Death is a Photograph

DPP is back, baby — and this time for an encore. Chase and Sam thought they'd round out the season — find a 'capstone', if you will — for the last year. That pediment takes the form of Chris Smith's fly-on-the-wall documentary American Movie (1999).
What does it mean to aspire towards creative production as a provincial dreamer-cum-slacker? What was left of the American dream as the clock ticked over and a new millennium began?
Find out in today's episode.

Out of Office

Fear the coming of the trilby. Yes, that's right — today, in the last episode of our first season, we're looking at Gen X accelerating towards middle age and a crash encounter with those coming up behind them: millennials.
No one captured this dissonant first encounter better than Noah Baumbach in his 2014 feature While We're Young — a spiralling comedy of manners obsessed with subcultures, technology, filmmaking, ethics, and the process of ageing itself.
Were the millennials the horrific spawn of a shallow age? Solopistic, self-involved, far too comfortable with 'selling out?' Or were they a pioneering generation, with enough earnestness and purchasing power to transform cities, fashion, media and art — at least sometimes — for the better?
Find out in today's episode.

Patreon here.
It's the early 2000s in Mexico — and everyone is feelin' fine. The PRI's uninterrupted one-party 71-year reign of social-democratic, but also neoliberal, authoritarian incompetence is over. The insanity of the drug war proper, unleashed in 2006, is a distant spot on the horizon. A guy with the last name Fox is in charge — he's like George Bush but with even more charisma...and a strange penchant for coke (a cola).
Yes, that's right — today's episode of DPP is covering the defining, break-out films of the Nuevo Cine Mexicano — Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros and Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mama Tambien. Or as Chase has characterised them — a pairing about female predatory behaviour and animal cruelty.
How was the USA's closest neighbour feeling about the End of History? Dread, joy? The irrepressible need to engage in dog fighting?
Find out in today's episode.

Patreon here.
This week, DP heads south. South to Chile — a nation which ended its military junta and dictatorship through an advertising-powered referendum just as the Cold War was ending. Could there be material that's more End of History in its politics?
Chilean director Pablo Larraín seemed to think not — producing his 2012 feature No — half as a celebration of the 1988 presidential referendum's ousting of General Pinochet, and half as a satirical send-up of the growth of political communications through advertising.
What happens when politics is stripped of its substance and rendered as a performative set of vibes?
Find out in today's episode.