Author of Generation Left. Co-host of the #ACFM podcast on Novara Media.
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllPinned reviews
More-
Uncut Gems 2019
David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years shows how informal, imprecise debts can produce the egalitarian bonds that hold communities together. Mathematically precise and firmly enforced debts, however, imply hierarchical relationships held in place by moral judgement and the threat of violence.
Debts of this second kind involve a loss of agency which is temporal in fashion. Debts bind your future self to a decision taken by your present self. Whatever you might want to do in the future,…
Translated from by -
Memento 2000
Commentary on Memento tends to focus on the formal innovation of its non-linear structure. It has two narrative sequences, one moving forward chronologically while the other moves backwards in time until the two join up. Although this is undoubtedly impressive, I’m just as interested in the way this interacts with the content of the film which seems to mirror the structure of political desire prevalent on the contemporary right. Memento is, after all, a film about denial and disavowal.
Its…
Translated from by
Recent reviews
More-
-
Train to Busan 2016
George A. Romero’s reinvention of the Zombie myth with his classic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead was so influential because he identified the dramatic potential of failed cooperation. The Zombies of the Romero universe are slow and lumbering, easy to out run and only really dangerous in large numbers. Again and again Romero’s films feature groups of humans holed up in a defensible building. The group can stay safe as long as they work together but they always…
Translated from by
Popular reviews
More-
La Chimera 2023
A ghost story. Of sorts.
With a doubling haunting, individual and societal.
The story is set amidst a real historical phenomenon of 1980s Italy which saw hundreds of ancient Etruscan tombs looted for antiquities by groups of tombaroli (literally tomb raiders). These low-level criminals were the bottom rung of a newly developed international network of criminal art dealers procuring illegal artefacts for the rich.
The film uses the tombaroli to figure the embrace of a form of hyper-capitalism by sections…
Translated from by -
That Christmas 2024
If you want a glimpse of a future in which corporations get AI (or really Large Language Models) to pump out derivative, soul destroying, filler then watch this film. Please note: it wasn't actually written by AI but by Richard Curtis, the closest the 90s got to a machine that pumps out vacuous, creativity free, sentimentality-by-numbers dross.
Translated from by
