James David Ward

The Well’s having their annual State of the World conversation right now. I read it for the first time last year, and I recommend following along. We’re bombarded by news and shallow political opinion all the time, so it’s good to calibrate by reading what some people with an opportunity to think more cohesively, and suggest overall trends and tendencies, away from the light and the heat, and get a different lens on it all.

There I was, wondering what I was going to write about today, and Netflix drops a new short film by David Lynch, on his birthday. Evidently made in 2016, it’s called What Did Jack Do? and it has to be seen to be believed. Go watch it, before the spoilers, before it’s memed out of existence, and then we’ll talk.

I’m not a religious man. I figure I would have ended up being in the church had I lived a couple of centuries ago, being of that sort of temperament, but not believing in any gods somewhat rules it out nowadays.

So I’m not necessarily the target audience for a film about Popes. It’s also smack-bang in the middle of Oscar bait territory. It’s a biopic about important white men on the cusp of an Important Event, starring two Great British Actors, filmed by a previous Oscar nominee from a script by someone with pedigree in this field.

When I watched this back in 2007/8, I remember being mostly distracted, but vaguely disappointed. After watching and critiquing the BBC’s His Dark Materials series, we went back to this one on Saturday just to check what we thought.

Watching this really makes you thankful for Jack Thorne and box set television.

After two weeks, I’m hopefully getting to the tail end of this cold. Only four tablets a day… I didn’t use to take anything when ill, due to some concerns about becoming resistant to paracetamol, but for the past few years I’ve taken the “nuke from orbit” approach to health care.