Dead Souls review – Alex Cox rides into sunset with anti-Trump spaghetti western

Rotterdam film festival The Repo Man director relocates Gogol’s surreal novella to the old west in what he says will be his final film English film-maker Alex Cox comes riding into town with this jauntily odd and surreal western which he has indicated will be his swansong, shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and also Arizona. Cox himself is the star – an elegant, dapper presence – and his co-writer is veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko. The story has obvious relevance to contemporary America, and a flash-forward makes some of this clear. But it is also inspired by the classic novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, a mysterious parable of greed and vanity about a man who travels around offering to buy the souls of dead serfs on various estates in pre-revolutionary Russia so landowners can lower their tax bills, but plans to claim that they are still alive and therefore pass himself off as a wealthy man. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://i...

‘The risk was worth it’: All Fours author Miranda July on sex, power and giving women permission to blow up their lives

The artist and author’s hit book had so much in common with her own life that even her friends forgot it wasn’t real. How did this revolutionary portrayal of midlife desire come to inspire a generation of women?

When Miranda July’s All Fours was published in May last year, it triggered what felt like both a spontaneous resistance movement and the sort of mania last experienced when the final Twilight book dropped, except this time for women in midlife rather than teenage girls. Two friends separately brought it to my house, like contraband dropped out of a biplane. Book groups hastily convened, strategically timed for when the men were out of the picture.

The story opens with a 45-year-old woman about to take a road trip, a break from her husband and child and general domestic noise. She’s intending to drive from LA to New York, but is derailed in the first half hour by a young guy, Davey, in a car hire place, to whom she is passionately attracted. The next several weeks pass in a lust so intense, so overpowering, so lusciously drawn, it’s like a cross between ayahuasca and encephalitis. The narrator is subsumed by her obsession, and disappears her normal life. The road trip is a bust from the start, but the effort of breaking the spell and going home looks, for a long time, like way too much for the narrator, and when she finally does, to borrow from Leonard Cohen (perhaps describing a similar situation), she’s somebody’s mother but nobody’s wife.

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