40. Under a warm blanket
I.
Watching Joe Pera Talks with You on HBO Max is like wrapping yourself in a warm blanket. In episodes of (usually) ten minutes, you follow the life of a music teacher in a small American village. Joe Pera’s character is a man in his thirties, with the clothes, hairstyle and interests of a 70-year-old.
This makes him funny, but never ridiculous. Just as other quirky characters in the series are never laughed at. Pera falls in love with Sarah, a prepper with a bunker filled with weapons and tinned food. How Pera deals with this is in itself a commentary on American society. He just doesn’t shove it down your throat with a crude joke like other comedians would.
One of the best episodes comes from season 1, when Pera Baba O’Rileyby The Who. He becomes completely captivated by it and calls every radio station in the area to request it. Anyone else would simply have opened Spotify.
Generally, the episodes feel almost meditative. Pera speaks slowly and monotonously, the images and colours are soft, and most is said in the silences and the characters’ faces. Even at ten minutes per episode, you could call this slow TV. It’s almost never hilarious, but it’s definitely a heart-warming series.
After three seasons, the series was cancelled, but Joe Pera has found his niche in the podcast world. In the current series *Drifting off with Joe Pera *he talks you to sleep. These, too, are almost meditative audio vignettes about all sorts of things – and it is indeed difficult to stay awake.
I mean what I’ve written above in a very positive way. I had a wonderful time in the strange Joe Pera universe. His new stand-up show Slow & Steady is now also on YouTube.
---II.
So much for the heart-warming part of this blog. I also watched Black Christmas (1974), and as someone writes on Letterboxd: “I was expecting a fun, campy Christmas slasher and instead I got one of the most chilling horror films I’ve seen in ages”.
A group of female students live in a large house. They occasionally receive calls from a breathy voice saying obscene things. Then one of the girls goes missing. And then the landlord. And then, as they say, all hell breaks loose.
Black Christmas was released in the same year as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and both have left a significant mark on the slasher genre. You hear people talk about the latter more often, but secretly Black Christmas is better. The film is incredibly tense even though you barely see anything. A fluttering curtain, a moving shadow in the background. This is the sort of film that gets under your skin. Not least because of the increasingly nasty phone calls and the distorted piano in the soundtrack.
This film is a proto-slasher, one of the first of its kind. Without Black Christmas, for example, there would be no Halloween. It is also a social commentary on the toxic behaviour of men. Over the years, there have been a few remakes that forgot that social commentary and focused on more violence and blood. That’s where horror films often go wrong. But the original is highly recommended for the Christmas holidays. A nice change from Home Alone.
---PS.
This is brilliant. A special episode of The Great British Bake Off, in which four British professional footballers bake cakes of their football heroes. Naturally, they’re absolutely hopeless at it. Best joke: Paul Hollywood on Wayne Rooney’s head.
---Visual artist Ekow Nimako works exclusively with black LEGO bricks. He uses them to create sculptures that are both futuristic and draw on black mythology.
---My former colleague Bram van Dijk and his father Kees are fans of Buurman & Buurman. That’s why they recreated the DIY duo’s inventions in real life, such as the pancake machine and the hovercraft. The creators of Buurman & Buurman saw the videos and invited Bram and Kees for a behind-the-scenes look at their studio. This resulted in a lovely portrait of “a very sweet family in a dull Prague suburb”. But the best part is the joy of 70-year-old Kees, who, I reckon, still goes about with a huge smile on his face.
---Fancy watching this HBO Max documentary about the hysteria surrounding the millennium bug? It’s available from the end of this month.
---The First Twelve Minutes of a Journey to the South is a short animated film by the Flemish animator and comedian Thomas Huyghe. You see four characters from a mixed group of friends on a very uncomfortable car journey. The details are brilliant, especially the way the passengers’ smartphones light up every now and then, and the driver trying to keep the conversation going.
---Threads is now officially available in the Netherlands. Yet another alternative to X, alongside Bluesky and Mastodon. The advantage is the low barrier to entry, thanks to the link with Instagram. As always, the early days of a new social network are still small-scale and cosy. Let’s hope it stays that way. You can find me here.
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