Steve Bowbrick

Yay! When my kids were young I used to get most of my reading done while waiting for them outside a dance/music/art class…

If you want a preview of the world imagined for us by the monarchists, accelerationists, integralists and AI oligarchs look no further than the Dune movies…

GROSS: Villeneueve's Dune - aristocratic excess: bit.ly/48EhUCq

That's splendid! We have one and sometimes two foxes in a den down the garden. We've noticed they're not here so much these days - the camera will sometimes capture nothing for days. Kind of hard to figure out what they're up to! Elusive critters.

Is there such a thing as SPEED SUMO?

Watch with only one hand - advert for watch brand Breguet

Emotions and a kind of approximate sense of what time it is

Words by Steve Bowbrick, from his post 'Paragraphs about AI': Some say we shouldn't be polite to the AIs - no 'pleases' and 'if you don't minds' - but some of us are worried that, come the singularity, there'll be an accounting and those of us who weren't sufficiently deferential in the early years will be rounded up and shipped off-planet to work in one of Mr. Bezos's mines. 5 October

Thing is I'm pretty sure that, when it comes to it, when you're allowed a second to rise from your work and look along the line of toiling miners, one of them is going to be Mr. Bezos himself.

This is from a post I've called 'Paragraphs about AI', where I keep all this nonsense: bit.ly/3XpHiVU

leaflet asking for donations from New Jersey radio station WFMU

When America’s only free-form independent radio station - not part of the American public radio system - feels the need to send physical mail to a fan who’s 3,000 miles from the transmitter on another continent. Must be tough times!

Makes your head spin - a kind of fable of human development - that you could take this little, 200 year-old locomotive and run it without modification on practically any railway in the world, including the TGV to Marseille and the 50,000km of Chinese high-speed rail.

"Money begets money, my dear…" Mercantile capitalism explained by a shifty-looking old gent during the Restoration. Honestly, Forever Amber is a brilliant movie - wildly silly - essentially the first bonkbuster and the biggest movie of 1947. bit.ly/4cjF001

I used to revere My Dinner with Andre. I thought it was some kind of high point for cerebral New Hollywood introspection, for downtown Manhattan intellectual self-confidence. The kind of cool New Yorker dialogue that the rest of us were just meant to admire. Then, a few years ago I decided, in a flash, watching it again, that actually it was a terrible, pretentious, involuted mess. The worst of American intellectual hubris. A dreadful, contemptible work of art. And it was kind of a relief (I gave it one star on Letterboxd and moved on). Then, last night, I went to see it again, at a live event put on by David Runciman for his Past Present Future podcast, and now I’m all over the place. I might have to write a proper review. Runciman’s guest, playwright Lee Hall, opened up the movie’s complexities, providing historical, theatrical and biographical context that gives the bloody thing a new validity for me. Blimey. Might have to revise that Letterboxd rating too.

It's forty years since i first saw My Dinner with Andre. I keep changing my mind. Last night I think I did so again, thanks to David Runciman and the @ppfideas.bsky.social crew who put on a screening at the Regent Street Cinema

Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal face off in an empty New Mexico street. Text overlaid reads: "EDDINGTON Catherine Liu, author of Virtue Hoarders discusses Eddington with Steve Bowbrick, editor of GROSS, live on Substack 11am PDT (2pm EDT, 7pm BST Tuesday 16 September 2025"

Eddington is Ari Aster's dark COVID Western: its culture war themes are becoming more relevant daily. Tomorrow, on the GROSS Substack, I'll be discussing the movie with influential @UCIrvine film studies Prof Catherine Liu at 11am PDT/7pm UK. Free and open to all: open.substack.com/live-stream/...

I'm using this as an index for the weakness of most film criticism - almost all the reviews just assume this information is present throughout. As if it's not material that it's withheld until the very end, in the weird, discontinuous Venice bit.

GROSS DISTRACTION - The Brutalist - holocaust as plot twist I'm struggling to phrase this without sounding like an idiot (I mean more like an idiot than usual).

It is a kind of numbing thing isn't it. I wrote it all down here, in case you have nothing on for the next ten minutes lol
bowbrick.substack.com/p/gross-dist...

Gave me weird feels around 'holocaust as plot twist'

I have two tickets to the BBC Prom tomorrow night that we can’t use - would anybody be able to go despite the tube strike? Free to a music lover

Amen. And the potboiler it was based on too - it was called 'an apostolic work'! Pauline Kael, who hated the movie, called it: "…the biggest recruitment poster the Catholic church has had since the sunnier days of 'Going My Way' and 'The Bells of St Mary's'"

The Exorcist isn’t a horror movie, it’s a Catholic evangelical text. The film’s muscular Jesuit priests send the demon packing and heroic Father Karras sacrifices his own life in saving Regan’s, as a true priest should. The Exorcist is the next review in GROSS, the cinema history newsletter gross.ly

Are they in the woods?

GROSS - cinema history and criticism | Steve Bowbrick | Substack A materialist critique of the immaterial joys of the cinema and a chronological journey through the biggest movies of all time. Click to read GROSS - cinema history and criticism, by Steve Bowbrick, a...

GROSS is a serious project - political and economic context, some world history, some comparison with other art forms - some unorthdox views about the classics and the great directors. Plus the jokes. Always the jokes. Join me! bit.ly/48GG5N3

And yes, that is a working URL: gross.ly - I bought the domain from the Libyan registrar - I'm pretty sure they're not sanctioned any more so no one's going to break my door down.

"GROSS: always historicize" Classic T-Shirt for Sale by bowbrick Fredric Jameson, literary critic, philosopher and political theorist, said 'always historicize'. At GROSS, the cinema newsletter, it's what I aim to do. • Millions of unique designs by independent art...

I've adopted Fredric Jameson's phrase 'always historicize!' for the logo! bit.ly/4lXh8DI

There's also a YouTube channel on the drawing board (do people still say that? Do people still have drawing boards?). Short video essays using footage from the movies discussed. I'm trying out an AI editing tool called Descript to speed up the assembly. Hmm.

There'll be other stuff between the main posts: last week it was Zach Cregger's Weapons as genre hoarding. I'm going to write about Eddington next. There'll be online chats and other fun gimmicks - plus some stuff that's outside the paywall for the hoi poloi.

What I'm doing is switching up GROSS from a happy hobby to a more organised affair. A fixed weekly post about a movie from Hollywood history (I'm writing about the top-grossing movie of every since 1913 and I'm up to 1973 - The Exorcist!)

GROSS/63 1972, part three - is The Godfather conservative? More to the point: is it a melodrama?

It's the third part of my essay about The Godfather and, incidentally, it's the first one that you'll need a subscription to read in full. I'd be thrilled if you'd let me know what you think - about this post and about the subscription offer! bit.ly/4mGBYbm

The Godfather is a melodrama and The Long Good Friday is an epic. Not going to argue about this. GROSS is cinema history with a bit of politics, a bit of historic context, sometimes some gags. bit.ly/4mGBYbm

White out of black advertising card from Facebook reads: 'We're looking for 10 men in Watford who want to complete a body transformation in the next six weeks'

I've been in touch with these people. Apparently the transformation involves the insertion of small, velvety horns at the front of the scalp and the replacement of your silly, old feet with two handsome cloven hooves. Pain is minimal and you'll definitely see the benefit when it comes to the rut.

Always wonder about the economics of these things. Presumably providing a reasonable amount of bandwith via multiple territories for customers must be fairly expensive. Wonder if the model actually depends on people signing up for a VPN and then never actually using it.

Something like the vision of the early utopian Internet generation. Unachievable because the infrastructure is operated in the interests of corporations and capital. There's no obvious way to change this - no benign, neutral, human-centred Internet hiding behind or inside the corporate one. Sorry.

It hadn't occurred to me - doh - but I learn there's a quite thoughtful school shooting metaphor here and tbh this adds a layer that I hadn't considered. Might bump my Letterboxd stars a bit. Still a total genre soup though...