Andy Quan's Blog

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Movies: seen on TV, probably on a streaming service, or on an airplane

Goodbye June. The critics called it formulaic and trite, while acknowledging the acting. I don’t expect much these days from movies seen on TV, so I found it enjoyable enough and thought the acting was sensational, and the family dynamics did feel true, for the most part. 

Movies (seen in the cinema)

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The post 2026 in lists: Movies first appeared on Enter the Quaniverse.

A work in progress. 

Television

Billionaire’s Bunker: We begin 2026 with mediocrity. The premise is great and we absolutely loved Money Heist (Casa de Papel). But perhaps that was creator Álex Pina’s peak. This was a soap opera with too many stories and such melodrama! Painful. Stranger Things, Season 5: I actually skipped Season 4. Seeing the kids bickering and whining just felt too much, even though I’d watched the first three seasons. I sort of felt: Ugh. Teenagers. But I wanted to check ...

A work in progress …

Musicals and theatre

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Concerts and performances

Khalid Abdalla’s Nowhere, Sydney Festival. With an actor as experienced and engaging as Abdalla, he really can present anything he wants to, so what would he talk about in his one-man show. He used everything in his arsenal to draw us in: dance, song, video projection, confession, personal history, and a tribute to an artist friend that died. I wondered where it would end up. It ended as a powerful statement from an Arab a...

Love Stories by Trent Dalton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m going to go right down the middle with a middling rating of this book, with the stars mostly for the intention. It is clear that Dalton is a lovely man with a great big heart and the genesis of the book and many of the stories are truly heart-warming. But Dalton turns sugar into saccharine. He’s so in love with the idea of love, so excited about the project of capturing people’s love stories by sitting on a corner in Brisbane with a typewr...

The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I was first exposed to the Memory of Fire trilogy, it was a revelation. Here, in anecdotes both poetic and mythic, Galeano turned the history of the world around, centering voices that had been suppressed and hidden, introducing his worldview to a somewhat sheltered but curious 16-year-old. So, I’ve always kept Galeano on my radar.

The Book of Embraces is especially charming because it is smaller and more personal, and tells me...

Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Because I’d raved about O’Hagan’s Marilyn Monroe book (as narrated by her dog, Maf), a new literary friend loaned me one of his favourite books, ‘Be Near Me’. To be frank, I was a bit confused by the whole experience. There is an immediate distancing because the narrator can be unlikeable, partly because of his own lack of self-knowledge. It’s evident early on that this fault is going to get him in trouble, and it’s like watching a slow motion...

When we travel, we try to choose at least one special restaurant, and since our trip to Seoul coincided with my 56th birthday, I was excited to choose Restaurant Evett. I follow a winner of Masterchef Australia, Nat Thaipun, on Instagram, and saw that she’d visited or worked there. And soon after, there was an article on Australia’s ABC news about the young Australian chef, Joseph Lidgerwood, from Tasmania, who had cheffed around the world and settled in Seoul in 2019, and opened Evett, which c...

The Collected Stories by Lorrie Moore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think I was in university when I first discovered Lorrie Moore, reading Like Life (1990) and then liking it so much that I read Birds of America too (1998). Oddly though, when I bought her ‘The Collected Stories’, shortly after its publication in 2008, I never tackled it (it’s a big book after all; there’s a boarding pass in it from when I must started it on a flight to Moscow). So, it’s strange to count that 17 years have gone by b...

The Progress of Love by Alice Munro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve decided to get all of Alice Munro’s work and go back and read them all … eventually. Previous to this one, I finished ‘Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You’ from 1974, and have skipped ahead by two books to 1982 and ‘The Progress of Love’. My new way of reading Alice Munro is to read a story, and then go to the excellent blog ‘Mookse and Gripes’ where I can read some excellent reviews and analysis by two of their writers. The bl...

Musicals and theatre

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Concerts

Tom Odell, Sydney Opera House. I wasn’t familiar with Odell’s music but we always trust our friend Steven, when he asked if we wanted to come. Backed by the Metropolitan Orchestra, these pop songs were given incredible orchestrations and Odell is a real artist and musician: his voice is a beautiful instrument – emotional, powerful and with its own character. Loved the concert. I am now a fan. 

Books

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Exhibitions

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The post 2025 in lists: Musicals, the...