This is a wonderful essay about Everything Everywhere All At Once’s portrayal of masculinity. I hadn’t conscously picked up on Waymond’s lack of a character arc, but it makes so much sense.
Also EEAAO (as no-one is calling it) was unexpectedly one of the best films I’ve seen so far this year. If you’ve been putting off watching it, please do check it out.
I was watching Thief the other night and couldn’t get over how James Caan (RIP to a real one) was only 41 in that film but looked so much older. This is a great explanation of why that is.
Meet Mavis: A Powerful, Patchable, Analog Synth | Moog
Moog have launched a really cheap (well, for Moog), build-it-yourself, semi-modular analog synth and the reviews have been pretty great so far.
The 22 best board games – Polygon
A solid list. If you’re just getting into board games, this is a great place to start.
Bo Burnham has put up an hour-long video of the outtakes from Inside. But it’s more than just your usual outtakes – some of it is really cleverly done. Like showing all the takes of a song all at once, and turning off the unused takes as he messes up, so that at the end it’s like a Super Meatboy level and you’re just left with the take he used in the final film.
I wasn’t originally taken by Inside (although this might have been overly harsh because of, you know, everything) but I really appreciate the amount of work he put in.
When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality.The reason it’s important to have this is because most of the time what a director really does is make decisions. All day long: Do you want it to be long hair or short hair? Do you want a dress or pants? Do you want a beard or no beard? There are many times when you don’t know the answer. Knowing what the theme is always helps you.
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I remember in “The Conversation,” they brought all these coats to me, and they said: Do you want him to look like a detective, Humphrey Bogart? Do you want him to look like a blah blah blah. I didn’t know, and said the theme is ‘privacy’ and chose the plastic coat you could see through. So knowing the theme helps you make a decision when you’re not sure which way to go.
Hypercritical: An Unsolicited Streaming App Spec
BRB forwarding this to the RTE Player team.
Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth”, Reviewed by Ethan Coen
In the interest of full disclosure, my editor has requested that I mention that I was Mr. Coen’s writing partner, producer, and creative collaborator on the aforementioned 18 films. I am also his brother. We parted ways prior to Macbeth in a split that the press described as completely amicable. Despite my prior association with Mr. Coen, I feel that I am entirely capable of reviewing his work in a fair and objective way.
Macbeth is Joel Coen’s shittiest movie by several billion light years.
How we made: Billy Bragg’s A New England
By 1980, Margaret Thatcher had been elected, the band had broken up and punk had dissipated into synthesiser groups, so A New England was my way of saying that I needed a hug as well as a new ideology.
Me too, Billy. Me too.