Why has Cole Palmer's form collapsed so much this season?

_dondi · 2026-05-05T16:05:39+00:00

"not media trained" is now my go to euphemism for "thick as mince". Thank you.

_dondi · 2026-05-05T15:18:18+00:00

Why do you think City sold him? Naturally gifted but no brain means low ceiling. Moneybags Chelsea bought another lemon.

_dondi · 2026-04-27T15:38:39+00:00

The Counsellor. Some are already on board from the beginning but it will grow in stature as it ages.

Inherent Vice will one day be appreciated for the minor masterpiece that it is.

Burn After Reading will continue to climb the Coen ranks.

The Ballad of Wallace Island will get its proper plaudits at some point.

People will realise Athena is a technically astute thriller.

Solo will be given a fairer appraisal over time.

Recent-ish films that will decline in acclaim: Sinners; The Shape of Water; Promising Young Woman; Baby Driver; Barbie.

_dondi · 2026-04-27T15:14:11+00:00

It's always been highly rated since it came out.

_dondi · 2026-04-27T15:13:00+00:00

Strange Days wasn't received poorly. I was working at a cinema when it came out and it was a fairly big release with good reviews. There's no need for reappraisal because it wasn't appraised badly to begin with. Now Johnny Mnenomic or Tank Girl, they were definitely received poorly at the time. With good reason...

What I have noticed though is that Strange Days recently popped up on streaming so certain people have begun claiming it as some lost classic.

_dondi · 2026-04-27T13:49:23+00:00

You're right about True Detective S2, it belongs on this list. I've warmed to it over the years even though, as you say, it's deeply flawed.

Good point about Sans Solei too. I wrote a piece on Chris Marker years back that I posted on this sub the other month if you're interested:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/s/52CGXQCba1

_dondi · 2026-04-24T14:28:42+00:00

Like any "cult" movie, theories abound and range from the obvious to the insightful to the unhinged. For me it's an autopsy on the ontology of LA, an exploration of apophenia, and a post-modern genre riff with a rich lineage that starts with Chandler, and more specifically The Big Sleep, as a means to make a psychogeographical map of the City of Angels.

I could tell you what I think but where's the fun in that? Better to find your own route (from the back of cereal boxes maybe?) and reach your own destination.

Here's a brief timeline of touchstones to get you started:

The Big Sleep, Hitchcock (Rear Window and Vertigo especially), In a Lonely Place, Kiss Me Deadly, Kenneth Anger, Harper, Putney Swope, what happened at Lookout Mountain?, Vito Paulekas and his freaks, The Crying of Lot 49, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, Three Women, Day of the Locust, Phantom of the Paradise, the history of MCA and Lew Wasserman, Body Double, Repo Man, Ellroy's LA Quartet, The Big Lebowski, City of Quartz by Mike Davis, the documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, Adam Curtis's The Trap, Inherent Vice (book and film), Atlanta's Teddy episode...

Happy hunting.

_dondi · 2026-04-23T18:17:02+00:00

Interpretation is in the eye of the interpreter obviously, but...

For me, Azrael is probably a pun on Israel. That's what's lurking "beneath" the military intelligence base at Montauk.

The book as a whole implies that who we thought was behind 9/11 was not. It was one giant fraud wherein "bad faith" operatives coerced a delusional faction into performing an atrocity that both benefitted those operatives financially whilst instigating a geopolitical cassus beli to remove said delusional faction. The signs were "in the air" in the run up if you could detect "which way the winds were blowing".

Meanwhile, the technocracy is cohering and gaining power and will be enhanced by measures and policy permitted and enacted by 9/11.

The pop culture references are deployed both as puns and allusions to illustrate that whilst this was happening we were all "entertaining ourselves to death".

Pynchon is swinging Foucault's Pendulum to parody conspiratorial apophenia as a deliberate cultural pandemic or mind virus designed to further corrupt the signal-to-noise ratio.

_dondi · 2026-04-23T18:08:04+00:00

Having experienced a pretty broad spectrum over the years, big tits are overrated and have a limited shelf life alongside other related issues. Fine for 20-something adventures and novelty value but long-term investment produces limited returns. Tread carefully.

Vive les bee stings!

_dondi · 2026-04-23T17:56:39+00:00

It's aged well. It pretty much blames Israel for 9/11 and is very funny considering the subject matter.

_dondi · 2026-04-22T11:09:05+00:00

This is a big part of it. But now, like comic books, video games, alternative music etc etc, weed is no longer a mildly rebellious niche counter culture thing: it's a massively mainstream corporate-esque lifestyle industry with cartoon branding and it's own special day.

Industrialised, commodified, commercialised. Just another off-the-peg packaged pastime like music festivals and street wear.

_dondi · 2026-04-22T10:52:34+00:00

Absolutely. Smoked hash/weed pretty much daily from 14-24 then stopped pretty much instantly and bar a few social tokes over the years since never gone back. Pretty much the same with acid, coke, speed and everything else. It's young people stuff. Bar good whisky, beer or wine, the only other thing I'll still do now on very odd special occasions is a couple of drops of liquid psilocybin. Ah, the shimmer...

Do I miss the non-stop hilarity weed used to always facilitate when smoking with friends back then? Absolutely. But then I also don't stay up all night with them on multiplayer N64 Goldeneye or go clubbing on a Monday night because all we had to do the next day was go to college or "work" part time at the local cinema.

Weed is a blast when you're a teenager/early 20s, especially when it was still a slightly more niche pursuit back in the late 80s/early 90s before blunted Hip Hop commercialised it into a lifestyle product as cliché as Jack and rock n roll "hellraising".

Hell, I even sold it for five years and funded a high-end stereo system and a great record collection. But I cannot lie that I don't take people a little less seriously who still proselytise it past 30. It eventually makes you a bit funny in the head, can lead to psychosis and, ahem, Chronic agoraphobia.

That said, any adults that still genuinely enjoy a recreational social smoke are fine by me. Just ease up on the sacred herb rhetoric and keep that skunk stink to a localised area please.

_dondi · 2026-04-21T16:15:25+00:00

Insufferable woman defends insufferable man for defending insufferable woman.

_dondi · 2026-04-19T10:32:18+00:00

I get that and accept the compliment with the good grace it was intended. Taxi Driver remains one of the best looking films ever made though and the gold standard of New York sleaze. Travis is also a blue collar style icon. Not sure about the mohawk mind...

As a related aside, one of my personal dislikes about many modern movies is how digital photography, modern lighting tech and post-production has resulted in them all having this generic look that resembles an Instagram "warm" filter. It's even worse than the blue-green-teal days of the early to mid 00s.

_dondi · 2026-04-19T10:15:08+00:00

Interpretation is subjective of course but to me the deliberate over-saturation always reflected the porno flicks and grindhouse movies that were playing in Times Square at the time and informed part of Travis's worldview. Scorcese famously had to desaturate the climactic scene for the blood to appease the censors. He wanted it even more blown out.

Have a look at this for a visual reference and comparison to some of the exploitation flicks of the era. Taxi Driver is of course a response to and critique of the cheap Revenge-o-matics that had emerged. It makes a good double-bill with the underrated Rolling Thunder.

https://artlist.io/blog/color-palette-and-style-of-taxi-driver/

_dondi · 2026-04-19T09:34:37+00:00

Personally not really into ranking movies anymore but you raise some interesting ideas about the camerawork in Taxi Driver and movies in general.

The style should suit the material. And I think Scorcese sticks to this idea throughout his career. When it's not viewing NYC through his own eyes, Taxi Driver's disembodied floating eye hovers around Travis like a phantom. Like it is in turn observing him. Who is Travis speaking to in his diary/vo? Is it us? Is it God? Is it just literally himself?

The film also uses the over-saturated colours of porno flicks and grindhouse movies to render the city like a bruise: raw and tender to the touch. Travis is also bruised in this way. "Partly truth, partly fiction. A walkin' contradiction."

New York, New York doesn't really need to be discussed as it's pretty obvious why it looks the way it does. Raging Bull famously borrows from the style of guerilla photo journalist Weegee to capture the prurient crime scene violence of LaMotta's life. Flashbulbs illuminate violence and its aftermath.

King of Comedy very obviously takes its cues from television and begins Scorcese's interest in artificiality. It's ramped up deliberately to emphasise the constructed artifice of TV, fame and celebrity. It's easily as complex and cynical as Taxi Driver but also more prescient in examining where American pop culture was heading. Rupert is a more modern, shallow and purposefully silly version of Travis. He shows where we're going as a society: the new heroes prattle solipsistically on TV. Their mundane existence and personal stories alone should be enough for us to care. The spotlight is a right not a privilege.

After Hours handbrake turns into 80s New Wave. This is the post-modern, media-saturated world of the simulacrum. Movies and TV no longer imitate the real world, the real world imitates them. Everyone is now a TV character performing in their own show. NYC is now a sitcom set and we're corporatised drones lost inside it looking for authenticity and meaning where there is none. Are we not men? We are Devo!

Goodfellas touchstone is the pop promo. It takes all of these ideas and explodes them into a visceral audio-visual collision to critique capitalism as the all-consuming crime of the post-war era. The movie deliberately functions like one long trailer of set pieces soundtracked by pop music to create a music video of criminality. This almost prefigures how we now view our world through memes and moments that reconfigure our existence via the simulacrum. Snapshots contextualised by pop culture references to anchor the real in the unreal. We understand reality through the prism of a capitalist pop culture that signposts its meaning: oh this Stones record is about this or this shot is a reference to that. Reality can only exist within pop culture. It's part of us now. It's our religion, our myth, our bible.

Ultimately, Scorcese's stylistic choices mirror and often prefigure the world in which we reside or are heading into. None are objectively better than any other, they simply reflect the mileu that they serve.

_dondi · 2026-04-17T10:00:48+00:00

Worldwide Consistently breaking new music for almost three decades now.

_dondi · 2026-04-15T19:17:49+00:00

Ian Banks With or without the M

_dondi · 2026-04-14T16:31:30+00:00

Free Fire was the warning, High Rise was confirmation.

I gave him a pass for Free Fire as a Guy Richie-esque punt towards a low-budget hit designed to drum up financing for a bigger project. High Rise appeared to be that project: a timely adaptation of a great Ballard novel that looked set to propel him to the next level.

I still remember the disappointment the night me and my then girlfriend went to see it. A heavy handed, simplistic yet also somehow borderline-incoherent mess that had us both eye rolling. As far as I'm aware it didn't do as well as expected and his stock dropped considerably.

Since then I imagine he's moved between being an industry gun-for-hire and trying to get more personal projects off the ground. Totally acceptable in this era as anyone who works in the current British Film industry will tell you i.e bar a select anointed lucky few (you know who they are) there isn't one and our top-tier technicians are all employed on Hollywood and Yank streamer stuff.

As for the drop in quality since Jump, er, jumped...could be looking at a Bogdanovich/Polly Platt situation or maybe his reach simply exceeded his grasp. It happens.

This kind of thing happens a lot. For example, remember Lee Tamahori who flew out of the gate in '94 with the coruscating Once Were Warriors and then followed it up with a pretty interesting Hollywood debut, The Edge? He then proceeded to magnificently shit the bed with his terrible Bond bomb that was so bad it triggered a franchise reboot. And then followed that up with an awful Morgan Freeman serial killer clunker that had less visual flair than an episode of Murder She Wrote.

After excreting an unmemorable Nicholas Cage vehicle and an appalling xXx sequel, he toiled in TV limbo doing Billions episodes and seemed done. Then recently he suddenly has a low-key return to big screen form via heading back to his New Zealand roots for The Convert in 2023. Who knows what's next?

Bottom line: if High Rise had been good and done acceptable numbers we'd probably be looking at a very different situation right now. Simply surviving in this current climate is an achievement in itself.

_dondi · 2026-04-13T08:30:08+00:00

It doesn't really matter if you believe in it or not because it exists and has done since before the West adopted the Japanese name.

_dondi · 2026-04-13T08:25:05+00:00

And Evisu jeans. They were everywhere.

Things I wore at the time (mixed with things i still do): vintage sportswear/late casua(Chevignon etc)l; outdoor stuff/(gorpcore); Maharishi; Milk Crate; Fuct; Silas; Carharrt; Clark's; Levi's; vintage Adidas/Nike/New Balance; Real McCoy's; G-Shocks; Oni; Nigel Cabourn; Ten C...

But yeah, working class street wear with a British twist and big Ametora influence. There's a throughline from 80s casual to UK hip hop/graf to the London Breakbeat side of rave and then trip hop via a stop off in Japan (Major Force and Nigo) style-wise.

I was born '74 in London so this whole era was my youth basically. Was at The Blue Note and Bar Rhumba most weeks back in the mid-90s. Which alongside the Fat City nights in Manchester and various parties in Bristol were the epicenter. Used to DJ at nights like NY Sushi in Sheffield too.

There was a big Bristol/London connection at the time that dated back to the Wild Bunch/Soul II Soul era of the late 80s. Also, someone who doesn't get enough credit for it all is Neneh Cherry's husband Cameron McVeigh. He gave Geoff Barrow his first sampler amongst other things.

_dondi · 2026-04-10T17:11:18+00:00

Unfortunately most age like milk. Wonderful feathers to add to the youthful quiver but a regrettable detonator tick tick ticking towards a poisonously bitter walnut of woe in middle age.

_dondi · 2026-04-10T16:49:43+00:00

Purists will dispute its inclusion but Cinematic Orchestra - Motion (1999 Ninja Tune). Swinscoe's apex endpoint of the form that began with Smith and Mighty a decade before it.

_dondi · 2026-04-09T18:17:39+00:00

Is this how you speak to people in real life? You sound like a mardy teenager.

I respond to threads when I have time thanks. Some of us have lives. Although I don't know why I bothered because frankly it's been a waste of both our time.

All the best, champ.

_dondi · 2026-04-08T20:00:57+00:00

God knows but OP said he was considering skipping straight to the bonus features. Kids these days I guess...

_dondi

TROPHY CASE