Shows
Months Of SundaysRe-boots, Re-writes and Restless Desire: The Matrix Resurrections (2021)'Why make something new with old code?' We loved The Matrix Resurrections - so why doesn't everybody? From the spectacular to the simulated; from gender transgression to the Lacanian lack at the heart of hollow contemporary blockbusters, we discuss why, in a culture of endless fan-service, The Matrix Resurrections is doing far more than having its cake and eating it. Let's see how deep the rabbit-hole goes...2022-01-1644 min
Months Of SundaysStyle Over Substance? Essayism, the Novel and the Popular Reception of Wes Anderson in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The French Dispatch (2021)"Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose."Wes Anderson: once the critical darling of the early twenty-first century, now slightly uncool to admit you still like. In the context of post-Trump America, the liberal penchant for gestural politics has led to Anderson's popular fall from grace; he is often accused of representing 'style over substance'. Does this accusation hold up? Does it matter if it does; might there be a place for the politics of the purely stylish? And how might these questions be answered differently with a look to...2021-11-2144 min
Months Of SundaysWhat's Wrong With Cinema Anyway? Irreconcilable Spider-Man[s], Doubles, and Digimodernism"...maybe you're not supposed to be Spider-Man climbing those walls? That's why you keep falling."The Marvel Cinematic Universe: a black hole exerting its inexorable, monolithic pull on culture, stifling creative flourishing and making cinema a marketable gallery of twee, collectible action-figures. But it didn’t have to be this way! It’s become cinephile’s dogma that Sam Raimi’s original Marvel Spider-Man films (2002, 2004, 2007) were the vulgar auteur’s answer to what mainstream superhero movies might have been: fun, tight, and with a lot of heart. Their unapologetic relishing of melodrama, and thematic development through action, forms an o...2021-11-2144 min
Months Of SundaysChasing Bleak Highs: Postmodernism to Nihilism in Heathers (1989) and Point Break (1991)'This'll be the kind of thing to infect a generation! It'll be a Woodstock for the 80s!' / 'If you want the ultimate, you've got to be willing to pay the ultimate price. It's not tragic to die doing what you love.'What have a classic high school satire and a camp action film got in common? Sex and death, of course! We explore late 80s /early 90s ennui as the breeding ground of films that both examine and encapsulate postmodernist depthlessness, chasing the only high left at the end of history: the end of life. In...2021-09-1942 min
Months Of SundaysLockdown and Limbo: The Exterminating Angel (1962) and Old (2021)Claustrophobic, paranoia and confrontations with mortality: the mental and material barriers on the enclosed settings of Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962) and M. Night Shyamalan's Old (2021) make them the ultimate lockdown movies. But what else might this surrealist classic and tonally weird mainstream horror have in common? How do their performances of intimate, domestic space map onto our own age of digital surveillance? And what have the rich learned (or not learnt) in their period of insular isolation?2021-08-1551 min
Months Of SundaysRom-sploitation: Adapting Austen and Misunderstanding Materialism'As if!'Jane Austen once described the scope of her work as 'the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory, on which I work with so fine a brush', an ambiguous writerly modesty that has contributed to her critical and popular characterisation as an elegant, apolitical author, unconcerned with the world beyond her finely-drawn drawing room satires. But Austen is a writer of prickly discomfort, her humour governed by the material rigours of regency society. Adaptations that fail to understand that Austen is 'way harsh' (in the words of Cher from Clueless, a latter-day Emma) will...2021-06-201h 01
Months Of Sundays'Water, water everywhere...': the sea, freedom, and constraint in Beau Travail (1999) and Bait (2019)'But it's impossible to fight just for an ideal. An ideal that just keeps changing. You know what I mean?'Claire Denis's Beau Travail and Mark Jenkin's Bait are films which use the ocean as a central motif. Since Homer's Odyssey, the sea has represented both metaphysical freedom as well as harsh material constraint. Both are about people who are at odds with their times: their work is the sea and the sea is their life and they cannot reach it. We ask how work and the sea are linked in these films, and what they...2021-05-3046 min
Months Of SundaysFreudian Dreams to Postmodernist Nightmares: the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise (1984-94)'It's only a dream!'A Nightmare on Elm Street, and its iconic villain Freddy Kruger, has been a cultural staple since Wes Craven's original film in 1984. Since then, there have been six more films in the decade-long series, all the way up to the postmodern malaise of 1994. From the Freudian modernism of the 80s films, through the carbon-copy unoriginality in the middle of the series, up to the postmodern reflexivity of the last two films, the films trace a familiar pattern, and one which charts wider cultural shifts around this time. We ask...2021-05-161h 09
Months Of SundaysEmotional Affect and the Hyperreal: Nathan For You and 'Hidden' Camera Comedy'You're filming something. That's kind of the purpose, right?' From the dizzy heights of Borat (2006) and Jackass (2002), to the pandemic-inflected How to With John Wilson (2020), Bad Trip (2020) and slightly disappointing Borat 2 (2020), the twenty-first-century can't get enough of comedy that blends reality and the scripted. Perhaps the most successful of these productions is Nathan For You (2013-17), the show where Nathan Fielder uses his 'knowledge to help struggling small business owners make it in this competitive world', blending cringe-comedy and reality TV to create a light-hearted but prickly satire on American business and media culture. But with i...2021-05-0255 min
Months Of SundaysZombified Desire: on consuming and being consumed in Dawn of the Dead (1978 and 2004)'They're after the place. They don't know why, they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here. They're us, that's all, when there's no more room in hell.'What happens when our desires become zombies of themselves? In George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the libidinal urge to consume and accrue play out in a radically altered landscape, in which capitalist modes of meaning-making have lost their value. We discuss how Romero subverts the traditional fantasy of the zombie film, of the apocalypse as a libertarian playground for a few individual survivors, by transforming...2021-04-041h 01
Months Of Sundays'Reality is not what it used to be': Lovecraftian Landscapes in In The Mouth of Madness (1994) and The Color Out of Space (2019)'God's not supposed to be a hack horror writer'We compare John Carpenter's metafictional Lovecraft homage In the Mouth of Madness with Richard Stanley's more recent The Color Out of Space. Why does Carpenter's film succeed where Stanley's fails in creating a truly Lovecraftian sense of horror, despite the latter's textual faithfulness? What makes Lovecraft the quintessential author of the 'weird'? And what are the political ramifications of a retreat into fiction, especially in our digital age? 2021-03-2152 min
Months Of Sundays'I've taken off my person suit': Hannibal Lecter and A Very American Displacement'I find the trout to be a very Nietzschean fish'As brilliant as it is bizarre, Bryan Fuller's 'Hannibal' (2013-15) is a psychiatrist's dream, chock-a-block with displacements: psychological, sexual, social, tonal, structural and bodily. How does Hannibal use cannibalisation to evoke the anxiety of de-individualisation in the similitude of corporate America? How has it borrowed from its precursors, Manhunter (1986) and Silence of the Lambs (1991), to flirt with censorship and create subplots into which the queer subtext of the main plot is camply displaced? And what happens when a police procedural takes off its person suit, and becomes...2021-02-281h 00
Months Of Sundays'Filth is my Politics': the Liberatory Camp of John Waters'Is this the cocksucker residence?'From the shockingly funny filth of cult classic Pink Flamingos (1972), to the dizzy heights of Hairspray (1988), and paying homage to Cry-Baby (1990) and Serial Mom (1994) along the way, we delve into the dizzyingly camp Baltimore of John Waters. What does the director proud that his 'work has no socially redeeming value' have to say to us about race, class and gender, with tongue firmly in cheek? And what does Hairspray (2007) get wrong?2021-02-1735 min
Months Of Sundays'The Immaterial Has Become... Immaterial': Pirates of the Caribbean and Hope in Hopeless Causes'The world used to be a bigger place.' / 'World's still the same. There's just less in it.'This episode, we plot our coordinates and set our course for the rosy mists of childhood, taking on the original 'Pirates of the Caribbean' trilogy. Captain Jack Sparrow is constantly dancing before the inevitability of fate, outliving the ephemeral freedoms of the doomed pirate era, as the centre of empire clamps down on the opportunistic flourishings of the periphery. We might find an appealing analogue in this late flourishing of commercial cinema, soon to be extinguished by remakes...2021-01-3144 min
Months Of SundaysApocalypse Nows: Imperial Hypocrisy through Heart of Darkness (1899), Apocalypse Now (1979) and the PresentDisneyland? Fuck, man, this is better than Disneyland!If the period of modernist fragmentation, late-60s political dissolution and present-day, post-end-of-history ennui have one thing in common, it's the anxiety that the end has already come. We trace Conrad and Coppola's respective journeys to 'hearts of darkness', which are revealed as the empty hearts of colonial expansion. We explore 60s counter-culture as a zombie version of itself, in an endless war which has detached representation from its political relevance. And finally, we find analogues for the posthumous culture of endless war in our present...2021-01-1749 min
Months Of SundaysPerformed 'Selves' in the Era of Digital Capitalism: Holy Motors (2012) and Possessor (2020)'I miss the cameras. They used to be heavier than us. Then they became smaller than our heads. Now you can't see them at all.'We discuss one of our favourites of 2020: Brandon Cronenberg's sci-fi horror film Possessor, in comparison with Leos Carax's rightly-lauded Holy Motors . As they unfold, both films reveal themselves to be concerned with the blurring of selfhood and performance. We ask how these films relate to our corporatized world of global mass surveillance and how much agency we have within this scheme, when our bodies seem to be fated by unseen corporate...2021-01-0454 min
Months Of SundaysThe Family Film at the End of History: Gremlins, The Addams Family and Scoob!Whatever happened to films like Gremlins 2? If the 1990s was a high-point of Western cultural hedonism, apathy and affluence, then it was also the perfect breeding-ground for camp fun for all the family, before such commercial film-making tipped over into the homogenised hits of the 2000s Marvel movie. In fact, in an era in which the Left had been so thoroughly quashed as to no longer be threatening in Hollywood, the very silliness of these rude romps permits them both sparkling moments of innovation, and anti-capitalist satire.2020-12-0649 min
Months Of SundaysThe Politics of the Muse: Josephine Decker's Shirley (2020), Madeline's Madeline (2018) and Thou Wast Mild And Lovely (2014)We dissect the recent filmography of filmmaker Josephine Decker, from pastoral genre bender Thou Wast Mild And Lovely to her recent fictionalised 'biopic', Shirley. Looking at the intricate power relationships and underlying eroticism, we wonder how the films respectively treat the conception of a muse, how far identities become performance, and how far the women in these films are directing their own lives, and if so, who for?2020-11-231h 06
Months Of SundaysDeadly Dames: Gender and Giallo in Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016)From Greek tragedy’s murderous enchantress Medea to the femme fatales of film noir, the west has a long-running cultural preoccupation with witchy women who kill. Nowhere more so than in giallo, the hyper-violent genre of stylised thrillers that emerged in Italy from the 1960s onwards, famously exemplified by Dario Argento’s cult classic witch-fest Suspiria (1977). But by examining Argento’s earliest film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), alongside a contemporary feminist pastiche of giallo, Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016), we unearth a surprising gender politics, in which giallo’s centres of agency and objectification are not all they a2020-11-0945 min
Months Of SundaysBig Corporate on Big Corporate: Amazon’s The Boys (2020)The second season of The Boys (2020) has been making waves in the past few weeks with its wittily brash cocktail of satire, violence and pacey plotting. But to what extent can truly subversive anti-corporate messaging spring from a corporation like Amazon? Can we see through Amazon’s generically pleasing house style to a genuinely consciousness-raising original? And is having your cake and eating it necessarily a bad thing?2020-10-1841 min
Months Of SundaysThe Shop Around the Corner (1940) and You've Got Mail (1998) - A Marxist AnalysisWe’re aiming all our most penetrating intellectual implements at a seemingly light-hearted topic this week: just what is the economic ideology endorsed by cherished 90s romcom ‘You’ve Got Mail’ , and the classic comedy on which it is based? From the economic anxiety of the Depression to the boom-based economic complacency of the 1990s, from sinister manipulation to a jarring cover of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, this episode doesn’t shy away from thinking seriously about the silly.2020-10-0433 min
Months Of SundaysThe Destruction of Time: Tenet (2020), Anachronism and NetflixIn this episode, we do a deep dive into Netflix shows like Sex Education, Sabrina, Umbrella Academy and Stranger Things and their disturbing tendency towards uncritical nostalgia. Where does this nostalgia come from? Why is it so prevalent, especially on a platform like Netflix which has a tendency towards algorithmically designed TV? And why does modern TV not want to historicise itself? We then move on to discuss how this trend may be exemplified in modern depictions of the Cold War, specifically the uneasy allure of time's ultimate destruction in Tenet (2020) and The House With a Clock in its...2020-09-2040 min
Months Of SundaysSex Work, Kitsch and [dis] Empowerment: Gigi (1944 and 1958) and Showgirls (1995)We compare Minnelli's classic MGM musical Gigi and Verhoeven's derided melodrama Showgirls. Despite their seemingly disparate traditions, a decadent fin-de-siecle set-piece and a satire of the 90s zeitgeist share a dirty dressing room in their taste for the hammy, the spectacular and the uneasily exploitative. But when does absurdity veer into skilful pastiche? What does Colette's novella Gigi tell us about the film's [mis]reading? And can these films' portrayal of commodified sexuality give us any insight into the performance of sex in the internet’s phantasmagorical arena?2020-09-0638 min
Months Of Sundays'The present is harder to find': Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo (2003) and David Cronenberg (2012)This episode, we delve into Don DeLillo's spiky satire of information capitalism and David Cronenberg's much-misunderstood adaptation. Has the future become a dully knowable property, endlessly foreseen on the passive screens of our spectacular society? Or can tomorrow still turn round to kick us in the teeth? Taking in twenty years of New York, from 9/11, to Occupy Wall Street, to right-popularism and pandemics, this episode asks the question: what does it mean to be ‘contemporary’?2020-08-2349 min
Months Of SundaysThe Political Compass of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)We dissect the politics of cult classic, Buffy, and its spin-off, Angel. Is Buffy individualist or collectivist? Libertarian or authoritarian? And what does its spectacularly camp aesthetic suggest about its ideological alignment? In a double-length bumper episode, we hope to bring you some of the magic of one of the most formally radical TV shows of all time, with a nod and wink to some potential political radicalism along the way.2020-07-261h 07
Months Of SundaysGender, Revenge and Sexual Assault: Ms. 45 (1981) and Elle (2016)In this episode, we discuss two women protagonists, both of whom undergo sexual assault and take revenge - creating two very different films. Are these exploitation movies? Is the stylised more truthful than the realist? And can women's stories, told by male directors, ever move beyond misogynistic ventriloquism?This episode contains sustained discussion of depictions of sexual assault.2020-07-1238 min
Months Of SundaysThe Class Dynamics of Joseph Losey: The Servant (1963) and Mr. Klein (1976)We discuss the films of Hollywood exile and Pinter collaborator Joseph Losey (focusing on The Servant, Accident, and Mr. Klein).2020-06-2137 min
Months Of SundaysThe 2020 American Protests: Race and Class in Do The Right Thing (1989)We discuss the films of Spike Lee, focusing on Do The Right Thing, as an interesting lens through which to see the contemporary American protests. 2020-06-0833 min
Months Of SundaysFree Will? Devs (2020) and DeterminismThis week, we discuss the potential for political agency in a seemingly over-determined world, in the context of new SF TV show Devs. Materially circumscribed and confined to our houses during lockdown, is there a way of escaping the tracks laid out for us?2020-05-1931 min
Months Of SundaysHome Invasion: Ready or Not (2019) and Knives Out (2019)We discuss the political co-ordinates of the home invasion movie in the context of the quarantined home and look at how two recent films have subverted the conventions of the genre from a left-wing political perspective2020-05-0332 min
Months Of SundaysSafe (1995), Children of Men (2006) and Viral ParanoiaThis was our first episode, so it's not as well produced/a bit ramble-y: enjoy!We discuss the eerie relevancy of Todd Haynes's Safe, and what it tells us about the current global state through the work of Mark Fisher, among others. We also look to Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men. 2020-04-2636 min