Authors — Brendan Byrne
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Man Out of Time: Justified: Primeval City
A neo-Western that premiered on March 16, 2010, Justified is about a man outside of time: Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens (a tall, lithe and supremely self-confident Timothy Olyphant), who metes out frontier justice (i.e. shoots folks at the drop of his very large hat) despite his temporal position in Obama’s America. Elmore Leonard made his bones writing (lots of) Westerns in the ’50s and, even after branching out into the super-cool super-bare crime novels he became famous for starting with The Big Bounce (1969), continued to dip into the genre; his 2001 long short story “Fire in the Hole,” […]
by Brendan Byrne on Nov 1, 2023 -
Vibes Out: Is Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery Really a Mystery?
Is Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, in fact, a mystery? It certainly presents as one at its beginning, when a group of unlikely friends, whom we will come to know as “the shitheads,” are whisked away to the private island of billionaire-bro Miles Bron (Edward Norton). As Daniel Craig’s returning sleuth Benoit Blanc points out, “You’ve taken seven people, each of whom has a real-life reason to wish you harm, gathered them together on a remote island and placed the idea of your murder in their heads.” So far, so trad. The film’s setting isn’t as familiar […]
by Brendan Byrne on Mar 1, 2023 -
Severance and Sub-Creation
In what would have been called in an earlier period of TV development “the pilot” of Apple TV+’s series Severance, Mark (Adam Scott) attends a dinner party populated by the most obnoxious people in any possible world—members of the professional class chattering about various online thinkpieces. Amidst their debates, the attendees learn of Mark’s high-concept job at Lumon Industries, where only employees who have had their work and non-work selves surgically divided—employees who have no knowledge of their work lives when they’re at home and vice versa—may labor on the company’s secretive “severed floor.” Immediately, he is questioned about the […]
by Brendan Byrne on Jul 14, 2022 -
“People Think the Audience is Stupid”: Sophia Al-Maria on Little Birds, Anaïs Nin and Screenplay Development
Sophia Al-Maria is an artist and (screen)writer, probably most well-known for co-coining the term “Gulf Futurism” and authoring the memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth (2012). Since then, Al-Maria has directed gallery films and worked on numerous unrealized film and TV projects. Al-Maria’s exhibition “Virgin With A Memory” (2014) was a response to Beretta, a self-authored script meant to be her directorial debut. Her short film Beast Type Song (2019) is both an extension of an unmade post-colonial SF project about “solar war” and a hang-out film with a slow, deliberate anger. Al-Maria created and wrote the majority of Little Birds, a six-episode […]
by Brendan Byrne on Jul 13, 2021 -
Choose Your Own Future: Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head
While Adam Curtis has been making films since 1983, he first gained a kind of international recognition that once might have been termed “cult” with The Century of the Self (2002) and The Power of Nightmares (2004). These films source-coded the psychological and political terrains of the neoliberal landscape, deftly flaying away the already-decaying narratives of the Bush/Blair era. Deploying a voiceover pitched somewhere between Marxian don and MI-5 briefing, the twisting, layered narratives of Century and Nightmares articulated answers that were neither easy nor comforting, but answers all the same. Contemporary society was a managed “dreamworld,” and the stories […]
by Brendan Byrne on Apr 8, 2021 -
Quarantine Reading: David Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife
As a publication about film, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of publishing during a moment when theatrical access to movies, and their ongoing future, is as much in question as everything else. During this suspension of normal filmwatching habits, we’ve reached out to contributors, filmmakers and friends, inviting them to find an alternate path to the movies by participating in a writing exercise engaging with any book about or lightly intersecting with film, in whatever way makes sense to them. Today: Brendan Byrne on David Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama. The […]
by Brendan Byrne on May 19, 2020 -
S. Craig Zahler and the Art of the Podcast
“We have a solution to Hollywood’s ‘development hell’ which I am pleased to share with everyone.” This was how Dallas Sonnier, or at least his marketing department, announced the introduction of “the original audiostate,” the neologism Cinestate (Sonnier’s Dallas-based indie production company) coined to avoid the dread word “podcast.” Through marrying the “grandiosity of Hollywood films with the intimacy of audio,” the audiostate is meant to transform that most beloved of objects, the unproduced screenplay, into multi-platform pitchable content. Since Sonnier’s 2017 statement, only one audiostate has been produced: the same year’s The Narrow Caves, a story of eldritch horror, […]
by Brendan Byrne on Mar 4, 2020
