Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Free play

    Free play

    One might be forgiven for thinking that the Joel and Ethan Coen made Barton Fink in order to dispel suspicions lingering in the wake of Miller’s Crossing that they would like to make a film which took some money at the box office. Miller’s Crossing was a financial flop and a critical success, but it Read more

  • Worth digging

    Worth digging

    Funk Factory is something of a period piece. It comes from an era where the boundaries between jazz fusion and funk were widely blurred, and it combines complexities appropriate to the former with the kind of pop silliness associated with the latter—along with some stunning grooves, of course. Funk Factory was a band that, as Read more

  • Reunion tour

    Reunion tour

    Unspecified possibilities are the stuff of optimism. At the end of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, when Renton strolls off into the sunset with a bag of cash, we don’t know what will happen next for him, but we know he’s decided to choose life. He’s going to go and find fulfilment, as any young man should Read more

  • Abstract affective allegory

    Abstract affective allegory

    Like all the books published by ShortBox, Jonathan Djob Nkondo’s After Laughter is a beautiful object, printed to a high standard, its bold, two-colour cover intriguing and inviting. The ShortBox website describes it as a ‘silent’ comic, which is to say it has no text. While I’m not one for policing the boundaries of genres Read more

  • Filmic mythology

    Filmic mythology

    If the daft comedy Raising Arizona was a film made of style, with Miller’s Crossing the Coen Brothers showed that the same basic material could still be used to construct something dark and serious, much as it had been in the Classical Hollywood era. Every shot, every line of dialogue, is crafted in homage to Read more

  • Habitable insouciance

    Habitable insouciance

    I haven’t seen a great deal of James Stokoe’s work, but what I have seen has been right up my street. He contributed to Prophet, one of the most psychedelic recent SF comics, and he drew the cover for the first issue of Protector, a promising new series from Image which looks likely to find Read more