Bob Weir (1947-2026)
I somehow forgot to mention Bob Weir’s passing on my last Five Cool Things. His death certainly isn’t cool, but his life was one of the coolest ever lived. At 16 years old, he formed a band that would later become known as the Grateful Dead.
Buy Bob Weir – Ace 50th AnniversaryThe Dead were, of course, a foundational force in rock and roll as part of the San Francisco sound in the 1960s, revolutionizers of acoustics in live music, and the godfathers of the jam-band scene. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, the Grateful Dead broke up but Bob Weir never stopped performing. Some say he has performed music live on stage more than any other human being in history.
I’m a huge Deadhead, and Bob’s death is a huge loss. But the music lives on and that is his legacy.
The Newsreader: Season One
This Australian series follows the lives of several journalists working for a TV news station in the 1980s. It is a little reminiscent of Broadcast News in that way, except here all the presenters are more than qualified journalists, not just pretty faces.
Geoff Walters (Robert Taylor) is the long-time anchor and part of the old school of journalism. Helen Norville (Anna Torv) is the much younger co-anchor who bristles against Geoff’s views on how the news should be run, bringing in a pretty face and glamour to the set. Dale Jennings (Sam Reid) is a junior reporter with ambitions towards becoming an anchor.
Each episode sees our reporters covering a lot of the big stories of the times, including the Challenger explosion, Lindy Chamberlain’s release from prison, the AIDS crisis, and the Chernobyl disaster. There is some good drama there as the characters scramble to get the best angle on the story, but there are also some nice comedic moments and some well drawn romance.
I can’t wait to see where Season Two goes.
Stranger Things
We live in a world saturated with nostalgia. It seems like every other thing is a sequel or a remake or set in times past, all so that we can remember what it was like when we were young, when the world made sense, when our biggest troubles were make-believe.
Buy Stranger Things Annual 2026: An Official Guide to the Hit Netflix TV ShowMost of these things get it wrong. Movies and shows set in the past rely on that nostalgic kick to keep us watching, but they don’t bother with actually trying to be good. Far too many of these things simply have characters reference the things from the past as if simply having someone say, “Hey, that’s like Ghostbusters” is all we need for that nostalgia high.
Stranger Things got it right. It is not just set in the 1980s, but it is completely infused with its culture, specifically the works of Stephen King (and the movies/shows adapted from them), John Carpenter, and Steven Spielberg. But while it does reference these things (both overtly and less obviously), it manages to be its own thing. It feels less like a thing made about the 1980s than something that could easily have been made in the 1980s.
The first season is absolutely brilliant. Each consecutive season has gone down slightly in quality. It hasn’t helped that it took them nearly ten years to make five seasons. I mean, seriously, the kids that are the stars of the show are now adults; Millie Bobby Brown is married and has a kid.
I came to this final season with lowered expectations. Like a lot of people, I was kind of over the show. But I wanted to see how it ended and wound up pleasantly surprised. It isn’t nearly as good as Season One (or Season Four, for that matter), but it found a way to explain most of the loose ends in a manner that wasn’t cringe, and it wrapped things up quite well. I might have even teared up a little.
The Vast of Night
My brother has been telling me to watch this movie for months, and I finally decided to give it a go. I’m glad I did; I don’t know why I waited so long.
Set in rural New Mexico in the 1950s, tells the story of Everett Sloan (Jake Horowitz) a disc jockey and all-around tech wiz, and Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick), a teenaged telephone operator. While seemingly everyone else is at a high school basketball game, strange things begin happening to our heroes.
Fay hears a strange static on her phone lines. Everett plays the sound on his radio show, asking if anyone knows what it is. An African American calls in to say he heard it once before when he was working for the military. An older woman claims she’s heard the noise before and that it comes from above.
The Vast of the Night is a bit of a slow burn. Aliens don’t come racing down from above. Secret government agents do not rush in and keep Everett and Fay from learning the truth. This is a film that relies on strange noises and stories being told to give us its thrills and chills. It does that effectively. I was on the edge of my seat wondering what would happen next.
Send Help
Sam Raimi has directed only two films in the last decade and a half. Both of them (Oz the Great and Powerful and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) were big studio films, and his directorial versions were clearly hampered by interfering producers. The last truly Sam Raimi film was Drag Me to Hell back in 2009.
Buy Drag Me to HellWell, I can gladly say, Sam Raimi is back, baby! Send Help stars Rachel McAdams as Linda Liddle, an intelligent but meek and mousy corporate cog. She had been promised a promotion by the owner of the company, but before she can get it, that guy steps down and his horrible frat-boy son Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) takes the reins. He gives the promotion to one of his golfing buddies instead.
But on a flight to Bangkok, their plane crashes, leaving Linda and Bradley stranded on a desert island. With Bradley wounded, it is up to Linda to keep them alive. Luckily she’s a huge fan of the reality series Survivor, and having wanted to be a contestant on that show, she’s spent a lot of time learning how to survive in such situations.
Soon enough, she realizes the tables have turned, and now Bradley must rely on her. And she relishes it. The office stuff is a little too overdrawn, and there is a twist in the final act that’s a bit silly, but I mostly loved this. Raimi is in his element, giving the island sequences a kinetic, gore-filled energy that makes me feel like a teenager watching Evil Dead 2 again.
Jo Nesbo’s Detective Hole
Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo has written some 13 novels featuring Detective Harry Hole. I’ve read several of them and quite enjoyed them. In 2019, they made an American film based on one of the books, The Snowman, starring Michael Fassbender, and it was an absolute disaster.
Buy The Bat: A Detective Hole NovelIn March, Netflix will release a Norwegian television adaptation of the books, and the trailer just dropped. It is just a teaser, so it is impossible to tell if this will be any good, but I’m glad Nesbo is involved and that it was made in his homeland. I just wish they’d had the balls to call it Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole.
