Sprezzatura

The greek gods were like the MCU back in the day — Dan Power (@therealdanpower) October 8, 2020 Remember when Scorsese said he's not crazy about Marvel films, and then everyone got mad, and then Francis Ford Coppola said "I'm backing, though," and then it was a whole big problem? That was eighty-seven years ago, feel old yet? Anyway, let's go back to that. Scorsese wrote a fantastic defence of his position in the New York Times that makes all the filmic points for me, which is good because I know so little about film that I think Garfield II is the pinnacle of modern cinema, but the problem is not that Marvel films are dumb explodey nonsense with simple messages and no 'substance' compared to a gritty Ken Loach character study, and Scorsese knows that. People like fun, dumb stories, and we always have. Bellerophon rode around on a flying horse and solved mysteries. Jupiter and Mercury went around doing epic Expecting Hospitality Off Our Subjects Pr...

My friend Chris asked me how I feel about the new Guardian article making the rounds, expecting a nice one message response. Bad move. Here is an essay instead. I think the article itself is a very solid look at Radiohead's relationship to seminal black artists; what I take issue with is that, however implicitly, the point of this article is ACTUALLY "here's why it's *okay* to still like radiohead." This is very hard to quantify or explain but basically this one girl made an political compass of all the different types of terrible boy she'd fucked - tag yourselves, I'm '1990s German football shirts' - and it's not on there but "guy who is way too into Radiohead" is one of these archetypes, and the dude whose image is conjured up when this archetypes is invoked is very white, and very uncool. " You know a guy got into Radiohead way too young when even his pocket rejects him ," that sort of thing. You don't wa...