This I can already conclude: films from Iceland are obviously like buses. You wait for an Icelandic film to watch for years, and then within a week you end up seeing three. (Okay, I cheated somewhat for the sake of the joke – I have seen an Icelandic short film about an old man who declares war on seagulls, but I must be misremembering the details, as I can’t find it on Google.) Another thing I can conclude: I like what I’ve seen of Icelandic cinema.
Continue readingAuthor: Matt
The Compleat Ingmar #9: A Lesson in Love (1954)
A Lesson in Love doesn’t exactly start very well, at least from a contemporary perspective: after an arch voiceover telling us to prepare ourselves for a comedy for grownups, we first meet a comely but angry young woman, Susanne (played by Yvonne Lombard), listing the failings of her older lover, the gynaecologist David Erneman (Bergman regular Gunnar Björnstrand). The lines are sharp, even witty, but it still seems that we’re watching what is essentially a male fantasy: obviously the young, attractive patients of a middle-aged, jaded gynaecologist would fall over themselves to undress for him in private as well as in his practice. It’s not that Bergman spares his protagonist, but whatever criticism is leveled at David, in the end it doesn’t matter. Young women seem magically attracted to him, and even as Susanne berates him for his cynicism, she still can’t help begging him to continue being her lover.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #29: There Will Be Blood
Prepare to have your milkshake drunk right across the internet: your cultural baristas once again return to the Paul Thomas Anderson well, this time to talk about his grim, disorienting epic There Will Be Blood that still confounds after multiple viewings. We also briefly touch upon family horror story Hereditary (which Mege talked about in this post), the surreal comic treat Legion (which we discussed in podcast #9) and and the celluloid nightmare that is The Lighthouse.
Prepare to have your milkshake drunk right across the internet: your cultural baristas once again return to the Paul Thomas Anderson well, this time to talk about his grim, disorienting epic There Will Be Blood that still confounds after multiple viewings. We also briefly touch upon family horror story Hereditary (which Mege talked about in this post), the surreal comic treat Legion (which we discussed in podcast #9) and and the celluloid nightmare that is The Lighthouse.
The Rear-View Mirror: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!
My mother was an emigrant from England. Since both my parents were from countries other than the one where I was born and where I’ve always lived, I always felt to some extent that wherever I was from, it was elsewhere – and if pressed on the matter, I would have said that I felt a connection to England and to the UK that I didn’t feel to the place my father came from. However, over the last few years I’ve very much had both an opportunity and a reason to re-examine my feelings towards the UK. Probably it started before then, but ever since the summer of 2016 it’s been impossible to avoid the escalating conversation/shouting match/toxic circle-jerk that, at its core, seems to be about identity: what does it mean to be British? What does the UK want to be? What does it want to represent in the world? Does it want to look forward or backward, outward or inward?
The Rear-View Mirror: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!
Bear with me, even though it’s still a few weeks before Christmas, but there’s no way we can’t talk about Frank Capra’s eternal holiday classic now that the Rear-View Mirror is reflecting the year 1946 back at us. When Frank Capra is mentioned, it’s easy to think of a certain kind of corny sentimentality, doubly so when the film in question is It’s a Wonderful Life. The fairy-tale ending, the song about lassoing the moon, the twee story about how an angel gets his wings whenever a bell rings, and Zuzu’s damn petals: it’s easy to be dismissive of the film. Easy and wrong.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #28: Werner Herzog
It is finally time for us to talk about the Grand Old Wild Man of German cinema, the director who made Klaus Kinski drag a boat across a mountain, the man who directed a film where all the actors were under hypnosis and another film where Nicholas Cage may have been one of the more normal parts of the whole. Join your cultural baristas for a conversation about Werner Herzog and his films, ranging from Nosferatu the Vampyre (1978) via Grizzly Man (2005) to Encounters at the End of the World (2007).
Girl, Incandescent: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
The painter’s job is clear: she must paint a version of the young woman that her potential suitor in Milan will treat like the 18th century version of Tinder, except for ‘swipe right’, read ‘marry the young woman you have never met in person, and she doesn’t have a choice in the matter’. The painter’s job is less that of producing enduring art than it is to advertise a product to be sold: the young woman is a commodity and the painter is there to make her into the most alluring commodity possible. Except, in the process of observing the young woman, the painter begins to desire her. The young woman is no longer an object of art, she is the subject of the painter’s longing. But if the painter fails to complete the portrait that will lead to her losing the woman she has fallen for, someone else will be called in to paint the young woman instead. They will lose one another either way – but, in painting the young woman, she can show her for what she truly is. For the painter, loving her subject finally entails the act of relinquishing her.
The Rear-View Mirror: Easter Parade (1948)
Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!
I’ve written about my ambivalent relationship to the musical genre before. It moves beyond ambivalent into downright ignorance when it comes to the musicals of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Sure, I’ve seen Singing in the Rain, but I have failed so far when it comes to other classics, such as An American in Paris. And if you were to ask me about Fred Astaire… well, it’s better not to ask me about Fred Astaire, unless you enjoy the sound of silence. It’s not that I dislike him, it’s more that I simply don’t know him.
They create worlds: Disco Elysium
One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.
The moment I wake up, I know that something is amiss. My reptilian brain and my limbic system talk to me, one in a snarling, jagged voice, the other in a hoarse, high-pitched whisper. They urge me, mock me, lead me astray – but who is this “me” they’re talking to? I drag my sorry body to the bathroom and look at myself in the fogged-up mirror – and there is no moment of recognition. I see my face, and it could be anyone’s. I’m a blank – and like a blank, I’m there to be filled with personality and meaning and purpose.
They create worlds: Outer Wilds
One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.
One of the biggest differences between computer games when I first started playing them, back in the 1980s, and modern computer games is scope. Open worlds of the kind that we’re used to nowadays didn’t exist on the 8-bit and 16-bit computers of yore, but these days it’s not rare for a game to feature a world many square kilometres in size. In 2001, Grand Theft Auto III let us rampage in a Liberty City that measured 9 km2 in real-world terms; Grand Theft Auto V, which came out in 2013, covered an area of 127 km2. Things get even more insane with the possibilities of procedural generation, so that we got a 1:1 scale simulation of the Milky Way galaxy in Elite Dangerous (released in 2015). As game worlds get bigger and bigger, though, it becomes increasingly difficult to fill them with meaningful content, and arguably Elite‘s in-game universe is several light years wide and a nanometre deep. Which is one of the reasons why the toy-box solar system of Outer Wilds is so engaging.
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