Spectre Collie

One Thing I Like About Poor Things

The best moments in Poor Things are the ones you can appreciate empirically

I went in hoping, and fully expecting, to love Poor Things, but it never really clicked for me. So it’s a good thing I’ve got a series called “One Thing I Like,” because there’s an awful lot to like about this movie.

The art direction is outstanding, delivering on the promise of the trailer and then some. It’s full of fantasy versions of cities (and a ship) that are beautiful and familiar, but just surreal enough to suggest that you’re seeing them for the very first time, and just sinister enough to suggest that there’s always danger lurking just outside of your field of view. The beginning calls back to The Bride of Frankenstein and Metropolis, just directly enough to make sure that we make the connection, but not so directly that it feels just like a reference.

And Emma Stone, obviously, gives herself so completely into this character that any trace that it’s a performance disappears within a few minutes. There’s no way the movie would’ve worked without her commitment. Mark Ruffalo is also excellent, acting as if he were a character borrowed from an entirely different movie, which is exactly what’s needed for the character. Willem Dafoe is at the stage in his career where yet another exceptional performance from him isn’t all that exceptional. And I think Ramy Youssef deserves credit for playing the straight man against so many showy performances; he has to function as the audience’s guide into a Victorian horror story, but one in which the story abandons its narrator a third of the way through.

Also, there are brief black-and-white interstitials when the story moves to a new location, each seeming like we’re getting a peek into Bella’s bizarre and beautiful dreams. But none lasts long enough to make any sense of them. Like a real dream, they seem to leave an after-image on the mind, even if we can’t reliably recall details.

Read the Room, Apple

Trying to make sense of Apple’s plans for the Vision Pro, while simultaneously trying to talk myself out of wanting one

I was innocently watching YouTube when I happened upon a clickbaity video warning that Apple Vision Pro has a PROBLEM, and I was powerless not to click on it. Inside, a man was furiously screaming that the company had limited the VR experience to ten feet by teen feet and you had to be sitting on an [expletive deleted]¹ couch.

My third response (after “why did I click on that?” and “take it down a few notches my dude”) was that he must be mistaken. He must’ve been taken in by a rumor, or maybe misinterpreted the public documentation.

But then I found an article by Samuel Axon on Ars Technica from last June, confirming that the documentation explicitly says that a VR experience (“fully immersive experience” in Apple’s retina-means-high-resolutionspeak) will be interrupted if the user moves more than 1.5 meters away from their starting point. In other words: the Apple Vision Pro won’t support room-scale VR.

Quick aside for anybody who’s unfamiliar with the terminology: “room-scale VR” just means that you can walk around your own space to move around the virtual space. Other types are seated (on your #@$%&! couch or otherwise) or stationary (standing but not moving from your starting position). All of the current major consumer-level VR headsets support room-scale tracking.

It’s entirely likely that I’d already heard this, and either misinterpreted it myself, or understood it and completely forgot about it. I’ve spent the time since then assuming that of course it must support room-scale tracking, since the device seems entirely capable from a technological standpoint. AR tracking on the last few models of iPhone — which aren’t purpose-built AR devices — is excellent, and you can place a virtual object in space, walk around the room a bit, and return to find it still sitting where you left it.

That Ars Technica article says, correctly, that the “limitation” shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to how the company is trying to position the device². Apple’s been insistent that this isn’t a VR headset; in fact, they refuse to use the industry standard terms like “augmented reality,” “virtual reality,” or even “mixed” or “extended” reality, in favor of their own “spatial computing.”

The general idea is that the Vision Pro is meant to enhance and extend the way you use Macs and iPads already — watching TV and movies, looking through photos and video, browsing the web, telecommunications, and I guess making keynote presentations? They’re emphasizing that this isn’t some entirely unfamiliar type of computer; it’s the same stuff you’re already doing, but bigger and in 3D.

1
I promised my mom I’d stop swearing so much in public.
2
No pun intended

Tuesday Tune Twenty Twenty-foursome: What I Am

FOUR tangentially-related tunes on the theme of self-actualization for the New Year

I’m not aware of too many things, but I am aware that I missed posting a Tuesday Tune Two-Fer last week. I decided to take a break for Christmas, largely because Christmas songs are ubiquitous anyway, and there’s not much original I can say about any of them.¹

But that’s all in the past! I’m making up for the missed week by delivering four tunes this week! That’s double the songs for the same low price! And now it’s the New Year, which means it’s time to decide who or what you’re going to be in 2024.

You could go expansive, like in “New Year” by The Breeders. Granted, only somebody as cool as Kim Deal could claim to be the sun and the rain and the New Year, but this is more about being aspirational than achievable.

If you like the idea of being the sun and the air, but you want to manage expectations a bit, you could change it up like The Smiths with “How Soon is Now?” Just make sure you’ve got Johnny Marr backing up your self-aggrandizing, performative gloominess, so it’ll be a few decades before people realize your bullshit isn’t that funny anymore.

Or, if you want to wallow in your neuroses, but not quite as hard and definitely not as gothic, then you could take a cue from Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel and declare “I Am a Rock.” Pros: A rock feels no pain, and an island never cries. Cons: It’s a little on the nose.

Of course, you could just skip the whole business and just spend the year spewing out nonsense, as in “I Am the Walrus” by the Beatles. Again, just be sure that you pair yourself with a brilliant producer, and you’ll be praised as an enigmatic genius.

As for me, I think LA’s fine, the sun shines most of the time, and the feeling is laid back.² For 2024, I aspire just to be a content, middle-aged man.

1
If you’re curious, I probably would’ve tried to find some way to pair “Put One Foot in Front of the Other” from Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town with “Santa Baby” by Eartha Kitt.
2
Update: The palm trees still grow, but the rents are no longer low.

2023, But Monthly

My year in photos

Today’s the day that everyone on Instagram was posting their year-in-review photos, which typically gets the “oh how nice for you” response that it deserves.

But out of curiosity I started flipping back through the photo album to get an idea of what my own hypothetical version would look like, and I was genuinely surprised. I’d kind of imagined events spread out over the past few years, and I didn’t realize that we’d managed to cram so much stuff into 2023.

This was supposed to be my “gap year,” where I’d wrapped up my last project as best I could, and could take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime chance to just take a year off. Work on personal projects, maybe build up a portfolio, but mainly just relax. So I’d mis-remembered the year as being mostly uneventful, but in fact we’d been lucky to do a ton of stuff. Here’s that stuff in list form!

Literacy 2023: Recap

Another year of failing to hit my target number, but being pretty happy about it nonetheless

I picked up this whole series again when I discovered Goodreads and its annual reading challenges. But the real goal for me isn’t to hit some number of books read, but a) make more time for reading for pleasure, and b) get better at summarizing my thoughts on a book without its turning into an over-long book report to prove that “I got it.” By that metric, this year’s been a success. More about rediscovering familiar books and writers than taking on anything new, although I managed to do both.

Goal
20 books in 2023

Final
18 read

Favorite Book of Literacy 2023
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. I didn’t expect to enjoy this one as much as I did, but early on it deviated from the format I’d thought it was going to take, and it went off to surprise me over and over again. It’s an infuriating (and I hope exaggerated) account of racism in America perfectly balanced with pulp sci-fi.

MVP of Literacy 2023
Agatha Christie. Last year I started reading or re-reading the mysteries, most of which I hadn’t read since high school, and it was more like discovering a new author than getting re-acquainted with a familiar one. I never appreciated how innovative and experimental Christie could be, or how well some of her books situated themselves in “modern times” as opposed to being quaint relics of the early 20th century.

Runner-Up MVP of Literacy 2023
Mary Roach. I kind of worked my way up to her most well-known books (Stiff and Bonk), which was a great way to get familiar with her style before seeing how good it could be when she’s firing on all cylinders. I’m looking forward to reading more of her books in 2024.

Goal for Literacy 2024
12 Books in 2024. I like having an arbitrary number to encourage myself to keep reading — and I probably would’ve left Shadow of the Sith hanging had I not been driven to finish it before the end of the year — but “a book a month” is a perfectly reasonable goal. I’d rather end the year feeling happy that I exceeded one arbitrary target instead of disappointed that I didn’t hit an equally arbitrary one.

RIP to Goals of Past Years
I did try to resume The Starless Sea, as I’d pledged in previous years, but I finally had to abandon it as being just not for me. My biggest complaint was that it was so high on its own supply of magical realism that it felt twee, but I read so many positive reviews that I resolved to try again. And almost immediately, it hit me with a description of a merchant who collected stars and traded them for secrets. I mean come on.

Most Looking Forward To in 2024
The Destroyer of Worlds, the sequel to Lovecraft Country, which I got as a Christmas gift

Call to Action
I’ve still got a long backlog of books, but I’m always looking for new recommendations. If there’s anything you’ve read that made a particular impact on you, feel free to recommend it in the comments or on Mastodon!

Literacy 2023: Book 18: Shadow of the Sith

An interim Star Wars story in which Luke and Lando try to protect Rey’s family from a sinister Sith plot.

Book
Shadow of the Sith by Adam Christopher

Synopsis
Set between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, the story begins with Luke Skywalker training the next generation of young Jedi while Lando Calrissian is searching the galaxy for his kidnapped daughter. Their paths cross when Lando overhears a plot from an evil bounty hunter assigned to track down a young couple and their daughter, which ties in with sinister plans from Sith cultists and Luke’s own nightmarish visions of a dark planet called Exegol.

Pros

A team-up of two characters I rarely see in Star Wars stories, during a time period that we haven’t yet seen much of.
Carefully connects the dots between ideas and events mentioned in the sequel trilogy, or shown briefly in flashback.
Gives more characterization of Rey’s parents, and offers an explanation of the events that led to her being left on a desolate planet at the start of The Force Awakens, as well as an explanation for how Emperor Palpatine had a son that no one knew about.
Some of the locations are as evocative and imaginative as Star Wars at its best, like a ghost planet bleached of color by radiation, and a world covered in diamond “frozen” over a treacherous ocean. Their descriptions suggest classic concept art from the films and TV series.

Cons

The dialogue is pretty clunky, even by Star Wars standards.
Trying to justify some of the decisions in The Rise of Skywalker is a thankless job, and I don’t think the book quite manages to live up to the challenge. In particular, the end of Rey’s family’s story to set up the first sequel is still unsatisfying.
The back stories for some of the characters are too complicated with a few too many names of characters involved, implying to me that they’re attempting to piece together threads from the comics or from other novelizations that I haven’t read.
Tries to split the difference between science fiction and Star Wars fantasy, which works sometimes, but often feels like unnecessary explanations for things the reader would otherwise just accept and run with.
Related to the above: because it’s essentially a chase story, so much of the story involves characters trying to track each other down across the Galaxy. The book tries to offer a pseudo-sci-fi justification, which just draws attention to how much of the plot is characters just knowing things “because reasons.”
An entire storyline of the book consists of characters trying to avoid a fate that we already know is unavoidable, and our main protagonists have no real agency in affecting it.
As it’s trying to fill in the gaps between existing stories, it’s obligated to leave most of its threads unresolved. This results in our main characters having no real arc; they end the story pretty much exactly how they began it.

Verdict
I didn’t enjoy this one, but honestly it’s as much my own fault as it is the fault of the book. It’s not my preferred “flavor” of Star Wars, but as it’s got “Sith” in the title, I should probably have predicted how much of it feels like “Star Wars For Goths.” (That still somehow manages to turn into a scene that reads like the goofy-but-horrifying-to-a-kid climax of Superman 3). I’m also realizing that I’m no longer the same kid who freaked out over Splinter of the Mind’s Eye; I just can’t get into the novelizations anymore, since they too often feel like trying to explore the inner minds of characters who, by design, are only just as deep as they need to be to drive pulp fiction.

It’s an unenviable job to have to connect the dots and provide depth and nuance to things that screenwriters only intended as Macguffins, or as puzzle boxes deliberately left for someone else to open and explore. Shadow of the Sith feels weighed down by too many franchise requirements to ever get the chance to go off on interesting tangents and tell its own story.

Our iPads, Ourselves

Dumb thoughts about obsolescence, both planned and unplanned

Apparently I’m firmly in the phase of my life where I get sentimental about computers of my past, and the one that’s been on my mind lately is the iPad mini.

That may seem weird, even by the inherently weird standard of getting sentimental about computers, because the whole idea behind the iPad is that the device disappears and puts all the focus on the content. But the form factor of the mini just got everything right. I remember seeing its initial announcement and thinking the whole idea was absurd: too big to be as pocketable as a phone, too small to be as practical as a full-size tablet. But then I went to a Best Buy, picked one up, and said, “okay, now I get it.”¹

I’ve “upgraded” to a bigger iPad, which is a lot more useful for the things I use an iPad for, but the mini is just ineffably more satisfying to hold. It’s also the form factor that feels most like living in the future. The larger ones might provoke thoughts like “I could draw masterpieces on this!” or “I could write a movie on this” or “I could watch a bunch of YouTube videos I’ve downloaded for a long plane flight,” but holding the iPad mini makes you² think, “I could scan the atmosphere for alien particulate matter with this!”

Last night, I dug my old iPad mini out of its resting place, found a lightning cable to plug it in, and quickly felt a pang of guilt. This is a device that had been perfectly happy in whatever Valhalla beloved computers are rewarded with after their short lifetimes of usefulness, and I’d cruelly yanked it away from the light, into the cold reality of late 2023.

A while back, when I tried something similar by recharging my old Nintendo handhelds, I was surprised at how easily most of them came back to life. They made a pleasant chiming sound and seemed to say, “Hey, welcome back! Let’s play a game!” The iPad mini just showed a dead battery icon before grudgingly stuttering into its home screen, as if to gasp, “Why won’t you let me die?”³

I looked it up, and I bought the iPad mini 2 in 2014. I hadn’t realized it’d been almost 10 years! It informed me that 154 app updates were available, and the installed apps were like a snapshot of ages past. Games that were never played, apps that had fallen out of favor and been replaced by newer versions, or ingenious ideas that the creators had simply abandoned. I’d forgotten about a book-in-the-form-of-an-app (remember those?) about Disney animation, which was touting the technological advancements of its newest feature, Frozen.

When I tried to place 2014 in my own lifetime, I couldn’t remember what was going on back then, even though it wasn’t all that long ago. For the record: it was right at the time of my disastrous second stint at Telltale Games, but the more memorable events were going to the British Isles for a wedding, and having parties and events with friends.⁴

I realized that that was a transition period in my life overall, where I’d stopped dividing up time in terms of projects I was working on and companies I was working for, and started using more personal landmarks like travel and social gatherings.⁵ It was the start of a shift to where I stopped thinking about my life in terms of productivity, and more in terms of just plain enjoyment.

By my old standards, that would make it seem like I wasn’t accomplishing as much. But by any really meaningful standard, it meant that I was starting to be able to enjoy all the rewards of hard work, instead of just working hard for the sake of some vague payoff in the future.

And back to using the iPad as metaphor: ten years of gradual improvements. If you read the tech blogs and watch the gadget videos, you could get the sense that the tech industry as a whole, and Apple in particular, has been stagnating. Just churning out variations on black rounded rectangles year after year, with incremental changes instead of revolutionary ones. But I can look at this device I got almost ten years ago, and it almost seems like a product of a different time. Things have gotten so much better since then, without my taking notice.

(To be clear: I do wish that ten years wasn’t “ancient” by modern computer standards. But I also have some stock in Apple, so the capitalist in me is glad they’re regularly selling more stuff).

So this iPad mini is unlikely to be that useful for anything apart from being a time capsule to not-that-long ago. But it also feels more like a kindred spirit: pretty slow and clunky, doesn’t perform as well as it used to, gets overheated with just a little bit of exertion, still mad sexy though.

1
No one at the store seemed all that fazed by my sudden announcement; I guess people at Best Buy are used to strangers having sudden epiphanies about gadgets.
2
Okay, just me
3
The heat pouring off of its right side made it seem even angrier.
4
I also had pretty sweet sideburns for a while there.
5
And my hair.

Illiterati

Illiterati is a cooperative word game that incorporates the best aspects of both

For Christmas, I got my fiance a copy of Illiterati as something of a last-minute gift, and we’ve had the chance to play it a few times already.

I knew absolutely nothing about the game apart from the fact that it’s light-to-medium weight and that it supports 1-7 players, so I was crossing my fingers and hoping that it’d be good. It’s been a very pleasant surprise, because I liked it immediately, and I’m always down for another game.

The premise is that each player is a librarian, trying to use random letter tiles to form words which will complete books. Meanwhile, a cabal of villains called the Illiterati are trying to eliminate all books from the world. Each turn, a new villain will appear to hamper your progress.

In practice: each player starts with a hand of tiles drawn randomly from a bag, with a separate “library” of tiles shared among all players. Each player also gets a red book and a blue book that they’ll try to “bind” over the course of the game. Each book has an objective, based on either a theme (the example in the featured image is “Sports Terms”) or a type of word (some examples have been words that are anagrams of each other, words that rhyme, etc). Once you have made enough word(s) to complete your current objective, you bind that book and move on to the next objective.

At the end of each turn, the players draw a random villain from the Illiterati deck, and its effect will play out. Then the players draw more tiles to supplement their hand, and the game continues. After every player has bound their two books, all of the players as a team draw a book for “the final chapter,” a more difficult objective that everyone has to complete simultaneously.

Just reading a description of the gameplay, I got the impression that Illiterati would be fun but straightforward, and probably light enough to be forgettable. Something like Bananagrams but with much nicer components, for instance. After playing a few games, though, I realized I wasn’t giving it nearly enough credit. It’s a word game plus a cooperative game, and somehow it has all of the best aspects of each, and it fixes most of the annoyances of each.

One Thing I Love About Wonka

My favorite thing about Wonka is how it effectively chooses songs from the original, and then goes off to do its own thing

When I first saw a link to a trailer for Wonka, a 2023 prequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory starring Timothée Chalamet, I was prepared for the worst. And I was pleasantly surprised when I could find nothing wrong with it; it looked perfectly charming.

After seeing it, I was happy to see that it is charming (albeit far from perfectly) from the start. It begins with the three repeated notes from “Pure Imagination” — which work so well because they are vaguely creepily discordant — before launching into an original opening song confidently introducing Chalamet as a young Willy Wonka.

I should admit from the start that I was almost hoping to find fault in Chalamet’s performance, and by the end of the first song, I gave up and just resigned to having to acknowledge that sometimes famous people are just good at stuff. I think he did an exceptional job creating a version of the character that is at the opposite end of Gene Wilder’s version — all of the optimism and kind-heartedness and almost-compulsive showmanship and eagerness to make people happy, but before decades of seeing people’s greed (and excessive gum-chewing and TV-watching) put a darker and more melancholy spin on it.

Which is, more or less, my most significant criticism of the movie: it delivers exactly what is promised on the poster, wonderfully, but no more than that. It’s an often-delightful and imaginative children’s movie about imagination and hope, with tons of people doing excellent work to sell every moment, but there’s little sense of a unique voice.

Santa in Space

Experimenting with Nomad Sculpt for Christmas 2023

It’s been a while since I’ve devoted some time to playing around with Nomad Sculpt for iPad, and I’d forgotten how much fun it is.

More than any other 3D tool I’ve used, it’s very intuitive, forgiving of mistakes, and seems designed for translating your intention into 3D instead of making you force what’s in your head into “proper” topology and such. Plus it’s got a ton of post-processing effects built in that feel like cheating; it almost seems like I know what I’m doing.

Here’s a model for Christmas 2023: Santa in Space. He’s so excited to deliver gifts to the ISS that he didn’t check whether his sack could survive the explosive decompression.¹ The original intent was to give him a big glass space hemet (with his hat on top, of course), but I found out halfway through that ~~Nomad doesn’t support transparent materials, as far as I’m aware~~.

Edit: Nomad does support transparent materials; they’re just not where I expected them to be (since it’s not where you set all other material properties). You can change them in the top-level material menu when you have an object selected, choose “blending” or “additive,” and set a transparency value. It does everything except auto-fit a globe around a long beard, which is why I haven’t updated the image.

I’d still rank myself as very much an amateur — I have trouble with getting sharp details without its turning into a big, lumpy mess — but I can already tell I’ve improved since the last time I played with the software. I think modeling cartoonish, chubby, white-bearded guys is playing to my strengths, since I always have a model at the ready.

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates!

Edit 2: Because it was bugging me, I went back in and gave Space Santa a helmet. (And tweaked a couple of other things like his teeth). Merry Christmas, Space Santa!

1
So to speak.

Literacy 2023: Book 17: The Thursday Murder Club

Richard Osman’s cozy crime story about a group of residents of a retirement community solving a “real” murder

Book
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

Synopsis
Four residents of a retirement community formed The Thursday Murder Club, where they look over cold case files and try to find some kind of justice for victims of unsolved crimes. When someone close to their community is murdered, they’re compelled to investigate, in unofficial cooperation with the local police.

Pros

Compelling and more quick-moving than you might expect from the premise.
Cleverly structured to stay in sync with the reader — loose ends are tied up, and potential suspects are cleared away, right as they need to be.
Deftly walks the line between “ghoulish fascination with lurid details of murders” and “bringing a sense of justice,” which is one of the problems inherent in the whole idea of a “cozy” murder mystery.
Clear sense of good guys and bad guys, and more significantly, which characters deserve depth and which are left as caricatures.
Gives each of the main characters a history and a depth to their present.
Deeper themes run underneath the murder mystery, asserting the dignity of the elderly as complex human beings in a particular stage of their lives, instead of existing only as “old people.” Goes into the details of their relationships, their fears, and how their current lives overlap their previous ones.

Cons

Aggressively cozy. Obviously, “cozy murder story” is the whole pitch for this book, but it threatens to make everything feel too artificial.
Feels like a bit of a cheat to have a character who’s essentially a super-hero, but with the advantage of adding a Poirot-style character into a story that could’ve easily been just four Miss Marples.
Some of the revelations late in the book seem to come out of nowhere — they’re foreshadowed, but the reader gets no clues to deduce them.
Ends up being more of a “crime story” than “murder mystery,” as you’ve got a vague idea of suspects and red herrings, but not enough clues to solve the mystery yourself.

Verdict
I was prepared to write this one off as “quick but shallow,” but halfway through, I was completely won over. I’d expected it to be just a case of a successful celebrity taking a stab at writing, taking advantage of his name-recognition to launch it into best-seller status. But it’s charming and often moving, a solid read as a murder mystery story, with just enough edge to its characters to make them appealing. I enjoyed it a lot, and I’m looking forward to the next three books in the series.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Overkill

Two tangentially-related tunes on the theme of going harder than necessary

The other night I was in the grocery store, and I seemingly spontaneously remembered the mighty morphin’ models at the end of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video. And it cheered me up a surprising amount. While I like to think of myself as an intellectual, I suspect that I’m actually more like an infant who’s still struggling with object permanence, and who lights up whenever he sees the face of someone smiling and saying “Yeah yeah yeah.” I was giggling in the bagel aisle.

I’m struck by how The Youths probably can’t fully appreciate what a huge cultural touchstone that video was. Even in a world where Beyonce, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift all exist, it’s hard to imagine someone being so singularly, globally famous as Michael Jackson. He had the money and fame to do literally whatever he wanted, and he was just batshit enough to do it.

It felt as if everyone in the world was immediately familiar with that morphing sequence, and it’s still the part that I remember immediately. Watching the video again, I’d completely forgotten the whole Amblin-esque beginning, with its unnecessary flight through a suburban neighborhood model, culminating in Macaulay Culkin launching George Wendt across the planet with only the power of his electric guitar. I’d also remembered the rest of the video playing out on a sound stage, instead of having Jackson in the desert dancing with tons of Native Americans, many of whom were on horseback.

For that matter, I remembered a long sequence of Jackson in an alley smashing car windows with the power of a crowbar and his crotch-forward choreography, but had misremembered it as a completely different song. That version of the video was supposedly controversial at the time, but now it seems superfluous and more than a little bit silly, coming across like one of those Musicless Music Videos.¹

Honestly, I’d been thinking that OK Go were pioneers in making ridiculously, excessively overwrought videos for catchy-but-let’s-be-honest-mostly-inoffensive-at-best pop songs, but this was a reminder that it goes way back to the early 1990s.

And while the morphing effect is still pretty solid even by 2023 standards, in my opinion, the thing that’s most effective about the whole video is simply the joy at the end. The smiles may be forced, but the sentiment’s not. I like that the most enduring image of the video is just a multicultural bunch of human beings being goofy and smiling at the camera. It kind of makes the rest seem unnecessary.

Which reminded me of “Overkill” by Colin Hay. Appropriately, the best versions of that song are the ones that remove the saxophone and the rest of the Men at Work, and just have an acoustic guitar and Hay’s amazing voice.

1
And I’d forgotten the most genuinely clever part of an otherwise extremely corny video: as director John Landis is talking to the last morphing dancer in front of a stock gray background on a sound stage, he can be overheard asking, “How did you do that?!”