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The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)
“We cut ourselves to suit the cloth. We cut ourselves to size when first we are delivered to the world’s blunt engine. Barely twenty, with catalogue shoes and faces not our own, we step out on the shifting funhouse floor, clumsy at first but rapidly adopting the requisite compensatory gait, a paraplegic cakewalk almost graceful…
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“A homeschooled pimp who argues with bins…”
I refuse to feign interest in a Rolling Stone article, but this tweet from Phil Purser-Hallard – and they’re all tweets, as even the dank one himself knows – is as dull as the story it objects to. To watch The Sopranos as “macho gangster pulp” is to admit you watched it in the most…
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The Matrix Resurrections, revisited!
The problem with the Matrix movies has always been that you can’t live in the future. This might be true on a philosophical level, but in cinematic terms there is a more immediate problem: the future world of the films has never looked or sounded like a destination. Resurrections tries to rectify that, filling the desert of…
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A Tornado in My House
The fourth in a series of posts about Six Feet Under Previously: Meanwhile, in the mid ’90s: In my last post on this subject, I made a passing reference to Six Feet Under being weird about bisexuality. This is a theme that really flares up in the third season, when Claire goes to art school…
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Comic Book Men
The third in a series of posts about Six Feet Under Previously: I would be surprised if ‘Grinding the Corn’ (S4E9) was anyone’s favourite Six Feet Under episode. Claire’s adventures in homosexuality take a sharp turn into calamity here, in a way that feels driven more by the show’s weirdness about bisexuality than anything else.…
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Hypnotised Chickens
We’ve been on COVID shutdown since my partner tested positive on Saturday, which is my excuse for watching Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977) two nights in a row. The second time around I watched it with Tom Scharpling and AP Mike’s commentary… …which is about as good a substitute for company as you could hope for.…
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Mise en abyme
Similar to the above but seemingly unrelated, we have The Paradox of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Sopranos. There’s an episode of The Sopranos where Uncle June’s dementia has got so bad that he sees a clip of Curb and thinks it’s footage of his life. The vague visual resemblance between Larry David/Jeff Greene and…
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“I made a terrible decision and brought us to a horrible place”
The second in a series of posts about Six Feet Under Previously: A relic of the late pre-algorithmic age, Six Feet Under benefited from being made when established techniques were being sized up for new purposes. You can see the old world in its story structure, from the death of the week openings to the…
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Six Feet, Infinite Dimensions
The first in a series of posts about Six Feet Under Re-watching Six Feet Under, the temptation creeps in to make it a story about Nate Fisher’s hair. It’s fun to watch the first season, with its eruptions from the afterlife and the subconscious, and to marvel at how our man always looks like he’s…
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Trash Humpers
(Harmony Korine, 2009) When I was living and doing political activism outside of Glasgow, I spent a little time at community council meetings in areas that were either rural or suburban. The priorities in these meetings were often new to me, and I tried to take even the frustrating parts as a learning experience. There…
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\\ Blue Box - “This is all a tape-recording" // 