Now Playing: January 2023

Our January edition of Now Playing features movies to drive away the cold and the search for rhythm from our contributors!

Ajay Makan

I’m spending the start of the year learning basic Hindi in North India and Netflix immigrant comedies are seeing me through the coldest nights.

Ali’s Wedding is a whacky romcom centred on a Iraqi Shi'a mosque in Melbourne and Kim’s Convenience is a sitcom set in a Korean bodega. Neither is subtle: Kim’s convenience, in particular, is full of hammed up accents and enough cutaways of fixed gear bikes to suggest it was funded by the Toronto tourist board. But both nicely skewer immigrant parent expectation (Ali spends a year in medical school lectures rather than tell his parents he failed the entrance exam) and the moments of parent-child reconciliation are satisfyingly sweet.

January’s too cold to have much critical faculty and immigrant comedy is my comfort blanket.

Francis Walsh

Lately, I like to use musical search terms to find public playlists on Spotify. Usually, the terms are specific ideas that I am curious about, or unfamiliar with, or just in the mood for, like a 7/8-time signature, or oboe solos, or the Purdie Shuffle. It is delightful to find a stranger who has curated a list to appease a curiosity they never knew I had, and the specific search terms help to showcase the underlying grammar of music. Seal and Pink Floyd seem a lot less disparate when they’re both counting to seven.

Also, after listening to Peter and the Wolf, I just pretend that every oboe is a duck.