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We don’t need no stinking…
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a film that’s been lurking in my brain since childhood, having been on the BBC’s regular repeat cycle in the 70s and 80s. ‘We don’t need no stinking badges’ is a famous misquote from the movie, which has been replayed everywhere from Broadway plays to videogames, and which… Read more
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Everlasting uncertainty
Having watched a lot of Coen Brothers movies lately, I’m starting to see their kind of purposefully aimless plotting as a norm, and when watching other films in which narrative incident seems arbitrary, it’s easy to ascribe them the same kind of inexplicability. Shit happens. Random happenstance springing from shambolic and incompetent attempts to steer… Read more
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Sharing the fun
Herbie Hancock was right at the beginning of his career as a sideman when he made his debut recording as a leader. Takin’ Off is quite a debut. Blue Note Records obviously thought Hancock had something, because aside from allowing him to retain the publishing rights to his tunes they gave him a stellar line-up… Read more
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One face in a thousand
In Rhetorics of Fantasy, her important structural taxonomy of fantasy literature, Farah Mendlesohn identifies four key types of fantasy, defined by the way that they relate the fantastical to the prosaic. The first and most widely used is the ‘portal-quest fantasy’, in which the protagonists either pass through some kind of portal from the primary… Read more
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The past present serious tense
Roger Deakins’s brilliant cinematography has been conspicuous in some of the Coen Brothers’s films—in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, for example, which is not one of their strongest releases, or the black and white The Man Who Wasn’t There, which was. But in other movies it’s just quietly excellent, conveying a narrative from actors to… Read more
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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 of the best modern punk… Read more
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