Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Not quite

    Not quite

    Martin Scorsese has something of a reputation as a film maker who does movies about criminals in New York, but Gangs of New York is not your usual Scorsese flick. It’s a historical drama, set mainly during the years of the Civil War, which draws much of its material from a book of the same… Read more

  • Central admixture

    Central admixture

    Having recently read and written about Quicksilver, the book which precedes The Confusion in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy, there’s relatively little that I feel compelled to commit to my journal in respect of the The Confusion. To say it contains ‘more of the same’ sounds dismissive, but that’s essentially the truth of it, and… Read more

  • Vivid conviction

    Vivid conviction

    Martin Scorsese enjoys making films about criminals. He likes representing their lives and their culture, and he often collaborates with actors who can improvise well, generating free-flowing, vernacular dialogue that’s sometimes hard to follow, but which creates an immersive sense that the audience is sharing their world with them. He’s also a technically gifted film-maker,… Read more

  • Rhyming cinema

    Rhyming cinema

    One thing I’ve had reinforced through watching the Rudolph Maté directed Robert Mitchum vehicle Second Chance (1953), is the total disconnect between Golden Age Hollywood movies and their posters. This is not a particularly egregious example, but still: ‘sky-high excitement atop a South American peak’ refers to scenes set and filmed in Mexico, and as… Read more

  • For the bakers

    For the bakers

    I’m fortunate enough to be closely related to someone (my mum) who is something of an authority on the state of scholarship around bread and baking, and she recommended Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery as remaining one of the best secondary sources, more than forty years after its publication. My interest in the… Read more

  • Light touch, heavy themes

    Light touch, heavy themes

    I inhabit a timeline in which the definitive version of Michael Moorcock’s huge fantasy sequence is The Tale of The Eternal Champion, available in your version of reality only in second-hand copies which sometimes slip between the parallels and turn up for sale in independent bookshops (or on Amazon). In your reality Moorcock disavowed this… Read more