Tag Archive: The American dream


The Mastermind: After the heist.

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November 16, 2025

The Mastermind directed by Kelly Reichhardt (USA, 2025)

In the BBC Mastermind quiz show which first aired in 1972 the catch phrase invented by original question master Magnus Magnusson when the time buzzer sounded was “I’ve started so I’ll finish.”   

In Mastermind, the movie, the feckless anti-hero JB (James Baline Mooney) played by Josh O’Connor starts something he has no idea how to end.  

I like the premise of this film which I take to be a study of alienated manhood and the drawbacks of a society founded on rampant individualism.

O’Connor was apparently cast because, unlike so many male lead actors,  he does not have a gym-toned body. Kelly Reichardt wanted him to look unexceptional because, although this is a heist movie, it’s a million miles away from the world of Ocean’s Eleven.

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A party pooper in La La Land

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February 8, 2017

LA LA LAND directed by Damien Chazelle (USA, 2016)

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Movies don’t exist in vacuums. La La Land is the ideal antidote to the ongoing carnage of Trump.

It presents a cloud cuckoo land where the American dream is alive and skipping with a populace ready to burst into song at the drop of a hat.

Here, a traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway is an excuse for a spontaneous party.

Here is a glossy world where the chief concerns are the demise of traditional jazz and the difficulty of breaking into Hollywood.

A world in which romance is not dead, racism doesn’t exist and where gender roles are well-defined. For two hours, we can pretend that all is well with the world and can exit the auditorium gushing that they do, after all, still make ’em like they used to.

It’s a movie that forgets it is a musical half way through and remembers just in time to concoct a grande finale but, just to show its post modernist edge, denies us the satisfaction of seeing our hero and heroine dancing off into the stars hand in hand.

In short, the mega-hyped La La Land is plastic, superficial and dumb. The perfect entertainment package served up as opium for the masses. An escapist yarn with the flimsiest of plots that the critics and audiences, desperate for distraction in these desperate times, are gleefully lapping up in their droves.

Not me!  I stand with the party poopers.

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