Author: James Curnow
Christmas Films: The Sentimental and the Savage
Christmas is here and the mighty interweb has spewed forth the inevitable tidal wave of ‘Best Xmas Movies’ lists. While pondering how I might obnoxiously subvert this tendency on my own blog (I momentarily considered writing a list of the ‘Worst Easter Movies’), it occurred to me that I was being torn in two directions…
The final days of Christmas: The sentimental and the savage
As Christmas arrives, you might have noticed that we never quite made it to writing a related article for each of the twelve days of Christmas (although I think that eight pieces is impressive enough). But to wrap up Christmas for 2013, I thought I’d republish a piece I wrote in 2012, in which I…
Cinema IS Christmas!
As a person unaffiliated with any kind of religion or spiritualism, at Christmas time I am left contemplating the question that millions of other human beings in today’s secular society must be pondering at the same time –what am I celebrating? Why is this day still meaningful to me? The easiest answers reside in notions…
On the first day of Christmas: Cinema IS Christmas
It is a common misconception in many countries that Christmas Day is the last of the twelve days of Christmas – in actual fact it is traditionally the first day. It’s quite likely that this general misunderstanding has largely been fostered by retailers who have little use for a twelve day Christmas campaign that commences…
Early Superhero Movies: 1920 to 1948
I’m no expert on superhero films and even less on the comic books that spawned them, but the recent release of The Dark Knight Rises on Blu-ray started me thinking about the historical development of the cinematic superhero. As a result, I’ve come across what appear to be some of the earliest incarnations of cinematic…