Crave!

Kiwi singer Jamie McDell releases her latest album today, and she’s take a few minutes to talk to Crave! about family, recording, and the musicians she’s been fortunate enough to work with in Nashville making her record.

Netflix continues to turn out classy, high-budget dramas. The latest is Clickbait, a stylish, engaging thriller that manages to make a few interesting points about modern life and wrap itself in a clever narrative structure. For all that, it has its flaws, but Steve and Simon both found it to be a highly entertaining piece of television.

Aotearoa finds itself back in lockdown, and so Kiwis are looking for things to keep us entertained. One of last year’s great breakout hits was La Casa De Papel, the Spanish thriller better known in the English-speaking world as Money Heist.

After four series–two utterly remarkable, two utterly barking mad but still thoroughly entertaining—the story was left hanging, and so, just in time for our current lockdown, we have a fifth series, and Netflix have released five episodes so far, with more to come in December.

And Simon and Steve have lots to say about this new instalment. Simon’s already written a review, but you’ll want to hear them both discussing the latest episodes together, won’t you?

Crave! has finally reached three figures! Steve and Simon refuse to let a pandemic hold them back, and Crave! returns, with a slightly updated format. We’re just looking at one thing per episode for a while, and for our one hundredth episode we’re focusing on The White Lotus.

Crave! is back, and this week Simon and Steve are doing their best to contain their frustration—they’re not angry, they’re just very, very disappointed—at Guy Ritchie’s latest, Wrath Of Man. Significantly less disappointing is Locked Down, surely the first of many, many films that feature the lockdowns of 2020 as plot points. It’s good, but it’s not brilliant. But next to Wrath Of Man, it’s a work of genius. And Simon has been very impressed with ZeroZeroZero, the latest in the Narcos/Ozark “let’s humanise drug dealers” trend, a show that finds the human side of violent criminals.

It’s been a while, but Crave! is back, and better than ever. In a heavily Kiwi-centric comeback episode, Steve and Simon talk about Black Hands, the new dramatisation of the Bain family killings, and about local acts Dave Dobbyn at Spark Arena and The Beths at Auckland Town Hall. And, since there is a world beyond Aotearoa, albeit one we’re keeping at a safe distance, there’s a lot to be said too about Des, the David Tennant-based exploration of British serial killer Denis Nilsen. Steve has taken one for the team and seen the new Sacha Baron Cohen vehicle, the over-egged but under-written Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm, and Simon finds something to celebrate in 2020 in the shape of a new Bruce Springsteen album, Letter To You.

As Simon and Steve inch ever closer to their hundredth episode, the emphasis remains on films. Radioactive is the story of Marie Curie, and a film that both our reviewers found quite engaging.

Less so Eurovision Song Contest: The Story Of Fire Saga, to give this latest Will Ferrell vehicle its Sunday-best name. While Steve, and Debbie The Intrepid Guest Reviewer, both found it highly entertaining, there’s just a little too much Ferrell for Simon’s tastes.

So as a palate-cleanser, Simon’s been enjoying the new album Folklore from Taylor Swift. Steve’s willing to be convinced, but still allows that it’s worth a listen.

And Simon, having had more patience with the first series of True Detective than Steve did, is revisiting the show for its third series, and is finding much to like.

Crave! is finally back, after months of lockdown and carefully managed isolation.

In this first post-lockdown edition, Steve and Simon disagree on Greed, the satire on the nasty wealthy from Michael Winterbottom, but agree on The High Note, a film which takes a great idea and fails to do very much with it.

Lockdown wasn’t totally wasted, of course, with Simon and Steve finding nothing but good things to say about Money Heist, the Spanish drama that has proven itself to be a global smash. Simon talks up The Sinner, a psychological thriller from the US, while Steve is delighted by Shtisel, a much lower-key family drama from Israel.

And in this episode’s podcast bonus, Steve talks to James Reyne, late of Australian Crawl, about his new album Toon Town Lullaby, due out on July 10th.

In what could be the last episode of Crave! to fully feature live entertainment for quite some time, Simon and Steve share a few thoughts about what lies ahead.

But in more positive thoughts, Steve has a lot of good things to say about The Book of Mormon, the massively successful and remarkably funny musical that, sadly, you’ll not be seeing in Auckland soon since its run has been, rather unavoidably, cancelled. At the other end of the musical spectrum, Simon is equally impressed with Aotearoa’s own Alien Weaponry, who made some very loud noises at the Town Hall lately.

The Personal History Of David Copperfield is an outstanding piece of period cinema, unlike Emma, which has left Simon a touch cold, while Steve is very impressed with Bombshell, which tells a rather unpleasant story very well.

Simon and Steve were very fortunate to be at the first scheduled Elton John concert in Auckland this weekend, because it turned out to be his last at Mount Smart Stadium, Elton having abandoned the show almost two hours in. But while we’re hoping that maybe we’ll see him again when he comes back to New Zealand to play the two shows he’s now postponed until January of 2021, there’s no denying that the show he did play was quite outstanding.

Despite Steve and Simon’s predictions to the contrary, Parasite won numerous Oscars recently, including Best Picture, and Best Director for Bong Joon-Ho. But while Simon agrees it’s a worthy winner, Steve does have some reservations, as he also has about Queen + Adam Lambert, an impressive show but not quite deserving of the utterly unalloyed praise that, in particular, Lambert’s fans seem to think it’s entitled to.

Back in the cinema, Simon has enjoyed the French rom-com La Belle Epoque rather more than Steve enjoyed the quite pointless, and pointlessly lengthily-titled, Birds Of Prey: And The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn (or, quite possible, just Harley Quinn: Birds Of Prey—either way, it’s hard to care).