Author: Oli
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What punk is for
A lot of the time, I listen to contemporary punk records, and I wonder where the anger’s coming from. I mean, obviously there’s still as much to be angry about as there was in 1977, in terms of inequality and injustice, but sometimes it all feels a bit forced. Much…
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Upended trajectories
At the point at which Burn After Reading was released, the Coen Brothers had a certain amount of form, in terms of making mainstream comedies populated by Hollywood stars. Like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty it stars George Clooney, but in contrast to those films, and to…
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A commercial flick gone weird
Of the four films that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together, Dark Passage is undoubtedly the most outlandish, in both narrative and formal terms. Its central conceit, of an escaped convict undergoing plastic surgery to completely transform his appearance, would be a challenge for modern techniques, but for a…
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Presence
There are no cum shots in Black Oni. There are long builds, ecstatic crescendi, contemplative soundfields, thunderous riffs, all the appurtenances of narrative, without any lazy concessions to closure. If you want fan service fuck off and listen to Dream Theater. Like the protagonist of a W.G. Sebald novel, the…
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Fate has a car crash
In Alex Garland’s recent science fiction-series Devs (which is in my opinion as good a piece of SF as has ever been filmed) there is a central symbol of randomness—a moment of unpredicted rupture which tears through lives, opening narrative space for a discussion of determinism and free will. The…
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Scenes and scenesters
Watching a film like The Big Sleep in 2020 it’s almost impossible to see past its mythology. This was a movie founded on mythic archetypes—those modern, anomic archetypes of urban America that Hollywood had been instrumental in establishing as the twentieth century’s leading pantheon. But the mythic figures portrayed by…
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Being themselves
I reviewed this album in 2013 when it came out, but I didn’t spend a huge amount of time with it then. I dug it out more recently when I was looking for some hip-hop to throw into my heavy rotation pile—this was the fourth album I tried on for…
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Unnecessary translation
I guess no-one hits the target every time, creatively speaking: I certainly know I don’t. But after our project to watch the complete Coen Brothers oeuvre in (rough) chronological order led us to three mediocre films in quick succession, I’m hoping they just had a bad patch—certainly their later movies…
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No contest
Having recently watched the Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty, a film whose production is apparently predicated on a chemistry between the leads that never materialises, it was instructive to watch To Have and Have Not, in which Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s mythical partnership was initiated. Of course it’s almost impossible…
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Staying true
There’s a sense that musicians (and other artists) are supposed to keep innovating, to follow an endless quest for the holy grail of ‘originality’, but there’s also a competing imperative, particularly in cultures like those of punk and metal, to stay true to your roots. Especially for bands that have…
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Heavy with meaning
You don’t have to like the protagonist of a story to identify with them, or to buy into their charisma. You don’t have to think they make good choices, and they don’t have to win. Consider Josh Brolin’s character in the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men, stumbling from…
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A***holes looking pretty
It’s an interesting proposition, a romantic comedy starring Hollywood ‘A’-listers, written and directed by the Coen Brothers. What would these masters of generic subversion do with such a broad palette of obligatory tropes? Something intensely stylish, and fiendishly clever, no doubt. However, their previous mainstream comedy, also starring Coens fan…
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A body speaks its truth
Having trained as an instrumentalist, and associated with other instrumentalists over many years, I’ve often found myself having to argue against the assumption that the only way to achieve musicianship is to study a traditional musical instrument. The music of the later twentieth century was immeasurably enriched by recording artists…
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Perfectly lonely
This spectacular and lavish volume from Chris Ware is the second of his beautiful large books that I’ve read. Rusty Brown is apparently an ongoing character that he’s been drawing for some time, a rather selfish and manipulative man-child nerd who takes advantage of his nerd friend Chalky White’s good…
Oliver Arditi 