So Long, Suckers

Stanley Schtinter's 450-minute edit of the British TV soap opera EastEnders is a magical and strange thing that confines us, for over seven hours, inside a fake pub in the year 1999. Time, culture, nostalgia and alcohol are just four of the major themes of this unique odyssey, which Calum explores at length in a solo essay. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other sub...

Fellow conspirators, There are few “reads” in modern history more trite than the “end of innocence” narrative that surrounds the assassination of John F Kennedy in November, 1963. The death of Camelot; the bursting floodgate heralding a decade of American unrest and a half-century of swelling ambient paranoia. Hey, we ain’t gonna deny it’s compelling. And it’s precisely this grand reading that und...

Dear friends, If there’s one thing, just one thing, guaranteed to feature in a Spike Lee joint, it’s the phrase “By Any Means Necessary”. The words, followed up by the printed call-and-response “Ya dig | Sho nuff”, adorn the closing credits of each of Lee’s films, forming the two-pronged slogan for his production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks—and, in turn, a kind of mission statement. No...

Dear fellow travellers, Christopher Nolan is no stranger to imagining disaster. His Dark Knight trilogy, adapted from various Batman comic-book stories, toys with various visions of urban destruction, both physical—those involving guns and explosions—and psychological, with each of the films’ major villains threatening no less than full-scale urban breakdowns. The cycle even concludes with the det...

Dear neon demons, In July 2018, some 10 months before premiering his Amazon Prime Video series Too Old to Die Young at Cannes, Nicolas Winding Refn wrote an op-ed in the Guardian with the headline, “our times need sex, horror and melodrama”. His straightforward and, we think, perfectly admirable argument can be boiled down to the following: We need to be pushed out of our comfort zones – of compla...

Dear friends, Perhaps what really marks out Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s seventh feature film, Winter Sleep ( Kış Uykusu ), against his prior work is the different method by which it encodes time. It’s not necessarily inaccurate to taxonomise this in terms of “cinematic” drama versus the distinctly “theatrical”—but of course, things are never that simple. At the very least, Ceylan’s talky, Chekhov-inspired...

Quick note: this has been a while between recording and release. You’ll notice almost immediately, when we say David Warner died, er, “last week”. Dear friends, Dramatic payoff is one thing, but there’s an immense and specific satisfaction to the climaxes of the very best crime films. This is, to be sure, a pretty nebulous generic designation that can centre gangsters, professional thieves or smal...

Fellow travellers, In the late 1960s, Soviet students and lecturers held a debate on the merits of Andrei Tarkovsky’s second feature, which had premiered to controversy in December ‘66 and would not be passed for release—slightly cut down—until 1971. Tarkovsky quotes from the debate’s transcript in his diary of September 1, 1970, and this speech from one of the film’s defenders sounds eerily famil...

Fellow passengers, James Cameron’s films have a lot going on, but they are not thematically complex. Yet, there is something to the drawn-out ruination of his grandest vision, the three-hour Titanic (1997), that transcends his rollicking blockbuster style and its classical roots. As we observe (if hardly originally) on our latest podcast, the film is smartly cleaved into two halves, the former of...

Dear friends, Towards the start of Chantal Akerman’s documentary Hotel Monterey (1972), Babette Mangolte’s camera captures three women waiting in the lobby of the titular building. One of them gets up and stands frame left; another stubs out her cigarette and leaves; our first subject then walks out of frame. The third remains on the lobby sofa, chewing on something and seeming a mite self-conscio...

Dear friends, Around a third of the way through Stanley Kramer’s “ultimate comedy”, enraged everyman Jonathan Winters—amply aided by supporting comics Marvin Kaplan and Arnold Stang—completely destroys a desert gas station. The walls collapse, roofing and awnings come down and, in a final, hysterical grace note, Winters backs his truck into a water tower and sends it buckling to the ground, floodi...

Dear friends, In his 1993 book Spectres of Marx , Jacques Derrida argued that though the USSR had recently collapsed and Francis Fukuyama’s neoliberal “end of history” pronounced, the key ideas and approaches of Marxism not only survived but were, in effect, indelible. To explain this he used the titular metaphor of the spectre, itself taken from the opening line of The Communist Manifesto , and c...

Dear friends, In his 1978 period drama Days of Heaven , Terrence Malick chooses to stage a key plot development as a shadow play. During a night of entertainments, Sam Shepard’s landowning patsy (“the Farmer”) observes in blown-up silhouette his wife Abby (Brooke Adams) and her supposed brother Bill (Richard Gere) having a moment of apparently more-than-sibling intimacy. The softened liminality of...

Dear pals, If you listen to the friends of OJ Simpson for long enough, you get the impression that the football superstar, suspected murderer and convicted armed robber has never told the truth in his life. Oral evidence of this abounds throughout the seven-plus hours that make up Ezra Edelman’s multifaceted portrait of “the Juice”, Made in America , all from the mouths of people who claim to have...

Dear friends, A century after production started, and 94 years since its first public screening, Abel Gance’s silent historical epic Napoléon is still being completed. The mere thought could no doubt give most working filmmakers (and a goodly number of critics) deep pause, if not shuddering anxiety. Yet, for a film so defined—in its very form, its voice—by its maker’s grand ambitions, surely there...

Hello friends, Here’s the first of our occasional sidebars—in this case an essay on duration in For a Few Dollars More , as a general companion to our episode on Once Upon a Time in America . If you prefer, you can choose instead to listen to this essay as a podcast, both above and on Spotify. Thanks for your support! —Calum We’ve mentioned on mic the idea of “dick swinging” (or, indeed, dick meas...

Hello friends, Il maestro Sergio Leone famously wisecracked, “When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism; the redemptive power of cinema; and dynamite. Now, I just believe in dynamite.” Once Upon a Time in America , the film that would consume well over a quarter of his working career and ultimately prove to be his swansong, would seem to demonstrate his point. In this rather crushing e...

Welcome, friends, to our introductory episode in which we discuss duration, pace, medium and more—using examples from Béla Tarr to filthy hobbitses, Kelly Reichardt to Fiddly Ridley and Small Axe to Avengers: Endgame . If you like what you hear, please stick around for our first episode proper, on Once Upon a Time in America (1984), coming very soon, and do sign up to receive our emails so you can...