“As the 70s dawned, survival for Dean Martin became a matter of staying on the horse and waiting for the culture to loop back in his favor, to mature into the venerated relic who had come direct from the bar.”
“Gregg Araki’s 90s films feel like prophecies of a cataclysm that never happened.”
“Peter Cook was never able to bridge the distance between his personal world and his many creations, and one gets the impression that he derived a certain satisfaction from keeping people guessing.”
“Holliday’s persona is one of shrewdness in the face of unrelenting condescension; she perfected the art of playing the outwardly ditzy blonde who lulls those around her into taking her lightly.”
Visions of the Future from 1995: Touching with Synthetic Hands by D.M. Palmer: “These films posited that to dream in public, to build new worlds on this freshly privatized terrain, was to risk new and previously inconceivable forms of personal ruin.”
“The capacity to dehumanize has always been present in cinema; to witness the vanquishing of enemies on the screen has served a cathartic function for every society in which cinema has taken hold.”
“‘Waterworld,’ ’12 Monkeys’ and ‘Tank Girl’ posit that when a civilization collapses, many of its customs will be upheld through authoritarian means…”
“9/11 was a psychic wound that fostered a new relation to the world, and those who grew up in its aftermath struggled to digest its lessons; some fell back onto intransigence, while others internalized the damage.”
“Few artists have dreamt more boldly and defiantly in their exile than Ferrara; he has faced up to the dark towers of commerce and coercion, the systemic violence that is rationalized and sanctioned to peak efficiency by the prevailing conditions.”
“The year 2012 was the first in which cinema could adequately assess the material and psychological toll of the crash. The box office tells its own story: audiences were looking for saviors…”
D.M. Palmer on the career women of ‘9 to 5’ (1980), ‘Baby Boom’ (1987), ‘Big Business’ (1988), ‘Working Girl’ (1988) and ‘Disclosure’ (1994).
“What is so strange about the New Hollywood renaissance of the 70s is that it took place at a time of acute crisis for the business. It was a signal of the industry’s weakness that these cracks in the veneer were not only permitted but encouraged…”
“The generation that had fought the war was confronting the generation that had overseen it, staging a sub-rosa assault on entrenched power.” – D.M. Palmer on ‘Patterns,’ ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’ and ‘The Apartment’
There Is No Try: Documenting the Silicon Valley Mindset | D.M. Palmer on ‘The Inventor, ‘Fyre,’ ‘Fyre Fraud’ and ‘WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn’
“Dennis Potter left us with one of the most ambitious and meaningful pieces of British television, bridging commercial and public broadcasting to address the state of the nation and the fate of the artist with his customary irreverence and accessibility.”
“The 70s were a tumultuous and often bleak decade for the British film industry, and this pessimism bled into its output.”
“Drug culture and social upheaval became inextricable on the screen in the 60s; it was a belated recognition on the part of the industry’s tastemakers that American cinema’s scrupulously maintained state of grace was no longer sustainable…”
“In all her dramatic iterations, Patty Hearst stands for an American purity that was always illusory but remains hallowed, that successive generations have set out to wrest back from the forces of complication.”
“In my hatred for the Bond franchise, I feel I may have done a disservice to its star. I have always had a tendency to discount Sean Connery as an exquisitely sculpted statue, capable of filling out a tuxedo very nicely but little else.”
“Quatermass is an eccentric antihero who presages Doctor Who in his singular disregard for established mores and the niceties of procedure…”
