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Glamour and technique
Technique is a weirdly invisible thing in film. Everything a director or an editor does is right there in front of you, but it’s somehow really hard to notice it. The whole business of film-making is a matter of glamour, a sleight-of-hand facilitated by distracting the audience with shiny baubles such as unfeasibly attractive stars… Read more
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Adversity included
‘Let’s be bold’, Hope and Social admonish their listeners in the song of that title, the third track of this vivid, broad-stroke album. They are very much preaching what they practise. It’s easy to describe them using terms like ‘relentlessly upbeat’ or ‘indefatigably positive’, because that’s certainly their vibe, but to do so would actually… Read more
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Beautiful scaffolding
Certain themes and techniques recur throughout Joel and Ethan Coen’s films. Convoluted crime stories with arbitrary conclusions in which none of the characters possess any real agency are not their exclusive preserve—they specifically referenced Raymond Chandler when talking about their plotting of The Big Lebowski, for instance. Such tales have a distinguished pedigree, and they… Read more
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Eyes the same size as her stomach
Luchie (as illustrator and cartoonist Lucie Bryon likes to call herself) was apparently blessed with extremely large eyes as a child. In pictures of herself as an adult, she has extremely large glasses. Although she writes in convincing idiomatic English, she is a Francophone, and this may be why the expression ‘eyes larger than your… Read more
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Crashing out
We’ve been watching a lot of Coen Brothers films of late, which display so much love for the Golden Age of Hollywood that we’ve started to revisit some of those old movies ourselves. Of course Spouse and I remember them from their endless TV re-runs from the 1960s to the 1980s, but it’s amazing how… Read more
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Brash beauty
I knew nothing about Julian Lage before beginning to listen to this album, on the recommendation of James Beaudreau (an excellent but little-known musician whose music you should definitely seek out). In fact, I listened to Love Hurts a fair bit before I found out anything about its author, so let’s start there. It’s a… Read more
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