This post on the end of culture as inspired by a presentation. Pip Bingemann of Springboards.ai presented at Cannes in Cairns – a marketing festival for Australians who wouldn’t be able to go to the Cannes Festival of Advertising. Pip’s presentation touched with things I had seen about the end of culture and had some interesting points within it. I didn’t agree with a lot of Pip said, some of it was down to nuance, but appreciated the journey that it took.
I have built the main headers around Pip’s slides, strap in for the end of culture.
What’s wrong with advertising?
Bingemann’s presentation as in praise of the disruption that (generative) AI was bringing. The thesis he put forward was that ‘machines’ had already messed up the advertising and media industries.
Advertising became self-service in nature.
There had been a move in online media to relevance over distinctiveness
We became slaves to numbers
Let’s look at those elements first.
Advertising became self-service in nature
Like the technological disruption of banking in the past with:
Postal banking
Automatic teller machines
Telephone banking
Online banking
Meta and Google’s advertising platform democratised media buying. Years ago a guy I have lost touch with used to be a manager at a McDonald’s branch in the west end of London.
Before cellphones became commonplace he had a side hustle. He used the restaurant telephone to phone up the newspapers, to book small ads. The newspapers had advertising sales teams, that he would speak to. He did it once for a friend and then word got around. Eventually, he was calling for businesses across Soho. Premium line suppliers, porn publishers and adult mail order catalogue companies. Eventually they needed the ads to be designed. This work was done alongside creating porn DVD covers and other marketing material.
He built a small successful agency off the back of it based in Soho. The agency remained in Soho until it was priced out by the fund management firms who moved in. Lots of other small businesses did the same for their plumbing business or hair salon. Their adverts would run in local newspapers across the country.
For more sophisticated ads like large print ads, television or cinema advertising; help was needed. This help got the ad ready, made sure that the publication received the artwork on time and in a format that they could use. They made sure that the artwork was presented in the manner agreed. With the likes of television, the advert might have to go through regulatory approval prior to publication.
If you were a larger brand with a national or international campaign, further help was needed in pre-testing and orchestration. Expertise might be needed to access more regulated markets while remaining on the right side of the law.
Technology allowed newspaper type adverts to be easily accessed by both agencies and brands.
TLDR: Advertising has been self-serving for decades, but I will grant that online allowed more sophisticated formats such as videos, colour photos and carousels. AND regulation has been slower to police advertising online, for instance YouTube ads don’t get the scrutiny that TV ads get.
Relevance over distinctiveness and slaves to numbers
The move to relevance over distinctiveness in online media was down to where online media was in the customer journey. It was (and for the most part still is at the bottom of the funnel).
Relevance made sense, particularly in search advertising. The first online adverts such as Craigslist classified and display ads were conceptually similar to their equivalents in the back pages of newspaper advertising. Newspaper ads were served in sections: cars for sale, homes for sale, local businesses, cinema listings, vets or pharmacies with a late closing time.
Search and many banner ad campaigns for that matter are about the last step (hopefully) before purchase. In the old pre-internet world, they would be direct mail or the direct response adverts that used to appear in magazines or the special offers beloved of shopper marketing.
Distinctiveness appeared further up in the funnel building long term memory models through brand building. It was TV advertising, radio jingles, magazine print advertising and billboards that evoked emotion and still evoke nostalgia decades later.
Saatchi & Saatchi for Gallaher
I would argue that the issue is less about relevance at the expense of distinctiveness, instead it’s about short-termist mindsets facilitated by numbers. The media industry is about to double down on this error, with initiatives like the European Programmatic TV initiative. And so I can empathise with Pip’s last point about becoming slaves to numbers. It’s ironic that the PowerPoint-friendly charts used by Google search advertising to explaining its value for marketers took off and drove marketing thinking.
Technology marketing itself came from broken origins and still is basically sales strategies by another name. A good deal of what data is created is based on what technology companies can see; rather than what marketers need to measure to get the balance between long term and short term marketing needs.
This MIGHT BE about to change if marketing expert Mark Ritson is to be believed. He posits that marketing technology start-up Evidenza.AI will provide business-to-business marketers with the kind of insight previously driven by market research, but much faster. From then on he sees it doing a better job at communications and media strategy. I am trying to keep an open mind on this at the moment.
TLDR: Advertising hasn’t become about relevance at the expense of distinctiveness, but instead about short-term at the expense of long-term marketing effects; partly down to technologists having a poor understanding of marketing.
Technology outputs data which marketers paid an inordinate amount of attention to; reinforcing the short term bias. Machine learning techniques now becoming available might turn this around by providing better marketing insight.
Machine learning tends towards the mean
Pip’s presentation went on asserting that machine learning tends towards the mean. Generative AI synthesises content based on what has already been done, which why Pip assumes that everything tends towards the mean. But that depends on how one uses these tools that we’ve been given.
As a strategist, I have used generative AI to knock out too obvious propositions, so I give the creative teams something interesting to work with in the creation of distinctive assets.
Apparently creative teams have been taking a similar approach in terms of ideation.
One thing I’ve heard more than once recently is how creative teams are using LLMs for brainstorms. But not quite how you’d expect… Because these algorithms answer back with the most likely predicted outcomes based on available data, you get the mean. The average. In creative terms that means the well worn “cliches”. So when starting a brainstorm or ideation session, quizzing the LLMs leads to a list of suggestions of what creative teams are generally most likely to suggest. At which point the team knows what NOT to do. The already well trodden ground. The list of the obvious. That also somehow gives a wonderfully smug angle on the use of AI in the pursuit of original work.
TLDR: generative AI will tend towards the mean, BUT that can be used creatively.
Agencies and clients screwed advertising
Pip’s slides don’t necessarily dig into the reasons why this happened. But I can put together some hypotheses and provide evidence that may indicate their validity or lack of it.
Clientside factors
Shareholder value ethos – Shareholder value the way we understand it now can be traced back to the 1960s. While Milton Friedman popularised it in an essay A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, the idea had surfaced years earlier in an opinion editorial published in Fortune magazine. The so-called Friedman doctrine became a lode star for investors and boards including the likes of ‘Neutron’ Jack Welch at General Electric. While this thinking still dominates the tyranny of the quarterly numbers that CEOs of publicly traded companies operate under; it is not the only perspective in the c-suite.
The financialisation of businesses – related to the Friedman doctrine, businesses became increasingly financialised thinking about short term financial decisions. A classic example of this is how post-regulation, legacyairlines in the US have been managed. Another example is Brazil’s private equity firm 3G Capital who managed to destroy billions of dollars in shareholder value with marketing cuts. Financialisation has definitely had an impact, but it varies from company to company. We also see it showing up on the agency side, with the move to using more freelance staff and burning out those staff that they do have. They have a fig leaf of mental health care in their talent acquisition literature, but it’s largely BS.
What gets measured gets done – Google advertising’s success was as much down to it being easy to tell a story about the marketing spend conducted on the platform as it was about effectiveness. The dashboards lended themselves to being easily reproduced in PowerPoint and spoke in the universal c-suite language of line graphs and pie charts. This was really important for Google to survive and thrive in the post dot com bust and the 2008 recession.
Marketing literacy – since before I have gone to college the c-suite was largely marketing illiterate. It doesn’t matter if they are a self-starting boy or girl made good, or minted from an Ivy League business school with an MBA. I have worked with both and they had a similar marketing knowledge level, the only thing that varied was the level of self confidence despite this gap. Neither do the management consultants that they may employ. Which is the reason why the team at 3G Capital were surprised when they cut marketing costs and destroyed brand and shareholder value.
Procurement – practices to systemise purchasing and avoid issues like nepotism and corruption have introduced a muscular procurement function who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Margins across disciplines have been squeezed to breaking point. This has led to a decline in entertainment and side benefits, my LinkedIn feed had advertising folk explaining that the cost of attending the Cannes Festival of Advertising was likely paid through budget cuts in: training, subscriptions for tools and publications and even head count. We might not have had an end of culture, but this is no longer the industry portrayed in Mad Men.
Agencyside factors
Splitting creative and media – prior to the mid-1970s creative and media buying were two departments in the one advertising agency. That allowed the free flow of research between the departments and the creative use of context as well as content. It also meant that margins had to support two management teams. Secondly, the options to best defend margins was in the media-buying side of the house, depending on how integrated into the media technology stack the the media buying agency became.
Change in north star from FMCG to technology companies – the rise of the internet completely changed the nature of marketing. Prior to the internet becoming mainstream, having FMCG experience as a marketer helped your career. In the early 2000s, Google, Yahoo! and later Facebook became the brands marketers wanted on your CV. The difference was that FMCG brands had subscriptions to the likes of the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. Yet American and British academia saw that most thinking from even the most prestigious schools can be boiled down to being the considered common sense opinion of tenured professors like David A. Aaker and Philip Kotler. Kotler was reportedly not interested in engaging with marketing science as consumer behaviour was too complex and difficult to model.
Relative recent awareness of marketing science. For reasons that I don’t fully understand marketing science is both old and a new phenomenon. The late Andrew Ehrensberg originally founded his Centre for Research in Marketing in the early 1990s and had been turning out marketing science academic papers for decades before that. Ehrensberg eventually moved to His work on the myth of ‘heavy consumers‘ and polygamous brand buying (smaller brands suffering a double jeopardy of fewer people purchasing them, and those that did purchase them, did so less often) was done back in the 1950s for Attwood Consumer Panel (would eventually become part of TNS). Some agency strategists knew about Ehrenberg, such as Stephen King of JWT. Some of this thinking was likely hidden by the decline of market research projects in agencies and the split between media buying and creative. In addition, Andrew Ehrenberg theorised why marketing science had a low adoption outside his center’s FMCG clients, which also encapsulated the gatekeeper role American academics played in overall mainstream academic adoption:
I also realised slowly that our kind of theorising – which at base describes and explains already-established and generalised empirical discoveries and which thus post-dicts them – was anathema to many American academic marketing colleagues. They espoused much more ambitious and complex-looking econometric procedures which never worked in practice, with the recent citation for a Nobel typically not referring to any established empirical patterns
Channels – I don’t know who thought that a video view could be just a couple of seconds, but digital platforms benefited from it. Some of the wisdom from this years Cannes Festival of Creativity was that short adverts don’t work that well as they fail to build memory structures. Somehow agencies, platforms and brands suspended belief to develop marketing campaigns that only made sense in 1980s cyberpunk fiction like Max Headroom. Even at Cannes, platforms like Tiktok believed that they operate like, and a have similar impact to a TV advert…
Research – like most strategists I have found that I am often operating with less qualitative research than I would like. One of the biggest programmes I managed to work on the research for was the global launch of a now famous weight management product. Even then we didn’t do enough interviews around the world to understand cultural nuances in play. I remember reading about strategists in the 1970s spending a good deal of time listening to focus groups hosted around the country. There was a mid-week ritual of taking a drive or a train to a city or town outside London for this research. Social listening has been touted as a possible research for product tracking and can be a useful source of consumer soundbites sometimes.
Testing – hand-in-hand with a decline in research has been a decline in types of testing. Content still gets tested, but brands and agencies didn’t test channels to the same degree. Which is why we’ve had short form ad formats for years, yet the knowledge that they’re not as good at building memory structures doesn’t seem to be embedding into clients and agency teams.
OK, but that’s advertising, what about the end of culture?
Pip claims that advertising is just one part of our world that has been under attack (from technology). Alex Murrell’s essay The Age of Average was cited as the source of this insight. Murrell makes his case on the common looks in car designs driven by developments in aerodynammic design over time, architecture and cityscapes, coffee shop styles, logos, book covers, video game franchises, packaging design and product design.
Part of the reason for the architecture was Le Corbusier and his his function over form theory of design and architecture (modernism) captured in Towards a New Architecture.
Murrell harked back to a time of distinctive cities like Victorian London. However what Murrell’s explanation overlooked was that even back in Victorian times London was becoming ‘standardised’. Chimney pots, bricks, cast-iron beams, windows and even church stained glass windows came out of catalogues. The same designs repeat over-and-over-again. The church stained glass windows went around what was then the British empire. It is a similar situation today. Buildings are made of standardised materials and design tools as we understand more about engineering.
Technology over time allowed buildings to get taller and let in more light thanks to improvements in construction, lifts (elevators) and environmental control. Where things get interesting is when governments and societies make decisions on what they want to keep or rebuild. Shanghai has preserved only a little of the Bund and few of its hutongs. Hong Kong has so far managed to keep some examples of its composite buildings. However once you get to street level you see a distinct evolving local culture despite their apparently similar skylines.
This mix of standardised components bought from a supply chain, improved engineering and regulation has also driven similarities in other products, such as motor cars which Murrell cited as an example. But again those similarities are more about operating at a macro-viewpoint. On closer examination, diversity in car culture and driving experiences start to build clear lines of distinctiveness.
And the car industry for decades has indulged in badge engineering where one vehicle truly does look like another.
Wolesley Hornet
Austin Cooper Mini
Innocenti Mini
Riley Elf
The examples I used above were all based on the Austin Mini. Wolesley was a luxury brand owned by BMC at the time. Italian care manufacturer Innocenti licensed the Mini from Austin until the agreement was cancelled by British Leyland. Lastly, the Riley Elf was a slightly more expensive alternative to Wolesley, both were owned by BMC.
General Motors were the masters of badge engineering using ‘common platforms’ as far back at 1909.
As for the complaints about logo design, books and later the web allowed influential design motifs like Neville Brody’s work at The Face, Arena and The Guardian went around the world, collected in three volumes by Thames & Hudson. His cover designs were in Tower Records stores from New York to Tokyo. Design is an industry sensitive to global influences that you see spread around the world. A second reason for the simplification and flattening of logos is the world that we now live in. Before the web logos only existed in the physical world. Digital brings common requirements:
Works in a website template that can be used globally.
Works in email headers and footers.
Works in a favicon and in a mobile app button.
One interesting point came out when Murrell (and Bingemann) looked at media where there was a coalescence of homage images and content based around a success. But these in turn created their own genres like the sweary covers on self-help books. How is this marking a low point in culture was beyond me.
I thought of genres like the European ‘gallo’ films or the European takes on the western films of which spaghetti westerns are the most well known. A lot of the films were dreadful. In the case of European westerns many of them borrowed a characters name from more successful films. So you saw ‘apparent’ franchises around ‘Ringo’, ‘Django’ and ‘Sartana’.
(Film director Alex Cox published one of the best works on the Italian western film genre 10,000 ways to die. It’s based on his university thesis and a fascinating read, if you choose to jump down that rabbit hole.)
You had a similar experience in the Asian martial arts film industry with countless variations on the the star name Bruce Lee, as the industry coped with the loss of most famous star.
This doesn’t mark the end of culture, but the manufacture of culture. What’s good or great is then strained through the filter of time and changing social attitudes.
As for the cinematic superhero cul-de-sac, there are clear parallels with the end of the western and the New Hollywood movement. This time its distribution in the driving seat rather than a new generation of directors. Like the New Hollywood movement there will be both successes and car crashes along the way and I am largely excited by it.
Bingemann also cites Adam Mastroianni’s essay Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly. Mastroianni hits on what is called a long tail. In scale-free networks with preferential attachments, power law distributions are created, because some nodes are more connected than others – so Taylor Swift will sell more because of the size of fan base she has grown over time. They have been studied since at least 1946 and Benoit Mandelbrot who is better known for his work on fractals was one of the main researchers. Wired magazine touched on it in 1998 when it published The Encyclopaedia of the New Economy written by John Browning and Spencer Reiss and the influence showed up in Wired contributor Kevin Kelly’s work New Rules for the New Economy. So one can guess that the ideas were being thrown around then.
Wired editor Chris Anderson wrote about it in a magazine article for Wired in October 2004, and turned it into a book. Algorithms in online services create bubbles and rabbit holes in different areas and surface media winners like MrBeast. But again culture has thrived despite of popular culture out of sight of the general public for decades will continue to do so. Examples include Northern Soul, punk, the Chicago house music scene, UK garage, grime, drill and donk, the long tail does not mark an end of culture.
TL:DR: Could the current culture eco-system be better? Yes, absolutely. But it isn’t broken in the way and extent that Bingemann believes. We definitely aren’t at the end of culture and it doesn’t need to be ‘saved’ by generative AI.
So what can AI do?
Bingemann believed that generative AI offers society a way out of the end of culture. So presumably it offers a way to enhance and create culture. He believes that it creates, I would finesse this a bit to say that it emulates, synthesises and combines elements to meet consumer instructions – since it is the sum of its training data.
Ironically, Bingemann bases his thesis on how surreal and abstract art represented the ‘death of traditional art’ and reinvented the meaning of art and unleashed a large amount of creativity. Traditional art didn’t die per se, there are still several artists selling realistic pieces including painting and sculptures alongside the ‘new art’ movements.
Generative AI puts tools in the hands of creatives that previously would have meant a lot of work. In the same way that desktop publishing and Photoshop reduced the cut-and-past compositing on layers of glass panels which were then photographed and image retouching done by hand in the past.
In advertising Bingemann sees five opportunities enabled by generative AI:
Move to value-based pricing (presumably based on substantially reduced cost of production). It’s what Huge tried to do with their pivot and what thinkers like Michael Farmer have been recommended. We’ll see what happens when this aspiration meets client procurement teams. I hope Bingemann is right.
Design AI around people. So far the progress has been mixed around this. We have been some companies like Klarna using ‘good enough’ generative AI to automate jobs out of existence. Adobe have taken more of a creative enablement approach. Based on my experience working on ads in the past with collaged backdrops and photoshoots for global campaigns, this could save tens of hours or more in art working.
Embrace the newcomers. Just like social and digital before it, when we had new agencies like Crayon, AKQA and Poke; Bingemann thinks that generative AI is likely to bring new businesses to the advertising eco-system.
Spend 10x more effort developing the next generation. Given that the advertising industry manages to continually churn experienced people out of the industry and no one was found to have retired last year from the industry according to the IPA – this is going to be a tall order. It would make more sense if AI was used to make advertising more representative.
Unite. Clients, agencies and technology. It’s a nice aspiration, but when clients are looking for good enough and efficient content, agencies looking for a margin and trying to put effectiveness in there as well and technology companies trying hold back their natural instinct to suck all the value to themselves, it will be a hard feat to achieve.
Bingemann argues that this is necessary for advertising, but also for creativity and considers advertising’s role to break culture rather than just reflect it. Culture and creativity will exist without advertising. Even during the Soviet Union, there was still creativity, art and culture – both mainstream and underground.
A Final Thought To Leave You On
GZero Media quoting Douglas Rushkoff (of Media Virus fame) on what generative AI means for culture moving forward.
While its not the end of culture as we know it, Springboard.ai are putting out some interesting tools that I could see competing with the likes of Julian Cole, Mark Pollard and others who are filling the ‘how to strategy’ gap for brand planners.
One of the cultural things that most defined the 1980s for me was the Moviedrome series of films on BBC 2. Late on a Sunday night, audiences were introduced to films by film director and academic Alex Cox.
Alex Cox and Jim Jarmusch with film programmer Cristina Cacioppo
Cox had a singular vision and an encyclopaedic knowledge that he used to showcase the film to be played with two to three minute introductions. He was like an art college mate that you could go and watch a film with at a midnight showing and then discuss it over a cup of coffee in a transport café afterwards, only for the different elements of the conversation to percolate through your thoughts on the drive home and over the next few days at work.
He made the audience more literate and personally gave me a better appreciation of film. More importantly, Cox taught me to explore film, which is why I tend to be not that interested in having conversations about the James Bond series, but am more animated by Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and the 1990s. Over time, I was able to go back and use sources like Wikipedia and IMDb and draw even more threads together to give me context about film and allow me to explore new things. but the framework was put in place by Alex Cox and his producer Nick Jones who where the original power house behind Moviedrome.
IMDb
While information has become more accessible online, it doesn’t mean that its necessarily accurate. At the time of me writing his post, according to the Moviedrome profile on IMDb, Alex Cox only presented the films until 1992. However you can find videos on YouTube for at least some of the introductions, such as Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia that was shot in 1994.
Curation and context
Moviedrome also showed the power of curation and context settings. I would choose Alex Cox over Netflix every time if offered the choice. Alex Cox’s Moviedrome introductions are still sought out by people on YouTube, which shows that there is a latent interest in the concept. Mark Kermode was used in the introductory role by BFI’s online film player service, but it somehow lacks that singular vision. Kermode did a great short interview with Alex Cox on the making of Moviedrome below.
Check out this introduction to Moviedrome when Mark Kermode interviews Alex Cox.
Mark Cousins took over a relaunched Moviedrome from 1997 through to 2000. I haven’t included his seasons here. I never got to see the Cousins’ introductions. I was finishing college, working shifts and eventually moving city to live in a shared house. None of which was conducive to a regular date with the TV.
By all accounts he did a good job to resurrect Moviedrome following on from Alex Cox and producer Nick Jones who had collaborated together on the first iteration of Moviedrome.
Season 1
Season 1 saw Alex Cox doe his first set of Moviedrome introductions in American style hotel room set with the cold cathode tube Moviedrome signage glinting through the window. One got the sense that the set was exceptionally flimsy.
The Wickerman
The Wickerman was an early 1970s classic of British horror before it appeared on Moviedrome. It had a steady viewership when it was shown late at night on television. Over time something about the hidden pagan cult on a remote Scottish island gave it a following outside the UK and it became a cult film in North America. There has since been a Hollywood remake and it also influenced the Scandinavian themed horror film Midsummer. Almost as important for me was Alex Cox explaining what a cult film was, which very much fitted into the eclectic taste that I had in films. He gave me a lexicon that helped me articulate and then fully understand my love of film.
Electra Glide in Blue
Cox pulled together a number of threads in his introduction to Electra Glide in Blue, some of the connections were quite strange and elegiac in a number of different ways. In some ways it was a motorcycle tribute with its Monument Valley setting to the John Ford westerns (like The Iron Horse), there was the influence of gay movie Scorpio Rising and also seeing it as response to Easy Rider. If it wasn’t for Cox’s analysis I wouldn’t have bothered watching it. It has a dissonant ‘odd’ feel to the film that was very ‘New Hollywood’ and a great supporting cast. Finally there is the Chicago connection. The soundtrack was done by members of Chicago and the film was directed by their former producer.
Diva
Maybe its the fact that I work in advertising that I am such a big fan of French thrillerDiva, but Alex Cox’s Moviedrome critique of it being a film of style rather than narrative intrigued me rather than put me off to watch it. I still enjoy watching Diva immensely.
Razorback
I don’t usually watch horror movies that look as if they are a shelf filler at the local video rental shop. Which on the face of it was what Razorback looked like. The director has previously shot pop videos and brought a sense and style of sensibility to the film. There is also a well produced surreal dream-like sequence in the middle from one of the characters wondering back to civilisation dazed and dehydrated. Cox focused on the dark vision portrayed of Australian life; Crocodile Dundee without the humour. Sexism, a love of Elton John songs, slaughter houses, killing kangaroos for pet food and nasty characters that are asking to be killed. This is mostly achieved by the wild boar of the title.
Big Wednesday
Big Wednesday is a surfing drama based on the director’s early adulthood. Cox points out the military obsession of John Milius, whom he considers mad but at least honest about its madness. Milius had grown up in Malibu, some of his friends were drafted to Vietnam and he had surfed with serving members of the Marine Corp based out of Camp Pendleton. Milius had been turned down from serving in the US Marines due to asthma. Cox compared it to American Graffiti and Steven Spielberg famously thought that it was like ‘American Graffiti meets Jaws‘. I saw the sadness of The Deer Hunter at the centre of it, rather than American Graffiti, but I can see what Spielberg meant with the loss of innocence through the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Milius managed to get early 1970s surf legend Gerry Lopez to do some of the water scenes (Lopez is the surfer’s, surfer – the person to whom Kelly Slater looks up to). The Cox intro persuaded me to watch a film that I would have otherwise skipped over despite my love of Endless Summer.
Fat City
If you’d have asked me to watch a boxing movie like Raging Bull or Rocky I would have turned you down flat. They’ve never appealed. The Moviedrome introduction challenged my perception. Yes, Fat City is a film about boxers, but not really about boxing. Instead its about the conversations and relationships outside the ring. The camaraderie and kindness that bought them together during difficult times. At the time Cox noted that was unusual; I’d argue that its even rarer now.
The Last Picture Show
Alex Cox set The Last Picture Show up as a discussion about the use of black and white film as an artistic statements. This was the first black and while film to be shot after studios demanded a total pivot to colour in order to take advantage of colour televisions. As Cox himself noted, few film makers have done this since, yet it has been used to great effect in advertisements and music videos. His critique of why black and white hadn’t been embraced where appropriate was down to the inherent conservativism in Hollywood culture.
Hollywood has certainly become more conservative since the decline of ‘New Hollywood’ and Cox’s career itself suffered after making Walker. The film has since been vindicated by its re-release by The Criterion Collection, while Hollywood has decided to instead regurgitate the Marvel universe on screen.
The film itself is about the decline of a small town, with the last cinema closing. The characters seem to be doomed to make the same mistakes as previous generations and its a beauty capture of small town life and personalities.
Barbarella
Barbarella was something that I was vaguely aware of as I had seen stills showing its 1960s futurism with posts of lexan in the set design and Jane Fonda in knee boots. A number of my more art inclined friends had the poster in their bedroom, but hadn’t seen the film either.
Alex Cox noted that the film was a (newspaper) comic book adaptation which was rare at the time. Modesty Blaise had been turned into a film, as had The Spirit which at that time had been adapted by ABC as a feature length one off. There were four Dick Tracy films in the post-war period and we were just over a year or so before Warren Beatty would play Dick Tracy alongside Madonna. This is all so vastly different to the Hollywood of today. He is brutally honest about the abilities of the director, but praises the actors, set and costume design.
Barbarella introduced me to French sci-fi comics and the worlds of creators like Pierre Christin and Jean Giraud aka Moebius.
The Hired Hand
Spaghetti westerns had got into the American movie zeitgeist at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. Clint Eastwood tried make films like Sergio Leone in High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales. Peter Fonda had his go after the success of Easy Rider with The Hired Hand. Cox in his introduction to this ‘acid western’ (aka New Hollywood ‘hippies’ trying to make Spaghetti Westerns) admitted that this wasn’t a great film. It is noticeable only for the performance of Warren Oates, someone who Cox characterised as the kind of actor that Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Ed Harris all would have agreed was a great actor.
I love spaghetti westerns and this homage is ok, but Cox would go on to show better examples of the western genre later on in the Moviedrome series.
Johnny Guitar
Johnny Guitar is one of the older films to feature on Moviedrome. The film was made in 1954 and as Cox told it, the film’s back story was as intricate as anything that appeared on screen. The film adapted a book that seems to have been written with one eye on it being a vehicle for Joan Crawford. The script was written by blacklisted leftists and the production shot by a cheap studio who wanted to try a new type of colour film.
Professional rivalry saw Joan Crawford get very drunk and act out. While the film didn’t do that well at the US box office, it was lauded by members of the French new wave including François Truffaut. The reason why that happened is that the main characters are played against type and Crawford plays a blinder as a strong principled woman in the lead. ‘Johnny Guitar’ aka Sterling Hayden’s role is diminished to make room for her.
All of this is playing out in a Hollywood being racked by McCarthyism at the time. Its an interesting Hollywood western, but it isn’t as big for me because I was watching at a different time and got to enjoy many of the high notes in European westerns before seeing Johnny Guitar.
The Parallax View
Nowadays psychometric tests and computer assisted recruitment are part of everyday life. The Parallax View highlighted these techniques in a kind of dark algorithm decades before private military contractors or QAnon.
I had the Iran Contra scandal during my childhood, the EU Echelon report, 9/11, the war on terror, Edward Snowden and the false hunt for WMD since. All of which gives The Parallax View a different context for me today than viewers back in 1988.
Alex Cox set a very different context for viewers back in 1988. He looked at The Parallax View from the perspective of the Kennedy assassination (he also hints at the Bobby Kennedy assassination as well). I remember watching The Parallax View a couple of years earlier in black and white one summer’s night on the family farm in rural east Galway with my uncle and grandmother. I watched it during Moviedrome and have watched it again since, including a screening at the BFI. I think it’s Warren Beatty’s standout film performance from his career.
It was out of this and other mysteries that conspiracy theorists grew into a cottage industry and spawned the likes of The X-Files and the Lone Gunmen.
Today we seem to be living in a looking glass world, where the more reactionary members of society are searching for a ‘real truth’ often following nebulous clues on online forums.
The Long Hair of Death
The Long Hair of Death is an Italian horror film made in 1964. The film was made in black and white, this allowed Alex Cox to return to the point he made about The Last Picture Show, of how black and white films can look better.
At the time Hammer studio and Roger Corman has been turning out lots of films in colour, many with a similar witchcraft theme to The Long Hair of Death. The Long Hair of Death uses a similar plot device to The Wickerman with people being burned alive in wicker structures. The Italian director behind this Antonio Margheriti went on to make a number of films with a theme about vengeance from beyond the grave. He made a variety of exploitation films through to 1997, including the Richard Harrison’s best spaghetti western Vengeance.
Invasion of The Body Snatchers
I think that I might have seen the Invasion of The Body Snatchers earlier than the Moviedrome screening, but I can remember the Alex Cox gave me a greater appreciation for what on the surface of it was a derivative black and white 1950s film. I can remember countless reproduction posters for the film on sale in the area around Matthew Street in Liverpool, The Palace and the Bluecoat Chamber indie shopping areas around the time that I watched this.
According to a friend at the time, the poster was supposed to give people bad acid trips if they dropped their blotting paper in a room with this on the wall as it harshed their mellow.
Alex Cox praises the original film and its remake as both being equally good. Invasion of The Body Snatchers in his view is a hybrid of science fiction and film noir, something that he compares to Kiss Me Deadly. He draws parallels in the film to the souless nature of modern American life in the 1950s which placed a higher emphasis on conformity prior to the existentialism that sprang out of the 1960s counterculture. There is also McCarthyism which blighted America during the 1950s. Don Siegel considered this the best film that he ever made. That is quite some claim given that his film history includes Clint Eastwood films: Dirty Harry, Escape from Alcatraz and Coogan’s Bluff.
The Fly
The Vincent Price film The Fly was featured in Moviedrome. I was only familiar with the David Cronenberg remake which featured the amazing Jeff Goldblum in probably his best screen performance. Vincent Price was also an amazing actor of both stage and screen. Alex Cox points out how The Fly was one of a number of films that mixed horror and science fiction as a commentary on the effects of nuclear radiation as part of a wider concern about nuclear war.
In the US there was Them!,The Incredible Shrinking Man and Forbidden Planet. The UK had the Quatermass series of TV dramas and films. Japan had it’s kaiju films starting with Godzilla which were inspired by the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (第五福龍丸) exposure to fallout from the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb tests.
One From The Heart
I had not come across One From The Heart before. Alex Cox provided context around the film in terms of it being Francis Ford Coppola’s film after Apocalypse Now. That it had been shot on the Zoetrope sound stages and was a flawed if admirable effort in storytelling and soundtrack selection, trying to have an almost music video level of narrative synergy.
The film has great talent like Harry Dean Stanton in it, but I found it to be a curate’s egg. I also am not as enamoured with ‘New Hollywood‘, though each Marvel and Michael Bay film I see produced drives me closer to Mr Cox’s perspective.
The Man Who Fell To Earth
Most of the reviews you will read about The Man Who Fell To Earth will eulogise David Bowie’s performance. Alex Cox acknowledged it as probably the best of Bowie’s career. But Cox’s real interest in The Man Who Fell To Earth is the work of director Nicholas Roeg. Its a great example of his work. Typically his direction visually is very good. It’s the editorial: where Roeg excels with films that are structurally very complex and convoluted.
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Truth be told, I first watched The Good, The Bad and The Ugly when I was very young. If it was now, child services would probably have got involved. But back then, it just gave me a lifelong love of spaghetti westerns. By the time I watched it again on Moviedrome, I got to see it for at least the third or fourth time.
Alex Cox points out that he considers The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is an overly long epic, that if released now (in 1988) would have easily won an Oscar. What I didn’t know until Moviedrome was the story of Richard Harrison recommended Clint Eastwood to Sergio Leone as a suitable protagonist in A Fistful of Dollars.
Richard Harrison was a fitness instructor turned actor who got some small breaks in the Hollywood studio system due to his first wife being the daughter of a studio executive at American International Pictures who were known for producing exploitation films.
He went on to shoot sword and sandal films in Italy, this then lead to spy films and spaghetti westerns. Eventually he worked around the world appearing in some Shaw Brothers films, Filipino productions for Silver Star Film Company and Yugoslavian productions.
One-Eyed Jacks
Marlon Brando’s self directed western One-Eyed Jacks can’t really hold a candle to the works of Sergio Leone. Its one of those films where the story behind the production is as interesting as the film itself. Alex Cox explained how Stanley Kubrick was linked to the film, but walked away as Brando was so hard to work with. Instead, Brando stepped into the director’s chair for only one time. An experience that left him dispirited and never directed again. Brando brought an obsessional level of detail and went full method in terms of his acting. The film is visually stunning.
He got drunk with Karl Malden where a scene required them to be under the influence. As a western it’s not bad, but the hubris and mythology around the film’s production will only take you so far. For years you couldn’t get a nice version of it, but it looks lovely on Blu-Ray. The original 5-hour director’s cut is considered lost, which is probably for the best.
Director Martin Scorsese is a fan of the film and championed a restoration of the film.
Season two
Season two of Moviedrome was arguably even more eclectic than season 1 and leant more heavily on films from the 1950s, but don’t let that put you off. In season 2, Cox moves out of the motel room set and pops up in drive through cinema which has been put together using some sketchy chromakey work. Cox seems to have shot his introductions in different places on the west coast of the United States from Los Angeles to the desert further south in the likes of New Mexico.
The Man with X-Ray Eyes.
The Man with X-Ray Eyes was an interesting choice of film by Alex Cox and Nick Jones. It was one of several films that Roger Corman directed. They could have picked any of his Edgar Allen Poe adaptions such as The Fall of The House of Usher, The Ravenor The Masque of The Red Death. At one stage Roger Corman managed to make 20 films in Connemara, which is a barren area in the west of Galway, over a four year period. Alex Cox justifies screening The Man with X-Ray Eyes because it shows how Corman manages to take a ‘humanitarian stance’ whilst creating exploitation genre films.
Jabberwocky
Jabberwocky was a fantasy with the strain of the ridiculous that mirrors at least some of the work that Terry Gilliam had previously done with Monty Python. It was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s poem, Japanese kaiju films like Godzilla and a society that had gone berserk. The sense of the ridiculous was carried on to Gilliam’s other later films including Brazil and The Time Bandits. Alex Cox didn’t do an intro so much as recite the Lewis Carroll poem.
Gilliam has been an iconoclast of a director and Jabberwocky is as good an introduction as any to his post-Monty Python work.
D.O.A.
D.O.A. like Scarface or The Irishman is one of them films that film people think that you should like. It’s cult in the sense that it has had an outsized impact for its budget. In many respects its a good solid film noir and was well shot.
Cox points out that the film had by the time of broadcast preserved its cult status for 40 years and had been recently remade. He then went on to focus on soundtrack wolf whistle that happens every time an attractive lady appears on screen. Once you realise, it gets ridiculous.
Prior to Moviedrome, D.O.A. had been shown on the BBC a number of times before. It didn’t feel ‘cult’ to me since it was a faithful standby film on late night British TV. Watching Derek Malcolm’s Film Club introduction made me appreciate the Moviedrome approach so much more. Malcolm sells D.O.A.; where as Cox got you to watch it because of its imperfections.
Malcolm was the voice of authority, the kind of person who would watch the South Bank Show religiously. Cox was gently subversive by comparison.
The Thing From Another World
I was a huge John Carpenter fan, so when Alex Cox explains that The Thing From Another World was the original inspiration for Carpenter’s The Thing I was sold. He speculates that Howard Hawks may have been the actual director as the overlapping dialogue style was a signature of his.
Cox then ties the crashed UFO premise in the plot with the proported Roswell Incident. Its hard to explain how popular UFOs and flying saucers were during the cold war and immediate post-cold war period. The interest then diminished after 9/11.
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Cox himself admitted that parts of The Incredible Shrinking Man were unintentionally funny. It isn’t the greatest science fiction film. What Alex Cox believed made the film unique was its political and moral stance. The film’s director Jack Arnold made a number of oddball science-fiction movies in the 1950s, including The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Tarantula. All his science-fiction films of that era seem to deal in one way or another with the atom bomb. He irradiated ants via nuclear test which then became giant creatures. Aliens from a planet ravaged by nuclear war take refuge on earth and a man who passes through a radioactive mist starts to shrink. The film explores some pretty profound issues and it would have been interesting viewing the film’s ending speech in the run up to the civil rights movement.
The Incredible Shrinking Man came soon after the Japanese film Godzilla. Cox points out that during the mid 1950s, in the US film industry only Jack Arnold was exploring the issues and concerns around nuclear annihilation. And he was doing so though the medium of science fiction b-movies.
The California Dolls
The California Dolls is a film that I haven’t revisited since Moviedrome showed it back in 1989. It has a lot of good ingredients. Its directed by Robert Aldrich who had directed the Dirty Dozen and features Peter Falk who most people know from day time re-runs of Columbo.
In the words of Alex Cox at the time
Like all road movies, this one is about America and the death of the American dream. But unlike most other road movies, it isn’t elitist or obscure
Alex Cox, Moviedrome
It tries to answer how do the protagonists hold on to their self respect in a corrupt society where money is the only store of value? This was coming out of the economic turmoil of the late 1970s when America was racked by inflation, carpet baggers like Sir James Goldsmith and globalisation. In many respects it reminded me a lot of the Paul Newman ice hockey film Slap Shot.
THX 1138
In THX 1138, George Lucas arguably made his best film early on in his career. Cox gives us some of the legend that came up around the film. The name apparently came from George Lucas’ car registration plate. The film was funded by Francis Ford Coppola.
Cox doesn’t think that its a great film because he considered to to be so alienated from real life. Ironically it feels more relevant now. The film made great use of brutalist architecture of what’s now the San Francisco BART mass transit system when filming. It draws on a number of influences such as Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World. There is also a similarity with the book version of Logan’s Run which came out as a film later. I think the coincidence with Logan’s Run is more a reaction to similar societal issues, a pivot to a more authoritarian world from the restless summers of the 1960s with race riots, anti-war protests and student sit-ins.
Stardust Memories
How meta does it get when you have a film about a film maker reflecting on in life and relationships that were in turn the inspiration for his films. This is the central concept behind Stardust Memories.
It should be of no surprise that it was Woody Allen who made Stardust Memories. At the very least, the film seems to be an allegory of his life. Back when Moviedrome featured Stardust Memories, it was a few years before Allen’s relationship with Soon Yi Previn and allegations of child molestation would come out. I think Allen’s complicated legacy means that you wouldn’t see as an effusive praise heaped on Woody Allen today. Despite all that, I still enjoy his take on dystopian science-fiction with his 1973 film Sleeper which I watched one Saturday night during the summer on the family farm in rural Ireland.
Night of The Comet
Season two of Moviedrome focused heavily on 1950s b-movies and Night of The Comet fitted right in despite being made in 1984. Alex Cox points out how the stylistic aspects of the Night of The Comet including colour filters and time lapse can’t conceal a lack of drive in the narrative. At the time Alex Cox wouldn’t realise that this film would go on to influence Joss Wheldon. It’s also notable that the main protagonists are strong female characters.
The Grissom Gang
If the Night of The Comet was a 1950s style sci-fi b-movie shot in the 1980s, then The Grissom Gang could be best described as a James Cagney style gangster film shot in 1971.
Alex Cox seems to have featured it because like The California Dolls earlier in the season, he considered it an under-appreciated Robert Aldrich film. He points out that the film is too brightly lit, which was common on Aldrich’s colour films. The film didn’t break new ground, it was good for what it was. But I didn’t bother re-watching it since.
Ace In The Hole
Billy Wilder did Ace In The Hole after Sunset Boulevard. Unlike Sunset Boulevard it didn’t do well at the box office, yet Wilder was said to be very proud of it as a film. Kirk Douglas plays a big city reporter stuck in the sticks who cynically exploits the plight of a man trapped in a cave on an indian reservation.
Alex Cox highlighted that Billy Wilder wrote, produced and directed all his films and chose his collaborators carefully.
Alphaville
Alphaville had been on the radar of film fans as its one of the best known French new wave type films. Alex Cox celebrated director Jean-Luc Godard’s ability to create a science fiction film through careful cinematography in hotel halls, and use signage and reflections to provide a futuristic sheen to the film without the use of special effects.
Two-Lane Blacktop
Two-Lane Blacktop is a road movie with a hot rod car, a muscle car, a couple of drivers and mechanic who pick up a hitchhiker. Alex Cox considered to be a car equivalent of Easy Rider. It is more interesting to watch than say The Cannonball Run or Smokey and The Bandit – but that’s setting the bar pretty low.
Trancers
It’s a cheaply made but enjoyable science fiction film. Trancers has a film noir vibe. Protagonist Jack Deth is like a parody of Mike Hammer. It used industrial sites just outside Los Angeles as a good deal of its backdrop which matched its film noir feeling with the post-apocalyptic future. The film borrowed liberally from Blade Runner and the Terminator. Trancers improbably managed to go on to become a franchise of five films. This is probably due to incredibly tightly managed production budgets and the improbable content appetite of the video rental market at the time, rather than midnight cinema showings.
Alex Cox critiqued the homeless people that looked too clean and highlighted a Father Christmas scene as his personal highlight of the film. He was right, like the cowboys in old Hollywood films the homeless people were too clean.
The Buddy Holly Story
Plane crashes devastated the music industry during the 1950s and 1960s. We lost Jim Reeves, Otis Redding, Hawkshaw Hawkins and most of the Bar Kays. But the crash that took Buddy Holly and friends probably had the biggest impact on music culture. The Buddy Holly Story gives a good account of Holly’s career.
Alex Cox wasn’t enamoured with the film genre or the musical performances, but he did seem to be impressed with the way Gary Bussey managed to bring Buddy Holly to life as a likeable control freak.
Five Easy Pieces
I didn’t need Moviedrome to sell me on Five Easy Pieces, as a kid I loved films set around the oil industry. Back in the 1970s companies like Shell held open days and their oil refinery looked like a cathedral of aluminium clad pipes. Add to this the dramatic flames that flared up at night and I was hooked.
Alex Cox in his introduction to the film highlights its numerous connections with Easy Rider. It was made by the same production company, both films featured Jack Nicholson and was shot by the same cinematographer. There is also a class aspect to the work, like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces celebrates the working man.
Sweet Smell of Success
Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster don’t exactly sound like the kind of leads that you would have typically had in a cult film like the Sweet Smell of Success. Alex Cox focused on director Alexander MacKendrick who was born in Boston, Massachusetts but educated in Scotland. MacKendrick directed some of Ealing Studios most famous comedies, including Whiskey Galoreand The Ladykillers. Sweet Smell of Success was his first American film; an incredibly funny indictment of the media and public relations and its influence of American life.
Sunset Boulevard
Season two of Moviedrome finished with the Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard. Alex Cox is a fan of Billy Wilder and this was the second of his films to feature in the second season. Sunset boulevard is a drama based in Hollywood, about Hollywood as it makes the transition from silent movies to the ‘talkies’ as films with audio were called back then.
Season three
Season three of Moviedrome started with one of my favourite films: John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. This was 1990, some 15 years before it would be remade by director Jean-François Richet. You had British classics Brazil and Get Carter, my first chambara film Yojimbo and a couple of great non-Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns A Bullet For The General and The Great Silence.
The Terminator like Sunset Boulevard before it was an odd choice of cult film because of the way it blew up the box office. It’s almost like calling Jaws a cult film.
On the face of it there is an eclectic collection, but there are some red threads running through the season beyond the film’s cult status. I didn’t appreciate all of the films in season three, but it did help me to understand what I did like in film.
Season three leaned into a mid century America theme with Cox seen to be on a pre-war stainless steel rail carriage in what I suspect is supposed to ape a Pullman roomette leaving him in front of pre-war era American cinema with neon signage. I suspect that many of Cox’s introductions in season three were filmed in Almería and the surrounding area of southern Spain where Cox lived at the time.
Assault on Precinct 13
John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 works on so many levels. Its slow building tension punctuated by violence owes a lot to the pacing of spaghetti westerns. The sparse brooding electronic soundtrack (what would now be called synth wave) reminiscent goes together with the film like a Morricone soundtrack and a Sergio Leone film. Carpenter is a unique all-round talent in film making. Jean-François Richet’s remake of Assault on Precinct 13 gets some great performances out of Gabriel Byrne, Ethan Hawke, Drea DiMatteo, Brian Dennehy and Lawrence Fishburne. It has verve and is brutally kinetic, but all this comes at the expense of tension built up in Carpenter’s version.
Alex Cox points out how director John Carpenter borrowed from Hollywood classics Night of the Living Dead and Rio Bravo. Some of the dialogue lines even come from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time In The West. (In some respects this was Tarantino’s method done before Quentin Tarantino was even making film). In true Moviedrome fashion he points out that the acting is awful, as was the costume design. There are only two women in the film and they both wear identical sweaters with an identical fit, (this could have been to save on special effects if they might be used).
Cox goes on to point out that the later They Live is probably Carpenter’s best film, that it has a similar messy violent ending to Assault on Precinct 13. The premise of Yuppies as aliens exploiting the poor humans was a unique idea that gave They Live the leg up. I think both films are fantastic, but then I am much more of a John Carpenter fan than Alex Cox seems to be.
The last point I would note is how the Moviedrome guide which accompanied season three (and also included details of previous seasons) suggested sources for movie still photography and soundtracks, but not copies of the films themselves on laserdisc or video tape. Thinking back to my own memory of purchasing films, it only started a year or two later, initially with John Woo films from Manga Entertainment and a company whose name I can’t remember but put out spaghetti westerns including Keoma and Requiscante on VHS format tapes.
Brazil
Brazil is the second Gilliam film featured on Moviedrome. Season two had featured is post Monty Python directorial debut Jabberwocky. Brazil was a big studio film, but the studios didn’t like what they got.
Alex Cox in his introduction traces Gilliam’s influences including the American MAD comics, France’s Métal Hurlant graphic novels and Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. Gilliam said that he was inspired by being in the middle of a police riot in Los Angeles and the industrial landscape of Welsh steel town Port Talbot. Cox uses Brazil as a case study in what can befall a film in the studio system including insensitive edits and non-releases. What I didn’t realise until Cox mentioned it was that Brazil was part two of a trilogy that starts with The Time Bandits and finishes with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen all three of which are about the ‘subjugation of magic to realism’.
Get Carter
From magical realism to dark realism. Get Carter catches the corrupt criminal Newcastle of the 1960s with its crumbling Victorian tenement housing and fine historic being replaced by brutalist architecture that was no better. A few years later former council leader T Dan Smith would be involved in a corruption trial that would bring down members of the conservative government. T Dan Smith was also responsible for a flourishing of the arts and further education in Newcastle, much of which tends to be forgotten; as was his dream of a ‘Brasilia of the north’.
Cox focuses on Get Carter being an ugly nasty gangster film in terms of its realism compared to the likes of the Kray brothers and compares it favourably to similarly themed films including Brighton Rock and Villain. Michael Caine plays the role really well and Mike Hodges keeps the plot running along at a rate of knots. Almost two decades later in The Guardian Cox argued that the darkness in the film had been misinterpreted by many has a criticism of ‘red trade unionism’ and a malaise of nationalised industries, which just wasnt the case. He also made some good points on how the British film industry was reshaping our collective view of recent history.
Goin’ South
Goin’ South is a Jack Nicholson vehicle. I am not the biggest fan, as Jack Nicholson tends to play Jack Nicholson. I came of age as an independent cinema goer around about the time of The Witches of Eastwick, and his pantomime Joker performance in Batman which also might have something to do with my view on Jack Nicholson films in general. Goin’ South is from that time when the creative energy had ebbed out of Hollywood westerns.
Alex Cox talks about the film in terms of it’s links to Easy Rider in terms of the film makers. He also points out that the movie was made at the La Joya ranch in Mexico where John Wayne had made many films. It lacked the interesting performances that other western films had and the Spaghetti western aesthetic that Eastwood brought with him back to Hollywood productions. While Cox liked seeing Nicholson alongside Belushi and DeVito, I still don’t understand what makes this a Moviedrome worthy film?
Dead of Night
Dead of Night is a British anthology horror movie made at Ealing Studios during the second world war. It is well directed and shot, I can agree with Alex Cox that its a wonderfully made film for what it is. But again struggle to understand why it was a cult film. I enjoyed watching it at the time, but have never looked at it again since.
The Terminator
It’s a bit odd thinking of The Terminator as a cult film, but it is a great film, apart from some more matte effects. Cox saw a clear parallel with other 1980s LA science fiction films like Trancers due to its punk aesthetic. He makes the point that The Terminator is better due to its script and its villain. He also reveals the debt that Cameron owed to an old episode of The Outer Limits called The Soldier where an assassin from the future returns to the present.
The Honeymoon Killers
The Honeymoon Killers is a bleak film about an odd couple where the woman insists on going along with her criminal boyfriend on his escapades. This involves him killing women he has befriended or married. Its cheaply made, but gets better as it goes on. Alex Cox liked that it had a similar visual look and feel to Night of The Living Dead.
Ulzana’s Raid
It wouldn’t be Moviedrome if there wasn’t a Robert Aldrich film or two in a season. Ulzana’s Raid was considered to be an allegory to the Vietnam conflict by some critics. It is notable that the film shows the horror and moral ambiguity of war.
The Loved One
The Loved One is less of a cult film than a teachable lesson in how not to do film making. Based on a novel by Evelyn Waugh, the writers managed to mess with a perfectly good story. Not even a guest performance by Liberace as a coffin salesman can save the film. You can hear Alex Cox’ take here. Unsurprisingly the film doesn’t seem to have been published on Blu-Ray.
An American Werewolf in London
I seem to remember this being a popular film during my time in secondary school and it having been screened a few times on TV prior to its appearance on Moviedrome. As Alex Cox points out An American Werewolf in London follows the well trodden rules of what a werewolf film should be. Many werewolf films were a bit hokey. An American Werewolf in London cut through the clutter, particularly with its transformation scenes to my young mind. Looking back at Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, you can see the stylistic similarities between it and An American Werewolf in London. In 2017 Landis spoke to The Guardian about the making of Thriller.
There were things that I didn’t notice at the time which Alex Cox captures in his introduction. The fact that the sound track manages to cram so many songs in with moon in the title, like a demented Spotify play list and its dedication to Prince Charles and Diana on the occasion of their wedding. Alex Cox points out that this cheesy brand of patriotism could only have come from an American. This season was a couple of years before Andrew Morton’s book exposed the marital problems that Charles and Diana were having to a wider public audience.
Its also hard to believe that the same John Landis who directed the Blues Brothers and National Lampoon’s Animal House directed An American Werewolf in London.
Yojimbo
Moviedrome was my gateway to the films of Akira Kurosawa with the showing of Yojimbo. It was sufficiently influential to me that I named this blog partly after the genre of film that Yojimbo belongs to. As Alex Cox pointed out, Yojimbo was the inspiration of A Fistful of Dollars – the start of Sergio Leone’s dollar trilogy of spaghetti westerns. It is important because it is beyond good versus evil type stories and based around an antihero. Alex Cox pointed out that while Akira Kurosawa was considered to be worthy of an Oscar lifetime achievement ward, he felt ashamed at how little he had learned in 50 years of film-making, and that he would have to keep working until he died, in the hope that he would one day get it right. Which says a lot about how he viewed his craft.
A Wedding
A Wedding is a Robert Altman film feating Mia Farrow. Its one of them films that I am supposed to like but feel ambivalent about. But thanks to Alex Cox, at least I can have an opinion about it. I am not quite sure how it earned its cult status and I’d only recommend it to Robert Altman completists. I have nothing against Mr Altman per se and loved M*A*S*H which I felt was one of the best comedies about the carnage of war and how the Vietnam war was affecting American society. It entertained but also touched you. A Wedding is not M*A*S*H.
A Wedding explores class and prejudice in America. The bride’s family don’t like the Italian heritage of the groom.
Phenix City Story
ThePhenix City Story is an exposé film like Reefer Madness or the Buford Pusser biopic Walking Tall. Alex Cox considered it an early example of ‘product placement’ on screen. It is the story of slot machine vendors and card sharps operating in Alabama in the years following the Second World War. African Americans were noticeable by their absence.
Walk on The Wild Side
In Walk on The Wild Side a rural boy is entangled with artist who has become a prostitute. Its an early role for Jane Fonda.
Alex Cox commented more about the periphery of the film. The New Orleans locations were later copied by other films. The film is set in the United States of the 1930s, but it could just as the America of Reagan and George Bush senior; the homeless hero, widespread unemployment and drivers won’t stop to pick up hitch-hikers. The most famous element of the film, by the way, isn’t the acting or the directing or any of that stuff. It’s the title sequence, designed by Saul Bass. Bass was famous for film posters and graphic design of title sequences from the 1950s onwards.
The Great Silence
The Great Silence probably one of the most dystopian spaghetti western movies you will ever see. Alex Cox described it as it “the most horrible ending of any film I’ve ever seen. It was considered too grim that the producers asked Corbucci to shoot another. Apparently, that version played in certain Middle Eastern countries, where spaghetti westerns, like action films were popular, but they have to had a happy ending.
It is an amazing film, but its similarity to Clint Eastwood’s pale imitation Joe Kidd killed the chance of The Great Silence from being screened in the United States.
A Bullet For The General
There is a genre of spaghetti western films called Zapata westerns. These were based around the Mexican revolution, even though they were shot in southern Spain. These films often had a left leaning political message. In A Bullet For The General Lou Castell plays an American mercenary hired to kill a revolutionary leader. He uses a naive Gian Carlo Volante as a way to get access to the revolutionary.
Down by Law
Jim Jarmusch is a director that Alex Cox is a bit of a fan of. One thing Cox also likes is black and white films. Down by Law is black and white film made in 1986 about two protagonists who were fitted up for a crime and helped to escape by a murderer.
Season four
By the time season four of Moviedrome the series was an institution with me and my friends. We’d discuss the films that we liked and the one’s that we were most looking forward to. This season’s intro breaks the fourth wall and shows a US dinner’s interior that is inside a sound stage.
The Beguiled
The Beguiled is a curate’s egg of a western with Clint Eastwood as an injured civil war soldier in an odd community of women. Alex Cox used it as a way of telling the story of Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel. I wouldn’t say that The Beguiled is a cult film, but its not a bad film to watch.
Vamp
Vamp is a camp horror film featuring Grace Jones and set design by Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. Its a bit better than Andy Warhol’s factory films with way higher production values. Its the kind of weird curio that was a signature of Moviedrome. I wouldn’t watch the film again, but it isn’t bad.
Knightriders
Knightriders features Ed Harris and is directed by George A Romero. Despite being a George A Romero film, it doesn’t involve horror. Alex Cox used his introduction to explain the American phenomenon of renaissance fairs, which includes jousting competitions.
Bizarrely in Knightriders this jousting happens with the knights mounted on motorcycles.
Something Wild
Something Wild is one of them romantic comedies that were always available at the video rental shop. They had some actors that you had heard of, but you never knew anyone who had actually watched it. In this case, the film is a bit more risqué than normal for an American rom com with Melanie Griffith in PVC and the occasional pair of handcuffs – in some ways it feels a little bit like British cinema. Alex Cox praised its ‘weird twist’ and a soundtrack including featuring John Cale, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Celia Cruz, Big Audio Dynamite, Big Youth and The Fine Young Cannibals. Director Jonathan Demme went on to make Philadelphia in 1993, one of Tom Hanks best films ever and a number of music documentaries.
Carnival of Souls
Carnival of Souls has oodles of cinematic style in a 1960s horror film. The weird thing about it is that the film wasn’t shot in the likes of Italy, but in Laurence, Kansas by the director, his neighbours and people from his community.
Carnival of Souls may sometimes look like it has shots missing (even the ‘restored’ version has charmingly ragged edges). But minute for minute it is better entertainment, and has better direction and more inspired performances, than films costing tens of millions more.
Alex Cox for Moviedrome on Carnival of Souls
Badlands
Alex Cox has a thing for murder spree films. Previously he’d featured the Honeymoon Killers on Moviedrome. Badlands is a better film with a young Martin Sheen playing one of the protagonists alongside Sissy Spacek. The film was very successful at the box office, which is rare for a film that is also artistically acclaimed. Cox focused on Badlands director Terence Malick. He only directed a couple of films and did script doctoring
The Prowler
I can barely remember anything about The Prowler save that it was a 1950s era film focused on police corruption. Going back to notes from the time, I see that Alex Cox focused on the director in his introduction. Joseph Losey had a string of films behind him when he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era of Hollywood. He left to go to Europe and made a succession of films under a pseudonym that were even more successful than his earlier US films including one with a young Alain Delon.
Performance
The UK had a golden era of gangster films before Tamer Hassan, Vinnie Jones or Craig Fairbass. Performance was one of the greats alongside Richard Burton’s Villain and Michael Caine’s Get Carter, which featured earlier on in Moviedrome. Performance captures ‘swinging London’ in the 1960s with Anita Pallenberg, Mick Jagger and a young James Fox as the titular gangster of the film.
At Close Range
At Close Range is a crime film, but one with some fantastic acting talent including Christopher Walken and a young Sean Penn. At Close Range is a stylish film not that far off a ‘Brat Pack’ movie meets early ‘Michael Mann’.
Alex Cox’s introduction points out that the film is made by the scions of Hollywood royalty and the positive trajectory of their subsequent careers. The script writer gets a fair bit of consideration. His father had shopped colleagues during the McCarthy era and went on to work on On The Waterfront. And in this film he has a son testify against his father in another trial.
The Duellists
The Duellists is the most un-Ridley Scott film you are likely to see from the director. It makes more sense that David Putnam was involved as well. It is an adaption of Joseph Conrad’s The Duellists. It is stylish but not particularly engaging as a film.
Cape Fear
As a child, I was more used to Robert Mitchum as an old character actor in made for TV specials that used to be popular like The Winds of War. Looking at Cape Fear makes you realise that he was a mid-century equivalent of Robert De Niro. I got to see Robert De Niro playing the Robert Mitchum character in a Martin Scorsese remake of the film pretty soon after I saw the original. Back then I spent a lot of time at then new cinema complex at the Croft retail park.
The Music Lovers
The Music Lovers allowed Alex Cox to tick the box for British cinema lovers by including a Ken Russell film. I always thought that Ken Russell was well regarded and and productive film director. Cox pointed out that Russell was not flavour of the month with many film critics which came as a surprise to me. It is based on the life of Russian composer Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky who marries as a way to deal with his homosexuality and things don’t work out the way he planned.
Manhunter
Michael Mann managed to make Alex Cox’s list at last. Manhunter is based on Red Dragon, the first book in the Hannibal Lector series of books by Thomas Harris. Mann gave Miami Vice its style and verve. He brings a clean white-out aesthetic to the series of films that is a sharp contrast to Silence of The Lambs which had been released around the time of the Moviedrome episode. Alex Cox focuses on the comparison of the Lecters: Brian Cox and Anthony Hopkins and Hollywood’s obsession with Englishmen as villains. FBI Agent Gately was played by William Petersen, whom many people know better as the CSI character Gil Grissom.
Hell’s Angels on Wheels
Hell’s Angels on Wheels made Alex Cox’s selection for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is shot by the same people who did Easy Rider the following year. Yet it is a very different film from Easy Rider. The rebels are the heroes, but the film action is pretty staid, all be it with a fair amount of sexual tension. Alex Cox focuses on the subsequent storied careers of those involved from Easy Rider to E.T.
Rumble Fish
Like some of the other films in the series, you could argue that Rumble Fish is a classic rather than a cult film. It had top shelf stars in it like Matt Dillon. What I didn’t realise until watching the Alex Cox introduction was the Rumble Fish was shot back-to-back with a movie adaptation of The Outsiders. In this respect I was reminded of the relationship between Wong Kar Wai’s Ashes of Time and Jeff Lau’s The Eagle Shooting Heroes – both riffed off Louis Cha’s novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes. The idea of a letter from a high school class getting Coppola interested in a book to movie project like The Outsiders, seems quaint now. It is hard to believe that Hollywood worked that way. Rumble Fish was an adaption of another book by The Outsiders author.
Rumble Fish was in black and white and has an art house feel to it.
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane continued the theme of showing Robert Aldrich films by Alex Cox. You have two Hollywood greats: Joan Crawford and Bette Davies as the protagonists. I didn’t realise until I watched the introduction that Aldrich had also done sequels of a sort.
Solaris
Solaris is a classic of Soviet cinema. I loved the way they shot some b-roll footage in Tokyo to try and pretend that it was the Russia of the future with weaving flyovers and Toyota saloons. Interestingly, Alex Cox compared it to The Shining whereas most people compared it to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and according to Alex Cox was one of the shortest of his films. The film is extraordinary, but I also remember how Cox very honestly admitted how little he knew about Soviet cinema and culture at the time. He described the film as conceptually better than 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Mishima: a life in four parts
The little I knew of Yukio Mishima before this showing was that he had written a couple of good books, that I am attempting to read at the moment and had right wing views. It is interesting that his biopic Mishima: a life in four parts was directed by American Paul Schrader. Relatives of Yukio Mishima had a say in the film leading to relative restraint in the portrayal of his gay lifestyle.
Schrader came up with a film that is complex, beautifully made with a great soundtrack and very divisive. The Japanese film establishment hated it. Yukio Mishima is the kind of character that was taboo to talk about at the time.
Cox was known for his sympathies towards left wing regimes like the Sandinistas (at the time this was made, Ronald Reagan had only just left office less than two years before), so I was curious what Cox would make of it. He treated the film surprisingly even handedly. Mishima is a complex character and I am sure the Moviedrome presenter appreciated that. Its also hard to associate the film that you watch with Schrader’s other works like Taxi Driver.
Season five
Season four had zig-zagged through film at a rate of knots that I didn’t know what to expect of Moviedrome season five. The first episode opened with a curious double bill Mad Max 2 and F for Fake. The title sequence riffed on King Kong, the building entrance featured instead of the Empire State Building was the then base of the BBC World Service at Bush House on Aldwych.
Mad Max 2
The George Miller directed film Mad Max 2 made a star of Mel Gibson and was visual shorthand for dystopian landscapes for years afterwards. It also reminded me of an old Hollywood western from the likes of John Ford. The villains in biker gear and bondage wear while the good guys were pale clothing more in tune with the desert conditions or animal pelts.
The protagonist anti-hero wears biker gear that has seen better days. Alex Cox points out that Mad Max 2 is a better sequel than the original and then compares this to the relationship between A Fistful of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More.
F for Fake
F for Fake is one of Orson Welles’ later films made in 1973. It is done in a documentary style about various forgers and con artists, with a strong implication that Welles and his career are as much fakery as anything else. That’s unfair to Welles the artist. Alex Cox talked about how Welles had suffered unfairly after being black-listed as a communist by Hollywood. Something that would dog is post-war career. It also affected the critical viewpoint on films like Citizen Kane for American film experts.
F for Fake is emblematic of Welles is later output and it is cleverly done, but you get the sense of it being made with limitations.
Dead Ringers and Rabid
This entire evening was based on the film career of David Cronenberg. What I didn’t realise until this screening was that Cronenberg had started studying biochemistry before pivoting to English in college. This probably influenced his early films like Rabid. Rabid is essentially a Canadian take on a typical Dario Argento movie. I could imagine Argento having done an Italian version of Cronenberg’s Scanners too.
Dead Ringers is the kind of mystery that Britain used to turn out in the 1940s, all be it much more graphic in nature. The casting of Jeremy Irons as the protagonist improved the polish and general characterisation of the film’s main characters. The big mystery for me was why Videodrome wasn’t in this double bill.
Junior Bonner
Modern western movie Junior Bonner is an atypical Sam Peckinpah film. Steve McQueen plays a modern-day rodeo cowboy rather than the typical It was also an odd film to choose as a vehicle to talk about Peckinpah’s career. I didn’t realise until Alex Cox mentioned it that Peckinpah started in TV production during the 1950s and then moved to the movie industry. This is fascinating as most of the talent traffic pivoted the other way in the late 1960s. By the time you get television shows from the 1970s; most Hollywood actors were metaphorically down on their luck guesting on shows like The Love Boat, Buck Rogers in The 23rd Century and CHIPs.
The Serpent and The Rainbow
The Serpent and The Rainbow was filmed in the Dominican Republic and Haiti by director Wes Craven. Alex Cox used the opportunity to talk about Craven’s more influential films The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street and People Under the Stairs. All of which makes it odder that Cox chose this film over the others to feature in Moviedrome. I like it as I think it has some great actors like Cathy Tyson and Bill Pullman in the film.
Les Diaboliques
At first glance, Les Diaboliques is a French language murder film. Alex Cox praised for its ability to frighten audiences and I recommend sticking with it through to the end. The film also became a vehicle for Cox to tell the audience off for their reluctance to watch foreign language films. The director also made Wages of Fear. A film about trucking explosives across South America.
The Spider’s Stratagem
The Spider’s Stratagem is an Italian film made by Bernardo Bertolucci. He is more famous for The Last Emperor and Last Tango in Paris. The Spider’s Stratagem was originally made for Italian television and addressed the murder of a man by fascists. The excesses of the fascist era were still an area of sensitivity for Italians. Despite being an interesting film, I can’t find any evidence that The Spider’s Stratagem never made it to DVD, Blu-Ray or streaming service for English language viewers.
Escape from New York
Escape from New York features amazing performances by Kurt Russell and Lee van Cleef. Alex Cox doesn’t hold Escape from New York in the same regard that I do. So its interesting that he was prepared to have it in Moviedrome instead of They Live. It turns out that Cox took issues with special effects created for the film by James Cameron.
Alligator
Alligator was screened as a double bill with Q The Winged Serpent and I didn’t remember watching Alligator at all, but do vividly remember Q. You can see Alex Cox’s introduction to Alligator here. His introduction to Alligator is chock full of movie trivia, but not necessarily a reason to watch the film.
Q The Winged Serpent
Q The Winged Serpent is something I vividly remember watching on Moviedrome. Its Ray Harryhausen type monster and a plot line involving an Aztec god were really impressive. There was something about the ambience of the film which also gelled with the Kolchak The Night Stalker TV series which was running on late night television about the same time. Both were shot in what feels like was supposed to be early 1970s New York and both could have existed in a shared universe. The reality was that Q came out in 1982.
Alex Cox points out the hybrid slasher movie meets King Kong high concept to Q and introduces the film’s real star: the Chrysler Building. He also admits that the director doesn’t have taste but praises his guerrilla approach to film making which regularly got him in trouble with the city authorities and the police.
Wise Blood
Wise Blood was interesting as a film to me because of its core idea of a man trying to form a ‘Church of Truth Without Christ’ which I found intriguing. I thought that it touched on the essential need for people to have rituals and order, even if they didn’t have faith in their lives. The setting of the film feels atemporal in nature. While it is supposed to start in the post war period it doesn’t stay that way. The film meanders along with what Alex Cox called a ‘strange dark quality’ more like one would expect from a European art film. The film was directed by John Huston and funded by a German film company. Like Diva shown during the first season of Moviedrome this a film about atmosphere and vibe rather than storyline.
Witchfinder General
Witchfinder General was the second part of a Moviedrome double bill alongside Wise Blood. The grouping didn’t really make that much sense. The film like Hammer Studios horror films was regularly shown on British TV at the time. But don’t let that put you off. Vincent Price does a fantastic job as the protagonist Matthew Hopkins, a historical figure who chased down witches and warlocks in England. There is something other-worldly about the ‘day for night’ shots that appear in this and other similar films.
Lolita
I don’t know if Lolita would be called a cult film today. It might be considered to be a classic. It has great stars like James Mason, Shirley Winters and Peter Sellers. Adrian Lyne filmed a remake with Jeremy Irons as the protagonist in 1997, however in the current environment with concerns about child safety and sky high anxiety levels I couldn’t imagine it being made today at all. From the perspective of a film expert in 1992, a young Stanley Kubrick managed to pull off a miracle by filming an unfilmable book by Russian author Vladimir Nabokov.
Cox went on to talk about Kubrick not being the untouchable director that most film experts treated him as at the time.
…I would be delinquent in my iconoclastic duty if I didn’t add that I think Stanley has lately taken to pulling the odd fast one. Not that it’s necessarily his fault – he’s been so lionized by the movie critics of this planet that he’s become uncriticizable. I think both The Shining and Full Metal Jacket are seriously inadequate films, but you wouldn’t find many professional pundits who’ll admit to anything like that. They’re all so afraid of Kubrick, and so desperate to find out what he’s up to, and to be among the first to see his next long-awaited offering, that the average review of a new Kubrick movie reads like a press release from the distributor. Is no one brave enough to opine that Full Metal Jacket should have been shot on location? Does not one lone dissenting voice feel that The Shining was a boring film?
Alex Cox – Moviedrome
Play Misty for Me
Clint Eastwood directed Play Misty for Me – the story of a late night radio disc jockey whose life is affected by a romantic event with what would now be called a ‘stan’. As a film this feels very now in terms of its subject matter and the increased accessibility of influencers and celebrities. I don’t know if its a cult film as its well known and generally quite popular. Although it is an American film, there is something about it that reminds me of 1970s and 1980s European ‘giallo’ films.
Alex Cox points out how Clint Eastwood uses many of the motifs found in Don Seagal films as part of Play Misty for Me. He compares it to Dario Argento’s works as well.
Walker
Walker was the high point of Alex Cox’s film making career and the one that probably permanently closed the door for him in Hollywood. It features Ed Harris and tells the tale of a 19th century American mercenary who ends up as the president of Nicaragua. Back in 1987, there were clear parallels with the Contras. One could also point out the similarity to Eric Prince of Blackwater and Frontier Services Group fame.
Cox doesn’t critique his own film, but instead reads a review from the BFI which compares it to Werner Herzog, Sam Peckinpah and Alejandro Jodorowsky. I think the comparison with Peckinpah and Herzog are certainly fair.
The film got its cult status primarily from its lack of commercial success, yet high quality – which is why it was released on Blu Ray by The Criterion Collection.
Tracks
Tracks now seems unremarkable given the number of more recently produced films about returning war dead. At the time it was interesting as it directly addressed America’s involvement in Vietnam. A lot of its atmosphere comes from the film being shot on Amtrak trains, giving it an other-worldly feel. You can find out what Cox thought about the film on Moviedrome here.
The Day of the Locust
The Day of the Locust is a classic example of an odd type of film to me. It is a period film, but is shot in a manner that makes you believe that it could have been made back in the 1950s or 1960s. Alex Cox pointed out that Hollywood universally seems to show the inside of the film business in a largely negative light.
The Big Knife
The Big Knife is yet another Robert Aldrich film featured on Moviedrome. The most interesting aspect of the film for me was how young Jack Palance looked like a real heart throb rather than a villainous stone cold killer – which were the kind of performances that made up most of his career. Its a good film noir genre film that just happens to be set in the middle of Hollywood. Palance plays a complicated character under pressure from his studio.
Season six
What I didn’t know at the time was the season six would be pen-ultimate season of Moviedrome. We see Cox as an old time cinema organist as he hams it up on screen in various black and white films. This season would see Django appearing alongside some other lesser known spaghetti westerns and the surprisingly under-watched Sean Connery film The Hill.
Darkman
Darkman is a character created by Sam Raimi that feels very much today like a comic book franchise. In this case, the comic books and novels span off the film rather than the film adapting comics. You can see aspects of Universal’s monster characters in there, a bit of Batman, Mr Hyde, The Spirit and the Punisher. If he’s a comic book character he’s aimed at the young adult and adult reader.
Cox laments that the film doesn’t have the creativity of Raimi’s Evil Dead franchise. I like Darkman. I think it has a great cast including Liam Neeson, Frances McDormand and Bruce Campbell.
House of Games
For the life of me, I couldn’t remember House of Games at all. Alex Cox praised it principally for its titles and the typography design.
Escape from Alcatraz
Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz was show on TV a number of times before it appeared on Moviedrome. I also remember the iconic poster design on videos peering down in the video rental shop, it was a well watched film during the 1980s before it appeared on Moviedrome. I don’t think that it fits into the conventional cult film definition. Alex Cox’s introduction talked about how Patrick McGoohan had gone from playing number six in The Prisoner, to playing the prison warden in Escape from Alcatraz.
There is also a certain symmetry between Clint Eastwoods portrayal of San Francisco police detective ‘Dirty’ Harry Callaghan and Alcatraz inmate Frank Morris.
A Man Escaped
I don’t remember A Man Escaped at all. I can see why Alex Cox liked it so much as a film. Its nicely shot and has authenticity from the director not using professional actors. A trait of some of the films that ran though Moviedrome. Cox also commented on how the film focused on the ‘small details’.
The Hill
The Hill is the kind of classic film that you would expect The Criterion Collection to publish; yet hasn’t been published by them yet. It is directed by Sidney Lumet and got one of the best performances ever out of Sean Connery. This was out at the height of Connery’s stardom. Goldfinger and Marnie had come out the previous year. The Hill came out the same year as Thunderball.
Cry-Baby
Cry-Baby is a classic John Walters film featuring a young Johnny Depp. Depp’s star is on the wane now with allegations of spousal abuse from Amber Heard and a break down in the relationship with his management team. However earlier in his career around the time of Cry-Baby he was an amazing talent appearing in Platoon, Edward Scissorhands and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. John Waters had just completed Hairspray. Both films featured 1950s Baltimore as a backdrop and were off kilter pastiche takes of John Hughes-type teen dramas with a healthy slice of Americana. I didn’t realise at the time that Cry Baby didn’t get the box office success of Hairspray.
Lenny
Dustin Hoffman biopic of Lenny Bruce Lenny seems unremarkable today. Its hard to appreciate now how controversial Bruce was at the time. His formula of no-holds barred social commentary is pretty standard fair in stand up comedy performances, but instead he was viewed as obscene and prosecuted for it. Today Bruce is a patron saint of comics and a key part of the beat generation. Alex Cox points out that Lenny is emblematic of Bob Fosse’s career of as a film director including Cabaret.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a remake of a classic 1950s science fiction film that was supposed to channel a number of cold war era anxieties. Cox had featured the original back at the beginning of Moviedrome and its interesting that he thought enough about the remake to screen it as well. Alex Cox considered this to be a good remake of a good film and thought highly of director Philip Kaufman who went on to make The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kaufman’s remake reflects a different America, one where the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate hand of unseen but felt political power lurking in the background.
Romance of a Horsethief
Its a bit of an odd combination to have as a double bill to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The main thing I remember about Romance of a Horsethief was Yul Brynner. The film never made it to DVD or Blu-Ray. Cox considered it a far from perfect film. Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg were the key reasons to watch.
Gothic
Ken Russell makes his second appearance with Gothic – a film about the origin of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Cox points out that the 1980s in many ways were a similar time to now. Back then, video publishers like Virgin started finance low budget film productions, in a similar way to the role of streaming platforms now. Madcap low-budget, high energy directors like Ken Russell benefited from this cash flow that allowed them to bypass the Hollywood studio system. This also explains how the Alex Cox biopic of Sid Vicious – Sid & Nancy got made.
The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey
The Navigator is an interesting film to watch. It is a medieval film made in New Zealand decades before The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Alex Cox has problems with the acting and it’s effect on the film. But one can’t deny that the film is conceptually brilliant.
Weekend
It was only a matter of time before Jean-Luc Godard again appeared on Moviedrome after Alphaville. Weekend is the tale of a couple going to visit the wife’s father and mother to kill them for what they will inherit. Cox praised it for a particular long tracking shot and critiqued its far left political slant.
Rebel Without a Cause
The James Dean star-making film Rebel Without a Cause by Nicholas Ray needs no introduction from me. The film and James Dean are both things you are supposed to like as the epitome of cool. Which explains why its outsized influence is outside cinema inspiring fashion through the decades that followed with its portrayal of American work wear and biker wear as fashion icons. The only film with a bigger impact was A Streetcar Named Desire which inspired wearing t-shirts as an outer garment. Alex Cox thought that it was hard to say if James Dean was a great actor, but he definitely considered Ray a great director.
200 Motels
Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels is an odd pairing with Rebel Without a Cause. Beloved of Q magazine readers, Frank Zappa wasn’t on my must watch list at the time. Its an odd mix of comedy sketches, concert footage and animation. Think Sesame Street for hippies.
Django
This was the first time that I had seen Django and I remember sitting there in the early hours of Monday morning nursing a cup of tea after the double bill. What the hell had I just seen? The most bizarre spaghetti western ever with prostitutes wrestling in the mud and a machine gun in a coffin. I went back and watched it a number of times since and it is up there in terms of my favourite westerns after the dollars trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West.
Grim Prairie Tales
Grim Prairie Tales was a second part of a western double bill led by Django. It features the excellent Brand Dourif who appeared in another Moviedrome favourite Wise Blood. This time he plays a mild mannered clerk around the campfire with a bounty hunter played by James Earl Jones in a wig. Think Edgar Allen Poe on the range.
Run of the Arrow
Run of the Arrow is an unusual western when a civil war veteran marries into the Sioux and has to pick a side when the Sioux go on the warpath. Alex Cox is a big fan of director Sam Fuller and cinematographer Joseph Biroc.
Verboten!
Verboten! is similar to Run of the Arrow in that in both films the protagonist is a war veteran. Both were directed by Sam Fuller. Verboten! is a romance that deals with the post-war rise of Nazism during the Marshall Plan period of economic reconstruction in Germany.
The Long Riders
The Long Riders occurred at the end of the popularity of Hollywood westerns. A fair bit of its aesthetic is taken from spaghetti westerns. Casting actor siblings provided the visual consistency you needed for the tale of brothers in the gang. Alex Cox featured The Long Riders mainly because it was better than Young Guns which was the only western of note that had been put out over the past few years.
The Big Combo
The Big Combo is a 1950s detective film. I thought that it was pretty derivative. What Alex Cox makes enthusiastic about the film is the way that its shot from a low angle and lit to make the best use of harsh shadows.
Face to Face
Face to Face is a fantastic western with a who’s who of European western stars: Tomas Milian, William Berger and Gian Maria Volontè. Alex Cox thought of it as a political parable on the rise of European fascism with strong overtones of Jorge Luis Borges’ literary works. I hadn’t realised until Moviedrome educated me was that Volontè had been blacklisted as a communist, until Sergio Leone had given him work on the Dollars trilogy.
Requiescant
Requiescant is one of the best non-Leone spaghetti westerns that I watched. I managed to get a copy of it on VHS after I saw it on Moviedrome. Tracking down a copy in either English or Italian is more difficult now. Lou Castel who played the worldly American mercenary in A Bullet for the General plays the foster son of a preacher and Mark Damon plays his nemesis. Cox points out that the director Carlo Lizzani was a leftist who tried to make it politics understandable to as wide an audience as possible.
What Have I Done to Deserve This?
What Have I Done to Deserve This is an early film by Pedro Almodóvar. He has made better films. Its a kitchen sink drama set around the high rise apartment blocks of Madrid and is a critique of wider consumerist life in Spain. Cox goes on to give us a run down on Spanish accents with the Madrid accent being the equivalent of BBC English in the country. This also explained by the Spanish didn’t watch Mexican cinema at the time. But What Have I Done to Deserve This? contains a cinematic easter egg featuring a photo in the background of Mexican director Emilio Fernandez, whom Almodóvar admired for his work.
Carrie
Carrie was a staple of popular culture during the 1980s and 1990s. It was regularly was shown on TV late at night and was a video rental shop favourite. The cinema poster was an iconic image that people could recognise even if they hadn’t watched the film. It was the first Carrie you thought of before Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw appeared in Sex and the City. Alex Cox points out the similarity of Brian de Palma’s Carrie and works by Dario Argento such as Suspiria. Carrie was de Palma’s first hit movie and was the first of a series of films that would be made from Stephen King novels. A trend that continued on to recent times with It. The way the film flips between dreams or hallucinatory segments and ‘real life’ reminded me a good deal of the Nightmare on Elm Street film series. Carrie was remade in 2013, I haven’t seen the remake yet.
Season seven
Season seven of Moviedrome was the last season featuring presenter Alex Cox. The theme of this season of Moviedrome introductions seemed to ape The Third Man. According to the internet, Alex Cox and Nick Jones tried to get the BBC to licence and include The Mattei Affair in this season. There is a wider mystery of how The Mattei Affair has never been properly distributed on DVD or Blu Ray despite being an excellent film that won the grand prize at The Cannes Film Festival and seems to have been buried since then.
The Andromeda Strain
I rewatched The Andromeda Strain during the COVID epidemic and it felt very now despite being produced in 1971. Director Robert Wise tells the story well as scientists try and investigate a deadly organism that is carried to earth on a US government satellite that crash-lands in New Mexico. Its hard to explain how big Michael Crichton was as an author during the 1960s through the 1990s. Crichton qualified as a doctor at Harvard Medical School, but went into writing instead turning out novels, TV shows and movie scripts. He became the king of the in-flight book. The first book under his own name is The Andromeda Strain in 1969 and this was quickly licensed for $250,000 – roughly equivalent to just under $2 million in today’s money. The film isn’t exactly in cult territory with a high budget of $6.5 million (almost 50 million in today’s dollars) and took in 8.2 million in US theatre rentals alone. Added on this would be foreign markets, broadcast rights, video tapes, laser discs, DVDs, Blu Rays and movie streaming.
Alex Cox commented on how the film made use of split-screen sequences and that it was shot in CinemaScope. At the time TV sets had a squarer shaped screen than today, so movies were often shown a small ‘letter box format’ or ‘panned and scanned’ to focus on the action which meant that you missed a lot of the film. Split screen sequences became a bit of a thing in the 1960s and early 1970s. He compared the ‘matter of factness’ in much of The Andromeda Strain with mundane technical exchanges to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Director Robert Wise had previously edited some of Orson Welles’ most famous films.
Fiend Without a Face
Fiend Without a Face was a double bill to The Andromeda Strain. And both start off with mysterious deaths and other worldly causes. Its not a great film by any means and I think Alex Cox liked it was more due to its visual similarity to Dr Strangelove at some points.
Talk Radio
Talk Radio is an Oliver Stone film. Stone has lost a lot of his popularity due to the way he held Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin in high regard. It’s based on the life of Alan Berg, a radio host killed by neo-nazis in 1984 who had a liberal world view. Protagonist Barry Champlain is less focused in his world view, he is more like an aggressive stand up comedian like the late Bernard Manning who used to shred as many members of the audience in his Embassy Club in Manchester.
Like Berg, Champlain too dies, but in the meantime he also wrestles with depression and marital breakdown. American talk radio now is associated with the legacy of right wing hosts like Rush Limbaugh. At the time of broadcast in 1994, Alex Cox’s favourite films by Oliver Stone were JFK and Salvador. No mention of the crowd-pleasing Scarface, which was interesting if a little bit obvious for Moviedrome. Its also interesting that Cox seems to disagree with Stone’s world view which he considers to be broadly in line with the Hollywood ‘limousine liberal’.
Carnal Knowledge
Carnal Knowledge in retrospect is a typical (if such a thing can be said) Moviedrome film. A bit of new Hollywood heritage with Jack Nicholson starring. Art Garfunkel makes one of his film appearances and it also features the great actress Candice Bergen. Director Mike Nichols made The Graduate, Catch-22, Biloxi Blues and Primary Colours. Cox frames the discussion around Nichols’ habit of doing films around angst-ridden middle class Americans. He likes the way the characters age in appearance and in their acting over a three decade period.
I find the ending where Nicholson appraises all of his sexual partners over the years in a slideshow with a demeaning cynical overview as exceptionally uncomfortable viewing. The character has no decorum at all.
Coogan’s Bluff
Coogan’s Bluff is one of the earlier Don Siegel / Clint Eastwood movies. Moviedrome featured other’s previously such as Escape from Alcatraz. The Southwestern nature of Eastwood’s sheriffs deputy character is a nice visual segue way from his western works to the later works of him playing Inspector Harry Callaghan. It was a film that was on the shelf of video rental stores and got shown on TV regularly. So is a little bit against the Moviedrome formula of largely unscreened films. I pinged a friend about the Moviedrome intro and the one recollection he had was a diversion that Alex Cox took into the history of the state of Arizona. I can’t remember specifically watching it on Moviedrome, but probably did so. The country lawman who goes to the big city had its day in the early 1970s as a formula with the TV series McCloud.
The Narrow Margin
The Narrow Margin is a classic film noir based on a train full of mob assassins. Alex Cox was a fan of the director who also made Tora Tora Tora and Soylent Green. He also appreciated the zippy dialogue and the novelty of shooting on a train and excellent cinematography.
The Harder They Come
The Harder They Come is a Jamaican film that is part Midnight Cowboy and part Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There is a very meta aspect to the film when the protagonist goes to see Django at the cinema. The protagonist Ivan fancies himself as the anti-hero Django, which explains his later actions living out that fantasy. Moviedrome was the first time that I had seen the film, but I had heard the soundtrack previously. The key dialogue ‘Who’s da bad man, who can draw?’ echoed around UK clubs at the time thanks to Darren McDonald aka Dee Pattern who sampled the film on his track ‘Who’s the badman’; the Sound System mix still blows up dancefloors today.
Alex Cox considered it to be one of the best non-rockumentary music films ever. He rightly praises its soundtrack and thinks is a great film as well. He points out the unvarnished aspects of the protagonist’s character. He is terrified of going to jail and is a mgsoinyst.
Salvador
Before the current left wing authoritarian regime and a society rocked by the atrocities of MS-13, a plucky trendy left wing militia overthrew an authoritarian right wing regime. Not even Oliver North’s back op backing the Contra right wing rebels could defeat them. Back in the 1980s El Salvador was a trendy liberal cause, hence Oliver Stone making Salvador. Woods was nominated for an Oscar for his role in the film. He was already quite the star, having appeared in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. In recent years Woods has been cancelled because of the conservative views that he now holds.
Cox compares the film with Platoon, which he believes is an inferior Oliver Stone film.
People Under the Stairs
People Under the Stairs is a Wes Craven horror movie overshadowed by his Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The underlying race politics and visual connection with video games that Alex Cox latched on to makes it feel much more now, than 1991 in many respects.
Halloween
John Carpenter’s Halloween and its protagonist Michael Myers spawned a franchise of horror films and kicked off the trend for slasher horror films including Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Alex Cox praised the use of steadicam to give Michael Myers first person view which was really cleverly done.
The Baby
The Baby is a strange 1960s film that was actually filmed in the 1970s. It gives it an odd feel. Its got the kind of dialogue that I expected to see sampled on gabba and happy hardcore records. Alex Cox compares it to Play Misty For Me and The Beguiled. What’s more interesting about the Alex Cox introduction is his discussion of directors for hire versus auteurs.
Carny
Carny reminded me a bit of Taxi Driver due to Jodie Foster’s character and Midnight Cowboy. What I didn’t realise until I watched the introduction was that the film was a vehicle for a member of The Band. The Band connection explains some of the visual motifs in the film. Alex Cox also mentioned how the film sensitively treated all the cast regardless of their look, height or abilities – something that you would have not expected in the Hollywood of the 1970s and 1980s. Also keep an eye out for a young Gary Bussey.
The Girl on a Motorcycle
The Girl on a Motorcycle is a cult classic film for a number of reasons. Firstly, its cast of Alain Delon and Marianne Faithfull. The solarised footage in the film giving it a far out look. The film poster which showed that Marianne Faithfull was naked under her leather catsuit. This poster was famous during the 1980s and 1990s. There seems to have been a move away from having art exhibition, festival or film posters as home decor. Its unsurprising that The Girl on a Motorcycle became a Moviedrome film.
Psychomania
If oddness was a sole measure of a cult film then Psychomania would definitely count. Its an American motorcycle gang style film, but shot in the UK. The gang’s leader is dead already and so can’t be killed again, which echoes the British film industry’s penchant for horror movies at the time. Psychomania has been lovingly remastered and published on Blu-Ray by the British Film Institute.
Race with the Devil
Race with the Devil is an odd mix of genres, horror, counterculture, a road movie and a thriller. Two couples with an RV make the trip from Texas to Colorado for a skiing adventure and then things get interesting. Peter Fonda ups the counterculture cred of the film. Cox criticises the acting of Peter Fonda. The 1970s era motorhome would still be plush today.
Detour
Detour is featured due to its tale of outrageous misfortune. Cox felt that the film is too short and too many voiceovers.
Rope
Rope is the first Hitchcock directed film that Alex Cox included in Moviedrome. Cox admits that the film is famous – so on the face of it a classic rather than a cult classic. According Cox it was that the film, like 84C MoPic, looks as if it has been shot in one take, some thing that he considers a worth cinematic experiment.
84C MoPic
84C MoPic or 84 Charlie Mopic is a Sundance winning film that depicted the experience of American soldiers. It made Moviedrome because of the film’s unique perspective literally seen through the lens of a US Army documentary film maker and protagonist. 84C is the job code that the US Army used at the time. The film is let down by cleanliness of of the actors according to Alex Cox.
To Sleep with Anger
To Sleep with Anger comes across as an African American take on Cape Fear. Danny Glover plays out of type and comes up with a villain that Robert Mitchum or Robert DeNiro would have been proud of. The film didn’t do that well at the box office, but give it time. I thought it was a really good thriller. Alex Cox described it as the best film he would show that season on Moviedrome.
Contempt
Contempt or Le Mepris to give it its original French title would be a cult film purely on the basis that it is directed by Jean-Luc Godard and featured a young Brigitte Bardot. It also features the underrated Jack Palance as a villainous producer. It’s a film about the process of making films. Alex Cox talks about how international free trade agreements had disrupted international film productions.
Excalibur
John Boorman’s Excaliburis a fantastic telling of the Authurian tale. I like it because it has a sword and sorcery type feel to the film. What I didn’t realise was that director John Boorman made this film, when his plans to make a version of Lord of The Rings fell through. It’s got Gabriel Byrne and Liam Neeson in it together – two of Ireland’s best film actors.
Nothing Lasts Forever
Nothing Lasts Forever is a music biopic of piano player Adam Beckett who gets shot by the FBI by mistake. I think Cox chose the film more for the movie trivia that he could wrap around the introduction rather than the film itself. The film is innoffensive and I am surprised that it was part of the unshown catalogue of films that the BBC had licensed, given that it would have been perfectly fine for a summer Sunday afternoon, which used to be ‘dead space’ in the BBC schedule. I don’t see anything in it from a cult status point of view, save that it had a bit of a following in Soviet-era Russia.
Naked Tango
Naked Tango is a film noir featuring a woman with a hidden identity who gets into a world of trouble and intrigue. Its a bit like an Argentinean version of West Side Story and a large chunk of cliched tango-ing. The film is interesting but lacking in a lot of areas but the locations and photography are really good; something that Alex Cox notes in his Moviedrome introduction. Naked Tango was distributed on VHS tape, but never managed to make the jump to DVD or Blu-Ray.
Apartment Zero
Apartment Zero was the second part of an Argentinian film double bill. It was just over a decade after the Falklands war and I remember people at work commenting on the fact that the BBC shouldn’t be showing Argentinian films. Which goes back to the nature of Moviedrome being partly political in nature. The reason for this is that it was based around the singular view of Cox. The film itself reminds me a bit of Hitchcock in terms of the way the characters are developed.
Major Dundee
At first Major Dundee seems like every other Hollywood western. However I think that Richard Harris’ performance brings a lot to the film. I considered Hollywood westerns dismissively, having had an early childhood full of John Wayne films that felt interchangeable. The raw authenticity and beautiful camera work of spaghetti westerns appealed more. Maybe things would have been different if the the first spaghetti westerns that I watched weren’t Sergio Leone. Major Dundee has a fantastic cast but was let down by his relationship with the studio.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a name that marketers probably hated. Its not memorable, is too long, but it is intriguing. Cox admitted that he hated it when he first watched it, but over the years he realised it was a great film hidden behind b-movie tropes. Benny the protagonist reminded me of Hunter S Thompson when I watched it. Cox goes on to comment that Benny is likely how a failing Peckinpah saw himself.
Cox claims that it is Peckinpah’s second best film after The Wild Bunch (which is far too well known and appreciated to be a cult movie). This is high praise indeed from the Moviedrome presenter.
Kiss Me Deadly
Although we didn’t know it at the time, Kiss Me Deadly, a Robert Aldrich directed film was an appropriate way to end the run of Alex Cox hosted films on Moviedrome. This is a classic film noir featuring the Mickey Spillane character Mike Hammer. Cox considers Mike Hammer to be the perfect anti-hero in terms of the acting. He also valued the film’s capacity to shock. In some ways it feels quite modern rather like the Bosch TV series on Amazon Prime – which is as close as we would get to current film noir genre material in the 21st century.
More information
Alex Cox on film promoting his Introduction to Film book. The ethos very closely mirrors the approach to Moviedrome.
Back in 2020, Alex Cox proposed a fantasy film festival to be held in Liverpool in 1972. Some of the films would have been familiar to Moviedrome viewers, whilst others would not.
The Moviedromer tumblr account which borrowed extensively from the BBC published Moviedrome guide was invaluable as well.
I couldn’t avoid doing a post on Afghanistan given what had been going on this week. The Afghanistan conflict posed a number of interesting questions about:
What privacy and security means for the people left behind in Afghanistan in the digital age
Why strategy is seldom a teacher and several countries have made the same mistake in Afghanistan – (Britain did so twice!)
The failure of intelligence in Afghanistan reminded me of the failure of intelligence agencies to realise that the fall of the Berlin Wall would happen. There was also a failure to underhand who the players were and their motivations in Afghanistan
What will Afghanistan mean for Pakistan moving forwards? Once out, the west has the perfect opportunity to shun Pakistan; which will leave the country vulnerable to Chinese predatory practices
The US Is Removing Records of Its War in Afghanistan From the Internet – Lives are on the line here, but helping them may mean destroying—even if temporarily—the memory of the war and all that happened. It’s a horrible problem to face. One potential solution would be for the U.S. and its allies to take as many Afghan refugees as want to flee the country. – it assumes that the Taliban and supporters like the Pakistani ISI intelligence agency haven’t been caching this material themselves over the years. Things got rolled up so fast, they probably have hold of records from Afghanistan government payroll ledgers to intelligence reports
Germany Flew 65,000 Beer Cans Out of Afghanistan, but Just 7 People on an Evacuation Flight – “There was transport capacity for alcohol, but not for the local staff in Afghanistan,” read a piece in Germany’s Bild newspaper, referring to the fact that the German military had earlier flown home 65,000 cans of beer and 340 bottles of wine before it withdrew from its bases in Mazar-e Sharif and Kabul at the end of June. – surely they could have blown up the alcohol and put people on the flights? – this is the kind of thing that fuels future grudges that morph into terrorist attacks. But it also shows the colossal failure in intelligence in a microcosm
SIGAR | Lessons Learned. The Ides of August – a couple of good post-mortem reads on Afghanistan. A few things struck me. Mission creep had been baked in, although much of that was down to the allies partnering with the Northern Alliance and liberal values. The dual nature of Pakistan, which I suspect Pakistan will get punished for in the longer term. The lack of intelligence on the main players involved such as former president of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai
Beauty
Skincare Preferences by Generation | NPD Group – Despite the generational differences in skincare preferences, there are also commonalities. At the end of the day, it seems we’re not so different, after all. Whether they are more like my mother or my cousin, we see from consumers across-the-board that they are open to trying new things, are looking for clean ingredients, and simply want skincare that produces results from a brand they can trust. Regardless of the trends driving the category, the demand for efficacy and transparency is here to stay
Business
Wolfsburg, we have a problem: How Volkswagen stalled in China | Reuters – Last month, though, he said Volkswagen had fixed the problems revealed by the test, that the ructions of the episode had subsided and the carmaker’s Chinese business was recovering. “We have once again clearly one of the safest cars on the market in this segment,” Woellenstein told reporters in July. “We will once again take up the old leadership of the Passat.”But there is quite some ground to regain in the large family car segment. A total of 47,480 Passats were sold in the first six months of this year in China, some way behind the 91,110 Toyota Camrys (7203.T) and 89,157 Honda Accords (7267.T), according to LMC. The figures from the same period of 2019, before the pandemic struck, show how steeply the Volkswagen model has fallen away of late: 91,400 Passats were sold versus 111,968 Accords and 85,396 Camrys. – I am surprised by this, given Volkswagen’s obsession with common platforms
Tata’s rise mirrors the sweep of India’s history | Financial Times – Tata is no longer at India’s entrepreneurial vanguard. The likes of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries and Gautam Adani’s eponymous group, with their investments in telecoms and renewable energy, hold stronger claim to be the “nation builders” of today. These tycoons represent a different way of doing business, one that has prompted much consternation. They lack Tata’s ambivalence about the state, aligning themselves unabashedly with Narendra Modi, and share few of the conservative Tatas’ qualms about “wealth creation for its own sake”.
Biden is sandbagging on immigration – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – the new American support for throwing open the country’s gates is more broad than it is deep. There’s a real desire to cleanse the stain of Trump’s human rights abuses and flirtation with white-nationalism — to at least be able to say that America is still the Nation of Immigrants, that we still have compassion for the people of the poor countries of the world. But beyond that idealistic impulse, I’m not so sure that most liberals have a strong, enduring commitment to welcoming in as many refugees, asylum-seekers, and economic migrants as possible.
One reason is that the Democratic party is increasingly the party of the educated, and to most educated Americans, people like refugees and asylum seekers live in a different world. There’s little natural class solidarity or empathy there. And when it comes to skilled immigrants — the people waiting desperately for that backlog of 100,000 green cards to be processed — well, to most educated Americans, that’s the competition. Both for themselves and for their kids in schools.
Beijing’s American Hustle | Foreign Affairs – U.S. institutions, especially in finance and technology, cling to self-destructive habits acquired through decades of “engagement,” an approach to China that led Washington to prioritize economic cooperation and trade above all else.
If U.S. policymakers and legislators find the will, however, there is a way to pull Wall Street and Silicon Valley back onside, convert the United States’ vulnerabilities into strengths, and mitigate the harmful effects of Beijing’s political warfare. That must begin with bolder steps to stem the flow of U.S. capital into China’s so-called military-civil fusion enterprises and to frustrate Beijing’s aspiration for leadership in, and even monopoly control of, high-tech industries—starting with semiconductor manufacturing
How Chinese pressure on covid origins probe shocked WHO — and led Tedros to push back – The Washington Post – When a WHO scientist on a coronavirus origins probe announced in February that the idea that the virus leaked from a lab was “extremely unlikely” and unworthy of further investigation, senior WHO staff in Geneva were shocked. “We fell off our chairs,” one member told the authors. The team in Wuhan appeared to have given in to Chinese pressure to dismiss the idea without a real investigation. Later, when the WHO-China team released a report that again dismissed that scenario, Tedros pushed back, saying that the research was not “extensive enough” and that there had not been “timely and comprehensive data-sharing.” Since then, relations between the WHO and China have nosedived. Chinese officials said in July that they would not accept any further investigation into the origin of the coronavirus in China and accused the United States of pressuring scientists. The WHO last week released a statement that resisted the idea that “the origins study has been politicized, or that WHO has acted due to political pressure.”
China, the WHO and the power grab that fuelled a pandemic | News | The Sunday Times – In 2017 Chan crowned her final year in office by welcoming Xi to Geneva. While he was there, she signed an agreement that committed the WHO to working alongside China on health as part of the country’s Belt and Road initiative. It was the first time any UN agency had signed up to the initiative, which seeks to extend Chinese influence and trade in more than 70 developing countries by financing infrastructure projects. The initiative is highly controversial because its critics argue that China uses it to shackle countries, particularly in Africa, to “unsustainable debt” as a way of gaining access to the continent’s raw materials and buying political favours. “I think health is too special to get into the really seedy politics that Belt and Road is part of, and I wouldn’t want the WHO to be associated with it,” Gostin argues. “The cost in terms of human rights and debt, and other adverse events for Africa, was a bridge too far.”
Hong Kong’s Leader Killed Her City – The Atlantic – Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing lawmaker and member of Lam’s cabinet, told me that simply having the laws on the books would provide a “deterrent effect” to protesters, and that the fears of journalists and activists over the curtailing of freedoms were not “completely misguided.”
How the daigou can help new brands | Vogue Business – The classic image of the daigou is of an entrepreneurial and well-connected individual who buys global luxury brands on behalf of Chinese clients abroad, where prices are lower and hard-to-find products are more accessible. But the new model daigou is also working closer to home, and mixing emerging Chinese designers with foreign brands. The motivation for the evolution of the daigou’s role comes from a wave of young Gen Z Chinese consumers who are seeking more interesting and affordable fashion and don’t care as much about the name on the label. This is good news for new brands in China – and elsewhere. In a fiercely competitive market, any well-designed brand has the potential to catch consumers’ eyes. What’s needed in the early days of a new brand’s development is an effective sales channel. – Building a similar relationship with daigou, that brands currently have with fashion stylists
[Report] Bad News, By Joseph Bernstein | Harper’s Magazine – In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good. Midcentury American man could come home after eight hours of work and turn on his television and know where he stood in relation to his wife, and his children, and his neighbors, and his town, and his country, and his world. And that was good. Or he could open the local paper in the morning in the ritual fashion, taking his civic communion with his coffee, and know that identical scenes were unfolding in households across the country. Over frequencies our American never tuned in to, red-baiting, ultra-right-wing radio preachers hyperventilated to millions. In magazines and books he didn’t read, elites fretted at great length about the dislocating effects of television. And for people who didn’t look like him, the media had hardly anything to say at all – give this a read
COVID slows Apple and Google production shift away from China – Nikkei Asia – AirPods — both entry-level and high-end models — were among the earliest products that Apple began making in significant amounts in Vietnam, having moved production there around two years ago during the height of U.S.-China trade tensions. Apple’s plan to bring some MacBook and iPad production to Vietnam has also been put on hold due to a lack of engineering resources, an incomplete notebook computer supply chain and the dynamic COVID situation, one of the people said. Production of smart doorbells, security cameras and smart speakers for Amazon, which recently moved to Vietnam, has also faced delays since May as assembly lines in the northern part of the country coped with a surge in local cases and tougher COVID prevention measures
Opinion | We built a system like Apple’s to flag child sexual abuse material — and concluded the tech was dangerous – The Washington Post – Our research project began two years ago, as an experimental system to identify CSAM in end-to-end-encrypted online services. As security researchers, we know the value of end-to-end encryption, which protects data from third-party access. But we’re also horrified that CSAM is proliferating on encrypted platforms. And we worry online services are reluctant to use encryption without additional tools to combat CSAM. We sought to explore a possible middle ground, where online services could identify harmful content while otherwise preserving end-to-end encryption. The concept was straightforward: If someone shared material that matched a database of known harmful content, the service would be alerted. If a person shared innocent content, the service would learn nothing. People couldn’t read the database or learn whether content matched, since that information could reveal law enforcement methods and help criminals evade detection. Knowledgeable observers argued a system like ours was far from feasible. After many false starts, we built a working prototype. But we encountered a glaring problem.
Our system could be easily repurposed for surveillance and censorship. The design wasn’t restricted to a specific category of content; a service could simply swap in any content-matching database, and the person using that service would be none the wiser. A foreign government could, for example, compel a service to out people sharing disfavored political speech. That’s no hypothetical: WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging app, already uses content matching to identify dissident material. India enacted rules this year that could require pre-screening content critical of government policy. Russia recently fined Google, Facebook and Twitter for not removing pro-democracy protest materials. We spotted other shortcomings. The content-matching process could have false positives, and malicious users could game the system to subject innocent users to scrutiny. – Emphasis in bold is mine
Technology
Laptops Shortage Is Easing as Pandemic Demand Wanes – Bloomberg – The waning demand for PCs will likely last for at least several more quarters. Memory prices are dropping precipitously on fears the chip cycle is over. But it’s good news for anyone looking to buy a laptop, printer, webcam or router. Expect them to be much easier to find in stores this fall. – I am hoping that the price of SSDs will fall again
Intel with an old take on big.little for Alder Lake | EE News Europe – Intel’s next-generation desktop chip, code-named Alder Lake, is the company’s first hybrid architecture to integrate two core types – the Performance-core and Efficient-core. This is similar to ARM’s big.little approach which used a small core optimised for low power consumption with lower performance alongside a larger, higher performance core. Both cores could run the same code depending on the context, avoiding the problems of having a scheduler to allocate tasks to multiple cores. This has traditionally been a limiting factor for the system-level performance of multicore chip designs
Epic’s Fortnite lawsuit has become a nightmare for Google – Protocol – Google ‘estimated in 2019 that it risked losing as much as $6 billion per year if app makers and app store operators banded together with Epic and began creating alternative distribution channels. So instead of offering a superior product, the company muscled its way to a market position now being viewed by U.S. regulators as potentially anticompetitive’ – this might feed into a wider FTC case later on given the focus on revenue. More related content here.
Why a list of Mac software recommendations and why me? I have been using Macs since my early cough, cough – ok let’s just say a long time. I bought my first Macs secondhand. The first one was a sit-up-and beg style Macintosh SE. This is in what nerds now call the Mac Classic style machine. This allowed me to proof club flyers on a computer rather than getting bromides made. The machine paid for itself in less than five months.
I moved on to a PowerBook 165 running ClarisWorks and early Internet software.
I managed to connect it to the net through my university and surf in 16 shades of grey. Some of the software I recommend has been maintained almost as long as I have been a Mac user which says something about the power of developer’s core ideas.
At the time there wasn’t the Mac user community that there is now. But what users there were made up for their lack of numbers with fierce passion.
When you bought a Mac you could tap into a real world community. My University user group met once a month and swapped software and tips.
It was this rather than the iMac which made sure Apple had a user base by the time Steve Jobs returned. Mac related magazines filled in the knowledge gap and carefully curated demo software. It was through this experience that I learned about some of the apps here. I have stayed loyal to them over the decades and upgraded them as required.
Nowadays there is a larger, but less passionate community. We tend to share web services rather than apps. We also tend to gather around the biggest rather than the best. I am a great believer in supporting independent development where the applications work better for me. This the lens that I view software through in making the recommendations below. Some of the recommendations come from people I trust like Mat Morrison. Where I have shared a piece of software I don’t use I’ve made this clear below.
Despite the disappointing* product designs of the last two MacBook Pro revisions, I’ve been surprised as a few more friends move to the platform. They’ve sought advice myself and other friends. So I thought I’d consolidate the knowledge and put it out there.
The process caused me to reflect on the software that I use and value. I like:
Products that work both online and offline, so Hemingway’s native app made it in rather than the Grammarly Chrome plug-in. Internet isn’t as ubiquitous as one would have you believe, God knows I love technology, but I am not blind to its faulty implementation
Products that seem to be mature and have gone through a couple of development cycles
Software has to fit me, rather than the other way around. I’ve built up behaviours over my time using computers and networks that seem to work for me. But we have different learning styles and habits, which was part of the reason why I’ve suggested choices that I don’t use but others like. Chances are one of them will work for you, but not all of them will
I prefer not to depend on web giants like Google, Facebook et al when it comes to software. Their ‘always in beta’ philosophy can make for inconsistent product experiences – look at how the Skype consumer platform UI and functionality has changed for the worse over time. ‘Always-in-beta’ also results in abrupt ‘sunsets’ – that’s tech speak for killed off. This happens for a few reasons. The bigger they get, the bigger a service has to be in order for it to be worthwhile supporting. Their product strategy is about you as a product rather than you as a user. This is true if its an application or an API. Their entry into a market can see them decimating small competition; once that has been completed if there isn’t megabucks they’ll leave just as fast. The RSS news service Google Readeris anexemplar for this process. I love new shiny things as much as the next nerd, but I also don’t want to invest too much into them if they can disappear just as quick
Communications
Communications used to be a simple process for me, as I used to run Adium.
At one time Adium supported ICQ, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN. Adium still exists but many of the main instant messenger platforms don’t. These days things are a little more complicated for me.
I run Apple’s Messages.app which allows me to use my iPhone’s SMS service and contact other Apple product users. It’s encrypted which is nice. It’s so simple, even my parents have managed to master it.
I use Slack to keep in touch with a number of professional groups.
My friends in China and Hong Kong use a mix of WhatsApp desktop app and WeChat’s desktop app.
I don’t use it so much any more but LINE and Kakao Talk make a couple of good desktop apps too. The Economist and Wall Street Journal do good content on their LINE channels. Bloomberg and the UK agency Battenhall publish some good content on WhatsApp that are worth subscribing to.
I use the consumer version of Skype to dial into conference call bridge numbers. I have used Skype for Business whist working at Unilever and Publicis – it wasn’t a positive experience.
I know some friends that find Franz handy, it seems to support an eclectic collection of services; but not all the ones I need covered.
Evernote alternatives
Evernote wasn’t the innovator that many people think it is. DevonThink and Yojimbo have been longer in usage amongst a small but dedicated Mac user base.
DevonThink – positions itself as document management. It also syncs across devices. It is an expansive and thorough piece of software, I’ve tried it. It’s great, but just wasn’t for me. Devon Technologies also have some interesting products that do web and system search. They have been handy for friends in recruitment headhunting research.
Yojimbo – In my personal experience I found Yojimbo easier to use than DevonThink. Both are great tools, but its a question of what makes the most sense for you. I think you should try both and see which one works best for you.
Graphics
OmniGraffle – great for diagrams and flow charts. OMNI are long time Mac developers and always seem to get the most out of the machine.
News
I have been vocal in my love of Newsblur RSS reader on other occasions, so won’t go into how fantastic it is here. I use a native Mac app called ReadKit to interface with Newsblur, Pinboard and Buffer on my Mac. This was really handy when I was in China, as the internet operates differently there.
ReadKit also has good integration with Buffer and Pinboard.in; services I use for social posting and bookmarking respectively. ReadKit isn’t perfect; in particular its persistent windows for posting to Buffer and Pinboard.in can annoy; but it works for me.
Office software
I use the default macOS applications Mail.app, Calendar.app and Contacts. app. They work flawlessly with iCloud to sync across iPhone, iPad and Macs. I have Google hosted, Microsoft Exchange and IMAP based accounts running on Mail.app side by side with no problems (so far).
I use the home edition of Microsoft Office (for Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Going for the home edition is a fixed cost rather than an Office 365 subscription. I use Hemingway to handle the creative process of writing and provide some editorial input. If I am writing a presentation for myself then I will use Keynote instead of PowerPoint.
I use OmniPlan as an equivalent to Microsoft Project.
Music
I still listen to ripped music on iTunes. Streaming services like Spotify often have a limited library of back catalogue music. Carefully curated playlists can see tracks disappear in an arbitrary manner when rights owners pull them from the streaming service. I listen to old DJ mixes, digitally bought music from BeatPort, iTunes and Bleep. I also rip CDs as often these are cheaper than their MP3 counterparts or haven’t made it into online music stores. iTunes also handles my podcasts and audio books. I have an iPod Classic that’s tricked-out with a 256GB SSD. I don’t run my phone’s battery down listening to music. I have been keeping track of my listening using last.fm’s app.
Productivity
BBEdit is a 25-year old piece of software for the Mac. It is a text editor but always comes in more handy than that descriptor implies. It’s one of them applications that I discovered on a Mac Format or MacWorld demo disk and then kept on using.
I haven’t used it, but Duet looks like a handy way of bringing a secondary screen around with you, if you are working out of client offices.
OmniFocus – list writing made better, but also handy for getting thoughts down on a presentation etc
Parcel – comes in handy for keeping an eye on your package deliveries.
PopChar X – I have been using PopChar since I was in college. I got it on a demo disc from MacFormat and immediately saw its benefit. Twenty years later I am still using the application.
Screen grabs
Papparazi is my go to screen grab tool, Skitch comes highly recommended from people I trust.
Utilities
Apple has got an annoying habit of taking ideas from great utilities and including them in future versions of macOS. This is great for users, but bad for Apple’s long-suffering developer community. It was independent developers who kept the faith during the dark times of the mid-1990s.
coconutBattery – recommended by a friend who uses it for ensuring that apps aren’t drawing excessive power when you’re on a battery. Here’s looking at you Google Chrome!
GraphicConvertor – yet another app that is over 20 years old and still supported. It manages to handle the most arcane graphics formats and allows you editing functions.
Fetch and CyberDuck – Fetch and Transmit have been the go to Mac apps for FTP clients for a long time. Familiarity for me means that Fetch edges out Transmit. Both are great pieces of software that I am happy to recommend. It is also worthwhile considering CyberDuck which is open source. CyberDuck has also done work on supporting Amazon and Google storage which some of my friends find invaluable.
Little Snitch – in the world of Mac users Little Snitch used to be famous for stopping Adobe software from phoning home. This was back before Creative Cloud when buying software was a major investment for agencies. So there was an interest in cracked user codes and careful monitoring of your network connection. Little Snitch is very useful these days as a really good firewall application.
Stuffit Deluxe – yes you can do a lot in terminal but you’d be hard pushed to find a compression app that handles as many formats as Stuffit. I even opened up some 20 year old .sea archives from my time in college.
TechTool – machine health monitoring that has been around since the dark days of the Mac. A great application to keep your Mac running the way you want it to.
Terminal.app (default app) – macOS is built on a proper operating system NetBSD and the Mach micro-kernel. Terminal allows you to access the power of the operating system. But with great power comes great responsibility, I strongly recommend some additions for your bookshelf. O’Reilly Publishing has some great books that provide advice on how to use the terminal notably Learning Unix for OSX. David Pogue’s Missing Manual series for macOS are worthwhile as references as well.
How to use RSS – isn’t a question that I thought would be ever asked. I put together a guide some eight years ago and had been meaning to update it for a while. I was reminded to do this by Wadds recent post on RSS. I realised there is likely a whole generation of netizens that hadn’t used RSS; or had used Google Reader and didn’t have a clue about what under-pinned it and how it could be useful.
‘RSS is dead‘ is a myth beloved of the social networks that want to spoon feed you algorithmically sifted world views. This myth has leaked into web development circles and I have had to fight with development teams to keep in support for the standard.
Put simply RSS is like a ticker tape for the web that allows you to get updates about new articles posted on websites.
My own journey in how to use RSS
I started off using RSS readers with NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire was an application that developed a swift cult following on Mac OSX. This would have been late 2002. I immediately saw the benefit as a PR person, having the news come to me, rather than having to go do a round robin of a list of sites in my browser bookmarks.
An RSS reader allows you to:
Collect updates from 100s of sites that you wouldn’t otherwise have time to get around
Read a precis of these updates
Organise sites into folders
At the time, only calendar, address book, email and task information synced across my work and home computers. I had only just got mobile email on a Palm PDA that connected into a Nokia 6310i via a data cable using Palm’s Mobile Internet Kit. This only allowed me to access a limited amount of the web but no RSS. This only worked with my personal email.
The problem with NetNewsWire was that there was no sync. If I read RSS at work I would then have to clear it again at home. I got around this by dragging my laptop into work and using the guest wi-fi network access. But this was misinterpreted by management.
I started using Bloglines an online RSS reader. This was eventually squeezed out of business by Google Reader. In 2013 Google killed Reader to try and force people to use the algorithmic feeds on Google+. Aside from destroying a large audience of RSS users; the cunning plan failed.
Google Reader was an RSS reader with some proprietary features including bookmarks. I decided against using Google Reader and went with Fast Ladder – which was run by Livedoor, a Japanese company. Livedoor eventually saw its CEO go to jail for securities fraud.
Since then I have been using Newsblur. Newsblur has a couple of unique features that put it head-and-shoulders above rivals like Feedly, theoldreader or Inoreader :
You can train the reader to highlight or hide posts that aren’t of interest
It provides three views: text-only (great for speed), feed and the article as it appears on the web page ‘in-situ’
It offers seamless integration with the pinboard social bookmarking service
Navigating your way around Newsblur
This is what the home screen looks like
What is an OPML file? If you’ve already used an RSS reader, an OPML file is a standard export file format that allows you to move from one RSS reader to another. The Goodies and Apps option gives you a bookmarklet that you can add to your browser to add new sites that you want to follow and links to apps for Mac and mobile platforms. On the desktop, using the web interface is best. On mobiles the app is pretty much obligatory to use.
