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A Die Hard Christmas
As the Christmas season approaches, it behoves one to trot out at least some of the tried-and-true Chrimbo tunes and movies to help engender the appropriate degree of merriness. Where better to begin our preparation for the Season of Goodwill to All than with that perennial favourite ‘Die Hard‘, a film which is so full…
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Extremism
The extremist is a person who has abdicated responsibility for the Self. To be the best possible person, we must, each of us, become the authors of our own narrative. To do this, we must first accept that we are stories begun by other storytellers; that our own narrative is but the continuation of a…
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The Awakening
Considering its place in the feminist canon, it is amusingly ironic that Kate Chopin’s rediscovery, in 1969, came about because of the work of a male student. In truth, though, it must be acknowledged that his work benefitted by coinciding with feminism’s second wave* and its interest in reclaiming female novelists lost because they failed…
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The Awakening of Captain Marvel
In 1899, Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’ caused, upon publication, something of a scandal. It is, after all, the story of a married woman – with two young sons – realising that there may be more to life than slavish adherence to the societal norms that bind her to a husband she has always obeyed more…
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The Post-modern Prometheus
‘The Post-modern Prometheus’, from Season Five of the X-Files presents us with something of a controversy. The plot involves a doctor working in isolation on the Hox gene – the gene which ensures that the correct structures form in the correct places within a body. Unbeknownst to said doctor, his father has been conducting experiments of his own,…
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Only the Lonely
Imagine walking into a town only to find that your arrival brings the population to the grand total of 1! How long would it take to have you pressing the emergency button, crying for help? This is the premise of the very first episode of Rod Serling’s almost legendary series, The Twilight Zone (1959-1964). Earl…
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Re-reading Edward Cullen
Edward Cullen is an older man, guilty of grooming a young girl – Bella is seventeen when they meet – with obvious nefarious intentions. So, many would have us believe. But, as anyone who takes the time to engage with a text to the extent that they actually put pen to paper (thus, I reveal…
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Strange Liberals
An article for the Pacific Standard from 2019 asks the question: Why is Hollywood so Liberal? This article, by Tom Jacobs, opens thus: “The worlds of movies, television, and theater are overwhelmingly populated by political liberals”. This claim is supported, as indeed Jacobs so supports it with an embedded link, by an article in the…
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A Stark Bickle
Martin Scorsese recently courted controversy by claiming that Superhero movies were “not cinema”. Quite what he means by “cinema” here only he can say for, however venerated he may be, surely he has no more say in defining the term than do the rest of us. It might seem that the opinion of one of the…
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Hosting the Language
The second episode of Season Two of the X Files, ‘The Host’, is generally regarded as a classic episode, favourably remembered for its iconic monster-of-the-week. Misleadingly, the title doesn’t refer to the creature but its victims. In actual fact, then, there is no single character in the episode to whom the title refers. The host is…
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