Author: Oli
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Style over easy
Joel and Ethan Coen’s second feature-film, Raising Arizona stands in stark contrast to their first, Blood Simple. It’s an extremely silly movie, constructed from bright colours, slapstick, overacting, babies and optimism. It lacks the strong defining images that structure Blood Simple, but is nevertheless a very visual narrative, in which…
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The magic of the real
My introduction to fantasy fiction was The Lord of the Rings, which I encountered surprisingly early, while visiting a friend whose mother was reading it to him as a bedtime story. I suspect her assessment of its suitability as a bedtime story for a three-year-old may have had something to…
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Past presence
Mike Leigh, film maker. That feels a much more appropriate term than director or writer: although there are many other minds at work in his movies, in all those elements of production which are crucial to rendering his worlds so seamless and complete, it is clearly Leigh’s vision that animates…
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Lessons unlearned
Infographics are big business. You can buy a big glossy book of infographics on more or less any topic, for any age of reader. They appear in magazines, newspapers, websites and on video, where they are sometimes expanded into extraordinary 3D animations. They’ve clearly been around for a while, and…
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Story in fragments
So, what to do with yourself when you’re confined to your house during a global pandemic? Watch all of the Coen Brothers’ films in release order, obviously. Although we actually started in the middle by re-watching Fargo so that Spawn could start watching the TV series with us. But now…
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State of the planet
At the age of eighteen I was a dope-smoking, layabout, benefit-scrounging squatter. During this phase of my life I was arrested for shoplifting. The thing I stole, however, was not food, or something I could sell to buy drugs, but a book. It was The Atlas of the Solar System…
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Caricatures on parade
I’ll come clean. Although I have some idea what it’s like inside a book by Charles Dickens, I’ve never actually read one. I started a few in my teens, but there wasn’t anything about their openings that made me want to read on, and nothing I’ve heard anyone say about…
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Good hair days
I keep threatening to cut my hair short. Spouse forbids it. Sometimes though, it feels like such a hassle wearing it long, and trying to make myself look presentable in public when bits and tufts are flying in all directions, sticking out from under whatever headgear I’m sporting, feels impossible.…
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Character profiles
The characters in Uncut Gems are busy. We see them from the side, metaphorically and often literally, brushing past the viewer, utterly absorbed in the complex and frantic business of living their lives. The camera’s narrative eye just drops into the middle of their confusing, interwoven existences, and watches as…
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No fable
Once you’ve made the hole the central metaphor of a lengthy work of fiction, you’re going to have to resign yourself to a whole mess of Freudian baggage. Whether you bring them with you, as part and parcel of your understanding of psychology, or they’re ascribed to your work irrespective…
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Los Santos: a city of four ecologies?
The title of this essay is obviously a misnomer. Los Santos, the fictional city in which Grand Theft Auto V is set, does not operate ecologically. The Foothills, The Plains of Id, Autopia and Surfurbia are all here in image, but the drivers and pedestrians that populate them so convincingly…
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A record to have and eat
If you read their website bio, Sanguine Hum have a convoluted creative background, balancing a wide range of interests and demands. A need to experiment, a commitment to accessible, melodic songwriting, an interest in ambient abstraction… somehow it all came together in time for their first full-length release in a…
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Food as illustration
In Western Europe we take holidays on the Mediterranean, we hear about migrants attempting to cross it, we imagine our histories as entwined with it—the cradle of a Roman Empire that impinged on the continent’s most distant fringes, bringing olives, wine, and dozens of other markers of its cultures and…
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Forty-three years well-spent
When I was seven years old, I passed into another world, and I have never fully returned to this one. That world, or more accurately those worlds, are to be found in a galaxy far, far way, and although everything you could say about them seems utterly lacking in credibility,…
Oliver Arditi 