2024 round-up

here's what I did this year

December 18, 2024

This year has mostly been focused on getting my thesis done. I should probably be working on that right now, actually. It’s about diaspora and interculturalism in the plays and films of Martin McDonagh, and I hope will be a book someday. But I did manage to do some other stuff, too, and in this newsletter, you are receiving a list of them.

magazine, newspaper and online articles

cast of the sitcom Taxi
Emma Stone as Bella Baxter in Poor Things
Al Pacino as Tony Montana in Scaface

This is a big world/That was a small town || Swiftly || 1 January

I was, if you can believe it, in the top 0.5% of Taylor Swift listeners on Spotify in 2023. This fact is so embarrassing that I barely listened to Swift at all this year, so she was only my… second top artist on Spotify Wrapped. Dammit. Anyway, 2023 left me in prime position to write a very short essay for Celia Mattison’s zine Swiftly analysing a lyric from ‘White Horse’.

Swiftly is available for free but on a pay-what-you-want system.

Taxi and the Workplace || Current Affairs || Jan-Feb

Taxi is one of the best shows of all time. It’s a sitcom from the 1970s starring, like, everybody? And in my lifelong battle to get people to watch classic TV, I went to bat for it on Current Affairs as a very beautiful and important show that depicts the workplace as transient and precarious. The first paragraph of this is probably my favourite thing I wrote this year: it is, I like to think, evocative as fuck.

Vast Wasteland or Fertile Soil? Redefining TV’s Golden Ages || Cineaste || Spring

This is a review of three recent books about TV — Pandora’s Box by Peter Biskind, Remotely by David Thomson, and Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties by Foster Hirsch — but in truth, it is an impassioned defense and brokenhearted cry of mourning for the medium of television, whose ascent is cheered by those who throw the dirt on its grave. A Cineaste reader said about this article, “She is funny, but she also is analytically keen. Poor old Peter Biskind.” But I say screw ‘im!

You can buy the issue here, but if you have access to any kind of academic library, you can almost certainly find it there. Check your regular local library, too! It used to be for sale at the IFI bookshop but unfortunately that was like a year ago.

Scarface is For Girls || Crooked Marquee || 3 March

You may remember way back early in the year people were doing a whole thing about how Barbie was snubbed because it’s a woman’s picture, in a way that seemed totally disconnected from reality. That’s not important, What is important is that if we must insist on gendering cinema this way, then the simple fact is that Scarface is for girls. I make the case for why this piece.

The Sundae Film Awards 2024 || The Sundae || 10 March

For the eighth time, The Sundae offers an unmissable alternative to the Oscars. Eighth! I truly cannot believe how long we’ve been doing this. I hope we do it forever.

I watched the Harmony Korine film Julien Donkey-Boy this year when watching the Dogme 95 movies, and it fucked me up real good. I think this piece is probably the most extreme example I’ve done so far of film criticism as attentively describing the physical experience of watching a movie, which is, for better or worse, something I’m becoming more and more interested in as something we need to address before we get to “meaning.”

A Portrait of the Autist as a Young Woman || Current Affairs || March-April

How close can you get to writing a personal essay without busting out the first person? When I saw Poor Things it seemed pretty obvious to me that it was about being neurodivergent, something which nobody else seemed to be saying. So I guess I had to. Also, that one little bit about Star Trek is really good, imo.

Hard Times in Professional Wrestling || Current Affairs || May-June

My editor for this piece asked me a couple of times to explain things for readers who aren’t wrestling fans and I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I am not a wrestling fan. Also, because is that even true anymore? It feels true, as long as “wrestling fan” is not a superset of “Mick Foley vs. Randy Orton at Backlash 2004 fan.” This piece is about the brilliant Netflix docuseries Wrestlers, and pro wrestling, and the relationship between art and commerce.

I did not give it this title. I’m not complaining, because it probably got better engagement with this title, but. I am complaining a little. This is not an article critiquing the special effects in Forrest Gump. I think it’s more of a robust defence of Forrest Gump clapping back at all the haters and losers for being wrong about one of my favourite movies ever.

An early draft of this piece had a paragraph about “We Didn’t Start the Fire” that I think was pretty good, so here’s that, too:

It’s easy to criticise Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire on the grounds that it’s just a list of stuff that happened. After all, it is a list of stuff that happened. But where We Didn’t Start the Fire derives its power — what every parody and Fall Out Boy’s disastrous sequel misses — is in listing all of those events in chronological order. It pulls us through post-war American history at a clip that creates absurd juxtapositions, but those juxtapositions reflect the absurdity of living through history. “Chubby Checker, Psycho / Belgians in the Congo” is a great lyric because it forces us to think about Chubby Checker doing the twist and the Congolese conflict in relation to one another, as things happening at once, when we instinctively segment history of the frivolous from the important. But reality does not segment them.

Coyote vs Acme vs Warner Bros. vs The World || Current Affairs || July-August

One of the first things I wrote for The Sundae was about how we need to break up the studios. I’m still at it today, and will stay at it as long as they stay actively destroying this artform that I so love. And I mean destroying in the most literal sense: deleting from existence, and getting a big payday to do so. A prisoner whose mother works at Warner Bros. wrote a letter saying I was dead on, also.

October of last year, I was hospitalised after having roughly ten billion seizures. That sounds bad, but my mam thinks I should celebrate the anniversary like a second birthday, because that was when I finally, after years of trying, got that sweet, sweet epilepsy diagnosis. My life is so much better now, and this article was the release valve for all my confusion and rage. I kind of hoped it would change the world, but mostly it just got friends of my parents to find out I’m some kind of writer or something.

The Sundae TV Awards 2024 || The Sundae || 17 September

But for real, we’ve been doing this for eight years? Eight?! And yet Dean and I have only gotten worse at making sure we watch any of the same TV shows come awards time. I love us.

Forget the Alamo || Current Affairs || September-October

My last article of the year before I buried myself in thesis-ing was about the wonderful John Sayles neo-western Lone Star, and how we are all doomed/blessed to live in and with history. I think it’s pretty good. Check it out.

scholarship

a panel from Fun Home
Daniel Craig as James Bond standing in front of a union jack
Stallone as Rocky with his arms in the air

Word and Image in Alison Bechdel’s Memoirs || The Journal of Modern Literature || Vol. 47, No. 2, Winter 2024, pp. 98-114

I know this says winter 2024 but it definitely came out in, like, spring. I know this for sure. This journal article is about how Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical comics construct the relationship between text and image, blurring the lines of what is written and what is drawn, and how that works as the organising principle for how she navigates dichotomies like self/other, subject/object, and past/present. Also, it doesn’t come up, but I’ll just take this opportunity to mention that I loved the Fun Home musical. It’s wonderful!

Reading the Complexity of James Bond’s National Identity on Film || The International Journal of James Bond Studies || Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 2024, pp. 1-10

When I got into James Bond, I was constantly asking myself “Isn’t it crazy how rarely James Bond is English?” and “Why is no-one talking about how rarely James Bond is English?” So I wrote about Bond’s complex and frequently hybrid national identity in the film series, emerging from ambiguous spaces and mimicking colonial codes, a thread that carries the whole way through and becomes narratively central in Skyfall. Also, when I delivered a version of this argument as a presentation at a conference, an elderly Scottish man told me it meant a lot to him. So there.

This one was published in an open access journal, so anyone can read it for free.

“She’s got gaps, I’ve got gaps”: a neurodiversity reading of Rocky (1976) || Journal of Popular Film and Television || June 2024, pp. 1-13

We hold these truths to be self-evident: 1. Adrian is autistic; 2. Rocky has ADHD and a mild intellectual disability; 3. together, they make the most beautiful neurodivergent community in miniature. This one is very close to my heart, and not just because it’s about the greatest movie ever made.

podcasts

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey || The 250 episode 365 || 3 February

Watching this awful film was almost worth it to have such a fun time talking about it with Dean, Darren and Andrew. Almost.

Poor Things || The 250 episode 371 || 23 March

I was basically Ed McMahoning on this one but I got to defend Driving Miss Daisy for no reason and also it sparked the idea for the much more articulate article I wrote about Poor Things for Current Affairs, as linked above.

Getting Diagnosed with Epilepsy || Younified || Newstalk, 4 September

Recorded shortly after my Irish Independent article about my diagnosis was published. Covers similar ground, but broadcast on the radio. The radio!

The Banshees of Inisherin || The 250 episode 393 || 28 September

PhD examiners don’t listen to this. Also, I have two regrets:

  1. we didn’t talk about Barry Keoghan really at all;

  2. I feel bad for how much I trash talked Longford near the end. As compensation, I will share this article about a Ukrainian woman who thinks Longford is dope, actually

The Sundae Presents

The Sundae Presents is a show that Dean Buckley and I co-host where we each pick a favourite film of ours that the other hasn’t seen before and make them watch it. We didn’t release as many episodes this year as last, but we did do a bunch, and you should catch up. Or relisten. Or both!

Available wherever you get your podcasts. And if it’s not, let me know and I’ll sort it out.

Keep an eye out for our Christmas special. You will never guess what it’s about.

Friday Film Showcased

This year, Conor Hogan and I launched a new podcast called Friday Film Showcased. It is, and I’m sorry to say I mean this sincerely, the greatest podcast of all time. Which is handy because the massive amounts of work we put into it wouldn’t be worth it otherwise. If you check out one thing from this email, make it this show.

You’ll laugh, you’ll learn, you’ll almost certainly play along to a game show. Available wherever you get your podcasts. And if it’s not, let me know and I’ll sort it out.

Keep an eye out for the concluding part of our look at the genre of giallo, where we discuss Lucio Fulci’s masterpiece Don’t Torture a Duckling.

parting recs

Listen: You might think you don’t want to listen to a Bee Gees song from 1987. But guess what? “You Win Again” is the… greatest song of all time? I spent much of this year obsessed with it. Passing it along for you to get obsessed with in 2025, like it in It Follows.

Watch: The Linda Blair cheapo roller disco teen movie Roller Boogie (1979) is high freakin’ art. It got universally terrible reviews and I am convinced it is one of Baz Lurhmann’s favourite movies of all time. And if it’s not, it should be. Baz, if you’re reading this, now more than ever, watch Roller Boogie!

Read: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I’m not being sarcastic. (More to come in 2025. Hopefully.)

Check out otherwise: Contrapoints’s Twilight video is the YouTube video of the year. Duh. Might be the YouTube video of the century. There’s a lot of century left to go, but I’ll take the bet.

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