- Blog
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Eras, golden ages, long decades – periodising the movies
I wrote this to avoid writing about Disney’s big hit of 1946 — Here’s another post lifted from my cinema history newsletter GROSS. I’m reviewing the top-grossing Hollywood movie from each year since 1913 and, when I got to 1946, I groaned. It’s Walt Disney’s Song of the South, the biggest movie of the year…
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Apex capitalism
The Apple Vision Pro represents the end of something. Or possibly the beginning. It’s an apex product from an apex economy. — (updated on 10 June with some new market valuations) What we know about capitalism – liberal democracy, Western economic dominance – suggests some kind of discontinuity is coming, some kind of historic break…
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La Calahorra, Andalucia, 1982
A beautiful village on the edge of a dusty plain on the Northern edge of the Sierra Nevada in Southern Spain. More on Flickr.
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On the spectrum
Two novels, one small and mean, one vast and generous, both magnificent — This year I started a bookclub in our house – with mixed results if I’m honest. It’s called ‘The Small Book Club’ and I seeded it with a pile of cheap and second-hand novels all of which are less than 200 pages…
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Skycaps on a break
From the archives. At JFK, 24 April 2005. They’re telling me about the previous Friday night’s $205M Michigan lottery win.
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Offset
More like this on old-school photo-sharing site Flickr. And, incidentally, I’ve been sharing my pics to Flickr for twenty years, which is making my head spin a bit. Still the only place that gives me the control I like over metadata, privacy and ownership, though. Seems crazy that Flickr still has essentially no competition, even…
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Three films that are not one hundred years old
My Substack newsletter is called GROSS. I’m writing about all the top-grossing films since 1913 – but I’ve made an exception for the new year and reviewed three films from 2023. — I feel like I want subscribers to know that I occasionally watch a modern film. Normal service will resume with the next movie,…
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Final act for the streamers
Netflix introduced ads and now Amazon Prime too. It’s your fault. — It’s a three-act drama — In act one it’s about growth—extravagent, out-of-control, venture-funded growth—you remember that. Piling on millions—hundreds of millions—of users as quickly as possible. And in this act the product improves. It has to. Features are added with no concern for…
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‘Working class golf’ – the posh media will never understand it
Broadcasters and journalists – please stop trying to explain darts. — I know you were privately educated and find darts to be kind of exotic – like chicken shops or pigeon racing – but when you invite a contributor to answer the question “…but is darts a sport?” or laughingly ask what “one-hundred-and-eighty!” means, you’re…
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No not that one, the other one
NAPOLEON, ABEL GANCE, GAUMONT, 1927, 330 MINUTES. — I’m publishing the occasional post from my newsletter about the history of film here on the blog. This one concerns the biggest international release of 1927. Not the biggest Hollywood release – that was The Jazz Singer. I’m reviewing that one separately. I really didn’t think I…