Months Of Sundays

'Why make something new with old code?' We loved The Matrix Resurrections - so why doesn't everybody? From the spectacular to the simulated; from gender transgression to the Lacanian lack at the heart of hollow contemporary blockbusters, we discuss why, in a culture of endless fan-service, The Matrix Resurrections is doing far more than having its cake and eating it. Let's see how deep the rabbit-hole goes...

"Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose." Wes Anderson: once the critical darling of the early twenty-first century, now slightly uncool to admit you still like. In the context of post-Trump America, the liberal penchant for gestural politics has led to Anderson's popular fall from grace; he is often accused of representing 'style over substance'. Does this accusation hold up? Does it matter if it does; might there be a place for the politics of the purely stylish? And how might these questions be answered differently with a look to the affective resonances of different films across Anderson's career? From the paen to the mid-twentieth century novel represented by The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) to the unashamed essayism of The French Dispatch (2021), we take a trip to the playground of the twentieth century. Follow us on Twitter here Follow us on Facebook here

'This'll be the kind of thing to infect a generation! It'll be a Woodstock for the 80s!' / 'If you want the ultimate, you've got to be willing to pay the ultimate price. It's not tragic to die doing what you love.' What have a classic high school satire and a camp action film got in common? Sex and death, of course! We explore late 80s /early 90s ennui as the breeding ground of films that both examine and encapsulate postmodernist depthlessness, chasing the only high left at the end of history: the end of life. In Heathers, would-be school-shooters seek stimulation in callous suburbia, while Point Break positions the endless chasing of the next wave as a hedonistic alternative to the dull bureaucracy of a hollowed-out state. But thrill-seeking is a pastime with an expiration date...

Claustrophobic, paranoia and confrontations with mortality: the mental and material barriers on the enclosed settings of Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962) and M. Night Shyamalan's Old (2021) make them the ultimate lockdown movies. But what else might this surrealist classic and tonally weird mainstream horror have in common? How do their performances of intimate, domestic space map onto our own age of digital surveillance? And what have the rich learned (or not learnt) in their period of insular isolation?

"...maybe you're not supposed to be Spider-Man climbing those walls? That's why you keep falling." The Marvel Cinematic Universe: a black hole exerting its inexorable, monolithic pull on culture, stifling creative flourishing and making cinema a marketable gallery of twee, collectible action-figures. But it didn't have to be this way! It's become cinephile's dogma that Sam Raimi's original Marvel Spider-Man films (2002, 2004, 2007) were the vulgar auteur's answer to what mainstream superhero movies might have been: fun, tight, and with a lot of heart. Their unapologetic relishing of melodrama, and thematic development through action, forms an obvious contrast with the smug quippery and bland action sequences of, for example, Spider-Man Homecoming (2017). Peter Parker's story is compelling because it illustrates a double-bind: if capitalism is inherently schizophrenic (as Deleuze and Guattari would argue), Spider-Man's New York is populated with heroes and villains splintering under the pressure of the market. Doubles and alter-egos are a theme inherent to the superhero genre, and no-where are they more fully explored than in the thorny irreconcilabilities of this trilogy. Join us for an aerial thrill ride like no other! Follow us on Twitter here Follow us on Facebook here

'As if!' Jane Austen once described the scope of her work as 'the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory, on which I work with so fine a brush', an ambiguous writerly modesty that has contributed to her critical and popular characterisation as an elegant, apolitical author, unconcerned with the world beyond her finely-drawn drawing room satires. But Austen is a writer of prickly discomfort, her humour governed by the material rigours of regency society. Adaptations that fail to understand that Austen is 'way harsh' (in the words of Cher from Clueless, a latter-day Emma) will flop; those that grasp her brittle subtlety will flourish. We're taking you from Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995) to Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice (2005) to Autumn de Wilde's Emma (2020); from Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995) to Whit Stillman's Love and Friendship (2016). How do these films deal with the complex currencies of Austen's world? And how might Austen herself be used as a currency?

'But it's impossible to fight just for an ideal. An ideal that just keeps changing. You know what I mean?' Claire Denis's Beau Travail and Mark Jenkin's Bait are films which use the ocean as a central motif. Since Homer's Odyssey, the sea has represented both metaphysical freedom as well as harsh material constraint. Both are about people who are at odds with their times: their work is the sea and the sea is their life and they cannot reach it. We ask how work and the sea are linked in these films, and what they can reveal to us about human desire and self-worth. We compare the regimented lives of modern disenfranchised Cornish fishermen to those of the colonial French navy, and analyse how Denis and Jenkin film the sea in relation to them. We also relate these films to the relationship through history between work and the sea, a relationship which goes on obscured to this day... Follow us on Twitter

'It's only a dream!' A Nightmare on Elm Street, and its iconic villain Freddy Kruger, has been a cultural staple since Wes Craven's original film in 1984. Since then, there have been six more films in the decade-long series, all the way up to the postmodern malaise of 1994. From the Freudian modernism of the 80s films, through the carbon-copy unoriginality in the middle of the series, up to the postmodern reflexivity of the last two films, the films trace a familiar pattern, and one which charts wider cultural shifts around this time. We ask how the first two films defy gender expectations and subvert already familiar slasher tropes. We delve into how these films represent dreams, and how far they can be understood as relating to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Is Freddy a phantom of the death drive, or a paradoxical creature of wish fulfilment? Finally, we analyse the nineties films' self-awareness, and what this means for our own dreams, desires and, indeed, nightmares.

'You're filming something. That's kind of the purpose, right?' From the dizzy heights of Borat (2006) and Jackass (2002), to the pandemic-inflected How to With John Wilson (2020), Bad Trip (2020) and slightly disappointing Borat 2 (2020), the twenty-first-century can't get enough of comedy that blends reality and the scripted. Perhaps the most successful of these productions is Nathan For You (2013-17), the show where Nathan Fielder uses his 'knowledge to help struggling small business owners make it in this competitive world', blending cringe-comedy and reality TV to create a light-hearted but prickly satire on American business and media culture. But with its final episode, 'Finding Frances' (2017), Nathan For You pulls us into a newly touching realm, where the line between construction and reality is thinner than ever. How does our fixation with the authentic reflect on our culture of constant performance, where social media makes us all into hidden-camera comedians? Is a 'New Sincerity' possible, in film as in literature, as the culmination of artifice? And if something moves us, perhaps even moves us to change our world, does its authenticity matter?

'They're after the place. They don't know why, they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here. They're us, that's all, when there's no more room in hell.' What happens when our desires become zombies of themselves? In George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the libidinal urge to consume and accrue play out in a radically altered landscape, in which capitalist modes of meaning-making have lost their value. We discuss how Romero subverts the traditional fantasy of the zombie film, of the apocalypse as a libertarian playground for a few individual survivors, by transforming consumers into the consumed. We imagine how the survivor of a zombie apocalypse, under siege in a mall, reflects the middle-class experience of lockdown listlessness, where individuals entrapped but surrounded by material comforts access the outside world exclusively through an increasingly surreal media. And finally, we consider how a more considered remake than Zach Snyder's 2004 film might have used a virtual landscape, rather than a physical one, as the playground of the posthumous desires of the twenty-first century...

'God's not supposed to be a hack horror writer' We compare John Carpenter's metafictional Lovecraft homage In the Mouth of Madness with Richard Stanley's more recent The Color Out of Space. Why does Carpenter's film succeed where Stanley's fails in creating a truly Lovecraftian sense of horror, despite the latter's textual faithfulness? What makes Lovecraft the quintessential author of the 'weird'? And what are the political ramifications of a retreat into fiction, especially in our digital age?

'I find the trout to be a very Nietzschean fish' As brilliant as it is bizarre, Bryan Fuller's 'Hannibal' (2013-15) is a psychiatrist's dream, chock-a-block with displacements: psychological, sexual, social, tonal, structural and bodily. How does Hannibal use cannibalisation to evoke the anxiety of de-individualisation in the similitude of corporate America? How has it borrowed from its precursors, Manhunter (1986) and Silence of the Lambs (1991), to flirt with censorship and create subplots into which the queer subtext of the main plot is camply displaced? And what happens when a police procedural takes off its person suit, and becomes something else entirely?

'Is this the cocksucker residence?' From the shockingly funny filth of cult classic Pink Flamingos (1972), to the dizzy heights of Hairspray (1988), and paying homage to Cry-Baby (1990) and Serial Mom (1994) along the way, we delve into the dizzyingly camp Baltimore of John Waters. What does the director proud that his 'work has no socially redeeming value' have to say to us about race, class and gender, with tongue firmly in cheek? And what does Hairspray (2007) get wrong?

'The world used to be a bigger place.' / 'World's still the same. There's just less in it.' This episode, we plot our coordinates and set our course for the rosy mists of childhood, taking on the original 'Pirates of the Caribbean' trilogy. Captain Jack Sparrow is constantly dancing before the inevitability of fate, outliving the ephemeral freedoms of the doomed pirate era, as the centre of empire clamps down on the opportunistic flourishings of the periphery. We might find an appealing analogue in this late flourishing of commercial cinema, soon to be extinguished by remakes and marvel movies. Join us to discuss piracy as a vanishing mediator of modern capitalism, the culture war 'at world's end', and how things might be less 'business' than 'personal' after all...

Disneyland? Fuck, man, this is better than Disneyland! If the period of modernist fragmentation, late-60s political dissolution and present-day, post-end-of-history ennui have one thing in common, it's the anxiety that the end has already come. We trace Conrad and Coppola's respective journeys to 'hearts of darkness', which are revealed as the empty hearts of colonial expansion. We explore 60s counter-culture as a zombie version of itself, in an endless war which has detached representation from its political relevance. And finally, we find analogues for the posthumous culture of endless war in our present: from a regurgitated culture unmatched to the progression of history, to the structure of endless naval-gazing perpetrated by certain online activists...

'I miss the cameras. They used to be heavier than us. Then they became smaller than our heads. Now you can't see them at all.' We discuss one of our favourites of 2020: Brandon Cronenberg's sci-fi horror film Possessor, in comparison with Leos Carax's rightly-lauded Holy Motors . As they unfold, both films reveal themselves to be concerned with the blurring of selfhood and performance. We ask how these films relate to our corporatized world of global mass surveillance and how much agency we have within this scheme, when our bodies seem to be fated by unseen corporate entities. And ultimately, we must ask: who is this performance for?

Whatever happened to films like Gremlins 2? If the 1990s was a high-point of Western cultural hedonism, apathy and affluence, then it was also the perfect breeding-ground for camp fun for all the family, before such commercial film-making tipped over into the homogenised hits of the 2000s Marvel movie. In fact, in an era in which the Left had been so thoroughly quashed as to no longer be threatening in Hollywood, the very silliness of these rude romps permits them both sparkling moments of innovation, and anti-capitalist satire.

We dissect the recent filmography of filmmaker Josephine Decker, from pastoral genre bender Thou Wast Mild And Lovely to her recent fictionalised 'biopic', Shirley. Looking at the intricate power relationships and underlying eroticism, we wonder how the films respectively treat the conception of a muse, how far identities become performance, and how far the women in these films are directing their own lives, and if so, who for?

From Greek tragedy's murderous enchantress Medea to the femme fatales of film noir, the west has a long-running cultural preoccupation with witchy women who kill. Nowhere more so than in giallo, the hyper-violent genre of stylised thrillers that emerged in Italy from the 1960s onwards, famously exemplified by Dario Argento's cult classic witch-fest Suspiria (1977). But by examining Argento's earliest film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), alongside a contemporary feminist pastiche of giallo, Anna Biller's The Love Witch (2016), we unearth a surprising gender politics, in which giallo's centres of agency and objectification are not all they appear…

The second season of The Boys (2020) has been making waves in the past few weeks with its wittily brash cocktail of satire, violence and pacey plotting. But to what extent can truly subversive anti-corporate messaging spring from a corporation like Amazon? Can we see through Amazon's generically pleasing house style to a genuinely consciousness-raising original? And is having your cake and eating it necessarily a bad thing?

We're aiming all our most penetrating intellectual implements at a seemingly light-hearted topic this week: just what is the economic ideology endorsed by cherished 90s romcom ‘You've Got Mail' , and the classic comedy on which it is based? From the economic anxiety of the Depression to the boom-based economic complacency of the 1990s, from sinister manipulation to a jarring cover of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow', this episode doesn't shy away from thinking seriously about the silly.

In this episode, we do a deep dive into Netflix shows like Sex Education, Sabrina, Umbrella Academy and Stranger Things and their disturbing tendency towards uncritical nostalgia. Where does this nostalgia come from? Why is it so prevalent, especially on a platform like Netflix which has a tendency towards algorithmically designed TV? And why does modern TV not want to historicise itself? We then move on to discuss how this trend may be exemplified in modern depictions of the Cold War, specifically the uneasy allure of time's ultimate destruction in Tenet (2020) and The House With a Clock in its Walls (2018).

We compare Minnelli's classic MGM musical Gigi and Verhoeven's derided melodrama Showgirls. Despite their seemingly disparate traditions, a decadent fin-de-siecle set-piece and a satire of the 90s zeitgeist share a dirty dressing room in their taste for the hammy, the spectacular and the uneasily exploitative. But when does absurdity veer into skilful pastiche? What does Colette's novella Gigi tell us about the film's [mis]reading? And can these films' portrayal of commodified sexuality give us any insight into the performance of sex in the internet's phantasmagorical arena?

This episode, we delve into Don DeLillo's spiky satire of information capitalism and David Cronenberg's much-misunderstood adaptation. Has the future become a dully knowable property, endlessly foreseen on the passive screens of our spectacular society? Or can tomorrow still turn round to kick us in the teeth? Taking in twenty years of New York, from 9/11, to Occupy Wall Street, to right-popularism and pandemics, this episode asks the question: what does it mean to be ‘contemporary'?

We dissect the politics of cult classic, Buffy, and its spin-off, Angel. Is Buffy individualist or collectivist? Libertarian or authoritarian? And what does its spectacularly camp aesthetic suggest about its ideological alignment? In a double-length bumper episode, we hope to bring you some of the magic of one of the most formally radical TV shows of all time, with a nod and wink to some potential political radicalism along the way.

In this episode, we discuss two women protagonists, both of whom undergo sexual assault and take revenge - creating two very different films. Are these exploitation movies? Is the stylised more truthful than the realist? And can women's stories, told by male directors, ever move beyond misogynistic ventriloquism? This episode contains sustained discussion of depictions of sexual assault.

We discuss the films of Hollywood exile and Pinter collaborator Joseph Losey (focusing on The Servant, Accident, and Mr. Klein).

We discuss the films of Spike Lee, focusing on Do The Right Thing, as an interesting lens through which to see the contemporary American protests.

This week, we discuss the potential for political agency in a seemingly over-determined world, in the context of new SF TV show Devs. Materially circumscribed and confined to our houses during lockdown, is there a way of escaping the tracks laid out for us?

We discuss the political co-ordinates of the home invasion movie in the context of the quarantined home and look at how two recent films have subverted the conventions of the genre from a left-wing political perspective

This was our first episode, so it's not as well produced/a bit ramble-y: enjoy! We discuss the eerie relevancy of Todd Haynes's Safe, and what it tells us about the current global state through the work of Mark Fisher, among others. We also look to Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men.