I know it’s silly to call something underrated when it’s just barely released. However, I can make some exceptions. In the case of Ben Morfitt’s recently released album “It’s All A Bit Weird,” it released to little-to-no fanfare and, in the weeks since, has only garnered maybe a few thousand views at most. I am not a music critic, so I’m not going to call this a review. Instead, I’d like to spotlight the work that Morfitt has done.

Not only has he produced an album that’s rich in variety and has tracks that seamlessly blend into each other with ease, but he’s crafted one of the most emotionally resonant pieces of music I’ve heard in a long time. This is impressive for several reasons, the king among them being the fact that there isn’t a single lyric to be found in Morfitt’s new record. Everything is instrumental, and although this may cause it to feel like a soundtrack on distant listens, closer listens reveal tracks that are meticulously paced, and manage to be surprising in areas one wouldn’t expect. The best example I can think of for this is SOS, the penultimate track. It starts out intense, sounding not unlike a battle theme you’d hear in a JRPG game like Final Fantasy. But then it goes harder than that. Suddenly, it sounds like a metal song. But not for too long before what sounds (to me) like a saxophone roars across the airwaves, and it takes a turn for the jazzier. The next track, Surrender, concerns itself more with motifs from previous tracks than anything else. The result is a melancholic and contemplative way to cap things off; as well as being a send-off that manages to loop back to the first track on the album just as seamlessly as the track transitions themselves.

It’s All A Bit Weird caught my eye when Ben Morfitt released The Stagnant Cruise in November 2020. A long and sprawling track that’s dried in an adventurous tan that manages to feel both hopeless and uncertain, it’s, without a doubt, his best piece of music to date. More than a year later, my opinion has not changed. Its inclusion in Morfitt’s new album only strengthens my opinion of it; the mood that the album carries could not be accomplished without it.

What saddens me, though, is that this album will likely never see the popularity it rightfully deserves. I suppose a lot of that has to do with the fact that Morfitt’s work has been dwindling in popularity. Not even a cover of The Office’s main theme song could net him more than one hundred thousand views. In a way, the fact that It’s All A Bit Weird feels like it’s about this decline, and the creative burnout that comes with it makes it feel more significant than a majority of the music that YouTube content creators produce. This isn’t some cheap, slapdash pop music made by somebody who wants to be a megastar while convincing the world that they have more of a footing in pop culture than their status suggests. It’s a personal passion project that manages to hit all of the strides it aims for, and then some.

I will be seriously disappointed if this album doesn’t have a cult following in ten years. And by seriously disappointed, I mean not surprised. But even if nobody else listens to it, it’s impacted me, and I can’t deny that. In short, It’s All A Bit Weird is a masterpiece that was overlooked the second it came out the gate. If you haven’t listened to it already, please do. It’s also on Spotify if you use that.

I like to have a lot of different names online.

I have a couple of good reasons for it. The first, and less significant, one is that I like to get creative. It might be fun to name yourself the same thing on every platform you sign up for, but eventually it gets tiring. The one I’m most fixated on is a fact of online culture: if people want to find you, they will fucking find you. I’m not going to get into that, nor do I want to get into that.

The main reason I say all of this is because Yultimona is not my first blog on WordPress. Not by a long shot.

I had a blog before this. I’d write weekly posts about how bad certain games I had never played were. I did that quite frequently back then; I thought of it more as writing practice than saying anything worthwhile–and I was proud of myself for it. Now that I’m slightly older, I can look at that and laugh. I still access to that blog, but I’m contemplating shutting it down.

These two blogs, though, are not my first.

As of a couple of weeks ago, I am twenty years old–which means I’m old enough for other people to tell me I’m still young. Nearly a decade ago, I had an account with too many blogs to count. Even if I wanted to count them all, though, I couldn’t; I shut down most of them years ago. That account has been made unaccessible for the sole reason of me using a fake email address to register it. My old password still works, but they don’t want anything to do with it.

I had a couple of blogs that I wrote for at the time; one about the game series TimeSplitters (which I had only found out about by mid-2010) and another about… well, whatever I wanted it to be about. The former had my attention the most because I played an absolute fuckton of TimeSplitters back in the day. Of course, writing about a game series long after it was in the limelight and having information on it long after it was made available isn’t exactly a recipe for success; I distinctly remember a few comments asking me what I was talking about because, you know, I was a child.

I also had another blog for short reviews. I remember I gave The Avengers a 10/10 after I saw it in the theaters, I remember giving a Wimpy Kid book of all things a 10… I mean, shit, I gave everything a 10.

I almost want to say I look back fondly on those times, but to be honest: I hardly remember them. Because I made my presence no secret back in the day, I looked up my old username and happened to find a comment written by another account talking about me. Another account that was, of course, created by me. I had no memory of ever doing that, it actually made me laugh.

Back then, I viewed a lot of my writing through the lens of imagination. Who cares if it was all incomprehensible gibberish. I had fun!

Ten years later, I don’t know what to tell you. I grew up, but I haven’t “grown up.” I’m not going to try to write anything poignant here about aging because there’s nothing poignant to write. If you want to know how I feel, just sit in the same chair for ten years. Age like a regular person would, and then come back to me. The only insight I can really give is that I’ll die someday, and I already knew that. Hell, it’ll happen to you, too. I guess, if I had to make some point with all of this rambling, it’s that the foot prints your mother used to put on plates won’t be the only sign of this coming generation being in the world. What good’s a second death if it only happens thousands of years into the future, where people have evolved past the need for love and past the need for memory? What we know of second deaths seems poetic now, but if you’re a Google search away, anyway can do it. I guess the real second death will be when Google goes offline, when records dating back to tens of thousands of years just… disappear one day. I almost want to say it’s a bad thing, but what downside is there? On a similar note, what benefit comes out of it? Neither have any conclusive answers, just feelings that might come out of you. If you want to die and stay dead, you might as well throw away your phone. If you want to be alive in some form after your death, there’s a way. It’s silly to think that back when the internet was first invented, very few people–at best–had the foresight to see things going in this direction. It almost amazes me at how far we’ve come technogically. But I have video games and movies to do that for me, so why think any more than I have to?

Anyway, The Avengers is a 7/10.

So I missed a month.

I’ll be fair: I saw a lot of movies in June. More than I usually see, anyway. I didn’t think to save my thoughts on those movies for this blog, so I put them all on Letterboxd. I was going to write about The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It and the utter lack of things I have to say about that movie, but I just don’t have the energy for it. I also would have loved to write about how endearing I found The Sparks Brothers to be, but the most I could probably say about it is: “watch it, it’s good.” I’m only going to be writing about two movies from June; the rest are from July.

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JUNE

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F9

I think the easiest way to sum up F9 would be to say that I would not have seen it if it weren’t for my job. For the security of my job, I cannot disclose what my job is, when I saw this movie, or what time. All I can really say about that is that I sat down and watchd F9.

As for the movie itself, it was… okay? I honestly don’t have a whole lot to write about it. It’s exactly what you’d expect walking into a movie called The Fast and The Furious 9. These movies have been running on for so long that, in order to keep relevance, they need to get stupider. I can’t attest to how stupid the previous movies were, this is my first one. What I can say is that this was stuuuupid. I was laughing the whole time. I want to say it was with the movie, because what movie that wants you to take it seriously would have action this ridiculous and exaggerated? At the same time, I never laughed at any of the character dialog. I found the spoken humor to be painfully unfunny.

In terms of plot, meh. It’s pretty standard for a blockbuster. You have an evil brother, a MacGuffin that can end the world, and a shit ton of location changes. I want to say that none of it engaged me, but to be fair: I hardly know these characters. The most interesting thing I can say in terms of the characters is that I initially confused Kurt Russel with Jeff Bridges before I realized that Kurt Russel was in The Thing and not Tron. I’d honestly pay to see a movie with them both together, if that hasn’t already been done. But, anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. The plot was lame and the action was fun, but good fucking lord this thing dragged oooooooon. Did this need to be over two hours long? Real talk, I’ve seen shorter movies with more plot than this.

I’m sorry I’m not writing with a more casual voice for this. I have no fucking idea how to start talking about F9 like a guy who watches movies seriously. Jesus, if I wanted to do that, I’d suck A24’s dick all day and ask for money so I can write Letterboxd reviews that in a snarky tone that anyone and their dog can do for free. So, anyway, this one’s not going on Letterboxd.

FINAL SCORE: C

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THE HITMAN’S WIFE’S BODYGUARD

Actually saw this one in July. My uncle was over, had a family friend hanging about, and my mom wanted to see it. Perfect storm.

I’m torn on whether or not The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard was fun or a waste of time. I want to say it was both. I had fun, but, like, am I going to remember that I had fun watching this in a year? There are all sorts of movies that my mom completely forgets about having seen, and although I can pride myself on not being like that, movies like The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard challenge that status quo. This is the kind of movie that Martin Scorcesse was talking about when he started talking about Marvel. The only difference between this and what he was describing is that this has no superheroes in it. It, instead, has a cast of superstars that could easily carry a movie on their own. The fact of the matter is, though, more of something isn’t always a good thing. With the exception of Salma Hayek, the cast does a fine job but could easily be replaced by anyone else. What doesn’t help is that the characters aren’t particularly likeable, which can be done to great effect, but only when it has something to contrast it. As an additional blow, both Reynold’s and Jackson’s characters don’t play off of each other. There’s a very common issue with weak buddy movies, and it’s that both buddies are two sides of the same coin. Initially, there’s a hint that things might not go this way. The movie opens with a fantastic idea: take a gun-toting bodyguard and take away both his guns and his license to bodyguard, but still have him want to be a bodyguard. If the movie stuck to this idea, it likely would have been a lot funnier. As it stands, there are scenes that do their job in being funny, but overall, there’s not much standing in the way to make this any different from the last Ryan Reynolds movie that made you laugh.

Then there’s a villain. Remind me, why did you hire Antonio Banderas to be a Greek character? It’s not even like they play into some sort of joke where they’re aware of the fact that that’s a glaring miscast, he’s just miscast. Even if he weren’t, his character lacks anything that would make him an interesting villain. He wants to see the world burn so a once powerful country can retake the throne it once had on culture. What are his personal stakes? There are none. Okay, let me reword that: what’s driving him to go after this goal? He… wants to see the world burn? I have nothing.

As a thrill ride that lasts four minutes but is only something you remember once you go back to theme park it was in, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard has a place. It’s not offensively bad, it’s just passable. Passable entertainment that will only hurt the most puritanical of viewers. In other words, it’s almost a perfect C.

FINAL SCORE: C–

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JULY

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BLACK WIDOW

It’s a Marvel movie. What do you honestly expect at this point? SPOILERS, I guess, because I’ll be talking about some plot stuff.

The most disappointing thing that can be said about Black Widow isn’t that it’s a filler movie, isn’t that it’s an origin movie for a character that got killed off. It’s that it has the ideas of a Metal Gear Solid plot and says absolutely nothing with them. The villain sits in a fortress in the sky. He looks like the critic from Chef turned into a Marvel villain. He’s raising an army of brainwashed women to do his bidding. He says he’s giving them a chance at life.

Think about where that could go. What he’s doing is obviously wrong, but what gives him all of this power? What political system allows him to grow and expand his empire like this? What might be the rationale for running such an operation? What world-view explains his actions and what slight similarities might that world-view have on our own?

Great, now stop thinking. Forget I ever said anything that might have kindled your imagination. Instead of all of that, imagine Black Widow fighting people. Throw her family into the mix; they have a lot of people to fight, too. Throw in a side-villain that’s only there to be intimidating but can be outwitted by a fucking chimpanzee. Then, for added flavor, turn the final set-piece into something that would fit perfectly in a video game.

I’m not going to say none of it was fun, but if I wanted that experience, I would have happily played it as a video game where there’s a margain for thoughtful commentary but the general expectation is big, dumb action. As a movie, it feels too tied down to the Marvel formula to do anything outside of its comfort zone. In a word, it’s safe. In much more, it’s a movie that my father would have rented at a Redbox for family movie night because there’s nothing about it that screams “see it in a theater.”

Another C to throw onto the pile…

FINAL SCORE: C

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PIG

Nicolas Cage has a pig. It gets stolen. He goes off on a quest to find it.

If those three sentences have you thinking “Taken with a pig,” you’re sorely mistaken. Pig, at times, has the power of a Tarkovsky movie but chooses to remain understated instead of being outwardly philosophical. It’s not a family movie and it’s only a movie you’d take your friends to if they’re into arthouse. It’s a beautiful, haunting movie that moved me to my core. It’s meditative in ways few movies are nowadays; the rare movie that makes me go “they don’t make em like they used to” without feeling the need to sing along to Beautiful Ones by Seude.

A big part of that is Nicolas Cage. For a man who’s whole shtick is how much of an oddball he is, he has a lot of range as an actor. When he does freak out in Pig, it’s not entertaining. It’s not what the movie lives and dies off of. It feels genuine and sincere.

The less that’s said about Pig in terms of its story and where it ends up going, the better. If you like slow movies, go into this one blind. If you’re on the fence, the best way I’d describe it is by asking whether or not the phrase “not every movie needs to be entertaining to be be good” resonates with you or not. If it doesn’t, this is best left untouched or, at the very least, on the backburner.

FINAL SCORE: A

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ROADRUNNER

I knew very little about Anthony Bourdain stepping into Roadrunner and, as cliche as it is to say, the man’s still a bit of a mystery to me. I read enough about his life before seeing Roadrunner to know that he committed suicide. But what made him big enough for there to be a documentary about him eluded me until I went to go see it.

Conclusion? Pretty solid. As a portrait of a man’s life, it showcases him at his best and worst in ways that could only be done through editing. I was also delighted to see John Lurie near the end of the movie because the thought that a young Lurie would be perfect playing a fictionalized version of Bourdain crossed my mind early into the movie.

Other than that, I don’t have much to say. It’s a solid documentary.

FINAL SCORE: B+

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THE GREEN KNIGHT

Earlier in this post, I mentioned that if I want to be a serious film guy, I have to suck A24’s dick. I guess I have little to say about this other than ‘here comes the airplane.’

The Green Knight feels old-fashioned without being impenetrable to those not in touch with historical storytelling. It would be a classic hero’s journey, but there really isn’t a mentor. There isn’t a journey home, either. It wears the ideas of a hero’s journey on its sleeve, but embraces a less traditional exploration on what a journey represents. Taken at face value, it’s magical and has more than a few scenes that are surprising in terms of their scope. Taken as the series of metaphors it’s likely meant to be taken as I’m sure there’s more to it.

Like Pig, it’s slow. However, there’s more to it and I can see there being a wider appeal to this than Pig. Overall, pretty good and I don’t think I hvae anything negative to say about it.

FINAL GRADE: A+

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OLDER MOVIES THAT I WATCHED IN JULY AND LOVED

Trainspotting was fantastic, probably one of my favorite movies of all time now and I’m surprised I didn’t see it sooner. Its sequel, T2 (not to be confused with a certain movie starring a robot) was similarly good but lacked some of the original spark. Ferris Beuller’s Day Off is still a classic and Election cracked me up in spite of how fucked up it was. I am thankful that I didn’t finish watching Climax with any of my family around.

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I know I missed a few movies in June/July. I didn’t see Snake Eyes and Old didn’t interest me; The Purge and Escape Room seems like they’d be good watches on streaming; Zola looked too awkward to watch in a theater; and I’d rather slam dunk myself into a coma than see Space Jam: A New Legacy. If any movies I missed interest me enough, I’ll write about them here. Otherwise, you can follow me on Letterboxd to keep up to date-ish with the movies I’m watching.