Over-The-Shoulder Podcast

This happens to be a great film, yet also an action film, yet also with a deep, dark message. How? In the modern age, it’s sad that all of those are basically exclusive from one another. But, back in the early seventies, The French Connection was just about ready to revolutionise cinema...

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://overtheshoulder129848657.wordpress.com/2021/05/23/the-awesome-bleakness-of-the-french-connection/

At the beginning of the film, Thunderbolt is disguised as a preacher, living a life in hiding. He reads a sermon to his church – severe, pithy and deliberated.

“As under the redeemer’s gentle reign, the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.”

We immediately cut to the insouciant Lightfoot’s carpe diem gait, buoyant upon the sultry Montana air, a blithe spontaneity to his every step.

Thunderbolt will repeat his same maxim to a new congregation many moons later, in the shape of an unfledged Lightfoot.

Lightfoot asks if it’s a poem.

“No.” Thunderbolt replies. “A prayer.”

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://overtheshoulder129848657.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/unlike-your-usual-western-thunderbolt-and-lightfoot-captures-something-beautiful/

Seinfeld blessed us with nine years of comedy gold. It was a sardonic narcotic like no other: dovetailed plot lines birthed from some of television’s greatest and most disturbed writers; misanthropic characters intent on questioning their most trivial confines; and detached, dead-on humour that revelled in depravity. The whole show was a love letter to a caffeine-fuelled New York, a big steaming bouillon of irritation – after all, the root of all comedy is indignation. The drug of Seinfeld was quickly valued higher than cocaine, fermenting popular culture with a subversive tangent of drollery, capturing the ethos of its time.

But. But, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility.

And perhaps the so-famed “show about nothing” has not treated its so dexterous ensemble so tastefully. After the sitcom came to its controversial end, critics quickly pronounced the cast’s favouring fortunes as the ‘Seinfeld Curse’. We were witnessing something not necessarily unprecedented, but something never seen on such a prodigious scale; not victims of failure, but victims of global, astronomical success.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://overtheshoulder129848657.wordpress.com/2022/02/01/seinfeld-and-setbacks-narcissism-and-nespresso-curb-and-class-an-essay-about-nothing/

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