Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Fate has a car crash

    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 symbol Garland chose is a Read more

  • Scenes and scenesters

    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 its stars are now mediated Read more

  • Being themselves

    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 size, the other three all Read more

  • Unnecessary translation

    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 have a good reputation. It’s Read more

  • No contest

    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 now to distinguish the ‘actual’ Read more

  • Staying true

    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 never achieved overwhelming commercial success, Read more