand, Brazil has some multiple-round voting system whereby winning in the first round is no guarantee you’ll win the election… but this is apparently the first time it’s actually happened that way. Lula was significantly behind Flavio Bolsonaro in the first round, but somehow turned that around on the second go and won the whole thing. Bolsonaro is spitting chips, obviously, cos that’s what his daddy did the last time Lula won… and he wants the result annulled because he’s protesting the fact that voting booths were allowed to stay open a couple of hours longer than usual despite the fact that his own campaign had called for this to happen. Of course, if Flavio had won, he would’ve been president in name only; I’ve no doubt daddy would’ve been calling all the shots from his jail cell.

Similar (hopefully) good times in Serbia, too, with their president Aleksandar Vucic kind of grudgingly accepting he’s been given the arse by voters there… apparently he couldn’t legally stand for a third term anyway, but he could still have been prime minister, so Serbia could still have been stuck with him if his party had won. Won’t be happening now, though. Curious about this Student List crew who beat him; the BBC piece describes them as having “no obvious leaders” and their “members are not used to politics”. Hopefully inexperience doesn’t get in the way of good things being done.

Oh, and Israel has an election in the next day or so too. I have little hope that the results there will be as positive as these ones, of course.

The Werewolf and the Yeti

Opted for some more Paul Naschy tonight; as the title suggests, this is one of his Waldemar Daninsky films, and an authentic Video Nasty as well (nice to have one of those for one’s October horror viewing), one of the handful that’s still never been released in the UK apparently (Arrow? 88 Films? Why aren’t either of you on top of this?). Speaking of titles, the literal rendering of the Spanish one, “Curse of the Beast”, is actually more accurate; there is markedly more werewolf than yeti to be had here.

Anyway, I’m clearly watching the Daninsky series well out of order, but I’ve always gathered that there’s little continuity to the series, with his origin being different in almost each one. In this instance, Daninsky joins an expedition to Tibet in search of the yeti, picking up after another expedition in search of same ended kind of terribly; perhaps needless to say, so does this one, albeit not in the way you might expect. Naschy is credited with the script, but the film felt to me like he actually wrote a number of different film scripts, took bits of each and just slammed them into one another while hoping for the best. I charcterised The Hunchback of the Morgue as “somewhat unbalanced and not entirely coherent”, and, well, this one is the same but even more so; the pacing and structure are so odd it feels like about 20-30 minutes of material that might’ve made it hang together more was either cut from it or maybe never even filmed. On the plus side, if the film is a mess it’s a pretty attractive one, shot almost entirely on location… Spain obviously stands in for Tibet throughout (a bit less happily, Spanish people obviously largely stand in for Tibetan people too) and looks pretty beautiful in doing so. And there were no burning rats in this one, which is an edge it has over the hunchback film…

Something we don’t see around here every day

There’s a goddamn dead whale in between the two beaches nearest to me.

A whale carcass has forced the closure of two busy swimming and surfing spots after washing up between Coogee and Maroubra beaches in Sydney – but there are no plans to remove it.
The whale’s heavily decomposed body was found on Thursday morning at Lurline Bay, a rocky cove surrounded by cliffs in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
It’s believed to be a juvenile humpback.
Local council said nearby Coogee and Maroubra beaches would be closed until further notice to protect oceangoers as whale carcasses have been known to attract sharks.
“We have cordoned off the area to leave this creature in peace and safe from the attention of people,” Randwick Council mayor, Dr Clare Willington, told reporters.
The council has also contacted Surf Life Saving about introducing extra drone patrols, but Willington said it was a precaution as there had not yet been reports of an increase in shark activity.
Willington said there were no plans to remove the whale and that staff were working with Gamay Rangers about a culturally and environmentally sensitive approach to take.
“This is a natural occurrence and in time nature will deal with the carcass,” Willington said.

In other words, presumably not this way:

I actually did see a live whale out here once when I was quite young, not sure exactly when but it was mid-to-late 80s… Dad had got word from someone that there was a whale at Malabar, so off we went to see it; not much to see, mostly just the tail fin breaching, but still, I saw a whale, which I haven’t seen since. I know whales come down the east coast in the latter part of the year, but this is only the second one I’ve heard of coming to my particular area…