When the actor-turned-bookseller asks the students what kind of people they want to be, what are we meant to make of that scene? He insists that they all pour their hearts out to him in "improvised poetry" and they all end up in tears. The final girl to deliver her speech refers to herself as a "freak" and no one jumps in to disagree. Is this a heartfelt scene of intergenerational connection, or is it just that a famous older…
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllRecent reviews
More-
-
I Am Martin Parr 2024
I'm bored of these sycophantic documentaries that just reiterate again and again that X was a great guy, nobody was doing what he was doing, he really revolutionised his field, he was such a genius, he defined a generation, etc. People in I am Martin Parr keep saying Parr was a controversial figure and that his work never deserved to be labelled as condescending or mocking of its subjects, but we never actually get to hear those critiques that everyone…
Translated from by
Popular reviews
More-
The Story of Film: A New Generation 2021
A Northern Irish man... an interminable voice over... sincerely delivered but inane observations... What connects these two seemingly unrelated films? Why are we seeing the same shot of Andy Serkis transform into an ape for the third time? What's with all this phone footage of people pretending to fall asleep? Will the rhetorical questions ever end?
Translated from by -
London 1994
What prompted me to revisit London (the first time I saw it was at the ICA shortly after the Brexit vote, the audience tittering despondently with every mention of British hostility to Europe) was a fleeting and somewhat disparaging reference to Patrick Keiller in Alex Niven’s book New Model Island. Niven lists Keiller among the British proponents of psychogeography, a concept which arose from the situationists in Paris. Niven describes its specifically British iteration as “smothered in foreboding and melancholy,…
Translated from by
