Is it possible for a film to be too good? As ridiculous as that may sound, there is a tendency to call a film ‘too sophisticated’ or ‘worthy’ as though it’s a bad thing, connoting emotional sedateness and lack of originality. I saw ‘Never Let Me Go’, the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel, five months ago at the London Film Festival. In the time I have waited for its national release to see it again, I have tried my best to... Continue Reading

When experimental writing goes wrong.

You: HELLO Stranger: hi Stranger: good night You: So what did you make of the last MGMT jam? Stranger: asl You: If you want me to do anything sexual then you may as well move on Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Talking about music can get a little long in the tooth when it is this c... Continue Reading

Yesterday would have been the 37th birthday of the one and only J Dilla. James Yancey, or Dilla as he came to be known, can be placed in that category of great musicians whose incredible genius has only been truly recognized after they have departed. In his short life, ended by a rare blood disease in 2006, he broke down the barrier between producer and artist and demonstrated the expressive power of the machine (notably the Akai MPC, hip ... Continue Reading

Clicking through the music blogoshere this weekend pointed to a lot of excitement about the line-up of American festival Sasquatch! being announced, which is, admittedly, eye-wateringly good, with Wilco, Modest Mouse, Yeasayer, Beach House, Deerhunter and many more suitably rich pickings set to rock the Pacific Northwest. First thought was to turn a wan eye to the bank account and then curse Sasquatch! for being a) in May, right about the time Ea... Continue Reading

The Nominees: Christian Bale for The Fighter Mark Ruffalo for The Kids Are All Right Geoffrey Rush for The King's Speech Jeremy Renner for The Town John Hawkes for Winter's Bone

A washed up, drug addicted boxing trainer. A sperm donor who forms a relationship with the two children he never intended to know. A mild-mannered Australian speech the... Continue Reading

The Philosophy of Gossip Girl: Lecture One I assume most of you will have read The Genealogy of Morals and watched the first three seasons of Gossip Girl, and be well-versed, therefore, in Nietzsche’s account of the Master / Slave relationship in contemporary New York. For those of you who haven’t read the primary material, I will give a brief introduction: Chuck and Blair, according to the Classical interpretation, represent the Mas... Continue Reading

"I sometimes think that our love of cigarettes owes nothing to the nicotine, and everything to their ability to fill the meaningless void and offer an easy way of feeling as if we are doing something purposeful. My father, my brother, and I each took a cigarette from the packet of Maltepes offered to us by the elder son of the deceased, and once they were all lit with the same burning match that the teenager artfully offered us, there followed a... Continue Reading

Radio 1. One day. One man. This is long. No apologies. I'll keep it short for the remainder of term.

Broadcasting behemoth VERSUS Faceless hack

0600: Dev, a new name to these ears, toils gamefully in the late graveyard (0400-0630). Whilst undertaking some preliminary research for this piece, I stumble across this in the blurb for his show of 1st February 2011: Dev found a musical burping & f... Continue Reading

In ‘Film as Film’, celebrated critic V. F. Perkins argues that the success of a movie depends on how well its separate elements come together. This is where the auteur theory, developed by François Truffaut and the Cahiers du cinema crowd, gains momentum. Filmmaking is usually a fragmentary and repetitive task. Having worked on a film set, I came away surprised that a coherent whole can emerge at the end of the process at all. Truth is, the ... Continue Reading

I don't know if it was all this talk of Willow Smith whipping her hair back (and so on and so forth), watching Eminem getting beaten up in front of his lil' sis on a rerun of 8 Mile I caught the other day (why didn't she provide back up?) or Rev Run's kid Diggy Simmons turning out to be a half decent rapper, but something in recent weeks made me start to think about rappers and the domestic situation. Countless quest... Continue Reading