Category: FILM IN PHASE SPACE
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Hillbilly Elegy
Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy was never just a bad film. It was an artifact of a broader failure — the inability of America’s dominant elites to speak across the country’s fracture lines. Howard brought his Blue America toolkit: polished narrative arcs, Oscar-ready casting, and the belief that empathy is itself a cure. His film told…
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Anatomy of the Swashbuckle
You know the scene: the pirate swings across the chasm on a frayed rope, the fedora’d archaeologist narrowly outruns the crushing stone, the scoundrel slips from the trash compactor’s jaws with a wink and a spark. These moments weren’t just popcorn fodder—they were a battle of wits played out on the screen. It was a…
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The Outside Man
So. France issues this thing: the Jacques Deray Prize. Annual. For crime thrillers. Ritualistic. Like maintaining a firewall against cultural amnesia. Deray himself? Lyon-born. Not your Melville-grade auteur. Not Becker-level firmware. But industrial-grade. Reliable. A workhorse chewing through continental action flicks with Delon or Belmondo plugged into the lead roles. La piscine? Sure, a sexy…
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The Cagliostro Protocol
Three data points from dead media. Cagliostro (1949), Orson Welles cranking out noir-gothic product for Italian producers from Alexandre Dumas. Dracula (1897), Bram Stoker manufacturing Victorian anxiety porn. The Magician (1908), Somerset Maugham debugging English imperial neurosis. Different decades, same protocol stack. The pattern: charismatic outsider penetrates failing system, exposes its vulnerabilities, triggers cascade failure,…
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Stoner Bricolage
One key difference between A New Hope in 1977 and The Empire Strikes Back, and everything that’s followed since, is that we shifted from stoner bricolage to nerd control panels. In the ‘70s, the best sci-fi came from people who thought like collage artists and smelled like soldering irons. You had stoners with engineering degrees,…
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Revenge of the Writer
Any showrunner, TV writer, film hack — they all know exactly when they’ve cut a corner. It’s not a mystery. It’s a negotiation. The only variable is how many corners you can cut before the whole thing falls over. You do just enough for the audience not to notice — or not to care. Minimum…
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Bookstores
The point of a bookshop is not to find what you are looking for. To believe otherwise is to mistake the architecture of the labyrinth for that of the supermarket. A bookshop is not a catalog made flesh, nor a repository of answers to pre-formed questions. It is a topos, a place of sacred…
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Andor
The Nocturne of Small Betrayals: Doing this now, probably because of early Andor withdrawal symptoms onset. Why Furst now? Because I’ve got maybe four episodes left of Andor Season Two, and then it’s back to the algorithmic sludge of prestige TV — safe, symmetrical, and so thoroughly test-screened it might as well be AI. I’m…
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Minecraft
I went to see Minecraft and couldn’t help noticing a pattern in recent blockbusters—from Mario Bros. and Everything Everywhere to Spider-Man, Ghostbusters, and The Batman: every character is hustling, struggling, or just scraping by. It signals how economic precarity has been normalized in American storytelling—and not just in dramas or indie films, where you’d expect…
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The Non Existent Knight
Of Empty Armor and Absurd Quests The first time I read The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino, I imagined I had stumbled onto a lost Monty Python script—one written in secret, translated from the Italian, and perhaps smuggled through time in a hollowed-out codpiece. There it all was: the self-serious knight with no self, the…