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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 their unnecessary remake of The… Read more
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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 surgeon in the 1940s to… Read more
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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 wayward present moment of this… Read more
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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 symbol Garland chose is a… Read more
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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 its stars are now mediated… Read more
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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 size, the other three all… Read more
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