Category: Articles
The First Australians: Ten great films about indigenous Australia
The twenty-sixth of January has passed for another year, although most of my readers will be unaware of the significance that the day holds for Australians. It is Australia Day, a celebration of our national character (perhaps akin to Thanksgiving in the United States) on the date that the First Fleet arrived in 1788. The…
Thinking Cinematically: The people’s prerogative
It is a difficult thing to love a popular art form, especially film. It means that one must accept that there is an assumption of equality of opinion amongst the public in relation to the form in which you have chosen to invest yourself. That is to say, most people feel qualified to watch a…
Cinematic Verisimilitude: Twenty great movie moments
For the cinephile, there will inevitably be moments of cinematic verisimilitude with which one will become obsessed. There will be moments when a particular filmmaker touches the cinephile in such a way that the emotive force of the experience will be beyond replication. The cinephile will certainly seek to replicate such a moment, frequently using…
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…