Category: FILM IN PHASE SPACE

  • 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,…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Nosferatu

    In the twilight of late-stage capitalism, where the gig economy thrives on precarious labor and ephemeral rewards, the vampire emerged as a cultural icon, embodying the dark allure of a crumbling empire. These vampires were not mere monsters; they were avatars of a seductive decay, haunting neon-drenched cities where ambition and exploitation intertwined. They whispered…

  • Prime Directive

    James Bond: Prime Directive (An Amazon Studios Original Film—Available Exclusively on Prime Video with Free One-Day Shipping!) There was a time—perhaps mythical, perhaps real—when James Bond was a man of simple appetites: martinis, women, and the occasional war crime disguised as “Queen and Country.” He was a blunt instrument of empire, a wrecking ball in…

  • Diary of a Streamer

    Watching The Hound of the Baskervilles with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Absolutely baffling how they made movies back then with zero fucks given for modern streaming necessities. No bathroom breaks, no snack intermissions, no “Are you still watching?” judgment pop-ups. Just a relentless, uninterrupted story unfolding at a steady pace, as if people were…