Category: Movies
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political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level
After getting irked by reviews of Oppenheimer, Adam Kotsko wrote a short thing that feels to me like it’s the missing piece to that Sam Kriss essay I excerpted last week, which has been—as the kids say—living rent-free in my head ever since. Kotsko has an interesting and very valuable insight into “culture war” stuff,…
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being a nerd has always meant being a machine for liking things
Via yer man Jay Springett, a gloriously excoriating piece of writing by Sam Kriss. After quoting a Warhol interview snippet which ends with Andy agreeing with the interviewer that Pop Art is all about “liking things”, and that liking things is being like a machine, “because you do the same thing every time. You do…
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Prayers for the damned: Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace
There’s something strange, to me, about modern cinemas—the architectural interiority of them, I mean. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been to them so infrequently over the course of my life, leaving my experience of them to be a series of lurching momentary mutations rather than a steady evolution of form; I don’t know. But it feels…
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We’ll always have Paris
Umberto Eco on “The Cult of the Imperfect” at the venerable Paris Review: When all the archetypes shamelessly burst in, we plumb Homeric depths. Two clichés are laughable. A hundred clichés are affecting—because we become obscurely aware that the clichés are talking to one another and holding a get-together. As the height of suffering meets…
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The Favourite
I enjoyed this movie a lot: visually sumptuous, as you’d expect of a period drama, but completely lacking in the prevailing fascination with (and fawning over) royalty and aristocracy, choosing instead to portray the English upper classes as fruitcakes, fops, ruthless opportunists, or some combination of all three. So we get plenty of big dresses,…