It has become a truism that we recover from a break-up as we might recover from drugs, and science proves it: that the level of oxytocin flooding the brain resembles the pleasure principle of a good fix. The removal of the loved one, or the drug, leaves us bodily distraught. Is there any filmmaker who has coincided with this idle scientific fact and turned it into an aesthetic ongoing first princi…
Ricky Gervais made a joke at the Golden Globes about the length of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and the youthfulness of Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends, who tended to be under 25. Gervais says that when DiCaprio attended the premiere, his date was too old for him by the end of the film. It is a good joke, but it also hints at the various ways film is a temporal experience, and not only in t…
In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, Henry James might appear at his most morbid, but one way of thinking about James’s work is the attenuation of cause and effect. Here, a man goes each day to church and lights a candle to the various dead who are no longer in his life, including and most especially Mary Antrim, a woman he was due to marry. There, he sees a younger woman who is lighting …
1 I first noticed him working at a bar in an arthouse cinema in Edinburgh. He was more confident in a particular way than I would expect in an environment that wasn’t averse to hiring attractive people. But these were individuals one might have expected to see working too in an art gallery, a bookshop or a museum. The confidence in him I would have described as cocky, while the type of assur…
Let us propose three useful generalisations: a writer needn’t be clever; they shouldn’t assume a reader is as well-read as they are, and should never claim a reference passes for an insight. Has Ana Lydia Vega in ‘Story-Bound’ failed to act on these assumptions, and would the writing have been better if she had been fair to them? Writers do what they like, and the more form…