notes: april 2026 (pt. 2)
i will no longer be getting that movie confused with “roadhouse” or that other movie confused with “fritz the cat”
biweekly newsletter listing all the music, movies, books, and, tv i, mike, have experienced for the first time over the past two weeks and also the things i have thought about them. again, i am mike.
2026 releases
lantlos, nowhere in between i liked the new sound on wildhund, which really gets perfected on the grunge-pop of lead single/album opener “daisies” as it gives way to continuously heavier guitar passages, though things never really seem to leave the runway again—most everything that follows instead foregrounds the layered and modulated vocals, breakbeats, and other electro-pop flourishes, not to mention shoegaze-as-vibe-ism. which, whatever, maybe it’s not for me, but it seems kind of unrealistic that this album will reach its intended audience. which is maybe M83 fans looking to get into hum.
sugar horse, not a sound in heaven the dark horse among the unreasonably large slate of “horse” artists releasing music at the moment and also one that doesn’t match the aesthetic of their band name or album artwork at all—those light pinks and greens feel a little misleading for some of the doomiest, sludgiest noise rock i’ve heard in a moment. reminds me a bit of baroness, whose music i admittedly lose interest in when the vocalist enters the equation, though i think these guys make the fronting-the-wrong-band thing work much better. also, some of my favorite metal albums are made by groups who genuinely seem to believe that what they’re making is dance music when it absolutely is not, while most of my favorite metal albums grapple with the “great crimes of the american empire in the 20th century,” as the LP’s press release affirms. i swear i thought “you can’t say dallas doesn’t love you” was something matty mac said in magic mike.
older albums
infinity crush, virtual heaven (2019) absolutely peerless writer when it comes to fawning love songs about someone who had better not be in her bed when she wakes up. also a true visionary among artists who are never not thinking about the load-out/load-in process when composing.
the nighty nite, dimples (2011) before john congleton produced your favorite indie rock album of the 2020s he fronted this deeply evil band that often sounds like the AJJ guy doing a halloween set as ben folds, delivering cringe lines like “please go easy on these hoes” over piano and horror-movie strings. sometimes sounds like it was made in 2011, unfortunately, but otherwise it’s a pretty fascinating EP.
wiki, oofie (2019) wiki’s stuff has always been hit-or-miss for me, and what this album made me realize that it’s “hit” when he’s working with tony seltzer and it’s “miss” when he sounds weirdly a like an east coast version of kendrick. i guess my other main takeaway here is that “grim” proves secret circle could’ve taken off after all if they’d just swapped antwon out for denzel—it’s rare we get a guest verse from zel that’s this dialed-in.
woods, woods family creeps (2008) trying not to phrase this in a “stuff isn’t good anymore” sort of way, but are there any post-aughts indie bands who were weird little freaks on their early material before flattening out their sound to fit pre-existing molds? at its most conventional, this album feels a bit waitsian—it’s a shame this band seems so ashamed of all these songs about shame they released prior to songs about shame. like, three of the most interesting tracks they ever released get stuffed into a single sub-five-minute recording here, which is maybe my only complain given that so much of the runtime is dedicated to the spacious instrumental jam stuff woods has been into from their early days as a friendly-ghost minimalist lo-fi freak-folk trio to their present-day formation as an upstate new york version of wilco. they were truly never the same after jarvis played that huge clothespin on ellen.
movies
cocktail dir. roger donaldson (1988) had no idea the extent to which this was the wrong kind of ’80s movie, with its proletariat protagonists lobbing the word “proletariat” around as an insult, whose romantic problems all stem from kalshi-fying their relationships, who take common objects for granted as they can only think of the millionaire inventors behind them. reaganism is embedded in the lead character who looks distinctly like an ivy leaguer whose dad probably had to make some phone calls instead of the underdog figure he’s meant to be (and poet—they always wanted to think that they can do art, too!), and it feels like cause and effect that we learn that the woman he truly loves is actually extremely rich immediately after he develops a conscience. above all it’s an absolute endurance test watching tom cruise make the most punchable faces he can as he dances behind the bar to dumb pop songs like he just announced windows 95. honestly at times this just feels like a feature-length advertisement for him at the dawn of the ’90s star-vehicle era of hollywood. there’s literally a romantic montage soundtracked by the lyric “i’ll be your pleasure cruise.”
the drama dir. kristoff borgli (2026) really love how hollywood flirted with cancel culture as a source of dramatic storytelling for a single summer before moving on (was there a cancelled-pastor movie or did i hallucinate that?), only to have some norwegian guy adopt the concept and prod deeper into it with every new script he wrote without losing any of the situational humor he manages to derive from a certain hive-brainrot facilitated by social media (also, unrelatedly, lots of puking-as-punchline). feels like the distinctly present-day romcom A24 has been reaching for lately, taking the “let’s start over” cliche of the genre and warping it into an allegory for the societal illness that is our inability to forgive each other’s childhood mistakes now that they’re all laid out on searchable timelines, while even offering up contemporized visions of primary plot points from taxi driver and chasing amy on the side (i also counted two seinfeld storylines—the sniffing accountant and george’s affection falling on deaf ear—to say nothing of the movie being about four people discussing their worst behavior around restaurant seating). also some of the funniest edits i’ve ever seen—like the french new wave only the cuts are actually saying something substantial.
falling dir. viggo mortensen (2020) most biden-era movie i’ve ever seen with its sexagenarian view of liberal righteousness expressed via carefully sculpted identity politics: the twilight-aged bigot from the midwest farmlands growls at his gay air force vet son who lives in california with his interracial family and prominently-placed obama “hope” poster (there’s also a goth niece in the mix). the whole thing feels loosely adapted from a “hate has no home here” yard sign, exuding a familiar smugness about taking the high road after half a decade of trumpism, with viggo at the center of it all doing everything that’s made me avoid his work from this period of his career—half the movie is just him smiling and shaking his head at his dementia-addled dad’s un-PC antics as he essentially slowly kills the man with kindness. lance henriksen looking like a confused freddy krueger manages to steal the show here (cronenberg also makes a cameo as a proctologist, naturally) despite viggo once again showing off his language skills and trotting out the fact that he shot a duck out of the sky on his first try as a kid in what is evidently the only autobiographical detail to the story. that and maybe the fact that the goth niece is wearing his ex’s band’s t-shirt.
howard the duck dir. william huyck (1986) movie about the very reasonable stress of suddenly finding yourself in cleveland with severe PTSD. george lucas’ next venture after bankrolling kurosawa’s return was something of a prototype for ted with any laughs it may elicit being uneasy as the audience grows more concerned that no movie this horny could possibly end without any sort of consummation. it becomes clear immediately that its comic aspirations never extend beyond replacing “guy” or “man” with “duck” or otherwise inserting that word in familiar names from pop culture—as if the store is called “bloominghumans”—and variations on that idea account for at least half of the jokes that aren’t about people thinking howard is either a pet or a kid in a costume. rather than a comedy i think this falls under the mid-’80s category of “spectacle films,” or totally incomprehensible movies produced to fill the void left by all the best ’70s filmmakers momentarily losing their funding. funny we all went nuts for spider-man in the 2000s when this was the precedent for marvel.
pleasantville dir. gary ross (1998) a fever-dream merging of the comically dysfunctional nuclear family from malcolm in the middle with the (in retrospect) comically functional dick van dyke show family; a westworld for even bigger nerds than genre buffs that also features plenty of the truman show’s simulation anxiety and peggy sue got married’s anachronistic horniness as a pair of disaffected ’90s youths johnny-b.-goode the sexual revolution and existentialist concepts upon a pre-enlightenment TV sitcom town on the cusp of embracing a ’60s culture that’s silly and sexy and dangerous. the way these two decades clash so significantly additionally goes to show how different the expectation-free ’90s were from the decade that preceded it—whose films incorporated the false optimism of the ’50s with a little too much ease—and its message seems to be that our supposed amoral society has far more to offer than the escapist fantasy old sitcoms provide to the type of person who wishes we were all still listening to nothing but john philip sousa marches. there are certainly the makings for a movie as transcendent as truman show here, though this one isn’t nearly as coherent. for one thing it suddenly seems to turn into a civil rights allegory in the final act, which is especially off-putting when the whole cast is white.
split second dir. tony maylam (1992) buddy-cop giallo set in cyberpunk london where a predator-like devil jack-the-rippers his victims into corpses very much worthy of grindcore album covers. i do still have a lot of questions, as is often the case with a movie like this—why is the movie called that? why did they feel the need to set the scene by telling us the city was what our world would look like in 2008 due to global warming only for that to never really come up again, aside from the rat infestation that comes with there being, like, a foot of water everywhere? why did they kill wendy carlos’ score?—but overall it does a good job of creating a blade runner-like world for whatever on earth the concept was supposed to be and is genuinely very funny. love rutger as an unbelievably cool guy named harley (like the motorcycle, because of the motorcycle) who throws everything over his shoulder when he’s done with it. he’s introduced by flashing his badge to a barking dog and saying “police, dickhead,” and you’d be surprised at how much more mileage he gets out of that bit.