Here’s a question to get your New Year off to a cheery start: Do you hold out much hope for humanity making it to the end of the 21st century? I can’t say that I do, not without major shifts in the nature and size of world civilizations as we now know them. In bumper sticker terms, put me in the “If you’re not depressed, you haven’t been paying attention” camp.

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, as someone cleverer than I once remarked, then what is making a movie about smells like? Anyone who answered “Smells like teen spirit” is (probably accidentally) in the right ballpark, as the 1985 novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer was a favorite of Kurt Cobain’s.