Martin • Taste
Martin From CORTIS: His Movies, Books, Vinyl and Playlist
Everything Martin watches, reads, plays and shoots on, in one place.
Martin has the most documented taste in CORTIS, and once you put it all in one place a pattern falls out of it: nineties guitars, Memphis rap, Spider-Man, and one 1996 film that turns out to be holding three songs on his own playlist.
The short answer
Martin has watched 27 films, seven of them Spider-Man. He reads Goethe, Dazai and Rick Rubin. His vinyl collection is half nineties alternative rock and half nineties southern rap. His playlist runs 51 tracks from Black Sabbath to SoundCloud rappers with a hundred listeners. And he shoots all of it on a 2006 Fujifilm compact.
The single best thing in here: Trainspotting is on his film list, and three songs from its soundtrack are on his playlist.
Every film Martin has watched
Twenty seven films, and the shape of the list is unusual: a complete Spider-Man run, a stack of science fiction about what it means to be a person, two Tim Burton films, and then a handful of things nobody would have guessed.
The Spider-Man run
Seven films. Every live action era plus both Spider-Verses, which means he has watched more Spider-Man than most people have watched films this year.
Spider-Man
The one that started all of it. A bitten teenager, a dead uncle, a line about responsibility that has outlived everyone involved, and Willem Dafoe talking to himself in a mirror.
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Spider-Man as an actual fifteen year old, stuck in a high school film he keeps trying to escape, with Michael Keaton as the best villain the series has had since Dafoe.
Spider-Man: Far From Home
A school trip across Europe that turns into a film about being told what to see and believing it. The illusion sequences are the best thing in it.
Spider-Man: No Way Home
The one where the multiverse opens and every previous Spider-Man walks through the door. Built almost entirely out of the audience knowing the other films, which is why it only works if you have seen them.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Miles Morales, and the film that changed what animation is allowed to look like. Comic book halftone, frames held on twos, a different art style for every character.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Bigger, louder, and about whether a story has to go the way it always goes. Ends mid sentence, which is either brave or infuriating depending on who you ask.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
The newest one in the run, and the first Spider-Man from the director of Short Term 12.
Science fiction, and what counts as a person
Six films that are all quietly asking the same question from different directions.
Blade Runner
Los Angeles in permanent rain, a man hunting artificial people, and the growing problem that the artificial ones want to live more than he does. The look of almost every science fiction film since came from here.
Interstellar
Earth is dying, a farmer flies through a wormhole to find somewhere else, and every hour he spends on one planet costs him seven years with his daughter. A space film that is really about time and guilt.
Her
A lonely man writing other people’s love letters for a living falls in love with his operating system. Warm, funny, and then quietly devastating about what he actually wanted.
Bicentennial Man
A household robot spends two hundred years trying to be legally recognised as a human being, which means giving up the one thing that makes him different: he cannot die. From the Asimov story.
Ghost in the Shell
A cyborg officer chasing a hacker who can rewrite people’s memories, in a Hong Kong-shaped future, asking whether anything of her is still hers. Slow, cold and enormously influential.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
A woman doing her laundromat’s taxes discovers she is the worst version of herself across every universe, which is exactly why she can save them. Absurd on the surface, and underneath it a film about a mother and a daughter.
Tim Burton, animation and the properly strange
Four films that share a sense of humour about death.
Beetlejuice
A dead couple hire a freelance poltergeist to get the new owners out of their house. The afterlife as a badly run government office, and Michael Keaton at his most unhinged.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Thirty six years later, with the same cast and the same handmade look. A sequel that mostly exists to let everyone do the thing again, and knows it.
Coraline
A bored girl finds a door to a better version of her house, with a better version of her parents, who would like to sew buttons over her eyes. Stop motion, and far more frightening than it is allowed to be.
Mind Game
A man dies in the first ten minutes, argues with God, and gets sent back. The animation changes style every few minutes, sometimes every few seconds. There is nothing else quite like it.
Japanese stories about being twenty something
Two adaptations of beloved manga, both about art school, bad timing and unreturned feelings.
Honey and Clover
Art students in a shared house, all in love with the wrong person, all trying to work out what to do with their lives. Gentle, and quietly sad about talent and how unfairly it is handed out.
Nana
Two girls called Nana meet on a train to Tokyo and end up sharing a flat: one a punk singer, the other following a boy. A story about friendship that is more intense than any of the romances in it.
Everything else
The eight that do not group with anything, and the most revealing part of the list.
Trainspotting
Heroin, Edinburgh, and a group of friends who are terrible to each other. Funny in a way that keeps curdling. This is the important one on the list: three tracks from its soundtrack are also on his playlist, which you can see further down.
La La Land
A jazz pianist and an actress fall in love in Los Angeles while both of them are trying to make it. The ending is the reason people argue about this film.
Jackass: The Movie
Grown men hurting themselves on camera for ninety minutes. No plot, no message, and genuinely one of the most influential things of its decade on how the internet behaves.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
A magazine photo archivist who daydreams his way through life finally goes somewhere, chasing a missing negative across Greenland and the Himalayas. Beautiful, and softer than the story it came from.
A Rainy Day in New York
A couple go to Manhattan for a weekend and spend all of it apart, each drifting into a different version of the city.
Twilight
A girl moves to a wet town in Washington and falls for a vampire. Blue filter, enormous soundtrack, and the film that defined a decade of teenage cinema whether people admit it or not.
Marty Supreme
A table tennis hustler with far more self belief than talent, in the Safdie register: fast, loud and permanently on the edge of disaster.
The Odyssey
Nolan taking on Homer. The second film of his on this list, after Interstellar.
The books on Martin’s shelf
Six books, and they split cleanly down the middle: three novels about young men falling apart, and three books about how to make things and how much to care.
Novels
Two of these are the most famous sad young man books ever written, in German and in Japanese, two centuries apart.
The Sorrows of Young Werther
A young man writes letters to a friend about the woman he has fallen for, who is engaged to someone else, and about how completely she has taken over his inner life. It made Goethe famous across Europe almost overnight, and young men started dressing like the character. Two hundred and fifty years later it still reads like someone’s private messages.
No Longer Human
The notebooks of a man who has never once understood other people and has spent his life clowning so that nobody finds out. Bleak, short, and one of the best selling novels in Japanese history. Dazai finished it the year he died.
Proof of the Sphere
A short Korean novel about two people who grew up together and what happens to the one left behind. It is told in alternating voices, it is far stranger and more physical than that description suggests, and it has been passed hand to hand in Korea for a decade on word of mouth alone.
Project Hail Mary
A man wakes up on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is, two dead crewmates and a job he cannot remember accepting: work out why the sun is going out. Then he finds he is not alone out there. Funny, relentlessly technical, and the friendship at the centre of it is the reason people finish it in two days.
Books about making things
The two non fiction picks, and both of them are really about attention.
The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Not a how to. Rubin’s argument is that ideas are already in the air and your job is to be in a state where you can notice them, so most of the book is about noticing. Written in short fragments you can open anywhere, which is how producers actually read. He passed it around inside CORTIS too: it is also on Keonho’s list.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
The counter argument to relentless positivity. You only have so much attention, so the real question is what you are willing to suffer for and everything else can go. Juhoon has read this one as well.
Martin’s vinyl collection
Twelve records, and this is the clearest window into his taste in the whole article, because nobody buys vinyl by accident. It divides almost perfectly in two: nineties American alternative rock, and nineties American rap, mostly southern.
The nineties alternative side
Five records, four of them from a four year window, and two of them the same band.
Siamese Dream
Enormous layered guitars over songs about being a miserable teenager, made while the band was falling apart in the studio. The record that made them.
Jar of Flies
An acoustic EP written and recorded in about a week, and the first EP ever to enter the American album chart at number one. Nutshell is on it, and Nutshell is also on his playlist.
Above
A one album Seattle supergroup built around Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley and Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, recorded while several of them were trying to get clean. Slow, bluesy and heavy in a way neither of their main bands ever was.
Surfer Rosa
Recorded by Steve Albini in about ten days, and the record that taught a generation the quiet verse loud chorus trick. Kurt Cobain said as much.
Doolittle
The follow up, cleaner and catchier, with the biting eyeball and the monkey and all the rest of it. Owning both Pixies albums is a choice, not an accident.
The rap side
Six records that run from Houston in 1991 to Los Angeles in 2023, heavy on the south.
We Can’t Be Stopped
Houston, and one of the most confrontational rap records of its era, with a cover photograph so infamous it is the first thing anyone mentions. Mind Playing Tricks on Me is on it.
The End
Memphis at its most claustrophobic: distorted low end, horror movie samples, tape hiss left in on purpose. Most of what the last ten years of rap sounds like starts on records like this one.
Pluto
Future’s debut, and the moment auto-tuned melodic rap stopped being a gimmick and became the default. Still the most joyful thing in his catalogue.
Piñata
A hard street rapper over dusty soul loops from one of the great crate diggers. On paper it should not work, and it turned into a modern classic.
Some Rap Songs
Fifteen tracks in twenty four minutes, most of them barely over a minute, made in the aftermath of his father’s death. Loops that never resolve and a voice buried in the mix. Not an easy listen and a hugely influential one.
Voir Dire
The same instincts nine years later, relaxed rather than raw, with The Alchemist doing what he does. Two Earl records in a twelve record collection says a lot.
And the new one
Getting Killed
The fourth album from the Brooklyn band, cut in ten days in Los Angeles and released in September 2025. Shambolic on purpose, played like their lives depend on it, and the only record here from this decade that is not rap.
Martin’s playlist, all 51 songs
This is the longest part of his taste and the hardest to summarise, because it runs from 1971 Black Sabbath to rappers with a few hundred plays. It is grouped below rather than listed flat, so you can see the shape of it.
One note on honesty: a good chunk of this playlist lives on SoundCloud and has essentially no writing about it anywhere. Where there was nothing true to say about a track, the row is left empty instead of filled with something invented.
Rock, grunge and the loud end
Twelve tracks, and the spine of the whole playlist. Two Deftones, two Black Sabbath, and a Kurt Cobain home demo.
| Song | Artist | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Nutshell | Alice in Chains | From Jar of Flies, 1994, which he also owns on vinyl. Four minutes of acoustic guitar and Layne Staley sounding completely alone. |
| Entombed | Deftones | From Koi No Yokan, 2012. The slowest, prettiest thing on that record. |
| My Own Summer (Shove It) | Deftones | From Around the Fur, 1997. The opposite of Entombed: one riff, dropped tuning, no mercy. |
| Sweet Leaf | Black Sabbath | Master of Reality, 1971. Opens with Tony Iommi coughing and then the riff that invented half of metal. |
| Into the Void | Black Sabbath | Same album, closing track, and heavier. Owning both of these is a Sabbath opinion, not a playlist filler. |
| Everlong | Foo Fighters | 1997. Dave Grohl wrote it during a break-up and it became the one Foo Fighters song nobody argues about. |
| Creep | Radiohead | 1993. The song the band spent twenty years trying to escape and eventually made peace with. |
| Wonderwall | Oasis | 1995. The most played acoustic guitar song on earth, and still good in spite of that. |
| Reptilia | The Strokes | Room on Fire, 2003. Two guitars doing completely different things and locking anyway. |
| Still Into You | Paramore | 2013. Pure pop written by a rock band, and the happiest thing on this list by a distance. |
| What More Can I Say | Kurt Cobain | A home demo, released on Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings in 2015. Tape hiss and one voice. |
| Eternity’s Pillars | sunn O))) | From Life Metal, 2019. Drone metal: barely any drums, guitars held until they turn into something else. The strangest pick here. |
Electronic, dance, and the Trainspotting connection
Seven tracks, and three of them come from the same film soundtrack, which is also on his film list above.
| Song | Artist | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Born Slippy .NUXX | Underworld | The closing song of Trainspotting, and the record that made Underworld famous outside clubs. |
| Dark & Long (Dark Train) | Underworld | Also from Trainspotting, ten minutes long, used in the worst scene in the film. |
| Think About the Way | Ice MC | 1994 Italian eurodance, and the third track on this playlist that is on the Trainspotting soundtrack. |
| Has It Come to This? | The Streets | 2001. The first Streets single, and the record that turned UK garage into something you could talk over. |
| Life | Mondo Grosso ft. bird | 2000. Japanese house with a live band feel. Shibuya-kei adjacent and very hard to dislike. |
| Genesis | Grimes | Visions, 2012. Made alone on cheap software in a Montreal flat, and it sounds like it in the best way. |
| Numb | Clams Casino | An instrumental. Cloud rap in its original form: blown out samples, enormous reverb, no rapper needed. |
Rap, from Memphis to SoundCloud
Nineteen tracks, and the most interesting part of the list. A few are well known. Most live on SoundCloud with three figure play counts, and there is genuinely nothing written about them anywhere, so those are listed without a note rather than with a made up one.
| Song | Artist | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| I Love You | Lil B | The Based God at his most sincere, which is the whole point of Lil B and the thing people miss about him. |
| G’s Ain’t Suppose to Cry | Gangsta Pat | Memphis, and the same lineage as the Three 6 Mafia record in his vinyl collection. |
| Red Light | Kevin Abstract, Quadeca & Ameer Vann | — |
| paris hilton | Nettspend | — |
| Sniffany | fakemink | — |
| Endeavor | wyrdo | — |
| Eyesight | slayr | — |
| Pop my sh!t | Brotherkupa | — |
| Riri | Nine Vicious | — |
| HOLY MOLY | Che | — |
| Cash Out | Rocket Rese, roomtrash6 & cybernene | — |
| Artifacts | ninososupremey & kage | — |
| 2019 | bby kell | — |
| ne plus ultra | ear | — |
| brokenheart | loukeman | — |
| ur all mine | westwood | — |
| i deserve it | yunosa | — |
| pretti loves u 2 | prettifun | — |
| knots | matt proxy | — |
| XY | Feng | — |
The soft ones
Thirteen tracks where the volume drops. Sinatra sits next to Frank Ocean and it somehow makes sense.
| Song | Artist | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Imagine | John Lennon | 1971. The most covered song about peace ever written, and still divisive for exactly that reason. |
| That’s Life | Frank Sinatra | 1966. Sinatra at his most bad tempered, which is when he is best. |
| White Ferrari | Frank Ocean | Blonde, 2016. Almost nothing happens in it and it is the best thing on the album. |
| Back, Baby | Jessica Pratt | On Your Own Love Again, 2015. One voice, one guitar, recorded so close you can hear the room. |
| Rain | SWV | 1997. Nineties R&B at its most weightless. |
| Great Pretender | Dominic Fike | What Could Possibly Go Wrong, 2020. |
| No Embrace | Dirty Projectors & Björk | From Mount Wittenberg Orca, 2010, a collaboration album written about whales and sung almost entirely in stacked harmony. |
| CD-R | Toro y Moi | — |
| Satellites | Frost Children | — |
| Snowmix | marasy ft. Hatsune Miku | marasy is a Japanese pianist best known for playing Vocaloid songs on an actual piano. |
| Paper Moon | minuano | — |
| wonder2 | Perfume | Perfume are the Japanese electropop trio who spent the 2010s being far weirder than their pop chart position suggested. |
The cameras he shoots on
Martin takes most of the behind the scenes photos that circulate from CORTIS, and he does it on two discontinued compacts rather than a phone.
The two bodies
Fujifilm FinePix Z2
A sliding cover compact with a Super CCD sensor, a 3× Fujinon zoom and a 2.5 inch screen. He holds it up in their vlog and says he carries it with him. The grain and the hard flash in his photos are not a filter, they are what this camera does.
Casio Exilim EX-ZS6
Sharper, wider and easier to live with, at 26–130mm equivalent. Better for fitting five people in a small room, worse at the specific soft look everyone is chasing.
The full camera breakdown
Specs for both bodies, the photos he has taken with them, the vlog clip where he shows the Fujifilm, and how to get the same look yourself are in what camera Martin from CORTIS uses.
And what he wears
The clothes are their own article, because the sneaker collection alone took a full Weverse live to get through. The short version: vintage and second hand mixed with designer, nineties band tees, Ralph Lauren rugby polos, military details, flared denim, and a pair of Maison Margiela Replicas covered in crushed Swarovski crystals.
The full wardrobe
Six pairs of shoes identified frame by frame, the polos, the one t-shirt he keeps going back to and the Tokyo stage outfit are all in what clothes Martin from CORTIS wears.
What all of it has in common
Put the four lists next to each other and three things fall out.
The nineties are not a phase
Five of his twelve records come from a seven year window between 1988 and 1995. His playlist leans on Sabbath, Alice in Chains, Pixies-adjacent guitar bands, Radiohead, Oasis and a Kurt Cobain demo. His films include Trainspotting, Ghost in the Shell and Beetlejuice. He was not alive for any of it.
Trainspotting is the keystone
It is the one place where two lists touch. The film is on his watchlist, and Born Slippy, Dark & Long and Think About the Way are all from its soundtrack and all on his playlist. Whether he found the songs through the film or the film through the songs, that is a real connection rather than a coincidence.
He goes deep rather than wide
Two Pixies albums. Two Earl Sweatshirt albums. Two Deftones tracks and two Black Sabbath tracks from the same record. Seven Spider-Man films. Two Nolan films. Two Tim Burton films. This is not someone sampling widely, it is someone who finds a thing and goes all the way into it, and the same instinct shows up in a rap section full of artists nobody has written about yet.
Frequently asked questions
What are Martin from CORTIS’ favourite movies?
Twenty seven films have been tied to him, including all seven Spider-Man films, Blade Runner, Trainspotting, Interstellar, Her, Coraline and Everything Everywhere All at Once.
What books does Martin from CORTIS read?
The Sorrows of Young Werther, No Longer Human, Project Hail Mary, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, The Creative Act and Proof of the Sphere.
What is in Martin’s vinyl collection?
Twelve records: Siamese Dream, Jar of Flies, Above, Doolittle, Surfer Rosa, Some Rap Songs, Voir Dire, Piñata, Pluto, We Can’t Be Stopped, The End and Getting Killed.
What music does Martin from CORTIS listen to?
Fifty one tracks, from Black Sabbath and Alice in Chains to Memphis rap, UK garage and a long list of SoundCloud artists. The full playlist is grouped above.
What camera does Martin use for his photos?
A white Fujifilm FinePix Z2 from 2006 and a Casio Exilim EX-ZS6. Full details are in the camera article.
Is this list official?
No. It is gathered from lives, interviews, vlogs and photos that fans have identified. He has obviously watched, read and listened to far more than this.
Where this comes from
The film list is built on the Letterboxd list COERs have been keeping, and the rest comes from lives, vlogs, interviews and photos where a spine, a sleeve or a screen was readable. None of it is official, and prices, editions and release dates are the ones published by the studios, publishers and labels themselves.
Keep going
More of his world is one click away: what Martin wears, the camera he uses, the perfumes the group wears, and what the rest of them read.
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